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Word of the Week: Monocoque

6/8/2015

monocoque

\ˈmä-nə-ˌkäk\

Every now and then a copyeditor stumbles upon an unexpected gem. A few weeks ago, I was working on a coffee-table book depicting various scale model vehicles made of LEGO. On a two-page spread featuring a lovingly crafted Ferrari 312T4, I came across the following:

...the model strips down to the bare driver's monocoque.

This snapped me out of my serial-comma trance. Stripping models? Bare drivers? Monocoques?? Call me juvenile, but it all sounded just a teensy bit suggestive.

Time to consult with some real juveniles: I asked my children. What was going on here? What did they think a monocoque was? Grimbert said, “Er… Whatever it is, there’s only one of them?” and looked uncomfortable.

Arwulf wasn’t sure either but (ever ready to sling the hypotheticals, bless the child) suggested I subvert the phallocentric implications by replacing the term with hemipenis, this being the word for the copulatory organs of male lizards and snakes. These organs are usually referred to in the plural--hemipenes, which sounds to me like a rather unfortunate kind of pasta--because lizards and snakes in fact have two of them, with each one making up half of the total equipment (hence hemi-).

(Snakes and lizards do not, you may be interested to know, use both of their hemipenes at once but alternate between the two “when the interval between copulations is relatively brief.” (Thank you, Wikipedia.) I am, btw, sparing you the images of squamate porn which, while readily available on the Internet, are honestly a bridge too far for a family-friendly blog. Google it if you are curious.)

The children being of limited help, I gave in and looked it up. Turns out the monocoque originated as an aeronautical term for a fuselage structure that bears the stresses of flight. The OED cites 1919 airplane design manual that describes a monocoque as a frame “so constructed that it can withstand all the stresses which it is called upon to bear, without the necessity for longerons or cross bracing members.” When applied to motor vehicles (like race cars) a monocoque is a chassis built as a single unit, forming a reinforced cage that protects the driver. The word is a French portmanteau: mono (one) plus coque (shell or seed). Coque is related to the Latin coccum, which comes from the Ancient Greek κόκκος (kokkos), meaning “grain, seed, or berry.”

So the LEGO modelers were not describing some sordid scenario of squamate supermodels getting it on with the pizza delivery boy, but instead a model race car that could be partially disassembled to show the protective cage where the driver sits. It’s all about protection.

This is the kind of monocoque the LEGO folks were talking about. (By J.Smith831 (Lamborghini Aventador LP 700-4 chassis), via Wikimedia Commons)

Interestingly (to me at least), coque is also a milliner’s term for a small loop of ribbon used to trim a hat. The OED cites a couple of examples from 19th century English fashion magazines, including a description from 1873 of “A large bow…composed of mixed coques of velvet and grosgrains silk ribbon.” Now no one knows hats like the English in my opinion, and in fact there are many fine examples of the current Royal Family sporting coques of every size, shape, and hue. Princess Beatrice had a particularly fine example at her cousin’s wedding.

Here is the lady in the hat By Surtsicna via Wikimedia Commons

And here is the schematic. Image created by User: Sodacan, via Wikimedia Commons

Much ink has been spilled about the Meaning of the Royal Hats. Is it an assertion of wealth and social primacy? A cry for attention? Épater la bourgeoisie? Performance art? After seeing round upon round of pseudo-scandals sweep through the tabloids (Diana’s secret daughter! Kate and Camilla at each others’ throats! Prince Harry Nude!) I myself wonder whether the coques may serve as a kind of monocoque: a protective armature that deflects the stresses of public scrutiny.

Just look at this:

By Carfax2 (Own work), via Wikimedia Commons

To my eye, this scene is all about the hats. Prince William and Princess Anne may be ablaze with medals and gold braid and military splendor but it seems almost redundant behind the smiling vanguard of royal women, coques en garde. From the Queen’s blue and white IKEA wine bucket to Princess Eugenie’s paper shredder tangle, the hats trap the observer’s gaze, cross-bracing the family, protecting the vulnerable human flesh within.

Though actually Princess Anne reminds me a bit of my tax lady.

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Word of the Week: Tax

5/12/2015

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tax

\ˈtaks\

April was a cruel month. Some of you were slammed with yet another snowstorm; around here it means the official end of the rainy season and the sinking realization that whatever meager sludge of water we have left in our reservoirs is going to have to see us through to October at least.

And of course it was tax season. Tax is very old word, which is not surprising given how long we’ve been doing it. (“Hey Thog! You have collected many rocks! You must give some to the cave elders so that we may throw them at the people in the next valley. Also to support public campaign financing.”) “Tax” comes from the Latin taxāre, meaning to evaluate or assess—it’s possibly also related to tangare (to touch). Before that it derived from the Greek τάσσω (tassein), which means to put in order or to arrange in battle formation—hence our modern word “tactics.”

"Zehent" by Geschichte Österreichs. Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons

I actually find doing the taxes almost soothing. It’s a modern version of an ancient ritual of self-assessment, where we tally up our pile of rocks from the year, touching them one by one: what we earned, what we gave away, what we are responsible for. A chance to count blessings in the most literal way imaginable.

This year, though, with me self-employed and Everett pulling double shifts, we were forced to acknowledge that the complexity of our situation outstripped the time we had available to puzzle it out. For the first time ever, we had someone else prepare our return. And after I arrived at her office, it became clear that while I might be sentimentally concerned with the tally and touch aspects of taxes, this woman was a master tactician. Sitting at a desk that resembled the bridge of an aircraft carrier, with two giant computer monitors gleaming balefully, she took my file of statements and receipts and began to arrange them in battle formation, deploying them against an invisible foe.

She rattled her ten-key through a long list of categories. Mortgage! Property tax! Medical care! Refunds! Dependent care! Then she stopped. She looked at the previous year’s return, flipped a few pages, then fixed me with a gimlet eye. “On last year’s return—this was home business income?” She pointed to a paltry line item, the fruits of a single editing gig that I took on late in the year after leaving my previous job. “You didn’t claim anything against it?” Um, well, it wasn’t all that much and I hadn’t been keeping track...

She seemed to swell a little bit. “You paid taxes on all of it?!?” I dithered a bit but admitted that I did, I guess?

She sat up straight in her chair, like a field marshal preparing to dress down a recalcitrant orderly. “That,” she said flatly, “is NOT acceptable. Not on my watch.” Fingers flying on her keyboard, she took me through a rapid-fire series of deductions. How much did I spend on this? What were my expenses for that? Advertising? Utilities? Insurance? Uniforms? Professional fees? Travel? As the evidence of my fecklessness mounted, her exasperation grew.

"Alfred von Schlieffen 1906" by Photo studio E. Bieber. Licensed under PD-US via Wikipedia. First I will finish your taxes. Then I will invade Belgium.

“Where’s the mileage from driving to these meetings?” she demanded. I imagined her standing in a map room, epaulets atremble with choler, smacking her riding crop on the desk.

Well, I said vaguely, I meet with that client after I go swimming, so I was already going in that direction. Does that count?

She smacked her invisible riding crop. “Of course it counts! Now. Expenses! Did you buy printer cartridges?”

Yes…

“How many? How many printers do you have?”

Well, two, but the kids mostly use one of them so maybe that doesn’t...

<Smack!> “Do you EVER use it?”

Well, from time to time, but….

<*Smack!!*> “That’s YOUR printer! YOUR cartridges! If someone else uses it that’s pilfering!”

But.…

“It Is a LEGITIMATE! BUSINESS! EXPENSE!” (*SMACK!* Rattle rattle ping!)

I was beginning to realize that my version of tactics amounted to hollering and whacking at the tax form with a stone club. And I was in the presence of a general, with a mind full of pincer movements and strategic engagements and heavy artillery.

I surrendered.

Two hours later I staggered out into the daylight, more than a little shell-shocked, but clutching the promise of a hefty refund and a long list of instructions for how to arrange my forces for next year.

Some of this I have taken to heart. But I am still struggling with the doctrine of "Never retreat! Never yield the barest inch of deductible assets!" I am, it seems, a lover not a fighter. So I muddle on, doing my best to keep my tin soldiers in order. At least I know the cavalry will back me up if things get really grim. The tax preparer swears that if we get audited she will ride to the rescue, rattle her sabre, and hold my hand.

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Word of the Week: Dutchman

4/10/2015

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dutchman

\ˈdəch-mən\

One of our domestic pleasures is watching reruns of This Old House: the venerable PBS reality show about home renovation.

I will confess that part of the fun is sneering at the conspicuous consumption exhibited by some of the homeowners (“Marble tile? In the KIDS’ bathroom?” I mutter. “And you’re making your roof gutters ENTIRELY OUT OF COPPER??” )

And part of it is the Schadenfreude when the plumbing guy makes his first descent into the basement and intones Cassandra-like (if Cassandra had been blessed with a thick Boston accent): “Well, there’s a fair bit of seepage here under the sub-floor.”

But for the most part the show is extremely soothing. The problems are so practical: a drafty attic, a crumbling deck, an inconvenient doorway. Competent workmen solve them all. They hammer and saw and lay bricks, and eventually the homeowners move back in to shiny new kitchens and much-diminished bank accounts.

Plus the workmen speak a wonderful language—full of routers and bullnoses and rabbits. And at least once in every season someone has occasion to fix a broken doorjamb or re-set a window and announces that he’s going to use a “dutchman.”

By USCapitol (Stone Drum "Dutchman" Repairs) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

In the building trades, a “dutchman” is a piece of wood or stone that is carved to shape and used to fill a gap or repair a broken or rotten section of something. Interesting, but why call it a dutchman? I ran the question past a couple of real Dutchmen (and Dutchwomen) of my acquaintance. Had they heard of this term? What do Dutch people call this kind of little patch? Being primarily mathematicians, however, my friends could offer little insight.

So I was forced to fall back on Google. One source (devoted to the history of stage construction) offers a reasonably plausible story that is almost certainly not true. According to this account a famine in the early 18th century led to a large migration of Dutch people to England, many of whom sought work in the building trades. At the time, the English were using wattle and daub to finish walls, which (apparently) meant that every wall had to be finished in a single work session. But the Dutch had figured out a technique that was much closer to modern drywall: they applied plaster and straw to a plank, let it dry, and then put the planks in place, using strips of linen and plaster to cover the joints.

The English workmen, being set in their ways (and possibly seeing their own livelihood compromised by these interlopers), viewed this approach with considerable scorn--a despicable shortcut countenanced only by sots and foreigners. They coined the term “dutchman” to refer to the act of covering up sloppy workmanship, whether with a plaster veneer or a wooden patch. After a while, though, even the nativist English realized that wattle and daub was a huge hassle and the new technique was faster, cheaper AND allowed for more decorative detail. And gradually the term “dutchman” lost its pejorative edge and even became a complimentary nod to the frugality of a people who will carefully patch a flaw rather than replacing the whole beam.

So far so good, but then Grimbert came along and asked why on earth we call the Dutch Dutch anyway? They don’t live in Dutch-land. This, I thought, was an excellent question. Turns out the word comes from the Old High German diota, meaning “people” or “nation.” In 9th century Germany this word was used to mean roughly “what regular people talk” (as opposed to Latin) and soon came to be a broad ethnic term referring to anyone who spoke German as their vernacular. By the 12th or 13th century the country was known as Diutisklant – today Deutschland – and it included the language and people of what is today the Netherlands. When a big chunk of this region became an independent state in the 1580s, the local inhabitants were speaking a variant of German called “Nederduytsch” (literally “Low German” because it was spoken in the low-lying countries near the North Sea, as opposed to the relatively high ground of Germany). And the English, right across the channel, gradually came to use the term ‘Dutch’ to refer exclusively to the Netherlanders since this was the particular subset of the Germanic people that they had the most dealings with.

So while in English Dutch is Dutch and German is German, in Dutch duitsch is German and Nederlands is Dutch. And in Germany Dutch is Holländisch and German is Deutsch. And in France German is allemande and Hollandaise is sauce. Which you can get on French fries. In Belgium.

It is things like this that make me long for the relative simplicity of seepage under the sub-floor. And a dutchman to smooth out the uneven spots.

By Alper Çuğun from Berlin, Germany, via Wikimedia Commons

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Word of the Week: Vermin

3/23/2015

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vermin

\ˈvər-mən\

Our firstborn came downstairs looking a little harried. “There was something scroobling around in the ceiling last night,” Arwulf said. “It was freaking me out.” Raccoons on the roof, I said soothingly. They like to use it as a shortcut between the front and back yards. Sometimes I can see them clambering from the eaves into the tree outside the bedroom window. The kids looked at each other doubtfully. “It didn’t sound like that,” Arwulf said. “It was RIGHT over my head. Like, inches from my face.”

Everett being out of town, I opted for denial. If not perambulating raccoons, perhaps these were benign or even charming creatures? Sweet little bunnies and squirrels, having tea parties! In cunning wee waistcoats! No way was I going to stick my head up into the crawlspace and disturb their adorable revels.

"The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse." Project Gutenberg etext 19994. Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons

A few nights later, up reading at 4 AM, I head it too – skittering, scrabbling, punctuated by the occasional small thump. This was not the familiar raccoon noise. This was closer, louder. Skritchier.

Something was in the ceiling. Several somethings. In fact it sounded like a pretty lively party up there.

I thumped on the ceiling with a broom. The noises stopped dead. I swept the ceiling with the bristles. There was a mad rush overhead as the party relocated to another corner of the attic.

I went back to bed and stared at the ceiling in the dark. Bunnies and squirrels. Undoubtedly. Enjoying a festive evening of scones. And ninepins. And disco. Surely not chewing on the wiring. Or gnawing into the cupboards. Or swimming up through toilets. Or leaping out of heating vents onto the beds below, all scrabbly claws and scaly tails. Certainly not!

As soon as it was light, I called the rodent guy.

This individual proved to be an extremely laid back dude in his early 20s, with a surfer’s lope, pierced ears, and an impressive array of tattoos. He opened the hatch door into the attic and a curiously evocative smell wafted out. Adorable vest-clad squirrels, I said hopefully? “Nope,” he said, descending the ladder. “Rats.”

Rats, I thought. Rats. But how bad was that really? After all, Arwulf had pet rats for several years – they were peaceable enough as housepets go, and I eventually became inured to the perpetual hint of rodent pee in the upstairs hallway. (That, I suddenly realized, was the nostalgic pong drifting through the open hatch.) Not that kind of rat, Josh said patiently. “Norway rats. They’re ugly and mean. Diseased. Total vermin.”

Vermin. The word comes from the Latin vermis, or worm—i.e. maggots–and quickly extended to include all animals “of a noxious or objectionable kind.” The OED includes in this category reptiles and “stealthy or slinking” beasts, as well as creatures of “loathsome or offensive appearance or character” that prey on food and livestock. I was reminded that “vermin” also gives us the US variant “varmint.” Rats would seem to qualify.

Despite myself I thought of Arwulf’s pets (Brandy, Marbles, and Galadriel). The winsome way they scrunched up their whiskered noses at visitors, hoping for treats. How they held peanuts in their teeny little paws and gnawed at them with long yellow rodenty teeth. The sound of little claws skittering along Arwulf’s floor. And along pantry shelves. And through the vents. House fires. Hantavirus. Plague.

Get rid of them, I said firmly.

So Josh set to work around the roofline, using steel mesh to plug up all the holes in the stucco where the varmints were getting in. For all my resolve, I remained ill at ease. As Josh made his way across the roof I tried not to think about the doomed creatures beneath his feet, huddling in terror at his step, hearing the gates slam shut around them as they were walled inexorably into their tomb. (“For the love of God, Montresor!” I muttered to myself, eyeing the bourbon. 11 AM? Still too early. Damn.)

A couple of hours later, his dreadful work complete, Josh went back up into the attic with a bunch of baited traps. “They’re shut in without food or water,” he explained cheerfully as he pulled the hatch closed. “So the peanut butter is pretty much irresistible. I’ll come back in a few days to see how you’re doing.”

Off he went. I closed the door behind him and turned to face the empty house, shifting and creaking in the afternoon heat.

I decided at this point that the sun was pretty damn well over the yardarm. I had that drink.

I slept badly that night, dreaming uneasily of roadblocks and broken machinery. Every couple of hours I woke with a start. Was that a snap? a squeak? In the silence I tried not to think of the scene above my head: the rodent family cautiously emerging from hiding, looking for their accustomed way out, only to find it blocked, and the next one, and the next. I tried not to imagine their growing panic and horror as the attic closed in around them, the smell of peanut butter and the sinister gleam of wire.

"The Cask of Amontillado." Harry Clarke [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

I wondered if maybe we should have gone to a hotel.

But a few days later, the scroobling was gone, and a peaceful silence reigned above. Josh returned with rubber gloves and a trash bag and retrieved a single furry corpse. “The others must have been outside for the day when I closed things up,” he said. “Looks like you’re in the clear. I’ll leave you a couple of traps up there. If you smell anything bad give me a call.”

