Catégorie: Word Of The Week

Word of the Week: Advent

12/31/2015

advent

\ ˈad-ˌvent \

My neighbor is out in the yard with an axe again.

These are parlous times, so I hasten to add that this is not a Nightmare on Elm Street scenario—just ordinary suburban landscape maintenance. About a week ago he cut down a ficus tree that had stood near the fence separating our back yards. And every day since he has been out swinging his axe, whittling away at the stump and the roots. The blade makes a monotonous thoonk … thoonk … thoonk. Chips come flying over the fence.

Meanwhile, the view out our back windows looks oddly bare. Instead of the screening tree we now suddenly see the back wall of our neighbor’s house—a looming expanse of blank tan stucco, and above it, empty sky.

Thoonk … thoonk …

Sitting here watching the chips fly has got me unexpectedly thinking about Advent. I know, Christmas is past. Most people's Advent activities involve putting trees up, not tearing them down. But I still think it fits.

Advent is the approach or arrival of something important. Traditionally, of course, this important event—THE important event—was the birth of Jesus. By the 14th century, though, the word was being used to describe the arrival of anything significant. Now it gets trotted out to mark almost any major development. (Google autofill helpfully offers me examples of various advents, including agriculture, photography, bedlam, and the Wurm [For all you Magic the Gathering fans out there].)

The word comes from the Latin adventus, meaning “arrival.” The same root also gives us “adventure,” and it’s related to the French avenir (future) as well as to “intervene” and “venue.”

Our neighbor, frustrated by the constant upheavals the tree created in his back yard, wants to put in something drought tolerant. Something manageable. He wants to intervene in his venue. And at first I saw his intervention in his venue as the kind of advent you don't want: some kind of Yeatsian rough-beast-meets-the-Lorax botanical dystopia. I envisioned his yard full of gravel and slot machines.

But I do actually have some sympathy. I know what those trees are capable of. The ficus in our own front yard dwarfs the house. You could hide a couple of school buses in its canopy. And while it shades and cools our house and provides food and shelter to countless furry and feathered creatures, it also makes ever greater inroads on the lawn and the front walk. (We have so far managed to maintain a shaky détente with respect to the sewer and water lines. But I see from Wikipedia that these trees can grow to 30 meters in height so this is a rearguard action at best.)

At any rate, I am trying to guide my advent metaphors into a more benign path. With his steady axe blows, our neighbor is opening up a space where something new can take shape. I hope it will not be gravel and slot machines but I try to remain open to new possibilities. I am looking at the blank wall and the empty sky, waiting for the next chapter to unfold. Happy New Year, all.

thoonk…

They are cute when they are little...

...but give them time and they will devour your house.

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Word of the Week: Grout

11/17/2015

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grout

\ˈgrau̇t\

Illustration based on U.S. Air Force photo by Airman 1st Class Kate Thornton-Maurer [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

One of the highlights of our family trip to Paris this summer was our adopted neighborhood in the 11th arrondissement. We rented an apartment a bit removed from from the museums and tourist spots, on a boulevard with the leafy, occasionally gritty vibe of a slowly gentrifying urban center. Pensioners, students, young professionals, and immigrants mingled in the streets. Metal shop shutters were marked with multi-lingual graffiti. Interspersed with the groceries and halal meat shops and boulangeries were places selling electrical equipment, plumbing supplies, surgical scrubs. I told a friend how lovely it was to be in a part of Paris where, instead of souvenirs and guidebooks, you could buy a bag of grout.

Boulevard Richard-Lenoir. Photo by Clicsouris (Photo personnelle), via Wikimedia Commons.

I don’t know why I am fascinated by grout. I’ve always loved watching people apply it, using that thin, soupy mortar to seal the gaps between tiles. And I just like the word: it is a old, plain word for an old, plain substance. It comes from the Old English grūt, meaning meal or porridge (which is after all what it looks like), and it harks back to a proto Indo-European root *ghreu- meaning “to rub or grind.” There’s a connection to beer as well (the other great permutation of porridge): in the Middle Ages “grout” referred to the fermented infusion of malt that settles to bottom of the brewer’s vat. It’s related to the Dutch word gruit, which means “dregs,” as well as to modern English “grits” and “groats.”

I have been thinking a lot about Parisian grout, after the neighborhood we so briefly called home came under assault last Friday. In the past few days I have been mentally retracing our steps across the district, recalling people we encountered. The red-haired bartender at the café across from the Bataclan concert hall, where Everett and I stopped for a drink after buying food for our Bastille Day dinner. The lady at the nearby boulangerie who greeted me kindly every afternoon and grinned behind her hand at my bad French. The restaurant we visited on our first night in Paris, around the corner from Le Petit Cambodge, where we sat at a sidewalk table into the long evening. The middle-aged man at the table next to ours who rose, smiling, to greet his companion with a kiss. The knots of young adults—black, brown, white—lounging on the canal embankment, chatting, smoking, drinking cheap beer. I hope they are safe and well, and that they find healing.

