Literati Glitterati - Part 1

Today is the final day of my three-day interregnum, the period between my former and future employment. I am an erstwhile Director of Marketing and Development, and will soon be a picaresque propaedeutic (I hope).


Interregnum is a word not too difficult to discern. Inter- means between, and regnum refers to a reign. So an interregnum is the period between two reigns, usually when there is no ruler or sovereign. It could also refer to these days between the recess of the 111th and the installation of the 112th congress. It has been used in English since the 1570s, prior to which (one can only assume) it was only used in Latin, its source language.

I remember encountering the word interregnum while reading something about the time between the war of 1812 and the Civil War. I also encountered another word that was new to me at that time: antebellum. Ante- is a Latin prefix meaning before with bellum being the Latin word for war. In the United States it usually refers to the period before the Civil War even though we’ve had a few wars since then. Its most common usage is in reference to the pre-Civil War south. Its first attestation is an entry in Mary Chesnut’s diary on July 14, 1862.

Mary Chesnut is a remarkable figure in American history. Daughter and wife of U.S. Senators, her family became leading figures in the confederacy (her husband becoming a general and aide to both Gen. Beauregard and Jefferson Davis), and her diaries of that time, which were published in an ill-fated attempt to relieve the debts incurred in the Civil War, have become

…generally acknowledged today as the finest literary work of the Confederacy. Spiced by the author's sharp intelligence, irreverent wit, and keen sense of irony and metaphorical vision, it uses a diary format to evoke a full, accurate picture of the South in civil war. Chesnut's book, valued as a rich historical source, owes much of its fascination to its juxtaposition of the loves and griefs of individuals against vast social upheaval and much of its power to the contrasts and continuities drawn between the antebellum world and a war-torn country.


- Elizabeth Muhlenfeld of Florida State University (on the web site Documenting the American South – http://docsouth.unc.edu/southlit/chesnut/bio.html)

While finding interregnum in the dictionary I encountered a new word (to me) that I haven’t seen used: interrex. It refers to the person in charge between reigns. (Remember Alexander Haig, who died last Feb. 20, 2010? If not, he’s easy to find on the internet.)



The word erstwhile has a more obscure path to English. It arrived about 10 years before interregnum and came from Middle English where it was spelled erest, and meant soonest or earliest. Even in Old English, from whence it came to Middle English, it was a superlative of time and had been spelled aerest. The superlative suffix –est was attached to the word aer, from which we get the word ere (oft used in poetry).

[More on Wednesday]