Confessions of ignorance

burin

2012-02-13T21:29:00.000-08:00

This is a bit different than my typical word posts, because I don't recall hearing it before. I probably have somewhere, but when I came across the mention of the word in Peter Carey's novel Parrot and Olivier in America today, I had no idea what he was talking about. Luckily, Carey is too savvy to assume anything about his readership's vocabulary, so he has the boy Parrot be equally perplexed and then reveals it's use to all of us before too long. As the boy says:

You do not know what a burin is, and nor did I, mistaking it for a shiv, a murdering steel shaft with a hemispherical handle.

A burin, it turns out, is an engraver's tool. Can you visualize it? Good for you. I can't. I'm going to need a visual...

In the book, Parrot learns to carve into a block of exceedingly hard wood, but most of the stuff I've come across here has to do with carving into metal--or stone. Here's a very informative video I came across:

After watching this video, you may understand why Wikpedia has a picture of the Dutch artist Hendrik Goltzius's hand which was said to be particularly suitable for using a burin:

Goltzius' self-portrait

The etymology does not seem to be all that conclusive--the word comes from the French burin, and is related to the Italian bolino, and the Spanish buril, and all probably go back to the Old High German bora--to bore.

Sounds about right.

plethora

2012-02-10T22:22:00.000-08:00

This was one I took mental note of awhile ago. I don't recall the circumstances. I think I know what it means in a general sense--"a plethora of" means an abundance of, or more than enough of--something like that. But what does it mean more precisely or originally?

370

You'll notice that no one ever exactly provides an answer to the question...

***

A plethora is more an excess of or overabundance of than sheer abundance, though the sense of simple abundance is now also in the popular vernacular. That's why it was once used to describe a blood condition characterized by an excess of red blood corpuscles. Or earlier an excess of bodily fluids. It comes, through Latin, from the Greek plethore "fullness". The sense of excess apparently comes later, at around 1700.

This is a perhaps rare case where a word has drifted eventually back to something more like its original sense.

longshoreman

2012-02-07T11:27:00.000-08:00

So in posting that last post about stevedores, and dredging up my small memory about Eric Hoffer, I realized that I had never heard him referred to as a stevedore, but definitely as a longshoreman. I may be wrong, but I think the word longshoreman is more part of our American mythology of labor than stevedore. But why is he called a longshoreman, exactly? I've been trying to piece this one together, thinking that it can't be that hard. The word is in English, after all. But all I can think is what long shore? And does it have anything to do with Long Island?

***
Okay. I'm not going to tell you the answer to this one just yet, because it is so incredibly obvious once you know it, that I think you can really get this one on your own. Instead I think I'll just embed the first part of a rare interview with America's most famous longshoreman.

Okay--did you figure it out already? One last chance to guess on the word's origins.

The answer in the comments field.

stevedore

2012-02-05T15:32:00.000-08:00

I was watching one of those guilty pleasure crime shows the other evening, Rizzoli and Iles, if I have to confess, and some forgotten plot point revolved around a stevedore who worked on the docks. By a combination of context and memory, i was able to decipher that a stevedore is some level of union worker, and I think at the moment I understood it pretty well. But I did get curious about the term and more precisely where it had come from. The "-ador" ending is familiar from words like "ambassador" and "matador", and I take it that these have something to do with work or job. But what kind of job is it to be Steve?

***

Okay, it was no mystery why a stevedore was someone who works down on the docks, because the role of a stevedore is to load and unload ships. It comes from the Spanish estibador "one who loads cargo", the verb being estibar, "to load cargo", and has its roots in the Latin stipare, "to pack down or press". The online etymology dictionary tells us that this gives it a to me surprising relationship to the word "stiff", where the rigidness and inflexibility we associate with the word apparently comes from being packed or crammed together, at least originally.

I really should know more about the role of stevedores and all other dock workers than I do. My dad was a big fan of the longshoreman philosopher Eric Hoffer and used to talk about him all the time. He was an admirer of his book The True Believer, which was about fanatical following of mass movements, but the one that made the biggest impression on me (without my having actually bothered to read it), was Working and Thinking on the Waterfront, which was his journal about his time on the docks. I remember my dad talking about how Hoffer said he would be hauling stuff around all day and then at night he would dream he was hauling it all around again. A stevedore, in other words.

Yikes--I have a hard enough time dreaming I'm working at the cash register.

Plus, I really liked the season of The Wire set on the docks, and you'd think I'd have picked up a bit more of the lingo.

Of course, those of you who are practiced in urban slang may have a different definition for the word. The same definition, only, uh, different.

Pig iron

2012-02-02T22:52:00.000-08:00

Iroquois Smelter, Chicago

Came across this one in Finnegans Wake the other night, but it's not one of his famous "portmanteau" (ie, made up words that combine and compress several ideas into one word) words. I've heard it many times and in many places, but never really thought much about it. It's a kind of iron. Duh. When you're reading along in a text and you come across the term pig iron, if you're lazy like me, you just substitute "some weird kind of iron" and keep going. But if you stop and look at it, as Joyce makes you do, repeatedly, you start to wonder a bit more about what you're looking at.

Does it really have anything to do with pigs? I'm going to guess not, but like I say, I really don't know.

***

Well, it has something to do with pigs. Pig iron is the result of an intermediary process in the smelting of iron. I don't know that I want to dig into the whole iron smelting process just now, but basically when you first smelt iron ore, you are left with pig iron, which, before further refining, has a lot of carbon in it. This makes it brittle and largely unusable.

The reason for the pig part, though, is not a denigration of pigs. The way "pig" came into the term apparently is that the shape of the mold was originally a branched structure, with the ingots at right angles to a central runner lying in sand. When the iron had cooled it was easy to break off the ingots from the thinner central bar. The association was made to a sow nursing a litter of piglets.

Pig iron came to take on a slang meaning of cheap iron, as in cheap guns, for example. But this is just slang, not the real deal.

Been awhile since we had our musical example here, and who better than Leadbelly to show us the way? Don't know what "Rock Island Line" has to do the price of pig iron?

Wait for it.

Force Majeure

2012-01-29T13:24:00.000-08:00

I know, I know--hardly a phrase you are likely to use in conversation on any given day. But it did come up in a group discussion the other evening, and since I had thought I knew what it meant, and was pretty much totally wrong, it seemed fair game for a blog post.

Let's start with the misconception. If I had been asked to guess what force majeure meant, I would have said that it meant something like 'the upper hand'. In fact, I would have thought it came from the realm of card games, and meant a serious hand, or some sort of decisive superiority of resources, such as in a military victory.

It turns out, though, that force majeure is a legal term and a fairly technical one at that. It refers to an inability to fulfill a contract due to an unpreventable and unforeseeable event, like a hurricane or a flood (though not all hurricanes or floods, because some are predictable or at least foreseeable). "An act of God" is one of the situations it covers, but war and unanticipated failures by third parties also fall within its purview. As you can imagine, there are a lot of legal battles over whether force majeure is really at play in a given circumstance. Wikipedia cites a couple of cases in French law, for example where the reason of force majeure was denied, once for a flood because a flood had occurred in the same area 69 years before, and once for an avalanche that occurred in the same area as one fifty years before. It would be interesting to know if American law has as long a memory on such things.

The reason this all came up at the Penny University the other night, though, had nothing to do with contract law. When I walked in, late as usual, there were a couple of guest speakers up front. These turned out to be Newton and Helen Mayer Harrison, who currently have a post in the Digital arts department up at UCSC. I hadn't heard of them before but they are apparently internationally acclaimed eco-artists. The list of projects they've worked on since the seventies is vast and impressive.

One of the projects they worked on recently is called "Force Majeure". Here is how they explain the use of the term in word:

We developed the name “the Force Majeure” to explain the accelerating transaction between aspects of the Global Warming phenomenon and their interaction with the many ecosystems that are under stress or in actual turbulence from over-demand by human activity. This work envisions a counter to the reduction of production and consumption due to market contraction and turbulence that mirrors the shrinking productivity and wellbeing of the world ocean and many, many other overstressed planetary sub-systems.

I have to admit that this is not the easiest text to parse, but they are a lot more down to earth in person. Here is a link to the project on their website at The Harrison Studio , and here is a link to the first section of their keynote speech at UCSC.

Graham Gets Grimm Again

2012-01-23T20:21:00.000-08:00

The man on the right is Rick Kleffel, but the man on the left isn't me.*

One of these days I'm going to whip this blog back into shape, but in the meantime, I thought it might be interesting for some of you who've never actually met me to hear me blather on about the Grimm Tales anthology that I have a story in, along with about sixteen other more accomplished crime writers. Not that you have to listen too closely to anything I have to say, but it can be fun to hear a voice behind the printed word.

Rick Kleffel is a local interviewer and reading enthusiast extraordinaire with the occasional spot on NPR, and we've talked a time or two before, so I wasn't too shy about strong-arming my way onto his show. I really like his interview style, which is to treat every interview as if it was important and to be well prepared for each of them. I often listen to his show on Sunday evenings here, and there's a uniformly high standard to his questions. You can catch many of his shows in the KUSP archives, or at his own website The Agony Column .

The good think about listening to my interview is that you'll get about 45 minutes of the great Sara Paretsky first.

*(It is Guillermo del Toro).

Polari as she is spoken...

2012-01-19T19:54:00.000-08:00

As I'm to gather my thoughts for our Finnegans Wake blog, I thought I'd post this YouTube link that Paul D. Brazill was kind enough to send me. Polari features a bit, just so you'll have some sense that I tried to stick to some sort of theme.

Paul's blog disappeared suddenly in an ominous seeming way yesterday, so I'm very glad to find out that it was only one of those Google glitches. Which are common enough that someone should invent a word for them. Like, say, "googlitches".

SOPA

2012-01-18T20:20:00.000-08:00

You can't really do a solidarity blackout on Google, so here is the next best thing.

PROTECT IP / SOPA Breaks The Internet from Fight for the Future on Vimeo.

dupe

2012-01-16T20:10:00.000-08:00

I was watching some show or other the other night and someone on it used the word 'dupe'. In context, it somehow seemed to have an added meaning of duplicate or double, and since I'm quite interested in the idea of double lives and doubles in general right now, I found myself wondering where the word 'dupe' came from. Of course we all know that it means cheat or trick or swindle, but I was wondering how it got its start and whether it did in fact have a double sort of nature.

***

Well, a dupe is, not so surprisingly, just a shortened form of "duplicate". So much for my fascinating connecting theories. But dupe as in "to dupe" or "to be a dupe" has an interesting, separate source. It comes from the Middle French duppe, which was thieves' jargon, and one thought is that it goes back to de huppe, or, in our language, "of the hoopoe", which was thought to be an incredibly stupid bird. I guess in English a gull, or even a dodo might stand in for this. I don't think I've ever heard a dim bulb described as a hoopoe here, at any rate.

This isn't the first time thieve's jargon has come up around these parts. It surfaced in the word posh, a post which also led to the discovery of another secret language--polari. I mention this mainly because I came across an article in this month's issue of The Believer, which talks about why the polari language is dying and what that means. Here's the link, but it will only give you the beginning of the thing. I leave you to your own devices to read the rest.

Is the hoopoe really all that stupid?

Maybe, maybe not. But they certainly don't lack an inquisitive streak.

Murphy Bed, O Murphy Bed--whereforeart thou?

2012-01-12T22:47:00.000-08:00

Sometimes it's better not to buck a trend and just go with the flow. So, after a suggestion from Adrian McKinty, author of the newly released and wonderful The Cold Cold Ground, that someone should find out where Murphy beds came from, I decided a little reluctantly that I'd look into it.

To be honest, I didn't think there would be anything very specific. No one seems to be able to track down with precision who made either the Davenport sofa or the Davenport desk, even though it was pretty clearly someone named, well, Davenport. There are some ideas around, but no thorough documentation.

I recently learned that Murphy is the number one surname in Ireland. The odds of tracking this one down seemed a lot smaller.

Not so.

The Murphys are alive and well and living in California. Well, some of them, anyway. They even have a website. (Yeah, go ahead on over--you'll get a quick demonstration.) I'm pretty much poaching directly from their story, but it turns out that one William L. Murphy who was born in Columbia, California, a Gold Rush boom town, made his way to San Francisco at around the turn of the last century. Like San Francisco dwellers even now, he found living quarters cramped and pricey, but being an enterprising type he invented a bed you could fold up into the wall, which at that time and for a long time to come was called the Murphy In-a-Dor Bed. Manufacturing began in San Francisco, but moved eventually to New York. (Although one of my sisters lived in a San Francisco studio for awhile and it had a genuine Murphy bed in it, which I have to say, was pretty neat.)

Another interesting thing about the bed was that it was in high demand in the 1920s and 30s, as urban dwellers faced the same dilemmas they do today. But with the onset of World War II, production dropped off because of the rationing of the steel used to build the bed frames. And after the war, the G.I. bill gave vets the possibility of buying their own homes and finding larger spaces.

Over the decades, this trend reversed, and if you live anywhere where housing is at a premium, as I do, you will be thinking that the Murphy bed seems like a pretty sweet deal.

Thank you, William Lawrence Murphy.

Davenport-- a tale of two settees. (Or one settee and a desk.)

2012-01-10T20:58:00.000-08:00

Looks pretty much like any other college coffee shop, right?

When you do this sort of blog, certain repetitions stand out a bit more than they might in normal life. All the same, by the end of my Christmas weekend, I had heard the word "davenport" more than seemed statistically likely. (Statisticians, scoff as you will ). My nephew had been mentioning the Davenport Coffee Shop at American University, where he's going to school right now in Washington DC.

So I mentioned the little town just up the coast from me, where the Davenport cash store is a popular place to drive up for breakfast.

Uh-oh.

Then our friend was trying to connect us up to 'her guy' in relation to my mom's estate. I finally said, I keep hearing about this "guy", but what's his name? His name, of course, was Davenport. Then on the next night, I saw something on Rachel Maddow about the Davenport Skybridge, which crosses the highway in (where else?) Davenport, Iowa, for better viewing of the Mississippi River.

Mr. Davenport, aka "the guy"

But all of this left unanswered a simpler question that slowly began to emerge. What exactly is a davenport? I mean, it's a couch, of course. I can even picture one in my mind. It would belong in a suburban den, and be plaid, with a cloth ruff. So does the word come from a name, a place or just what exactly?

Iowa--who knew?

Time to find out.

***

I'm not sure we have the answers we need here--maybe we're left with more of a puzzle. A davenport is a sofa, but it's the kind of sofa that means different things to different people. To some people it means a very formal sort of couch, while for others, it means couch that hides a bed within. Although it is not entirely possible to trace this to a source, it does seem very likely that it started as a kind of sofa, made by a company with the family name of Davenport.

But wait! Are we talking about the sofa, or are we in fact talking about an entirely different piece of furniture? Because the facts are indisputable--before there was a davenport sofa, there was a davenport writing desk. Two different pieces of furniture called davenport? What the heck?

Davenport user on the right...

Hmm. Apparently, there were not just one but two different families who decided to trademark their furniture under their own name at different points in time.

Oh, really?

Here's what I think.

"Davenport" actually refers to a secret portal for space aliens. So any time you hear the word "davenport", you need to be cautious and on your guard. Anyone called Davenport is probably "of another realm"--one that has a curious affinity for fine furniture, which despite their incredible need for secrecy, they are unable to resist identifying with themselves. Any place that names itself Davenport is advertising it's special portal powers.

Unconvinced? Take a look at this short video of the Davenport Skybridge and tell me it's not blatantly advertising itself to the cosmos as point of entry:

Am I crazy? Yeah...crazy like a Davenport.

trifles, a continuation

2012-01-04T21:07:00.000-08:00

Well, I think this was sort of inevitable. You don't post a story on a blog about words and ignorance (amongst other things) with a title containing the word "trifle" without in the back of your mind realizing that you will need to address the puzzling nature of the term as well. I do know that a trifle is a) a thing of little or no importance, and b) a rather elaborate British dessert. The question arises--are these two things related?

***

I think so. "Trifle" the dessert seems to have come from the first meaning of "trifle" as a thing of no importance. Although I haven't entirely satisfied myself why it came to to be called so, I think it is less a matter of ironic understatement than the fact that a trifle is meant to be a frothy light dessert rather than a heavier cake. My guess is that it's the lightness of the concoction that got it it's name. A regular commenter here, who goes by a couple of different noms de plumes including Tales from the Birch Wood, has graciously taken on the task of hunting down the history of the dish at her blog The Widgeting Hour, which leaves me only to dig up the etymology of the original word.

Back in the early thirteenth century, "Trifle" was originally trufle, "a false or idle tale" and only later in that century took on it's more current day meaning of "a matter of little importance". The English derives from the Old French, where trufle meant "mockery" and was a diminutive of truffe, or "deception".

Oh, lord--I have played right into the punsters' hands here, haven't I? Too late to turn back, I suppose...

A trifle

2011-12-30T19:43:00.000-08:00

I had a really nice Christmas. I was especially aware of this this year, because the way the holiday fell, I had to work Christmas Eve and had pretty much decided that would preclude getting together with the family, even though for various reasons, I really wanted to do that this year. But my sister was kind enough to drive down to Santa Cruz and pick me up after work and so I was able to go on a rather madcap adventure around the state spending time with many people I care about. There were many elements to all this, but I thought I would mention one here in particular.

My sister as usual decided that it was not enough to pick me up in Santa Cruz and stay up late wrapping presents. She also wanted to throw her semitraditional Christmas Day brunch. She makes a souffle and sausage but as there was another guest coming she thought she'd also make a trifle. A trifle is not really a trifle to make, it has a lot of things in it and a lot of layers. Fruit and whipped cream feature heavily. As usual, I thought it was a tad over ambitious and as usual, she ignored me, much to my benefit, as it turned out.

Everything actually went very smoothly so we opened presents and the guest arrived and we shared a very nice meal and good conversation. It was a beautiful sunny California winter day, and the trifle looked gorgeous on the well set table and we dug in with appetite and really nothing could have been better. We even had Christmas crackers, and the little trinkets inside seemed apropos.

The doorbell rang and we were saying goodbye to the friend while my sister answered the door and stood there talking to someone. She stood there for a long while and though I was curious I was also distracted, so didn't think much about it till she came into the dining room, followed by a young guy, barely out of high school. "This is Nicholas," she said. We said hello, somewhat perplexed, as I had never heard of him before. He was smiling, and had merry eyes. The odd thing--and it will sound like some sort of literary device,though it isn't--but for some reason, he had the white fringe of a Santa Claus suit around the ankle of one leg. He said he had found it in a trash can at the St. Vincent de Paul.

My sister went out to the kitchen and got him a tin of the Christmas cookies she had made and we made small talk with him while he waited. After he had said goodbye, we looked at my sister and she told us his story. He was a foster kid who had aged out of the system two weeks before he had finished high school and was now homeless. He had come around to her door a few times before, looking for work, and she had given him some small tasks to do. He was happy because he had gotten a sleeping bag and maybe a place to sleep at night.

When you work in retail, you can feel a bit put upon during the holiday season. It is easy enough to understand that you're part of the "the 99%" a lot of that time, but there are other moments when you realize that by other standards, you are also part of the one percent, which merely means "lucky".

Nicholas left, though I'm sure he'll be back. And my sister will undoubtedly try to figure out some way that he can be helped to find work and a GED. There are a few ideas floating around all ready. After he had gone, we all looked at each other, a bit ashamed of our good fortune. My sister looked at the table, seeing it as he would have seen it.

"Oh!" she said. "I should have given him some trifle!"

Grimm Tales--Untreed Read Freed!

2011-12-21T20:59:00.000-08:00

We interrupt our irregularly unscheduled programming here at Confessions of Ignorance to make an important announcement. Well,important to me, anyway. Normally I have a bit of reluctance to turn my blogging world into a platform for self-promotion or even other promotion, but this time, I have no scruples. Riding on the coattails of my betters, I've got a story in a really terrific new anthology. Grimm Tales, edited by John Kenyon and with an introduction by the Galway master of crime writing himself, Ken Bruen, features a whole host of up and coming crime writers, all working out their own variation on the premise of taking a well known fairy tale and ringing some changes on it in a piece of contemporary crime fiction.

John posted this challenge sometime toward the end of last year on his blog, Things I'd Rather Be Doing (I believe I actually learned about it through the crime community connecting blog of Sean Patrick Reardon, Mindjacker), and about seventeen of us took the challenge and came up with something that looked pretty much like a crime story. There was a contest, and there were first, second and third place winners, but basically everyone just did this in the spirit of fun. That would have seemed to be the end of it, but one way and another John thought maybe a book could be made of it, and Untreed Reads gave him the greenlight for an ebook. I believe we all quite enthusiastically agreed to be part of the project. I mean, how hard is it to say yes, when the story has already been written?)

John has been faithfully shepherding the project through to publication and keeping us all posted on the book's progress. I don't know why it came as such a surprise to me when a couple of nights ago, he emailed us all that Grimm Tales was live. But it was a pretty exciting one.

I like--really like--to read mysteries and crime fiction, but I'm not a crime fiction writer, so I have have a bit of a sheepish feeling about my own part in this. If you happen to read my story, you will quickly see that it is not really noir. It doesn't even totally qualify as crime fiction. So I was happy to get a little and quite unexpected nod from Ken Bruen in his introduction, making me feel that at least it was okay for my story to be included.

