Wednesday, September 14, 2005

Not Exactly What I Had in Mind

Bizarre: In this person's family, my venerable last name is used when someone wants to describe a mess:
Please excuse the way my place looks. It's stribley, which is a word my grandmother passed down to my mother and the women in our family. Cluttery. Messy. So I named my place "Stribley Cottage." As in, Mr. Darcy has Pemberley, Mr. deWinter has Manderley, I have Stribley.
I'd love to know the etymology for that usage, as I assure you, I'm nothing if not clean and neat.

As for me, I believe I'll start using my name to describe that which is most refined and elegant, as in "What a simply stribley automobile the Aston Martin is.

Oddly enough, this distant relative (we all likely came out of Cornwall, England) considers our name in a saltier context.

(Found while, yes, ego-searching on Google's new blog search engine.)

No comments: