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Word of the Week: Stage

4/29/2018

stage

\ˈstāj\

The big news this spring at the Bluefish Editorial desk is that we are getting ready to move. Now that Grimbert and Arwulf are both launched on their college careers, Everett and I are seizing the opportunity to leave the suburbs for someplace more central, more walkable, and (not to put too fine a point on it) more fun. So we have put our house on the market and we are moving to a new neighborhood.

Making a house we’ve been in for twenty years presentable for sale has been no small task. The last couple of months have been a frenzy of thinning things out and packing things away and delving into corners and deep cabinets and the backs of closets. Extraneous furniture has been sold or stashed in the garage. We’ve schlepped carton upon carton of donations to the Friends of the Library and the church book room. I’m on a first-name basis with the guy at the Goodwill dropoff. (Hi Ramon!) A platoon of tradesmen has come through, painting and pruning and weeding and patching and repairing.

At the end of all that activity we thought things looked pretty good. But no, the realtors told us, that had been but the prelude—it was time to prep the house for showing. It was time to bring in the stagers.

A stage is a raised platform on which something can be built or performed. It is a place where fantasies and dramas are acted out, where illusions are given the gloss of reality. In construction, it can be a scaffold or step, a place from which work can continue at a higher level. The word comes from the Old French estage, which in turn comes from the Latin stāre (meaning to stand); estageis also the source of the modern French étage, meaning a floor in a multistory building.

Staging a house is highly performative. The idea is to present the house in its ideal form, devoid of the personality of its owners, with just enough cues that prospective buyers can visualize themselves inhabiting it. Just as important, the buyer is supposed to imagine the new and improved life they will live in this space: it needs to conjure up not only who they are, but who they can become. That vision is aspirational—it is about leveling up.

House stagers are expert at invoking that aspirational vision. Consider what they did with our bookshelves. We live in a suburb known for its good public schools. In theory, a house full of books should appeal to upwardly mobile young families looking to settle here. Books say: People who live here are readers! They are informed and erudite! They succeed in their professions and throw interesting dinner parties!

But actual bookshelves—even when well organized and reasonably tidy—do not successfully convey this. They are messy and visually chaotic, and potentially full of uncomfortable ideas. So the stagers cleverly transformed our real-life bookshelves into inspiring gestures towards book ownership.

First, they did another shelf purge. The remaining few books were tastefully grouped with an eye to size, color, and visual weight. A fair number ended up stacked on their sides and crowned with decorative objects.

The effect was pleasing, I have to admit—the savor of a well-stocked library, without the dust or the silverfish!

The staging of the rest of the house, though, was more upsetting. Here were the artifacts of our lives—our furniture, our pictures, our stuff—polished up and arrayed to present an idealized vision of suburban prosperity straight out of a Pottery Barn catalog. The counter that had for 20 years been the daily repository for groceries and mail and keys and lunchboxes was now a breakfast bar, complete with multi-layered place settings that we were forbidden to touch lest we sully the pristine arrangement of napkin-on-plate-on-larger-plate-on-mat. The landing where we once dumped miscellaneous furniture and the occasional laundry basket was recast as a reading nook. Fake plants and twee knickknacks appeared—raffia spheres in glazed bowls and cunning candleholders made from wrought iron and mason jars. Throw pillows popped up like dandelions.

But the final straw for me was a tasteful little vignette that included a family portrait taken when our kids were in middle school. Suddenly what was on stage was not just our stuff—it was us. Our family was being deployed in the service of an aspirational vision of white, heterosexual, educated, upper-middle-class, happy nuclear family “normality.”

If you lived here, you'd be us now!

Which on the one hand, doesn’t sound like that big of a deal? After all, we ARE a happy educated white upper-middle-class partly heterosexual nuclear family. No shame there! But to see that identity so explicitly commodified—“buy this house and this can be you!”—left me feeling deeply complicit.

Unsurprisingly, the agents suggested we make ourselves scarce for a few days while they held open houses and walked potential buyers through the property. The last thing they needed was some homeowner barging onto the stage muttering balefully about capitalism and heteronormativity. So we decamped to an Airbnb—and by the time we returned four days later, we had an offer in hand and were embarking on a new stage called escrow. (Which, it turns out, is a rather interesting word in its own right, but I will save it for later.)

Since we got back, the Pottery Barn ideal has been slowly succumbing to the wear and tear of daily life (though we still haven't dared touch the breakfast bar napkins). But I took down the family portrait display. I wasn't sure who those people are any more.

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Word of the Week: Petrichor

1/15/2018

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petrichor

ˈpeˌtrīkôr/

This week on the Bluefish Editorial desk, it RAINED.* Some of you in other parts of the world may not fully appreciate how thrilling this is. As a rule, we in San Diego only ever get rain between November and March, and the last few years not even then. The state’s record-breaking drought was eased by last year’s wet winter in Northern California, but even though SoCal has shared in this bounty (thank you California Aqueduct!) we have seen precious little actual rainfall.

But this week we got a good drenching. My neighbor’s backyard gauge read a whopping 2.5 inches. The garden is looking fresh-washed, and the leaves have got that sheeny plumpness they never get under the sprinkler.

And I have had occasion to contemplate a lovely word that gets very little use around here: “petrichor.”

You have probably noticed petrichor, even if you did not know what it was called. It’s that distinctively sharp, earthy scent that accompanies rain, especially after a long dry spell. Poets have talked about that smell for millennia.** And in fact we (like other animals) can detect this odor on the wind from miles away, possibly because our ancestors depended on being able to find water in often hostile conditions.

National Park Service: Rain on Ryan Mountain, Joshua Tree National Monument

But while we can smell it, and many love it, for a long time English didn’t have a word for it.

Until 1964, that is, when two intrepid Australian geologists, Isabel Joy Bear and Richard Grenfell Thomas, took it upon themselves to understand exactly what that smell is and where it comes from. Their article, “Nature of Argillaceous Odour,” appeared in the journal Nature, and their analysis proved unexpectedly illuminating for me.

I had always assumed the rain-smell is biological in origin: some bacterial funk in the ground loosening up and breathing out in the welcome presence of moisture.

