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Word of the Week: Juror

9/29/2014

juror

\ˈju̇r-ər \

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

But I keep my mouth shut.

I am sworn. That is the very nature of a juror: the word comes from the Anglo-Norman jurour from the Latin word iūrāre “to swear.” I have promised to hear all the evidence and to judge the facts, and well, I’ve got to live up to that.

"The Jury" by John Morgan. Licensed under Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

It took a couple of days to recognize the feeling the rituals of the courthouse rouse in me. It’s the same amazed fascination I feel in an airport, or a hospital, or a theme park, or any other complex human system. There are hundreds or even thousands of people swarming around, each engrossed in some fragment among the hundreds and thousands of fragments that give the place its meaning.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That's all I can tell you. I swear.

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Word of the Week: Swelter

9/12/2014

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swelter

\ˈswel-tər\

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

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

"Ase o fuku onna" by Utamaro - Library of Congress. Licensed under Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

So we sit in front of the fan. And we swelter.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cute shirt! I would think. Sleek! Fashionable!

[long pause]

[teeter. wobble]

Maybe it would look better tucked in? Like this?

[tuck. teeter]

Or like that?

[re-tuck, wobble]

[long pause]

No, too dorky. Untucked then.

[try to stand on tiptoe. slip into tub]

Monica tucks in her shirts…

[tuck in. stagger. retuck.]

That looks good, right?

[long pause]

[wobble]

Oh God that looks stupid stupid stupid stupid.

[stomp. wobble]

Wait. Maybe like this.

[long pause]

[teeter]

That’s probably OK.

[wobble]

[pause]

Do I look like I’m trying too hard?

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

I was never very good at fashion.

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

When it cools off maybe I will get me a pair of legwarmers.

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Word of the Week: Cicatrice

9/2/2014

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cicatrice

\ˈsi-kə-ˌtris\

"Ma Cicatrice" By Jacques HONVAULT (Own work), via Wikimedia Commons

I just finished Anthony Trollope’s Can You Forgive Her?—the first of the Palliser novels and a great read about money, sex, marriage, and power. When the story opens, Alice Vavasour had been engaged to her cousin George but broke it off because of unspecified bad behavior on his part and subsequently became engaged to one John Grey.

Grey is a Paragon. He’s noble and good looking and unflappable and a thorough gentleman, and he’s always right. In other words, he’s fairly dull and really irritating.

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

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

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

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

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

When reality falls short, it’s time to make stuff up. I leave the false etymology as an exercise for the reader, but I can at least provide some bogus usage notes. The Google word frequency widget suggests that “cicatrice” enjoyed something of a vogue between 1846 and 1859: I asked Arwulf, our resident history expert, why this might be and she obligingly fabricated a few theories. First she noted that many of the citations were from medical journals. Since chloroform had been invented in the 1830s and popularized in the 1840s, perhaps the spike in references to cicatrices had something to do with an increased interest in surgery? Or, it could be related to the increasing number of anti-slavery books and pamphlets in the US describing (and often showing in graphic detail) scenes of whipping or branding.

Or, since 1846 was also the year in which Elias Howe received a patent for the first sewing machine, there may have been an uptick in sewing-related injuries at about that time. (Arwulf is quite wary of our sewing machine, believing with some justification, that it is out to Get Her.)

"L-Naehmaschine3". Licensed under Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

These all sound entirely plausible to me. Choose the theory that seems most appropriate for your needs.

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

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

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Word of the Week: Protest

8/26/2014

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protest

\ˈprō-ˌtest\

My mind has been rolling on a double track. There’s the day-to-day where nothing much seems out of place. And there’s the part of me watching Ferguson in a stew of helpless anger.

There is much to protest. When a teenager walking down the street in the middle of the day can be shot dead. Again. When the apologists shake their heads and say, well there must have been a good reason for it. Again. When the police force denies accountability and casts forth a smokescreen of innuendo: he was a suspect, he may have been on drugs, he had it coming. Again. When the we wearily embark on another investigation that will mostly likely decree that the killing of this young black person was justified. Again.

