"Cloister"

[veronica-rich.livejournal.com]

I also posted this to Tumblr, but not everybody reads it. Today’s Word of the Day in my email was “cloister.” Now I know the meaning of it, but reading it made me realize something just now:

1. to confine in retirement; seclude.
2. to confine in a monastery or convent.

Not only is it a natural mispronunciation of Lister’s name, it’s an accurate description of the rest of his life, more or less, in just about every stage - confined, imprisoned, frozen, etc. How did I never notice this? Did anyone else and I'm just slow?

Besides the obvious hilarious meaning, I read somewhere some time ago that "rimmer" is a slightly different-spelled version of either Old or Middle English "rimer," which you can figure out somewhat by phonetics - "rhymer" or storyteller, for a broader definition. I guess if you want to be REALLY super meta you could say Rimmer goes through a lot of changes and "lives" a long time in different forms (human, hologram, space hero - which carries with it its own iterations of disguise/change of personality Ace needs to be best suited to the situation at hand) ... so he's constantly rewriting his own story and showing up in the stories of a LOT of other people.

Or, knowing Grant Naylor, they just meant it to be ass-licker.