Merchant Marines

I don't remember where this phrase came up most recently, but I've often wondered about it. Merchants and Marines seem slightly incompatible to me. I can understand if it's just a floating mercantile fleet, which I assume it probably is, but then I don't understand why people, usually men, refer their time with it by saying "And so I joined the Merchant Marines". So, does it have a military structure? If privately owned, why haven't the corporate names long since taken over? Even baseball stadiums have been co-opted, after all. I've even met a people who've been in the Merchant Marines--a Finn, intriguingly, but not only do I know nothing about what they did there, I don't even know what to call one. A merchant? A marine? We shall see.

Oh, okay. First of all, in case I get some of this wrong, there's an informative site here. But basically, the Merchant Marine is a civilian auxilliary of the U.S. Navy. Apparently--and I may be wrong about this, as I couldn't somehow nail this down--all U.S. flagged ships are part of the U.S. Merchant Marine, and in the event of war, become supply ships for U.S. efforts. But in the meantime, they ply their peaceful way carrying imports and exports in U.S. navigable waters. A  member of the Merchant Marine is not called a merchant or  a marine, but a mariner. According to Wikipedia, there were 465 ships in the Merchant Marine in 2006, and 69,000 members.

I still don't quite get whether everyone who is considered crew of these U.S. flagged ships is automatically a mariner, or just how all this stuff gets decided. And why do a portion of U.S. ships end up flying under different colors?

However, researching this post reminded me that I did know a bit about the Merchant Marine after all. The Merchant Marine is not one of the uniformed services. Who cares about that, right? Well, apparently, perception is everything. Because even though the Merchant Marine served valiently in World War II, braving many of the same high sea dangers that other branches of the military did, it wasn't until 1988 that President Ronald Reagan signed a bill into law that granted veteran status to those mariners who had served in war. Up until that point, they did not receive any of the benefits granted to other branches of the military.

It turns out that I already knew this. It was part of the story that was told in the excellent documentary The Men Who Sailed the Liberty Ships. I have to admit that I didn't connect this story to the merchant marine, but that's just me. You can check out an excerpt or two here, but do watch the whole thing if you get a chance.

Word Catcher

Not to get out of coming up with my own challenges, but assuming that a few people reading this might actually be more interested in words than in the spectacle of me humiliating myself, I thought  this interview Rick Kleffel did with poet and word guy Phil Cousineau might be worth posting. His new book Wordcatcher covers much of the same territory that this blog does, although from a much more informed starting point. One thing we do have in common is an interest in the stories that are hidden in words, rather than simply their etymology. A sentence from the interview, though I don't remember if it was his own or something he was quoting: "Words are daughters of the earth." I find that quite lovely. He gives women a lot of credit for the naming of things, and of course I find that quite lovely too, although I suppose it's possible I might be a tad biased...

scuppernong

"Scuppernong" is a word that may be common in the American South, but as far as I know, it really hasn't made it out west. I have found it several times in my current rereading of To Kill a Mockingbird, and I can deduce a little of what it means from a couple of sentences. Here they are:

"Finders were keepers unless title was proven. Plucking an occasional camellia, getting a squirt of hot milk from Miss Maudie Atkinson's cow on a summer day, helping ourselves to someone's scuppernongs was part of our ethical culture, but money was different."

"Our tacit treaty with Miss Maudie was that we could play on her lawn, eat her scuppernongs if we didn't jump on the arbor, and explore her vast back lot..."

Okay, the fairly obvious thing is that a scuppernong is some sort of fruit. My hunch is that it is fallen fruit, but I am not at all clear whether it is all fallen fruit or some particular kind of fruit, which gains a special name when it is fallen. Well, let's see if I have gotten this all completely wrong...

Well, I got the fruit part right, anyway. But that's about all I got right. Scuppernongs are grapes. They are a type of Muscadine grapes that grow in the southeastern U.S. They got their name because they were originally found  along the Scuppernong River in North Carolina by the first European settlers of the area.

Here's a couple more things I found from this venture into the world of scuppernongs:

Those European settlers could not believe the amount of wild grapes they found in that coastal Carolinian region.

Scuppernongs, the grapes, quickly got new nicknames. "Big bubble", "suscadine", "sculpin", "bullets", which is slang for "bullis", and as it went further afield, "suppeydine" or "scuppydime". I must admit that I really like these variations.

Scuppernong, the river, gets its name from the Algonquian word "ascopo", which means "sweet bay tree".

The Mother Vine, which is of course a Scuppernong vine, contends in a pretty serious way for the title of oldest productive vine in the world. It's four hundred years old and lives on Roanoke island. Here's a little link to   other possible contenders.