Anyway, enough about me. Rather than focussing on highlights, I'll just mention that a variety of familiar tales (and some not so familiar) and a smaller showing of nursery rhymes inspired the very various stories to be found here. For some reason, "Hansel and Gretel" had an outsize number of takers, but as you will see the outcomes are very, very different.

As you might suspect, Untreed Reads is all about ebooks, but if you don't have an ereader, don't despair. There is certain to be a format that you can download on to your computer if that's your option.

You can check the link out HERE

(I know I put my story up on my Story Dump blog and linked to it from here, so a few regular readers may have already read mine. I'd buy it for the other storytellers anyway.)

caret, or triple homonym

2011-12-18T18:09:00.000-08:00

Bowing to the inevitable, I take up the third and I do hope last word which has the same sound as my last two posts. I think I do know what a caret is, but as is so often the case with this blog, having to say it aloud makes me wonder whether I do have it right. I believe that a caret is that little arrow shaped mark, most often used to join things in a manuscript. I can't off the top of my head think what else it might do. I have no idea what its origins are. I don't even know if it is limited to sitting on top of a sentence or can be turned sideways or upside down. God help me if it can because if so I will be at this all night.

Anyway, let us begin:

***
Okay, tempting as it is to have a do over, I pretty much have that totally wrong. Sorry, internet community readers that only skim the first paragraph here before passing on to something more scintillating. Far from meaning that a space is needed, it means that something is missing and needs to be added . It comes out of Latin carere, to lack.

Secondly, though in my mind's eye, I was seeing it above the line, like this: ˆ, it is just as likely to be used below, like this:˰ . You can put the missing material, such as an apostrophe or a comma, under the mark, over the mark or in the margins.

A caret might also be confused with a circumflex (which means "bend around") such as Ê, which is placed over a letter to distinguish its pronunciation in some way.

Carets actually have a lot of uses. They are used as notation in mathematics, computer programing, logic, music and social networking, and have strayed very far from their original meaning of missing. I could break it down for you, but you may as well, just go to the source.

Perhaps the most interesting thing to me in these researches is that caret is related through this Latin origin to "caste", because in addition to meaning 'to lack', also means 'to be cut off from' or 'separated'. This incidentally is also the connection to 'castration'. Whoa.

As Peter Rozovsky made this request, and one aspect of this was to know whether there was a keyboard command for this symbol, I will finish with these. I am not totally sure I understood his question correctly, but if you want ˰, you type 02F0 and then hit alt+X. If you want ˆ, you type the Crtl key plus the caret key over 6 and then hit the Space bar. At least this is how you do it in Windows. I don't know if this is a uniform thing or not.

carrot

2011-12-13T17:59:00.000-08:00

I know it seems like I'm just being a bit lazy here, having just done a post on the word carat. Okay, I am a bit lazy, but if that were totally the case, I would have just drifted off over into the word caret, as my typing seemed to have drifted over in that direction anyway. (I hope this has been mainly corrected by now, but you never know.)

No, this is a little bit stranger than that. Even though I may not know carat from caret, I certainly do know both from carrot, so I am not sure what byway led me to an old recording of The Carrot Seed Song the other night.

Although we had a lot of records when I was little, I guess we must have not had that many that were just for kids, because I listened to this one a lot. It's a simple story, but I think it's kind of an interesting one, since it warns the youthful hero not just against his detractors, but even against his well-wishers. Have a listen.

(Something seems to be wrong with the embed feature, so here's the link just in case: http://youtu.be/tpONMLBVqZI )

I remembered this song well enough in high school that I could do a full dramatic rendition. (Okay, so it wasn't that hard.) I'd like to say that I learned the stalwartness it was meant to teach, but I'm afraid I can't.

I will say that it seems to have made a strong impression on others of my era as well (Notice the guy in the chair. A lot of my audiences probably felt the same way.)

Ditto what I said above: http://youtu.be/SUrevGSu7Ik

carat

2011-12-11T20:25:00.000-08:00

Sometimes late at night when I'm tired but not really tired enough to sleep I find myself watching Jewelry Television. For me, home shopping channels are oddly mesmerizing, even though I've never had the slightest inclination to buy anything, but lately it's really the jewelry that I find most fascinating.

This is hard to explain, as I have never had much interest in jewelry stores or even jewel exhibits at museums. I don't wear jewelry and have no desire to do so. But for some reason, the enthusiastic presenters at JTV always reel me in. Woo hoo! one says--look at the flash off of that opal!

I have no idea if any of the gemstones they are selling are actually valuable, but it sure is fun listening to them make it sound as if they were. (There's a good novel, by the way, about the art and con artistry behind the jewel business--How to Sell, by Clancy Martin, which I reviewed awhile ago here .

But despite listening to the JTV argot, I realized recently, that I really have no idea what a carat is. Although I think we tend to associate the word carat with diamonds, they come up in all kinds of gemstones. I assume that "carat" has something to do with weight, for what else could it be, but it's odd how little carats seem to have to do with the size of the stone.

Well, let's get to it.

***

Sheesh. Nothing is ever just easy, is it? Let me start by admitting that I wasn't really entirely sure how to spell "carat" going in. Maybe that's because there are actually two spellings of it. Carat, yes, but also karat. As far as I can tell from this interesting post about the distinction, both variants go back to the same source, but have taken on different meanings. In American English, the convention has arisen to say that carats have to do with mass and weight, while karats have to with purity. In British English the same spelling is used for both senses.

The word goes back to the Middle French carat, which had to do with measuring the fineness of gold, derived from the Italian careto , which was taken from the Arabic quirat, meaning pod or husk, or four grains of weight, and then back to the Greek keration, carob seed. In early, predigital times, the carob seed was used as a standard of weight because of its uniformity, just as a grain was used as a standard of a far smaller weight.

the name carob comes from the Greek word kera, or horn, which describes the shape of the pod, not the seed.

To get really bogged down in obscurity, the Greek weight was equal to one Roman siliqua, which in turn was 1/24th of a golden solidus of Constantine. This is important because keration then took on a sense of being a proportion of 1/24th, which then became a measure of gold purity. This is why when something is advertised as 18 karet gold, it should have 18 parts of gold to 6 parts of alloy. And why 24 karat gold is usually followed by an exclamation point.

But when it comes to gemstones, a carat is a unit of mass. A carat is equal to 200 milligrams. But it still derives its name from the lowly carob seed. The confusion is not a late add on, but arose from the unit of measurement itself.

Gold prices being what they are right now, there are more carats than karats being featured on JTV these days. By the time the bubble bursts on gold, I'll probably have a pretty good handle on the difference.

Bicycle Animation

2011-12-06T17:39:00.000-08:00

Just for fun.

heyday

2011-12-04T14:28:00.000-08:00

I just came across the phrase "in their heyday" yesterday somewhere or other. Normally, it's the kind of thing I just pass by, as I know what it means, more or less. It's sort of "at the height or zenith of one's fame or wealth or skills". Something like that. It usually if not always refers to some glory days that have since passed.

But I really have no idea where the word comes from or even if I do actually have the definition strictly correct. I'm a bit tired of talking turkey for now, so let's see where this one heads.

***

Well, this is the kind of thing that I find interesting. The original expression has nothing to do with days, apparently, but rather goes back to an expression from Middle English, heyda, which was an exclamation of playfulness or surprise, an extension of 'hey'. Heyda!--a bit like Hurrah! or Huzzah! This was back in the 1500s, and it wasn't until around the 1700s that it somehow got conflated with the word "day" and began to be used to describe the period of greatest vigor.

And here I was, thinking it had something to do with haymaking.

The Online Etymology dictionary notes that in Latin, hei was a cry of grief or fear, but heia was an "interjection denoting joy". Interesting what one little vowel sound will do.

Since this post is a bit shorter than my usual rambling, I'll put in a plug for a very nice little publisher out here on the West Coast, called Heyday Books , which does some good and sometimes very beautiful books on California and the West. I know of them partly because it's one of my jobs in the bookstore I work in to order backlist titles from them, but also because they have published a couple of really nicely made books by the late James D. Houston. Houston was probably best known for his novel Continental Drift, or perhaps the book he co-authored with his wife Jeanne Watasuki Houston, Farewell to Manzanar, which described her family's experiences in a Japanese interment camp.

Before he died, Heyday published a collection of essays he wrote on his sense of place, Where Light Takes Its Color From the Sea, which enjoyed quite a bit of success locally, and one that they've published posthumously, called A Queen's Journey, which is an unfinished novel about Liliuokalani, the last queen of Hawaii.

Heyda, Heyday! Heyda, James Houston!

(I just realized that I forgot to say why all the focus on James Houston in particular. It's because he was a Santa Cruz resident, a friend of the local bookstores, and really a pretty terrific person.)

Cold turkey

2011-12-01T22:23:00.000-08:00

Yeah, getting back up to speed here after an outside commitment, it's lucky that one of the "non-effort" posts of recent weeks has generated some questions, and luckier still that it has also generated some answers. Peter Rozovsky of Detectives Beyond Borders wondered about a couple of turkey related expressions "talking turkey" and "cold turkey". Commenter Dan of My Point Being fortunately did a bit of my work for me. He brought up the theory that "cold turkey" has its roots in the result of going into withdrawal for opium addiction, when the skin turns clammy and goosebumpy. Or turkeybumpy. You get the idea.

However, the online etymology dictionary cites a slightly earlier reference which uses the idea of "cold turkey" in the sense we more widely use it, namely, "without preparation". In this etymological thread, cold turkey is a meal that requires no preparation, so it becomes a more general metaphor for things we do without building up to them. Sounds like a bit of a stretch to me, but it may be so.

Especially since, it turns out that at one point in it's history, the phrase "talking turkey" became "talking cold turkey", later to be contracted back to the original form again. It's a phrase that has lived a few lives. Originally, it meant to exchange pleasantries, presumably over a meal, but later acquired its current meaning of not dressing a matter up, but dealing in hard facts.

As the turkey seems to have been the focus of much American speech, it does really seem a shame that it didn't become our national bird.

(The Cold Turkey image is by Hayden Kays.)

amphibious

2011-11-26T20:14:00.000-08:00

In between finding time to write blog posts, I thought some among you might enjoy another distraction from the natural world. This one's more watery...

Wild Turkey

2011-11-21T18:38:00.000-08:00

Yeah, I know some people are wishing I was going to be talking about the bourbon. In a slight departure here, mainly because I don't have time right now to do a proper post, I thought I'd pass along a really enchanting show form Nature that I happened upon on PBS last night, that by happy chance is also being made available for free on line.

It's the story of a natural scientist who decided to hatch and 'mother' a brood of wild turkeys. You really could not have a more delightful and down to earth guy than Joe Hutto, who tells his own story in the film. Some people might sound a little crazy in taking this on, but by acknowledging that he may have 'gone native' a bit, he pulls us into his undertaking pretty deeply ourselves.

Without further ado, then, My Life as a Turkey .

( I hope people outside the U.S. can watch this. Really not sure of its range.)

The Bonus Army

2011-11-18T21:27:00.000-08:00

Well, it's not exactly Cucumber Time right now, so I'm a bit (more than a bit) behind in everything. But I thought in the spirit of Occupy Wall Street I'd do a little piece on a moment of American history that I've never heard of before, and which has become sharply relevant just now.

The Bonus Army was a group of World War I vets and their friends and families who marched on Washington in the spring and summer of 1932 to demand early payment of a bonus promised them for their service. It was not due to be paid them till 1945, but since many of them had been out of work since the beginning of the Great Depression, they were asking that this bonus be paid early. Washington, even liberal Washington, seemed not too keen on the idea.

Rachel Maddow did a very nice piece on this moment in our American past, showing the parallels to what was taking place in the Oakland version of Occupy Wall Street.

(I've edited this to put in the audio version, because the embedded segment hasn't led to the right video clip here)

I probably would have just watched without doing much more with it except that I came across a New Yorker archive article that they've made available without subscription about E.B. White's reaction to the Bonus Army (He was sympathetic with their plight, but not so impressed with the action itself.)

Then this week, I found that the Library of America blog was posting some reporting by John Dos Passos on the movement.

I like the way this current occupation is reflecting back echoes of American movements past. Mario Salvo and the Free Speech movement has also figured in the picture lately. I think sometimes we don't see the importance of such moments for our common history--our human common history, not just America's--until some aspect of those moments is mirrored in our own.

komkommertijd--cucumber, part 2

2011-11-13T15:35:00.000-08:00

No, I am not about to start confessing my ignorance of foreign words--or maybe I should just confess straight out that I am ignorant of them. The number of them of which I'm not ignorant, is, statistically speaking, too small to count.

But in a recent post on the humble or not so humble cucumber, the multilingual Peter Rozovsky managed to fit in a Dutch cucumber joke. I was very surprised, then to find yet another reference to the Dutch komkommer, since I read pretty much exclusively in English. I happened to be reading a very interesting article in The Paris Review by Lydia Davis on the art of translation in general and her task of translating Madame Bovary in particular. I can't link to the article, but I'm happy to report that I think most of it was done as a series of blog posts here . (You'd start at the bottom with the oldest entry.)

Anyway, I can't quite remember the context since the book she is discussing is written in French but in talking about the difficulties of translation, she mentions komkommertijd, which in Dutch literally means 'cucumber time'. To just translate it as 'cucumber time', though, would not reveal its meaning. Davis says that it is the time in August when everyone is away and not much work gets done. It is also the time when Dutch farmers harvest cucumbers. The Dutch would understand the references to both in the word, while most of us wouldn't have a clue of either. How would you get that across?

skulk

2011-11-10T19:14:00.000-08:00

Just a word I heard recently, which got me thinking about it. I know, or think I know, what skulking is, of course. I think of it as sort of lingering around in the shadows in a less than candid or forthright way. I'm not sure if it always has an extra nefarious motive, but I think usually it does.

It's a great word. Where did it come from? I'm going to guess it's an old Anglo-Saxon one.

***
Well, it's Middle English out of Scandinavian. It's got relatives in Norway (skulka, to lurk), Sweden (skolka, which seems to focus on doing a bunk, cutting a class, playing truant) and Denmark (skulke, meaning shirk). I don't have a lot more to reveal about the meaning or history of the word, but I did find one cool thing that I did not know.

If you have three or more foxes together, you have a skulk of them.

A skulk of foxes, yes, but not exactly skulking.

angary

2011-11-07T22:10:00.000-08:00

Adolphe Cassandre, 1935

I'm a little short on time at the moment, so I thought I'd try for a short post for a change. I ran across this word in an interesting way. I jumped in at the last minute to write something for Patty Abbott's flash fiction challenge, in which she offered to make a donation of five dollars to the work of Union Settlement for every flash fiction piece written about a painting by the artist Reginald Marsh. I liked the idea, and I liked the paintings. Peter Rozovsky did a very nice piece here, and so, though it was a bit of a slapdash affair, I did do the challenge at the last moment. You can read my story if you want, but frankly, I got more interested in the story of the S.S. Normandie than that of the human characters. I got a bit of that into my tale, but one interesting detail I omitted was that the Normandie was seized by the U.S. while it was in the New York harbor after France fell to the Germans under the right of angary, and planned to refit it as a warship, the U.S.S. Lafayette.

Angary? What was that when it was at home? Google wasn't particularly helpful, as it kept trying to turn my search into a search for Angry Birds. (Sometimes I feel the whole world is trying to turn my eyes in the direction of Angry Birds, even though I know that once I succumb to their stratagems, all is over.) But angary has nothing to do with Angry Birds, unless they turn out to be belligerents in a conflict. Angary is the right of a belligerent (though this is usually a government or something big like that) to seize the property of a neutral party or nation that happens to be on the belligerent's territory, to use it for the purpose of war, or to prevent its use by the enemy, including the property of the citizens or subjects of the neutral state. Part of the deal is that the belligerent has to return the property and compensate the neutral party fairly for this when the war is over.

Hmm. Call me skeptical. I'm not sure that that worked out very well in the case of the Normandie...

posh

2011-11-04T22:37:00.000-07:00

I know this should have been Posh Spice. Couldn't face it.

The last post brought up some reflections about the word 'posh'. This one isn't so much about what the word means, since we all probably have an idea of that, but more where it comes from. In England and the greater British Isles it definitely seems to have an echo of class consciousness in it. In America, I think it's more known than used, at least in a serious way. So what did it originally mean? I'm sure it's obvious, but somehow I can't quite put my finger on it.

***

"Origin uncertain". The popular imagination has it that it refers to the expression 'port outward, starboard home,' which referred to the preferred ship reservations for the tony class on the passage to (and from). It first came into print in Punch in 1918 in the following sentence: "Oh yes, Mater, we had a posh time of it down there." (I have to throw that in, because it reminds me that for some reason, my dad and I believe his brother-in-law, my uncle used to address my grandmother, their in common mother-in-law as Mater, and I realize that I really have no idea why. They weren't British or posh.)

Apparently, there is no evidence to support this theory. Another, supposedly better conjecture is that the word posh originally meant 'dandy' round about 1890, and this in turn came from thieves' slang for money. Then the claim is that this hails back to the Romany or Gypsy language, with 'pash' meaning half, and pashera, 'half penny'. Slang seems more likely in this case, as there always seems to be a faintly derogatory whiff to the word, do what you will.

It seems this word and its derivations is one of those things people do often ask about, at least so they think here. I was glad to find this very appropriate quote from Anatoly Liberman:
"Another post suggested that I temper my enthusiasm, because people are allegedly interested not in etymology, but in "words and slang; they ask about posh or the whole nine yards. They'd see no point in asking for etymologies of water, wind, wool, winter, well, [and] wine," unless those "could be illustrated with lantern slides of Life in Roman times." I've been taught never to assume anything and not to generalize in a hurry. This advice I'll pass on to anyone who will take it. Queries reflect the sophistication of the questioners. The more people know, the less trivial their questions become. If they realized how interesting the etymology of water, wind, wool, and the rest is, they would have asked about it."

No post about the word posh would be complete without a nod to the fabulous 'Posh Nosh'. If you've never heard of it, here is the first episode. It's not long.

a right donnybrook

2011-11-01T15:47:00.000-07:00

Posh, indeed.

Okay, I have probably never used that phrase in my life. However, I have read it enough for it to seem familiar. Familiar--not necessarily precise. I have a feeling I've thought of a donnybrook as more of a rout or a disaster, when I'm getting the impression it means more of a free for all, or in American imagery, a brawl in a Wild West saloon.

I also think I've thought that Donnybrook must be the sight of some battle, kind of like Waterloo, which has also become metaphoric. For some reason, my mind always had it as from the times of chivalry, and if pressed, I'd say that the image is more along the lines of knights on their chargers battling by a not impossibly large stream. Maybe on a tapestry.

So I was somewhat surprised to learn, once again on a recently resumed discussion over at Peter Rozovsky's place ,that Donnybrook is actually one of the posher areas of Dublin. Is this just a coincidence? Or has there been a significant transformation from rowdier days of yore?

I've been to Dublin, by the way. Suffice to say I was not staying in one of more exclusive districts...

***

Well, we have the answer in one word: gentrification. Donnybrook was not always so. In fact it was the site of a famous fair which had been licenced to the corporation of Dublin in 1204, and that lasted a fortnight at it's height. Sadly, over the centuries, it became notorious for drunken brawls. No doubt it was the ancestors of the present gentry who wanted this unsavory festival shut down, but it wasn't easy. The license holders had absolute right and weren't caving to public pressure. It wasn't until 1855 that John and Peter Madden were persuaded to sell it at the behest of the Lord Mayor of Dublin to powers that were then willing to shut it down.

We will end with not one but two musical references. First a jig:

And of course, we cannot fail to include a drinking song:

gritty

2011-10-29T22:02:00.000-07:00

On a recent post at Detectives Beyond Borders, Photographe à Dublin pondered a question that I believe has been preoccupying her a bit, namely, since when does something have to be gritty to be realistic? This led me wonder when 'gritty' came into the lingo to mean, not 'full of grit', but a dark and unflinching look at harsh reality. I don't know if I can find the answer to this one, but it seemed like a nice one to attempt.

***

Well, in a way I wasn't too successful. I was somewhat surprised that the Online Etymology Dictionary has it that the sense of 'gritty' passed from describing the physical quality of grit to meaning unpleasantness in general as early as 1882, derived from the sensation of eating gritty bread apparently. But this still didn't tell me a lot about the genre. And in fact there was dearth of etymological explanations, though quite a large fascination with 'nitty-gritty' and it's possible beginnings. That's a bit far afield for this post, though.

In the end though, I was richly rewarded by finding the word defined in the Urban Dictionary. Sure, you've got the link, but since many won't bother to click on it, I'll just post it here in its entirety. You really should just go on and read all three definitions:

gritty

harsh, coarse, rough and unrefined, as in film depictions that portray life as it truly is, without false distortions, stylizations, or idealizations. Often, the realism is exaggerated such that the culture or society being portrayed appears more coarse than it really is.

The film "28 Days Later" is a gritty, dirt-under-your-fingernails kind of raw.