And that, it seemed, was that.

Alas, that is never that when it comes to vermin. And once you have a brush with “noxious and objectionable beasts,” it is a short leap to “winged insects of a troublesome nature.” Once again it was Arwulf who tipped us off, discovering a pile of what looked like sawdust or tiny seeds behind a dresser. After a fruitless few minutes debating whether this might just possibly be the detritus left by a stuffed animal that had sprung a leak, we resigned ourselves to the inevitable. A few minutes on Google image search taught us a horrid new word:

Frass.

Frass. By JJ Greive of Home Inspections Of Puget Sound (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Frass is the excrement of larvæ, or the refuse left behind by boring insects. It comes from the German frasz, itself from the root fressen, which means to devour.

It is related to our English noun fret (as in fret-work)—presumably the net-like or pierced appearance of fretwork resembles the skeletal remains of a leaf that’s been eaten away by an insect. Or the lacy remnants of a floor joist, or a bearing beam gnawed away until it resembles a pierced medieval rood screen. Not to mention the effect on a homeowner so afflicted.

I put in a call to the termite man.

The termite man, as it turned out, might have been the rodent guy’s grandfather. They resembled each other not at all––Ben was short and dark and wiry where Josh was tall and blond and lean––but they shared a keen gaze coupled with an incongruously laid back vibe. (It occurs to me that when your job involves dealing with people whose homes are infested with vermin, a calm and unflappable demeanor is undoubtedly an asset.)

Ben prodded our baseboards and tapped at the walls and the eaves. He went back up into that ghastly crawl space. “Watch out for the rat traps!” I said helpfully. I hoped he didn’t care for peanut butter.

When Ben emerged, his verdict was less dire than we might have expected: rather than fumigating the entire house, we could get along by zapping the little bastards with electricity. I signed this order with equanimity. Termites are unquestionably vermin in my book, not vermin masquerading as pets or vice versa. Termites never have tea parties. (Neither kid ever had an ant farm, thank God.)

Ben returned a few days later, ray gun in hand, and spent a pleasant afternoon sending bolts of electricity along our joists. He claims that the framing is not badly damaged and I am inclined to believe him unless I actually feel the house lurching underfoot. My conscience seems similarly stabilized. I have yet to reprise the long night of the Tell-Tale Scroobling, and I can walk underneath the attic hatch without thinking about vermin as much as 60 percent of the time. I do not brood about the fate of the termites. I do not picture their once-seething nest tucked behind our bookcase, nestled between the studs. Lying in bed at night, I do not imagine them reanimated and swollen to Frankensteinian proportions by mysterious galvanic forces. Not at all.

My candle was nearly burnt out, when, by the glimmer of the half-extinguished light, I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open; it breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs....

Perhaps I should imagine them in little vests.

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Word of the Week: Ambergris

2/21/2015

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ambergris

\ˈam-bər-ˌgrē(s)\

It’s been almost a month since the last word (sorry!) and I find myself returning to a throwaway fact I unearthed in the course of writing that post: marmalade used to be made out of quinces flavored with rosewater and musk or ambergris.

That’s pretty intoxicating. Not only is the quince rumored to be both the forbidden fruit from the Garden of Eden AND the apple of discord that Paris gave to Aphrodite (thus pissing off Hera and Athena and sparking the Trojan War, thanks dude), rosewater is straight out of the Arabian Nights.

All this and ambergris too? The name literally means “grey amber” but the stuff is entirely unrelated to the more familiar yellow amber (ambre-jaune) that comes from fossilized tree sap. Ambergris is marine, much smellier and much more mysterious.

For a long time, no one quite knew where it came from. The Greeks thought it was a kind of magical guano. The medieval Chinese said it was floating dragon spit. The Arabs said it came from springs deep beneath the shoreline. Dutch sailors claimed it was the sap of a rare coastal tree (and no doubt could arrange to sell you a seedling for a reasonable price).

John Singer Sargent: Fumée d'ambre gris (1880). [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

The reality is perhaps equally weird. In the words of the OED, ambergris is:

A wax-like substance of marbled ashy colour, found floating in tropical seas, and as a morbid secretion in the intestines of the sperm-whale. It is odoriferous and used in perfumery; formerly in cookery.

“Morbid secretion” forsooth: we are talking sperm whale shit. In particular, it is the shit of bilious and dyspeptic sperm whales. Sperm whales eat a lot of squid, and it seems that the squid beaks can trigger an inflammatory reaction in the whale’s guts. The result is a thick tarry mass of fatty digestive fluids mixed with squid ink and beaks. The whale shits this out (it is said that the accompanying flatulence can be heard for miles) and it floats around in the ocean for a time, ripening and mellowing, until eventually it washes up somewhere looking (according to Melville):

...like ripe Windsor soap, or rich mottled old cheese; very unctuous and savory withal. You might easily dent it with your thumb; it is of a hue between yellow and ash colour. (Moby-Dick, ch. 91)

Ambergris is fabulously rare, and fabulously expensive: a 6 pound hunk of the stuff found by an English beachcomber a couple of years ago is said to be worth somewhere between $60,000 and $150,000 dollars.

The thing about ambergris is that it is supposed to smell absolutely divine. A perfumer quoted in a recent news article says “It’s beyond comprehension how beautiful [the smell] is… It’s transformative. There’s a shimmering quality to it. It reflects light with its smell. It’s like an olfactory gemstone.”

Others, more prosaically, say it smells something like well-rotted manure with top notes of tobacco and decaying seaweed. Most accounts agree that there is a distinct whiff of animal feces or ‘barnyard’ about it. And it has squid beaks in it.

Not what I would choose to stir into my breakfast confiture, but people are strange.

