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.

Skein, Neighbor, Weigh

The word skein follows a rule I learned from my old-lady school teacher in the first grade:

i before e,
Except after c,
Or when sounded like "a,"
As in neighbor and weigh.

Evidently this little ditty has been around in school books since the 1870s or so. And, although the rule has many exceptions, the word "skein" is not one of them. For it is pronounced as if it had a long a, n, and e: skane.

Originally a skein was a specific length of yarn, depending on the type of fiber. Let wool be our example here. A skein used to be 80 yards of hand-spun wool, as measured on a spinner's weasel or clock wheel, a type of winder two yards in circumference, with a gear ratio of 40:1. When the yarn reached 80 yards, the weasel made the popping noise we know from the nursery rhyme, "Pop Goes the Weasel." The round of yarn was removed from the winder and tied with yarn in four places for washing, dyeing, and drying.

Skein started as a lovely old Middle English word, skeyne, meaning a certain length of hand-spun wool or another fiber from Middle French escagne and from Vulgar Latin scamnia, from scamniare, to wind yarn.

The first known use of the word skein was in the 1300s, the century in which Geoffrey Chaucer (ca. 1343-1400) lived.

Now yarn is sold in skeins or balls by weight, not by length. A typical skein of yarn weighs 25 or 50 grams, but varies in length depending, of course, on the weight of the fiber.

Tippy Tea

Assam tea leaves are harvested in two flushes. The first flush is picked in late March and makes a strong and earthy tea with a malty, full-bodied flavor. The second flush, the more highly prized, and more expensive, "golden-tip" tea, is picked in late May and early June and is said to be just as malty, just as full-bodied, as tea made from the first flush, but smoother.

I have had both, and Assam Golden Tip Tea, in my humble opinion, was only marginally smoother, and that impression lasted only until I took the second sip.

But I could not pass up the chance to post on tippy tea, and to save both of us a little money the next time we are looking at shelves piled high with Assam and Assam Golden-Tip tea.

Reading for Fun

When you are absorbed in reading fiction, several areas in your brain "light up." And not just the centers for reading and understanding words. Also activated are centers for the sensory and motor activities described in the story. In other words, you are in some way experiencing the story vicariously.

We know this because of recent research into the brain through functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI. In one study, among the first to show our brains on literature, Michigan State University professor Natalie Phillips examined scans of Stanford University graduate students while they skimmed or perused Jane Austen's novel Mansfield Park.

(A brief digression. Skim and peruse are opposites, or antonyms. I have seen the two words conflated in recent usage.)

When the students read the text closely, their brains showed increased blood flow to the regions controlling sight, hearing, taste, smell, or touch, depending on the story, or to the specific region of the motor cortex controlling that body movement.

Meet you on the holodeck, anyone?

Tea-Garden Time

Lately, between dinnertime and bedtime, I have been feeling as tired as the wrung-out dish rag in the kitchen sink. One evening, I made myself a cup of Assam tea, which, the tea container assured me, was very good with milk. ("And sugar!" I said to myself.) It gave me a little pick-me-up, did not irritate my stomach like Chinese tea does, and did not keep me up all night like coffee would have.

Assam tea is brewed from the leaves of Camellia sinensis var. assamica, the tea bush native to the river-valley lowlands of the small state of Assam in northeastern India. This tea bush is different from its cousin Camellia sinensis var. sinensis, the Chinese tea bush native to the southern highlands of China. And, by the way, these are the only two places in the world where tea bushes grow naturally.

The Chinese discovered tea five thousand years ago. According to the charming legend, emperor and herbalist Shennong had his attendants boil all his water for purity. One day they presented him with a cup of boiled water into which a leaf from the Chinese tea bush had inadvertently fallen. He noticed the restorative property of the drink and . . . end of story! Soon tea became popular throughout China. Chinese tea was introduced to the west by Portuguese priests and merchants in the sixteenth century and was all the rage in Europe by the seventeenth-century.

I am pretty sure that Assam tea was discovered at about the same time as Chinese tea, but it was not introduced to the west until the early 1800s. A Scottish adventurer, Robert Bruce, discovered Camellia sinensis var. assamica in 1823. After his death, about 1830, his brother had the bush verified in Calcutta as being similar to, but a distinct variety of, the Chinese tea bush. By the late 1830s, the East India Company test-marketed Assam tea in London and soon instituted policies encouraging British subjects to lay claim to land in Assam and plant tea-garden estates.

