In the spirit of equal time allotted to any and all with differing opinions and/or values, tonight's picture is of Callie, sister (kind of) and co-habitation canine of the Estate on the Edge of Nowhere. Neither of these two dogs care for having their pictures taken, but Lexie (the piglet) is definitely the more amenable and more photogenic of the two. When you take a picture of Callie, there is sometimes a challenge determining which end you are actually capturing for posterity; the front end or the back end. Callie, however, is the much more calm and patient (tolerant) of the two. I was wakened this morning at about 3 a.m., because the piglet had to go outside. When I let them back in, I camped out on the couch, and never really did make it back to sleep. So, I am a little cranky right now and am looking forward to bedtime. But night time chores first.Connive -- Verb. 1. to pretend ignorance of or fail to take action against something. 2a. to be indulgent or in secret sympathy. b. to cooperate secretly or engage in secret scheming: conspire. "Moreover, the government was only too happy, for propaganda purposes, to connive at such large-scale fraud." Anthony Daniels, USA Today Magazine, September, 2014
Did You Know? Connive may not seem list a troublesome term, but it was to Wilson Follett, a usage critic who lamented that the word "was undone during the Second World War, when restless spirits felt the need of a new synonym for plotting, bribing, spying, conspiring, engineering a coup, preparing a secret attack." Follett thought connive should only mean "to wink at" or "to pretend ignorance." Those senses are closer to the Latin ancestor of the word (connive comes from the Latin connivere, which means "to close the eyes" and is descended from -nivere, a form akin to the Latin verb nictare, meaning "to wink"). But many English speakers disagreed, and the "conspire" sense is now the word's most widely used meaning.
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