Contabulation: noun The act of laying with boards, or of flooring; the floor laid.
Came across this word in Webster's 1828 dictionary today as Meghan and I were trying to come up with a better word than 'groove' for our word of the week on our family calendar. In searching, this word does not appear in any other modern dictionary searches, even online. Makes you wonder how many other words have been lost over the years.
Contabulation is the act of laying flooring essentially. Laying what others will walk on. Laying the footing. Your life will take place on top of what you have contabulated.
We are laying that flooring for our girls right now, each day. As we plan our weeks we have this in mind. As I think about in a few short weeks leaving for a two month exercise, and next year for a 6 month deployment, I think about the downstreams effects that fatherlessness had on myself and my siblings. Regardless the justification, even be it military service, does not give our family back the time I am away. I pray each day that we lay the footing well for our girls. That it will be firm while I am gone. And I pray for wisdom and clarity as to my military service for I do not see it a sustainable career for our family. Our contabulation window is closing, and I don’t want to come home from the field one day to realize the flooring wasn’t finished and the furniture is already in place.
this is a great insight and a great work. reminds me of something i just read last week in Ambrose Bierce's Devil's Dictionary under his definition for LEXICOGRAPHER -n. A pestilent fellow who, under the pretense of recording some particular stage in the development of a language, does what he can to arrest its growth, stiffen its flexibility and mechanize its methods. For your lexicographer, having written his dictionary, comes to be considered "as one having authority," whereas his function is only to make a record, not to give a law. The natural servility of the human understanding having invested him with judicial power, surrenders its right of reason and submits itself to a chronicle as if it were a statue. Let the dictionary (for example) mark a good word as "obsolete" or "obsolescent" and few men thereafter venture to use it, whatever their need of it and however desirable its restoration to favor - whereby the process of improverishment is accelerated and speech decays. On the contrary, recognizing the truth that language must grow by innovation if it grow at all, makes new words and uses the old in an unfamiliar sense, has no following and is tartly reminded that "it isn't in the dictionary" - although down to the time of the first lexicographer (Heaven forgive him!) no author ever had used a word that was in the dictionary. In the golden prime and high noon of English speech; when from the lips of the great Elizabethans fell words that made their own meaning and carried it in their very sound; when a Shakespeare and a Bacon were possible, and the language now rapidly perishing at one end and slowly renewed at the other was in vigorous growth and hardy preservation - sweeter than honey and stronger than a lion - the lexicographer was a person unknown, the dictionary a creation which his Creator had not created him to create."
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