Category: Word Of The Week

Word of the Week: Protest

8/26/2014

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: 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: Gloaming

6/24/2014

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gloaming

\ˈglō-miŋ\

I have been in Maryland for the last couple of days visiting my brother—we’ve spent several lovely long summer evenings sitting on the porch in the gloaming, discussing family lore, and watching fireflies. We agree that gloaming is a very fine word. (He put in a plug for “crepuscular,” which is also a fine word, but we’ve been Latinate here for a few weeks now and it’s time to change that up. Get your own blog, bro.)

By Wildfeuer (Own work), via Wikimedia Commons

Gloaming comes from Old English glóm, meaning twilight. It probably stems from the Teutonic root *glô (meaning to glow)—but it might also just possibly be related to gloom.

I really like this, because gloaming describes that moment poised right on the balance-point between glow and gloom—twilight. Where we sit, watching fireflies and trading stories.

The word fell out of favor in English for a while, but the Scots (God bless them) kept it current. I can see why they hung on to it: a word like that is especially useful in a place like Scotland that has generous endowments of both gloom and glow.

Take one of the OED usage citations: “This fell furth in the gloming” (1620). Not a very illuminating or exciting quote, but the “furth” part caught my eye. So I tracked down the reference in Robert Pitcairn’s Ancient Criminal Trials of Scotland (which turned out to be a very entertaining read, btw!) And I got a family story. Here's what went down in the gloaming:

Sir James MacDonald, 9th chief of Clan MacDonald of Dunnyveg, was being held in Edinburgh Castle, accused of committing acts of mayhem against various rivals, including his own father. (The indictment says that young James went to his father’s house in the dead of night with 300 “barbarus, wikked and bludie Hieland-men” in tow, barricaded his father inside the house and then set it on fire when he refused to yield himself up. [The parents survived.])

While locked up, MacDonald and a fellow prisoner somehow tricked their guards into dropping their swords and leaving the room. (I like to imagine they pointed and said something like “Hey! What’s THAT over THERE?!?!”) At any rate, once the guards had obligingly disarmed and turned around, the prisoners shut them in a shed, took the swords, rushed the Castle gate, and escaped over the wall. The other prisoner got clean away but MacDonald, who was wearing leg irons throughout these escapades, broke his ankle when he jumped from the parapet. He was eventually found hiding in a dunghill and taken back into custody. Condemned to be beheaded, he managed to escape again (more successfully this time) and made his way to Spain.

Our own family stories are mostly less harrowing. There’s the cousin who is said to have deserted from the Confederate Army. There’s the great great grandmother who may have had an affair with Sanford White. There’s the Quaker ancestor who was whipped for refusing to report for military service. No one shows up at his parents' house with a hundred bloodthirsty thugs, but there is war, madness, adultery, criminality, and desertion (both marital and martial). There are ordinary people leading lives that flash out for a moment and then go dark.

There is gloom, and there is glow.

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Word of the week: Meretricious

6/16/2014

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meretricious

\ˌmer-ə-ˈtri-shəs\

"Meretricious" is a slippery word. It means flashy but cheap; gaudy. It’s the kind of sneer that a highbrow critic might lob at a rival’s work. Bravura, but no substance.

But whenever I run across the word I have trouble remembering that it’s supposed to be an insult. I wondered at first whether some bit of glamour from its near-homophone “meritorious” was clinging to it? After all, “meritorious” is a noble word, with noble associations. It means “worthy, deserving of praise.” Here’s Fabian’s Chronicles in 1494:

Good and merytoryous deedys shulde be holden in memorye.

Or the alleged last words of Alexander Pope (1744):

There is nothing meritorious but virtue and friendship.

(I am skeptical about this attribution, actually, because Pope has been credited with several different sets of last words, most of which are much funnier. Still, it sounds pretty good.) And so when I see something like this, I get a touch of cognitive whiplash:

Let us be thought over-much plain and simple, even bare, rather than gaudy, flashy, cheap and meretricious. Let us manifest the taste of gentlemen.

(That’s Frederick Law Olmstead in 1893, pointing out that the worst thing you could possibly be is [shudder] Tacky.)

But it turns out that on some level my confusion is, well, merited. Because in fact meritorious and meretricious come from the exact same root: the Latin merērī, which means to earn money or to work for hire. Merērī is related to the Greek μείρεσθαι (meiresthai), which means to deserve, or to earn as one’s share.

So what happened, that one branch of the word is laudatory and the other an insult?

Alas, it’s one of the oldest stories in the world. Merērī—whence “meritorious”—often referred to a soldier earning wages. A praiseworthy endeavor. But “meretricious” comes from an offshoot noun, meretrix—meaning a woman who works for pay. Therefore a prostitute, because Obviously. What else?

Here’s Sir Francis Bacon in 1626, using the word in its more literal sense:

The Delight in Meretricious Embracements (wher sinne is turned into Art) maketh Marriage a dull thing.

There’s so much to unpack here! Those “meretricious embracements” (i.e. women having sex in exchange for money) make “sinne” into an art form. And then the women’s clients, lured away by the gaudy & flashy (but fundamentally empty) attractions of the courtesan, get bored with the meritorious procreative sex they are supposed to be having with their wives. Note the slaps here not only against women, and sex, and men, but also against Art, which you had better not enjoy too much, because it might really just be tarted up sinne.

When the word began to be used in a more figurative sense things started getting really ugly. Here’s a 17th century Protestant getting all riled up about the Catholics:

…the meretricious Gaudiness of the Church of Rome, and the squallid Sluttery of Fanatick Conventicles.

Now I’ve been to the Vatican, and I will grant that it is pretty darn gaudy. But this is not just about bad taste. This guy wants you to be repulsed by Rome’s wealth and corruption, so naturally he emphasizes how gross and female it all is. Not only have you got a gesture towards the Whore of Babylon (a favorite Protestant trope), all bedizened on the outside and corrupt and stinking within, you’ve ALSO got the prurient fascination with sluttish “Conventicles,” themselves presumably riddled with madness and disease. (There is an entire genre of anti-Catholic screeds that essentially boils down to Nuns Gone Wild.)

The Whore of Babylon, riding the 7-headed Beast of the Apocalypse. From the Luther Bible (1534), of course. (Image from Wikipedia)

So what should have been an honest word has acquired a train of unsavory associations. “Meretricious” may have started out referring to hard work for a deserved wage, but it’s now gotten all tangled up with harlotry/sex/sin/corruption/venereal disease/glitz/Vegas/flash—and pretty soon you’ve got guys like Frederick Law Olmsted (who may have been a brilliant landscape architect but also seems to have been a pompous jerk) going on about how we have to have Gentlemanly taste and not get snookered by shallow and showy ornamentation. Because that’s for harlots, amirite?

Perhaps this is why I find myself unwilling to accept “meretricious” as a pejorative. I am a woman who works for pay. And I don’t like to see a meritorious word end up saddled with the whole messy baggage of the Patriarchy.

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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

Word of the Week: Incunabula

Word of the Week: Gloaming

Word of the week: Meretricious

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