[Here is my take on today’s Finding Everyday Inspiration https://dailypost.wordpress.com/blogging-university/writing-everyday-inspiration/ prompt on the subject of “Lists” ]

The earliest meaning of list refers not to an ordered category of things but to deviation from the mean. It is related to the word ‘lust’ (desire) and refers originally to the way a ship at sea lists from side to side at the will of the waves.

Later it came to be used to refer, in a largely agricultural society, to the boundaries of a tended field, the point at which it shades off into raw nature and from there, by extension, through the enclosure movement, to the idea of a strip of land that marks this boundary and, by further extension, one that measures and marks out the lay of the cultivated land.

The dictionary emerged in the 18^th century as a list of definitions, marginal to actual language usage, which nevertheless aim both to curtail the encroachment of natural language growth and to organize and standardize the prevailing status quo.

The list is also an important literary device and the best examples are always those that subvert the modern bureaucratic sense of the term by harking back to the original meaning of wilful natural deviation from a norm.

Lists appear not only in literature but also in film. A famous scene in Godard’s Weekend reconfigures the list as a tracking shot of a bizarre traffic jam. In Spike Lee’s 25th Hour, the protagonist, at one point, launches rap-style into a long embittered list of the ‘ethnic’ groups in New York City by whom he feels aggrieved.

All lists are arbitrary, especially those that adhere most strictly to some preconceived rule.