28 Days Later--gritty!

gritty
	A type of realism, usually invoked by films and documentary. Strangely enough, "gritty realism" is only perceptible to media and film critics and the term is hardly ever used by anyone else. In fact no-one but film and tv critics ever use the term. Film Critic: " X is a film depicting the gritty realism of life in the New York suburbs" or "the gritty realism of this documentary is in stark contrast to his other work"

gritty
	A middle-to-upper class term to describe the living conditions of the majority of the human populace as seen through indie movies. "The film 'x' was a gritty depiction of life on the streets of NY."

There was one other consolation prize, although this time of bittersweet nature. I discovered the blog of Michael J. Sheehan, which is called Wordmall. Sheehan is a retired English teacher of the City Colleges of Chicago, and he has been running a pretty fine etymology et cetera blog for a few years. It's kind of like this blog, except that he actually knows what he is doing.

Check it out, and do feel free to defect.

I might.

cartel

2011-10-23T13:08:00.000-07:00

I've been reading John Perkins' Confessions of an Economic Hitman on my breaks lately, and though so far I haven't found anything too surprising in it--I was expecting a bit more derring-do, frankly--he does a good job of telling our recent history and involvement in various other countries' business in a readable and succinct way. So of course he gets into the formation of OPEC and the oil embargo that was launched by that cartel in the early 70s. Now, I've heard about OPEC for all of my adult life, and I've heard the word cartel because of it, but that doesn't mean I have any idea what a cartel is. Do you?

I mean, I do know that OPEC is a group or a league or an alliance of oil producing countries. But I'm not sure why calling it a cartel makes it something different. Is it something to do with the markets? Is it a financial entity rather than a purely political one? Is it a very specific and legal term, or is it a loose word that can fit a variety of organizations?

***

Well, yes, it is a fairly specific and legal term. According to the legal dictionary aspect of the Free Dictionary online, a cartel is an arrangement between competing companies or national monopolies that are in the same resource development field or industry. They join together to take control of this industry or resource and can set (or fix) prices, control distribution, and reduce competition among other things.

The word cartel goes back to the Italian cartello, or placard, which is a diminutive of carta, or card. (Related words are 'chart' and 'charter'.) In the 1550s, it meant a written challenge, but over time came to mean a written agreement between challengers. Its current meaning, however, in reference to a commercial trust, came to us in the early twentieth century from the German Kartell.

Anyone who has been watching Breaking Bad lately will be champing at the bit to add that another use of the word comes in the form of 'drug cartel', and that other functions of a cartel are allocation of customers and the allocation of territories. I'm not sure how Walter White's blue crystal meth factors in to all this, though, because apparently cartels usually work best when they have a homogenous product, not when there is a superior product that one member has that customers are vying for.

Breaking Bad cartel muscle

Of course, this is the problem with cartels. Wikipedia's article on the subject launches right into the games theory view of the subject, citing it as an example of a situation known as the Prisoner's Dilemma. For a cartel, this means that any given member could do better if it were to betray the arrangement by pricecuts or producing more volume, but if everyone does the same, they will all be worse off. If I read him correctly Perkins in Confessions is saying that the U.S. sought to break the OPEC cartel by entering into a complex financial relationship with Saudi Arabia. It was interesting that my first Google hit on Saudi Arabia and OPEC hit upon this much more recent NY Times article , which shows precisely the kind of tempatations a cartel member is subject to.

Cartels are illegal in the U.S., and by now, most other places. Here, this came about through the Sherman Antitrust act of 1890, though this was used effectively only later, beginning mainly with Teddy Roosevelt in his efforts to break apart various monopolies of the time. "Antitrust" is a bit confusing, as putting money in trusts was a monopolistic tactic of the day. The bill is not actually against trusts, but against the misuse of them for monopolistic advantage.

Despite their efforts to control private cartels, governments often do create them themselves. The U.S. allowed cartels during the Great Depression in coalmining and oil production. In a public cartel, such as OPEC, the government itself becomes involved in enforcing price-setting and output, and one influential economist, Murray Rothbard, thought that the Federal Reserve itself was essentially a public cartel of private banks.

Sometimes anyway, the worthiness of a cartel is in the eye of the beholder.

I liked this little quote from The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith on cartels:

People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices. It is impossible indeed to prevent such meetings, by any law which either could be executed, or would be consistent with liberty and justice.

Cartels, then, are a very human tendency. So apparently are bands that take the names of my theme words.

smithereens!

2011-10-18T21:26:00.000-07:00

Having just used this word in a limerick homage to Peter Rozovsky's answer to Patti Abbott's flash fiction challenge, I find myself wondering about its origins. Is it just one of those nonsense words, or does it have some root in reality? I feel that 'smith' has got to have some part in it, whether the name or the occupation, but can't get any further with it. Can you?

***
Wrong! Nothing to do with smiths of any kind. It comes from the Irish word smidirīn, and I have to say I suspected that -een ending was Irish. Coleen, Eileen, shabeen, well, you get the idea. The original word is smiodar, combined with that familiar diminutive -in or -een ending.

Apparently smithereen has some shaky beginnings. There is actually some chance that it came from English first as smither and was incorporated into the Irish language, only to be given back later. The spelling wasn't stablized and so there are mentions of shivereens and smiddereens before we have the 'official' version. Basically, though, we're talking about bits or fragments, usually begotten by explosive shocks.

I liked this article about the word, not least for the idiosyncratic fragments by two brilliant authors that frame it...

And this post would not be complete with out reference to the rock group of the same name. Herewith, a sample:

grueling

2011-10-15T19:48:00.000-07:00

Sand marathon in the Sahara Desert

In the last post I discovered somewhat to my disappointment that 'gruesome' and 'gruel' have no real kinship. Gruel, which is a watery porridge made from the meal or paste of some grain or bean, has nothing to do with shuddering but something to do with grinding. It is a bit more related to 'grain' and 'grit'. The speculative protoindoeuropean root is *ghreu--"to rub, grind". Okay, fair enough. But then, what about grueling? Is this related? I now see that it probably is--a grueling race is probably also a grinding one. Let's find out.

***

Grueling in our modern parlance means physically or mentally demanding to the point of exhaustion. And it does relate to gruel. Hooray! But surprisingly, grueling is slang. It comes from an idiom, 'to get one's gruel ', ie, to get one's punishment, or more brutally, to die. As Anatoly Liberman points out in his book Word Origins and How We Know Them, Dickens almost certainly knew the expression, which is why Oliver Twist's "Please sir, I want some more," rings doubly poignantly. What Oliver wants is simply a little more gruel.

Somehow through my mom's side of the family we got to know the morning food known as grits. It seems that somehow this passed into our knowledge rather late in our family life, because as a child it was all Quaker Oats and Malto Meal when it came to hot cereals. Grits are a Southern dish, so this probably came through my uncle's side. In any case, we all enjoyed it when we had a Christmas or holiday breakfast of grits, scrapple, and fried green tomatoes. But grits and gruel are closely related, all through the fine crushing power of a mill, and not at all gruesome, when you get right down to it.

gruesome

2011-10-13T23:34:00.000-07:00

Like many others last weekend, I watched the season finale of Breaking Bad. (Don't worry, this won't give anything away about the episode.) I caught it a little late, but the one word that leaked out beforehand was 'gruesome'. And I will say that if you are looking for gruesome you will not be disappointed.

But after I got over the shock and horror--no, that's not true, I will never get over the shock and horror--after I tried to return to some semblance of the normal life I formally led, I suddenly realized that gruesome was one of those perplexing '-some' words. When I started exploring 'cumbersome' a few posts back, I learned that -some has the general meaning of having the quality of or full of something. "Has some" might be a better way to describe this ending. But often what it has some of is a bit obscure. And so it is here.

What is 'grue' in this word? Is it some strange twist on 'gore'? Does it mean 'gray' in Old French? In our times, I think we agree on something like "horrible to observe, often involving body parts." But where did it all begin?

Guesses?

***

Well, I had some hopes that it might have something to do with gruel, but of course it didn't. 'Grue' is an obsolete word meaning 'to shudder'. It comes from the Middle English word gruen. There seems to be little trace of what that came from, but in any case, there is a Dutch/German/Danish and Norse configuration of similar words floating around it.

Although the term languished in English, it was used commonly in Scotland and Northern England for centuries. It took Sir Walter Scott to use it in his historical novels and thus give it back to standard English. Although I do have to wonder what Scott would have made of that Breaking Bad episode. Less gruesome or more gruesome than his own imagination?

Anatoly Liberman also has a thing or two to say:

"Quite a few words in the languages in the world begin with gr- and refer to things threatening or discordant. From Scandanavian, English has grue, the root of gruesome (an adjective popularized by Walter Scott), but Old Engl. gryre(horror) existed long before the emergence of grue-. The epic hero Beowulf fought Grendel, an almost invincible monster. Whatever the origin of the name, it must have been frightening even to pronounce it."

'Gr-', huh? Did I mention that my last name is Graham?

Probably not. I wouldn't want to scare you.

spelunking

2011-10-10T20:21:00.000-07:00

It's a fantastic word, isn't it? For such an oddball word, I'm guessing it's actually fairly well known, but maybe I just think that's just because I went to UC Santa Cruz and can remember extracurricular activities sometimes officially sanctioned and sometimes not that centered around spelunking. It's cave exploring, in case you haven't heard it. I have to admit that I never visited any of the caves on campus, and didn't really even know where they were. I'll try to rectify that here.

But it was while I was watching The Amazing Race the other night that I got to thinking about the word again. I guess it was when the show visited Indonesia, where the teams had to descend 160 feet into a dark cave to search for a mask and dagger. (Frankly, it would have been climbing the bamboo ladder back up again that would have been my undoing.)

Why is it called spelunking? It's got to be either a foreign word or a made up word and I'm wondering why people were so attracted to it that it's common to use it rather than the more familiar 'cave exploring'. I'm going to guess that it's a real word from somewhere else. Germany?

How about you?

***

Not made up, though it does have an obsolete source, namely spelunk, which was Middle English for cave. That comes as so often, from the Old French (spelunque or spelonque), back to Latin spelunca and finally to the Greek spelynx.

Here's what's interesting though. Spelunking is kind of a revived word. Apparently a guy named Clay Perry coined the word while on assignment for the Federal Writers Project to describe the activity of a group of men and boys who were exploring the caves of New England in the late thirties and forties. But 'spelunker' soon became associated with cave 'enthusiasts' as opposed to the more serious 'cavers', and a bumper sticker was eventually circulated maintaining that 'Cavers Rescue Spelunkers'.

Typically, this distinction seem to have been lost on Santa Cruz. And I mean that in a good way.

There is another slang meaning of spelunking, but you are going to have to go over to the Urban Dictionary and research that one for yourselves...

cucumbersome

2011-10-06T18:30:00.000-07:00

No, that is not a stutter in the machine. Both Peter Rozovsky and Sean Patrick Reardon found themselves wondering how 'cucumber' might fit into all the cumbersome madness of the post before and frankly it crossed my mind as well. And then Peter beat me to the draw on the pun--who'd have thought it?--so there you go. I should probably let them write this post themselves.

So is cucumber in any way related to cumbersome, encumber or any of that family?

I haven't looked yet, but my guess is no--it will turn out to be sheer coincidence. Wagers, ladies and gents?

***

Correct! Cucumber has apparently always stood for the simple cucumber. It is a single source with many variants as it passed from the Latin, which was cucumerem or cucumis, which is suspected to be from an even earlier Mediterranean language. Out of this we have the Old French cocombre (which lent English that 'b') and modern French concombre. Apparently the French still want a little more distinction from the English. And we've got the Italian cocomero, the Spanish cohombro and the Portuguese cogombro. Do you ever get the feeling that when it comes to words, people can't just leave well enough alone?

African Horned cucumber

As a matter of fact, Old English had a perfectly good word for them, which was eorþæppla, or earth-apple. Not that they look all that much like apples to me, but still. Maybe they were rounder back in the day. The Brits kind of took their own back after awhile, though, when, in the 17th century, they began referring to them as Cowcumbers. Which I kind of like, actually.

The online etymology dictionary waxes on uncharacteristically, telling us that cucumbers (or probably more likely, cowcumbers) were planted at Jamestown in 1609. And we even get a bit of scientific trivia. The phrase 'cool as a cucumber' which dates back to at least 1732, was apparently only finally confirmed in 1970, when it was proved that on a hot day in the field, a cucumber was 20% cooler inside than out.

Why no one ever thought to stick a thermometer in one before this, I don't know.

This would be about time for a nice cucumber salad recipe, but the truth is, I'm not all that crazy about those little earth apples (they are actually from the gourd family). Until they're pickles, anyway. Feel free, however, to post a good recipe below.

Oh yeah, and I forgot all about sea cucumbers. But that's probably another story...

cumbersome

2011-10-04T18:42:00.000-07:00

This one was another of those writer's regimen riff words, and it really intrigued me. Cumbersome is something like burdensome. I often think of a cumbersome object as more bulky and awkward than heavy, though maybe that's just me. Unencumbered means something like free of attachments or not weighed down. but what is 'cumber'? Is is a lost word, or one that never existed in the first place?

I also found myself wondering whether the phrase 'to be lumbered with' is related in some way. Frankly, I'm not sure I've ever heard that in American usage--it may be a British expression.

And finally, what's with the '-some' ending? I was thinking about how often it doesn't really give me a clue, I just have to know what the word in full means. A better example of this is 'handsome' or maybe 'winsome'. Well, I may have bitten off more than I can chew here, but let's take a look.

***

Well, I found several surprises here, which is always interesting--at least for me. Cumbersome can mean awkward becaue of size weight or shape, but also difficult in terms of its extent or complexity. Turns out a lot of things are cumbersome in this life.

That isn't what surprised me, though.

What surprised me is that the original meaning of cumber, from about 1300, is to overthrow or destroy, to be overwhelmed, to harass. Not quite the sense I'm trying to convey when I say I'm carrying a cumbersome bag of groceries from the store. But maybe this is a false track, because there is an old French word, encombrer, and I think i's sense of to be hampered by obstructions or barriers is really closer to the mark.

But there's also the possibility that it really did have a sense of havoc and destruction, and got diluted, as big words have a tendency to do. (The degradation of the word 'awesome' being a case in point).

Lumber was the one that really got me wondering, though. Of course I've read about lumber rooms, or storage rooms, in British books, but in America lumber is pretty much always the end result of taking a saw to trees. Apparently, this is not the source word, but the other way around. Lumber originally meant, and probably still does mean, 'disused bit of furniture; heavy, useless objects'. To be lumbered with apparently does not mean to be constrained by a bunch of timber, but by a lot of, well, crap.

This word doesn't come from where you might think it would, either. It seems to have come from Lombard, which was a family out of northern Italy famous as bankers, and, in their migration to England, moneylenders and pawnbrokers. Although this lineage isn't assured, it seems likely that the what you might call tat in these pawnshops, also known as lombards, is what was eventually referred to as lumber. Who knew?

Venturing ever further afield, my search into that whole -some suffix thing, I was quite surprised to discover what handsome originally meant, round about 1400. It meant easy to handle, or ready to hand. Hard thing to give oneself airs about, I'd think. The meaning extended to be fair sized, or considerable, until it came to another meaning of having a fine form or good looking.

Handsome man of Martineau's day

The online etymology dictionary had this interesting quote from Harriet Martineau in 1837:

[Americans] use the word "handsome" much more extensively than we do: saying that Webster made a handsome speech in the Senate: that a lady talks handsomely, (eloquently:) that a book sells handsomely. A gentleman asked me on the Catskill Mountain, whether I thought the sun handsomer there than at New York.

I think we've largely settled on good looking, though, by now.

divulge

2011-10-01T21:46:00.000-07:00

I'm doing a kind of writing course this month through the Southeast Review. I've done it before, so I can tell you that the set up is that each day they give you various sorts of writing prompts, interviews and so on to get you to pump out a lot of material. I'm not usually all that successful at keeping up with it, but its a good program and I recommend it if you have some extra hours in the day. The last piece of the thing every day is a 'riff' word that you can use in any way you like. I thought it might be fun to use a few of them on the blog if they fit, and the first one does.

Of course I know what "divulge" means. It means to reveal something hidden--a secret, maybe, or even something buried physically. Something is brought to the light.

But I find that 'vulge' intriguing. I guess it's because it reminds me of bulge and also of revulsion, but there's a kind of disgorging imagery going on in my head. I can't seem to figure out the etymology on this one.

***

Hmm. I guess I forgot to say that I did wonder if somehow the '-vulge' could in any way be related to 'vulgar'. I knew that the Vulgate was the Bible translated into the common language of the Roman people, which was great as long everyone understood Latin. And I did know that 'vulgar' was just a way of saying common, which is often misconstrued by the upper classes as meaning something low. But I still didn't see how it could shed light on a word about revealing a secret. However, I was making this too hard.

Divulge comes (of course) from the Latin divulgare, which simply meant 'to publish', or 'to make common property'.

It's all right there in the word, isn't it?

utopia

2011-09-29T19:16:00.000-07:00

I think we all know what this one means, or to put it a little differently, we each have our own idea what we think it means. Sir Thomas More borrowed it from Greek to be the title of his book. In Greek it meant nowhere, which is kind of the thing about utopias. Maybe it's just the era that I happened to grow in--in the shadows of the utopian projects of the sixties. I think a lot of them did some good, but they all ran up sooner or later against the human fraility of their framers to one extent or another.

Nevertheless, I thought I'd just highlight this word right now, because oddly I have been hearing it in a lot of different contexts recently. I think it's in the air right now. It's one of those words that seems to be gaining energy and life again. I think a lot of people, despite or probably because of the economic woes that many face, are beginning to think again about what the good society (as Wikipedia points out 'utopia' (nowhere) is in English a homophone with 'eutopia' good place) could possibly be.

We had an interesting guest at the Penny University this week. Gary Patton was a supervisor of Santa Cruz county for twenty-five years. He used to hold early morning weekly meetings at a local coffee shop so that he could talk to his constituents. Although he's been a familiar face in the bookstore I work in, and I've run across him in other contexts as well. But I'd never really heard his bio. He got into community work because of his interest in utopian thought and together with other Santa Cruzans worked to put their own vision of Santa Cruz's future in place. They succeed in keeping the North Coast from becoming a major development, and in other ways worked to keep the small town character of the place. As Patton said, it takes about five people working together to form a movement. Fifteen is probably better, but you can do it with five.

He has an interesting blog that I learned about that evening too. It's called Two Worlds/365, and .. you can find it here . It isn't necessarily about utopia, but I think utopia is implied.

It's a funny coincidence that I came across this article in the Sentinel today. The short story is that after the 1989 earthquake, downtown Santa Cruz was in ruins and had to be rethought. One of the decisions was to make Pacific Avenue not only one way, but not the same one way all the way through. Now, an outside consultant has been hired by the local merchants, who apparently gives them the flabbergasting news that the traffic pattern is keeping some of the major players from coming to town.

"Your design is keeping stores like Apple from coming here," the consultant said.

Oh, horror. The design, by the way, didn't keep Borders from coming here and lasting 10 years or so. I have a sneaking suspicion that it wasn't the Santa Cruz traffic pattern that finally brought them down.

Having Apple on Pacific Avenue is probably on the checklist for some people's utopia. It wouldn't be on mine. But that's the thing about utopias. It's not as easy to construct one that fits all sizes as one might think.

Zanzibar

2011-09-25T12:15:00.000-07:00

Getting back to my more usual subject matter here, I've found that ignorance has once again given me an easy topic. I was sitting with a sales rep the other day, who was showing me some photography books he was trying to sell. Each was dedicated to a country or region. One of them was Cuba, one of them was some Arab desert region that I had never heard of, and one of them was Zanzibar. Of course I'd heard of Zanzibar. It was only later, after he'd taken the books back and left, that I realized that I had no idea where Zanzibar really is.

It is certainly a name to conjure with. I think all my associations to the word may actually come from film or perhaps there's a line in a famous poem or two. In any case it's a highly romantic word, with resonances of spices and somehow I'm thinking there's an Arabic/African trade route involved. Was there a Bob Hope/Bing Crosby "On the Road to" movie?

We shall see.

***

Yep, there was a movie. But the more contemporary cultural reference, and the reason some of you will know more about the place than I did, is that one of its most famous sons was Freddy Mercury, a.k.a. Farrokh Bulsara, of Queen.

Basically, my sense of Zanzibar was more or less right, which must mean that those Bob Hope movies had a hitherto unsuspected level of documentary reality...

Zanzibar is an archipelago off of Tanzania, on the east coast of Africa, and is currently a semi-autonomous region of the same. It has indeed been a kind of crossroads of not only Arab and African trade, but also that of India and Persia/Iran. There is a bit of a controversy about what the name actually means. The Persian language has it as Zangh Bar, meaning brown, Negro, or even rust coast, but the Arabs derive it from Zayn Z'al Bar, which means something along the lines of 'fair is this land'.

The spice aspect wasn't wrong either. These islands are often called the Spice Islands, which I thought might be the case, although there is an Indonesian archipelago which is a rival for that name. In fact, their main export, cloves, were originally imported from these other islands, the Moluccas. The real reason, I think, that Zanzibar is on the map for us now, though, is that the Persian traders who discovered these islands (whatever discovery means when you're talking about islands that have traces of human tools from 50,000 years ago) saw their strategic importance in trade routes between Africa, the Middle East and India. The larger island, Unguja, had, and probably still has, a defendable harbor.

