As my dad might have said, “If I had a shilling for every time somebody I taught wrote they were keeping a dairy, I’d be rich now”. I even scrawled it myself on one early angst-ridden notebook, despite having an unholy fear of cows and zero desire to become a milk maid.
This frequently misspelled word comes from Latin diarium, meaning “daily allowance,” the point being to record events in date order, usually for posterity (or to remember to order the Dairy Diary from the milkman).
I usually start well, but halfway through January when nothing has happened, I’ll get lazy and lapse. It’s then I return to whichever notebook’s the current ongoing journal.
You insert your own dates in a journal. Purists will point out the word also means daily, as in the drearily familiar “Bon Jour Madames” of yesteryear. I can’t speak for boys, but most girls kept dairies or diaries in their youth with “Reader, I saw him” comments and copious exclamation marks. Our days were so full of hormones and emotion, we could barely wait to be alone and record it all in green ink, capital letters, triple underlining, and purple prose.
So mortifying were these tomes in retrospect, few survived, but what wouldn’t we give to hear the teenage outpourings of our favourite grandmas?