Note the rather deceptive use of the term "tea garden" (to say nothing of "lay claim to land"). We are talking about plantations, which, in order to prosper, depend on an owner-slave or at least a master-serf relationship to keep the cost of production down, no matter whether tea, coffee, sugar, rice, or tobacco is being grown.

Based on plantation custom, the Assam tea gardens are on Tea Garden Time, one hour ahead of the Indian Standard Time (IST) observed throughout the rest of India and Sri Lanka. It is sort of a daylight savings time, so that the workers get as much time in the fields as possible in the sunlight between 9:00 am (IST 8:00 am) and 5:00 pm (IST 4:00 pm).

So while I am sipping my restorative cup, around 8:00 at night "tea-garden time," and resting from my labors--or maybe even inspired to take them up again for pleasure--the plantation workers in Assam are just beginning their field work for the day.

1850 engraving of Assam tea production.

Queen Anne's Lace

The lacy flower head of Queen Anne's Lace is called an umbel, from Latin umbella (ae), parasol; the word is a diminutive form of umbra (ae), shadow or shade.

Each umbel has about thirty tiny white flowers in a flattened round, and sometimes the umbel has a purple center flower. The white flower bears two seeds and one fruit each: The flat inner sides of the seeds are stuck together until they are dry enough to separate, and the rounded outer sides are covered in burrs. The purple flower is sterile.

As the flower head dries, its stems close in on themselves like a parasol, eventually to let go of the parent plant and fly away. Seeds drop during flight or after landing, and some are carried even farther away by animals whose feather or fur picks up the burrs. So, nearly a failsafe system for making sure that seeds have a chance to find new ground.

Here's the kicker, though, and I was not ready for this. Nobody knows why some umbels have a central purple flower and some do not, and nobody knows why the purple flower is sterile.

Do you know about eol, Encyclopedia of Life? The purpose of which is to provide information about, and pictures of, every kind of life on the planet, all in one database. Eol is a wonderful resource for projects like this.

The word umbel was known to my old-lady Latin teacher through its use in Martial and Juvenal. Evidently the first use of the word umbel in English is in dispute, but the earliest reference seems to date to 1590.

The Waffle Iron

Usually my waffle iron and I are on pretty good terms, an amazing state of affairs given my history with household appliances. Pretty good terms, that is, except for the wake-the-dead siren that sounds when the waffle is done--just in case I've fallen back to sleep while meditatively watching the hot water drip through the coffee in my cone filter into my French workman's glass.

Right now, though, the waffle iron is out of temper and the siren sounds like a drowning finch and the waffles stick something terrible. Breakfast is waffle top or waffle scrapings, or, worse yet, just plain old toast. Cleaning stuck waffle off the waffle iron becomes a task for later in the day, when I am feeling more pulled together. (I am not a lark nor much of an owl, I am a daytime, sunshine person.) And making waffles the next morning becomes an exercise in hope, or maybe I should say folly.

This is life, and I am resigned to that. Some days everybody is out of temper and a little grumbling and jostling are normal. But this morning, I did get a mostly whole waffle out of the waffle iron, or two, actually, and the waffle iron is not in the clean-later pile. Very good news.

The home electric waffle maker became a fixture of the well-appointed kitchen in the 1930s, right alongside the pop-up electric toaster. General Electric introduced the first commercial electric waffle maker in America in 1911; Bisquick, Aunt Jemima, and the rest introduced dry pancake and waffle mix in the 1930s; and the Dorsas brothers introduced frozen waffles, Eggos, in 1953.

Apparently the etymology of waffle is unclear or in dispute. According to the Wikipedia entry, waffle originally comes from a Frankish root, wafla, or honeycomb. According to the Online Etymological Dictionary, waffle originally comes from Proto-Germanic wabila, honeycomb or web, with ties to Old High German weban and Old English wefan, to weave. And if the words "Frankish," "Proto-Germanic," and "Old English" don't leave you all aswoon, as they do me, I'm done now.

As for the second meaning of waffle, to waver, maybe I will tackle that some day when I am feeling indecisive.

Monticello Soup

Once I finished writing the Monticello post, I had some "leftovers." So, Monticello soup.

Not only did Thomas Jefferson design (and, after seeing European and classical architecture,) redesign Monticello himself, he built in a few ingenious things to make life easier. A hideaway bed. A revolving clothes horse with 48 arms, sort of like a spiral dry cleaner's rack hung vertically. A revolving book stand for five open books at a time, which folds up into a cube for storage.

