You might be wondering what I smoked for breakfast to be able to come up with a name like Mooreeffoc for my blog. What does it mean? What does it have to do with this blog? Well, G.K. Chesterton offers a good explanation:

Dickens himself has given a perfect instance of how these nightmare minutiae grew upon him in his trance of abstraction. He mentions among the coffee-shops into which he crept in those wretched days one in St. Martin’s Lane, “of which I only recollect that it stood near the church, and that in the door there was an oval glass plate with ‘COFFEE ROOM’ painted on it, addressed towards the street. If I ever find myself in a very different kind of coffee-room now, but where there is such an inscription on glass, and read it backwards on the wrong side, MOOR EEFFOC (as I often used to do then in a dismal reverie), a shock goes through my blood.” That wild word, “Moor Eeffoc,” is the motto of all effective realism; it is the masterpiece of the good realistic principle - the principle that the most fantastic thing of all is often the precise fact.

Simply put, Mooreeffoc is taking something plain and looking at it in a new and different way. In a way it can be defined as reading between the lines. It’s the effect you get when you look past something in order to gain a new perspective on it. Tolkien also wrote about the word in his Essay on Fairy Stories:

Mooreeffoc is a fantastic word, but it could be seen written up in every town in this land. It is Coffee-room, viewed from the inside through a glass door, as it was seen by Dickens on a dark London day; and it was used by Chesterton to denote the queerness of things that have become trite, when they are seen suddenly from a new angle.

Mooreeffoc is used in literary fiction, such as that of Tolkien and Lewis, to cause the reader to look at something they hadn’t thought to really look at before, and to think more deeply on certain points they may not have thought on before. Even the parables of Scripture use Mooreeffoc to show the truth by presenting it from a different angle.

The word Mooreeffoc, I think, describes this blog perfectly. The whole point of this blog is to look at things from a new perspective, specifically literature, poetry, and any other form of writing. So that’s the story.

The end.

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 11th, 2007 at 9:47PM and is filed under Miscellaneous. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.