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Word of the Week: Ballot

6/25/2016

ballot

\ˈba-lət\

Week before last, I took a couple of days off from the Bluefish Editorial desk to conduct our regular civic ritual of running the polls. In many ways this Election Day was much like others I’ve written about before: there was the usual run-up of trainings, supply inventories, garage cleaning, booth assembly, and ballot preparation.

This last was a little more complicated this year: because of the vicissitudes of California’s not-completely-open primary, instead of our usual four stacks of paper ballots we had nineteen. And even this did not fully account for the range of possible party affiliations and languages in the precinct, which is politically purple as well as pronouncedly polyglot. All day, our touchscreen clerk kept hoping for a Filipino-speaking member of the Green party to arrive, so he could leap in and save the day.

Alas for the frustrated clerk, no such voter appeared, but we did see many of our regulars. There was the sweet-faced elderly man who likes to show off his wallet plastered with several years’ worth of I Voted! stickers while his wife chats up the Vietnamese-speaking poll worker in her ongoing quest for suitable young men to fix up with her granddaughter.

There was the leathery man from around the corner who usually does his yard work in a Speedo but who mercifully honors the occasion of going to the polls by donning street clothes, which he wears with the over-starched awkwardness of the habitual nudist. There was the guy from over the back fence who likes to play guitar and sing Portuguese love songs, followed by his next-door neighbor who favors slightly out-of-tune karaoke.

There was the extraordinarily beautiful fifty-something Asian woman with her much older white husband—every year he is more frail, and every year she is more tenderly solicitous. And then the scrappy couple that always insists on sharing the same voting booth, where they argue loudly in Vietnamese about the measures and candidates.

And there were the newbies, young and old. New arrivals to the neighborhood, with kids and dogs in tow. A pair of 40-something white men, first-time voters, who were super amped to be voting for Trump. A recently naturalized mother and daughter from India who asked me to snap a photo of them in front of our flag. And a whole crop of shiny new eighteen-year-olds, including several who went to elementary school with our kids. (Few things make me feel quite as old as handing a ballot to someone I’ve seen stick crayons up their nose.)

In the lulls, I contemplated the notion of the ballot. In the Venetian Republic, voting was sometimes accomplished by dropping a little colored ball into a container. Our word ballot is borrowed from that practice, coming from the Italian ballotta, or small ball (a diminutive of balla). It conjures up a rather stately procession, with all the Venetian electors lined up in their silken robes and plumed hats, dropping polished marble balls into a golden urn.

The interior of the Sala Maggior Consiglio, The Doge's Palace, Venice, with patricians voting for the election of new magistrates. By Joseph Heintz der Jüngere (1600-1678), via Wikimedia Commons

Of course this vision of gleaming order has probably never actually existed, then or now. More often than the cool click of marble spheres, our precious ritual seems like a crowded playcenter ball pit. There are hordes of kids shrieking and lunging around, slinging balls at each other with stinging force, thumping and climbing on each other or sinking inexorably into the sticky sub-layer of lost socks, old band-aids, and pocket grit. Someone ends up with a bloody nose, another with a wicked case of norovirus; others are dragged home fractious and wailing.

By יעקב (Own work), via Wikimedia Commons

But on the ground, in our no-frills garage, the procession had a certain motley sweetness to it. Trumpites and nudists, earnest immigrants and baffled teenagers, former refugees and frazzled parents, lovers tender and quarrelsome, they came to cast their votes. The footing may have been uncertain underfoot, the balls sticky with cake and spilled punch, but there we all were, doing the best we could, in our flawed, human, limited, glorious way.

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Word of the Week: Antimacassar

5/31/2016

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Antimacassar
\ˌan-ti-mə-ˈka-sər\

This week on the Bluefish Editorial desk, I’ve had occasion to consider the antimacassar. Even if you don’t know the word, you will probably recognize the object—the little crocheted lace doilies that adorn armchairs in Victorian parlors, the sine qua non of maiden-aunt fussiness.

But while today they may be dismissed as useless fripperies, they were designed to serve a useful purpose; and thereby hangs a tale.

Armchair with antimacassars (Etsy)

Even a cursory glance at nineteenth century British portraiture shows that hair, and lots of it, was a marker of virility and social status. Just look at these fellas.