A protest is a formal pledge or public declaration. It comes by way of Old French from the Latin protestari, which means to declare or swear publicly. It’s related to testari (to testify), which in turn derives from testis, or “witness.”

"Ferguson, Day 4, Photo 26" by Loavesofbread. Licensed under Creative Commons via Wikimedia Commons

Protest. Testify. Witness. Ferguson is protest in the purest sense of the word: people stepping out into the street. The signs, the shouts, the hands upraised, saying: “This. This is my truth. This is my life. It matters. Listen.”
I sympathize with those who long to throw a bottle, smash a window, curse an armored cop. This is my truth. My life. It matters. Listen.

"Ferguson Day 6, Picture 12" by Loavesofbread. Licensed under Creative Commons via Wikimedia Commons.

The machinery rolls out to shut it down—in the streets, the talking heads, the trolls. Again. Get back. Disperse. Get inside. Stop talking. You are an unreliable witness. Again.

My own truth, my own life, is insulated from so much of the grief and the rage and the pain. I have the hideous luxury, most of the time, of being able to look away. So in the last two weeks I have been trying hard to see. To bear witness. To listen.

And when I do look back to my everyday life I try to hold on to the double vision. My witness: I have access to employment, to health care, to housing, to capital, to social power. Bank managers lend me money. People usually assume I am telling the truth. I have never been stopped by the police except once, doing 80 in a 55 zone. He gave me a ticket and told me to slow down.

I am called to witness. I am called to be useful.

At night, I go running down a dark street. An officer passing in a patrol car raises his hand in a casual wave.

I protest.

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Word of the Week: Rapture

8/18/2014

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rapture

\ˈrap-chər\

I often see divers when I am out swimming. Usually my first clue is a wodge of bubbles swirling up from the depths below me—perhaps a glint of metal, a lamp beam, or the flash of reflective tape as they lumber slowly about. Every now and then, though, I will catch a glimpse of a sleek human shape slipping silently through the kelp forest. No air tanks, no bulky gear—just fins and a stray bubble or two. Free divers. They look like mer-people, occasionally sparing me an upward glance as I churn my way across the glittering margin between the deeps and the air above.

Image via Wikimedia Commons

Free diving is done without breathing apparatus. Mostly these divers stay near the surface, exploring the kelp for a minute or two, then surfacing for air. The most extreme form of the sport, though, is another thing entirely. It’s also called “competitive apnea” and that’s pretty much what it is: the diver submerges for as long, or as far, or as deep as s/he can on a single breath. Sometimes for minutes at a time. Down to where it’s dark and dangerous. Just the thought of it scares the hell out of me.

So I had to take a deep breath (as it were) when I watched the new short Narcose. This 12-minute film is a real-time depiction of a dive made by world apnea champion Guillaume Néry (really there is such a thing! he has a medal!) in which he dons a monofin, dives 125 meters straight down, and then returns to the surface. It’s amazing enough that he can hold his breath while swimming for five minutes and not die. And the shots of him descending and ascending are extraordinarily beautiful. But the heart of the film is the visions Néry experiences on the way, which are based on his own accounts and are reproduced in eerie and loving detail.

It turns out divers at great depths can have vivid hallucinations, as the nitrogen in their body tissues interferes with their brains in ways still not entirely understood. The result is euphoria, exhilaration, time distortion, confusion, and (eventually) unconsciousness and death. Afflicted divers drift and play in the water until their air runs out.

I learned about the phenomenon as a kid, in my many hours spent riveted to The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau. I loved everything about that show: the ocean creatures, the ship Calypso, the Zodiac rafts, Cousteau in his red watch cap squinting out over the waves—and especially his gravelly accented voice-overs. His invocation of “ze RAHP-tuure of ze DEEP” was the most terrifyingly enticing thing I’d ever heard.

Rapture of the deep!

Leave it to a Frenchman to come up with such a poetic and evocative phrase. Left to ourselves, we practical Americans would no doubt persist in calling it “nitrogen narcosis.” (Or worse, the “Martini effect”—so called because someone likened the sensation to drinking one martini for every 50 ft of depth beyond the initial 100—a phrase that evokes nothing more exalted than getting sloshed at an ad-man’s lunch.)

