Dear Panpanpan,
We have been discussing the term "homefires." You didn't find it in your dictionary. There is another way to look for information about a word or term by using a search engine to see what it supplies.
I used a search engine called "Ask Jeeves." You can easily find it through Google. "Jeeves" is the name of a fictional English butler in a famous and well-loved series of funny old English novels still enjoyed world wide. They were written by the famous P. G. Wodehouse. Jeeves was the superb butler helper and advisor to a young Englishman named Bertie Wooster. A butler attends very smoothly and skillfuly to the supervision of service and the extra needs of a wealthy English household.
When I asked Jeeves "What are home fires?" using the two words separately as in
"home fires," the search engine gave me all kinds of information about dangers to homes from fires in the house. There were sections on home fire safety, causes of home fires, children and fire prevention, forest fires and homes, and statistics about home fires.
When I put in the two words as one and asked Jeeves "What are homefires?" as used in my recemt post, the sites offered had almost the opposite meaning. From dangers to homes the sites offered the cosiness of home. Sites offered a Home Schooling Online site called <Homefires.com>. There is a site called "Homefires Hearth Home Page", a "Homefires Bakery" that offers breads and cinnamon rolls
baked in a German masonry oven.
I think by now you see that the second way of writing "homefires" means a cosy
hearth and home where children learn together, where the fragrance of baking bread can be smelled, even an organization for various faiths to share and cooperate with each other. In English we use the term "hearth and home." A warm and cheery fire burning on the hearth is the symbol of home.
There was an old WW1 or WW2 song that began "Keep the homefires burning while the hearts are yearning, turn the dark clouds inside out till the boys come home.
There's a silver lining through the dark clouds shining......till the boys come
home." It was encouragement to those left behind, and to those at the front a
comfort, to hear a song about maintaining the warmth of hearth and home until the returning soldier loved ones came back from the war.
"Ask Jeeves" is a good search engine when you want to ask a question using a sentence. Another good search engine is "Clusty". It is a clustering search engine, and once you see how this site organizes search results into folders grouping
similar items together I think you'll use it a lot. Clusty allows users to focus on the area of interest without all the chaff, as the site says.
Here is an example of what the site offers: if you search for "pearl" the site
organizes the top 250-500 results into subject folders such as Jewelry, Pearl Harbor, Pearl Jam, Steinbeck Novel and Daniel Pearl. You can see how quickly you would be able to "cut to the chase" and find just the kind of pearl you were seeking. It is a superb search engine that has won much attention and many international awards. If you don't already know these two I think you will be glad you
know them now.
Warmly, Mary