Roanoke Island, though? Isn't that where all those colonists disappeared? Yep, here's a little background on that.

Personally, I don't think the role of the Mother Vine in this disappearance has yet been adequately explored.

The Elements--a diversion

Fear not--the well of ignorance here will never run dry. But for those with a taste for this kind of thing, I thought I'd mention the project Sam Kean is doing over at Slate. For the next few weeks, he'll be posting articles to his blog about the periodic table. I'm going to check it out as he goes along, and I hope you do too.

I followed such a liberal arts track through college that it's easy for me to forget sometimes that I actually enjoyed certain aspects of the science classes I took in high school. At least, I enjoyed the mysteries of the periodic table, even though I think it was rendered more opaque than it might have been by the heavy accent of our Eastern European born chemistry teacher. Still, he knew what he was talking about, if we had had but ears to hear. Anyway, I'd liked the neatness of the chart, even if I don't remember too much about it now. Maybe it's time to revisit that.

Anyway, if any of you happen to follow the links to read Kean has to say about the different elements and have your own thoughts about them, please let us know...  

poetaster

This one comes up from time to time when you read certain kinds of things--British fiction, say, or The New York Review of Books. I don't think I've ever heard it said in casual conversation, which is why I don't even know if it is pronouced poet taster or poet aster. Or even, as in the pun I saw it in most recently, a Poe taster. For some reason I always think of it being a poet with a qualification--I mean a poet in a qualified sense, or a dabbler, but if that -aster has to do with stars, as it does in disaster, it could mean a star poet, kind of like a poet laureate. Well, I'm sure it will all become quite obvious shortly...

Okay--a poetaster is a poet of inferior worth, or at best, one reputed to be of inferior worth. It comes from combining poet and the pejorative suffix -aster. How -aster came to be a pejorative is a bit beyond me. The online etymological dictionary has it that the suffix denotes things with an incomplete resemblance, using as an example a word I've never heard before 'patraster'--one who plays the father. So okay, the poetaster is one who plays the poet. I thought there might be a resemblance to the word manque, but that seemed too easy.

In the course of looking up the etymology, I came across this poem, which oddly mirrors my own path around this word. As the poet has given permission to blog his work as long as you mention his name, I will mention here that his name is Ronberge and he has a book of poems called Don't Think When Thriving!, which I have to admit is a pretty good title. But without further ado, his poem:

I dedicate this poem to all those who use the term poetaster; especially on me!


‘Poetaster! ’

The first time I read the word
I read it: ‘Poe – taster’
So I thought it meant someone who likes old Edgar Allan.
A least had a taste for his words
And tried hard to imitate his art
Not always with success
Doesn’t sound too much like an insult
Does it?
No Really
Nevertheless
It got me curious
And I dug a little deeper…
Did some research on the subject
Don’t you just love a century
Where ignorance is a choice you make
By not typing a word or clicking on a button
By not searching for answers or not asking questions?
Here is what my research gave me
On that particular matter:
It was first used in a play
One of Shakespeare’s contemporaries
‘The Poetaster’
an Elizabethan satirical stage play,
written by a guy named Ben Jonson,
The term poetaster,
Meaning an inferior poet in the play
with pretensions to artistic value,
was coined by Jonson in this play.
And the wordplay itself
was actually on ‘disaster’
‘This poet was a disaster’
Poet–dis-aster,
take out the ‘dis’
Voilà
‘poetaster’
Pretty self-evident, yes?
Now I’ve always suspected that latin
Is not the forte of the many…
‘Poetaster’!
Anyone with a modicum
Of knowledge in etymology can spot it…
Take ‘Disaster’: it comes from two words
‘Dis’ meaning separation, negation, reversal
And ‘aster’ from ‘astrum’ meaning ‘star’
Literally meaning the star of reversal, of doom!
Follow me so far?
This was the old name for a comet
Who in the old days were thought of as a bad omen
So if you read the word
‘Poet-Aster’
Then you can clearly see
That Literally
Etymologically
It means
‘Star – poet’!
No reversal here!
…
Hey you know what?
Go ahead and call me ‘Poetaster.’
The jokes gonna be on you.
Cause I figured something out
You weren’t clever enough to!








 


 

fungible

I heard this word on some financial news the other night, and realized that it's come up a time or two before in similar contexts. If you're like me, there are certain words that catalyze a kind of brain crash, and for me 'fungible' is one of them. It's partly because the world of finance is opaque to me in the first place, but partly because no matter how much I glean from context, 'fungible' immediately makes me think of fungus and also of sponge, so 'fungible' just sounds like something squishy in a kind of odious way. I had to try to find the word in context even to begin talking about it and so already know that it has to do with the liquidity of assets, which in this context (ooh, yuck!) doesn't really help matters.

