mirabile dictu; contretemps

both very familiar / both elusive in my memory

Definition of mirabile dictu:
interjection. “Latin: wonderful to say, or to relate; incredible” (answers.com)

Definition of contretemps:
noun. “French: An unforeseen event that disrupts the normal course of things; an inopportune occurrence; an awkward clash; An unexpected and usually undesirable event: accident, casualty, misadventure, mischance, misfortune, mishap.” (answers.com)

Where I ran across them:
From the same article by Dick Cavett that brought us abstruse (see previous blog entry). Have you read that article yet? You should. Go!

“…Two men in the short line of swim-suited, giggling aquatic revelers are recognizable. A tourist bystander asks her friend, ‘Hey, can that be Dick Cavett?’ ‘Where?’ ‘There. In the water. The guy clinging to the naked lower calves of William F. Buckley Jr.’ As the latter might have answered her with that famous and much imitated resonance, ‘Mirabile dictu, madame, you are correct.’ …”

“…They had sailed from New York, the yacht captained by Bill, the undaunted sailor. By this time he had been an eagerly welcomed guest on my show numerous times. What he might have termed “our initial contretemps” was forgotten. …”

My two cents:
Dick Cavett utters a phrase, mirabile dictu, which I haven’t seen in quite awhile, and reminds me it is so wonderful that I just have to celebrate it. Again, it’s no real mystery as to its meaning, but it’s just such a darn fine specimen that I’m giving it a proper salute, and a promise never to forget it, ever again.

By the way, of (infuriating) interest are Microsoft Word’s consistent attempts to auto-correct dictu with a phantom “m” to create the word, dictum. All by its lonesome, Word suddenly knows better than Dick Cavett?? What hubris. I’m this close to writing Bill Gates, but I think he just retired, rich as Croesus from thinking up stuff like Word and auto-correct, so I’ll spare us all and take it up with my Preferences Menu. And why did that old Dictaphone joke suddenly come to mind? Sorry, I digress.

Cavett also throws in a great bon mot that really rattled my cage: contretemps. Now, people, I took 4 years of high school French, and read Le Petit Prince -- en francais -- cover to cover. How could I forget the word contretemps? Two words: Forty. Years. But I’ll be kind to my aging self and move along, with contretemps now solidly back in the ol’ literary bag.

Pendant longtemps, j'espère.