Dead Man's Hand

Wild Bill Hickok (1837-1876) died of a gunshot wound to the back of the head while playing poker in a saloon in Deadwood, then a gold-rush town in the Black Hills, Dakota Territory. The game was five-card stud and Wild Bill held a pair of black aces and a pair of black eights, all facing up. In the hole, he held the two of spades, according to a writer who interviewed eye witnesses.

The man who shot Wild Bill used a Colt .45 at close range. The shot went through Wild Bill's skull and cheekbone and hit another player in the wrist. The shooter, Jack McCall, was most likely avenging a petty insult Wild Bill had made to him earlier.

Wild Bill carried a Smith & Wesson No. 2 revolver, which, of course, he had no time to draw before he died. He had not drawn in a gunfight since his own friendly fire killed his deputy in a shootout in Abilene in 1871.

McCall was acquitted at his first trial in Deadwood, but made the mistake of bragging about the murder some months later. He was arrested and convicted at a second trial in Yankton and hanged for his crime. McCall could not use double jeopardy as his defense, because his first trial had been held in Dakota Territory, which, according to the 1868 Treaty of Laramie, was not U.S. land, but belonged to the Lakota Sioux.

Regrettably, this is not the first "dead man's hand" we know of. The first dead man's hand might have been played in Illinois forty years earlier, but, within ten years of Wild Bill's death, his gained ascendancy as the definitive dead man's hand. The shootout is still reenacted on summer evenings in Deadwood, South Dakota.

The Queen's Gingerbread Men

Queen Elizabeth I (1533-1603), displaying a wicked sense of humor, loved to surprise her courtiers and visitors with gingerbread men made in their own likenesses.

In the kitchen, the queen's baker cooked together honey, bread crumbs (as flour), pepper, sometimes saffron to give a red color, and ginger. He pressed the dough into hand-carved wooden molds and let it dry so that he could pop the cookie out of the mold with one good whack against the table. Since the dough was already cooked and he did not add leavening or bake it, the cookie retained all its detail. (Today, with modern gingerbread cookie recipes, we get the Pillsbury Doughboy, as far as detail goes.) Then he decorated it with white icing and highlighted it with gold leaf.

Now the Greeks and Romans used ginger in cooking, and we know this because we have records. For instance, the Roman government taxed ginger when Arab traders brought it across the Red Sea from its native China and India to the port at Alexandria. When Rome fell, usually dated to Alaric the Goth's Sack of Rome, 410 AD, ginger was no longer traded.

The Crusaders (our erstwhile Jihadists) brought ginger and other spices back to the West in the eleventh century. Monks were the first to make gingerbread. Later bakers took over the work, and the first bakers' guild we know of comes into existence in 1162 in Pontoise, France. By 1415, gingerbread bakers on the Continent formed their own guilds.

In London, bakers formed guilds as early as 1155, but gingerbread bakers did not become a separate body. In 1569, Queen Elizabeth united the white-flour and brown-flour baking guilds to form the Worshipful Company of Bakers.

Although gingerbread cookies had become popular "fairings" (that is, treats sold at fairs) and street novelties, they were originally molded as scenes from Bible stories and later as secular images of all kinds. Elizabeth was apparently the first to think of molding them into portraits, or maybe I should say caricatures, of members of her circle.

Unfortunately I have not spent hours and days in a wonderful, possibly (in my imagination) bookwormy and musty old British library, but have rather done my usual research: dilittantish-ly poking around the web until I come up with a story that rings true to me.

But just imagine Elizabeth's delight as one of her hapless suitors or a wily diplomat from France or Spain has to bite his own head off in order to consume his treat.



Today's gingerbread men.

This image, which was originally posted to Flickr.com, was uploaded to Commons using Flickr upload bot on 18:52, 9 May 2008 (UTC) by Themightyquill (talk).

Compare and Contrast

The first time a teacher told me to compare and contrast, I thought, "But that's redundant, because comparing is contrasting."

And, sure enough, the Webster's entry for compare shows this for the second definition:

"[T]o look at (two or more things) closely in order to see what is similar or different about them or in order to decide which one is better."

The etymology of the word is simple, too. Our word compare came into late Middle English in the 14th century, from the Old French comparer, from the Latin particles com (with) and par (equal), to find the similarities and differences in things that seem equal.

So, lesson learned. Teachers, you need only tell your students to compare. Students, question authority and think for yourself.

Alphabet Books

I've been reading the so-called "alphabet series" of detective stories by Sue Grafton (born in 1940), "A" is for Alibi (1982), "B" is for Burglar (1985), and so on. I'm up to "F" is for Fugitive (1989). (The author is up to "W" is for Wasted [2013]). Perfect reading for a word nerd, don't you think?

Kinsey Milhone is the name of the detective the stories are about, so the first thing I wondered was, "What kind of name is Kinsey?" I found out in the third book, "C" is for Corpse, that Kinsey was given her mother's maiden name as her first name, a Southern custom. Apparently, Kinsey is an English surname meaning "king's victory."

The second thing I wondered was, "How come detective stories are so fun and easy to read, so much so that I do not expect to run across a word I do not know, like mackle."

My first jobs were in libraries, where I felt completely at home and loved being around books and people who loved books. My next jobs became a career, if you can call it that, at high-tech companies for which I wrote ads and direct mail about oscilloscopes, printers, and the like. There I felt like a round peg trying to smoosh myself into a square hole.

Anyway, what I learned, as a writer of this promotional prose, is that you want to aim for a reader at sixth-grade level with an unlikely specialty in electrical engineering. Then you are sure to be read and understood.

"Aha!" thought I, mulling all this over, writers of detective stories know about this sixth-grade reading level too. I'll bet that if you took the top ten books of fiction on the New York Times Bestseller List and ran them through the sixth-grade word filter, you would not find ten words above sixth grade reading level.

So what gives with mackle? I looked it up in accordance with Rule No. 1: Look up every word you don't know.

Mackle means "a blurred or double impression in printing" and comes to us from the Latin macula, which means spot, by way of the French macule, in the late sixteenth century.

Gloucester

I went for a walk in my neighborhood a few days ago and it started to drizzle on the way back. Just the sort of weather to make me think of the word moisty, as in one of my favorite nursery rhymes:

The Old Man of Gloucester
One misty moisty morning,
When cloudy was the weather,
I chanced to meet an old man,
Clothed all in leather.
He began to compliment
And I began to grin.
How do you do? And how do you do?
And how do you do again?

I thought, "Maybe there's a post in the word moisty." Was that a word that English-speaking people use outside of nursery rhymes, I wondered. According to the Urban Dictionary, the word has acquired a vulgar meaning, a moisty being the feminine version of boner.

Now, if you are comfortable using moisty or boner in casual conversation and informal writing, good. But I am not.

So, moving on . . . .

"Maybe there's a post in Gloucester." One time I read that British towns whose names end in caster, like Lancaster, chester, like Winchester, cester, like Worcester, were originally Roman camp towns.

Through hundreds of years of fielding armies and occupying countries, the Romans had developed an almost unassailable plan for the castrum or fortified camp. The soldiers lived in the camp when they were not marching or fighting; on occasion, they retreated to it to save their skins. So when they occupied Britain, or Provincia Britannia, from 43 to 409 CE, they built many such camps to accommodate the men, and these became towns and cities.

For a legion of 5000 to 6000 soldiers, officers experienced in camp construction would lay out a square 450 to 550 feet on each side, with headquarters (the praetorium) in the middle. They would supervise digging a trench around the perimeter, raising the wall, and laying the criss-cross of roads with gates at each end of camp. On the road, every soldier marched with his palus, or fence-post, which became part of the palisade around the top of the wall. The camp was complete in six hours at most, and could be built, if necessary, while the legion was under attack.

Gloucester (pronounced "gloster") became a market center in about 48 CE and a Roman colonia, or retirement center, in 97 CE. The Roman word glevum (the first part of Gloucester) means
bright place or caer glow in Celtic.

Layout of a Roman camp.

Kastell Theilenhofen Iciniacum (English). CC BY-SA 3.0. Mediatus.

Paladin

The city of Rome grew out of the settlements of seven hills, including the first settled, the Palatine Hill. The Palatine Hill includes Bronze Age remains from as early as 1000 BCE as well as the Lupercal, the legendary cave where orphaned twins Romulus and Remus were nursed by a she-wolf in 771 BCE.