So what does fungible really mean? What's its derivation? And why, oh why does it have to keep reminding me of a giant fungus plotting to take over the world?

Okay, at root, fungible really means 'interchangeable'. (Fungus, by the way, probably comes for the Attic Greek version of spongos, which is sphongos and means sponge. See?)  It helps to understand that it is related to function, not fungus. It comes from the Latin fungor--to execute, to perform, to discharge a duty, and -ible, which signifies the ability to do so. It actually comes down to us from the Latin through law, not finance, and the idea is, what is equivalent to what is owed, or, more simply, what exactly will make this right?

There's a good definition that helps our understanding of the way the word is used in different contexts at WordIQ. Fungibility is the degree to which items are equal. The example used there is that a gram of gold is recognized as substitutable for any other gram of gold, while a bale of wool is not a pure measure in the same way, as wool varies in quality, color, etc.

It's interesting to think about the most fungible assets as the ones being in some crucial way most uniform. You can trade a barrel of crude oil for another barrel of crude oil without blinking--okay, that was probably an unfortunate example--but when it comes to a barrel of apples, we might be arguing all day about whether my barrel of apples is sweeter than yours or vice versa.

darshan, darśana, दर्शन

It is the practice of this blog (and, okay, by 'practice' I really mean 'whim') that when a word springs to my attention a couple of times in the space of a few brief days, it's time to get it sorted out. Darshan came up twice in an even shorter period than that. First, I noticed it in a comment on a post  at Girish Shahane's Shoot First, Mumble Later blog. Girish was on a tour of Eastern art in Western Europe, and a commenter said "Looks like you are getting a priviliged darshan of all the museums and exhibitions." I thought, okay, that's an Indian word that I do not know, but I get the general idea of the sentence, so let's let it slide. I mean really, isn't there a limit to the ignorance I am supposed to proclaim and then attempt to correct?

Apparently not. Somehow the next morning, I ended up on Gretchen Rubin's Happiness Project blog. I say "somehow" because I got there through a series of links on Slate, and because I don't really know what to think about happiness projects, even when they're written into our Constitution. It's not that I'm against happiness or anything, just that it seems to fall where it will. As does misery.

Anyway, somehow the links lead me once again to 'darshan'. Gretchen also found it to be a word outside her ken, but she made an interesting leap with it. According to her research, 'darshan' means sight, or auspicious viewing. According to her, "Darshan is the beneficial glow that comes from being in the presence of a great spiritual leader (or holy place or object). Merely looking at such a person – and even better, receiving his or her glance – bestows a blessing."

The interesting extension that Rubin makes is extending this to movie stars and the like. She hadn't really understood people's need to see and be in the presence of their idols, but the kind of spiritual benefit sought made it all make sense to her. Well, you can read the whole thing here.

But maybe we shouldn't just take Rubin's word for all this. What does darshan mean?

Well, it pretty much means what she said, I think. But here's a bit from the Bhagavad Gita, where Arjuna is granted a vision of God:

Hari, the great lord of the possessors of mystic power, then showed to the son of Prithâ his supreme divine form, having many mouths and eyes, having (within it) many wonderful sights, having many celestial ornaments, having many celestial weapons held erect, wearing celestial flowers and vestments, having an anointment of celestial perfumes, full of every wonder, the infinite deity with faces in all directions. If in the heavens, the lustre of a thousand suns burst forth all at once, that would be like the lustre of that mighty one. There the son of Pându then observed in the body of the god of gods the whole universe (all) in one, and divided into numerous (divisions). Then Dhanañgaya filled with amazement, and with hair standing on end, bowed his head before the god, and spoke with joined hands. [Arguna said:] O god! I see within your body the gods, as also all the groups of various beings; and the lord Brahman seated on (his) lotus seat, and all the sages and celestial snakes. I see you, who are of countless forms, possessed of many arms, stomachs, mouths, and eyes on all sides. And, O lord of the universe! O you of all forms! I do not see your end or middle or beginning. I see you bearing a coronet and a mace and a discus—a mass of glory, brilliant on all sides, difficult to look at, having on all sides the effulgence of a blazing fire or sun, and indefinable. You are indestructible, the supreme one to be known. You are the highest support of this universe. You are the inexhaustible protector of everlasting piety.

Maybe I'm missing something, but this seems to be of a slightly different order than seeing Brad Pitt on the street...

On the other hand, it's possible that I'm wrong...