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Word of the Week: Juror

9/29/2014

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juror

\ˈju̇r-ər \ 



It’s been a while since the last word, and this week’s word is the reason why. I’ve spent the last two weeks serving as a juror in a criminal trial. And one of the things about being a juror is that I am not allowed to talk about it. This does not come naturally to me, the not talking about it. I want to ask questions and make comments from the jury box, or at least nudge my neighbor when I hear a particularly preposterous piece of testimony. And when I’m not in court and THAT TOPIC comes up in conversation, I sometimes have to physically stop myself from blurting out, “Hey, wanna hear a story?”

But I keep my mouth shut. 

I am sworn. That is the very nature of a juror: the word comes from the Anglo-Norman jurour  from the Latin word iūrāre “to swear.”  I have promised to hear all the evidence and to judge the facts, and well, I’ve got to live up to that.
Picture
"The Jury" by John Morgan. Licensed under Public domain via Wikimedia Commons
It took a couple of days to recognize the feeling the rituals of the courthouse rouse in me. It’s the same amazed fascination I feel in an airport, or a hospital, or a theme park, or any other complex human system.  There are hundreds or even thousands of people swarming around, each engrossed in some fragment among the hundreds and thousands of fragments that give the place its meaning. 

And like an airport or a hospital or a theme park, it’s a place that involves a lot of waiting, which gives me ample opportunity to watch the other creatures in the hive going about their business.

Attorneys, clients, and translators huddle in little knots, clutching file folders and conferring in English, or Spanish, or Vietnamese. Anxious women wrestle children in and out of strollers. Stray words float among the dust motes in the morning sun: arraignment, plea bargain, subpoena.  Sleek-suited lawyers eel through the crowd, wheeling luggage carts overflowing with banker's boxes and binders and reams of printouts. A family gathers in a quiet corner and prays. 

There are prisoners in County Jail jumpsuits and shackles being led to court appearances. Most look stoic, some resigned, a few are cheerful. The deputies keep others from getting too close, but every now and then a passer-by calls greetings or words of encouragement to a friend jingling past. Waiting for the elevator, a pair of young women, chained together, nudge each other and laugh at some whispered joke. I can’t quite see, but I think they are holding hands.

One morning a large crowd mills about in the corridor. Most are young men in the standard dudebro uniform of baggy shorts and polo shirts. “DUI Day,” a deputy tells me. By noon they are all gone.

A toothless old man in flip flops walks out of a courtroom, beaming. His daughter trails behind, deep in conversation with a translator and a lawyer: this piece of paper is a dismissal of charges, they tell her, show it to the clerk and they’ll be able to process the application. “Green card! Ha! Yes!” the old man crows, clapping his hands. He bows his thanks to the attorney as his daughter tows him off toward the stairwell.  

There’s a small army of custodial workers, who keep this dingy, battered building incongruously spotless. The floors gleam. The baseboards are dusted. The cramped and inconvenient bathrooms are immaculate, with plenty of toilet paper. I’ve never seen a trash can more than half full.

The jurors on my case are the usual varied bunch: there’s a business owner, a sales clerk, a couple of managers, a cable technician. A retired professor, a landscape architect, a personal trainer, a programmer, a new college grad, a zookeeper. And me.  We are of different ages, classes, races. We have almost nothing in common beyond language and citizenship. Yet through the peculiar alchemy of the legal system we motley twelve have been transformed into a jury and charged with the responsibility of rendering a verdict--literally “to state or report the truth”—about the question before us.

We act out the required rituals. When called, we all file in under the bailiff’s watchful eye and take our assigned places. The evidence is presented in an orderly gavotte: swearing-in, initial evidence, cross examination, re-direct.  We watch and listen, taking notes in our steno books with cheap ballpoints.  Whenever we return from a break, someone has refilled the dented water pitcher set on the edge of the jury box.

As I’m writing this, we are waiting in the corridor for the attorneys to work through a wrangle of some kind.  We have fallen into our usual break-time habits. The business owner is on the phone trying to coordinate a carpool for a Cub Scout event. The personal trainer is immersed in Things Fall Apart; the zookeeper is reading Suze Orman. The landscape architect and the programmer are swapping barbeque recipes. The cable tech has slipped downstairs for a smoke. 

A few dozen prospective jurors are assembling for voir dire in a trial just getting underway in the courtroom next door. They look anxious and uncertain, and the bailiff herds them into line. We old hands view them with the tolerant condescension of long-haul backpackers encountering a busload of day-trippers.