But while this is to some degree true in wet, fertile regions, in deserts like the one I live in, the smell comes from the rocks themselves. Bear and Thomas demonstrated that pure mineral samples, even those heated in a kiln to destroy any organisms present, nonetheless release the odor when moistened or even breathed on. When they isolated and examined the substance, they found that it is the result of a reaction between the rock and plant oils in the air; this stuff accumulates in the rocks and soil in dry weather and then is released into the air when the humidity rises before a rain.

Bear and Thomas proposed that this fragrant yellowish substance be called petrichor: a compound of two Greek words: petros (πέτρος) meaning stone, and ichor (ἰχώρ), the golden fluid that flows in the veins of the gods. Petrichor, they said, was the “tenuous essence” of rock—its uncanny aromatic lifeblood.

National Park Service/Kathy Bell: Clouds on the summit of Ryan Mountain, Joshua Tree National Monument

They didn’t know how right they were: this “tenuous essence” turns out to have powerful effects. It turns out that petrichor inhibits the germination of seeds, possibly as a way of keeping young plants from germinating too quickly at the first hint of rain (after all, there may not be more for some time). With steady, regular rain, though, the petrichor washes away and the seeds can sprout. But even then the ichor is not done—as it washes out of the soil, it flows on into waterways, where it serves as a signal to fish and frogs that the dry season is over and it’s time to start making babies.

So petrichor is a kind of lifeblood, circulating throughout the system, telling us that the water has come again, letting us know when it’s time to sprout.

I know that the rain was not so kind to other parts of the state. But here, the yard drank deep, the roof did not leak, and we breathed deep and counted our blessings.

I feel like the earth, astonished at fragrance borne in the air, made pregnant with mystery from a drop of rain...

—Rumi

*No, not literally ON the desk, thank goodness, or I would be too busy blaspheming the gods to write this.

**Interestingly, while I found a fair number of Greek, Middle Eastern, and Australian poets talking about the smell of rain, examples from England itself are relatively rare. Paradoxically, the fact that the English live in a place where it rains all the time means they probably have little experience with true petrichor, which requires a long dry period to emerge. However, the English will not shut UP about the smell of dew, which operates on a similar principle.

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Word of the Week: Pie

8/7/2017

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pie

/pī/

Today on the Bluefish Editorial Desk, it’s time for Reader Queries! After my last post, one of my lovely and intelligent subscribers wrote to ask what “PIE” stands for—was it something to do with Indo-European languages or an especially enthusiastic way of talking about, you know, pie? Clearly some disambiguation was in order.

There’s a lot of PIE out there. Depending on the context, it can refer to Prince Edward Island, or to pulmonary interstitial emphysema, or to the Principle of Inclusion/Exclusion (which Everett tells me is a formula for counting up the number of objects that are contained in overlapping categories),* and a host of other things.

But as my Lovely and Intelligent Reader surmised, in these posts PIE generally stands for “Proto-Indo-European.” This is the Neolithic ancestor of all the Indo-European languages spoken today (including Spanish, English, Hindustani, Portuguese, Bengali, Russian, Punjabi, German, French, Persian, and about 420 more). No direct records of PIE exist, but linguists have reconstructed its grammar and vocabulary by comparing the features of daughter languages and extrapolating backwards. About half the people on the planet speak one of these PEI-related languages as a native tongue.

Most of the other half speak Chinese, Japanese, Korean, or Malay—a fact beautifully illustrated by an image shared by another Lovely and Intelligent Reader, which presents the world’s major languages according to number of speakers. This is, appropriately enough, termed a pie chart; one might even call it a PIE pie chart, though the largest piece, being Chinese, has no connection to PIE at all.**

Proportional pie chart of world’s most spoken languages (via Imgur)

But let us not lose sight of the essentials! As Lovely and Intelligent Reader #1 suggested, PIE might also be an especially enthusiastic way of referring to pie.

And all-caps levels of enthusiasm are warranted! Pie is in fact one of my favorite foods. It is defined as a sweet or savory dish, usually consisting of meat or fruit cooked in (or sometimes under) a pastry shell. (Dough-less variations like shepherd’s pie notwithstanding, I do think that pastry is essential to pie-ness.)

A beautiful example, courtesy of my lovely and intelligent sister-in-law Pat Howe

The word “pie” appeared in English in about the 12th century, but it originally had nothing to do with pastry. Instead a pie was a bird, what we now call a magpie; the word didn’t acquire its food-oriented meaning until about 200 years later. And the original pies (the birds) didn’t become magpies until the 17th century; “Mag” appears to be short for “Margaret” or “Margot,” which was slang for a gossipy woman, probably a reference to magpie’s chattering call.

Magpies are pretty great. Like other corvids, they are extremely smart—some scientists say that they are as intelligent as great apes in their grasp of cause and effect, as well as their social intelligence, imagination, and ability to anticipate future events. They use tools, they work in groups to hunt for food and outwit predators, and they can count.

The other kind of pie (Pica pica). Via Wikimedia Commons

But what do they have to do with pie? One theory is that the connection can be found in magpies’ striking black and white coloring, which has given us terms like “piebald” and the Pied Piper (so named because of his patchwork clothes). Pies came to be called pies, this theory holds, because they too sported spots or patches of contrasting color. This is I suppose marginally plausible, since many early pie crusts (called “coffyns”) were designed more to contain and preserve the filling than to be eaten. These freestanding pies, large and cylindrical with thick straight sides, often came out of the oven scorched and blackened in spots. It’s conceivable that someone might have described them as pied.

But I think a more promising vein lies in magpies’ fondness for picking up shiny objects and hoarding them in their nests. There is a French expression, trouver la pie au nid, which means to make an unexpected and pleasant discovery, or literally to “find the magpie in its nest.” And pie, after all, is a collection of often random foodstuffs gathered into a nest-like pastry shell. Think mincemeat, or four-and-twenty blackbirds (which I suppose might be a pie pie***). Still not convinced? Think, then, of haggis, the Scottish dish consisting of a motley assortment of offal, oatmeal, and suet boiled in a sheep’s stomach. The etymology of haggis is unclear, but there is an English word haggess that dates back to the early 13th century. It means—I kid you not!—magpie.