Rapture, though! Rapture can mean ecstasy, joy that sets us outside ourselves. But it also means being snatched up, transported, carried off. There is a lot of violence to the word: it comes from the Latin raptus, which means to tear up or carry away, to abduct—the word that also gives us “rape.” It’s related to modern English “raptor,” meaning a hawk or predatory bird—something that stoops down from above, talons outstretched.

Image by Tony Hisgett from Birmingham, UK; via Wikimedia Commons

Rapture is not simple happiness. In fact, it's not happiness at all. It swoops down and seizes us, carries us someplace we do not recognize, where we may be transformed, or torn to pieces and devoured. That’s scary stuff—stuff I usually prefer not to consider as I splash along the surface of my life.

Except in the last two weeks, three people I know have died very suddenly. I seem to be spending a fair bit of time going to memorial services where we all stand around shaking our heads: “Well I guess he didn’t suffer….” “I saw her last week at the planning meeting.” “God, I’m going to miss him.” They are gone, just like that—leaving only a few widening ripples on the surface. What was it like for them, diving so quickly into not-knowing? Did they see it coming? Could they snatch one last deep breath?

I am no diver. The weight of the water above, the ache in my lungs, the pressure in my ears: the thought of going deliberately into that makes me panicky. I prefer the bright surface of sun and foam and water and air.

And yet, rapture of the deep! It swoops down, talons outstretched, in a blaze of brilliant light. Sharp teeth arcing up from the blue-black shadows below.

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Word of the Week: Badger

8/11/2014

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badger

\ˈba-jər\

Those who have followed this blog for any length of time may have noticed that my children appear here not under their real names but as “Arwulf” and “Grimbert.”

I have discussed the origin of Arwulf’s name elsewhere, but my husband pointed out recently that I have yet to say anything about Grimbert. People are probably wondering, he said, seeing as how Grimbert the badger is much less well known than his companions Reynard the fox and Chanticleer the rooster.

Being a persistent fella, a couple days later he emailed me a raft of links to French folktales involving Grimbert—perhaps I could set the record straight? And write about badgers? Say, maybe “badger” could be a word of the week? Because if I hadn’t done the word of the week yet, “badger” would be a good choice. “Hector” is also a good word. But “badger” is better. If I hadn’t yet written a word of the week, I should really consider “badger”…

All right, already! I set out in dogged pursuit. And as so often happens I found that the burrow leads someplace rather unexpected.

The word “badger” in English originally did not refer to the animal: instead it meant a peddler or trader who sells grain. This might have been a person with a bag, or possibly a person with a badge (for example a license that allows the bearer to sell goods in a given marketplace). This activity was not always entirely ethical. Here’s the first entry in the OED, from the Statutes of Ireland in 1467:

Diuersez aulters persouns appellez Baggeres ount vsez de aller a vne marchee & ount achatez..frument & blee a vne price et puis apres ount prisez lez ditz g[r]aynes a vne aulter marchee & illeosqes lez ount vendeuz pluis chierement par ii d. ou iii d. en vne Boshelle...

I am not sure why this is in Franglish, but here’s the gist: various persons called “Baggeres” would go to a market and buy wheat (frument), then afterwards take this grain to another market and sell it for 2 or 3 shillings more per bushel.

As a result of their (shall we say) entrepreneurial enthusiasm, these mercantile badgers inspired a fair bit of hostility. They are frequently referred to as hucksters or swindlers. In 1592, the preacher William Cupper described them as an actual plague:

Vserers, also brokers, badgers and hucksters, and such like locusts that eat vp the poore and cause the markets to be inhaunced should bee bridled to the ende the poore may haue things better cheape. (cited in James Davis’ Medieval Market Morality: Life, Law and Ethics in the English Marketplace 1200-1500)

Local authorities shared the view that keeping grain prices low helps the poor, but probably with a more practical rationale: expensive bread is a good recipe for civil unrest. Many laws were passed prohibiting the sale of grain anywhere but in approved and regulated markets—in part so that taxes could be properly assessed and paid, but also to keep a tighter lid on speculation—to “bridle the badgers,” as it were.