In a few minutes we will be called back to our case. We will file back into the courtroom and reassume our assigned places and our prescribed roles. The pitcher will be full again. The gavotte will continue.


That's all I can tell you. I swear.
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Word of the Week: Swelter

9/12/2014

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swelter

\ˈswel-tər\
It is one of the crueler ironies of life in Southern California: September rolls around, with its iconography of crisp apples, changing leaves, and new school notebooks—and we get brutal heat waves and Santa Ana winds. 

For the last couple of weeks, temperatures have been regularly in the 90s and 100s. Even worse, and unusual for this part of the world, it has not been cooling off appreciably at night. A series of hurricanes has been swirling about in the Pacific and while Arizona is being pummeled by flash floods we get only giant thunderheads piling up over the mountains, taunting us with the possibility of rain that never materializes. 

Picture
"Ase o fuku onna" by Utamaro - Library of Congress. Licensed under Public domain via Wikimedia Commons
So we sit in front of the fan. And we swelter.

Swelter is a great Old English and Germanic word, meaning to sweat, languish or faint because of heat.  It comes from the Germanic verb swelt, meaning to die or perish, though also with a connotation of languishing, starving, or burning away. This word pops up in Old High German as swelzan (meaning to burn away), and also in the Old Norse sulte or svelta (to starve). In English, swelt also gave rise to sulter (a spell of hot weather), a word that has since wilted into obscurity, but not before giving us “sultry.” 

I must confess to a certain peevishness while reading the OED’s usage notes. All these medieval and Renaissance folks enjoying their Little Ice Age. What the hell do they know about living in Southern California without air conditioning in the era of global warming?

Nothing is what. Fellas like John Jewel go swanning about in their velvet doublets asserting that it is “Better … to Marrie, then to swelter inwardely with filthy affections.” (An Apologie in Defence of the Church of England (1571)).

But if Johnny boy knew ANYTHING about sweltering, he’d know that “filthy affections” are among the first things to fall by the wayside when the mercury rises and sharing a room with another living human is unbearable. As Cole Porter observed, far more pithily, “It’s Too Darn Hot.”

Then I saw Caleb Trenchfield’s 1662 description of “Physitians who, willing to appeare richly clad, swelter in Plush in hot summer”—and I was suddenly catapulted back to the sartorial trenches of middle school. 

I was a teenager, not a 'Physitian.' But I had a similar appreciation of the need to appear richly (or at least fashionably) clad. So every September I would peruse the pages of Seventeen, hoping to find the right look for the new year. This being Southern California circa 1980, plush and ermine were not often featured on the “What’s Hot” pages. But there were glossy depictions of all kinds of other finery that the editors insisted were a good idea.  Khaki and Lace! Legwarmers! Qiana jersey! Suspenders!  Each year I would carefully curate a few back-to-school outfits and look forward to the start of classes and the possibility (alas, not realized until much later) of scoring a few filthy affections.

The nice shiny clothes never quite fit right—a little too tight here and too gappy there—but what was worse was the creeping self-doubt, niggling like an itchy label.

I didn’t have a full length mirror, so the last day of vacation would find me standing perched on the ledge of the bathtub, trying to get a good view of my first-day outfit in the medicine cabinet over the toilet.  



Cute shirt! I would think. Sleek! Fashionable! 

     [long pause]

     [teeter. wobble]


Maybe it would look better tucked in? Like this?

     [tuck. teeter]



Or like that?

     [re-tuck, wobble]

     [long pause]


No, too dorky. Untucked then.

     [try to stand on tiptoe. slip into tub]



Monica tucks in her shirts…

    [tuck in. stagger. retuck.] 


That looks good, right?

     [long pause]

     [wobble]



Oh God that looks stupid stupid stupid stupid.

     [stomp. wobble]



Wait. Maybe like this.

     [long pause]

     [teeter]

 

That’s probably OK.

     [wobble]


     [pause]



Do I look like I’m trying too hard?



The next day I would head out the door into the blazing heat. In among the new books and the Pee-Chee folders, I’d discover that the lace was scratchy and the khakis stuck to my legs and that smudges and stains really show up on Qiana.  By the end of the first week everything was completely wilted and I’d be back to my usual uniform of jeans and nerdy T-shirts. 

I was never very good at fashion.

I’m still not, but one of the many advantages of middle age over middle school is that I don’t care. I have spent much of the last week alternating between two cotton shift dresses I got at the thrift store. These are cool and comfortable and flattering and they do not require me to balance on the edge of the tub. I still don’t have a full-length mirror, but I do have plenty of filthy affections.


