Aegypt

The fantastical country of yore, where anything that couldn’t be explained came from. John Crowley also wrote an astonishing book by the same title, about our all-too-human propensity to impose patterns and masques on the world where there is really no pattern — but it does help us sleep at night.

Losing the original spelling of this word (and others like it, such as aether) seems to me a great pity, a bit like losing a bit of wonder. Oh, well, we still have aegis. Woo hoo.

Peter Naus