And the first dome in America. Although beautiful and stately, the room under the dome proved to be impractical as a ladies' drawing room, its original purpose, and was rarely used. It is about 26 feet in diameter, with eight circular windows and a skylight, and it is difficult to heat in winter or cool in summer.

With his son-in-law the plantation manager, Jefferson invented the mouldboard plow for the hilly ground of Albemarle County. As you plow a furrow, the topsoil lifts up and over the mouldboard, falling in a strip to one side only. The mouldboard plow made faster work of plowing a field on a hill and left ridges deep enough to help drain off snowmelt and heavy winter rain.

Jefferson maintained experimental gardens in an effort to determine which fruit and vegetables were best grown in the Virginia climate. During his time in Paris, he shipped European plants to Monticello and American plants to Paris. And he both collected and distributed seeds from friends and neighbors in America, the Lewis and Clark expedition, and European gardeners as well.

Most of Monticello was in cultivation. Jefferson grew fruit, vegetables, and flowers for the main house and cash crops, tobacco and later wheat, to enable the purchase of other goods. However, the plantation was not successful, in part because of debt inherited from his wife's family, in part due to crop failure, and Jefferson died in debt.

I Put On My Thinking Cap

I used to hate it when my grammar-school teacher would link two or three things that sound alike but mean different things. "Oh, no!" I would wail to myself. "Now I'll always think of one thing when I think of the other, and that will confuse me." So I would put in extra effort to file the info away in two different places, one for its, let's say, and one for it's.

Its is a possessive pronoun. Possessive meaning, "belongs to." I'm talking about a magazine and I want to refer to the cover: its cover. Pronoun meaning not a noun (the name of a person, place, or thing), but a special stand-in word, like I, you, he, she, it, we, y'all, they.

One of the South's greatest contributions to the English language is y'all. We no longer have an intimate you, formerly thee, thou, thy, thine, like French, Italian, Spanish. We have never had a plural you, other than you (implied plural). Y'all is perfect. You becomes the form of address for a single person (possibly an intimate); y'all becomes the form of address for a group.

It's is a contraction; that is, the phrase used to be longer, "it is," but, when you put the apostrophe (') in place of the letter i in is, you can use a shorter, more colloquial sounding phrase: it's. "It's a bird, it's a plane, it's . . . Superman!"

Simple as that.

Vitruvian Man

"Vitruvian Man" is that pen-and-ink drawing you are probably familiar with, by Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519), of a man in anatomical, side, and spread poses inside, and defining the points of, a circle and a square. Da Vinci made the drawing in about 1492.

Remember the Monticello post a few days ago? Oh, well, no matter.  Anyway, we recovered the 10-volume work, De architectura (Ten Books of Architecture) by Vitruvius, first-century-BCE Roman architect, in 1414. But we did not recover his illustrations.

Vitruvius believed that human proportions had their basis in the cosmic principles of geometry and proposed that this truth should inform our architecture. Since we had lost Vitruvius's original drawing, da Vinci made one, giving Vitruvius's text in the mirror-writing around the figure.

In 2011, researchers at Imperial College London noticed that the model for da Vinci's drawing may have been a cadaver who died of the inguinal hernia evident on the left side of the groin. (Today, if the condition were severe enough, we would have repaired it by emergency surgery; in 1492, it would have been fatal.)

The discovery that da Vinci's Vitruvian man has a physical flaw is big. Monumental, even. Vitruvius articulated the theory of the microcosm; da Vinci illustrated it, and, maybe even unwittingly, enriched the idea. Each of us is perfect as a Platonic representation of the human figure; each of us is subject to disease and imperfection as an individual.

I'm not a philosopher, so what do I know? But that's my take on it.

Vitruvian man is depicted on NASA's EVA (Extra-Vehicular Activity) patch. (NASA is the United States National Aeronautics and Space Administration.) The patch is worn on the spacesuits of members of EMU (American Extravehicular Mobility Unit) and on the uniform jumpsuits of people who have walked in space.

"Vitruvian Man" as drawn by Leonardo da Vinci in 1492.

"Da Vinci Vitruve Luc Viatour" by Leonardo da Vinci - Own work www.lucnix.be. 2007-09-08 (photograph).

Nerd

I am not surprised to learn (from Wikipedia) that the word nerd first appeared in a book by Dr. Seuss (pseudonym of children's author and illustrator, Theodor Seuss Geisel, 1904-1991). The book was If I Ran the Zoo, published in 1950, one of my favorites then and now.