Making the leap from the locust-like trader of grain to the burrowing quadruped requires another form of speculation. While it is tempting to say that the animal was named for the peddler because it is similarly tenacious and combative, this is (alas) unlikely. The OED says that the name for the animal more likely derives from “badge” or “blaze” – a reference to the white stripes on a badger’s head. Others say that “badger” comes from the French “bêcheur” or “digger.”

Whatever you call them, they are pretty cool creatures. They are closely related to weasels and otters and they live in burrows (called “setts”) that are often quite extensive and can be hundreds of years old. Mostly nocturnal, they eat rodents, eggs, fruit, grubs, small rabbits, bulbs, and whatever else they can find. And they are also reported to be quite clean: unlike many other underground creatures, badgers will not shit in their burrows, and instead use communal latrines outside.

Badgers travel under many different names, including “dasse,” “brock” and “bauson.” (Image by Killianwoods (Template:University Observer) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons)

But as Everett reminds us, “badgering” is central to the badger experience. It can mean “haggling” or “driving a hard bargain” (another nod to the unbridled grain sellers). More commonly, though, to badger means to hound, harass, or nag. Experts agree that this derives from the practice of badger-baiting, but exactly how depends on whose side you are on.

The “badgerer” could refer to the humans and dogs harrying the cornered animal—badger baiting was a popular sport through the early 20th century. In fact the Dachshund was bred as a badger hunter (the German “dachs” means “badger”). It's a little hard to imagine your average wiener dog taking on a desperate 30-pound creature equipped with sharp teeth and long claws, but there it is. The Brits started trying to ban badger baiting as early as 1835, though it stubbornly persists under the table even now.

On the other hand, it may be the badger itself that does the badgering. The animal is by nature peaceable but will fight fiercely when provoked. Some say that when it fights it will bite until its teeth meet and then hang on until its adversary gives up. (Ferrets and weasels are known to do this too—see, for instance the famous Annie Dillard essay, “Living Like Weasels,” which in turn inspired a Laurie Anderson song I like very much.)

This seems to jibe with the character of Grimbert. While Reynard is clever and unscrupulous, and Chanticleer is vainglorious and thin-skinned, Grimbert is honest, diligent, and very stubborn.

And it’s not just a “get out of my face and don’t bother me” kind of stubborn. At one point in the story, Reynard gets in hot water with the other animals and asks his nephew Grimbert to hear his confession. (I don’t know how a fox ends up uncle to a badger. It is a mystery.) Grimbert does so and grants absolution, only to see Reynard leap right back into sin at the sight of the next henhouse. You’d think he’d give up, but a few episodes later, the exact same thing happens again. Reynard asks Grimbert to shrive him of a lengthy catalogue of sins (including theft, adultery, and murder), Grimbert agrees, and again as soon as he is absolved Reynard goes right back to his old ways.

The author presumably wanted us to laugh at the folly of a priest who keeps on absolving sinners even when they have no intention of changing their ways. But I can’t help but admire Grimbert’s tenacity: all evidence to the contrary, he cannot let go of the possibility that maybe—just maybe—this time his uncle can be brought to the good. Faced with usury, swindling, or wanton cruelty, the badger keeps the faith. He keeps that shit out of the burrow.

He bites down hard and does not let go.

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Word of the Week: Susurrus

8/4/2014

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susurrus

\su̇-ˈsər-əs\

It is August, the pinnacle of summer, and this week’s word is full of summer associations. A friend ran across it in a novel she was reading and was delighted to find a word she did not know—an especially rare pleasure for highly-literate types. “Encountering a new word,” she told me, “is like finding a gem, or a perfectly ripe fruit.”

It’s also to my ear an exceptionally beautiful word, both in its sound and its sense. A susurrus is “a whispering murmur.” It is the sound of a breeze passing through a forest; of hushed conversations at the other end of a reading room; of lizards scuttling through dry leaves on a hot afternoon. It’s a drowsy, peaceful word.

