Consolatory appears in an essay by Hannah Arendt, in a 2017 collection titled Tough Enough: Arbus, Arendt, Didion, McCarthy, Sontag, Weil, edited by Deborah Nelson. This is one of those words that belongs to the days when recipes contained casual measurements (think of Elizabeth David's), and American schools taught students how to form the subjunctive tense.
Cheffy appears in a New York Times "best restaurants of 2017" articlette by Pete Wells about the Flushing, Queens, restaurant Guan Fu Sichuan—"[it's] probably the most cheffy Sichuan place in town . . . ." (See page D6, Wednesday, December 13.) Like puppy, cheffy is an adorable word. Cheffy has floppy ears. I'm ready to give it a loving home life.
However.
Readers: A word more suitable, I believe, for your consideration, lives in an argument formulated by John Milton, in his Areopagitica. In the year 1644, books, according to Milton,
Although this quotation appears in the Oxford English Dictionary (under the fourth definition for potency), I found it in The Reader in the Book: A Study of Spaces and Traces, by Stephen Orgel (Oxford University Press, 2015). Apparently there is now quite a lot of work in the field concerning everyday readers of books in early modern culture.contain a potencie of life in them to be as active as that soule was whose progeny they are; nay they do preserve as in a violl the purest efficacie and extraction of that living intellect that bred them.
(Flashback: Twenty-five years ago, a professor of English teaching a graduate level course on Shelley and his circle at New York University brought to class a triple-decker novel so students could see for themselves how readers "spoke" to one another in the margins of the book. It was fascinating.)
Orgel's book quotes from a 2005 Cambridge University Press title by Heidi Brayman Hackel, who makes the obvious and yet profound point that the book in early modern England filled a role "as available paper."
Think on this, even on the fact of paper's availability in those years.
Marginalia represent such an appealing aspect of print culture. I like to imagine fleets of individuals making margin notes, exercising their status as free-thinking agents.
A bound book can be such a beautifully private, giving space.
Potencie, instead of potency, strikes me as open-ended. The -ie is as a dance step, or a liquid trickle; it suggests movement that may continue along its path, as long as nothing intervenes; whereas the terminal y in today's version of the word says That's that.
To me there is more hope in potencie than in potency.