After Persia, Zanzibar came under the control of the Portuguese, who retained it for 200 years. Then the Sultanate of Oman had its day there and came to hold sway not only over a major portion of the East African coast, but trade routes leading into the continent. Yes, spices were traded, but they were not the only goods on offer. There was also ivory, and, yes, slaves. In fact, Zanzibar was Eastern Africa's main slave port, and at the height of this trade, 50,000 slaves passed annually through its markets.

Monument to the slaves in Zanzibar

The British gradually gained control by influence of the sultanate, and took real control after a sultan they did not approve of came to power. What followed was the Anglo-Zanzibar War of 1896, which military buffs may like to know is, at 38 minutes, still on record as the shortest war in history--at least according to Guinness.

Zanzibar gained independence from Britain in 1963, but it was only a month later that an African led Zanzibar Revolution ended the lives of hundreds if not thousands of Arabs and Indians living there, and in the process put an end to the Arab dominance of the coast that had gone on for a couple of centuries.

Freddy Mercury was actually very representative of multicultural Zanzibar and its destiny in many ways. He was born to a Parsee family, but his father worked as a civil servant for the British government. So it makes sense that Freddy was sent to an English boarding school, though the boarding school was not in England, but just outside Bombay. After school, Freddy returned to Zanzibar and it was actually the growing unrest in 1964 in Zanzibar that persuaded his family, rather wisely I'd say, to join many other British and Indian families seeking a new home in England.

The rest, as they say, is history.

Troy Anthony Davis: October 9, 1968-September 21, 2011

2011-09-21T21:07:00.000-07:00

Troy Davis was scheduled to be executed at seven p.m. this evening, Atlanta time. In California this was four p.m. and as usually I would be starting a register shift at this hour, I asked to be let off early. The idea of being so fully in the world of commerce at that hour seemed like a big contradiction to me. I didn't know quite where I would go, but after I left, I thought I might walk the labyrinth outside the Episcopalian church as a fitting thing, but I'd forgotten that it was the open market day and it didn't really seem like a very introspective place to be. I then thought I might walk on to the Progressive Missionary Baptist Church nearby, because with it's predominently black congregation, I thought it might have been the kind of place that Troy might have liked to worship if he'd had the chance. I've often heard some great sounds coming over the fence, but this was a Wednesday afternoon and the place was shut and empty.

I decided to walk on home, as by now I assumed Davis would be dead and I would rather walk home and think about this quietly than ride home on a bus full of students. I didn't really feel that I'd had a significant deep moment, but I thought walking in solitude might go some way towards reaching this goal. My feet aren't the best these days, but I thought it would still be better.

I reached King Street, a street I had walked on this very morning as I usually do, and saw from quite a distance that there was a gigantic crane some ways down and it was at work on a tremendous project. As I got closer, I saw that the crew was busy at work bringing down an enormous tree. People were stopping and watching and taking pictures, and it was a busy intersection with a guy standing in the middle of the street just to direct traffic. I saw a woman that I knew and she said that her daughter lived in the house that had been in its shadow and that it was being taken down because its branches kept knocking out the wires and cutting off people's electricity. We were all impressed by the efficiency of the men high up in the branches. I said, well, I suppose there's some positive side to the tree coming down for the neighbors.

My friend said, "It's a hundred year old tree. Nobody thinks its a good thing."

When I got home, I was surprised to learn that the Supreme Court had asked for an eleventh hour delay in the execution of Troy Davis. I watched events unfold on television. The delay did not result in a stay, and the executioners proved just as efficient as the tree men had. Troy Davis was pronounced dead at 11:08 tonight, still protesting his innocence.

vigil

2011-09-20T12:58:00.000-07:00

As I am going to have to at some point change this back from an advocacy platform to what it was intended to be, I thought a good transitory word would be 'vigil'. I will note here that it was announced this morning that Troy Davis was not granted clemency, and is scheduled to be executed at 7 PM Wednesday evening, Atlanta time. I feel that the time of advocacy is over and the time of vigil has begun. But what exactly is a vigil?

I was not surprised by the sense of watchfulness and wakefulness it has. It comes to us from the Latin, of course, and took on the meaning of 'the eve of a religious festival' in the thirteenth century. The meaning of a watch kept on a festival eve comes later, toward the end of the fourteenth century, and our more contemporary sense of 'an occasion of keeping awake for some purpose' isn't recorded till 1711.

For some reason this started me thinking about vigilantes, which originally comes from the Spanish language, but somehow ended up in the American West--probably, I'm guessing, through the Spanish speakers who also lived in the region. It's interesting that the original sense of watchmen has all but disappeared from our mythology of vigilante justice with its disregard for due process.

I'll write a less cursory post about something probably completely unrelated in a few days.

One More Night and Then We're Done

2011-09-19T23:04:00.000-07:00

"A Life in the Balance--Examining the Troy Davis Case"

2011-09-18T12:53:00.000-07:00

Although it may seem like I'm belaboring the case for Troy Davis here a little, I have been watching this film by Terry Benedict put out by Amnesty International in four parts on YouTube and thought I'd run the first part here. It's a thoughtful piece and I think one of things it underscores is that even if you are pro-death penalty, as some of Troy's advocates are, there is too much doubt as to what really happened that evening to sentence Davis to death. Amnesty has never taken a position on Troy Davis's innocence, only on the fairness of the proceedings against him. It's a good, thought-provoking documentary, and as both the filmmaker and Davis have said, it isn't for Davis alone that we do well to educate ourselves on these matters.

You can still sign a petition to stop the execution HERE .

clemency (on Troy Davis)

2011-09-13T13:19:00.000-07:00

Yes, I know what it means. For anyone who is wondering, it means lenience or mercy. It means gentleness. In law it means the power granted to an official to in some way lower the harshness of a sentence imposed upon a prisoner.

As things stand, on September 21, Troy Davis will be executed for the shooting of a police officer in Atlanta, Georgia. There are many reasons to think that he wasn't the shooter, and certainly enough doubt to incline a reasonable judicial system to at the very least, not kill him.

Clemency, is not actually what Troy Davis has ever wanted, as clemency won't clear his name, and in fact takes for granted his guilt. Troy has always wanted a new trial, but clemency is now the only thing still open to him.

I've signed the petitions of course and written emails, but really I've had a hard time imagining what would sway the Georgia Board of Prisons and Paroles to act any differently than they have in the past. Rather than simply be discouraged, though, I've decided to repost an old post from a different blog I did a couple of years ago on Troy's limbolike situation. If you'd rather just cut to the chase and help Troy, though, you can find out more HERE.

I Am Troy Davis

There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest. The Talmud tells us that by saving a single human being, man can save the world. We may be powerless to open all the jails and free all the prisoners, but by declaring our solidarity with one prisoner, we indict all jailers.--Elie Wiesel, Nobel Lecture, 1986

I must admit that, initially, I failed to understand the reasoning behind the Amnesty International T-Shirt that bears the words that head this post until I read this quote from the Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech by Elie Wiesel the other day. I had previously thought it presumptuous to express an identity between myself and a man who has spent decades in prison, under the shadow of death, most probably for a crime he did not commit.I am not Troy Davis, I thought. I have never had to live through what he has and it is naive to think I could simply 'empathize' my way into his situation.

All true, of course. But what the shirt is really saying, at least if I understand Wiesel correctly, is that in expressing solidarity with another human being, we are showing ourselves willing to share an identity with them, and even to stand in for that human being in situations where he or she can not themselves stand.

I have posted here about Troy Davis's case before. It is not my general intent to make this blog a soapbox for issues of the day. But the plight of this one particular human being moves me deeply, and his fate hangs heavily on me. As Wiesel says, there may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time we fail to protest. In Troy Davis's case, there are a great many people in the world who have protested a great many times, and after such a long drawn out issue, where one is handed defeat time and again, the spirit languishes and there is a temptation to step back and not raise your own tiresome voice yet one more time. But by Wiesel's lights, this is exactly the time when you must lift it, and shout loudly.

Martha Silano has a thoughtful meditation on her blog about a poem by Emily Dickinson and Abu Ghraib here. It seems appropriate in this context as well.

Apparently with no surprise
To any happy flower,
The frost beheads it at its play
In accidental power.

The blond assassin passes on,
The sun proceeds unmoved
To measure off another day
For an approving God.

Troy Davis may be innocent. He deserves a new trial in the aftermath of witness recantations. All channels of justice may now have been closed to him. But that fact in itself doesn't make him any less deserving of it.

If you would like to check out the Amnesty International position on Troy Davis, and see what you can do, please go here.

(Other posts I have written about Troy are included here.)

error

2011-09-11T15:48:00.000-07:00

Comedy of Errors
Shakespeare Santa Cruz, 2011

To be perfectly honest, I thought this was going to be a kind of easy post. I saw "The Comedy of Errors" at Shakespeare Santa Cruz the weekend before this one, and got from the program notes that "error" had something to do with wandering. I thought that was pretty cool, given the wandering, questing nature of the play and thought I'd be able to report and comment on that.

But closer inspection shows that the program notes only say that the play may well be a pun on the Latin word errare, to wander. Which leaves me as much in the dark as ever. If error doesn't come from errare, where does it come from?

***

I'm a bit stuck on this one. 'Error' does apparently come from the Old French error, which meant mistake, flaw, defect and, interestingly, heresy. It derived from the Latin erro 'to wander, stray or rove'. The Online Etymology Dictionary tells us that most Indoeuropean languages take their word for error from the sense of wandering or straying, but that the Irish word for error is dearmad, which comes from dermat, "a forgetting". An interesting difference.

Another interesting thing is that the Germanic languages seem to have taken that original PIE base *ers- and turned it into words like ierre (Old English) and ire (Old Frisian) and irre (Old High German), all of which have at least one meaning of "angry". The Online Etymological Dictionary has it that this comes from the Germanic notion of anger as "straying" from normal composure. Hmm.

Now none of this is too confusing, but when you think, as I did, that the word 'errant' must come from the same sense, you get your comeuppance fast. Here I was thinking of all those lovely knights errant, wandering around on what I supposed were their knightly errands. But it seems that errant in English comes from the fusion of two words in old French, both stemming from different forms of errer, one having to do with wandering and the other with, well, erring. In English, most of the wandering meaning stuck with 'errant' and much of the second meaning went with the word 'arrant'.

I didn't even think I knew the word 'arrant' until I stepped away from this post for a bit and realized that I did of course know the phrase 'arrant knave'. What's fascinating is that although an arrant knave and a knight errant sound very different to our ears now, in fact, since knight originally comes from Old English cniht "boy, youth, servant", and knave originally comes from Old English cnafa, "boy, servant", you have quite a doubling over and entwining of wandering, mistaken identities.

In fact,what you have is The Comedy of Errors.

Happy Labor Day round up

2011-09-05T20:32:00.000-07:00

It's somewhat ironic to work on Labor Day, but that's retail for you. For some reason I was very busy with the blogs yesterday, though, and so I thought I'd post a few links. There's a review of Tove Jansson's very wonderful The Summer Book, a cool video of how microlending looks on a map, and the links to two very different hunting stories.

The Online Etymology Dictionary

2011-09-03T19:57:00.000-07:00

Regular readers of this blog may realize how often I resort to the Online Etymology Dictionary to resolve my bafflement over a good many things. Like many reference works, I had used this free resource, usually checking it against other sources, without thinking too much about it. It seemed to have sprung into being whole, and I assumed there was a team of zealous scribes somewhere, busily looking into the sources of all our English words. I say all, which is not entirely true, but when you can find a word like, say, 'furbelow' there, you know it's extensive.

One evening recently, I happened to see an abbreviation for a language there that I wasn't sure about, so with uncharacteristic industry, I searched out a list of abbreviations. I didn't actually discover the meaning of the abbreviation--and have since forgotten what it was--but I did find a whole list of supplemental material that I'd never thought to look for before. And it was here that I discovered that the online dictionary is actually the work of one man. Douglas Harper, upon discovering that there really was no comprehensive free online dictionary of etymology, decided to compile his own. Drawing on a whole host of basic sources and a raft of supplemental ones (so in that sense, there really is a team of scholars behind this) he has singled-handedly brought them together for the likes of you and me to access easily.

Easy enough, you say. The man is probably some pinched old hermit, holed away in an attic. In fact, he is the father of young children whom he shares the care for, has a full time night job at a newspaper, and has written several historical titles about Chester, Pennysylvania, mostly relating to the Civil War. The one I like most, perhaps, is West Chester to 1865: That Elegant and Notorious Place.

The online etymology dictionary is his gift to the world. (Although if you want to show the guy some thanks, you can sponsor a word for ten bucks for six months.) I really liked and was moved by his dedications at the end of his introduction page. He talks about one of the chief sources for his work, Ernest Klein's A Comprehensive Etymological Dictionary of the English Language. Klein, he tells us, was Rabbi of Nové Zámky in Czechoslovakia from 1931-44, and 'was deported to Dachau and returned home after liberation to find "that my father, my wife, my only child Joseph, and two of my three sisters had suffered martyrdom in Auschwitz." He moved to Canada, and out of his sorrow and urged on by his surviving sister he set down his lifelong love of etymology into a book, and in its introduction he wrote:

May this dictionary, which plastically shows the affinity and interrelationship of the nations of the world in the way in which their languages developed, contribute to bringing them nearer to one another in the sincere pursuit of peace on earth -- which was one of my cardinal aims in writing this dictionary.'

Ernest Klein

Thank you, Douglas Harper, for sharing your work and this history with us all.

A miscellany

2011-08-31T22:02:00.000-07:00

In case you aren't that interested in furbelows, I've got a few other blog posts going this week, including one on a new font called Dyslexie, one on a meta episode of Community, a few thoughts on a Cozy Knave, and a plug for an excellent an anthology.

furbelow

2011-08-29T21:47:00.000-07:00

I don't know about you, but to me this is a pretty obscure word. Nevertheless, when the same word comes up twice in the same day, I take heed. First I read it in a mystery novel, and then I heard it in a play. Now from the book, I took it to mean the ruffle around the bottom of a bed, and from the play I think it had to do with some sort flounce around the bottom of a pelise (not that the word pelise was all that familiar--I kept thinking they were saying "police", so I was quite confused by lines that sounded like "I just saw him with the police!").

I think that 'furbelow' is a word more used in British English than American, and maybe it's as simple as fur+below, though the fur aspect is still rather baffling. We shall see.

***

Well, I'm glad to report that it is not as simple as all that. A furbelow is indeed a ruffle or a flounce or fringe or , by extension, any elaborate ornamentation. But it has nothing to do with fur, or, for that matter being below anything. The word it stems from is the French word falbala, or perhaps the Provencal variation farbello, which is more of fringe. This in turn is probably a corruption of the Italian faldella, which is the diminutive of falda, which means more like pleat, flap, or fold, and points back to one of those very densely packed ProtoIndoEuropean roots, *pel, which generally means 'to fold'.

Oh, yeah--it's also a seaweed...

Laminaria bulbosa, a furbelow

riot

2011-08-26T22:03:00.000-07:00

Partly, this post is just an excuse to link to Christopher Hitchens thoughts on the recent riots in England.

It's an interesting, moderate (for him) short piece, but if you don't feel like reading the whole thing, I'll cut to the chase and quote what's probably the biggest point he's making:

But the only really new development, without historical analog, is the emergence of gangs and even small-scale "communities" that feel they owe no civic or political or in many cases religious loyalty to the state or its institutions. These groups and areas often detest each other as much as they do the wider society: There has been graphic violence, for example, between Afro-Caribbean and Asian Muslim factions. Clearly, also, these are the sort of rank, polluted waters in which white supremacist and jihadist groups can find their fishing grounds.

And here, just for the sake of another perspective, I thought I'd include this clip of the West Indian writer Darcus Howe.

But after reading a fair amount of commentary on this recent upheaval, I found myself wondering what a riot really is. I mean we all know what one is--the unruly mob works itself into a frenzy over something, whether deservedly or not, and out of the range of anyone's control, wreak havoc. I mean, you can tweak that a bit, but isn't that more or less your sense of it?

Anyway, I realized that I can't identify the root of the word, and maybe some sense of where it came from will give us some clues about the phenomenon.

***

Well, it's French. That would have been my guess, as I had also thought of the word 'griot', but then realized that I not only didn't really know what it meant but didn't know if that one was French either.

Ignorance can take one down an ever deepening spiral of inadequacy sometimes.

'Riot' does indeed mean violent, noisy public disorder but there were a couple of facts about the word that I found interesting. First off, in law, the word has a more precise meaning of three or more people acting together in a tumultuous way that disturbs the peace in the pursuit of their private purposes.

I had heard of course that three's a crowd, but it would never have occurred to me that three people could be a riot. Instigate a riot, maybe, but that's a little different.

It makes sense, though, because the meaning in Old French of riote was 'dispute or quarrel'. This sounds more like what three people get up to than what a mob does.

It's also interesting that though the sense of 'riot' as public unrest is first recorded in the late 14th century, the word was set down as meaning 'debauchery, extravagance and wanton living'. Didn't seem to have much to do with breaking in windows with baseball bats. In fact, pretty much the opposite...

I was also a bit surprised to find the origin of the term 'riot act', as in 'reading someone the riot act', which at least in American vernacular pretty much means to give someone a dressing down. But those subject to British law, or at least more aware of British history, will know that it comes to us from the
British parliament's Riot Act of 1714. One of the things it did was give local officials the power to disperse or punish an unruly mob (in this case, though, it had to be twelve or more people). Similar to our current day Miranda rights in one regard, it was required that the riot act actually be read to the restive group before action could be taken. If the crowd did not disperse within one hour, the local authorities were authorized to use force.

Finally, I guess it wouldn't be right to make it sound as if all the rioting happens in England. We had a small riot here about a year ago. My understanding of it was that under pretext of a dance party on the street, a group lured a lot of students downtown, and then after diverting the police with false alarms away from the center of town, proceeded to do some damage. The police did not arrive in force until some 45 minutes after the actual rioting had started. Below is some fairly raw footage:

Absolute Zero Cool

2011-08-21T15:18:00.000-07:00

Posted a new review of Declan Burke's much anticipated Absolute Zero Cool over at Not New for Long.
(Well, much anticipated in the circles I frequent, anyway.)

It's cool, all right.

tripping the light fantastic

2011-08-20T18:47:00.000-07:00

Perhaps this is a bit of a cheat, and I certainly am not planning to send you to my Finnegans Wake blog many times in the future. But this week I found myself looking into some things that could equally have appeared here. If you'd like to see how badly wrong I was on the phrase 'tripping the light fantastic' (a general knowledge of superiority to me being I assume one of the pleasures of reading this blog), you can go HERE, and skip, or shall I say trip, right along to the last couple of paragraphs.

Or not.

Feux Rouges

2011-08-18T18:58:00.000-07:00

No, I know what this means. I just like having the opportunity to write it here once more, before I direct you over to my book review of this book by Simenon, author of the legendary Maigret novels. Red Lights, as it is known in translation, is not a Maigret novel, though. It's a stand alone about a man who is headed to pick up his kids from summer camp when things go badly wrong.

I didn't read this in French, but in this case, it's quite appropriate to read it in English, as the story is set in New York and points north, and the cast of characters are definitely American. You can check out my short review, or whatever it is, at Not New For Long.

spokes

2011-08-16T22:02:00.000-07:00

Well, if you thought about it, you might have seen this post coming. After my last post on what 'bespoke' means, it had to gradually occur to me that with all the sprechen and sprachen and speaking going on, there was a big question about another aspect of the word, which, dare I venture, doesn't probably have a lot to do with speech. I'm talkin' spokes, people. No, not spokespeople. Those things that you find inside wheels that I suppose keep the rim from getting wrecked. My confession of ignorance isn't really about function--though I suspect there is a thing or two to learn there too, but about etymology.

What's the root?

***

Okay, okay. You guessed it already, didn't you? My problem was that I got stuck on the vowel. It's not related to speak, it's related to spike. Or probably is. At least in one theory, it's related to a lot of sharp, pointy things, like spines and pinnacles and Lithuanian thorns (speigliai) and tongues of buckles (spitna), and Latin ears of corn (spica), and all relating back to one of those ProtoIndoEuropean bases, *spei-, meaning 'sharp point'. Apparently the OED is not so sure that it actually relates to all the Germanic family words, but in any case, in Old English it was spaca and is related to the word spicing, which meant 'large nail'.

This all makes sense, but I'm still a bit confused. Spokes originally referred not to those those little sticks you see connecting the hub and the rim, but to lengths of a log that had been split horizontally into sections. What we now think of as spokes were actually carved out of these longer pieces of wood. The meaning of the word drifted, in that fascinating way that words do drift, from the raw material to the finished product. I'm not really sure why those original bigger pieces of wood were called spokes, though. It wouldn't seem that they would have necessarily been all that sharp, but I doubt I can dig down to the heart on that.

A couple of things came to light as I researched this word. One is that even spokes have geeks. One of the things that spoke geeks (mainly cyclists) talk about is the question of 'hang or stand?'--that is, does a loaded bike stand on its bottom spokes, or hang from its top ones? You can look at it one way, or you can look at it another. It's all a bit beyond me, I'm afraid.

