Diary

: See Diary (novel) for the novel by Chuck Palahniuk and Diary (album) for an album by Sunny Day Real Estate

History

The word diary comes from the Latin diarium ("daily allowance", from dies, "day" - more often in the plural form diaria). The word "journal" comes from the same root (diurnus = of the day) through "journey".

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The oldest extant diaries come from East Asian cultures, pillowbooks of Japanese court ladies and Asian travel journals being some of the oldest surviving specimens of this genre of writing.

Related Topics:
Pillowbook - Japan - Asia

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Sales of "page a day" diaries go back hundreds of years (Letts, for example, is over 200 years old). At first, most of these books were used as ledgers, or business books. Samuel Pepys is the earliest diarist that is well known today, although he had contemporaries who were also keeping diaries. (John Evelyn for one.) Pepys also was apparently at a turning point in diary history, for he took it beyond mere business transaction notation, into the realm of the personal.

Related Topics:
Letts - Ledger - Samuel Pepys - John Evelyn

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Until does seem that around the turn of 20th century, with greater literacy and industrialization throughout the globe, particularly the Western world, diary writing was mostly limited to the members of the higher socio-economic classes. In the West, at least, a high prortion of historical and literary figures from the Renaissance to the 20th century seem to have kept a diary. (see list below)

Related Topics:
20th century - Western world - Socio-economic classes

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In the 1960s Tristine Rainer authored the book The New Diary. It was revolutionary in expanding awareness of diary-keeping as a literary genre. In the work she identified techniques that people use either spontaneously or have employed in their daily writing to explore themselves and their experience of the world in which they live. The idea, as expressed in the title, is that a diary is much more than a dry record of weather or daily events--it allows the writer to communicate deep and often spiritual realizations.

Related Topics:
1960s - Tristine Rainer - The New Diary

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One of the most tempting things about diaries is that writing one is accessible to anyone with pen and paper. No education is needed. One doesn't need to know how to spell or use grammar. Writing a diary is something some people are driven to do, often as a way to put their existence into perspective. Too often diaries are perceived to be written only by teenage girls. The onslaught of diaries sold in "cute" colors with locks and keys helped this illusion. Now, many people prefer the word "journal" so as to avoid this common misconception.

Related Topics:
Pen - Paper - Spell - Grammar - Teenage - Girl - Illusion

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