English lifted this one wholesale from the Latin word for “humming or murmuring.” It seems to derive from a Sanskrit root svárati (meaning sounds or resounds) that has engendered a flock of cognates across many languages: there’s Greek syrinx (Σύριγξ) "reed flute," Old Church Slavonic svirati "to whistle," Lithuanian surmo "pipe, shawm," German schwirren "to buzz," and the Old English swearm, or "swarm."

As a kid I spent many of my school vacations with my grandparents in the mountains of western North Carolina, where they went each year to escape the infernal summers of Chapel Hill. The cottage they rented was made of chestnut boards marked with the twisting runnels left by burrowing insects in the trees. There was a big front room filled with rough-hewn oak furniture and perhaps a deer’s head mounted above the fireplace. There was a shabby and somewhat unreliable kitchen, a couple of bedrooms for grownups, and a big attic where whatever grandchildren were in residence slept on beds with metal springs and faded coverlets made of tufted mauve chenille. Fifty miles from Asheville, and at least 10 miles from the nearest town with a coffee shop and a supermarket, there was not much to do, which was very much the point. We kids swam in the river. We stitched ill-fitting doll dresses and cut our fingers whittling homemade propeller toys. We went on walks with our grandmother, who brandished her walking stick at snakes and (to our lasting mortification) swiped fresh sweet corn from other people’s fields.

Next to the porch grew a giant yew bush, eight feet across. A child squirming through the outer branches could rest hidden inside, in a resinous dappled cave almost big enough to stand up in. I spent endless afternoons here, equipped with a couple of peaches and the battered house copy of The Adventures of Robin Hood (a great 1930s edition that I have not seen since: the covers were frayed and some of the pages loose but it had full-color illustrations and a wonderful pseudo-Old-English style). It was very quiet. There was the whisper of a scythe as the farmer next door brought in the buckwheat. The mail truck rolled by on the distant road. A tinny fizz as my grandfather tried to catch the afternoon news on his portable radio.

The leaves moved against the sky. A few black ants came to investigate my peach pits.

I know I came out eventually. I know there was supper and cousins and card games and fireflies. But I don’t remember that part right now. I remember the rustle of piney needles under my bare legs. The faint ripple of talk drifting out the kitchen window. The wide drift of an afternoon with nothing to do but watch the trees. A perfectly ripe piece of fruit.

Susurrus.

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Word of the Week: Marooned

7/25/2014

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marooned

\mə-ˈründ\

I’ve been visiting my mother for the last couple of days. These more-or-less monthly visits have a pleasantly predictable groove. There is much schmoozing and exchanging of updates on family and friends. There is arm-waving about the State of Things Political, Artistic and Academic. She reads interesting bits of the paper out loud in the morning before I have had my coffee and I try not to get annoyed. I frowse about in my pajamas until noon and leave papers all over the table and she tries not to get annoyed. She asks me to fix various electronic devices that aren’t working right. The wine is good, and the conversation excellent.

It’s also, I’ve found, a place where I can get a fair bit of work done. There’s a comfortable spot at the kitchen table; there is Wifi and coffee. So yesterday, after a pleasant morning discussing Tom Stoppard and reprogramming the irrigation system, I happily settled in.

Only to discover that the Internet had disappeared.

A quick investigation revealed that there was signal, but the cable modem was not sending out IP addresses. There was no connection between the house wifi and the rest of the world. Past experience suggested that this was likely a brief interruption caused by a fault at the cable company and it would self-resolve shortly.

But for the moment I was marooned.

No big deal—I am resourceful! I cobbled together an outline based on stored information and handwritten notes. I wrote emails and stacked them neatly in the outgoing message tray. My paragraphs were dotted with <check ref> notations, awaiting the life-giving flood of digital information.

After a couple hours of this happy Swiss Family Robinson existence, though, I needed to check an etymology. A quick rummage through the bookshelves revealed that while my mother owns useful reference works like Eminent Chinese of the Ch’ing Period and the Cambridge World History of Human Disease (which, I might add, falls open to bookmarks at the entries for cholera and tertiary syphilis—fun stuff, Mom!), she does not, apparently, own the Oxford English Dictionary.

