After the feast comes the logy
2009 November 25
A final post from Stephen King’s The Gunslinger. About a hundred pages in, the title character has been traveling across a desert and has just met a boy who has given him food and water:
He ate and drank until he felt logy, and then settled back.
I wasn’t sure what this meant, though from the context I would have guessed it meant satisfied.
Nope. I looked it up, and it means “sluggish” or “groggy.” Remember that when everyone is slumped on the couch tomorrow night.
American Heritage and Merriam-Webster Online give slightly different etymologies:
- AHD: Perhaps from the Dutch log, meaning heavy or a variant of the English loggy, meaning heavy, sluggish, from log, from the Middle English logge.
- M-W: Perhaps from Dutch log; akin to the Middle Low German luggich, meaning lazy.
Happy Thanksgiving, everyone! (And happy Nov. 26 to my British, Aussie, Canadian and other readers abroad!) See you all next week.
Be careful with looking up stuff from the Dark Tower, eventually there’s a whole different set of dialect introduced.
Yes, I think I just assumed that it was a Dark Tower neologism, like ‘popkin’. Although I have my doubts about ‘popkin’ too now…