Narrator Gerald McGrew claims that he would collect "a Nerkle, a Nerd, and a Seersucker too" for his imaginary zoo. Nerd, like Nerkle, is a perfect Dr. Seuss word.

Along the way, the word has become associated with a person who is single-minded, or perhaps now we would say obsessive, about an intellectual pursuit, and who is passionate about that pursuit, but not necessarily comfortable socially. So also introverted or reclusive.

When I claim to be a word nerd, I mean it! When I wrote papers in college (by hand, I might add, because we had typewriters, not computers, and I could not write on a typewriter) I stacked exactly five sheets of paper on my desk, I began writing, I tossed the top sheet I had written on, because the writing was messy or crooked or wrong-headed, added the next fifth sheet, looked up the word I wanted to use next in the dictionary so that I could be sure it was the right word and I was using it correctly, and so on to the end of the first paragraph. There were a lot of crumpled-up first pages in my dorm wastebasket.

I've come a long way in the obsessive department, but, if you ask me what I am thinking about at any given time, it is likely to be a word.

"Read a Book!"

When I was a baby, I would stand up in my crib and yell: "Margarett! Read a book!" (Margarett was my grandmother and I had learned that calling out her name got her to come running.)

Among the books I loved at that time were the Simon and Schuster Little Golden Books, which came on the market in the fall of 1942. The books were colorful, child-sized books and sold for 25 cents each (about $4.00 in today's dollars). This was something my family could afford.

Of the twelve original titles, I vividly remember "reading" at least three.

In the Poky Little Puppy, the puppy learns, "Don't be late for dessert, or you might not get any." This was never my problem.

In the Three Little Kittens, the kittens lose their mittens. Oh, no! They have to find them. And then they have to wash and dry them and get them ready for next time. I can't remember ever having lost my mittens; not that I don't lose them now, because I do, or I would if I dared to take them with me.

And in the Little Red Hen, the hen who found the wheat planted it, tended it, harvested it, and baked it into bread. Every time she asked another animal for help, she got a "no" and had to do everything herself. When it came time to eat the bread, she told everyone that, since they did not help with the work, they could not share the loaf of bread with her.

But I do try to share, whether anybody has helped me or not.

Junk Food

Before 1972, we didn't have junk food. (According to the Wikipedia entry, Junk Food, the first use of  the phrase is attributed to Michael Jacobson, then director of the Center for Science in the Public Interest.)

We had snack food, about which see Bon Appetit's fascinating post, United Snacks of America, from the 1900s to the present day. We had candy bars (circa 1903), convenience food (1937), and fast food (1951). But until the phrase junk food, we had no implicit judgment of the value of this food.

My idea is that by labeling food good or healthful, bad or junky, we add a false moral component to the equation. You are not good if you eat healthful food and you are not bad if you eat junky food. By the way, in a distinction that may be disappearing, healthful means "beneficial to health" and healthy means "in good health." So food cannot be healthy.

As anecdotal proof only, I offer the story of Kansas State University professor of nutrition Mark Haub. He went on a junk-food diet consisting mostly of Twinkies, Oreos, and Doritos.  "[I]n weight loss," he said, "pure calorie counting is what matters, not the nutritional value of the food." He lost 27 pounds in two months, lowered his body mass index (BMI), and lowered bad cholesterol.

Not that Professor Haub recommends such a diet; he does not. He does suggest that portion size is a factor in weight loss or gain.

Monticello

In 1764, Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) turned 21 and came into his inheritance of 5,000 acres in Albermarle County, Virginia, his father having died about seven years earlier. Jefferson first used the name Monticello in a garden-book entry of 1767 and, in 1768, he cleared and leveled the 850-ft peak called Monticello ("Little Mountain" in Italian) on his property.

By this time, Jefferson's library included Andrea Palladio's 1570 I Quattro Libri dell' Architettura (Four Books of Architecture), which showed plans for villas based on classical Roman plans, James Gibbs's 1732 Rules for Drawing, and an Italian-English dictionary. From his studies of these (and other) works, Jefferson, acting as his own architect, designed and drew up plans for Monticello.

Now the Venetian Renaissance architect Palladio (1508-1580) had studied Vitruvius (ca. 80-15 BCE), the Roman architect and author of De architectura (Ten Books of Architecture), whose text and illustrations were both lost during the first collapse of European civilization in the fourth century CE. Vitruvius's text was rediscovered in a monastery library in the early Renaissance, 1414, the first illustrated version was published in 1511, and Palladio himself provided illustrations for a later version.