Ambergris is traditionally used as a fixative in perfumes to help other more evanescent smells last longer. But as with other conspicuously expensive and smelly things, people also liked to use it in foods and medicines on the rationale that anything that fragrant and that expensive must have magical properties. It was used to treat stomach ailments, paralysis, heart trouble, epilepsy and sore throats.

It was also (unsurprisingly) prized as an aphrodisiac. Charles II of England, ever the ladies’ man, fortified himself for his escapades with a dish of scrambled eggs with ambergris. Madame du Barry is said to have slathered the stuff all over her body and thrown herself into the path of Louis XV, who obligingly installed her as his chief mistress. (Did you know the position of chief mistress (maîtresse-en-titre) was an official title in pre-Revolutionary France, and came with considerable power and its own set of apartments? Probably worth a few ounces of ambergris body butter.)

Theodor Giesinger, “Comtesse Du Barry.” Original held and digitised by the British Library. Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Grimbert tells me that 18th century doctors made a concoction of chocolate, ambergris, and powdered human skulls, which was prescribed as a cure for hypochondria. I imagine it worked, since a similar mixture (less the powdered skull) was still in use a hundred years later when Brillat-Savarin wrote his Physiologie du Gout:

Whenever I feel, some day or other, the burden of age, when I think with difficulty, and feel oppressed by some power unknown, I take as much powdered ambergris as will lay on a shilling with a cup of chocolate, sugar it to my taste, and it has always done me a great deal of good.

Interestingly, the modern word “amber” originally referred only to what we now call ambergris––the word comes from the Arabic “anbar,” which means perfume or fragrance. (I do not know if this is the same word as in Iraq’s Anbar province but it is possible.) Eventually though, the word extended to refer also to resinous amber (which confusingly enough is also sweet smelling, also washes up on beaches, and also has stuff embedded in it). By the 17th century the French started calling the fossilized tree sap “ambre-jaune” (or yellow amber) to distinguish it from the “ambre-gris,” and the term "true amber" (or “ambre proprement dit”) gradually began to refer to the resin rather than the perfume.

(And here’s a neat little aside: resinous amber gives us our modern word for electricity. The Latin word for resinous amber was “electrum,” from the Greek ἤλεκτρον (“elektron”). This in turn is believed to come from an earlier word ἠλέκτωρ (“elektor”), possibly Phoenician, which means “shining sun.” And when scientists in the 16th century picked up a hunk of this shiny sun-like golden stuff and rubbed it, they noticed that other lightweight objects like bits of straw and paper would then stick to it. So they called things with this property “Electrick bodies” since they behaved like “electrum.”)

But back to ambergris!

It has been suggested that 19th century whalers tracked their quarry by following the faint smell of ambergris on the waves. Moby-Dick seems to offer at least potential corroboration––Ishmael suggests that “the motion of a Sperm Whale’s flukes above water dispenses a perfume, as when a musk-scented lady rustles her dress in a warm parlor.”

I find this a rather intoxicating image: the scented lady rustling in her parlor, illuminated (Ishmael would insist) by whale oil lamps or spermaceti candles. Evanescent, though. “Proper amber” will turn soon enough from ambre-gris to ambre-jaune; electric lights will muscle out softer glows; the scent of “olfactory gemstones” replaced by Febreeze and Axe body spray. Our hot chocolate and our marmalade will be clean and modern, free of morbid secretions.

But I’m still keeping my eyes open when I walk on the beach. Who knows, I might happen across some fossilized dragon spit for my hot chocolate. Hold the squid beaks.

"Sperm whale fluke 2". Licensed under CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons

William Quiller Orchardson, "The First Cloud." Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

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Word of the Week: Marmalade

1/30/2015

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marmalade

\ˈmär-mə-ˌlād\

M was one of the first friends my parents made after they moved to Los Angeles in the early 1960s. The story I always heard was that shortly after my parents had moved into their rented house my father was walking down the block and heard someone in a nearby house playing the piano. The piece was something Russian and complicated, and whoever was playing played very very well indeed—so much so that my dad made a point of introducing himself to the next adult he saw emerging from the house, on the assumption that anyone who could play like that was someone worth knowing.

This was M, and she was indeed worth knowing. She and my parents were friends from that point forward, through births, divorces, deaths, career changes, and mid-life crises. She played the piano. She raised two children as a single parent. She edited journals and spoke three languages. After her children were grown she went back to college and got a degree in Indo-European studies. She threw parties full of poets and musicians and scholars.

When my mother stopped by M’s house for afternoon tea, I did not complain about having to tag along. I would not be entertained or made much of: M was not especially interested in children. But there was a jigsaw puzzle of a Pieter Bruegel painting in the coffee table drawer and I would sit on the rug and piece it together—kids in the town square rolling hoops and walking on stilts and pulling each other’s hair. Every now and then the grownup chat would break through my absorption: something about Sanskrit, or real estate, or a tale of someone’s outrage or ineptitude, which M would recount with gleeful animation, gesturing with her cigarette.

The picture on the puzzle. Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1526/1530–1569); "Children's Games," via Wikimedia Commons

M was very beautiful. She was born in New York but spent a large chunk of her childhood in the Russian expatriate community in 1930s Paris. For me she carried all the glamour of the ancien régime mixed with a healthy dose of California beatnik. She told stories of jazz clubs and operas, of debutantes in jeweled gowns who put lemon juice in their eyes to make them sparkle as they swept into the ballroom.

Her house was small and cluttered, full of framed pictures, objets de vertu and piles of miscellaneous stuff. Whenever I visited her in later years she was perpetually “cleaning things out” and would press some item upon me: a high modern table lamp, a pamphlet about a German naturist child-rearing technique, a beaded vase. She would urge me to take some of the endless stacks of CDs spilling off her shelves, while warning that some of them were “trash”—and then watch in attentively eloquent silence as I self-consciously made my picks. For all her shedding of objects the house never seemed to get any less crowded; going inside was like visiting the carapace of a decorator crab, growing ever more encrusted with shells and shiny rocks.

