Conversation

https://spectator.com/article/the-spectators-notes-2/

My sister has unearthed my precious copy of The Junior Puffin Quiz Book, published in 1966, when I was ten. […]

A single question which encapsulates, including its careful semi-colons, the lost culture The Junior Puffin Quiz Book represents: ‘Is a psaltery (a) the book of Psalms; (b) a kind of musical instrument; (c) a term used in heraldry; or (d) a kind of fossil?’ What ten-year-old today knows what a psaltery is? How many more even know what the Psalms are or a single fact about heraldry? […]

What I most notice is the book’s underlying, self-fulfilling assumption that children could and should know a great deal about a wide world. The book also has the spirit of enquiry. It loves to investigate meanings in order to spread knowledge. Hence this: ‘What is the meaning of the word “quick” in the phrase “the quick and the dead”? Do you know of any other phrase in which “quick” has meaning?’ The answer says, ‘“Quick” here means “living”. The quick is the living part of the nail. And if we cut this, we are “hurt to the quick”. A quicksand is as it were a living sand; a quickset hedge is a hedge of living plants as opposed to a fence; quicksilver (or mercury) seems alive as it moves about.’ How full, how economical, yet how poetical.

https://archive.ph/KrP83