On the plantation, Jefferson grew tobacco and mixed crops and later changed over to wheat. The property comprised the house, a nailery and other outbuildings, slave quarters, gardens for flowers and produce, and experimental gardens. Around one-hundred-and-fifty slaves served in the house, on the grounds, and in the fields.

Jefferson brought his wife Martha home to Monticello in 1772. They enjoyed ten years of happy marriage and parented six children, two of whom survived to adulthood. His wife died in 1782, four months after the birth of her last child. At this time, the original Monticello was mostly complete.

Two years after the death of his wife, in 1784, Jefferson left Monticello and took a diplomatic post in Paris. While in Europe, Jefferson continued his amateur study of classical architecture and took note of the current trends as well.

Jefferson returned to Monticello in 1789 and began remodeling it in 1796 on the site of the original house. This time he wanted to go beyond the drawings in the books and bring home the true Enlightenment spirit of Monticello in a way that the original building had not.  He continued remodeling Monticello throughout his presidency (1801-1809).

Monticello is illustrated on the reverse (back) of the United States nickel.

A floor plan of Monticello.

Image credit: Thomas Jefferson Foundation. Copyright © Thomas Jefferson Foundation, Inc. From the Monticello website at http://www.monticello.org.

Elements of Style

In his Elements of Style (Ithaca, NY: W. P. Humphrey, 1918), Walter Strunk, Jr., rules on using commas in a series of three or more terms, one of my favorite little "tests" for clear writing. "Thus write," he says, "red, white, and blue; honest, energetic, but headstrong; He opened the letter, read it, and made a note of its contents."

Just like any style sheet for newspaper, publishing house, or corporation, Strunk's little book is prescriptive, because he is making one of many editorial decisions that will save the writer from confusing his or her reader.

Conforming to the nature of a style sheet, which gives examples but not reasons, Strunk does not explain why the writer should use the serial comma. But the reason is that the reader never has to puzzle out the meaning of a sentence like this: "My usual breakfast is coffee, bacon and eggs and toast." (Now that I've looked up Wikipedia's example for the serial comma, I have brain-freeze on an original example.)

No, this mistake (as I would read it) is not life-threatening. If you could care less about such things, au revoir and maybe I'll catch you on the flip side. But, with the serial comma, the meaning of each sentence becomes clear on the first reading. To me, that is a win-win.

However, the original Elements of Style (1918) is nothing more than a style sheet, like Associated Press’s Stylebook for journalists or  the Chicago Manual of Style for publishers. Until, that is, E. B. White (1899-1985), one of our great American writers and a former student of Strunk at Cornell University, transforms it, in his 1959 edition, into a true guide for writers (Elements of Style, Fourth Edition, William Strunk, Jr., E. B. White, Roger Angell [New York: Longman, 1999]).

Soon, I'll let E. B. White take us from the mechanics of clear writing to the hallmarks of good writing.

Summer Reading

My dear food-writer and foodie friend has said several things to me that have changed my life. My favorite is, "Whenever I don't know what to read, I read Pride and Prejudice. That way, I'm never disappointed."

When my daughter had cancer and our family went through two years of hell trying to save her life (and succeeding), I read Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice (London: T. Egerton, 1813). When my husband was ill with ALS (Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis--also known as Lou Gehrig's disease), I read Pride and Prejudice. I read it after I was widowed, and look forward to starting it again this hot summer evening.

I confess that, until lately, I have been thrown by Elizabeth's answer to her sister's question, "How long have you loved him?" It sounds so flip.

Elizabeth says, " . . . I hardly know when it began. But I believe I must date it from seeing his beautiful grounds at Pemberley." (Notice that in most of the recent mini-series and movie adaptations, script writers rarely change Austen's dialogue, because each bit of dialogue is so perfect for the person who says it. And this is so perfect for Elizabeth.)

She makes a sly allusion to the theme of the novel, "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife." Our Elizabeth cannot resist a little humor, even though she takes the joke seriously. But, without pride or prejudice, and now having seen Darcy's estate, she knows what kind of man he truly is. The fields and forests and lakes are well-managed and productive, the people who serve him admire their master for his kindness and fairness, and the house itself, without being showy, shows off his handsome demeanor and his well-ordered and cultivated mind.

Elizabeth sees a union for herself not with a self-important nitwit like Mr. Collins, not with a thoughtless wastrel like Wickham, not with a man who long ago lost his common sense to beauty alone, like her father, but a marriage that truly contributes to the society in which it flourishes.

