Category: Teens

Word of the Week: Dinkle

11/17/2014

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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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:

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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: Incunabula

7/1/2014

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incunabula

\ˌin-kyə-ˈna-byə-lə \

Still on the road this week—Arwulf and I have been visiting college campuses and assorted family members along the East Coast.

The big marble box (Photo: Public Domain)

Yesterday we stopped in at Yale, where I showed her several of my former haunts. Most of these were dismissed with a tolerant nod or an eye-roll—until we visited the Beinecke rare book library. This truly remarkable building is essentially a box within a box. The exterior walls are made of thin marble panels that block UV rays but allow some light to filter through. And inside this translucent marble shell is the Holy of Holies: a 6-story glass cube filled with ancient books that seems to float suspended in the space. (In fact, in true sacrosanctal fashion, the glass cube is rigged so that if a fire starts in the stacks the entire space is flooded with halon gas, which will suppress the fire without risking water damage to the books. People in the stacks are advised to get out ASAP if this happens because this system does not care if you live or die. What matters is saving the books.)

The Holy of Holies. (Photo credit: Everett Howe)

This is a place filled to the rafters (if it had rafters) with cool stuff. There are Shakespeare Folios, Gutenberg Bibles, Audubon’s Birds of America (the marvelously-named Double Elephant Folio), and countless maps and illuminated manuscripts. And they let grubby undergraduates handle them! (Well, they do encourage you to wash your hands first.)

In fact Beinecke was a major factor in my own decision to go to Yale way back when. (Other key factors: Yale was far away from my home in Los Angeles, and I got in.) Arwulf, who wants to major in history and is deeply interested in medieval studies (and who, like her mother before her, wants to get the hell out of suburban Southern California) beheld these riches, and a gleam appeared in her eye.

The gleam intensified when our guide told us that the Beinecke library is home to a significant percentage of the world’s incunabula. (Though it turns out Harvard has more, ahem.)

I had been vaguely aware that this word had to do with old and rare books. But it actually derives from the Latin word for swaddling clothes--literally, the straps that hold a baby in a cradle (in- plus cūnae, or cradle). So by extension, incunabula refers to the earliest beginnings or first traces of something. Eventually people started using it specifically to refer to the earliest beginnings of print culture; more precisely, to books printed before 1500 and the broad adoption of movable type in Europe.

Here's an example from 1499: Copulata super tres libros Aristotelis De anima iuxta doctrinam Thomae de Aquino. It may not be quite as dirty as it sounds. (Image from Wikimedia Commons)

Swaddling has been around a lot longer. It is widely used to calm newborns, and some people recommend keeping it up well into a baby’s first year. Nowadays most people use a blanket of some kind, but classically people used strips of cloth (“swaddling bands”), sometimes for several months, on the theory that restraining a child in this way will help her limbs grow straight and without deformity. (It doesn’t.)

We swaddled Arwulf when she was a tiny infant because it seemed to help her sleep. We called it the Baby Burrito and it was adorable. But soon enough, she grew too active to put up with this treatment and kicked her way out of her wrappings. The waffle-weave blanket we used is still tucked in a drawer, but incredibly, she is about to start her senior year of high school.

There are times I fear she will never be able to live on her own. How on earth could she? She rarely gets out of bed under her own steam; she has been known to skip several meals in a row because she can’t be arsed to get off the computer and look in the fridge; she loses her cell phone in the heaps of laundry piled on the floor of her room. And yet we see the traces of her adult self emerging from the adolescent cocoon: the intellectual fire, the bravery, the focus, the story-teller’s flair.

She gleams as she gazes at the incunabulae: this is her kingdom. She is getting ready to kick through her shell and leave her wrappings behind. Strips of linen heaped on the bedroom floor.

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Word of the Week: Ungulate

6/9/2014

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ungulate

\ˈəŋ-gyə-lət\

A few days ago I asked a table of friends and family what my next Word of the Week should be. Grimbert piped up: “How about ungulate?” he said.

Ungulate? This was pretty much out of the blue. Why? I asked him.

“Don’t know,” he replied. “It’s just a cool word.”

I am an indulgent parent, so I agreed. Ungulate.

But I have to say my first association with this word was tinged with desperation. When I was a child my family would visit the San Diego zoo on our summer vacation. And every single trip, we would find ourselves marooned mid-afternoon in the farthest, hottest part of the park, trudging past enclosure after enclosure of antelope. I was not impressed then with the majesty of the ungulate. I wanted to sit down. I wanted some shade. If at all possible, I wanted some ice cream. And none of these were forthcoming—only more antelope. Every year we would plan our route to avoid this purgatory: perhaps we could visit the antelope first, on our way to the elephants? Or take a detour by the tigers? Or just hang out all day in the cool darkness of the reptile house?

