Staring, Staring, Staring

Our daughter is a girl of many expressions.  For a long time it made no difference that she couldn’t speak, she managed to convey her feelings through the medium of her facial expressions.  Which I suppose is preferable to the medium of modern dance.  Anyway, she is one of those people who you would not describe as inscrutable.  In fact, scrutable, if it existed as a word, could have been coined just for her.  (It turns out that scrutable has been used and is a recognised word, although it has fallen out of the rather niche use which it once enjoyed.  It even merited a definition in Samuel Johnson’s dictionary, or to give it its full title, A Dictionary of the English Language: In which the Words are Deduced from Their Originals, Explained in Their Different Meanings, and Authorised by the Names of the Writers in Whose Works They are Found.  What a wonderful book that is.  One of these days, when I have totally run out of ideas, I’m just going to dedicate a blog post to words and definitions from that most remarkable book.  Let us all hope that day is a long way off.)