Livy (59 BCE to 17 CE), ventured a guess that the Palatine Hill got its name from the Arcadian settlement of Pallantium. Other ideas put forth include origin in the word palis, Latin for stake, as in a fence made of stakes, or palātum, Latin for palate. In short, we don't know.

At any rate, the emperor Augustus (63 BCE to 14 CE) lived on the hill and later emperors, less chary of showing off their imperial status than Augustus, built their palaces here. The word palace comes to us from Palatine.

Whew! Long way around. Anyway, the word paladin, meaning knight or official of the emperor, comes from the same root word, Palatine. The word first shows up in English in 1592, in the first work of a minor poet, Samuel Daniel (1562 to 1619), but came to us by way of the Old French word paladin, used in the Song of Roland (mid-twelfth century) and other early chansons de geste.

The paladins, also known as the Twelve Peers, were in Charlemagne's service just as the Knights of the Round Table were in Arthur's. They were the best of the French warriors, sent to battle the Saracens (the early word for Muslims) in the Crusades.

I first came across the word paladin in 1957, when Have Gun--Will Travel premiered on television. The hero of the show is Paladin (actor Richard Boone), an educated, gentlemanly "knight without armor" who compares his methods to the movements of the knight on a chess board. He says the knight is an "attack piece, the most versatile on the board. It can move eight different ways, over barriers, and [is] always unexpected." ("The Road to Wickenburg," Season 2, Episode 7, October 25, 1958, Have Gun--Will Travel, CBS, Television.)

Our modern-day Paladin does not wear armor, but he does dress distinctively. On the trail he wears all black, and this struck me, even though I was only eleven, because I was an avid consumer of Western movies and tv shows, and the hero always (or almost always) wore a white hat. In other words, the hero was unremittingly good, never tempted, never wrong.

Tower of Babel

Remember the story of the Tower of Babel from Genesis? God found the people speaking one language and sharing all their knowledge, and, more than that, building a tower all the way to Heaven. So He put a stop to this alarming train of events. He made sure the people scattered, their languages became incomprehensible to each other, and the tower was never completed.

Genesis 11, 1-9
1 And the whole earth was of one language and of one speech.

2 And it came to pass, as they journeyed east, that they found a plain in the land of Shinar; and they dwelt there.

3 And they said one to another: 'Come, let us make brick, and burn them thoroughly.' And they had brick for stone, and slime had they for mortar.

4 And they said: 'Come, let us build us a city, and a tower, with its top in heaven, and let us make us a name; lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.'

5 And the LORD came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men builded.

6 And the LORD said: 'Behold, they are one people, and they have all one language; and this is what they begin to do; and now nothing will be withholden from them, which they purpose to do.

7 Come, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech.'

8 So the LORD scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth; and they left off to build the city.

9 Therefore was the name of it called Babel; because the LORD did there confound the language of all the earth; and from thence did the LORD scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth.

Now we know that balel is the Hebrew word for confound or mix up; we are given this etymology right in the last verse of the story. It is not much of a stretch to think that, just as the Greeks heard "bar, bar, bar," when barbarians spoke, or we hear "blah, blah, blah," the Hebrews heard "bal, bal, bal."

We also know that Babel is a Hebrew loan word from the Akkadian word "bab-ilu," meaning "gate of God."

And we know that the particle el (cognate to "ilu" in Akkadian) means God or god, first in Canaanite and then in Hebrew. (So all those Biblical names that include the particle el, like Elizabeth or Daniel, have a little bit of God in their meaning.)

Like the story of the flood in Noah's Ark (in Genesis chapters 6 to 8), I have the fanciful notion that the story of the abandonment of the Tower of Babel and the confounding of languages has some basis in communal memory.

Once upon a time, linguists hypothesize, Indo-European peoples spoke a common language, now called the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) language. During prehistoric human migration, each group spoke whatever it called PIE, but added to the language as its circumstances required and borrowed from whatever native languages it came into contact with.

The people thought they could reach Heaven if they built the tower just a little higher. The Tower of Babel by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 1563. Held by the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna.

Uploaded to Wikimedia Commons by Dcoetzee.