(Left to right: portrait of J Port Storehouse; Portrait of man, by E S Dunshee and Co, Boston; Portrait of Seth Kinman by Matthew Brady. All images via Wikimedia Commons

All this luxuriant hair and beardage requires a certain amount of upkeep, though, and men were plagued then as now with thinning hair, baldness, and split ends. So, to keep their hair smooth and shiny and encourage its vigorous growth, they turned to what my hairdresser likes to call “product.”

One of the most popular formulations was Macassar oil, produced by the London firm of Rowland and Sons. These enterprising gents offered a wide range of products to disguise gray hair, brighten the teeth, and smooth the skin, as well as patent medicines to remedy toothache, indigestion, and boils.

Rowland’s Original Macassar Oil was one of their biggest sellers, named for the port of Makassar on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, whence the ingredients supposedly came. Their ads boasted that the mixture:

Accept no substitutes!

is the only article that really produces and restores HAIR, also Whiskers, Mustachios, and Eyebrows; prevents HAIR from falling off, or turning Gray, to the latest period of life; changes Gray Hair to its original color—frees it from scurf and makes it beautifully soft, curly and glossy. In dressing Hair, it keeps it firm in the curl, uninjured by damp weather, crowded Assemblies, the Dance, or in the exercise of Riding.

(Echoes of all this dancing and partying and riding about in damp weather heedless of disarranging one’s mustachios still resound in those late-night TV commercials featuring men with ostentatiously vigorous locks enjoying an Active Lifestyle of swimming, saunas, and disco, as they bask in the attention of bodacious ladies.)

Rowland & Sons’ original formulation was made from oil extracted from the seeds of the kusum tree mixed with ylang-ylang and a bit of musk. Its popularity was such that imitators and DIY recipes sprang up almost immediately, based on everything from almond oil to bear grease. The kusum oil had a reddish tinge, and the DIY recipes mimicked this signature feature by mixing the base oil with alka-net root, a substance often used to make red dyes and varnishes.

This mixture was applied liberally to the hair and scalp, resulting in a distinct “wet look.” Compounding the problem, a head coated in oil would naturally also act as a magnet for all the soot, coal dust, powdered manure, and manifold other gunk afloat in the air of nineteenth century cities. All this posed a major threat to the upholstered furniture just then becoming widely popular in middle-class households (due in part to the mass production of machine-woven fabric and the invention of the steel-coil inner spring—the Industrial Revolution was quite a remarkable thing).

Faced with the prospect of gentlemen, exhausted from all that riding and dancing at Assemblies, resting their lavishly anointed heads on the divan, the housekeepers of Victorian England took up their crochet hooks and fought back. The antimacassar was born.

The first documented use of the term came in 1852; within a decade elaborate patterns were being circulated in ladies’ magazines, and every well-brought-up middle class young woman was expected to have a trove of daintily wrought antimacassars in her hope chest. These would allow her to enjoy the company of a fella who was free of scurf and firm in the curl, without having to reupholster the furniture every six months. Truly a formula for domestic bliss!

The antimacassar’s reign lasted a less than a century. As modern shampoo and Scotchguard have come on the scene, the classic antimacassar has largely fallen out of favor. The only place where they are still regularly seen* is on airplane seats, though here too they are becoming less common (at least in the US).

But fear not! The summer travel season may be upon us, but Ingenious individuals are getting out their metaphorical crochet hooks and stepping into the breach, ready to bring the antimacassar into the twenty-first century. Now, though, the goal is not to protect the upholstery from the passenger, but to protect the passenger from the upholstery. Etsy abounds with hand-crafted airline seat covers for fastidious travelers. For those who don't want the extra laundry, disposable versions are also widely available.

Not your grandma's antimacassar

And one enterprising individual has launched a crowdfunding campaign for a combination seat cover and body wrap—essentially a full-body antimacassar. Be warned, though, reading the copy and comments at these sites will quickly convince you that all seats on commercial flights are teeming with Ebola and bedbugs. And scurf.

Happy travels, everyone!

* The only place I have ever personally encountered antimacassars was in China in the 1980s, where they were fixtures in meeting rooms, along with lidded ceramic cups for tea. I cannot say whether they are still to be found there, though if young men in Wuhan still favor brilliantine the way they did thirty years ago it’s probably not a bad idea.

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Word of the Week: Peduncle

4/24/2016

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peduncle

\ˈpē-ˌdəŋ-kəl \

Spring has been springing mightily around here. The camellias have come and gone; the frog has returned to the bromeliad on the back porch. I’ve made my annual pilgrimage to the tax lady, who smacked her riding crop on the desk and produced a nice refund for us. We’re already starting to get notices about the upcoming flurry of spring exams and concerts and end-of-year potlucks.