So there is a strong case to be made that pies are called pies because they are unexpected and sometimes disorderly collections of treasures, hidden in a pastry shell or box and waiting for us to discover them, like Jack Horner with his anarchic thumb spearing the Christmas plum.

I like this whiff of chaos within the array of neatly crimped pies in the baker’s window. It reminds me of one of the most joyous and disorderly applications of pie—the pie fight. This is such a classic trope you might think it has been going on for millennia, but no—pie-throwing is apparently a 20th century art form. The first documented instance I can find is in a 1909 film called Mr. Flip. But once the pie had been cast, filmmakers realized that this was comedy gold. Charlie Chaplin had his first pie fight in 1916, and Laurel and Hardy’s The Battle of the Century (1927) is an acknowledged masterpiece of the genre.

One of my favorite pie fights occurs in The Great Race, featuring Natalie Wood, Jack Lemmon, Peter Falk, Tony Curtis, and about 4,000 pies. Like all great scenes of its kind, one of the most delicious bits occurs at the very beginning, when the protagonists burst through a door—and we see that they have arrived in a room FILLED WITH PIES, row upon neatly stacked row of them, and we know the scene can only unfold in one way.

It’s a jolt of pure potential energy, like seeing the martial arts hero stroll into the teahouse or the fruit vendor wheeling his cart into the roadway where the car chase is about to break out. The world holds its breath for a split second, in joyful anticipation of the mayhem that is about to unfold.

Which brings me back to PIE. One of the joys of playing around with words on this blog is getting a good look at the utter mayhem at work in the English language. There is nothing like the moment of glee I feel when I crack open the OED and see a nice fat etymology entry, a magpie in its nest, stuffed with disputes and detours and weird convergences. Linguists may have figured out a nice tidy protolanguage in PIE, with its tables of inflections and declensions, its conjugations and ablauts. But every time English seems to settle down, along comes something like the Norman Conquest or the Industrial Revolution or emojis, and we are off to the races again. English is a magpie stealing shiny objects for its nest of treasures, a linguistic pie fight that kicks over the table and splatters custard on everyone in range.**** Crimp your crusts all you want, PIE! We’ve got our own pies, and we’re not afraid to fling them.

Splat!!

*He also tells me that it is properly called the Inclusion/Exclusion Principle; however, that would be IEP rather than PIE, so I choose to disregard.

**There may be no Chinese connection to PIE, but there is such a thing as Chinese Pie. Also known as Pâté Chinois, this is a French Canadian variation on shepherd’s pie, consisting of layers of ground beef, sautéed onions, and canned creamed corn, all baked under a mashed potato topping. The story, which might even be true, is that the dish was made by Chinese cooks working on the construction of the trans-Canadian railway. While I can’t imagine Chinese laborers finding this at all appealing, their French Canadian counterparts became quite fond of the stuff and, it being cheap, filling, and easy to make with available ingredients, they brought the recipe home with them. Some now claim Pâté Chinois as the national dish of Québéc.

***OK fine, all you bird pedants, blackbirds aren’t corvids; they are from the thrush family. But many corvids are black birds and the rhyme does not specify the precise taxonomy. I will not retract.

****As professional nerd James Nicholl memorably put it: English doesn’t just borrow words, "English pursues other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.” (This quote is often misattributed to the late great Terry Pratchett, but while Sir Terry may well have shared the sentiment, it was Nicholls who actually said it.)

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Word of the Week: Punch

7/10/2017

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punch

\ˈpənch\

Hello strangers! It’s been a hectic few months here at the Bluefish Editorial desk. I do at least have something to show for my long silence: since my last word, I have midwifed two academic books and a fistful of journal articles, plus an AP test prep book, a set of abstracts, a grant application, and a slow-blooming memoir. Less appealingly, I have also racked up a great heap of deferred maintenance: a desk disappearing under an avalanche of files, weeks of backlogged invoices and receipts, not to mention a rising tide of household clutter and a long-unweeded garden.

As I tackled that heap, I realized that my workout has been neglected as well. An injury kept me out of the ocean for a few months, and the treadmill at the Y was not holding my interest (especially once House of Cards became so grotesquely outstripped by reality that I couldn’t watch it any more). I was getting stiff and creaky and cross, so when a friend suggested I join her at a local kickboxing gym, I figured why the hell not? I don't think of myself as much of a bruiser, but I'd never tried anything like it before, and at least I’d get a chance to work out my frustrations. So I bought a pair of boxing gloves on eBay and have been devoting a chunk of my mornings to punching things.

Turns out, I am extraordinarily bad at it. I’ve got terrible hand-eye coordination, unreliable balance, questionable core strength, and less stamina than I like to admit. But I also found that whaling on punching bags is SUPER satisfying and (as long as I am willing to deal with the humiliation of being so profoundly inept) actually quite empowering. Not only can I now do real pushups, I can totally beat someone up, provided they are tall and cylindrical and hold very very still.

“Punch” is a good solid verb. It means to hit something with a hard forward blow, especially with the fist. But somewhat to my surprise, “punch” is not directly related to the Latin pugnus, meaning “fist” (whence “pugnacious”) though it does apparently come from the same PIE root. Instead, “punch” is an abbreviation of puncheon, which is a tool used for perforating or stamping things—like an awl, or a cutting die, or a dagger. As such, “punch” is less about pugilism and more about pricking or stinging: it is closely related to “puncture” and “pungent,” and (more distantly) to “pounce.”

That got me wondering about all the other punches out there, which it turns out are similarly not about punching.

There’s the punch that we drink. I’d idly thought it might be so named because of the effect it can have on a drinker, or perhaps the piercing effect of a stiff hangover. But no, this word seems to come from the Sanskrit pañcāmṛta--panch (or “five”) plus āmṛta (“nectars”)—the five nectars of the gods. (Āmṛta, it turns out, comes from the same root as “ambrosia.”)