And there was the marmalade. M’s back yard overflowed with citrus, including a large and thriving Rangpur lime tree. Rangpur limes are not technically limes – they are, as best I can tell, mandarins crossed with lemons. The fruit is fragrant and very sour. For years M used them to make marmalade, which my parents coveted and which I found utterly horrible.

Marmalade, after all, is a very adult jam. While now we know it as a conserve made from citrus fruits boiled with sugar, originally it was a paste or jelly made from quinces and flavored with rosewater and musk or ambergris. The resulting mass was then cut into squares and eaten, the medieval equivalent of gummy bears (though funkier-smelling and much more expensive). The word comes from the Portuguese word for the quince fruit: marmelo. Marmelo is itself a blend of the classical Latin mēlomeli (honey flavored with quinces) and melimēla (a variety of apple). It’s related to the ancient Greek words for apple (μῆλον ) and honey (μέλι): something astringent, and something sweet.

In later years I developed a grownup’s taste for bitter flavors and discovered that I rather liked M’s lime marmalade. As this fortunately coincided with M’s decision that she was no longer really interested in climbing ladders or hoiking around vats of boiling jelly, I became a custodian of her recipe.

And after that, every time I visited her in the winter I came away, willy nilly, with bags of fresh limes. Sometimes I protested—I was traveling on the train and couldn’t carry a 20 lb sack of fruit; I was about to leave for a trip and didn’t have time to deal with them—all in vain. The limes were inexorable (and on at least one occasion when I did not get to LA during the proper season M prevailed on my mother to mail me a box, California Ag Department rules against shipping citrus across county lines be damned).

The last time I saw M, we had dinner out and I drove her home. After many years with a second-rate piano, she had just inherited a Steinway, which she showed off with unrestrained delight, patting the keys and naming them by the colors the notes made in her head: maroon, shiny black, purple, matte black, crimson. She played Chopin for me and told me that while most people with perfect pitch find the notes go a little bit sharp in their old age, she (ever unconventional) was going flat. This pleased her a great deal. Before I left, she pressed a frying pan and a flowered nightgown into my hands and reminded me that I must come back in January for the year’s lime consignment.

She fell ill two weeks later and died after a brief and endless struggle.

At a memorial service a couple of weeks ago, M’s tiny house was swept eerily clean, windows thrown wide, wooden floors visible for the first time in my memory. The lime tree out back was bursting with fruit, all perfectly ripe and fragrant and sour. “Take all you want,” M’s daughter told us, “Take more!” So we picked and picked, filling every bag we could scrounge. And since then I’ve been in my kitchen almost every evening, slicing and stirring and processing. I’ve made nearly 6 dozen jars so far, yet the pile of limes doesn’t seem to be getting any smaller. We are racing to freeze the rest, keeping a precarious step ahead of the fruit flies and the mold.

Six dozen jars so far -- then ten dozen, a dozen dozen? More? We are utterly marmaladen, but this will be the last batch from that fabulous tree. I can hear M in my head: “It was a good year, kiddo. Take a few more.”

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Word of the Week: Resolution

1/21/2015

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resolution

\ˌre-zə-ˈlü-shən\

I like Christmas. I like the tree and the presents, the carols, the Christmas Eve church service. I like the house full of relatives all waving their arms and talking at once. I like the constant edge of chaos in the kitchen, the endless procession of groceries and pots of coffee, the ongoing puzzle of meal planning and repurposing leftovers.

By YVSREDDY (Own work), via Wikimedia Commons

The rituals around New Year’s are much less appealing, largely because I don’t like hangovers, I don't like crowds and noise, and I don’t like staying up late. If I have to participate, I'd prefer to watch the Times Square ball drop at 9 PM California time and then repair to bed with my book. And on top of it all we are supposed to make resolutions? Blech.

Resolutions often seem to be about rigor – they are all about firmness, decision, conclusions, and determination to act. We have Congressional resolutions, judicial resolutions, and resolutions of difficult issues. Even musical resolutions bring things to a conclusion, taking an unsettling, dissonant chord and shifting it to a more harmonious one. (There is a fine, and almost certainly apocryphal, story about how Mozart’s mother, frustrated with her son’s propensity for sleeping past noon, discovered she could get him out of bed by playing the first seven notes of a scale -- Do re mi fa sol la ti…. – and then stopping. This was said to so agitate young Wolfgang that he was compelled to leap out of bed and rush to play the final note, thereby ensuring that he stopped frowsing around and did something useful with his life. Thanks mom.)

These kinds of resolutions are very much in keeping with the modern New Year’s scene. Pull up your socks, balance your checkbook, hit the treadmill. Oatmeal for breakfast, and don’t even think about putting butter on it.

But when you go back to the classical Latin, resolūtiōn is the action of untying or unfastening, or unravelling a puzzle – it suggests a limp or relaxed state, looseness.

These days, very few resolutions seem to be about looseness. Based on an extensive search of the available literature (read: 5 minutes on Google) these seem to be the most common New Year’s resolutions:

Lose weight
Get organized
Save money/get out of debt
Exercise
Quit smoking
Give to charity/volunteer
Floss

No wonder only about 8% of Americans keep them. I think it’s time we bring some looseness back to the New Year’s resolution. (Here are some of mine from the last few years that have worked out pretty well: Throw away the scale. Don’t work on weekends. Have some wine. Go outside when you can. Nap.)

The best resolutions are not about forging a new and improved self. Instead, they are about looseness and unraveling and bringing things into proper balance. Fittingly, resolution also means reducing something to its constituent elements--like when things decompose. In about 1520, John Rastell wrote that

Corrupcyon of a body..ys but the resolucyon..Of euery element to his owne place.

