Posted on: March 17, 2010
I often sign off emails with just ‘Best’, which I think sounds less formal than ‘Best Wishes’. But lately I keep mistyping the word, and it comes out as ‘Beset’. This felt like a Freudian slip, because I do feel beset by things at the moment – tasks, problems, existential dilemmas… But when I looked up the word ‘beset’ in the Shorter Oxford Dictionary on historical principles, I found in the examples of usage that, as well as being beset by ‘men and hounds’, ‘contradictions’ and ‘sinne’, things could also be ‘beset with pearls’. I’ve decided that this includes jewels and beautiful things in general, and so that’s what I’ve decided to go with.
Beset,
Judy
