Quaint! Quaint! Over the last couple of months (maybe more), this word has for some reason echoed in my head frequently.
Have you ever been in that situation where you know a word, and you think you know what it means but one day the sky collapses on you, your whole life is a lie, and the word means something absolutely unrelated to what you thought it meant?
I like to console myself by saying that it is inevitable for someone who knows a larger than usual number of words, my vocabulary being something I pride myself on, but still it shakes the very foundation of your existence.
Since I am being so vivid about this matter, it stands to reason that I probably experienced it recently. I shudder when I look back on the moment when I realised that my faithful companion, "quaint", doesn't mean what I so surely knew it to mean. All my plans of writing an eloquent blog post on the world not being quaint came crashing to my feet. I think I have even (mis)used the word in a previous blog post. Blimey!
How I thought it read - "Quaint - The belief that large, great, monumental things result from comparatively very small, minute and apparently insignificant events, actions or things". A classic example is the following story. The wise Chanakya failed in his first attempt to win the throne for a certain Maurya, who would later become king. Dejected, the scholar returned to his home, and continued with his life when he saw a boy consuming piping hot soup by carefully removing the soup from the sides and drinking it, while the wise man burnt his tongue like a common fool. Thus enlightened, a brain-wave struck and instead of directly attacking the current king, he planned a campaign to slowly eliminate all those around the king, "wait for the soup to cool" and then attacked the king to help his friend of Maurya to usurp the throne. While I cannot account for how much of the story is factual and how much is anecdotal, (what does drinking soup from the side mean anyway!), I thought believing that a boy drinking soup lead to a successful attempt to win a throne and overthrowing a ruler is to be quaint. Apparently not.
Dictionary.com defines quaint as "having an old-fashioned attractiveness or charm; oddly picturesque; strange, peculiar, or unusual in an interesting, pleasing or amusing way."
The smell of old books is quaint then, not the flap of a butterfly wing leading to a tornado.
Then again, it intrigues me why this word spent so long in the confines of my cranium. I raged against it. The world isn't quaint. They ignore all the work Mr. Chanakya must have done to eventually remove the reigning king. The popular (probably exaggerated and untrue) story of Archimides figuring out all those equations by seeing some water overflow his bathtub (something he'd probably seen everyday) does grave injustice to all those hours he surely spent meditating on the problem of the king's crown (the problem he solved following his Eureka moment). I, for one, am certain, that those hours of brainstorming were essential for him to see the everyday occurrence of water overflowing from a bath from a new perspective.
Humanity likes to believe that life is "quaint". Not really quaint of course, my kind of quaint. We like to believe that ever since "that performance", that sportsman's career was uphill all the way. Never mind the hours and hours in the gym and in the practice sessions; it was that one thing. Like to believe that this big small thing (small big thing?) is coming our way. We never like to hear the hard part, always the fairy-tale for us. Grown-up fairy-tales, with equations and diagrams and bad words.
It isn't. The ugly things, grime, sweat, toil, these are the things that take us through. The moment of inspiration is an effect, rather than the cause of the same.
To quote Lionel Messi, arguably the best footballer ever.
"I start early, and I stay late, day after day after day, year after year. It took me 17 years and 114 days to become an overnight success"
Kudos Little Argentine Magician!