What exactly these uplifting nectars are differs depending on who you ask. One source lists them as spirits, rosewater, lemon juice, sugar, and spices, which actually sounds quite refreshing. Another suggests that the five are milk, curd, ghee, honey, and molasses. Tantric texts say that they are the five bodily excretions (saliva, urine, sexual secretions, menstrual blood and poo)—which still sounds better than the punch served at the college parties of my youth, consisting of grape Kool-Aid mixed with grain alcohol. Yes, it was as vile as you think.

(There is an alternative theory that punch was a sailor’s term for an alcoholic drink served on India-bound ships and that it was named for the puncheon (a large barrel—another meaning of the word) that it was served from. The OED dismisses this claim, but it is a nice story and if it helps keep your mind off the Tantric nectars, then go for it.)

And then there’s Punch, of Punch and Judy fame. Since his character is literally all about hitting people, I thought for sure his name would have some link to punching. But no: Punch is an abbreviation of Punchinello, which in turn is an Anglicized version of Pulcinella, the baggy-pantsed, huge-nosed comic thug from commedia dell'arte.

Punch and Judy show, Swansea. By ALoan at English Wikipedia (Transferred from en.wikipedia to Commons.) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

Pulcinella is believed to be a diminutive of pollecena, or “turkey pullet”—possibly in reference to the character’s big nose and squawky voice. And it turns out that the puppet Punch, like Pulcinella before him, is more of a cudgeller than a pummeler: he usually carries a big stick that he uses to whack at anyone who crosses him, including his spouse Judy, clowns, policemen, babies, dogs, crocodiles, and the devil. (I have learned that this stick is often split at one end so that it makes a satisfying percussive thwack! It is called—I kid you not—a “slapstick.”)

So I am coming to realize that punching isn’t quite what I thought it was. Because while there is certainly a good bit of slapstick involved in my own apprenticeship (like when I wind up for a big kick at the bag, miss, and end up flat on my butt—trust me, it's hilarious!), it's really not about fists and brute force.

In fact, the more I think about it, the more I realize the truth behind Muhammad Ali's brilliant catchphrase: Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee. We're talking stinging precision, a ruthless takedown of his opponent, and the sweetness of nectar under it all. That man knew how to pack a punch.

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Word of the Week: Zambazo

2/27/2017

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zambazo

\zam-'bä-zō\

In addition to my regular Bluefish work and all the time spent saving the world, I also sing with an a cappella quartet. We are just getting started as a group, so we’ve been focusing on building up our repertoire—mostly a mix of jazz, pop, and a bit of doo-wop—and getting ready to record a demo tape.

Last week we spent a fair bit of time polishing up the classic “Java Jive,” which was originally recorded by the Ink Spots in 1940 and then repopularized by the Manhattan Transfer in the 1970s.

It’s a catchy little song—many of you may know it already. It begins: “I love coffee, I love tea / I love the Java Jive and it loves me…” And since coffee, like many exhilarating substances, has inspired considerable jive, the song goes on to riff on a series of more or less obscure coffee-related references. Give it a listen, or check out the lyrics here.

It's full of great stuff! There’s “slip me a slug from that wonderful mug / And I’ll cut a rug till I’m snug in a jug.” This is reasonably straightforward: “Give me some coffee and I will dance until I am tipsy” (or alternatively, "until they put me in jail" or "until I end up in bed with someone").

And there’s “A slice of onion and a raw one / Draw one,” which is lunch counter lingo for “a burger, rare, with onions, and a cup of coffee from the urn.”

And there’s “drop your nickel in my pot, Joe!” which references the classic 5-cent price of cup of coffee--and yes, that is definitely a double entendre. (Joe, by the way, seems to be a shortened form of jamoke, which itself collapses Java and Mocha—two of the primary sources of coffee beans.)

A slightly more perplexing line is “I love java, sweet and hot / Whoops Mister Moto, I'm a coffee pot!” Wikipedia suggests that this is a “nonsensical couplet,” but I am not so easily satisfied. Mr. Moto was a Japanese secret agent featured in the spy thrillers of John P. Marquand. The books, mostly set in Asia and Imperial Japan, were popular enough for Twentieth Century Fox to produce a series of movie adaptations in the late 1930s, in which Mr. Moto was played by Peter Lorre. (Another example in Hollywood's long and ignoble history of hiring white actors to play nonwhite characters.)

In the novels, Mr. Moto is cultured, resourceful, and unfailingly polite; he has a degree from Stanford, and he also turns out to be proficient in jujitsu, firearms, and pole vaulting. But in all his adventures amidst the intrigues of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, he displays no apparent affinity for coffee, beyond being occasionally described by the narrator as “coffee-colored.” [The push-pull as these books use Mr. Moto to work out American anxieties about the ambitions of Imperial Japan and the status of the Oriental Other is totally fascinating, but I don’t have space to get into it here.]

The movies augment Mr. Moto's accomplishments to include talents like ventriloquism, a broad knowledge of hangover cures, and a facility with disguise. So it is conceivable that in one of these movies Mr. Moto disguises himself as a waiter or dispenses coffee as part of a hangover remedy—but if so my sources do not mention it. It may be that Wikipedia is right after all.*

But there’s one line of "Java Jive" that I have had less luck pinning down: “Shoot me the pot and I’ll pour me a shot / A cup, a cup, a cup of dat zambazo!” This line doesn’t occur in the Ink Spots original, and it doesn't appear in the lyrics linked to the Manhattan Transfer version, but it can be heard in many recordings and it’s written into our arrangement.

So what the heck is “dat zambazo”? Dat is pretty clearly “that,” but zambazo doesn’t seem to exist in any of my usual dictionary sources. Googling the word turns up a 2011 video made by a group of Scandinavian art/design students, who made a fictional ad campaign for a coffee product called "Zambazo” for a class project. So there’s a clear confirmation that zambazo is associated with coffee, but no indication of where the word comes from. (It could even be that the students got it from the “Java Jive”…)

A broader search turned up plenty of unlikely possibilities. I learned that there is a Swahili word sambaza which means “to make smooth.” I found a company specializing in açai products that calls itself Sambazon. I wandered for a while in the gardens of sambusas (also called sambosas and samosas), those delicious savory triangular pastries popular across India, Southeast Asia, and North Africa. One online lexicon included the Esperanto word zambezo as the equivalent to the Dutch aambei—which, alas, turned out to mean “hemorrhoid.” Another dead end (as it were).