And my lovely brother has given me not one but TWO spring-appropriate offerings for this blog: a word and a webcam.

The word is peduncle. This is a botanical term, meaning the stalk of a flower or a fruit.

My brother came across the word back in March, when local news in DC was abuzz with the possibility of an unseasonable freeze harming the spring show of cherry blossoms. Faced with this potential calamity, the media descended on the National Park Service horticulturist tasked with producing the Official National Cherry Blossom Forecast. This nice fella happily explained to reporters that yes, bad weather at the wrong time could impact the bloom. But in fact the process of blossoming has six distinct stages, to wit: green buds, florets visible, extension of florets, peduncle elongation, puffy white, and peak bloom. And as long as we didn’t get a hard freeze during the peduncle elongation phase, all would be well.

I thought it was quite lovely that our nation sees fit to employ a Flower Ranger to keep an eye on the cherry trees. And I was even more charmed when I looked up the word. Turns out that peduncle comes from the Latin pedunculus, a combination of ped (or foot) and the diminutive suffix -unculus: so literally, a little foot. Like many young things, when cherry blossoms start growing their feet get big. But as long as their toesies don’t get too cold we will get our flowers.

As you can see, the cherry blossoms ultimately survived their peduncular phase. Photo by David Furth

My brother’s other springtime offering was a link to a webcam in the National Arboretum that is trained on a nest where a pair of bald eagles are raising their chicks. Some enterprising government employee has climbed 90 feet up into a tulip poplar so the USDA Agricultural Research Service can stream 24-hour live coverage of this family scene to a waiting world.

It has been hands-down the most riveting news coverage of the season. The two chicks squirm and gape as their parents keep them supplied with a seemingly endless supply of dead fish. There’s feeding and preening and sleeping and nest-tidying and careful deployment of new sticks to keep the little ones from toppling out. In bad weather the parents spread their wings and the chicks huddle underneath, and the tree sways back and forth in a long slow arc. Given a choice between the rancid political shriekfest du jour and a pair of eagles cramming regurgitated fish guts into their offspring, I’ll take the fish guts every single time.

US National Arboretum

But I got a bit of a shock last week when I clicked on the cam link to visit the family after a few days away. When my brother first sent me the link it showed a pair of ugly gray fuzzballs flopping awkwardly around the nest, getting their little crops so crammed full of fish guts that they sometimes fell over on their faces under the sheer weight of parental nurturance. And here they were only a few days later, gloriously hideous, all claws and beak and scrawny half-molted necks, pecking at each other and clamoring for more food more food MORE FOOD.

What happened? Suddenly it’s late April and I realize I haven’t tackled the word I’ve been sitting on since way back in March. The cherry blossoms have come and gone and the trees are in full leaf. My adolescent lurches around the nest on his elongated peduncles, polishing off ham and granola bars and gallons of milk.

Spring is like that. Blink and you’ll miss it.

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Word of the Week: Scribblatory

2/21/2016

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scribblatory

\ˈskrib -lə-ˌtȯr-ē\

This week on the Bluefish Editorial desk, I’ve been working on a book chapter discussing (among other things) the life and philosophy of Jeremy Bentham, one of the first apostles of utilitarianism.

Bentham was a legal reformer, a proponent of medical utility, the developer of the Panopticon model of prison surveillance, and an all-around odd duck. He was the kind of indefatigable ideas guy who corners you at parties to tell you all about his extensive research into political economy and the shortcomings of English jurisprudence. While he collected around him a bevy of devoted acolytes (including John Stuart Mill and Edwin Chadwick (“the father of British sanitation”)), he never married and, despite his advocacy of women’s equality and the importance of sexual pleasure, he does not seem to have had great success on the dating scene.

The "Before" pic. Portrait by Henry William Pickersgill [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

When he died, he left explicit instructions that his body be publicly dissected and that his skeleton then be reassembled, dressed in his clothes (yes, down to the underpants), and set up in a glass booth. This “Auto-Icon,” he hoped, would stand as a testament to his utilitarian philosophy. Even better, it might start a trend—Bentham envisioned a whole gallery of Auto-Icons featuring the philosophical and scientific luminaries of the age, held up for the edification and pleasure of the viewing public.

Here he is:

Bentham as he appears today. Photo by MykReeve at the English language Wikipedia [CC-BY-SA-3.0], via Wikimedia Commons.

He had no such luck (Or at least he wouldn’t until the year 2999 when, according to the TV show Futurama, the technology was invented to store and preserve the living heads of important historical figures, including Thomas Jefferson, William Shakespeare, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Richard Nixon, and Lucy Liu.)

Head of Ruth Bader Ginsburg. From The Infosphere, the Futurama Wiki. (Content is available under Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported.)

As of today, alas, Bentham’s Auto-Icon is the only one. He sits in the cloister of University College London, where students have periodically made off with his imperfectly mummified head and used it as a prop for various pranks. (The head in the picture is made of wax; the original is locked away in a safe, and the curator in charge of its preservation will not take it out for you to look at, no matter how much you beg.)

One of Bentham’s lesser-known proclivities was making up words. My author notes that a lot of these have entered the modern lexicon—including maximize, minimize, rationale, demoralize, dynamic, international, unilateral, exhaustive, cross-examination, sexual desire, and false consciousness.

But there are many others that did not make the cut, for example metamorphotic, disceptatorial, morphoscopic, undisfulfilled, infirmation, subintellect, thelematic, antembletic, scribblatory, imperation, and incognoscibility.

I’m finding these dead-end words kind of fascinating. Take scribblatory. The OED lists it as a nonce-word, meaning “tending to cause scribbling.” The only usage example they provide is from Bentham’s own Rationale of Judicial Evidence, his analysis and critique of the English laws of evidence, in which he derides “the dilatory, scribblatory … mode of the courts of equity.”

And that’s it. A perfectly cromulent word that, as far as my research can discern, was used once and never again. Or, as the entry read when I tried to look up the word on UrbanDictionary.com, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

(I do note, however, that the domain name scribblatory.com has been registered within the last year (perhaps by some enterprising Benthamite?) although there is no website as yet.)

And then there’s undisfulfilled, which means “not unfulfilled,” apparently to be used when “fulfilled” is too definitive. This word doesn’t even rise to the level of a full citation in the OED, except as one of the seemingly endless list of compounds built on the un- prefix (right between undisfigured and undisgraced). Again, Bentham’s coinage of the word is the only example of the word in use.

Undisfullfilled, though, has shown up in one more-or-less real world application: someone in Sligo County, Ireland has adopted it as his username on a dating site. Mr. Undisfulfilled doesn’t seem to have gotten far in his quest for amorous fulfillment—apart from his age, gender, and location, his profile is blank. The entry under his name lists his “dateability index” at a crushing 0%, which puts him pretty much exactly on a par with poor old Bentham.

I wonder about the story here. Was Undisfulfilled’s incognoscibility subintellected by potential partners? Or was this a thelematic infirmation of his own appeal—or even an antembletic move designed to fend off morphoscopic scrutiny?

He isn’t saying. But there he sits, preserved in his virtual glass case, an enigmatic silhouette gazing serenely, or at least silently, over the backwaters of the internet. I like to think he is not unfulfilled, and that maybe he will in time acquire a snappy straw hat.

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Word of the Week: Rodomontade

1/21/2016

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rodomontade

\ˌrä-də-mən-ˈtād \

Last week I had the rare pleasure of encountering a word I did not know. The word: rhodomontade.

A quick check of the dictionary revealed that a rhodomontade (or as it is more usually spelled, rodomontade) is an extravagantly boastful and bombastic speech. There are certainly plenty of those around these days, but I’ve never heard them called that, and that was excuse enough for muting Twitter for a few minutes and doing some investigation.

Rodomontade, it turns out, is a made up word. It exists in French and Italian, but it does not come from an earlier root—instead it comes from the name of a character in Matteo Maria Bolardo’s hugely popular Orlando Innamorato and Ludovico Ariosto’s even more popular sequel, Orlando Furioso.

These epic poems were written in the late 15th and early 16th century and have inspired countless works over the years, from The Fairie Queene and Much Ado About Nothing to Monty Python and Mad Max: Fury Road. The plot is nearly impossible to summarize but as the title suggests the central character Orlando—a Christian knight during the time of Charlemagne—starts out in love and ends up furious. He falls passionately in love with a lady, and when she runs off with someone else, he goes mad with despair and grief and goes rampaging naked across Europe and Africa, destroying everything in his path. As one does.

But Orlando is not the half of it. His story is tangled up with those of dozens of other characters who go racing in and out of the frame, fighting, falling in love, having visions, being enchanted, making imprudent wagers, and generally trailing plot complications into an impenetrable thicket of preposterous incident. There’s war! Politics! Sex! Woman warriors! Passion! Revenge! Disguises! Mistaken identity! Returns from the dead! Hippogriffs! Voyages to the moon! Whatever you are looking for in a narrative, Orlando has it on offer.

Our word comes from one of the threads in this seven-layer funnel cake of a story—a Saracen king named Rodomonte, whose name (if Google is to be relied on) might translate roughly as “gnawing at a mountain.”

Funnel cake -- choose your strand!

It’s a good name, because Rodomante doesn’t do anything small or quiet. He is a fearsome warrior and a brilliant general, but he is also brutal and callous and given to monologuing about his prowess. In one entirely typical episode, Rodomonte encounters a beautiful lady on the road and is instantly enamored, only to discover that she is sworn to chastity and en route to a convent. Undaunted, he tries to impress her with a genuine original rodomontade (“Hey babe, I’m a king! Armies tremble at my wrath! Let me tell you about my exploits!”) but she remains unmoved by either his deeds or his many manly muscles—though to be fair she is probably also put off by the fact that he expresses his opinion of the convent scheme by picking up the hermit who is escorting her there, whirling him overhead, and slinging him into a rock.

So she insists that carnal congress is not in the cards, but she does offer to brew him a potion that will make him invulnerable to arrow or sword. Rodomonte thinks this sounds like a great idea (plus he is sure he’ll be able to talk her out of the chastity thing later). But she is too clever for him: she brews the potion, gets him drunk, smears the stuff all over her naked body and invites him to prove the potion’s effectiveness by attacking her with his sword—which he does, killing her on the spot. “Neener, neener, still chaste!” her severed head says as it rolls across the floor (or words to that effect).

(I must pause here to observe that while I am no tactical genius, I can think of several ways this young woman might have made more sensible use of the this-guy-is-both-gullible-and-drunk dynamic at work here. Like, oh I don’t know, RUNNING AWAY or GETTING HIM TO STAB HIMSELF NOT HER. This is why I have not been hired to write any 15th century Italian epics.)

Rodomonte has enough grace to feel kind of bad about the whole thing, so he builds a bridge in the young woman’s memory and camps out on it so he can yell threats at travelers until they give him tribute money. When Orlando at last comes rampaging through this subplot, naked and insane because or course he is, the two have a shouting match on the bridge, which segues into a colossally awkward shirts vs skins wrestling bout, at the end of which both men fall into the river. Orlando climbs out of the water and goes roaring off into the next canto, and Rodomonte, armor aslosh, is left to scramble back up to his bridge and prepare to yell at the next guy.

Battista Dossi. Battle of Orlando and Rodomonte. c1529. Oil on canvas. 82 x 136 cm. (Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, CT)

(Actually it's worth taking a closer look at this picture, just for the pleasure of Rodomonte's expression....)

And that’s the last we hear from him until the very end of the poem, when he crashes a wedding to do some more shouting, at which point finally everyone gets fed up and he ends up being killed in a duel with the groom (who, I might add, is a Saracen cavalier who has converted to Christianity in order to marry a badass warrior chick who loves to dominate men with her magic lance. I can’t make this stuff up!)

It occurs to me that Rodomonte and his mountain gnawing are not a bad metaphor for this shouty season. There certainly are plenty of callous would-be generals slinging people into rocks and carrying on about their exploits. But the sheer gonzo exuberance of Orlando reminds me that however loud they yell they are only one thread in the crazy tangle of plots on our plate. If the rodomontades are too much to take, we can put that plot down for a while and follow another thread. Maybe one of the ones with hippogriffs in it.

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Word of the Week: Advent

12/31/2015

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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: George

10/12/2015

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George

\ˈjȯrj\

This week on the Bluefish Editorial desk I have been working with a biography that tells the life story of an immigrant who came to the US from Poland in the 1920s. To mark the start of his new life, this young man decided to shed his birth name in favor of something new and cleanly American: he named himself George. But this choice of name was not made in honor of any of the usual suspects (George Washington or George McClellan or even George Washington Carver). Instead it was an homage to an idiomatic phrase I had never heard: “Let George do it!”

Of course I looked it up. (That is, after all, my job!) “Let George do it” is a bit of early 20th century North American slang, used when a person means to let someone else do the work or take responsibility for something: “We have to make a schedule for cleaning out the office refrigerator; otherwise everyone will just let George do it.”

Okay, I thought, that’s clear enough—but why George? Was a historical George left holding the bag at some crucial juncture? No less an authority than H.L. Mencken suggested that the phrase “Let George do it” comes from the 16th century King Louis XII, who liked to hand off boring tasks to his prime minister Cardinal Georges d'Amboise with a breezy “Laissez faire à Georges.” Alas, much as I want this to be true, the phrase doesn’t seem to have ever been widely used in French and it didn’t appear in English until 300 years later.

There is of course St. George, patron saint of England and a whole bunch of other countries. (Also, for what it’s worth, the patron saint of skin disease sufferers and syphilitics.) He is often invoked when there’s serious business to be accomplished, like defeating the French (viz: “Cry ‘God for Harry! England and St. George!’”)

The historical St. George was a 3rd century Roman soldier from Palestine, the child of aristocratic Greek Christian parents, who became an officer in the army of emperor Diocletian. He did well, rose in the ranks, and became a tribune and a member of the Imperial Guard.

Fresco depicting St. George, from the St. George Church Museum: Kyustendil, Bulgaria © Plamen Agov • studiolemontree.com, via Wikimedia Commons

Around the year 300 AD, though, Diocletian was being prodded by one of his subordinates to crack down on the Christian element. And when Diocletian caved to this pressure and asked his soldiers to make sacrifices to the Roman gods, George refused loudly and publicly. Diocletian seems to have been rather distressed by this. He liked George, and at bottom he really seemed more interested in tax reform and overhauling the imperial bureaucracy than engaging in pogroms. He tried to hush the whole thing up, offering George a promotion, and money, and land, if he could just pipe down and not make such a big fuss over the whole monotheism thing.

But George was ready to step up and do the job no one else wanted to do. So he gave away all his goods to the poor and told the embarrassed Diocletian that, no, he couldn’t recant and Diocletian would just have to execute him. Which he reluctantly did. (This whole persecution endeavor seems to have taken some of the heart out of Diocletian, who stepped down when his term as Emperor ended two years later and retired to the Dalmatian coast to grow vegetables.)

That was the story for about 800 years, until the Crusaders—who revered St. George as a fellow soldier and who were trying to encourage people to step up and take on the hard work of conquering the Holy Land—decided that it might hurt recruitment if “let George do it” meant giving away one’s treasure and agreeing to have one’s head cut off. Maybe George could be shown getting rich and winning glory? Add a dash of manly heroism, maybe a little love interest? And maybe someone else could be on the receiving end of the head-cutting-off part?

So they went Hollywood: Action-Hero George (strapping and handsome, and accompanied by a very fine horse) comes to a city troubled by a dragon, which they have been placating with a steady diet of sheep and maidens.

St. George and the Dragon by Paolo Uccello - The Yorck Project: 10.000 Meisterwerke der Malerei. DVD-ROM, 2002. ISBN 3936122202. Distributed by DIRECTMEDIA Publishing GmbH.. Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

When George appears the king’s daughter is about to be sacrificed, either because she’s been chosen by lot or because they’ve run through the local maiden supply and she is the only one left. George beheads the dragon, frees the princess, and rides back to the city in triumph where they shower him with gold and flowers and gratefully convert to Christianity on the spot.

(In what one might call the Indie version of this story, George gets the princess to put her sash around the dragon’s neck, which tames it so that it follows her like a puppy, and all three of them (four, if you count the horse) return to the city together. The people are terrified, but George offers them a deal: if they convert to Christianity he guarantees the dragon won’t hurt them. Caught between baptism on the one hand, and the toothy monster that has eaten so many of their daughters on the other, the townspeople opt for baptism by the thousands—after which George kills the dragon and cuts it into pieces.

"St. George and the Dragon." By Thomas Maybank [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

This strikes me as kind of a jerk move on a lot of levels. First off, intimidating people into mass conversion by threatening them with a dragon is a douchebag maneuver and theologically suspect to boot. Plus, it doesn’t seem very fair to the tame and trusting dragon, who is probably hoping for no more than a dry spot to sleep, meaningful employment, and maybe the occasional evening of sheep sloppy Joes and trash TV—and who then winds up getting cut into pieces to prove some kind of point about God’s inevitable triumph over lizards.

But I digress.)

So what is there in George-ness that inspires noble exertion? What magic is in that name? It comes from the Latin Georgius, from the Greek name Γεωργιος (Georgios), which was derived from the Greek word γεωργος (georgos) meaning farmer or husbandman. Zeus himself was a George: the Athenians sometimes called him Zeus Geōrgos: the god of crops and harvest. The word can be broken down even further into the elements γη (ge) "earth" and εργον (ergon) "work" (ergon, of course, gives us both “ergonomics” and “organ”).

So it turns out that the name George is, fundamentally, about work. Which kind of fits when you think about it. British aviators in the 1930s called the auto-pilot George. Curious George, in one of his greatest adventures, Takes a Job.

A classic! Plus, he gets into the ether.

What name could be more fitting for the George in my manuscript? He was the kind of person who would step up to take responsibility for tasks that other people would just as soon avoid. Even better, he spent his career as a labor organizer, working with shoe and boot workers in the Midwest. In fact, he spent his career slaying dragons, from foot-dragging factory owners to corrupt union emperors trying to purge the leftist elements from their ranks. In a world that often shrugs and says, "Let George do it," we could use more like him.

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Word of the Week: Hiatus

9/21/2015

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hiatus

\hī-ˈā-təs\

Yes, readers, you are right—it’s been a long time since I’ve sent out one of these little missives. Nothing dire or distressing behind the silence, just a busy summer. I have been on hiatus.

"MInD tHe GaP" by Alessandro da Roma - Own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons

Hiatus means literally a gap or a space: it comes from the Latin hiātus (meaning gap or opening), which comes from the root hiāre (to gape open). The same root gives us not only the related word “gape” but also the Germanic word “yawn.” A hiatus can be a gap in a material object, or a gap in the abdominal wall (hence hiatal hernia). It can be the space between two vowel sounds in a word when there is no consonant to come between (as in cooperate, or preeminent, or, for that matter, hiatus). It can be a gap in a series or sequence. Like for instance a gap in a series of bi-monthly blog posts….

A cosmopolitan friend of mine recently observed that Americans seem unusually fond of the word “hiatus.” In other English-speaking places, she said, it is a specialized, rather formal term. In the US, though, people use it all the time, even in casual conversation.

I’ve been mulling this over ever since. Why, I wonder, did we Americans embrace “hiatus” so enthusiastically?

I think it might be related to our work culture. Americans uphold the importance of being a good worker and productive citizen to such an extent that we find it difficult to conceive of human value in any other way. We lionize the companies that demand 80 hour workweeks and the go-getters who throw all their energy into their startup. We are still arguing over whether workers should get sick days or paid parental leave (pay people to NOT work???). We are encouraged to monetize all the spare crannies of our lives—to Uber and Airbnb and TaskRabbit our way to total economic engagement 24/7.

So of course we choose our words carefully when we describe the time when a task is NOT getting done. Consider some of the alternatives:

There is, of course, vacation. It comes from Latin vacāre (to empty out), which is also connected to “vacate,” “vaunt,” and “evanesce.” A vacation is an empty space in a busy life, free from work and other obligations. Nice work if you can get it, but this emptiness seems to freak us out. Many of those Americans fortunate enough to get paid vacation don’t make use of it—either they or their employers cannot deal with the void at its heart.

There is the sabbatical. This one comes from the Latin sabbaticus and the Greek σαββατικός, which refer to the Sabbath or day of rest (the Hebrew root shābath means “to rest”). The term originally referred to Mosaic law, in which every seventh year the land was to remain untilled and debtors and slaves released. Now, however, far from leaving the fields untilled, a sabbatical implies that useful work is taking place during the gap and that you’ll come back having written a book.

There are others: you might be on leave, or on break. There might be an intermission. A time out. Recess. Or you could be off. Like a switch or an elderly quart of milk.

Hiatus, though, foregrounds the work, not the worker. Activity simply stops, to be resumed at some later date. And the worker, meanwhile, can quietly disappear between the lines, free of unfortunate insinuations of illness, laziness, or (god forbid) recreation. In that space she might be productive or she might not. She might gape. She might yawn. No one will know. It's quite subversive really.

Mind the gap.

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Word of the Week: Ballot

Word of the Week: Antimacassar

Word of the Week: Peduncle

Word of the Week: Scribblatory

Word of the Week: Rodomontade

Word of the Week: Advent

Word of the Week: Grout

Word of the Week: Squash

Word of the Week: George

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