Oh my word Self, Selves, Shelf, Shelves

When Thales was asked what was difficult, he said, To know one’s self. And what was easy, To advise another.Diogenes Laertius

When you buy a product, food item or medicine, check out its shelf-life which will be displayed on it. It is illegal to sell products by a retailer (online and offline) that are out of date.

It is not only difficult to know one’s self, and there are many interesting words formed out of the self: Imagine, how many compound words you can form with ‘self’: yourself, themselves, herself, himself (pronouns), and compound nouns like self-abasement, self-abnegation, self-abhorrence, self-abuse, self-accusation, self-addressed, self-aggrandizement (but self-aggrandizing is an adjective, so are self-appointed, self-aware, self-catering, self-closing, ), self-contempt…

Sense your ‘self’, before we discuss about it. Philiospher and psychologists have endlessly debated and discussed about it without consensus: is self there in a person?

Shelf is a noun, and its plural form is shelves. Shelf means ais a flat bottom surface of a recess in a wall; a thin flat piece of wood, or metal, or a concrete structure projecting from a wall on which one place things of the household or the office such as books, souvenirs, mementoes among others.

Shelf is a projecting horizontal ledge in a cliff of a land. Shelf is a reef.

Shelf is a sandbank. On the shelf refers to a woman when she is expected to be married. Before the Internet, match-makers for a man and a woman were highly in demand (also now in internet-less areas) but now there are online matrimonial sites for women on the shelf to have more options or choices to choose their other halves.

On the shelf also refers to a pensioner, or to a retired person from his or her working life. On the shelf personnel could be found in the parks, and on the public transports, or attending to their children and their children. In this sense of the word, its adjective forms are shelved and shelf-like and the nouns are shelfful or shelffuls.

Shelf-life is a noun, and its plural form is shelf-lives, it means the duration or a length of the time for which an item stored remains usable. The government officers related to the safety standards of food products will be on the field to find out the products that are stored to sell but of their shelf-life.

The couple spent more than half a day trying to figure out what items to place in the shelf room. Shelf room is the available place on a shelf in a house, or an office.

Kovuuri G Reddy