Ultimately, the most promising leads came from Spanish. The Story of Spanish mentions zambazo in passing as an alternate form of zambo—a term used in colonial Mexico’s intricate racial caste system to refer to the child of a mulatto (mixed African and white Spaniard) and a native. Zambo may also be related to sambo—though Green’s Dictionary of Slang says that in the United States the term, which dates back to slavery, may in fact derive from the Foulah word for “uncle” or a Hausa word that means “second son.”

But my personal hunch, fueled only by speculation and caffeine, is that zambazo comes from the Spanish zambombazo, which means “the sound of an explosion” or “a powerful blow from a fist”—in effect, “Kaboom!” This fits with the long tradition of nicknames for coffee that emphasize its power as a pick-me-up: think “rocket fuel,” “jitter juice,” “jamoke jolt,” “leaded/unleaded,” etc. Actually proving this would require considerably more research and expertise than I can muster (what with the day job and saving the world and all), but it sounds like a reasonably plausible story.

So even though this week’s word has no officially sanctioned provenance, it turns out that a ditty about coffee provides an interesting tour of the global intersections of race. It's a song about an international commodity (one that is not only black itself but also imported from parts of the world populated by black and brown people) that name-checks “coffee-colored” Japanese spies in the service of Asian imperial expansion and the paranoid classifications of the New World racial hierarchy—all brought together by a quartet of black musicians (called the Ink Spots no less!) using the coded language of lunch counters and juke joints to sing about the cheery cheery bean.

There's a lot going on in that little cup.

Kaboom!

Photo by Julius Schorzman (Own work), via Wikimedia Commons

*One enterprising sleuth has posited a connection between Mr. Moto’s coffee pot and a scene from the end of Arsenic and Old Lace. Elated to learn he is not doomed to live out the family curse of becoming either insane or a murderer, Cary Grant leaps into a taxi and exclaims “I am not a Brewster! I am the son of a sea cook!”—to which the taxi driver sarcastically replies, “I am not a taxi driver. I am a coffee pot.” It is indisputably true that Peter Lorre appears in Arsenic as well as the Mr. Moto movies, but since “Java Jive” came out before Arsenic and Old Lace opened on Broadway, I don’t think the play can be the source of the lyric. (If anything, the influence runs the other way.)

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Word of the Week: Prime

1/25/2017

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prime
/prīm/

This week on the Bluefish Editorial desk, I completed my first batch of invoices for the new year—and found myself struggling once again with the perennial problem of remembering to write the current year instead of the one just past. My invoicing software, thank goodness, is smart enough to get it right,* but I mislabeled a whole bunch of archive copies and had to spend a good bit of time mucking about in my filing system getting it all sorted out.

Writing the wrong year is a January ritual for many of us, and we all have our own ways of dealing with it. I had a co-worker once who, every January, would diligently practice writing out the correct date on a piece of scrap paper. After writing the date 25 times or so, she said, she would have fully retrained herself and could be reliably correct for the rest of the year.

And then there was the college roommate who at the start of each year would put her clothes away in the dorm room dresser and then quiz herself on which drawer held what. “Socks!” she would say, pointing at a drawer and then opening it to check; she repeated this routine until she was reliably perfect. Apparently she found the momentary disorientation of opening what she thought was an underwear drawer and finding T-shirts instead unpleasant enough to warrant preventative measures.

I have never gone to such lengths myself, but I do usually come up with some kind of mnemonic about the new year, which I then recall 15 seconds AFTER writing the wrong date on something. This time around I noticed that 2017 has the distinction of being prime, in that 2,017 has no factors other than itself and 1. The last prime year was 2011, the next one won’t be until 2027.**

So this seems a prime time to consider prime. It is borrowed from the Latin prīmus, meaning “the first” or “the earliest.” Prīmus came from *prismos, which was the superlative of PIE *preis- (“before”)—so basically, “firstest.” From “firstest” we also get related meanings like “excellent,” “most notable,” and “of high quality”—and thence words like primer (as in a first coat of paint) and primer (as in an elementary textbook or first reader), as well as premier and primary and primordial and prim.

The English term “prime number” entered the language in the 1560s, as a translation of the Euclidean term πρῶτος ἀριθμός (protos arithmos). Protos, it turns out, comes from the same root as prīmus, and has much the same meaning of “firstest” (see, for instance, words like proton, prototype, and protoplasm). So calling these numbers prime makes sense in terms of literal translation.

Here are some prime numbers!

But why are prime numbers considered somehow primordial? Because all whole numbers can be expressed as the product of some combination of primes. So numbers like 5, 17, 463, and yes, 2017, can be described as the numbers that came first—the basic building blocks from which all other numbers can be derived.

And yet, as I muddle along, mislabeling invoices, I find myself considering the murky waters between first and best and how easily we elide the difference between them. Prime time, for example, used to mean simply springtime, the first season of the year; only later, with the advent of broadcast television (and ratings) did it come to mean the peak or most popular time for viewing.

Is firstest necessarily bestest? My date-rehearsing colleague and my drawer-memorizing roommate would probably say it is. They were best-foot-forward types, always on top of things, no false starts.

The year is young, they might say. Put on your socks and get it right the first time.

Happy 2̶0̶1̶6̶ 2017, everyone!

* I do not want to have to wrangle with an automated university disbursement system that reads the wrong date and decides not to process payment because the work predates the purchase order. At times like that I wonder whether it would work better if the machines just talk to each other without involving us messy and fallible humans—but wait, no, that sounds like the setup for Skynet and the Machine Wars and any number of similarly dystopian futures. Do not support.

**The prime numbers wiki (there is such a thing because of course there is!) informs me that after 2027 we will have to wait only two years until the next prime year since 2,027 and 2,029 are “twin primes”—prime numbers that are only two numbers apart, like 3 and 5, or 29 and 31. Apparently this phenomenon is very interesting, but I can’t tell you much beyond the fact that twin primes exist and that it is generally believed [though as yet formally unproven] that there are infinitely many such pairs.