One article I read in the aftermath of the attacks pointed to a possible rationale behind the terrorists’ choice of targets: this was the heart of young, progressive Paris, the author said, places where white Parisians and folks from the banlieues mingle and hang out. Where the bonds between immigrant and native are being hesitantly, imperfectly strengthened. The terrorists could not have been blind to this symbolism, he said, when they struck here—not at government ministries or cultural sites or tourist magnets, but at ordinary life and the promise of a more integrated society.

Perhaps so. They struck at the young bartender and the baker and the restaurant goers and the young people beside the canal. At places where you eat and drink, where there is porridge and beer and good bread. Places where people rub up together. Where a community is bound together by a thin, fluid mortar that flows into the gaps between them. A smile, a nod, a can of beer. Music. A kiss. Grout.

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Word of the Week: Squash

11/3/2015

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squash

\ˈskwäsh\

We are awash in squash. The weekly box from our CSA is overflowing with pumpkins, butternut and acorn squash, cucumbers, melons, zucchini. Our counter looks like this every week:

ACTUAL picture of one of our weekly deliveries. (Photo credit: my neighbor April)

I have perforce been contemplating the word squash.

It is in fact a lovely case of convergent evolution. The verb squash (meaning to crush or squeeze flat) comes from the Old French escasser (“to crush, shatter, destroy, or break,”). This in turn comes from the Vulgar Latin *exquassare, from Latin ex- “out” plus quassare “to shatter.” It’s related to quash, and to squeeze, and (distantly) to scud.

But squash the noun—the word for the things covering my counter—comes from the Narraganset word askuutasquash. This word is a compound of askut, meaning “green, raw, uncooked” + asquash “thing that may be eaten” – so “a green thing that may be eaten raw.” My sources helpfully note that in the Algonquian languages –ash is a plural affix, which is appropriate because, as anyone who has ever cultivated a zucchini patch knows, there is never only one squash.

But if the word was brought into English by contact with Native Americans does that mean that squash was unknown to Europeans before contact with the Americas? The answer is a little bit involved.

There have been gourds and squashes pretty much since there have been people. In fact these might be the first plants ever to have been domesticated. DNA analysis suggests that members of the Cucurbitaceae family (especially bottle gourds) were being domesticated in Asia and Africa from about 12,000–13,000 years ago. Some members of the family made their way to the Americas (possibly by being carried or possibly by floating), where various MesoAmerican peoples started cultivating them, eventually giving rise to much of the bounty on my counter: thin-skinned summer squashes like zucchini, pattypan, and crookneck, and hard-shelled winter squashes like pumpkin, acorn, and butternut.

But while Europeans, Asians and Africans did not have access to pumpkins and zucchini before 1500, other cucurbits—including melons, gourds, and cucumbers—were well known. Folks in pre-contact Europe may have languished for want of pumpkin pie (not to mention BLTs and tater tots), but they at least had cucumbers and melons. And colorful metaphors thereby: Arwulf tells me that the Latin word for cucumber (cucurbita) also meant “dolt,” not unlike our idiom “melon-head.”

(Side note: when I was a kid I would sometimes catch Richard Pryor movies on afternoon TV. These movies were heavily overdubbed for broadcast and I was puzzled for quite a long time about why Pryor seemed so fixated on “melon-pickers.” Just about EVERYONE in those movies was called a melon-picker at one point or another.)

Now, of course, all kinds of squashes are grown pretty much everywhere. Wikipedia tells me that China alone produces more than 6 million metric tons of squash every year, plus 41 million metric tons of cucumbers and 57 million metric tons of watermelon. And the good folks at our local CSA are not far behind. There are something like 975 identified species in the Cucurbitaceae family, and I believe we have sampled most of them. We’ve had casseroles and breads, pies and side dishes and agua fresca. I have the creeping sense that something is about to come sprouting out of the discarded rinds and seeds in the trash and envelop the kitchen in inescapable tendrils.

Not for nothing are squashes and gourds nigh-on universal symbols of fertility, being not only suggestively round and firm and full of seeds, but also insanely prolific.

I comfort myself by remembering that when our culinary invention runs dry there is another nice instance of the convergence between the Latin exquassare and the Narraganset askuutasquash: science departments at many colleges and universities have a Halloween tradition of freezing pumpkins in liquid nitrogen and dropping them off the roofs of buildings. This not only squashes the squash, it does so in a way very much in keeping with the original Latin meaning: the pumpkin shatters outwards with a satisfying boom. Thus the ex-quassare creates an ex-squash.

Video of a pumpkin drop at the University of Oregon. NB: the first pumpkin that drops is not frozen and as such is a little disappointing. For the real deal, fast forward to 0:41

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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: 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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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: Juror

9/29/2014

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juror

\ˈju̇r-ər \

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

But I keep my mouth shut.

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

"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: Advent

Word of the Week: Grout

Word of the Week: Squash

Word of the Week: Ambergris

Word of the Week: Resolution

Word of the Week: Dinkle

Word of the Week: Drive

Word of the Week: Juror

Word of the Week: Swelter

Word of the Week: Cicatrice

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