Countertenor

Words.  In all  my readings of newspapers magazines, web pages, flyers, I often encounter new words English and as often as not foreign which I find interesting, stimulating, worth remembering.   In English they are usually rare, obscure terms, in foreign languages, they describe objects or events unknown in the English speaking world.  I write these terms down on the backs of envelopes, on margins of newspapers and scraps of paper, to keep for future categorization and use, and then I lose them.  So it goes.

Yesterday I finally got an idea to start keeping track of these discoveries by writing them down in a blog.  I had no candidate words and no name for the blog when I opened the Wall Street Journal this morning and read an interview with a German opera singer named Andreas Schull, who sings countertenor.

Countertenor is  "singing music originally written for castrated men more than two centuries ago".


Says Mr Scholl:

 "The complete human would be someone who integrates both male and female elements, and a countertenor does that. That's what I like, that the countertenor can be a figure of identification for men and women—because challenges to humanity are not exclusively male or female."