Walter Paget [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

“I seemed banished from Human society…I was alone, circumscribed by the boundless ocean, cut off from mankind, and condemned to what I called silent life.”

Reader, I despaired.

Then my lovely husband (should I start calling him Friday?) reminded me that I could use my iPhone—elderly and temperamental as it is—as a portable base station. Suddenly, I had a raft, an oar, and a makeshift sail.

Clinging to this frail bark, I was able to access my online references. I restocked my supply of properly spelled names and attributions. Emails bobbed out on the flood like so many corked bottles. The smoke of a passing ocean liner drifted across the horizon: Facebook! And there at last was the UCSD VPN and my faithful OED.

It was clear what this week’s word must be.

I knew that beyond the familiar usage meaning “to strand,” there were also communities of “Maroons” in the inaccessible back country of the West Indies: fugitive slaves who lived high up in the mountains for generations, fighting the plantation owners and ultimately a powerful force in the independence movements of the 19th century. At a guess I would have said that these folks were so named because they were in a sense marooned, living isolated from the rest of society. But it turns out the opposite is true. Here’s the earliest usage of the term in English, from the 1666 History of the Carribby-Islands:

[Slaves] will run away and get into the Mountains and Forests, where they live like so many Beasts; then they are call'd Marons, that is to say Savages.

(I would venture that the plantations were probably just as savage as the mountains, if not more so. No doubt you had to be mighty tough to survive long in either.)

The word comes from the French marron, which means “feral” or “fugitive.” It seems also to be related to the Spanish cimarrón (fugitive) and cimarra (wild place). Both of these derive in turn from the classical Latin cȳma (young shoots of a plant). So we are talking someplace overgrown, wild, and inhospitable: a good spot to hide out for a while.

The idea of being marooned appears a bit later. It first refers to people being deliberately stranded in a desolate place as a form of punishment (or just to get them out of your hair). The OED mentions an account of Magellan marooning a mutinous priest on the coast of Patagonia. Over time the meaning expanded to include people who were cast away through misadventure, like good old Robinson Crusoe—though the word never appears in that book as this sense doesn’t show up in the language until several years after it was published.

“Maroon” seems also to have taken an odd journey through the American South, where apparently a “maroon party” refers to an extended camping or hunting trip in the country. Whether it’s co-optation or poor taste (remember cakewalk?), this is a usage I have never heard: anyone out there who is familiar with the phrase please let me know!

And then there’s the color. This also comes from the French marron, but this marron means “chestnut” and seems to be an entirely different word with an entirely different lineage. It has been knocking around the Romance languages a long time but it’s not clear where it came from before that (the Medieval Greek word for “cherry” [μάραον]? Some speculative proto-Romance word meaning “rock”? No one is sure.)

By Achromatic (Own work), via Wikimedia Commons

Fortunately, my period of isolation fell far short of Crusoe’s 28 years. And while my iPhone raft was an admirable stopgap, I am happy to report that a little additional fiddling with connectors ultimately restored the full flood of Mom’s internet. So I sailed back home to San Diego and she is exploring the deeper cultural meaning of Weird Al Yankovic videos.

Of course this essay would not be complete without a mention of perhaps the most culturally significant usage of the word:

Update January 2015: Copyright goons exist! Imagine, if you will, Bugs Bunny, carrot in hand, cracking: "What a maroon!"

I admit I include it with some trepidation: if the Warner Brothers copyright goons come after me I may end up stuck on a desert island somewhere.

Perhaps I can borrow Mom’s book about the Eminent Chinese of the Ch’ing.

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Word of the Week: Bereft

7/14/2014

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bereft

\bi-ˈreft\

Specialized Sequoia Elite (2007).

I went out to lunch with a friend last week and left the restaurant to discover that my trusty bicycle—which I’ve had for seven years and more than 15,000 miles—was gone.

Vanished.

Disappeared from a city-installed bike rack on a busy corner in the middle of the work day.