The desired spoke length for wheels with crossed spokes.

And it was only as I was writing this that I realized that there was a phrase about spokes that's a bit odd. The expression 'to put a spoke in one's wheel', meaning to put a stop or obstacle into someone's plans, doesn't make a whole lot of sense if you try to visualize it. An extra spoke would only strengthen the thing, wouldn't it?

Well, in fact, we're talking about a whole different set of wheels. Before spokes, there were still wheels. They were circles of wood with a small hole or two in which a long pin (or spoke) could be inserted and then act as a kind of brake.

Getting around in the Bronze Age

New post on Things You May Have Missed

2011-08-14T21:57:00.000-07:00

I'm just back from vacation, and thought I might change things up here a bit. I know that there are one or two people who actually delve a little deeper into the many facets of my blogging but as this seems to be the most popular one, I thought I'd use it as a kind of rubric for my various other blog interests. Truly no obligation if the links don't appeal, and it really doesn't mean I'm going to do any less of this particular blog than I've ever done. It may be more trouble than it's worth, but I have kind of wondered how to get myself out of the quandary of multiple blogs, which may have been a mistake, but which I intend to keep separate for now.

In any case, please enjoy Mr. Jake Shimabukuro while I get my next confession in order...

bespoke

2011-08-07T18:56:00.000-07:00

'Bespoke' is one of those words that, when I read it, I know I don't understand but pass over as if I did. In my mind bespoke always means something like 'spoken for', so when I read it in a sentence like 'He was wearing a bespoke suit,' as I did in some crime story or other recently, my mind does a weird swerve and thinks of a 'spoken for' suit, which doesn't make a whole lot of sense. But as that doesn't usually hinder the general sense of the story--and also doesn't come up all that often-- I've let it slide, as frankly I often do with unfamiliar descriptions of fashion.

Until now.

***

Okay, now that I know what a bespoke suit is, I realize that what I wrote above isn't totally true. When I read this kind of word, I actually fill in some sort of image. Because in whatever that story was I was reading, the suit I filled in was a kind of blackish one with gold pinstripes, and there was some sense of it being Sunday go to meeting best, as worn by a country person who didn't always wear suits. I saw a little hay in there somewhere, maybe in the guy's mouth. Probably got the word 'spokes' mixed into this in my head.

The tailors of Savile Row would not be too happy with me right now, nor would the author feel that he had succeeded in conveying the right impression, because a bespoke suit is what we in America call a custom-made one. It makes sense, then, that I've probably only ever seen the word in British fiction.

The idea of a bespoke suit comes from the word 'bespeak', of course, in the sense of 'to speak for something'--which fits my idea of it, but has the further specialized sense here of 'to give order for it to be made'.

This comes about, I think, from the very loose sense of 'bespeak' itself, at least according to the OED. 'Bespeak' comes from the Old English besprecan which came from a common German compound, meaning 'to call out'. In English it took up a variety of very meanings, which the Online Etymology dictionary has arising quite independently of each other, including 'speak up', 'oppose', 'arrange' 'request' and 'order goods'.

The reason for this is that the 'be-' prefix has quite an extraordinary range, and can be an intensifer, a privative (meaning deprive of, such as a beheading), a causative, which is a word that shows something has transformed something else (I would again think behead, but I digress.) In short, it can have 'just about any sense required'. Be- was useful in forming many new words of the 16th and 17th centuries, more than a few of which have since disappeared from view. The online etymology gives examples of two nice ones: 'bethwack', which is obvious, and 'betongue', 'to assail in speech, or scold', which is not.

Speaking of bespoke suits, here's a good blog post about Rufus Sewell recklessly endangering one.

The Nielsen Ratings

2011-08-02T20:07:00.000-07:00

Several weeks ago, I got a phone call. It was a recorded message rather than a live person, informing me that I would soon be asked to participate in a Nielsen ratings survey and it was very important that I participate. I found this approach very irritating--if it's so important, maybe you just call me--and had pretty much decided to refuse.

This is a far cry from my feelings about the Nielsen ratings as a child. As I understood it then, the Nielsen ratings people picked some very lucky families and put some kind of box on their television and these Nielsen families represented the American viewing public as a whole. How we wished to be designated that special family, where our favorite shows would be counted! Cynicism has taken its toll over the years and I don't believe that my lone opinion counts to any degree whatsoever, at least not in the keeping and cancelling of TV shows. And the using of my personal views in a kind of grand data base feels more invasive than special at this late stage too.

So I was all set to say no and face down their incredulity, but the Nielsen people outsmarted me. I was phoned in due course by an exceedingly nice woman who did not come across in an aggressive way at all. I thought, what the hell, and agreed to receive the 'Nielsen diary' in a couple of weeks. And to answer a few questions.

There were more questions when the 'diary' arrived. Of course there were. One of them was how many televisions you had in your house--and how many of them were actually functional. I am not sure what fascinating social analysis this question leads to, but I found it funny that they had nailed me, because I have two, and only one is functional. (It's complicated). Another thing that I found strange, but interesting, was that you were supposed to record when the TV was on but no one was watching. I found this a harder question than I thought it would be, as there were certain times during the week when I wasn't sure if the person in the house (me) was actually 'watching' or just kind of hanging out in the general vicinity of the television set without any real way to tell how much I was actually taking in.

There was also a question about how many channels I currently had. This was the one that caused me some trouble. I really have no idea. I have a standard Comcast contract where I get everything available through channel 100, but that's nothing like a hundred channels. Besides, there are random channels that come in well above that. I have never counted, nor did I have any intention of doing that for the Nielsen ratings. They suggested that I just print out a copy of the channels I receive, but I never got anything like that, and I started to get really annoyed. I was even more annoyed when someone called me that night to ask if I had received the packet. I think there is this mentality at the Nielsen's that everyone is actually happy to share their viewing patterns rather than thinking it a pain in the neck. The guy suggested sending in that printed thing and when I said I had no intention of counting what channels I had, he didn't just let it go, but asked me if I could get my diary, I said I was not going to get the diary. There was a pause and he said "Oh, so you're not at home?" I said I wasn't. I was absolutely bound and determined that I wasn't going to jump through any more hoops, so I said no, even though it was probably only 10 feet away. He told me not get all upset about it.

Anyway, I did my best with the questions and was ready to start recording my viewing hours. I found the whole process very strange. Clearly they want to fit you into a certain demographic, and I'm sure they got some of that, but actually, as it was summer, and few new network shows are on, my viewing was not particularly typical. And, I was busy that week. I watched less than I would have some other weeks.

In fact, though, the most interesting thing to me was that I felt an incredible urge to both lie and to do the atypical. You get columns for all kinds of people, even visiting strangers, and as someone who writes the occasional piece of fiction, the temptation was strong to fabricate a lively household complete with guests. That would have been wrong, but I also was tempted to watch a bunch of strange shows that week and mess with the findings. That would have been fair I think, but the fact was I didn't have time to do that. I still wish I had. I didn't even record my strange but occasional obsession with Jewelry Television. I don't wear jewelry, I don't buy it, but occasionally I get absolutely fascinated by these late night descriptions of gems I have never heard of. What can I say? I also like docents. I like people to tell me things. But this wasn't the week for it.

Anyway, I filled out the booklet faithfully and truthfully, if dully. I thought I might go into the history and use of the Nielsen ratings here, but frankly, it turns out that I'm not all that interested.

P.S. In looking for an image, I found this interesting little piece on how it all works. Reading it, apparently people who are participate are sworn to confidentiality. Oops. I actually don't remember promising anything like that, but if I erred, I'm happy to have my results nullified. I'll even send back the dollar they sent me in compensation--that is, if they send me the postage.

liminal--some thoughts on professorspeak

2011-07-26T19:43:00.000-07:00

To be frank, 'liminal' is one of those words I've just skipped over in the past. I suppose some people hear it in everyday speech--I can't say it's ever come up in mine. When I come across the word 'liminal', it usually means I've inadvertantly wandered into the world of academic writing. Liminal is the kind of word that has been taken up as a sort of jargon among academic professionals, and for better or worse, I tend to tune out this kind of stuff.

But liminal is a perfectly good word, and reading it in my copy of Down These Green Streets the other day made me wonder about it a little. True, the word 'liminality' was used by a professor, namely one Ian Campbell Ross, who wrote the introduction for the book, but he at least has the grace to define it as he goes, as an indeterminate state of being. He's speaking specifically of the novels of Brian McGilloway, which operate in both a literal and metaphorical borderland. (And let me add that neither Ross nor the other writers I've sampled in the book are guilty of much acadamese. It's a highly readable collection.)

But where does this word come from? Is it related to 'limit', or to what exactly? And if it's good enough for academics to toss off every now and again, why can't we find more uses for it in daily speech?

I just now realized as wrote this, that 'subliminal' has got to be related, and we use that one all the time. Or at least more.

***
I've commented elsewhere recently that a little Latin wouldn't go amiss around these parts. If I'd had some, no doubt I would have recognized that 'limin-' as going back to the Latin limin, which means threshold. English speakers might be a bit more familiar with the word 'lintel' which, also means threshold. It gets a bit confusing over at the old Online Etymology dictionary, because it seems like lintel derives from the Vulgar latin 'limitaris' or threshold, which goes back to Latin limitaris, which is an adjective meaning 'that is on the border' while liminal comes straight from the old Latin limen, but they seem to cross over and influence each other anyway. Quite appropriate for threshold words, I'd say.

Anyway, though subliminal and liminal are related through their history, they don't really relate in current usage. Subliminal in our present sense means something like 'below the threshold of awareness'. It seems to have been coined or at least translated from a coinage back in 1886 by a German psychologist named Hebert, but became popularized in 1957, when people learned about the perils of subliminal advertising. (A book called Subliminal Seduction, complete with illustrations of scary things advertisers were putting in their ads was still around when I was in college.)

But liminality has another and rather specific source. It was coined in 1884, but the Online Dictionary has it as a rare word. It's comtemporary usage all stems from the work of Victor Turner in anthropology at the University of Chicago in the sixties. Without getting that deeply into it, the liminal state is what Turner terms the stage of the rite of passage between childhood and adulthood. In more traditional societies, it is made a part of the initiation ceremony, but Turner apparently also saw a certain liminal quality to the Hippie revolution that was going on at the time. Even he titled one of his books Betwixt and Between, and left liminal to hang out in the subtitle, which seems like a good idea to me.

In short, liminal is a part of academic speech and not the popular lingo because it never really escaped the confines of the university. Maybe some of us should take it out for a good walk every now and then. Introduce it to the neighborhood.

derby

2011-07-21T21:15:00.000-07:00

This one came up a little while ago, but I hadn't had time to get to it. There was a short period where the women's roller derby came to town, the Kentucky derby was on, a friend at work introduced me to the shirt.woot derby, and I was reading a book with a character wearing a derby hat. In thinking of writing this post tonight, I realized that there was also a County Derby or a Derbyshire where quite possibly all these things have the ground of their beings, but I wasn't sure if it was in England or Ireland. Then, luckily for me, I happened to be reading an essay in Down These Green Streets, in which it turns out that Sheridan Le Fanu's Uncle Silas came from a short story originally set in Ireland, but his publisher's leery of a purely Irish tale, persuaded him to set it in Derbyshire.

So that's one thing sorted.

Now it seems that a derby must be a race of some sort, but is it a particular kind of race? And did people, men, wear particular kinds of hats to go to it? Frankly, I wouldn't know what a derby hat looked like if I sat on it. Well, particularly not after I'd sat on it.

***

The Derby at Epsom, 1821 by Théodore Géricault

So the origins of this bifurcated path are simple enough. Well, sort of. They come from the Derby, an annual race on the Epsom Downs, which was inaugurated by the 12th Earl of Derby, Edward Smith-Stanley in 1780, and called more correctly the Derby Stakes. The Derby is probably the most prestigious horse race in England, so it's no surprise that the name was mimicked by the time the Kentucky Derby came into existence in 1875.

Simple enough, right?

Well, kind of. Because although it's easy enough to see the translation to any kind of race, there are other kinds of contests that are called derbies that have nothing to do with racing, but are more like bouts. So what's up with that? Well, I have a theory....

First, though, the place name Derby is somewhat disputed. The online etymology dictionary says that the name of the town comes from the Old English 'deorby', which means 'deer village' or deer habitation. That '-by' at the end means 'homestead', or 'habitation' and this relates it a bit surprisingly to 'bylaw', which means the local law, or the law of the place. However, this site has a somewhat different derivation. They note that Derby was once called Northworthige by the Saxons, and was changed by the invading Danes. But they think that Derby, which sits on the banks of the Derwent and has a neighboring town of Darley, and perhaps comes out of a Roman station called Derventio, may share with all of these the British/Celtic root of dwr, or water. Personally, I'm thinking more water than deer here, but who am I to say?

What's interesting to me, in any case, is that -by. Because it ties back to this more current sense that a derby is not always a race, but sometimes a contest between two sides. As this comment, from Word Reference.com makes clear, a derby, when it's not a big international race, is a small local contest:

In the UK a "derby" (small "d") means a "local derby": a match (football, rugby, cricket, etc.) played between neighbours. Not every big match is a derby. Manchester United vs Arsenal is a big match, but it is not a derby, because there is almost 200 miles between the clubs.

Finally, a derby hat is really just an American version of the English bowler--(think Jeeves). It began being manufactured in the U.S. in 1850--no one seems to know how the name came about, but one story is that the manufacturer saw a lot of 'English gentlemen' wearing these bowlers at the English Derby. Anglophilia goes back a long way, I guess, even though 1776 was a lot closer then than it is now.

the debt ceiling

2011-07-16T23:35:00.000-07:00

Andrea Pozzo--The Apotheosis of St. Ignatius

Don't worry--this won't be a blog post devoted to delving deeply into the financial realm. But after watching many nights of political news revolving around the looming crisis of not increasing the debt ceiling, I am still a little baffled about what the debt ceiling actually is. I know that the general idea is that we don't want as a nation to default on our creditors and that raising the debt ceiling is the way to avoid that, but how exactly do we do it, I do not know.
Let's see if anyone can shed a little simple light on this.

***

Okay, yes, there is a very simple answer. Before 1917, Congress had to pass a new law every time they borrowed money. But when the United States became involved in World War I, they needed a more efficient method to raise funds. The debt ceiling was, and is, simply the amount that the Treasury Department has the leeway to borrow, by issuing bonds, bills and notes without going back to Congress constantly to ask permission.

Many think that the debt ceiling is an outmoded financial tool because it isn't really able to control spending in the way it once did. Much of our debt is not up for discussion, coming from the growing costs of mandated programs like Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. As one former policy advisor to President Reagan put it, in our current situation, "it makes no sense to treat the debt ceiling as an independent variable."

Some argue that we still need it, though. According to Professor Krishnakumar of St. John's University, it represents the last vestige of Congressional control or accountability over the national debt, and it encourages Congress to "consider the interest of the general public and future generations, rather than those of special interests, and thus acts as an important institutional check on party and interest group politics."

But whatever it's utility, no one is saying it's a good idea to default. So roll up your shirt sleeves, duly elected officials, and hammer out a deal. I mean, it's the kind of thing we sent you to Washington to
do.

What's the image, you ask? Why, that's a hedgehog ceiling lamp. See, it's a high ceiling, and I'm thinking maybe we could all use a little light.

Editing this to add a few links that are by people who actually know what they are talking about on this, or at least know a whole lot more than I do.

CBS News

Fret Ceiling--Slate magazine

Abolish the Debt Ceiling!--Slate Magazine

Mayhem!

2011-07-10T12:18:00.000-07:00

Salt Riot in Kolomenskoe by Nikolay Nekrasov, 1821–1878

Of course I know what mayhem is. Or perhaps, fortunately for me, I don't--not if you have to experience something to really know it. We often use the word in a hyperbolic way to express our sense of things being out of control, sometimes violently out of control. I also think of mayhem as having an agent--as in 'committing mayhem'--rather than as an impersonal chaos, such as can come about through natural disaster. And of course I think of it as being something violent, which not all chaos is.

But what is mayhem really? I feel it must have ancient roots, but perhaps it is just something that was coined in a 1920s ad campaign.

Let's see.

***

Well, it looks like the word drifted from a more personal meaning to a larger collective one over time. It's first meaning had to do with injury, with deliberately inflicting damage upon another person. In law, it means the intentional crippling, mutilating or disfiguring of another person. It comes out of the idea of doing the kind of damage to an adversary severe enough that they can't retaliate. That is why originally, in British common law, it had to do with cutting off a limb or damaging an eye. According to wikipedia 'cutting off an ear or a nose was deemed not sufficiently disabling'. And it wasn't until 1697 that a case called Fetter vs. Beale allowed that when a person is battered to the point where part of his skull comes out of his head, that too is mayhem.

Yikes. If such humor wasn't beneath me, I would say that that was pretty much a no-brainer.

You can get discouraged when you try to figure out word origins. I mean sure, 'maim' sounds a bit like mayhem, but even I can see that would be a bit of a stretch. Except it isn't. Both mayhem and maim come from the same source. They derive from the Old French mahaigne (bodily harm, loss of limb) and are related to Middle High German words like meiden or meidem, which mean 'gelding'--presumably the noun and the verb. It all goes back to a theorized ProtoIndoEuropean root *mei--to change, or in one version I read, to cut. Altering by cutting has been with us for a long time.

However none of this explains why a very current meaning of mayhem is also chaos, or a state a physical disturbance. It doesn't explain why, at this very moment, there is something called Rockstar Mayhem Festival playing right here in Northern California, and though it looks pretty wild in a heavy metal sort of way, I am pretty sure that depriving people of their limbs is not part of the show.

I've seen two different ideas about why mayhem came to have its very popular secondary meaning. One is that the word was reassessed in the mid 1500s to mean rowdiness, chaos and confusion, and that this is because such states are an aftereffect of violence. Here's a nice little article on Lexical Chaos--English has a lot of words for it. But elsewhere I've read the idea that the second meaning of mayhem comes out of a mistake. In this scenario people understood the word to have a new more generalized meaning after hearing or more likely reading it attached to other things in phrases like 'violence and mayhem' or 'rioting and mayhem'.

In any case, let us hope that Rockstar Mayhem Festival involves no true mayhem at all.

Not even of the headbashing kind.

(I was going to put a heavy metal video there, but couldn't bring myself to do it. Even I have my limits.)

Happy Fourth

2011-07-03T18:57:00.000-07:00

Although I wrote this up for my story related blog I thought I'd put it up on a couple of my other blogs as well. Have a great holiday.

Happy Fourth of July weekend, everyone. In honor of the day (though largely by coincidence), I've made my self-published novella The Bird Watchers available again. The real reason this is all happening now is that Lulu.com has offered people the option of getting a proof copy of a new work, and while I've been working on that, which is actually a sequel to this one, I realized that I might as well make this one available again too. "For a limited time only" as they say, the book will be available at cost, or as a free download. At some point I'll probably boost the price a dollar or so but for now, I'd be interested in comments from anyone who wants to take the time. As a self-published book, it's got all the flaws that come with the territory, but more people than just my mother seemed to have liked it the first time around, so give it a go if you'd like.

The link at Lulu is HERE .

(I also don't know if the download works as a true ebook, but there's nothing to lose by trying it out.)

libel

2011-06-29T21:39:00.000-07:00

Until last week, I thought I knew what libel was. I thought it was it was when you told a lie about a public figure, or in other ways defamed their character. And perhaps that is it what it means today. But I've been reading a fascinating book during the slow moments at work called The Influencing Machine. It's by Brooke Gladstone, who is an NPR managing editor and media analyst. If it actually was a novel, I'd call it a graphic novel, but since it's, well, analysis, I'm a bit at a loss what to call it. Gladstone herself seems to be okay with calling it a comic.

Anyway, one of the things she attempts to depict in comic form is the creation of and history of the free press, and how often and for what reasons it falls from those ideals. It's a fun and engaging way to learn a little history.

Gladstone talks about how the advent of printing (and her thesis is, with the advent of all new media technologies) the resultant freer speech of the populace was not always greeted with enthusiasm one might expect from royalty. Printers could be ruined by the charge of seditious libel for printing criticism of the government. Gladstone says, "And the truth is no defence. Legal doctrine holds that 'the greater the truth, the greater the libel'--the greater the threat to divine right."

So what is libel, if it is not falsification? Is it just an attack on someone's good name--even if the attack is based on truth? And if not, when did that change?

***

Libel involves first and foremost publication. It's when something that you say in writing, print, signs or pictures damages someone's reputation. ('Slander' is when this damaging thing is spoken.) But it's interesting to see that, just as Brooke Gladstone reports, in the earlier versions of defamation, saying that you were only speaking the truth wasn't much of a defense. According to what I've gleaned from Wikipedia, there was originally almost as strong a taboo against making public, insulting true statements as there was against making public, insulting false ones. It's something about the shouting something out loud that makes it libel, and perhaps our current ideas of inflammatory speech touches upon this. Apparently in English Common Law, the issue with libel is more in the realm of breaching the peace than the actual or imagined harm done to the defamed.

I'm not sure how matters stand in actual practice in England today. But in the U.S., to prove that someone has libelled you, you must first prove that the statement is false, next that the statement has actually caused harm, and finally that the statement was inadequately researched before being made. Anybody can be libelled. But when it comes to celebrities, it must also be proved that there was actually some intent to cause harm.

