Postile

Just over a year ago I tried to find out what the word, postile, meant, and didn’t have much success. However, it’s obviously a word that people go looking for, and get all sorts of results. Which, in a way, is surprising in itself. Getting results for a word that doesn’t appear to exist is quite clever on Google’s behalf.
Way back in 2004, Nick, who was then a design engineer in California, wrote that he was suffering from postile dysfunction. Look up that phrase on Google, and you get a whole pile of bloggers using it. Did Nick start it, then?
Postile dysfunction appears to be a play on the phrase erectile dysfunction, and bloggers seem to express the idea of running out of blog ideas by it. But because it’s not firmly established in that way, it can also mean when a post that’s been uploaded goes wrong somehow. Intriguing.

There’s a rather odd entry from Wikipedia on the word: Postilė (Postilla, tatai esti trumpas ir prastas ischguldimas euangeliu) is postil written in Lithuanian language by Jonas Bretkūnas in 1591. Positlė is one of the best known works of Jonas Bretkūnas.
Okay. The picture at the side has the word on the cover; it’s not a piece of music as I’d first hazarded. Seemingly Bretkūnas was a linguist and historian.
We get a bit more information here: The "Postilė" by M.Daukša is one of the most significant monuments of the ancient Lithuanian written language. Already in the preface the author praises the mother tongue, encourages Lithuanians to cherish it. This work gives us a possibility to perceive the Lithuanian language of the 16th century, to learn richness of it, to widen the vocabulary and the phraseology of the Modern Lithuanian literary language.

Postile is also a family name for a number of people living in England and Wales.

Neil Gaiman

I can believe things that are true and I can believe things that aren’t true and I can believe things where nobody know if they’re true or not. I can believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and Marilyn Monroe and the Beatles and Elvis and Mister Ed. Listen – I believe that people are perfectible, that knowledge is infinite, that the world is run by secret banking cartels and is visited by aliens on a regular basis, nice ones that look like wrinkledy lemurs and bad ones who mutilate cattle and want our water and our women. I believe that the future sucks and I believe that the future rocks and I believe that one day White Buffalo woman is going to come back and kick everyone’s ass. I believe that all men are just over-grown boys with deep problems communicating and that the decline in good sex in America is coincident with the decline in Drive-In Movie theatres from state to state. I believe that all politicians are unprincipled crooks and I still believe that they are better than the alternative. I believe that California is going to sink into the sea when the big one comes, while Florida is going to dissolve into madness and alligators and toxic waste. I believe that anti-bacterial soap is destroying our resistance to dirt and disease so that one day we’ll all be wiped out by the common cold like the Martians in War of the Worlds. I believe that the greatest poets of the last century were Edith Sitwell and Don Marquis, that jade is dried dragon sperm, and that thousands of years ago in a former life I was a one-armed Siberian Shaman. I believe that Mankind’s destiny lies in the stars. I believe that candy really did taste better when I was a kid, that it’s aerodynamically impossible for a bumble-bee to fly, that light is a wave and a particle, that there’s a cat in a box somewhere who’s alive and dead at the same time (although if they don’t ever open the box to feed it it’ll eventually just be two different kinds of dead), and that there are stars in the universe billions of years older than the universe itself. I believe in a personal god who cares about me and worries and oversees everything I do. I believe in an impersonal god who set the universe in motion and went off to hang with her girlfriends and doesn’t even know that I’m alive. I believe in an empty and godless universe of causal chaos, background noise and sheer blind luck. I believe that anyone who claims to know what’s going on will lie about the little things too. I believe in absolute honesty and sensible social lies. I believe in a woman’s right to choose, a baby’s right to live, that while all human life is sacred there’s nothing wrong with the death penalty if you can trust the legal system implicitly, and no-one but a moron would ever trust the legal system. I believe that life is a game, life is a cruel joke and that life is what happens when you’re alive and that you might as well lie back and enjoy it.

The female hippy character, Sam, in Neil Gaiman’s American Gods: on a roll, and expressing the confused state of belief that she probably shares with many other American citizens. It’s also an aria for one of the main characters; Gaiman being both real and cynical and joking and hilarious all at the same time; and a marvellous expression of Sam’s smart/naïve/intellectual/simple personality. And a rare moment of warmth and humour in a fairly dark novel.