Singerie

Singerie, French for "monkeyshines" and a kind of chinoiserie, is a design motif in which monkeys join a fun-loving crowd of partiers. Like chinoiserie, it is supposed to provide a gently mocking view of the human condition.

Singerie became fashionable in late 17th-century and 18th-century France and is typically associated with Rococo decorative painting. A primary example of which is the breathtaking Grande Singerie, a recently restored boudoir in the Chateau de Chantilly.

What a great word, singerie! and a loan word at that. And one that is unfamiliar enough that I will continue to italicize it, even though I would not italicize more well-known loan words, like subpoena or faux pas.

To this day, we have sophisticated examples of singerie, in textiles, for example. Just take a look at Scalamandré's wonderful Chinoise Exotique.

But my earliest exposure was to popular singerie. I don't know how many yellow kitchens I went into as a child, on whose walls were a "praying hands" plaque or a Pennsylvania Dutch saying, "Too soon old, too late schmart." Similarly, there could be a monkey see, monkey do relief or a see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil statuette.

Well, enough monkeyshines and on to more serious matters.

Detail of the allegory of the theater.

This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported, 2.5 Generic, 2.0 Generic and 1.0 Generic license.

To Be, Or Not To Be

William Shakespeare (1564-1616), English playwright and poet, gave us an immortal body of work. He was born in Stratford-on-Avon to a Catholic family (an outlawed affiliation at the time), married Anne Hathaway in 1582 and had three children, and wrote 38 plays, 124 sonnets, and some odd bits between 1589 and 1613. We don't know much more about him, and of some of what I have said we are not certain.

Historical criticism, a movement with its beginnings in the Protestant Reformation, gave us the tools to study the Bible not so much as if it were the literal truth, but as if it were the truest document human beings could write, edit, and collect. The idea of studying texts this way was eventually applied to secular works. So, by the mid-1800s, the question arose: did Shakespeare write these plays and poems? Or did somebody else?

Instead of assuming that Shakespeare, among the most creative geniuses the world has ever known, revised his manuscripts on the fly and did not necessarily keep track of all of his emendations as well as he might, Joseph C. Hart, in the Romance of Yachting, 1848, put forth the notion that several authors had worked on the manuscripts we have. I am belittling his case by my language, but the idea gained ground and a group of scholars still believes we should look at Shakespeare's authorship this way.

We have even had a movie about this lately, Anonymous (directed by Roland Emmerich, performed by Rhys Ifans, Vanessa Redgrave, Joely Richardson, and others, Columbia Pictures, 2011, Film), in which Edward De Vere, one of the top contenders for Shakespeare's slot in the alternate-Shakespeare view, is proposed.

What do I think about all this? Well, of course, I have already given you a hint, but my idea is that we have no real evidence to support this theory. For introducing this problem, the alternate-Shakespeare scholars should be locked up in their offices all day with nothing to read but gossip magazines.

As far as I am concerned, Shakespeare wrote Hamlet (The Oxford Shakespeare: Hamlet, William Shakespeare, edited by G. R. Hibbard [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008]), and this and his other works will continue to delight us from opening night to the present day to the "Conscience of the King" (Season 1, Episode 13, Star Trek, Desilu Productions, December 8, 1966, Television), star date 2817.6, and beyond.

Perry Mason

I love a hero, and my favorite hero of all time is Perry Mason.

Perry Mason has a long and honorable run. Created by Erle Stanley Gardner (1889-1970) and introduced in his first pulp-fiction novel, the Case of the Velvet Claw (Roslyn, NY: Walter J. Black, 1933), Perry stars in murder mysteries, radio serials, television shows, and made-for-tv movies from the first book until the last movie in 1993.

Perry is a fictional defense attorney in the Los Angeles of his day. (You can sometimes tell which year by the car he drives.) He defends his usually wealthy clients against murder charges by discovering the real killer and by using whatever legal, if unorthodox, means are available to him in the courtroom. He relies on his own wits and the help of his bright and loyal secretary, Della Street, and his man-about-town private investigator, Paul Drake.

Let me remark at this point that Perry is not the classic tragic hero with a fatal flaw; he is the good-guy hero of melodrama. For melodrama is story set to music, with the sound track cuing our feelings, whether joyful or fearful, like the organist at the silent-movie theater.