I got the basic etymology from the Online Etymology Dictionary, but leave it to Anatoly Liberman to make it more interesting. As the dictionary does, he traces 'libel' back to libellus, the diminutive of liber, or book. As he tells it, when it first made it's way into the English language, via French, at the end of the fourteenth century, it was still straightforward and meant a little book or pamphlet. Liberman goes on:

The rest is a classic example of a process called in works on historical semantics the deterioration of meaning. The OED traces every step of the downfall. “Little book” → “a formal document, a written declaration or statement” → “the document of the plaintiff containing his allegations and instituting a suit” → “a leaflet assailing or defaming someone’s character” → “any published statement damaging to the character of a person” → “any false or defamatory statement” (the last stage had been reached by the beginning of the 17th century).

Here's the rest of his article on The Long Arm of Calumny.

racketeering

2011-06-23T23:47:00.000-07:00

I don't think this caught on.

Behind the scenes here at Confessions of Ignorance, I've been uncharacteristically fumbling a bit for a topic. There are tons of topics, of course, but none of them has felt 'hot', or hot enough to spend a lot of time on here. However, I'll make up for it now by making two confessions of ignorance. The first is that, until a couple of days ago, I had never heard of Whitey Bulger, gangster, terrorizer, and alleged murderer of Boston. Which of course makes it rather hard to celebrate with the same glee as others his capture yesterday. All the same, I have seen quite a bit of news about him in the past twenty-four hours, and besides being captured in the town of my birth, Santa Monica, California, my sister now lives in the town just north, and could easily have passed Bulger and his girlfriend on the Third Street Promenade or countless other places.

Third Street Promenade, Santa Monica

Anyway, that little bit of ignorance may well have cost her, or even me ( since I've been known to visit) two million dollars.

Well, never mind, I'm sure I can make it up by writing this blog somehow.

The second bit of ignorance, though, is a bit more shocking. As the bio of Bulger was divulged the term 'racketeering' came up a couple of times. I know of course that racketeering is a crime and one those that gangsters get imprisoned for, but realized that I don't actually know what the activity consists of. Running a racket is running some kind of illegal scheme, but is it anything more precise than that?

***

Okay, essentially, a racket is an illegal business. We've all heard of a protection racket, in which money is extorted from businesses to protect them, when the real villain they are being protected from are the gangsters behind the racket themeselves. There is also the numbers racket, which is an illegal lottery, and since it seems to have been an Italian phenomena in poorer neighborhoods from at least 1520, I'm wondering if the numbers racket proceeds the other kinds of rackets as a term, especially since it had a system in place where runners ran money and betting slips back and forth between betting parlors and the headquarters, known as a numbers bank. Just an idle guess on my part, though.

The term racketeering, however, has a specific date of origin. This was in June, 1927, when Gordon Hostetter of the Employer's Association of Greater Chicago used it to describe not the local mafia, but the local trade unions. An article in the Journal of Urban history by Andrew Cohen says that Gordon was an anti-union activist and wanted to imply and association between "bootleggers like Al Capone" and the trade unions. The unions eventually were able to fight back against this image, and convince the public that they were the victims of extortion, not its perpetrators. But this picture of unions continued to shape the legal status of collective action.

Hmm. This is all beginning to sound very familiar. Very recently, somehow...

This is not Whitey Bulger.

blogger help

2011-06-19T18:53:00.000-07:00

This is more by the way of a public service announcement than a true confession of ignorance. A lot of problems seem to be arising with blogger lately, and one I've heard a lot is the inability to sign in, or to comment, etc. If this is something that's happening to you, it might help to uncheck the 'stay signed in' option when you come to that crossroads. (One way to to get to it, since even that isn't easy, is to go to the comments part of your own or someone else's blog and try to comment, which will take you to the sign in place.) Paradoxically, once you've unchecked the box, you will then stay signed in. You will have to sign in again only when you have actually left Google by, say closing all your windows or logging off or whatever. This is a lot better than having to try to sign in every time you want to say anything. I would doubt that this is an actual solution but I have since read other people offering it, so give it a shot.

ramshackle

2011-06-16T20:34:00.000-07:00

Well, hopefully this will be a short one. To me, 'ramshackle' means put together with no thought or plan, not cohesive, and definitely not up to code. I may turn out to be wrong about that, but even if I'm right, I'd really like to know where such a great word comes from. Let's find out.

***

The free dictionary has it as "so poorly constructed or kept up that disintegration is likely." Pretty much my thoughts. But here's what's interesting. 'Ramshackle' is actually a back-formation, which, in case you don't know (as I didn't until taking up this blog) is when you create a new word by analogy from an already existing word, falsely assuming that that is its source. For example:

"Stripping the in- from inchoate is known as back-formation, the same process that has given us words like peeve (from peevish), surveil (from surveillance) and enthuse (from enthusiasm). There’s a long linguistic tradition of removing parts of words that look like prefixes and suffixes to come up with 'roots' that weren’t there to begin with."

(Ben Zimmer, "Choate." The New York Times, Jan. 3, 2010)

So in case you thought 'ramshackle' had anything to do with rams or shackles, well, it doesn't. 'Ramshackle' is a back-formation of 'ramshackled' which is an alteration of 'ranshackle', which in turn comes from 'ransackle'.

Starting to sound familiar? The original word is 'ransack', which comes from Old Norse rannsaka 'to pillage', but more literally to search (saka) the house (rann). I'm going to take the original meaning of 'ramshackle', then, to mean--what a house looks like after it has been pillaged...

I've been slacking a bit on thinking outside the box with these so let's end with a little video from a little group called

graduation

2011-06-12T14:51:00.000-07:00

It's been a busy graduation weekend in my neck of the woods, which of course happens annually in a university town, and this year my oldest nephew graduated from high school and my close friends' son just graduated today from our old stomping grounds, UC Santa Cruz. It had been awhile since I'd actually attended a ceremony, but I did get up to my nephew's and although I thought it was more for him, I think in a way it was more for me. These kind of events place you in time, I think. It was pretty cool to see diversity represented as a reality in the student population, and to hear the student speakers add words in a variety of other languages in tribute to their parents. And I heard there small jazz group give the best rendition of 'The Star-Spangled Banner' that I have ever heard. Brought it to life again.

So I know what graduation is. But the more I thought about the word, the less I understood about why it had come to be the label for this symbolic event. Surely it has a relation to 'gradual'. And grade? I guess you could say high school's end is approached 'gradually', but it seems like 'culmination' or some other word connoting achievement would be more in order.

Oh, well. It's been a long week. Let's find out.

***

So basically we have two different kinds of graduation among our definitions. We have the kind that is related to the ceremony of giving or recieving a diploma or degree, and we have the kind that is about measurement on a scale that increases by regular amounts, also called degrees. I would have guessed that making any kind of equation between these two different types of degrees would have been a bad analogy, but apparently they are quite related. According to the online Etymology dictionary, the term had a special significance in alchemy, which in the early 15th century meant 'tempering or refining something to a certain degree'. It was at this time that the 'action of giving or receiving a degree' came into usage. Though I was unable to come up with a true etymology, it does seem as though the graduation ceremony as we think of it today has that sense of refining or tempering a person to a different degree than when they started rather than being so much about the gradual process that proceeded it.

Be that as it may, the interesting thing to me is that both 'graduate' and 'degree', and for that matter 'gradual' and 'grade' all link back to the Latin gradus, or 'step, pace, walk'. This links them to such words as 'congress' and 'progress', and back to that theoretical precursor language, Proto-Indo-European, with ' *ghredh-, which leads us to the Lithuanian gridiju "to go, wander," Old Church Slavonic gredo "to come," and old Irish in-greinn "he pursues."

So many steps, so little time!

Congratulations to you, Evan and Charlie, and to all your cohorts. The following Gaelic blessing may be a bit of a cliche by now, but in this context it seems singularly apt.

May the road rise up to meet you.

May the wind be always at your back.

May the sun shine warm upon your face;

the rains fall soft upon your fields and until we meet again,

may God hold you in the palm of His hand.

And to both of you, well done.

quantum

2011-06-05T19:47:00.000-07:00

Remember a couple of weeks ago when I said I wasn't going to do any guest request posts on particle physics? You don't? Then, uh, never mind. Actually, I don't even know what particle physics really is. I'm assuming it's the physics of subatomic particles, but this might be an inadequate description.

I do know that physics, and quantum physics in particular, has been every blessed place I turn lately, and I'm guessing it's high time to nail this sucker down. Except as it's all about indeterminacy, that's probably the one thing you actually can't do. We'll see.

But don't worry. This time around, I'm only looking at the actual word 'quantum'. With maybe a few random thoughts.

So, what exactly is 'quantum'? Here's my very sketchy idea of it. Quantum physics is the physics based on the data that comes from being able to study matter at the subatomic level. It 'overrides' the theories of classical physics, and is pretty wild stuff. But why 'quantum'? I think quantum refers to a subatomic called a quanta. I also think its etymology may be Latin. Okay, enough of this humiliation. Let's find out the truth.

***

Okay, I'm relieved that quantum is actually a plural noun from quanta, yet chagrined that I failed to discern the underlying relationship to 'quantity'. A 'quanta' is the smallest possible discrete unit of any physical property. It comes from the Latin quantum, "how much" or "amount". Around 1610, it came to mean "one's share or portion" in English. It was recoined for modern usage by Max Planck in 1900, when he sought to account for the way iron changes color when heated, which is not accounted for in classical physics. He explained this by positing that radiation existed in discrete units rather than continuous waves, just as matter does.

Obviously, none of this is new stuff, even if I am just getting around to it. There is a surprisingly entertaining and coherent article from a 1930s edition of Scientific American that I stumbled across in my researches. Interestingly enough, the current issue has as its cover story "Living in a Quantum World". Which leads back to my recent interest. As this recent issue has it, we are used to thinking that quantum mechanics applies mainly to the subatomic world--i.e., one which, in our daily life, we need not particularly concern ourselves. Classical physics works well enough. But apparently most physicists now concur that there is no gap between the subatomic world and the day to day one--it's only that they're finally able to see the effect on a larger scale as well.

I am not really of a scientific bent, so of course my real interest comes through literature. We've been doing a little Finnegans Wake reading group here in Santa Cruz, and more and more its become apparent to us that the at the time relatively new understanding of quantum physics influenced Joyce in writing the book. In fact, as I just learned in the beginning of a paper written by Andrzej Duzsenko on Joyce and quantum physics, its clear that Joyce, who wrote the Wake between 1923 and 1939 was highly influenced by this revolution in scientific thought, as were many other artists of the time.

Nevertheless, my sense is that it is only now that real understanding of the implications of this new model are truly beginning to work their way through our collective consciousness. Or am I just behind? Maybe all the rest of you switch frequently from the mindset of classical physics and the mindset of quantum physics. If so, please enlighten me how it's working out for you. And if you've tried any quantum jumping, let me know that too. Just don't send them any money on my account.

Or from my account either.

***
Oh, the blog plug. Let's do a fast one for Brian O'Rourke , who has been a bit out of blog land of late, due to new fatherhood, but who seems to be returning a bit, a habit I hope to encourage. Brian is one of those freewheeling blogs where I've learned a bit about everything from beer pong to great movies, but right now he's doing one of his hallmark features called "Promote Whatever You Want". I suppose there are some restrictions, like not promoting, say, napalm, but the only real rule is that you can't promote him. On the blog. So technically, I'm not cheating.

device

2011-05-29T10:24:00.000-07:00

The following is a commercial I've been seeing a lot lately. It's not a great commercial, but it got me thinking...

Fifty billion network devices by the year 2020. Seven devices for every person on earth, which really means that you and I will probably have at least twenty. And I'm not even close to being an early adapter.

Device is one of those words, old and reliable, that seems to have been gaining a bigger market share lately. I may be wrong, but I think its newer sense has really only passed into the common parlance over the last year or two. Before that, we heard more about the individual devices that people owned--Ipods and Ipads, Tablets, cell phones, ereaders, etc. To tell the truth, I am not sure of all the electronic paraphenalia that is meant to be included under the header of networking devices, but I do know that, according to the commercials, it's all getting a little out of hand.

What is a device? I mean, in its original sense? It's funny, because I have some vague association to the word that leads me to believe it has some occult meaning other than its more prosaic one. I would have just blamed that on to my ramshackle associative mind, but I came across a newish book of Philip Reeves called Fever Crumb and after a beginning where Fever and Dr. Crumb are manufacturing some paper boys, a "Master of Devices" is mentioned. Something tells me we are not in Silicon Valley anymore, Dorothy.

***
Device: A contrivance or an invention serving a particular purpose, especially a machine used to perform one or more relatively simple tasks.

That's what the Free Dictionary has to say about it. Relatively simple tasks? Perhaps. But these days the relatively simple tasks that our devices do are done at a speed beyond human comprehension, and enable them to accomplish things that we could not do in several lifetimes.

I often hazard a guess at the etymology of a word, only to discover my effort is completely without merit. This time, I was relatively sure that device and divide would be another false leap.

Guess what? Wrong again.

Device is a late 13th century word, and comes from the Old French devis.

Here's how the Online Etmology dictionary defines devis:"division, separation, disposition, wish, desire; coat of arms, emblem; last will." Ultimately the French can be traced back to the Latin. Divisare is the Vulgar Latin frequentive for dividare. (Vulgar Latin is the speech of the common person back in the day, and frequentive, though formidable sounding, really just means a the form of a verb that expresses repetitive action. It often becomes an independent but related word, as apparently it has in this case.)

So, a heraldic devise, a term which any of us who have ever had an idle look at the family coat of arms presumably has something to do with the way it divides the coat of arms. And anyone who has dealt with a will also knows that it is largely about divisions.I assume that the disposition, wish and desire aspects stem from this part of the word's history.

But speaking of desires, whenever I hear the word devices, I automatically think of the phrase 'devices and desires'. This is because of the P. D. James novel of the same name, but James, who is very well read and British to boot didn't just make this up out of whole cloth. She lifted it from somewhere, and that somewhere turns out to be The Book of Common Prayer.

We have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts.
1928 Book of Common Prayer, The Order for Daily Morning Prayer

The devices James was thinking of, though, were not not social networking ones, but presumably nuclear ones. Her novel is set at a nuclear power plant on the British coast. It's been a long time since I read it, so I'm hazy on whether the peril was illegal uranium or just the danger of the plant itself, but I do know that 'apps' did not figure in.

"Devices and Desires" has been lifted for more than just the James title. A little book searching reveals under the same name a book about contraception, a science fiction novel, a study of gender and American nursing, and unsurprisingly, a couple of books of poetry. It's a tribute, not just to the prayerbook, but to the wide range of usage this original word for a simple gadget that would just perform its mindless task has come to cover.

Reddish Design Studio

And now to the more sinister, or at least supernatural aspect of device. Because once you start plugging in supernatural and device into the old Google Search engine, you of course come up with golem. What is a golem? Well, it's basically the Frankenstein monster of Jewish lore (although the Jewish model precedes the Mary Shelley versiion by a few hundred years)--an anthropomorphic being created wholly from inanimate matter, and made to fulfill some desire of mankind. The golems inevitably crack up and cause ruin and have to be destroyed.

So you think golems and our latter day devices really have nothing to do with each other? Well, what about this, then?

Seriously, though--seven devices for every human being on earth? I would have thought that the trend was for each person to have only one--but that one would of course have to do everything.

***
Almost forgot to add a blog favorite. Let's give this one to Peter Rozovsky, of Detectives Beyond Borders renown. Although if you checked it just at this particular moment, you come across a piece about Elmore Leonard, in general, Peter specializes in writing about crime fiction beyond our American shores. Maybe you think you don't like crime fiction, or even that you don't like foreign fiction--heaven forfend. Follow along on his blog for awhile, and I'm pretty sure you will realize that you thought wrong.

canard

2011-05-23T21:10:00.000-07:00

I'm watching Rachel Maddow at the moment, and they just played back an old ad from the Johnson-Barry Goldwater presidential election. Someone had mentioned 'that old canard'. Realized of course that I have no idea what a canard is. I think of it as meaning that old saw or in this context, that old trick or even strategy. But what is it really? For some unknown reason, canard makes me think of ducks.

Maybe I'm mixing it up with mallards.

***

Okay--right about the duck, wrong about the phrase. I should have known the word's origin anyway. We used to sell pate de canard at the cheese shop I worked in many years ago, and I have enjoyed it many a time since. Sure, I usually refer to it as duck pate, but still.

An old canard is not an old saw, though. It's a false or unfounded story, a groundless rumor or belief. It comes from the French canard, which means hoax. Many seem to think it comes from the phrase vendre un canard à moitié--to half sell a duck, which means to cheat. The story behind this phrase is lost in history.

I found an interesting alternate version in a book called The Gaelic etymology of the languages of western Europe by Charles Mackay.

The natural history of the newspaper canard could more satisfactorily dealt with if authentic were forthcoming as to the origin of the term. It is to be feared, however, that the accepted story of the first canard--the typical canard to which all canards of a later period to be worthy of the name should present at least a general resemblance--must itself be regarded as a canard. The first canard, so runs the legend, was the tale of twenty ducks, all characterized by a ducklike greediness; while one of the number exhibited, under peculiar circumstances, a voracity akin to that which our own journals, in the dull season of the year, are still in the habit of attributing to the pike. To test not only the appetite and capacity of ducks, but also their disposition to eat one another, the first of the band of twenty was slain, and his remains distributed among his companions, who hastened to gobble him up, feathers and all. A second duck, one of the nineteen who had just swallowed their fellow-creature--was now killed and like the previous victime, cut up into small pieces for the benefit of the survivors. Duck number two having been thus disposed of , a third was treated in a similar fashion. A like fate awaited duck number four: until, one after another, nineteen ducks had been sacrificed on the altar of science, and for the advantage, in respect to immediate gratification, of duck the twentieth. This strange story was quoted from one French journal to another and was generally disbelieved, so that the 'voracity of the duck,' and ultimately the word 'duck,' got to be looked upon as the appropriate title of absurd newspaper journalism of every kind. The pointless fable of the twenty ducks (unless, indeed, the last all-devouring survivor was meant to prefigure such credulous newspaper readers as might be able to gulp down the preposterous fiction), after dying out in France, was revived in America, where the pretended derivation of the word canard, in the sense of newspaper hoax, from the duck story as above related, is sanctioned by the authority of Webster.--
Pall Mall Gazette, March 2, 1876.

There is also a French plane called a canard, because the French thought it looked like a duck when it flew, but I think I'll leave you to look that one up for yourselves...

*Being me, I forgot my intention of my last blog, which was to highlight some other blog before I go. Fortunately, I have a great suggestion for today, namely Nathaneal Green's 500 Words on Words . His blogs are always interesting and meticulous reflections on language and many things language related. Just by chance, he has a new post up where he's asking YOU for reading suggestions. So go give him some. You'll get points, and maybe even an AWARD. I just got a great one. Okay, there's no money involved but you'll still be happy that you did.

slattern

2011-05-14T22:42:00.000-07:00

(I think I had better mention straight off that this post comes as the result of a mistake. Simpatico online friend Kathleen Kirk mentioned on her blog that she would pass on a Versatile Blogger Award to me and some other bloggers she reads. The title of her blog post was 'Versatile Slattern', and somehow I ended up taking that to be the title of the award as well. I don't know--it made sense to me at the time...)

I wouldn't say this was a guest request, more a guest prompt. I notice over on Kathleen Kirk's blog that she has just awarded me a Versatile Slattern award along with a lot of other probably more versatile and probably a lot less slatternly bloggers. You're supposed to post seven facts about yourself and pass the award on to a bunch of other bloggers, but I'm a bit tired of the current facts about myself and I don't have a huge list of bloggers who appreciate the chain letter effect, so I think the way I'm going to approach this is to highlight some blog I frequent with each of these entries for awhile. Check in at the end for a sample.

First things first, though. Before I (provisionally, and without attending to all the rules) accept this award, I think I'd better figure out what a slattern is. Basically, I think of it as a slovenly person, and okay, pretty much always a woman. Slattern, slut, slovenly, sloppy--they all seem to go together in one package in my mind. At one end, unkempt and disorderly, at the other, well, at best a bit of a tramp and at worst... no, I'm not going there. I mean, maybe a slattern will turn out to be some kind of a queen!

***

Yeah, yeah--the Urban Dictionary has all of that worse end of the spectrum and then some. Tart, floozy, trollop, strumpet--these are just a few of the more polite words that are interchangeable with slattern. Also included are Britney Spears, Ann Coulter and Paris Hilton. Also apparently interchangeable is 'woman'.

And then, yes, on the other end, a 'deliberately offensive term meant to insult a woman's hygiene and grooming.'