I think I stood with my mouth hanging open for nearly a minute. My lovely friend offered hugs and the loan of her spare bike. A passerby stopped to ask if we needed help. A kind man working in the bank whose windows overlook the rack said that no, he hadn’t seen anything and unfortunately their outdoor security cameras cover the ATM, not the bike rack. (Some priorities, these!) So I filed a police report, talked with our insurance agent, and made my way to my afternoon appointments on the bus.

For a day or two after I was more than a little stunned. I kept mentally revisiting the rack, each time surprised anew by the bike-shaped mass of air filling the space where she ought to have been. I could almost see the dotted lines outlining her absent shape.

Sure, I was pissed off. Distressed at the time and expense of replacement. Sad that people steal, whether from greed or necessity.

But more that that I felt bereft.

Bereft is a very old word. It’s from the Old English beréafian: the prefix “be-” plus réafian, which means to rob, to raid, to carry off, to break a hole in, to pluck. Before that the Old Saxons called it birôƀôn, the Old High Germans biroubôn, the Goths biraubôn, and before that the early Germans said *birauƀôjan.

The word been around as long as loss. After the Vikings or the Ostragoths or the Huns swept through, the survivors huddled beneath their smoking rooftrees, staring at the air filling the space where their goods, or their cattle, or their children had once been. Bereft.

Viewed in that light, this is honestly pretty trivial. It’s just a bicycle. We will not starve in the winter because of a plundered granary or grieve a kidnapped child. This is a middle-class annoyance.

But still—I feel forlorn. Far more, I think, than if I had lost a car (though I hasten to add that I am NOT in any hurry to test this hypothesis).

One friend suggested that putting in maintenance hours on a bike or car makes it dearer to us, but I don’t think that’s the case here. I spent some time getting her set up the way I wanted, but I was never one to lovingly polish the frame or tinker with the gears. I fixed the flats, kept the drive train clean and lubed, and got where I wanted to go.

Others have said I’ve lost a friend, even a part of the family. That’s not right either. She wasn’t a member of the family. She never had a name, though I always thought of her as “she.” She didn’t have a personality. And she wasn’t a friend, though I suppose she was a companion of sorts.

She was a tool, an expression of my will, an extension of my body that moved me through the world. She was part of me.

So now I have an odd version of phantom limb, forgetting she's gone until I am brought up short by the stump where she used to be. There’s an empty spot in the garage. My calendar shows two meetings 3 miles apart and I suddenly realize that no, I can’t just ride between them. I run errands on the battered old hybrid I handed down to Arwulf when she started middle school. It steers like a tank, and there's something seriously amiss with the rear wheel. I hitch along, grumbling and remembering how it used to feel to hit this hill, that curve, the long straightaway down to our corner.

When the time comes (and the insurance comes through) I will go out and find another ride. But I feel the need to memorialize my companion—plucked up, tossed into some raider’s longboat and shipped off to Craigslist or dismantled for parts.

She was a good bike.

I’ll miss her.

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Word of the Week: Catherine wheel

7/7/2014

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Catherine wheel

\ˈka-th(ə-)rin- ˈhwēl\

Happy Independence Day! In honor of the season, this week’s word is fireworks-related.

A Catherine wheel is a kind of firework that rotates while it burns. Often it’s a rocket or a sparkler angled and mounted on a pin, so that it spins around in a circle as it fires. I don’t know whether many Americans call it by this name: fireworks vendors also call them pinwheels. But “pinwheel” seems like a puny little name compared to Catherine wheel, which carries love and death and torture and mystic visions trailing in its wake.

Here’s the story:

Catherine was the daughter of the pagan king of Alexandria in the 4th century CE. She was brilliant and well-educated, as you might expect from someone who grew up with free run of the greatest library in the world. And when it came time for her to marry, she announced that she wasn’t going to settle for anyone less beautiful, wise, or wealthy than herself. Many suitors presented themselves and were summarily dismissed—until the Virgin Mary appeared to Catherine in a vision and married her to Jesus.