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Word of the Week: Apocalypse

12/13/2016

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apocalypse

\ə-ˈpä-kə-ˌlips\

Well. It’s been a hell of a month here at the Bluefish Editorial desk. In the home stretch of this endless election, as the debates and the Wikileaks and the ever-descending spiral of hideosity unfurled, I found myself in a state of increasing agitation. I did what I could. I gave money. I pitched in on some local campaigns. And I hoped for the best.

The first clutch of real dread hit me on the day before the election, when Merriam-Webster’s Twitter account (which is a work of genius & you all should follow it) updated its header image

Old image:

New Image:

That’s when I knew that no matter what the outcome there would be no happy ending. The only question was how bad it was going to get.

That’s still the question. Calamity fills my news feed: innocents slaughtered, ice sheets collapsing, the vulnerable suffering, leaders gleefully sharpening their knives to carve up the safety net, civil rights, and civil liberties.

Is it any wonder that I have been thinking about apocalypse? *

Now by apocalypse I don’t mean the end of the world—I still hope it won’t come to that.** In fact, apocalypse did not necessarily mean doomsday until relatively recently. The word derives from the Greek ἀποκαλύπτειν (apokalyptein), meaning to uncover or disclose: quite literally to take off (apo) a cover (kalyptein). It’s the moment when the veil is lifted and a truth is revealed. ***

That truth is often a sear-your-eyeballs kind of thing. That’s what you get in John of Padmos’ visionary scripture, whose title was originally translated into English as Apocalypse and later re-translated as Revelation, which is what we still call it today.

Revelation certainly contains a fair bit of calamity. Rivers of blood, hailstones, dragons, massacres, lakes of fire. At the time it was written, the Romans had just destroyed Jerusalem and razed the Temple; the empire itself was wracked with divisions, and civil war was never far from the surface. The apocalyptic vision John described—bloodshed, destruction, war, famine, plague—wasn’t held in store, waiting to bring about the end some time in future. It had been there all along. Elaine Pagels says that as far as John was concerned, the world had already ended.

The Seven-Headed Beast from the Sea. The Bamberg Apocalypse (German, 11th century) via Wikimedia Commons

But in among the Seven Seals and the multi-headed beasts, John also seems to have provided some coded but fairly practical political advice for churches trying to survive under the Roman empire in the first century. Keep the faith. Pay attention to what’s happening around you. Be wary of compromises that undermine your fundamental values. Organize.****

And that’s kind of where I’m at. The veil has been pulled aside, revealing the ugly that has always been there. The racism, and the misogyny, and the easy dehumanization. The greed and the frantic worship of power for its own sake. None of it is new; it's just been revealed to us yet again.

Now I am not planning on making the Word of the Week a space for partisan screeds or political agita. That’s not what this blog is about. In this forum I’ll be sticking with words and etymologies and riffs on my life and times. It’s fun and silly, and I need a place for fun and silliness. Maybe you do too.

But this doesn't mean that I am withdrawing from the political fray or closing my eyes and hoping that somehow all comes right in the end. Far from it. The veil has been lifted and for all the grief and outrage I can't escape that there is much to do.

So here is my note from the apocalypse. Keep the faith. Pay attention to what’s happening around you. Be wary of compromises that undermine your fundamental values. Organize.

If you want dispatches from the activist side of my life, including action steps, come visit my new blog, Eating the Whale.

* Everett has a post about apocalypse on his blog, and some of the ideas here are indebted to it and to him.

** But of course there is no guarantee and any student of history can tell you how things can go very very bad, very very fast.

*** Kalyptein is an interesting case. It comes from the Proto-Indo-European *kel- (hidden) which is the same root that gave us “cell” and “hell”, as well as our modern prefix klepto- (to steal). (Yes there is an irony there, that our current apocalypse is connected with kleptocracy.)

Kalyptein also gives us Calypso, the nymph who kept Odysseus on her island for seven years, whose epithet means something like “the concealer” or “the subtle one who keeps things hidden.” The name of the Caribbean music, however, comes from another source entirely, though experts differ on exactly what that source is. The prevailing theory seems to be that this kind of calypso comes from “kaiso,” which in the language of the Efik people of Nigeria means “go on, keep going.”

**** Actual biblical scholars can probably tell me a million ways this interpretation is off base. But if I were trying to send messages to embattled fellow travelers in a time of uncertainty and crisis, this is pretty much what I’d say.

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Word of the Week: Miss

10/15/2016

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Miss

\ˈmis\

For the last few years I have been engaged in the delightful project of Letting Myself Go. Out with constricting fashions, pantyhose, and high-heeled shoes! I wear clothes that are comfortable and pleasing to my eye. I eat what I like and what makes me feel good. I don’t worry about wrinkles. And somewhat to the chagrin of my stylist and my mother, I have stopped coloring my hair.

All of this has been unequivocally good for my wellbeing. But round about the time I started showing up in public rocking visible grey streaks I noticed a sharp uptick in the number of people calling me “Miss.”

Miss??

“Miss” as a form of address is an abbreviated version of “mistress.” Mistress is no mystery: it comes from the Old French maîtresse, which is the feminine form of maistre, or master (which also gave us maestro and maître d’). Maistre comes in turn from the Latin magister, meaning teacher, chief, or director (hence “magistrate”), and magister comes from the Proto-Indo-European *mag-yos, which appears to be the same root that gave us “mega” and (to my delight) “mickle.”

(Interestingly, magister is widely believed to be a constrastive adjective meaning (roughly) “the one who is greater.” Its counterpart is minister, meaning literally “the one who is lesser,” or if you prefer, “the one who serves.” I find this fascinating but it’s probably a different post, and there’s a decent chance my husband the seminarian will get to it first. You’re welcome, sweetie.)

But while masters and maestros and magistrates and ministers and maître d’s all have undeniable clout, the power of a Miss is ambiguous at best. Back in the day there were a few arenas where a Miss had some authority: think of schoolteachers, actresses, and debutantes (who at least had the ability to decide which of their suitors to encourage).* The redoubtable Susan B. Anthony went by “Miss” to her dying day (at which point the New York Times ran an admiring obituary that nonetheless went out of its way to note that “Miss Anthony possessed a figure of medium size [and] a firm but rather pleasing face” and to comment on her fashion choices).