Aside from the fact that I love him (Oh! too much sharing?), there are numerous signs that Perry Mason is the good guy. Among them, I mention a repeated motif: His client is never guilty, no matter how bad things look in terms of motive, means, and opportunity. And another: When Perry confronts the bad guy in his home or office, the bad guy mixes himself a drink and offers one to his guest, but Perry never accepts. Perry is not a tee-totaller and often has a shot of whiskey or a glass of wine (after dark, of course) once a case is won. Even now, these details play out in modern television shows about crime.

Perry Mason is a man of strength, courage, and integrity. In short, a man after my own heart.

Well, how about a little dose of real life? Raymond Burr, who played Perry Mason on television, was gay, but, for fear of American public reaction, did not reveal his sexuality until late in his life. Apparently, a publicist made up a sad but phony story about a lost wife and son that stuck to him and helped camouflage his 35-year relationship to the love of his life, Robert Benevides. Burr did not outright deny the story about the wife and child; he just refused to discuss it.

But I'll take my heroes where I can get them, and Perry Mason, conflated with Raymond Burr, is still my hero, for his loyalty and steadfastness to his partner and his other great qualities.

Chinoiserie

My dear soul-mate friend gave me my own little piece of chinoiserie, the rice bowl her great-aunt carried with her on missions to 1890s China. Miss Nellie (her name, as far as I can recollect) hoped to convert to Christianity those whom she thought of as heathen. What courage! what faith! what a sense of righteousness! to head off to an unknown land hoping that foreigners will fill up your rice bowl.

Chinoiserie, French for "Chinese in design or evocative of Chinese design," became fashionable in seventeenth-century Europe and has been in vogue ever since. Although there are similar allusions to other exotic cultures in the decorative arts, Moroccan, for instance, or Persian, there is no all-encompassing word that I know of for these other influences.

Like the travelogue in literature, chinoiserie (and other decorative allusions) give Westerners a peek into another culture, so that, by momentarily becoming outsiders, we gain insight into our own foibles and proclivities and see the other as ourselves.

Amazingly, when Miss Nellie is carrying her rice bowl among the unsaved, it is not chinoiserie. It becomes chinoiserie when it takes up residence in a Western home like mine.

Notre-Dame Cathedral

I love words.

The word cathedral is from the Greek καθέδρα, transliterated kathedra and meaning seat, in this case denoting the church where the bishop or archbishop has his throne.  The Romans borrowed the word from the Greek and made it into cathedra, because there is no k in the Latin alphabet. Hence, cathedral.

When I was in Paris (me! I was in Paris!), we went to Notre-Dame de Paris. Even though I was over sixty, I climbed all 387 stairs to the roof. If you've done the climb, you know that this is the only way to see the gargoyles up close and you can guess that, yes, even though I am in pretty good shape, I had to rest a few minutes on the way up and was winded when I got there.

Turns out the gargoyles are part of the run-off system; troughs cut in their backs and mouths like spouts drain rainwater off the roof and away from the walls. The English borrowed gargoyle from the French gargouille, in turn from the Latin word for throat, gula (an onomatapoeic--or "sounds like"--word). Believers may have seen the gargoyles as grotesque beings who scared evil spirits away.

833 years later, in the feature-length cartoon Hunchback of Notre Dame (Walt Disney Animated Classics, 1996, Film) we find that gargoyles are like any other scary creature from the past, kind of funny and a carrier of cultural knowledge of sorts, with the gargoyles Victor and Hugo paying homage to the author of the 1831 novel of the same name.

While gargoyles were part of the original design, flying buttresses (arched exterior supports) were not. Some time between ground-breaking in 1163 and the turn of that century, the choir walls began to show stress fractures and the flying buttresses provided an elegant solution to an inelegant problem. The phrase flying buttress dates from this time and may have had a Frankish, and ultimately proto-Germanic, origin in bouter, to push against.

NOVA recently aired "Building the Great Cathedrals," PBS, December 26, 2012, Television. We are still adding flying buttresses today to shore up Gothic cathedrals with stress fractures in walls that are too tall for the weight they must bear.

War and Peace

Anyone who has tried to read Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace (Moscow: The Russian Messenger, 1869) or any other great novel in translation knows that translation is a creative process and requires the translator to reenter the work. Understand the author's design. Choose words that support that design. Give characters the lifelikeness the author gives them. And so on.

In trying to read War and Peace, for instance, I have given up because the translator had not solved the problem of Russian naming conventions. Each character in a Russian novel has a given name, a patronymic, and a family name. The practical translator picks one version of the person's name and pretty much sticks with it (if he or she expect me to keep reading, anyway).

