GLIB, adj. This adjective has a lot more possible definitions that I thought! If you’d asked me what it meant a few days ago, before I started poking through search results, I think I would have said “superficial” or maybe “flippant.” My results bear that out, but there’s a whole network here: offhand, informal, easy, shallow, insincere, fluent. What connects all this? Glibness, it turns out, is smoothness and slipperiness. We apply it metaphorically: an oil spill is not glib, but the corporate PR guy trying to shift blame definitely is.
Glib is probably a shortening of the obsolete, dialectal word “glibbery,” meaning “slippery,” which is amazing. Even more Jabberwocky: “glibbery” probably came from Low German “glibberig,” also meaning slippery. Sounds like another way to describe a slithy tove.
All these gl- words to describe smooth, slippery things can be traced back to a Proto-Indo-European root *ghel-, which means “to shine.” You can see its descendants in glib and glide but also in glow, gleam, glint, glimmer, glisten and “all that glitters (or glisters) is not gold,” an expression about distinguishing superficial appearances from true worth.
I have thought a lot this week about Substack as a platform, in the wake of founder and CEO Chris Best going on Megyn Kelly’s podcast to talk about “tech censorship.” (Ugh.) I wish he hadn’t gone on in the first place, but what he said mostly seemed reasonable to me. I do wish Substack was a little more hands-on in their approach to moderating content. Substack occupies a strange place in our media landscape—is it possible to be only “a platform” and not “a publisher”? I don’t know. For now, I’m not going anywhere. This is just to say that I am paying attention.
It has been pointed out by certain members of my household that because there is no paid subscription option for this newsletter, I (and readers of Word Suitcase, I hope) get value out of Substack, but that Substack gets no value out of me (or you). Welcome to my confidence scheme, ragtag group of lovable, singularly competent misfits who will soon become a found family. Let’s go steal a newsletter.
EDITED TO ADD: This was an early sign of problems to come. I left Substack in March 2021.
I read no Capital-R Romance or small-r romance this week—again: why, is something distracting happening?—but I did zip through Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House. Funny enough, last time I read a Shirley Jackson novel, we were on Impeachment No. 1 and I discussed the roots of the word “impeach,” so it feels appropriate that I was reading another Shirley Jackson novel for Impeachment No. 2.
(Maybe I should read another one, just in case? Or, like, all of them?)
Speaking of things we couldn’t call unexpected and sudden chills, Hill House is fucking great. I don’t know why I want to read horror when the world is on fire; maybe I want to be afraid of something that isn’t real. Maybe I just wanted to read a whole book’s worth of Shirley Jackson’s astonishing sentences. Hill House has a justly famous opening paragraph and I appreciated both Benjamin Dreyer’s thoughts on it and DongWon Song’s. The music of “even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream” has been in my head all week. Better that than, well, pretty much anything else.