The untidy meaning apparently came first. It is at least related to the word 'slatter'--to spill or splash awkwardly, to waste.
Of course, I had to see what Anatoly Liberman had to say about the whole thing. As usual, this is where we get into the larger and to me more interesting 'slant'. For 'slattern' turns up in his book Word Origins: and how we know them in his chapter on sound symbolism as he describes the group of words that resonate with each other simply because they start with that 'sl-' sound. As he has it, 'glide' and 'slide' are related words, but in the last, the idea of smoothness gives way to the idea of slipperiness. Sleek and slick, sled, slither, slobber--the list goes on and on. He talks a bit about the word 'sleazy'--apparently it did not come to mean sordid until around 1941. Liberman goes on,

"The adjective sleazy must have acquired its present-day meaning to conform to its sound shape. A word cannot exist in slums, surrounded by slatterns and sluts, and preserve its' purity amidst all this slime."

All right. But this still leaves the question of why I thought a Versatile Slattern Award sounded like a compliment and not an insult. Well, it's all about linguistic reclamation, folks. You can read about taking back the pejorative on Hoydens About Town. It's a bit more rhetoric than even I want to wade deeply into, but to justify it a bit, let's end this portion of the show with one more thought from Mr. Liberman, this time in his article for OUP, A Flourish of Strumpets:

The author of an old dissertation (a Swiss researcher named Margrit Keller) examined British dialectal dictionaries and found about 600 words and phrases meaning “girl” and “woman.” Most of them are derogatory and harp on a few familiar notes: slovenly, lazy, garrulous, flighty, ugly, and too accessible for men’s pleasures. One or two are interesting to a linguist.

***

Today's blog mention must of course go to Kathleen Kirk of Wait! I have a blog?! .After a year of daily writing on what other people were reading, she has loosened up her criteria but not her posting. Pretty much every day, Kathleen is on to something new. She's a poet, an actress, and I am getting the impression that she is currently doing something with musicals. Possibly involving the Civil War. And definitely involving the word 'skedaddle'.

torpedo

2011-05-10T20:40:00.000-07:00

No, it's not what you think. I have not started wondering obsessively about weapons of war. As a matter of fact, the only reason this word came up was that it is was on the label of a type of Sierra Nevada beer I was drinking the other day. The only place I've ever seen these, though they must be common enough, is at the Mexican grocery that's on my way home. It's taken me a couple of years to wonder why it was called 'Torpedo'. And then, only as an afterthought, I wondered how torpedoes--those more familiar weapons of mass destruction--came by their name. It's not an English word--well, now I suppose it is. So what was it originally--Spanish?

What I'm guessing is that torpedoes must be named after some kind of fish, or shark--something deadly that moves swiftly underwater. Either that, or it's some kind of acronym. What's your bet?

***

Okay, maybe it's not fair to say this now, but I did wonder a bit about the similarity to the word 'torpid', meaning sluggish or slow. But that hardly seemed likely, so I figured it was a false etymology. The word 'torpedo' does come from a fish, of the genus torpedo, naturally, which is composed of electric rays, some of which are more commonly known as 'crampfish' or 'numbfish'. (More commonly known to some, I'll just add.) The connection to the word torpor is in the effect they have on their victims, in that they numb or cause torpor with the electrical charge they give off.

As Wikipedia has it, "With their thick, flabby bodies, torpedo rays are poor swimmers. Their disk-shaped bodies allow them to remain suspended roam with minimal swimming effort." Not exactly our idea of a torpedo now, is it? But the first torpedoes may have looked a lot more like their namesakes than the present day ones. They were basically floating mines, and it's interesting to see the evolution of them. Sadly, people tend to be quite ingenious about this kind of thing.

The progression seems to have been figuring out ways to secretly attach mines to enemy vessels, to developing floating mines that lay hidden underwater, with the unfortunate consequence of being hazardous to both sides, to 'spar' torpedoes, where the explosive device was basically set out on a long stick in front of a vessel and would detonate upon impact with another vessel, to finally figuring out ways to have these explosives self-propel themselves through the water toward a designated target. It was trickier than you might think to get these machines to stay under the water and to keep their aim true.

Here's a couple of things I didn't know. The first coinage of the word 'torpedo' for weaponry is attributed to Robert Fulton, he of steamboat fame. While in France, he developed what is thought of as the first practical submarine, the Nautilus. The Nautilus was designed to drag a 'carcass', ie, a mine. The ship pulled up alongside its target and drove a spiked eye into the enemy's wood hull. The submarine then sped off releasing the mine on a line that paid out through this eye, and only when the end of the rope had been reached did the mine explode on contact, while the Nautilus was safely away. It was demonstrated successfully on several occasions, but failed to capture European interest.

Which is why we remember him for the steamboat, I guess.

You know that famous line about torpedoes? "_____ the torpedoes, full speed ahead!" Well, I always thought it was "Man the torpedoes, full speed ahead!" But that was wrong. It came at a moment in the Civil War when the ironclad leadship, the U.S.S. Tecumsah, had just been sunk by tethered floating mines, then called torpedoes, at the Battle of Mobile Bay, and the whole fleet paused, afraid of going forward into these parlous waters. This is when David Farragut, who was watching the sinking while lashed to the rigging of his own ship, rallied the troops by ordering, "Damn the the torpedoes! Full speed ahead!" Which led to a major victory.

There is probably a lot more about torpedoes that I don't know. But I'm sure the real question here is, what about the beer? I have to admit that, because of where I found it, I assumed it was a label marketed to the Hispanic community here. But I'm wrong. According to their website, Sierra Nevada is "a big American IPA; bold, assertive, and full of flavor highlighting the complex citrus, pine, and herbal character of whole-cone American hops." I don't know why it's called Torpedo. Maybe because it packs a wallop? Or it's 'mind-numbingly' good?

Nor do I know why this little Mexican market is the only outlet I've ever noticed in town. Safe to say, though, that it must make someone very, very hoppy.

Mother's Day

2011-05-07T23:43:00.000-07:00

Julia Ward Howe

Working in retail as I do, I've been selling cards, books and assorted bric-a-brac nonstop for the last couple of days, so it would be a bit hard for me to miss that Mother's Day is tomorrow, and could hardly fail to note that it is the first one since my mom's death last fall. My mom hated Mother's Day, though, so it was always a bit of a quandary what best to do about it anyway. For one of her early Mother's Days, my dad got her some kind of gift, which annoyed her in the extreme. 'Why did you get me that?' she asked him. 'I'm not your mother!' In later days, he'd buy her a robe or whatever and foist it off as coming from us. Obviously, it was always a bit of a puzzlement how best to deal with the day, though I must say she was never ungracious to any of her kids when it came down to it.

She was a devoted daughter and hardly a resentful mother, so it may be hard to understand her stance from outside. Basically, she resented the commercialization of the day, and the obligatory gift giving required. She always believed that people should do things for others because they wanted to, not out of guilt. I think she may have been a bit naive about certain aspects of human nature in this regard, but I think all in all I still prefer her leniency to its opposite.

A few years ago, though, I learned a few other facts about Mother's Day which are not at all what we think of when the day rolls around now. I think these are the kinds of things she would like to know now, and not wholly disapprove, so in her memory, I refreshed and added to my knowledge of this, and will set it down here.

First of all, Mother's Day is not just a transfer of the English Mothering Day or any of the other celebrations of motherhood that have come down to us from ancient times. English-speaking America originally abolished Mothering Day, not out of any animus toward mothers, but because all holidays, secular and otherwise, came up for review and were abolished or amended in the new, Puritan influenced culture. It wasn't till after the Civil War that Julia Ward Howe, who, though she had written the words for the Battle Hymn of the Republic, had been devastated by the carnage and loss of life that had taken place in the war, attempted to make Mother's Day a day about pacificism. Here's her Mother's Day proclamation of 1870:

Arise, then, women of this day!

Arise all women who have hearts,
Whether your baptism be that of water or of tears
Say firmly:

"We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies,
Our husbands shall not come to us reeking of carnage,
For caresses and applause.
Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn
All that we have been able to teach them of
charity, mercy and patience.

"We women of one country
Will be too tender of those of another country
To allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs."

From the bosom of the devastated earth a voice goes up with
Our own. It says, "Disarm, Disarm!"
The sword of murder is not the balance of justice!
Blood does not wipe out dishonor
Nor violence indicate possession.

As men have of ten forsaken the plow and the anvil at the summons of war.
Let women now leave all that may be left of home
For a great and earnest day of counsel.

Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead.
Let them then solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means
Whereby the great human family can live in peace,
Each bearing after his own time the sacred impress, not of Caesar,
But of God.

In the name of womanhood and humanity, I earnestly ask
That a general congress of women without limit of nationality
May be appointed and held at some place deemed most convenient
And at the earliest period consistent with its objects
To promote the alliance of the different nationalities,
The amicable settlement of international questions.
The great and general interests of peace.

Okay, this original Mother's Day didn't fly. But it did set a precedent. It was left to Anna Reeves Jarvis to adapt the idea and start a Mother's Friendship Day in West Virginia, the broader aim of which was the reconciliation of family and friends who had found themselves on opposite sides of the Civil War. It was her daughter, Anna M. Jarvis, who later set about trying to get an official Mother's Day off and running in support of peace and in memory of her mother.

Anna M. Jarvis

The younger Ms. Jarvis then actually quit her job in order to devote herself more completely to the idea of this holiday, and after being taken up by the states, it became an official holiday under Woodrow Wilson in 1914. Not the greatest timing if you want it to be all about peace, but still. Good work, Ms. Jarvis.

However, things are rarely that simple and certainly not this time. White carnations became the symbol of the holiday, and thus gave the American floral industry a vested interest in keeping the thing going. Not even 10 years after the official National holiday came into existence, the younger Ms. Jarvis was suing to stop a mother's day event, and by the 1930s had actually gotten herself arrested for disturbing the peace at an American War Mothers group.

As a website called Mothersdaycentral.com has it:

In opposition to the flower industry’s exploitation of the holiday, Jarvis wrote, “What will you do to route charlatans, bandits, pirates, racketeers, kidnappers and other termites that would undermine with their greed one of the finest, noblest and truest movements and celebrations?” Despite her efforts, flower sales on Mother's Day continued to grow. Florist's Review wrote, “Miss Jarvis was completely squelched.”

So you see, my mother's feelings about the whole thing come from a long and noble line of ambivalence. but I can't resist finishing with the above article's last ironic twist:

Anna Jarvis died in 1948, blind, poor and childless. Jarvis would never know that it was, ironically, The Florist's Exchange that had anonymously paid for her care.

Happy Mother's Day, Mom.

I know--I know...

(Editing this to add a link to Kathleen Kirk's post on the same theme.)

Trivia

2011-05-03T22:11:00.000-07:00

Because I've been out sick a few days, and because I have a thousand other more worthwhile things to do with my slowly returning energy, I've decided instead to tinker around with the blog. Normally, I don't use this blog for self-promotion and I'll assure you up front that this post won't result in any further financial gain for me. But I thought it might be fun to give a little history on how I came to indulge in the rather trivial pursuit started here, with the idea of putting a little widget in the sidebar after I do.

A few years ago, 2005 to be precise, I must have had it in the back of my head to try some freelance writing. I don't know exactly what I had in mind, but one evening a little ad leapt out of the back page of our local free paper. Now normally the kind of thing you'd find here were ads for enlargements of the usual organs, and ways that you, yes, you could get into the movies and so on. So I didn't normally pay much attention to it, but for some reason a tiny ad saying something along the lines of 'Get paid to write trivia.' and then an email for Blue Bike Press.

Now this intrigued me. I thought how hard could that be? I'd been to a few pub quizzes, and thought I'd be up to the job of thinking up questions, if not of answering them. I think I was actually headed to a trivia night that night, as it happened.

Anyway, in typical style, I dilly dallied about it, until I noticed that the next week the ad was gone. I found the old issue of the paper and decided to respond anyway. Nothing much happened, but then a few weeks later, I got an email from Faye Boer asking me to let her know a convenient time to call. Eventually I spoke to this very kind and lovely person, and learned that it wasn't trivia quiz questions she was after. She wanted a co-author a trivia book. Blue Bike Books had already done a successful series on each of the Canadian provinces, and had decided to branch out south of the border. They already had a Canadian writer, Lisa Wojna, who was doing some of the more standard parts of each of these U.S. books, but as she lived in Canada, she was needing American cohorts who knew the states in question. Although this was a much bigger gig than I had originally had in mind, it didn't take me long to say that I was interested.

Although I had originally responded to the inquiry for a Northern California writer, I did mention in the interview that I had been born in the southern part of the state and had had connections there all my life. In the end, this was the part of the state they hired me to write about.

The way it worked was that they sent me a list of categories and some of the things they expected to be covered within those categories as well as the categories that Lisa was covering. I had to get in a bio, a photo and I'm sure some other stuff that I no longer remember. The photo was not going to be published in the book, but was to be used as the source of a caricature. Of this, more later.

In some ways, the book had a rocky beginning. A close friend died between my making the commitment and starting to fulfill it, and another friend tragically lost a young husband before the process was completed. It was an odd atmosphere for a book with the subtitle 'Weird, Wacky and Wild'. Add to that that my first attempt to get a handle on the material had to do with California's early history, which, to put it quite simply, was largely tragic. I sent it in to Faye Boer, and although she said it was good work, her after comment was, "You do know that this book is supposed to be humorous, don't you?" So much of that earlier material was scrapped.

Researching a trivia book, like researching anything, is a strange journey. Many things pop up that you wouldn't expect, and many of them are moving, especially when you are dealing with the landscape of your own childhood. I don't think much of that shows up in the book--if it did, I failed to complete the basic assignment.

As I'm posting this partly as information for others pursuing this kind of work, I think I should mention one major glitch that came up at the last minute. Blue Bike Press had sent me the list which I, sometimes agonizingly, was at pains to fulfill. One of my friends at work said in passing, Seana, if you need some sports trivia, I'm your guy. I said blithely, no, they didn't ask me for any of that. But when the manuscript went to the substance editor, she said, "You haven't included any sports trivia!" As it turned out, they had accidentally omitted it from the list. But that didn't let me off the hook, of course. What would a trivia book be without sports trivia? I felt embarrassed not to have realized that for myself. But instead I went through a mad dash through Southern California sports, and even though I am far from a sports fanatic, I found much that was interesting there as well. Of course.

When the whole project was completed, I felt a certain degree of satisfaction with it. Left to my own devices, I would probably have written a somewhat different book, but then, left to my own devices, I would certainly never have written anything at all. Writing something under deadline is a lot like being back in school, I discovered, and I didn't actually enjoy that part that much. It's maybe why I haven't gone on to do other assignments as I once thought I would. But digging deep into obscure pockets of knowledge proved to be somewhat addictive. One thing that I learned about trivia is that it is rarely, well, trivial. The word trivia comes from a Roman word meaning the place where three roads cross. It's what comes up at the crossroads, which is usually thought of as the vulgar, the commonplace. Almost by definition, though, it's what engages our human interest. It's what, when we meet strangers on the way, we find too interesting not to talk about, to gossip over, to linger on. It is also possibly fractal, a sliver of the whole. But that's another discussion.

How did that photo of me turn out when it became a caricature? Well, you'd have to buy the book to find out. But if you want to see me rendered as some sort of Alpine mountain climber, well, it might be worth the price of the ticket...You can order it direct from Lone Pine Press, through Bookshop Santa Cruz, or, uh, any of the usual suspects, should you so wish.

How Ignorant are YOU?

2011-04-27T13:01:00.000-07:00

I thought I'd do a little table turning here today (and also make things a bit easy on myself, as I'm home with a cold) by posting the link to this quiz from a recent Newsweek. These are 25 questions that might be asked of an immigrant to the U.S. who is seeking citizenship. Apparently the way it works is that you are randomly given ten of these questions and have to get six of them right. The test was given to a wide swathe of Americans and 38% failed. Go ahead and take the test if you're so inclined, then meet back here. (Updated to say that the link to the first question is HERE)

(For anybody is not so inclined, you might just take a look at this issue of the magazine on line anyway. I actually swiped it from the laundromat because it has an article by Paul Theroux on Japan's recent tragedy, another by Simon Winchester on the lost city of Atlantis, and even a piece by Stephen King on what he considers to be some must see TV.)

***

All done? Great. Let me start out by confessing that though I would have passed the 25 question quiz, on the shorter and official version, it depends a lot on what the ten random questions were. Odds are good, but still. And a lot might have ridden on the fact that I temporarily blanked out on the name of our current vice president. I could see him but that was it. I'm sure it would have come to me, but that's a lot to have riding on a memory glitch.

Now I'm not going to argue that Americans aren't pretty ignorant. Every time you watch one of the late night shows ask random people on the street if they know who the current Speaker of the House is, or even easier questions, you realize that a lot of people aren't exactly keeping up with current events. But I didn't entirely buy the larger premise of the piece, which was to bemoan our educational system and then propose remedies.

First of all, this kind of quiz is the kind of thing that is a bit like the DMV quiz. Sure, you know it all somewhere, or knew it once, but before you go in for the quiz, you get a little booklet, swat it up, and hone your memory. I know we have a lot of high school dropouts in this country, but most people who did complete all four years did have to take Civics, or at least in California they do. So you did learn at some point about the three branches of government, the two houses of Congress, the Bill of Rights and amendments at some point. Didn't you? I'm not saying it's particularly deep knowledge, but it does at least give you a structure to start from.

Secondly, the citizenship quiz makes a funny contrast with the proposed remedies in this follow up article , which among other things, advocates teaching the broader implications and questions that our history brings up. Surely the way you ace the citizenship quiz is by a lot of rote learning and ignoring the bigger issues altogether.

Maybe because I got it wrong, I question whether it is really important to know how many members there are in the House of Representatives, except when you're a strategist for a major political party. And I wonder if knowing how many amendments there are (yeah, wrong again) is as important as knowing what was at stake in a few crucial ones, like those that abolished slavery, and gave voting rights to a wider and wider portion of the population.

Excuses, excuses. What else did I get wrong? I blew it on Presidential succession (wrong house, though of course I had known it and will know it again), and I messed up on the supreme law of the land (Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness? Did I mention I have a cold?). But the one I would have contested if it was all that stood in the way of me and the swearing-in ceremony? I said that one of the powers of the federal government was taxation.

Yeah, it's been recently on my mind.

boogie

2011-04-24T17:29:00.000-07:00

Having just recently read the excellent Eightball Boogie by Declan Burke, and with an eye to getting to James Lee Burke's The Lost Get-back Boogie soon, since a friend was kind enought to lend it to me recently, it occurred to me to wonder a bit about 'boogie'. I think I assume that 'to boogie on down' somewhere is more or less to hustle on down, and maybe implies a certain degree of rhythm and style. I also assume a boogie is a kind of dance or a type of music, somewhat (though not very much) like a polka or a waltz would be. I also assume it has African-American roots, probably Southern, and maybe even African ones. But what really is a boogie when it's at home, and where did it come from?

***

Bitten off a bit more than I can chew here, I'm thinking. First off, are we talking about the word 'boogie', or the music 'boogie'? I mean, it all comes together in the end, but from rather divergent sources. The online etymological dictionary is uncharacteristically a little too concise this time around. It says that the verb 'to boogie' comes out of late sixties rock music based on blues chords, which relates to an earlier blues style also called boogie, circa 1941, which goes back to the boogie-woogie style music of around 1928, which hales back to the boogie, or rent-party. Whew. That's a lot of undifferentiated boogieing! And surely boogie is not a translation of rent-party, but a slangy reference to one?

According to Jeremy Siepmann in The Piano, boogie-woogie was specifically an urban style, different from its cousin, barrelhouse, by being quicker--eight beats to a bar versus barrelhouse's four. Like barrelhouse, boogie-woogie was piano music, with a heavily accentuated bass line, which at first imitated banjo and guitar styles of early blues singers, but grew to mimick the sound of the steam railways, so many of which were built by black labor.

As Siepmann has it, boogie-woogie "is rife with extra-musical associations, most of them connected with sex". (Some rent parties they must have been, eh?) Boogie-woogie quite often meant "gettin' it on", with an unfortunate but related meaning of "secondary siphilis". Siepmann says that it was one record, Pinetop Smith's Pinetop's Boogie-Woogie of 1928 that sealed the deal on the name musically. Here's a later but I think faithful version:

Champion Jack Dupree - Pinetop's Boogie Woogie by Delta_Mike

Okay--if this elementary approach to boogie-woogie is a little too elementary for you, you might want to check out this extensive research, which will probably be more your cup of tea. Meanwhile, here we have a few other questions to try and sort out. Because where did boogie come from before it was a Southern urban music style?

There are a couple of different points of view on this. First of all, the musical slant leads back to this word deriving from Black West African English bogi, to dance, which might be related to Hausa buga, to beat drums. Makes sense, right?

But what about this interpretation from Cecil Adams at the Straight Dope? He thinks that the word comes by an extremely long road from the Latin Bulgarus, which meant a person of Bulgaria. He says that the Old French word boulgre referred to a sect of 11th Century Bulgarian heretics, and the word passed into English as bougre, or heretic. This devolved into 'bugger', meaning what we've come to think it means but also more generally, any doer of "despicable acts". 'Bogy' or 'bogie' became another name for the devil, and then other little impish spirits as well. Hence, bogeyman. The thought is that bogey then became yet one more disparaging term for black people, and was later reappropriated by them. Much like that N-word epithet. Fine. Maybe that's it.

