Some days I pick a word from something I’ve read to focus on and use that day or within the week. One of my favorite places to find them is in Maureen Dowd’s NYT Sunday opinion columns. She peppers her paragraphs with head-scratching words such as gallimaufry, meaning hodgepodge or jumble, or French phrases such as après moi, le déluge meaning: after me, the deluge, and their usage is always spot on! I don’t feel she means to be pretentious; I truly believe she just likes to drop in obscure words for fun.
Today— March 7, 2023—I found liminal in an email, in the sentence: “They were walking into liminal space, with a familiar past of place and spirit left behind and a future promise of spiritual power, wedded to tangible material things in the distance.”
I Googled it. Here’s my research:
lim-i-nal
adjective
occupying a position at, or on both sides of, a boundary or threshold.
relating to transitional or initial state of a process
A common example of liminality is the short time between life and death or between sleep and being awake. Liminality can refer to the physical, emotional, and metaphorical transitions that occur in life. These transitions often feel uncomfortable for the people experiencing them. In anthropology, liminality is the quality of ambiguity or disorientation that occurs in the middle stage of a rite of passage, when participants no longer hold their pre-ritual status but have not yet begun the transition to the status they will hold when the rite is complete. Wikipedia google search link
Liminal is a word I kinda know but want to know better, “well enough to use in conversation and writing,” as I say to my students. The word immediately brought to mind my Covid year off which was the sabbatical from teaching I never would have been granted otherwise. A magical year of inward expansion and recalibration of relationships. I’m looking forward to using it at the dinner table in a conversation with my husband just to add a bit of fun and spice to the meal.