To no avail. Three o’clock would roll around and there we would be, grumpily contemplating the lesser eland, with miles of baking pathway between us and the nearest lemonade stand. Honestly, if you had asked me then what “ungulates” were, I would have said they are sore-footed, sun-struck misery.

But my beloved son had made a request, so I girded my loins and set forth into the furnace of inquiry! An ungulate is a hairy, hooved land mammal like an antelope, a sheep, or a yak. The term comes from the Latin ungula (hoof), which comes from unguis (nail or claw). These animals run about on their tippy toes, with the weight-bearing toe or toes protected by a hoof—a modified nail that works sort of like a dancer’s toe-shoe, supporting that tiny little bone.

All well and good. But apparently the zoological world has been struggling for some time with what exactly it means to be an ungulate in a taxonomical sense. It seems that when people began making up family trees they started by focusing on how things look. So when they saw creatures with hooves and creatures with “sort of” hooves (like elephants and hyraxes with their big flat nails) they naturally assumed that all of them came from a common ancestor. As a result the category of ungulates got very very large so it could contain all these hooved and sort-of-hooved creatures in one big happy family (well, Order, actually).

Then genetic mapping knocked everything into a cocked hat. Not only did the “sort of” hooved animals come from a completely different branch of the tree from the actually-hooved animals, even the story of the actually-hooved animals proved to be way more complicated than anyone thought. When you look deep into the DNA, it turns out that “even-toed” ungulates like giraffes and hippos are actually more closely related to dolphins than they are to “odd-toed” ungulates like horses and rhinos.

This is all very peculiar, but that is how science works. I am grateful to the good folks at the Ultimate Ungulate page, which has a great deal more detailed information, plus some really fine pictures of yaks.

The upshot, according to these dedicated zoologists, is that “ungulate” should be considered a descriptive term but not a scientifically definitive one. In other words, an ungulate is a hairy land mammal with hooves. But don’t get all technical about it.

While the Ultimate Ungulate page is unsurpassed when it comes to detail, once again the prize for evocative usage goes to the OED. One of the earlier documented usages of the word comes from Van der Hoorven’s Zoology in 1858:

“Feet tridactylous, with all the toes insistent, ungulate.”

That is a phrase so gorgeous that even miserable eight-year-old me might have glimmered for an instant on the death march past the dik-diks. I believe it refers to a rhinoceros, which is certainly three-toed, ungulate, and fairly insistent.

Of course when it comes to insistent tridactylous feet, even a rhinoceros cannot compete with “The Irish Washerwoman” which, if you clicked through on the link at left, is now stuck in your head and will remain so for at least the next 6 hours. (Sorry about that.)

I am an adult now and I take my own children to the San Diego Zoo. But we have learned from my childhood travails. When we weary of the okapi and the gazelle, we summon the SkyBuckets and are whisked from the antelope mesa back to the lush oasis of the flamingo pond and the slushee vendor. Cooling drinks in hand, we watch the streams of tourists flowing through the gates like migrating wildebeest, yakking away.

Grimbert's right. It's a pretty cool word.

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Wildfire Diary

5/15/2014

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So Tuesday afternoon I was sitting in a coffee shop, writing and minding my own business, when I got an email from Arwulf:

“considering del norte is on fire and they evacuated the school and it's like 95 degrees outside and really windy can i have a ride home?”

I’d been under the Cone of Silence* for a few hours so this was startling on a number of levels. I turned my browser back on and found my social media accounts buzzing, and local news feeds awhirl with footage of helicopters and great plumes of smoke and FLAMES.

The FLAMES in particular got my attention, once I realized that they were very close to my house. Considerably closer, in fact, than I was. Close enough that we had probably better get the hell out.

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Virtual Friends, Real Friends

4/21/2014

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Not long ago, I was talking with other parents of teenagers when the subject turned to relationships and the Internet. “I try to limit how much time my kids spend online,” one parent said, “so they can spend their time with their real friends.” Nods and murmurs of agreement all around.

Really?

I have a kid who spends a lot of time online. Like a whole LOT of a lot. Apart from a couple of friends from school, Arwulf’s most important peer relationships take place over the Internet, on Tumblr, in anime and fanfiction forums, over IM and Skype.

And while most of these relationships are casual, a couple are friendships as deep and textured as any face to face relationship.

These kids have never met in person. They are scattered across the English-speaking world: the US, UK, Australia. They must negotiate time zones and school schedules to spend time with each other.

But spend time together they do.

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Word of the Week: Dinkle

Word of the Week: Drive

Word of the Week: Swelter

Word of the Week: Incunabula

Word of the Week: Ungulate

Wildfire Diary

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