But then again, there is this persistent thread of meaning in the idea of moving. As in the French bougir, to move. As in boogie board, and really as in the title of the two books that got this whole topic started. Possibly this idea is discredited, possibly not. James Lee Burke, who writes in and of Louisiana has certainly come across the boogie-woogie connotations of his title. But he is just as likely to have come across some form of the French word in the Cajun French dialect that he and his character, Dave Robicheaux both know and occasionally speak.

Is it possible that the boogie we have today is a kind of amalgamation of all these things?

It would certainly be nice to think so.

skedaddle

2011-04-17T19:11:00.000-07:00

Chicamacomico Races, Outer Banks

Hooray! Taxes are done and so I can get back to business here. A couple of days ago, fellow blogger and poet Kathleen Kirk asked if I did guest requests, and unless it's about, say, particle physics, the answer is yes. She had often wondered where the word 'skedaddle' came from and only come up with a few pieces of information about it, namely that it started to appear during the Civil War and that its origin was unknown. I said I would look into it, with the usual disclaimers. It's not like I have hidden sources of information, after all.

I think we all know pretty much what skedaddle means--at least those of us who are speakers of American English. "To run away or flee" is the general sense of it, but there's a light note in it--I don't think you'd probably hear anyone say "He coldbloodedly murdered his entire family and then skedaddled."

Anyway, the authorities are sticking to the "origin unknown" idea, but there is a bit more to it than that, which is what I'd like to get into here. The Online Etymology Dictionary actually quotes this blog's hero, Anatoly Liberman, in support of this unknown quality, but a closer examination of his book Word Origins and How We Know Them shows that he speculates in an interesting way about the word.

He starts by telling us of a German linguist named Heinrich Schröder who wrote an article about what he called Streckenformen. Sounds very forbidding in a German sort of way, but in fact it just means something like stretched forms, or words that have extensions within them. His idea was that sometimes people add an extra syllable in the middle of a word either to emphasize it, or to make its meaning funnier. The German language has more of these 'extenders' than English does, but slang like 'flibberdegibbet' and 'gobbledygook' with their connecting and unnecessary 'de' syllables in the middle are possible examples of what is, after all, only a theory.

Interestingly, skedaddle cropped up before its 1861 usage. It was in the dialect of Northern England and meant 'to spill', especially milk, but also, perhaps by extension, potatoes, apples and other things that could fall from a cart. Liberman makes an interesting observation when he says that skedaddle is a 'so-called' Americanism, "because American words alien to the British Standard often turn out to be regionalisms brought to the new world from England." Liberman thinks our skedaddle is most likely related to the English dialect 'scaddle' which means "to scare or frighten: to run off in fright". Sounds plausible, if inconclusive.

As Michael Quinion over at World Wide Words tells it, skedaddle was one of those words that spread like wildfire--for its day and given its media options, it "went viral". It appeared in the New York Tribune on August 10, 1861 in the sentence "“No sooner did the traitors discover their approach than they ‘skiddaddled’, (a phrase the Union boys up here apply to the good use the seceshers make of their legs in time of danger).” As Quinion says, all the early references of this term referred to the war in a similar way. But it quickly morphed in civilian usage to a more broad sense of 'leaving in a hurry'. It rapidly crossed the Atlantic, appearing in London newspapers by 1862, and even found its way into Anthony Trollope's Last Chronicle of Barset, which appeared in 1867.

You can check out the sentence over at Mr. Quinion's place, but let's just say that by the time Lily gets her hands on it, skedaddle has nothing whatsoever to do with the Civil War.

harbinger

2011-04-12T14:59:00.000-07:00

So a harbinger is a kind of portent, right? It's come up a few times recently, mostly in watching the news about the Washington budget crisis, and of course I get it in context. But what is a harbinger when it's at home? And from whence does it derive?

***
Well, we got a lot going on here. A harbinger is one who foreshadows what is to come. A forerunner. If you contemplate that synonym, you may get a clue as to where 'harbinger' comes from. To be honest, I thought it might turn out to be some kind of bird. But no, a harbinger comes from the 15th century English herbengar, who was someone sent ahead by the military or a monarch to procure lodgings in advance. It's a twist on Middle English herberger, a provider of shelter or inn keeper. It goes back through the French to Old High German and the original compound is heri-- 'army' and berger--'shelter'. In this, it's related the the French auberge, or inn, also with German roots, which explains why it's never sounded very French to me. As time went on, the lodging procurer by imaginative extension became a kind of herald.

'Harbinger' is also related to 'harbor', with its roots of here-- 'army' and beorg--'refuge or shelter'. It seems obvious once you break it down, but hardly so from present day usage.

An interesting little oddity attaches to harbinger. Between herberger and harbinger, you'll notice that somewhere along the way, an -n- was acquired--an intrusive -n- as the online etymological dictionary would have it, and it even directs you to the word 'messenger'. Here you will find that the original word in English was messager. On this point, the dictionary gets quite uncharacteristically grumpy: "With parasitic -n- inserted by c.1300 for no apparent reason except that people liked to say it that way (cf. passenger, harbinger, scavenger)."

Sounds a bit like me when I've failed to plumb the depths of the mystery here.

A plant called 'Harbinger of Spring'

All right, so harbingers of spring are all well and good, but as a fair portion of the commenters here are crime fiction readers and writers, this post would not be complete without a harbinger of death. CBS doesn't let you imbed video, but you will find this odd story HERE.

2011-04-08T20:41:00.000-07:00

After my recent 'beg the question' post, I can't resist postingthis link to an article by Ben Yagoda about how long we should cling to a word or term's original meaning in the face of a more popular misuse. I post it not only because the same kind of question has come up here--though not been begged--but because Yagoda mentions the 'begs the question' question himself.

So where are you on the prescriptivist/anything goes spectrum?

ersatz

2011-04-05T17:35:00.000-07:00

Something brought this one to mind recently, I don't remember what, and then I saw it again in a blogpost condemning many things, including 'ersatz art' and thought, well, it's time to do it. I always think of 'ersatz' meaning fake or phony, but I realize as I contemplate it that it also has connotations (to me anyway) of empty, hollow, puffery. I'm guessing it's a direct steal from some other language, but that '-atz' ending isn't giving the clue I should probably be getting from it. Is it Yiddish? German? Russian? Made up?

We'll see.

***
Well, this is pretty good. Ersatz, in its original German, simply means replacement or substitute. And it is always a noun or part of a compound noun in its native language. It became an adjective in its crossover to English out of a simple misunderstanding. In what is once again turning out to be a military post, we have World War II Allied Forces POWs to thank for bringing it home.

There appear to be a couple of different points of contact. First, on the Eastern Front, the Germans fed prisoners what they called 'substitute bread' or ersatzbrot, which was made with inferior flour and 'extended' by various means, including adding sawdust. Secondly downed British airmen were frequently given ersatzkaffee, which had no real coffee in it, but was more of a grain drink. Because of these associations, ersatz became linked in English speaking minds with 'inferior' and what was actually a double noun in German was assumed to be an adjective and a noun in English, so that the 'ersatz' could be broken off and used as an adjective on its own.

SMS Yorck in the Kaiser Wilhelm Canal

For Germans, though, ersatz does not automatically have a pejorative cast to it. As proof of this, German used ersatz in the course of its early 20th century ship production. They would take the name of a former ocean going vessel and give the replacement ship the same name while it was in construction, not christening it with a new name until the vessel was complete. So the replacement ship for the sunken armored ship Yorck, which apparently blundered into Germany's own defensive minefields, was the Ersatz Yorck, and it and other replacement ships Ersatz Gneisenau and Ersatz Scharnhorst together comprised the Ersatz Yorck Line. Only Ersatz Yorck was ever even started and none were ever completed. Beginning a shipbuilding project with the name of a sunken battleship ever in the back of your mind-- especially a battleship that was accidentally sunk by your own side and which the captain was courtmartialed over--wouldn't have seemed the best way to go about this to me. But then, no one has asked me, have they?

A line drawing of the Ersatz Yorck

Followers

2011-04-03T20:43:00.000-07:00

This post does not beg any questions, but simply is a question. Do people that read this blog with any regularity wish I had a followers' gadget on here? I don't mind putting one on if it helps anyone else, but since it's not really the way I keep up with the blogs I like, I haven't felt the necessity. I've added a subscriber button recently, because some of my friends and family are not on Blogger but like a reminder now and then. So I'm reconsidering the follower gadget too. Let me know if you have any opinion whatsoever about this. If I hear nothing, I'll just leave this as it is.

Also, if you wish I would follow your blog instead of just reading it, let me know, either here or by my readily available email, and I will add you. It doesn't mean I'll read you any more that way, but I'm game.

Up to a point.

begs the question

2011-03-30T21:37:00.000-07:00

I was with my sisters this weekend and one of them said that something 'begged the question'. I thought she was using the expression wrong and she thought I was. So does it mean, something that begs for a further question, or does it mean something that manages to avoid the question entirely? I don't think I really need to go into who thought what in this case, as I'm perfectly willing to expose my own ignorance, but not so big on pointing a finger at others, should that prove to be the case--at least on the internet. (Okay, okay--there have probably been exceptions.) Let's just shoot ahead and find a meaning for the term.

***

Well, safe to say that we were both wrong to one degree or another. In any case, there is no winner. To beg the question, as I'm sure any logic student reading along here will already know, is actually a specific form of logical fallacy in which an argument is assumed to be true without reference to anything outside itself.

Here are some examples from the Nizkor Project, which apparently is attempting to educate us on logic in order to help us not be bamboozled by Holocaust deniers:

Bill: "God must exist."
Jill: "How do you know."
Bill: "Because the Bible says so."
Jill: "Why should I believe the Bible?"
Bill: "Because the Bible was written by God."

"If such actions were not illegal, then they would not be prohibited by the law."

"The belief in God is universal. After all, everyone believes in God."

Interviewer: "Your resume looks impressive but I need another reference."
Bill: "Jill can give me a good reference."
Interviewer: "Good. But how do I know that Jill is trustworthy?"
Bill: "Certainly. I can vouch for her."

I think some of us may recognize this logical fallacy more easily under the heading 'circular reasoning'.

Basically, 'to beg the question' has nothing to do with questions. It is a (some would say clumsy) translation of the Latin phrase petitio principii, which in post-classical Latin turns out to be a rough translation of Aristotle's first description of this logical fallacy, 'assuming the conclusion'. For a fascinating discussion of all the language transformations involved, go here. The comments are mostly quite informed, so there's a lot of material here. Both 'beg' and 'question' have very ambivalent roots, which is what has led us to all get so mixed up about this.

The question remains--what are we to do? The wrong meaning has slipped into the vernacular. Do we just accept and go on? Not according to Beg the Question.info They have even incited the mobs to take up their pickets and march on Washington at one point.

Apparently many failed to notice that this impassioned plea took place on April Fool's Day.

But despite kidding around, their advocacy is not all tongue in cheek. To wit:

"While descriptivists and other such laissez-faire linguists are content to allow the misconception to fall into the vernacular, it cannot be denied that logic and philosophy stand to lose an important conceptual label should the meaning of BTQ become diluted to the point that we must constantly distinguish between the traditional usage and the erroneous "modern" usage. This is why we fight.".

Apparently, you can even get a T-shirt in support of the cause, so don't let me keep you...

dogsbody

2011-03-25T22:05:00.000-07:00

Well, I think I know what this one means, and if I'm right, I've had a couple of occasions to feel like one lately. I think that in our modern parlance, its something akin to a gofer. It is the loyal, trustworthy, relied upon and yet taken for granted servant who attends to things so that we don't have to. Mothers, I think, are often dogsbodies, because the phrase implies something beyond mere servitude and refers a bit to our fleshly bodily life. There is something of our physical being, at least in the sense of our physical presence implied. I think the sentence, "We need a few warm bodies," implies something of the same thing, though maybe without the 'fidelity' that dogsbody represents.

But maybe I have it completely wrong. Let's see.

***

Oh, man--not the British Royal Navy again! But yes, a dogsbody is a junior officer in this military force, and by extension a person who does the grunt work. Apparently, peas and eggs boiled in a bag together were a staple of the early 19th century British navy. It wasn't exactly caviar, and, as is the way with the offensive, soon enough becomes a descriptive noun for someone you intend to disparage. 'Sack of shit', for instance. No one seems to know how the unloved staple got the name dogsbody, though some think it was the shape of the bag. In any case, as pejoratives do, it managed to outgrow its naval usage and become a general term for, yes, a gofer, in Britspeak around the 1930s.

As witness:

squalid

2011-03-19T20:32:00.000-07:00

I was reading along in the ever provocative Detectives Beyond Borders awhile ago. My main reason for doing so was to hold fast to my position that though Brodsky may be a genius and I definitely am not, he was still wrong in his use of the word "literally" in one instance of his otherwise unblemished record. I was probably taking his whole meaning too literally, but who cares? The point is that the comment thread ~~degenerated~~ elided into a discussion of Dogfish Head beer, and the always informative Elizabeth taught us that the Dogfish Head in question was actually a cape, that dogfish are a type of shark, and that said shark belongs in the family Squalidae. (You knew I was going to get back on topic eventually, I hope.)

Now I don't know if it this type of shark that is in this ominously named family, or if all sharks are, but you've got to admit it's a pretty pejorative classification. Unless it isn't. When I think 'squalid', I think miserable, poverty stricken, in close oppressive quarters, unclean, but I don't think sharks really live this kind of life.

So what is 'squalid'? Does it really just mean dark, or murky? We will now descend to the depths and attempt to find out...

***

...'Squalid's contemporary meaning is indeed "dirty and wretched" and implies 'from poverty or lack of care'. No huge surprise there, then. But I believe the link to the dogfish is the result of an earlier, more fundamental connection. Because in addition, 'squalid' also means 'rough'. Although according to the Online Etymological Dictionary the earliest origin is unknown, the basic idea is that something is 'coated with filth', or in other words, rough with it. Similarly, the family Squalidae, which includes 'dogfish, sleeper sharks and relatives' are characterized by spiny dorsal fins. I think this is probably the basis of their 'roughness'.

(I'm editing this to add that it is probably not the spiny dorsal fin, so much as the sandpapery texture of the dogfish skin in general that leads to the characterization of roughness. Dogfish 'denticles' may be viewed here.)

Okay, folks. I wanted to put in a dogfish video, and so came upon this one. It is definitely not for vegans, maybe even not for me, so be forewarned.

In fact, I think I'd better give you the title of the video: "Dogfish refuse to be cooked and eaten". Just so you can see where this is going...

Dogfish Refuse To Be Cooked And Eaten - Watch more Funny Videos

parlous, part...Just kidding. Happy St. Patrick's Day

2011-03-17T19:31:00.000-07:00

Well, it's been a strange up and down day for me, but my sister sent this You Tube of a Flash Mob which I think might be a good way to end the parlous trend...

My sister does this kind of dancing herself, and besides, I'm a sucker for these flash mob things.
I know it's all over for anyone not in California, so I hope St. Patrick treated you well!

parlous, part 3

2011-03-14T22:27:00.000-07:00

I've shared the story of our own little corner of the world, but obviously it pales in comparison with what has happened in Japan. Rather than stumble around in my typical fashion, I thought I'd do some real public service by posting a bit of the Rachel Maddow show and her clear, lucid segment about nuclear power and it's containment--or lack thereof. Here's the first:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

To relate this back to our own experience here in Santa Cruz for just a moment, it became very clear that accurate information is crucial when contemplating disaster. Our survival modes kick in. In this county, while many people went down to watch the tsunami, others fled to the hills. Many of those who chose the hill option were Hispanic. Was this because they were more cowardly or more naive than their white counterparts? No. One reason was that many of them lived in the lowlands that were actually being evacuated. The other part of it was that on Spanish radio, reports of 30 foot waves were being broadcast, as opposed to the 6 foot waves on English speaking channels. With that in mind, here's another clip:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Many people here first learned of the Japanese earthquake by one of two means. First, there was a late night tsunami warning that came over the television--my sister got one up at her home in San Rafael--and there was the 'reverse 911' call, which several of my friends got, notifying them of a voluntary tsunami evacuation. As much of this kind of thing may well be cut soon, I thought, I'd also put up this little clip from The Ed Show:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

My own public service announcement is now over. Good luck, everyone.

parlous, part 2

2011-03-11T20:30:00.000-08:00

It's been a bit of a freaky day here. In what I think is an unprecedented way, I got a call from my floor manager at shortly after six in the morning, saying that there had been a massive quake in Hawaii and that Santa Cruz was on tsunami alert. Of course, it later proved to actually be Japan, which I'm sure everyone knows about by now.

Currently, I live up the hill toward the university, but it was not so long ago that I lived down near the Boardwalk and Beach Flats, which, as you can tell by the name, is an area that would be particularly prey to a big tsunami.

Although when I watched the news before I left for work, it already seemed pretty clear that the bookstore would not be directly affected, it is on the flood plain, and there was a short period of time when I envisioned walking down the hill at the hour when the tsunami was expected to arrive, and seeing the whole lowlands inundated. It's funny, because this brought back another parlous time, that of the 1989 earthquake, and one of my own distinct memories of that period was that we had been wrangling over where to put a rack of postcards for days, and when the earthquake hit, I remember seeing the stupid postcard rack toppled over. And I could not help but see our recent hopes and tensions and disagreements over the fate of the bookstore after the demise of Borders in something like the same light--how insignicant they all were in the face of a force of nature like an earthquake, or a massive wave.

It was an eery day. It was beautiful out, but that did not alleviate anything. I started to walk downhill to work, and passed a house where the family was coming out to go to school, or so I thought. I'd probably said "Hi," to its residents a few times over the last year or so, but today the little boy immediately asked me if I had heard about the earthquake in Japan. I said I had, and rather stupidly, I told him that I had heard about the tsunami warning from my boss, but that it sounded like it would be okay. He said, "We're not going to school today, we're going to work with my mom." His younger sister said, "She works in the mountains." "Well, that sounds like a really good idea," I said. "We have to leave our dog here and hope she'll be all right," the boy said. "And my fish," the sister said. I said, "I think they'll probably be okay," as matter of factly as I could. And of course I knew they would be (particularly the fish) but it seemed a very poignant thing to think about these kids who didn't and couldn't know that and were having to leave them behind.

I went to work, and it was sort of normal there. By this point, the idea that the tsunami would come that far inland--really, the problem was that it would come up the river and flood the banks--was pretty unlikely, so there was no real fear for ourselves. But one of my friends and coworkers had had to leave her twin daughters off at daycare, which was just outside the area that had been 'voluntarily evacuated', and for some reason, this morning of all mornings was the one that they had chosen to stand at the window and wave goodbye.

The downtown was dead. It probably would have been slow in any case, but there was a still feeling that was different than other mornings. Everyone had either fled to higher ground or had gone right down to the water to watch, and we heard that the traffic was terrible from the delivery people.

Everyone was getting calls from out of state relatives warning and wondering. We had all been woken up at five or six by someone,  it seemed. It seemed faintly ridiculous until we reminded ourselves that they had only heard the words 'tsunami' and 'Santa Cruz', and it wasn't at all laughable to them. I had my own bittersweet feeling about all this, realizing that my mom would have been one of those people who would call, and there was a feeling of relief that she was beyond those kinds of needless worries and also a personal sadness that she would not be calling ever again.

The only real destruction that seemed to have hit Santa Cruz was the harbor (as pictured above), and though this was bad enough, it was only property, not life. One of they guys was champing at the bit to go out surfing. Another came in later that day. He had lived closer to the water than anyone, and after a late night of gaming, woke up to see that everyone had left  his Beach Flats apartment complex. His was the only car left sitting in the parking lot. He had to call the police to find out what was going on. His main concern was that he had left the area with nothing and wasn't sure if he would be able to get back in.

When I was working the register later in the day, a young woman, a total stranger said to me, "What a weird day." We agreed that you could feel it in the air. An energy. A vibe.

Of course, when I got home, our day was rendered insignificant by the tragedy Japan faces, and by their nuclear dangers. But I thought I would post about our own small parlous moments, such as they are. All day, I've had this kind of image of the Pacific being just a small pool, or lake, or bathtub, calm and still except when a big rock is thrown in on the other side, and the ripple laps up on our shores in no time at all.

parlous

2011-03-10T20:37:00.000-08:00

I'm not entirely sure, but I believe that it was in this very interesting article on the present state of publishing that I once again came across the phrase 'parlous times'. It comes up every now and again, and it illustrates one of the ways I and I suppose other people deal with unknown words or concepts they run across in a book or article. Maybe it's different for Kindle readers, who apparently have some kind of dictionary function, but I kind of doubt it. I think it's more typical that we simply make our best guess. Sure, it's lazy, but it also shows something about our deductive capacities.

Anyway, for better or worse, I always read 'parlous' as 'perilous'. I know it's a stretch, and I suppose it will turn out to be hugely wrong, but it does more or less work as far as I can tell. Still, it seems unlikely that the two words are the same words, just differently spelled. So what can 'parlous' be? If it doesn't have to do with peril, the closest I can come up with is the French parler, which means 'to speak, talk'. Doesn't seem quite right...

Quelle chance! It is perilous. It's simply the way those 14th century Middle English types contracted the word 'perillous', borrowed from the Old French perillous.

Dangerous, anyway you look at it.

( Oh, yeah, the picture is by James Gillray, a British cartoonist, whose satires of British and French society were published between 1792 and 1910.)

And now, Team Parlous: