The Best of Margaret St. Clair

1

In the past, I have been accused of making up some of the unusual words that appear in my stories. Sometimes this accusation has been justified; sometimes, as in “Vulcan’s Dolls” (see Plant Life of the Pacific World) it has not. For the record, therefore, be it observed that “dight” is a middle English word meaning, among other things, “to have intercourse with.” (See Poets of the English Language, Auden and Pearson, Vol. 1, p. 173.) “Dight” was reintroduced by a late twentieth-century philologist who disliked the “sleep with” euphemism, and who saw that the language desperately needed a transitive verb that would be “good usage.”