Dieter
Z: I add my praise to Jansy’s. Not only for the reasonable arguments
recently posted, but for their Nabokovian humour and elegance. They
admirably confirm your long, valued exposure to the Master! You are
absolutely correct to be cautious about which sources need or deserve
to be cited. The web is awash with non-peer-reviewed, often
pseudonymous, banter, and urls are notoriously volatile. We
Citationologists sympathize with you over “priority claims.” It’s
difficult enough for well-documented inventions (Tesla/Edison),
scientific theories (Wallace/Darwin) and mathematical methods
(Newton/Leibniz). For literary allusion-tracing priorities, it’s
well-nigh impossible. Hint: date stamps on text files can be trivially
hacked.
Yet, pace JM, am I the first to report the following
suggestive support for DZ’s “ombriole” derivation? Idle, devious
googling revealed this from VN’s Russian translation of “Speak Memory”
[his mum is picking mushrooms, (II:3)]? Probably not!
...бисерная морось на
зеленовато-бурой шерсти плаща образовывала вокруг нее подобие дымчатого
ореола.
[...the beadily-minute drizzle on the greenish-brown wool of her cloak
formed around her the likeness of a smoke-colored aureole.]
Yet VN’s original English reads:
"...her
small figure cloaked and hooded in greenish-brown wool, on which
countless droplets of moisture made a kind of mist all around her."
Clearly, VN’s “second thoughts” transformed
the mundane “mist all around her” into the magical дымчатого ореола
It’s at least arguable that “aureole” graced a favoured
place in VN’s lexis.
Further, Joe Lavender’s naughty
holograms (is this the word DJ used for projected 3-dimensional
images?) call for the corona that, my saucy friends tell me, surrounds
many a ripe nipple. Only brolly fetishists would connect ombrioles with
umbrellas! Note, en passant, that “nipple,” like the Latin “aureolus”
(from “aureus” = [golden] crown) is also a diminutive! These
diminutives have less to do with size, one hopes, than as terms of
endearment ;=)
Stan Kelly-Bootle