That was then. Today, the pinnacle of Miss-ish authority seems to be the beauty queen. I realize that achieving such a title requires considerable skill and tenacity, but the power of the tiara and sash is limited (the Trumpian transmogrification of Miss Venezuela into Miss Piggy and Miss Housekeeping is only one example, though an especially egregious one). Honestly, though, any term of address that is routinely prefaced with “Little” is to be viewed with suspicion.

Misses Mississippi: Pat McRaney (Miss Miss. '60) crowning Annice Ray Jernigan (Miss Miss. '61). Photo from the Mississippi Department of Archives and History, via Wikimedia Commons

So when the nice waiter turns to me and says, “And for you, Miss?” I have to admit I find it grating.

It’s only men who Miss me—I don’t think I’ve been Missed by a woman since I was a child**—and that tells me that there are gender, age, and power dynamics in play. The waiter’s impulse may be understandable enough on the surface: He can see that I am middle-aged but doesn’t want to acknowledge that by calling me ma’am. So he uses the title appropriate to a much younger woman, thereby allowing us to pretend that I do not look my age. But at the same time, he is serving up a whole lot of implications along with my espresso: that older women are diminished versions of their younger selves, that women’s self-worth depends on their being thought desirable, and that desirability is a matter of being young and available.

To all of which I say, Phooey! I am fifty-one years old. I am respected in my profession, active in my community, capable, funny, and wicked smart. I am neither a debutante nor a beauty queen. I take up space. I ain’t no Miss.

Now I am not about to harangue the poor waiter, who is only trying to do his job. But I am pushing back against the Missification of middle age.

Ma’am will be just fine, thank you. Or mistress. Or maestro.

* I don’t know whether Miss is still in common use among teachers—a quick scan of Grimbert’s high school staff roster turns up mostly Ms-es and a few Mrs-es, plus one Mademoiselle (a veteran French teacher who has stuck with it out of habit).

** The exception has been African American ladies of a certain generation, for whom "Miss + given name" is a term of respect. (And you had BETTER respond with some serious deference yourself or you will be exposed as a lowlife with no home training.)

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Word of the Week: Parablepsis

8/15/2016

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parablepsis

\ˌparəˈblep sə̇s\

This week on the Bluefish Editorial desk, I’ve been doing a lot of proofreading. I like proofreading, at least in limited doses. It’s like doing needlepoint or sorting socks—repetitive, soothing, and every now and then offering a satisfying payoff (like finally finding the elusive partner to the solitary black trouser sock that’s been languishing unmated in the drawer for weeks, or reintroducing the missing “not” without which the entire paragraph collapses into rubble).

This time around I’ve been working on college test prep guides—placing apostrophes and fixing typos and making sure questions are numbered and aligned properly. And, on questions where test-takers are asked to answer a series of questions about an extended piece of writing (usually from literature), I have been making sure that the text quoted in the questions exactly matches that of the original passage. Which, surprisingly often, it doesn’t.

I do not blame. In addition to proofreading such questions, I’ve written a few, and I certainly know how easy it is to make this kind of error. The eye moves faster than the typing fingers can keep up, and sometimes the fingers just … leave a bit out.

What I didn’t know is that there is a word for this: parablepsis.* The term is used in the study of ancient writing to refer to the action of a scribe who in copying a text inadvertently skips (or, less often, repeats) a section, thereby introducing an error into the copy. It comes from the ancient Greek παράβλεψις, meaning to look askance: παρά (para) “beside,” and βλέπω (blepō), “to look at.” It's what happens when you look away from your task for a moment and lose your place.

In fact it turns out there is a whole raft of terms for the things scribes do wrong when hand-copying manuscripts. There’s haplography, in which letters are left out; there’s dittography, in which the scribe writes a word or phrase more than once (and who among us has has not made this mistake at at least once?). There’s homœarchon (mis-transcribing words with similar beginnings) and homœoteleuton (mis-transcribing words with similar endings). There’s metathesis (reversing letters, words, or phrases), and there’s straight up contamination (including an extraneous element, like a marginal annotation, into the copy).**

Unknown Artist. Eadwine the Scribe at Work. Eadwine Psalter. Christ Church. Canterbury (England) UK. circa 1160-70. Via Wikimedia commons

All well and good, yet I keep coming back to that nice little “blep” in the middle of this week’s word. From my time spent wandering the wilder reaches of Tumblr, I have learned that a “blep” is the term for an animal, especially a pet cat, showing a tiny amount of its tongue. Like this:

By Nancy Wong (Own work), via Wikimedia Commons

Or this:

By Dwight Sipler from Stow, MA, USA (Uploaded by Jacopo Werther), via Wikimedia Commons

Or this:

Iamlilbub, via Wikimedia Commons

Images like these make up a significant portion of the internet (at least of the part that isn’t porn). There are entire subreddits devoted to blep, with tens of thousands of participants sharing pictures of their cats’ little pink tongues. The most popular ones get shared and re-posted until Google image search overflows.

I like to think there is a subtle cognate at work here. After all, people blep too, especially when they are concentrating. Like when they’re doing needlepoint or proofreading or sorting socks, or (yes) scribing. I’ve caught myself blepping several times in the course of writing this post. (In fact, I’ve been excruciatingly aware of my own tongue the whole time—and now I bet you are too! You’re welcome!) But it is a universal—I blep, you blep, all of God’s children blep.

From a manuscript at the Bodleian: Saint Mark—lion-headed, stylus in hand, captured in mid-blep.

But why? Some scientists have studied the phenomenon, and they claim that the human blep (or what they gaily call “sympathetic mouth actions in imitative synchrony with manual actions”) is a vestige of earlier gestural forms of communication. They base this claim in part on their finding that blepping is often right-lateralized—i.e. the tongue sticks out of the right side of the mouth—and so may be controlled by the left hemisphere of the brain, which is responsible for processing language. My own highly unscientific investigation (“Huh, which side is my tongue sticking out on now?”) does not corroborate this finding, but perhaps I am ambi-blepsterous.