This actually makes decomposition sound quite pleasant: it’s just a matter of all the elements going to their own places.

This appeals to me, because as lovely as the holidays can be I must admit that one of my very favorite parts is when it all ends. The relatives decamp. We take the extra leaves out of the table and wash the napkins and haul the tree out to the curb. The ornaments get put away in their little boxes and go back to their spot in the rafters. The turkey carcass is boiled into broth and stashed in the freezer. The scattered pine needles are swept up and dumped in the greenwaste bin. The coffee filters and the can opener are at last put away in the proper drawers. The house feels spacious and quiet.

Loose.

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Word of the Week: Dinkle

11/17/2014

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dinkle

\ˈdiŋ-kəl\

There is a list of labels I never would have thought in a million years could describe me. Sunday School Teacher. Business-woman. Geology buff.

And now: Band Mom.

Not Grimbert's band: This is Liberty-High-School-Band-5713 by Loadmaster (David R. Tribble); via Wikimedia Commons

It started innocuously enough. When Grimbert started high school he signed up for marching band. Sounds like fun! I thought. He’ll play a little clarinet, maybe learn some John Philip Sousa. I envisioned him playing the national anthem and the school fight song at football games. Maybe they would even line up in the shape of a giant “W” on the field.

I had no idea.

The first hint I had was Grimbert coming home after the first week of practice announcing he needed Dinkles and a shako.

“Say what?” I asked.

“Dinkles, mom. It’s a kind of shoe.”

“Oh. OK. And a … spork?”

(Eyeroll) “Not a spork, mom. A shako.”

Turns out competitive marching band is not just school fight songs and giant initials: it is more like a cross between a Busby Berkley spectacular and a marine landing. There are props! There is precision drill! There is a color guard dancing and waving flags and twirling rifles and sabers. (Sabers?!) There are hours and hours and hours of practice in the blazing sun and late into the night. There are drill books with indecipherable scrawls and grids and hash marks and squiggly arrows showing the triangle people moving HERE, while the square section moves THERE and the little circles weave in and out in between, and then all 150 kids end up in a perfect 10 x 15 grid thus opening a porthole to a new dimension. And they do this while marching backwards playing the 1812 Overture. Preferably with live cannon, if the band director could figure out a way to get them onto the field without damaging the artificial turf.

It’s all highly educational. Grimbert has gotten a lot out of it, and he seems to be having a pretty good time. I too have learned many things in my tenure as a Band Parent:

I have learned how to load 150 instrument cases onto a trailer in under 15 minutes.
I have learned how to make concession stand nachos on an industrial scale. (Start with five 7-pound cans of liquid cheese.)
I have learned to avoid the band room when the kids are changing out of their uniforms. (Imagine, if you can, the smell of several hundred adolescents who have been wrapped in polyester and marching in the sun for 3 hours. I take it back. You cannot imagine this.)
I have learned that when the kids put on their sporks (“Shakos, mom!”) with the feather plumes it changes the way they stand and move and makes it much more difficult to pick out one’s own kid from the crowd. It also makes them look like giant Q-tips.
I have learned that nothing is sacred, musically speaking, when it comes to band music. Grimbert’s field show this year features the “Lacrimosa” movement from Mozart’s Requiem. Which they play while marching backwards, wearing Dinkles and shreks (“Mom!”) The first time I witnessed this, I laughed so hard I shot coffee out my nose. No one else in the bleachers seemed to think it was all that funny.

And of course I had to track down where the word “dinkle” comes from. My first thought was of “Crazy” Harry Dinkle, the band director in the comic strip Funky Winkerbean. (Actually this is untrue. My first thought was: “Isn’t ‘dinkle’ slang for penis?” Which in fact it is, though this seems to be an entendre that is studiously overlooked in the marching band world. And since I do not especially wish to Go There, we will instead consider Funky Winkerbean.)

For those of you who do not read the comics (I hear newspapers are dead), Funky Winkerbean is a long-running strip that centers on staff and students at a high school in an unnamed small Midwestern city. It’s supposed to be one of the “comic” strips--at least the last panel often includes a joke of some kind--but since the mid-90s it has been taking on Serious Real Life Issues. The result is an unnerving mix of bad puns, cancer, snarky comments, alcoholism, PTSD, and crushed dreams. Characters age in real time, so you can use the career of your high school avatar as an index of your own decay. (Former editor of school paper hopes to land the anchor spot at a local news station. Whoops! Instead she gets laid off & replaced by a younger, sexier woman promoted from the weather desk! Hilarious! And then her husband leaves her! Ha ha ha!!)

At any rate Band Director Dinkle is supposed to be lovably obsessed with his apathetic and marginally talented band. Their anomie may be due to the fact that their team is called the Westview Scapegoats, or it may be because they always have to play in the rain. Dinkle dreams of brilliant shows, ablaze with fireworks and pageantry; his students trudge around the field, dent their instruments, and occasionally sneak off to sniff glue behind the gym or get each other pregnant. In recent years Dinkle has moved on to some kind of district management position, but he reappears periodically to offer advice to his successor (who is missing one arm because of a car accident caused by her drunk-driving high school boyfriend. What a riot!)

I was fairly certain that Dinkles are cognate with Band Director Harry: the question was, were the shoes named for the character or the was character named for the shoe? I figured the latter, but it turns out I was wrong: the Savoca family, a Pennsylvania outfit that has made marching shoes since the 1940s, revamped their line in the mid-1980s and named their flagship product after Harry Dinkle, whose beaming mug now adorns every box.

Of course back when the Savocas made this arrangement FW’s Westview High was a pretty happy-go-lucky place. Characters hadn’t started aging yet, and so they frolicked on their Grecian urn, forever young and fair, or at least until Batuik unleashed the grim indignities of mortality on the poor saps.