I can certainly see the teenage Cathy falling hard for Jesus: he’s got a lot going on in terms of her stated desires for beauty and brains and wisdom, and even wealth, if you are counting the heavenly kind. What I do find a little weird is that in paintings of Catherine’s mystic marriage, Jesus is almost always depicted as a baby—often sitting on his mother’s lap while he puts a ring on Catherine’s finger. Marrying a guy who is actually sitting naked on his mother’s lap is perhaps not everyone’s ideal wedding scenario, but who am I to judge?

Hans Memling: The Mystic Marriage of St. Catherine (1479). Image via Wikimedia Commons

José de Ribera: The Mystic Marriage of St. Catherine (1648). Image via Wikimedia Commons

At any rate, the newlywed Cathy, in the fervor of her love and her newfound Christianity, began using her formidable wits and eloquence to convert pretty much everyone she met.

Around this same time the Roman Emperor Maxentius was persecuting Christians (a popular pastime among 4th century Roman emperors). Cathy paid him a visit, hoping that she could talk him out of this. Maxentius, having heard her widely praised as a brilliant and well-educated young woman, decided to put her in her place by arranging for her to debate his top scholars and orators. These fellas, Max told himself, would smack down her pro-Christian arguments and establish once and for all that idol worship was where it was at for all good Romans.

They didn’t stand a chance.

Cathy whupped them. She ran rings around them logically. Adding insult to injury, her arguments were so compelling she converted her opponents to Christianity on the spot. Enraged, Max had his scholars put to death and threw Cathy in prison, figuring that if he couldn’t shut her up with reason he probably could with force.

In prison, though, she turned out to be even more of a rock star. Hundreds of visitors streamed through her cell to meet her and talk with her, and she converted them all. As convert after convert emerged, Max’s fury grew even greater and he had all of them—including his own wife—executed as well.

And still people flocked to her. Desperate to stem the tide, Max tried a different tack: perhaps Cathy would marry him? Seems a perfect plan: he’s an emperor, she’s a princess, and hey! as it happens, he’s available!

Cathy would have none of it. She was already married. (To a baby, but that’s beside the point.)

At which point Max lost it completely and sentenced Cathy to death on the wheel. (This is a horrible mode of execution: the condemned is tied to a wagon wheel and bludgeoned to death, with the executioner breaking as many bones as possible along the way.)

Before researching this post I had always assumed that this was how she died. Saints are often depicted with the instruments of their martyrdom, and Catherine is usually shown with a large wooden wheel with metal spikes attached. Plus it’s super gruesome, and that always is a plus for martyrs.

But it seems Max was thwarted even here: when Cathy was brought to the wheel, it exploded into pieces the instant she touched it. Whizzzz! Bang!! Boom!!!

By Chris Sampson, via Wikimedia Commons

If this were a movie, Cathy would escape at this point, bring Max to a just comeuppance and start a happy new life with her baby-husband. But since we’re talking Catholic saints, there’s no Hollywood ending. The wheel may have been blown to smithereens, but Roman emperors did not lack for back-up execution methods, and Max had Cathy summarily beheaded. Which at least had the advantage of being quick.

St. Catherine became a hugely popular saint in the Late Middle Ages. Historians agree that she almost certainly never existed, but that has not stopped people from building shrines, displaying bones said to be hers, and peddling phials of the healing oil said to flow from her miraculously preserved body.

She is honored today as the patron saint of philosophers, preachers, librarians, and scholars. (She is not, however, the patron saint of fireworks—that honor goes to St. Barbara, who is also for some reason the patron saint of mathematicians.)

Our family missed out on 4th of July fireworks this year: the kids and I were fresh off a much-delayed cross-country flight and ended up falling asleep before they even started. But as I lay dozing in bed, hearing the distant whoomps and thumps and howling dogs, it seemed somehow fitting that a story that starts with a girl and a library ends up with fireworks.

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Word of the Week: Juror

Word of the Week: Swelter

Word of the Week: Cicatrice

Word of the Week: Protest

Word of the Week: Rapture

Word of the Week: Badger

Word of the Week: Susurrus

Word of the Week: Marooned

Word of the Week: Bereft

Word of the Week: Catherine wheel

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