Still, as I cross-check the SAT questions against the original passages I sometimes think of the monks all lined up in the Scriptorium, dutifully churning out copies of the Codex Zographensis, with their little tongues sticking out of the corner of their mouths. And with each mistake I catch, each haplograph or homœoteleuton, I imagine one of the monks nudging his neighbor to snicker at a colleague, scribbling away on the next bench: “Hey, check out Eadwine! He’s really putting the blep in parablepsis!”

*Everett brought this word home from a class he’s taking on the New Testament. There are many reasons I married him, and the fact that he brings me little posies of interesting words is one.

**And that’s not getting into the deliberate things that scribes (monks in particular) did when fed up with the burdens of the transcriptive life—everything from complaints about cold weather, bad food, and their fellow monks, to criticisms of the author or translator, to grumbles about the hairiness of the parchment they were writing on. One long-suffering monk got to the end of his manuscript and added his own postscript: “Now I’ve written the whole thing. For Christ’s sake, give me a drink.” I feel ya, dude.

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Word of the Week: Nice

7/16/2016

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nice

\ˈnīs\

It’s been a dreadful few weeks. Yet more young men murdered at the hands of the state. Police officers cut down while serving their community. Bombs, guns, coups, and mayhem from Istanbul to Bangladesh to Medina to Orlando to Dallas.

Yet the headlines filling my news feed today have been unusually jarring: “France Shaken by Nice Attack.” Trending twitter hashtags, filled with prayers and good wishes for all who are suffering, include #WeAreNice and #NiceAttack.
If only we were in fact suffering from an attack of excessive nice.

But it’s not that kind of world, nor is it that kind of word.

Our word nice has traveled a great distance in the course of its long history. The word entered English in the late thirteenth century meaning “stupid” or “foolish” (from the French nice [clumsy, weak, poor, simple, stupid], and farther back the Latin nescire [not-knowing or ignorant]). Once arrived in English, nice quickly picked up a remarkable number of additional connotations, including “coy” and “reserved”; by the fourteenth century it also meant “fussy” or “fastidious.” A hundred years after that, nice had acquired some of its relatively modern meanings of “precise,” “subtle,” or “careful.” (This is where we get expressions like “a nice distinction” and “nice and easy” and eventually Nicely-Nicely Johnson.) By the eighteenth century it had come to mean “agreeable” and by the nineteenth, “kind” and “thoughtful.”

(The city of Nice is another kind of nice altogether. It was founded around 350 BCE in the wake of a fierce battle between the Greeks living in what is now Marseille and their neighbors to the east, the Ligurians, who also claimed that territory. The Greeks won, and they commemorated their triumph by turning a longstanding seaside settlement into a new city: Nicaea (Νίκαια), named for Nike, the goddess of victory.)

Nice View (photo by Jonik, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under Creative Commons 3.0.)

Today, nice is usually deemed a positive word, but (perhaps because of its wealth of meanings), careful writers are often told to avoid it. Oliver Strunk (son of Elements of Style co-author William Strunk, Jr.) called it “a shaggy, all-purpose word, to be used sparingly in formal composition.” I remember my grade school teachers threatening to take points off our essays if we said things or people were nice. “It’s too vague,” they said, “It doesn’t mean anything!”

One of the more prominent proponents of this view is the redoubtable Fowler (of Fowler’s Dictionary of Modern English Usage), who criticized nice back in 1926, saying it had become “too great a favorite with the ladies, who have charmed out of it all its individuality and converted it into a mere diffuser of vague and mild agreeableness.”

Some in the anti-nice brigade even try to enlist Jane Austen as a fellow-traveler, citing the wonderful exchange between Catherine Morland and Henry Tilney in Northanger Abbey:

"I am sure," cried Catherine, "I did not mean to say anything wrong; but it is a nice book, and why should not I call it so?"

"Very true," said Henry, "and this is a very nice day, and we are taking a very nice walk, and you are two very nice young ladies. Oh! It is a very nice word indeed! It does for everything. Originally perhaps it was applied only to express neatness, propriety, delicacy, or refinement—people were nice in their dress, in their sentiments, or their choice. But now every commendation on every subject is comprised in that one word."

It does sound as if Henry is anticipating Fowler: he sees a legitimate word that has become unworthy of serious people because silly young women have charmed it out of all specificity. His teasing puts poor Catherine in the crosshairs of a longstanding tradition in which young women’s speech comes in for criticism (even when their male peers are doing exactly the same thing—upspeak, anyone?)

But I reject the implication that Austen herself is a proto-Fowlerite when it comes to nice. Henry Tilney may be an admirable man in many ways, but right here he is being a putz, a fact that his sister Eleanor points out with some asperity. To Henry’s remark about “every commendation on every subject” being reduced to the pabulum of “nice,” she zings back:

"While, in fact … it ought only to be applied to you, without any commendation at all. You are more nice than wise. Come, Miss Morland, let us leave him to meditate over our faults in the utmost propriety of diction, while we praise Udolpho in whatever terms we like best.”

I don’t think nice is vague or meaningless at all—but it is complex. Eleanor puts her finger on the word’s slipperiness when she essentially asks Henry which kind of nice he wants to be. Does he want to be exact, or does he want to be kind? Will he be thoughtful, or will he be foolish? To his credit, Henry shapes up, and while he continues to tease Catherine, and reproves her from time to time, he does so with kindness and decency. He becomes, in a word, nicer.

Of course, nice has its limits. We and our world can be brutal and violent, and nice is a pretty draggled daisy to put in that rifle barrel. Nice the city—beautiful, ravaged, reeling Nice—was built ages ago on the blood of Greek and Ligurnian fighters who didn’t make it home. You can’t fix that with nice. Nice by itself won’t fix centuries of systematic racism or the messy historical tangle of hatred, grievance, exploitation, and resentment that propels young men into sniper nests or puts them behind the wheels of murderous trucks. Nice by itself won’t do much to reform a justice system, on the street and in the courts, primed to view young black men as a deadly threat.

But in the midst of the struggle, I hope we can stage our own kind of nice attack. An onslaught of compassion, and kindness, and maybe a little foolishness. That kind of #NiceAttack, I can get behind.

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