Actually the more I think about it, the more I realize that there is a certain melancholic sweetness to this whole Band Mom thing. Grimbert’s high school, like the one in FW, is named Westview. And while I devoutly hope Grimbert won’t be subjected to the full range of miseries that Batuik inflicts on his characters he will certainly grow older. He will struggle. He may be thwarted in love. He will probably lose his hair (sorry sweetie, but the genetic die seems to be cast on that one).

But here on YouTube he will remain in Keatsian glory, a “happy melodist, unwearièd / For ever piping songs for ever new.” You’ll know him when you see him. He’s the one in the spork.

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Repost: Election Day

11/3/2014

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Hello Readers! Sorry for the long silence: I got unexpectedly busy this month. New posts are in the works. But in the meantime, in honor of Election Day, here is a re-post from earlier this year.

Originally posted June 5, 2014

For many years we have hosted a polling place in our garage. And for about as many years Everett and (more recently) I have also been serving as Precinct Inspector for good old 110270-Garage-Howe-Residence.

By Cary Bass (Own work), via Wikimedia Commons

Maybe I watched too much Schoolhouse Rock at an impressionable age, but I find the whole thing almost unbearably touching.

Take the Election Supply Box.

Here we are in a major democracy, the largest economy in the world, a SUPERPOWER. We are going to exercise our most sacred civic responsibility, evoking Lincoln and Jefferson and marble halls and lofty ideals about human equality and the right of self-determination. There are ballots and procedures and safeguards designed to make sure people can vote freely and securely and have their vote count. And that is WAY cool.

But along with the ballots and pens and Official Seals I also get a stapler and a roll of masking tape and a little packet of thumbtacks. Because you also need these things to make democracy work.

A week before Election Day I will be sitting in the midst of the unpacked supply boxes, taking inventory and filling out paperwork, and suddenly I will find myself clutching a packet of thumbtacks and fighting back tears. Because the Big Important Things like how we run our community and the future of our nation depend not only on ballots, but also on tiny mundane things. Like making sure the poll workers have some thumbtacks to post the street index so a campaign volunteer can get out the vote.

And that just about kills me Every Single Time.

So Monday night we prepped the garage as we have so many times before. I pulled out the bikes and assorted impedimenta (I forgot we even HAD a wading pool!). Everett hung up a set of old tablecloths (red white & blue, of course) to conceal the shelves of tools and paper towels and weed killer. I swept up the dust and grit that had accumulated since the last election, dragged in a table, a few chairs, and a lamp, and set up the booths.

We had our thumbtacks.

We were ready for democracy.

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Word of the Week: Drive

10/9/2014

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drive

\ˈdrīv\

We have been teaching Arwulf to drive.

Drive is a very practical, utilitarian verb, brought to us unambiguously from the Germanic. There’s Old English dríf-an, High German trîban, Old Norse drîfa, and the Gothic dreiban, all with meanings quite similar to our English word.

But as is so often the case, this simplicity is deceptive. By my count the OED offers more than 50 different definitions for drive (and that’s just for the verb).

Our goal has centered around the most common modern sense of the word: we want Arwulf to learn to drive—“to direct the course of a vehicle.”

Image via Wikimedia Commons

This is supposed to be a quintessential part of the American Teenage Experience™. You can’t have Rebel Without a Cause or American Graffiti, or Back to the Future or Ferris Bueller or even Bill & Ted, if you don’t drive. Teenagers are supposed to yearn for their licenses and that breath of freedom and independence (not to mention the chance to canoodle in the back seat).

It looks like it’s not so much that way any more. Freedom and independence (and even canoodling) can be had on the internet: a car seems more trouble than it’s worth. In the face of Arwulf’s indifference, we had to resort to a different, earlier form of driving: We drove her to it. We chivvied her along like a recalcitrant musk ox, with the switch of Noodge and the goad of Parental Pressure.

I get what she’s been driving at: for her the incentive to drive is sorely limited. It does not mean freedom. It means chores. If she is going to have to run to the grocery store or chauffeur her brother to karate she’s going to drive a hard bargain.

Some moments have driven me to distraction. As we clock hours in the car preparing for her behind-the-wheel test, I have learned that heavy traffic inspires Arwulf to extremely animated discourse about historical mayhem: Roman emperors! Plagues! Great Power Intrigues! She drives her point home about how the Hapsburg emperors were all LOSERS, as I the supervising parent watch the blind curve and the semi in the next lane and the sudden slowing up ahead and clutch the passenger-side panic handle until my teeth creak. It could drive a person to drink.

Other modes of driving seem quite soothing by comparison.

Lumberjacks drive logs down rivers.
Beekeepers drive bees into new hives.
Artists drive media like paint or gold leaf, spreading it out quickly and very thin.
Washerwomen “drive a buck of clothes,” soaking a batch (or “buck”) of wash repeatedly with lye or soap in a “bucking tub.”
People drive feathers, using a current of air to separate them by lifting the lightest ones away and collecting them by themselves. (Do this a few times over, and you get the sort of extra-fluffy result that Othello is referring to when he says The tyrant custom … / Hath made the flinty and steel couch of war / My thrice-driven bed of down.”)
This also happens with wind over fresh snow. The tiniest cleanest flakes blow into drifts—so, “pure as the driven snow.”

[deep breath]

In the end, Arwulf showed some drive. She finished her training hours, mastered the three-point-turn, and went to the DMV, where the State of California declared itself satisfied with her competence.

In Arwulf’s words:

i acquitted myself Well and Mightily and now have one whole drivers license with which i can send 2000 pounds of metal and plastic careening down the public thoroughfare on the power of liquefied dinosaurs at speeds humanity was never meant by nature to attain.

Or, in the words of another modern sage: