Florence Nightingale's Little Owl

My post of July 23, 2014, titled "Athena's Little Owl," mentioned Athena noctua, an owl known to frequent the Athenian Acropolis from at least the Archaic Era (and so presumably much earlier) to the present day. The image of the owl was imprinted on the silver tetradrachm, first minted in 526 BCE.

For a work of fiction that I am writing, I recently did some research on Florence Nightingale (1820 to 1910), founder of the modern nursing profession.

In 1850, she traveled to Italy, Greece, Egypt, and Germany. During her visit to the Parthenon in Athens, she rescued an Athena noctua owlet from mischievous children. She hand-fed it, trained it to bow and curtsy, and kept it as her pet for the next five years. While she was in Germany, she visited Pastor Theodore Fliedner’s hospital and observed his school for deaconesses at Kaiserswerth near Dusseldorf.

In 1851, she returned to the German school for three months' training. Afterward, she began her nursing career in England.

In 1854, she was recruited to train nurses for duty in Turkish hospitals during the Crimean War. She was getting ready to leave with her nurses the following year, and the owl, left in her attic in the care of unreliable family members, died of neglect. Heartbroken, Nightingale had the owl stuffed and kept it in her home ever after. You can see the stuffed owl today in the Florence Nightingale Museum in London.

(To us, stuffing the owl may seem like a rather ghoulish way of honoring her pet, but it was in keeping with the sensibilities of the Victorian Era.)

In the Crimea, she became known as the "Lady with the Lamp," for she made nightly rounds to check on her patients.

Nightingale laid down the principles and practices of modern nursing. No longer were nurses untrained in sanitation, nutrition, wound care, and other important health fields; they became professional, knowledgeable caregivers. In 1859, she wrote Notes on Nursing and, in 1860, she founded the Nightingale Training School for nurses at St. Thomas Hospital in London.

Within five years, Nightingale Nurses took over the nursing duties in workhouse infirmaries in England and Ireland and, within seventeen years, Nightingale Nurses headed up wards as Matrons all over the United Kingdom.

In the following years, she undertook studies in public health and the health of men in military service and won membership as the first woman in the Royal Statistical Society for her use of modern graphics, such as the pie chart, to present her data. In 1883, she earned the Royal Red Cross. In 1904, she was appointed a Lady of Grace of the Order of St John (LGStJ). In 1907, three years before her death, she became the first woman to win the Order of Merit.

"Bare Ruin'd Choirs"

In 1534, Henry VIII (1491 to 1547), King of England, broke with the Church of Rome, ostensibly because the Pope refused to grant him an annulment of his 24-year marriage to Catherine of Aragon. (The marriage had given him no male heirs.) That same year, Parliament declared him the Supreme Head of the Church of England. To this day, Queen Elizabeth II holds the title, "Defender of the Faith and Supreme Governor of the Church of England."

Between 1536 and 1541, Henry enacted the "Dissolution of the Monasteries," which called for Roman Catholic church lands, monasteries, priories, convents, and friaries in England, Ireland, and Wales to be forfeit to the crown. Some of the properties Henry sold for ready cash; some he granted to his favorites; and a few he gave to the Church of England to be used as churches or cathedrals.

In the course of this process, many of the buildings were plundered for building materials and fell into ruin.

Now, as I happen to know from a footnote or commentary for Sonnet 73 that I read in college, "Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang," is, among other things, a reference to the Dissolution of the Monasteries, for the choir is the part of the church where the choristers sat or stood during Mass.

Curiously, I can find no reference to this, which I take as a valid interpretation, in internet commentaries on the sonnet. A valid interpretation, and possibly a poignant one, if Shakespeare (1564 to 1616) did in fact have Roman Catholic roots or beliefs, as some scholars think.

Sonnet 73

That time of year thou mayst in me behold,
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou seest the twilight of such day,
As after sunset fadeth in the west,
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death's second self, that seals up all in rest.
In me thou seest the glowing of such fire,
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death-bed whereon it must expire,
Consumed with that which it was nourished by.
This thou perceiv'st, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well, which thou must leave ere long.

  William Shakespeare

Francis Towne, Netley Abbey, 1809. Tate Britain.

A Word Nerd's Idea of Fun

I've been planning to write a post about the word "moat" for a while now.

The word "moat" comes to us from the medieval Latin word "mota," meaning mound. (The word "mota," whose etymology is lost in time, may come from the Gaulish word "mott" or "motta.") In the mid-fourtheenth century, medieval Latin "mota" became Old French "mote," the mound on which a castle is built, or, with the part standing in for the whole, the ditch dug around the castle and often filled with water for an added line of defense.

Hmm, I thought, digging a moat to help protect a castle seems like a pretty basic idea, right up there with building a wall. I wonder whether moats were used for defense in ancient times.

Well, yes, they were, and I must have encountered this fact in college, because I read my Herodotus. In his Histories, Herodotus (484 to 425 BCE) describes of the ancient city of Babylon as surrounded by a "broad and deep moat."

Just for fun, I thought some more, let's see if I can find out when Babylon, founded circa 2300 BCE, first included a moat in its plans. I may need to cite this information in passing.

Well, the answer is, no, I cannot find out when Babylon first had a moat. This after a couple of hours of research on the Internet. The answer may be there somewhere, but I cannot find it.

However, I did find something absolutely wonderful.

Go to this website for SOAS, University of London: http://www.soas.ac.uk/baplar/recordings/. Now listen to someone read a poem to Ishtar, in Babylonian, from the Old Babylonian Period, 1900 to 1500 BCE.

And that is my idea of fun.

In Praise of Coffee

One good thing about being a writer is that you get to leave the dishes in the sink when it's time to write. Or, maybe I should say, you get to make another cup of coffee and then leave the dishes in the sink.

I love looking forward to my morning coffee the night before, dreaming about it while I am sleeping, and, against all reason, even leaving my warm bed to get it started. I love smelling the grounds and measuring them into my filter and pouring (or, in my case, if your teakettle has lost its lid and you are using a soup ladle for the moment, scooping) boiling water over it. I love watching the water drip over the grounds into my cup--which, by the way, is glass, so that I can see the magical process--and turn into coffee or, in Turkish, kahveh, from the Arabic قهوة, qahwah.

From what I can find out, coffee came to us from Yemen: according to Wikipedia, the "first credible evidence" we have of people drinking coffee dates from the mid-fifteenth century at a Sufi Muslem monastery in Mocha, Yemen. From there, coffee spread to the rest of the Middle East, Persia, Turkey, and northern Africa; to Venice, the trade-route link between East and West; and then to the rest of Europe.

Pope Clement VIII, instead of banning the "Muslim drink," wisely blessed coffee--in Italian, caffè--in 1600. Or maybe I should say that he "allowed," instead of "blessed," coffee. The first European coffee house began serving coffee to Romans in 1645.

A now-discounted tale claims that, in 1683, Viennese bakers, who as a matter of course stayed up all night to make pastries for breakfast coffee, heard the Ottomans tunneling under the besieged city and sounded the alarm, thus saving the citizens. In celebration of the victory of Christendom over the Turkish Empire, the bakers formed their pastries into the shape of the crescent on the Islamic flag.

Of course, as a writer newly restored by coffee, I would just as soon reinstate this story to the canon. What could be more perfect than freshly brewed coffee and newly baked croissants?

"Lie" and "Lay"

A promise is a promise, and I promised a friend I would write a post about the distinction between "lie" and "lay." Even at the risk of sounding like his mother--one of the last things I want to do--who apparently was a stickler for the correct use of "lie" and "lay."

So I've dredged up the grammar lessons I remember, read a lot of stuff in the grammar books and on the internet, and revisited my childhood frustration with teachers who irrevocably linked words that sound alike but otherwise have no reason to be linked: "lie" and "lay," "there" and "their," "sit" and "set," "its" and "it's." My eight-year-old self thought that this linking would clutter up my mind with meaningless associations between words so paired. And it did.

Now that my mind continues, with the passage of time, to declutter itself, I find that I do not want to write a post about this topic. Just know this: The grammatically correct command to the well-trained dog who understands some English is, "Lie down."

Beyond that, I, your trustworthy grammatical guide, would have to enter into the labyrinth of transitive and intransitive verbs, subjects and objects, present and past tense, and a whole lot of other technicalities that you can readily look up. I don't have enough string for that.

I am more interested in the romance of language. Sometimes words can do things that cannot be done any other way. Sometimes words bring to mind civilizations and ideas past. Sometimes words carry within them the tune that they sing.

Xmas

My mother, God rest her soul, had as many faults and foibles as I do. On the back of a #10 envelope (her, and now my, favorite place to make a note or write a list) she scribbled that she had "a lifelong interest in education." This so that I would remember to put the information in her obituary.

And she made sure that I had an excellent liberal arts education, for which I am grateful every moment of my life. She enrolled me in Catlin Gabel School, a private grade and high school, when I was eleven; she continued to pay my tuition at Reed College even after I got married at the age of twenty; and she paid for me to get a master's degree at Portland State University when I was twenty-eight.

The summer I was fifteen, she had me take a class with her at Reed, Calligraphy, taught by Lloyd J. Reynolds (1902-1978). If you have ever had a great teacher, you know that his or her light stays with you for the rest of your life.

The way Lloyd approached his subject, calligraphy was more than the "study of beautiful writing." It was also the study of people representing their ideas in symbols and letters. So he began teaching us by going through the alphabet. Aleph, our letter A and a, came to us through the Phoenician alphabet from an Egyptian hieroglyph representing an ox's head, the bar on the A representing the ox's horns. And so on.

By the time he got to the letter X and x, he explained that the word Xmas was not a tacky modern abbreviation, like the word nite for night, but that it represented X, the Greek letter Chi, a short form of Christ. Xmas was first used as early as 1100. Even today, though, the word is considered informal, and not appropriate in the best writing.

Bocage

I had a wonderful word in mind for my June 6 post: bocage. This year we marked the 70th anniversary of D-Day on that day, when the Allied armies mounted the greatest invasion in our history to take back the European continent from the Nazis.

According to the Wikipedia entry, bocage is a Norman French and English word typically meaning fields broken up by woodland thickets, which act as both windbreak and boundary. In American English, the word bocage came to mean hedgerow. The soldiers who stormed the beaches and pushed into Normandy encountered heavy resistance both from the enemy and from the very dense bocage.

The day I started working on this post was Hallowe'en, a good day to post about words like Samhain, hallow, or soul cake.

But I could not make myself write about a word or phrase with a Hallowe'en theme. If this is what you are looking for, please let me refer you to the Writer's Almanac, by Garrison Keillor, where you will find an appropriate Hallowe'en entry, as well as other interesting notes about the date, October 31.

I do not know if Garrison Keillor is a dreamer or not, although I imagine that as a writer he must have some characteristics of the dreamer. But the man also has a staff to help write seasonally appropriate entries, even out of season. (Note to self: what would it take for me to do this? More than I have, or not?)

Of course, having a staff also makes the possibility for mistakes even greater. In the Hallowe'en post, he (or, as I imagine, one of his staff) says, "Martin Luther was a monk who disagreed with the Catholic Church's practice of selling indulgences, which forgave the punishment for sins." In fact, the indulgence--that is, the payment you had to make for forgiveness--is the punishment, and, in return for the payment, you got forgiveness. So this should read: ". . . selling indulgences, by which you could have your sins forgiven."