February certainly took its time getting here. I can't remember the last time I felt like a month took a full year to pass...

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Started off the new month, however, on an interesting note: A graduate student from the German Department who works with me in the Dey 110 Instructional Resources Lab asked me if I knew what the word "Psychomachia" meant. He's in a medieval German lit course and was reading a book in which the term in question pops up, he estimated laughing, "at least 3 times in every sentence."

I had to confess that I'd never seen the word before and will willingly admit my ignorance of its meaning right here, publicly. But, the Internet is sometimes a wonderful thing...

After just a little "sleuthing" (read "Googling", or is that "Googleling" or "Googeling"?) it turns out that the word is actually a title, as the following paragraph from The Maven's Word of the Day website indicates:

Psychomachia (with an i) is the title of of a poem by Prudentius from around 400 A.D. It's a Greek word, meaning 'a struggle or fight for life'. As used by Prudentius, it meant 'conflict within one's soul' and was used of the battle between the spirit and the flesh.

And in a more general sense:

By the early modern era of English, psychomachia was being used not only to mean a tortured struggle between virtue and vice, but also a work of literature that dealt with this theme. This latter meaning is still used today among scholars who study medieval and early modern literature.

And the online dictionary Dictionary.com defines the word Psychomachy as A conflict of the soul with the body.

Apparently these clarifications were all Jeff needed to be able to shout "Eureka" and get on with his studies. I'm not sure when I'll ever use the word, but, hey, if I ever want to describe - in pretentious fashion - the battle between good and evil going on in my head to someone (my psychiatrist maybe?) I'll just start screaming repeatedly "psychomachea! psychomachia! psychomachy!" Either that, or should I decide to go back to school and take the GRE again, I'll know at least one more of those infrequently voiced, erudite words.

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I'm not sure how this fits in, but somehow it's appropriate: Yesterday I checked out and today I finished reading Fritz Leiber's Conjure Wife, an absolutely incredible piece of rarefied writing. Occasionally and strangely, I felt as if I were reading bits of "classic literature" -- almost like English translations of Goethe, Kafka, or E.T.A. Hoffman. I don't think I managed to race through those Germans' works, however, quite as fast as Leiber's little treatise on witchcraft.