When it cools off maybe I will get me a pair of legwarmers.
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Word of the Week: Cicatrice

9/2/2014

1 Comment

 
cicatrice

\ˈsi-kə-ˌtris\

Picture
"Ma Cicatrice" By Jacques HONVAULT (Own work), via Wikimedia Commons
I just finished Anthony Trollope’s Can You Forgive Her?—the first of the Palliser novels and a great read about money, sex, marriage, and power. When the story opens, Alice Vavasour had been engaged to her cousin George but broke it off because of unspecified bad behavior on his part and subsequently became engaged to one John Grey. 
Grey is a Paragon. He’s noble and good looking and unflappable and a thorough gentleman, and he’s always right. In other words, he’s fairly dull and really irritating. 

Alice seems to recognize this: fairly early on in the story she breaks up with him too (she dresses it up with some cockamamie story about how he is too good and noble for her, but she’s really afraid she will be bored and annoyed). And through a chain of events (and some meddling by her cousin), she becomes engaged once again to her old flame George, knowing that she doesn’t love him but also knowing that he needs her money for his political career. Her story gets more complicated from there, with John Grey being annoyingly steadfast (he knows Alice & what is good for her far better than she knows herself, you see, and he pulls a switcheroo to keep George’s hands off of Alice’s [er] assets by replacing them with his own) and George becoming increasingly angry and abusive because what he really wants is to put a thumb in John Grey’s eye by reclaiming Alice’s love as well as her money.

George’s distinguishing physical characteristic is a “cicatrice”—a scar—on his cheek, left by a boyhood incident in which George killed a house-breaker prowling outside his sister’s room in the night, apparently intent upon her jewelry. This old wound is described as shrinking and growing and changing color with his moods. And as his moods darken over the course of the novel, the cicatrice seems to take over more and more of his face and define more and more of his character. Sometimes it “yawns open” or flushes hideously red or purple to signal yet again that George is gearing up to do something truly appalling. 

As poor Alice spent several hundred pages dithering around between these two unsatisfactory suitors, I found myself wondering about “cicatrice.” It’s not a word I encounter often, and it has an intriguingly sinister sound. Perhaps there was some exotic and unexpected connection—with cicada, perhaps, or carapace or cockatrice? Something alien and uncanny and insectoid. Perhaps there would be pedipalps!

Alas, cicatrice turns out to be pretty disappointing, etymologically. Every source I consulted, from the OED to the etymological reference to the Latin word study lexicon, says simply that it comes from the Latin “cicātrīcem,” which means scar. Full stop. No cognates, no earlier history. That’s it.  

I find this unsatisfying: a scar always demands a backstory. “How did that happen?” we ask, with varying degrees of prurience and tact. Sometimes people show them off, testament to a surgery or a duel or a childhood mishap. Sometimes the story is even true. For the word to lack a history and associations of its own seems unnatural.

When reality falls short, it’s time to make stuff up. I leave the false etymology as an exercise for the reader, but I can at least provide some bogus usage notes. The Google word frequency widget suggests that “cicatrice” enjoyed something of a vogue between 1846 and 1859: I asked Arwulf, our resident history expert, why this might be and she obligingly fabricated a few theories. First she noted that many of the citations were from medical journals. Since chloroform had been invented in the 1830s and popularized in the 1840s, perhaps the spike in references to cicatrices had something to do with an increased interest in surgery? Or, it could be related to the increasing number of anti-slavery books and pamphlets in the US describing (and often showing in graphic detail) scenes of whipping or branding.
Or, since 1846 was also the year in which Elias Howe received a patent for the first sewing machine, there may have been an uptick in sewing-related injuries at about that time. (Arwulf is quite wary of our sewing machine, believing with some justification, that it is out to Get Her.) 
Picture
"L-Naehmaschine3". Licensed under Public domain via Wikimedia Commons
These all sound entirely plausible to me. Choose the theory that seems most appropriate for your needs.

George does not fare well in the end: his Parliamentary career is short, ignominious, and extremely expensive; he loses the slim chance he had to inherit family money; he abuses and alienates everyone who might have cared for him; and eventually Alice—who at this point is justly terrified of him and his cicatrice—breaks it off again. At which point he skips out on his debts, dumps the long-term mistress who suddenly shows up in the final reel, changes his name, and escapes to America. 

How he tells the story of his scar there is not recounted. I hope he blames it on a sewing machine.

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