Lexical Note:
Steeple
15 August 2018

In the steeply pitched roof there was a single window in each of the two rooms.

Because I was tired, I misread “steeply” for “steeple,” and only then did I realize that steeples are steep. 

The sentence comes from Chapter 6 of “Reading Turgenev,” one of the two novellas that comprise William Trevor’s Two Lives. (The other, My House in Umbria, is the source of a movie that Kathleen and I love to pieces, although neither of us has ever read the story.) 

Because one of my favorite movies — I saw it in the theatre back in 1962, before it won Best Foreign Film — is Les dimanches de Ville d’Avray (Sundays and Cybèle), you’d think I’d have known. But steeples have an underived quality, don’t they? 

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