The podictionary word for today is renovate:  I have been through more than one renovation project but the one I just wrapped up was the most frustrating.  It dragged on and on.  But to keep our houses from falling down we have to keep fixing them up.  Actually more effort seems to go into making them better than they were before, rather than just keeping them in good repair. 

I see from the National Association of Home Builders that we are spending more than 200 billion dollars a year on renovations in North America—although they call it remodeling, not renovation.  I can believe 200 billion because I feel like I made a significant contribution to that total.  The New Oxford American Dictionary tells me that remodeling is improving on the design of your house, while renovation is restoring it to a good state of repair, so I guess that’s why the NAHB likes the word remodel, it means more work for them.  The etymology of renovation isn’t that interesting, it comes from Latin and means literally “to make new again.”  But the fellow who gave us the first citation is interesting. 

His name was John Leland and he was talking about an old abbey.  John Leland had a job working for another guy who’s name you might have heard, King Henry VIII.  John was the official librarian and King Henry assigned him the task of poking into all the libraries in England to see what ancient books and documents lay there.  Many of these documentary storehouses were contained in churches and we have John Leland to thank for our knowledge of some of the material because even as he toured around England making his notes, Henry VIII had his run in with the pope and all the churches in England suddenly went from being Catholic to being protestant, with an accompanying mix of property swaps and documentary guffufles. 

But John Leland was more than a librarian and as he toodled around England he wanted to check out all the places he was reading about in all those old documents and he kept pretty extensive notes.  So much so that six years into his perambulations he wrote a letter to the King saying he wanted to write a whole pile of books about his findings.  Included were

• a four volume encyclopedia of English writers up to that time;
• an extensive topographically oriented description of England so that accurate maps could be made;
• a six volume description of the islands and countries surrounding England;
• fifty books, one for each sire in England and Wales, describing their local history
• a three volume set of the genealogical relationships of English nobles
The amount of information boggles the mind doesn’t it.  It certainly boggled poor John’s mind because within a year of promising all this to the king John went insane.  But his notes survived and years later were published in many volumes collectively known as his Itinerary.