Daymare

As a student, I never had the stereotypical nightmare where final exams arrive and I realize that I must take a final in a course I have never attended.  Oddly enough, after my daughter went to college, I had a nightmare in which she was indisposed, so I was tasked with attending her classes and taking notes for her.  In this nightmare, I could not find the classroom or was late or such.

 

On the contrary, as a full-time teacher, and even as a substitute teacher, I have  had a nightmare in which I cannot find the classroom, am late for class, am not prepared to teach,  do not have an attendance list, and such.  Sometimes these nightmares translate into bad daytime experiences, or a “day-mare.”  I realized early in my teaching career that such a thing as a stupid question really does exist, in spite of what teachers are taught to say.  While teaching freshman composition as a graduate assistant, I had one student who frequently made the class a “daymare” for me.  Late in the semester, a different student from that class told me that I would visibly wince when the King of Stupid Questions would raise his hand.  (To make my daymare even worse, he ended up taking a second class with me!)

 

A different student caused dismay with his monumental indifference, a condition found more frequently in students (and others).  Most students will at least feign interest on some level, attempting to hide their distractions behind books or innocent facial expressions.  I wrote a poem about this student which I entitled “Daymare”:

 

Cheeseburger/fries waft

In the low gravitation

Behind what should be

Knowledge-hungry eyes.

Out-to-lunch

Rings up on dusty, green lenses.

As he sits and stares,

Not even pretending to take notes,

I total out the day’s tape and wonder

How much change I owe him.

While I never published that poem, I was proud thinking that I had coined the word “daymare.”

Imagine my surprised pleasure recently to run across the word in Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield.  The narrator is speaking of his unshakeable thoughts of his current guardians, “a monstrous load that I was obliged to bear, a daymare that there was no possibility of breaking in, a weight that brooded on my wits, and blunted them!”  The OED defines “daymare” as “a condition similar to night-mare occurring during wakefulness.”  The first example of usage is dated 1737 and the last 1889.  My American Heritage Dictionary, 5th ed. includes the word as Standard English, but I have not found it in abridged current dictionaries.

Sometimes when we wish someone goodnight, we say “Sweet dreams,” meaning "sleep well."  In the daytime, when we say, “Good day,” we mean “goodbye.”  In the day time, when we wish good will upon parting, we say, “Have a nice day.”  Perhaps in the context of “daymare,” we should wish someone well by saying, “Sweet day.”

Have a sweet day!