Then, to make things worse, it's always somebody or other's name day.

Maybe you can tell by now that my irritation got the better of me, and more than once, at the two Natalyas' name day in Chapter 1.

I have also given up reading a translation because the writing sounded stilted, as if the translator just plodded along word by word, instead of choosing the best word for the job, and the publisher didn't know the difference.

Just go to Amazon or Barnes and Noble, search on "leo tolstoy war and peace," and take a peek inside different editions, and you will see what I mean. With War and Peace, the translator has a particularly difficult problem: the first sentence is in French and, to be true to the novel, must stay in French or somehow retain its French "flavor."

A word to the wise. If you are translating a work of fiction, be prepared truly to become the author's voice. If you are reading a work of fiction in translation, be picky and look for the integrity the work of art deserves.

Bartie and Me

I tell my Sheltie (Shetland Sheepdog) Bart that he rivals Marley for the title, "world's worst dog."

He jumps up on people. He poops in the house. He runs around the dining table so I can't catch him. He rummages through the trash. He barks continuously to call everyone's attention to his delight in going to his crate for a treat. He pulls on his leash and slips his collar so that he can greet oncoming dogs. And, for his latest trick, he eats through the sheetrock wall that I have shoved his doorless crate up against.

The astute dog person will note that Bart's and my many failures in training are really my problem, not his. And, in his defense, he is eating through the wall because he is nervous about the new dog.

Like parenting, training a dog requires selfless devotion and martial law (so to speak). A happy dog knows who the leader of the pack is: me. A happy toddler knows the answer to the question, Mama, can I get a candy bar? A happy teenager (if there can be said to be such a one) knows the answer to the question, Mom, can I stay out all night at Jared's party?

The question of training comes up with one dog, of course, but add another and you see the beauty of tough love. Practice sessions. Drills. KP (Kitchen Patrol). Physical training. Perfect, beautiful discipline.

When you are using an abbreviation, follow it immediately with the full name, in parentheses if your sentence structure is similar to mine. Sheltie (Shetland Sheepdog). KP (Kitchen Patrol). Otherwise you run the risk of confusing and irritating your reader.

Brewing Up Some Trouble

I'm the absent-minded-professor type. When I should be minding my p's and q's or making sure there are no obstacles in my path, I am thinking about the origin of the word coffee and its many wonderful synonyms. Well, yes, a cup of coffee would be good about now, and, as I told my historian friend, "More coffee, more Diane!"

Anyway, the etymology of coffee is in dispute (surprised?), but most sources agree that the word originated in Africa, where the Coffea plant grows, and came to us from the Arabic قهوة (qahwah), the Turkish kavfeh, and, through trade (ca. 1598) between the Ottoman Empire and Venice, the Italian caffè. (For another post, we got the concept of zero in much the same way.)

My favorite way to make coffee at home is right away, first thing in the morning.  Beyond that, I use a one-cup drip filter and cone. The problem here is that you have to take care of a lot of things, and without drinking any coffee first, I  might add. Find a clean cup. Boil water. Figure out where you are keeping the filters these days and fit filter paper into the cone. Measure out coffee. Pour boiling water over coffee into cup.

While my mind is in the ivory tower thinking about the origin of the word coffee, wondering if there are some lovely famous quotations about coffee like there are about tea, promising myself to look up the difference between moka and espresso, I discover that I forgot to buy coffee filters. And not for the first time, either!

What to do? Remember Harper, Paul Newman's detective character in a 1966 movie with Lauren Bacall playing his client. (Harper, directed by Jack Smight, performed by Paul Newman, Lauren Bacall, Julie Harris, and others, Warner Bros.) Harper wakes up, bleary-eyed, stumbles around the kitchen trying to make coffee, finds that he is out of Chemex filters, and goes through the trash until he finds one he can use, all the while thinking about his next move in solving the case.

Forgetfulness

One factor of aging is that old memories tend to return; hence, as I mentioned in the wicker-cage post, you may be fortunate enough to remember parts of famous passages you once memorized.

Another factor of aging is that some memories tend to slip away, old and new alike, a process aptly described in Billy Collins's "Forgetfulness." The poem first came to my attention on Garrison Keillor's Writer's Almanac for Tuesday, March 22, 2011, on National Public Radio (http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/?date=2011%2F03%2F22).

Now, Billy Collins was born in 1941, in March, nearly eight months before Pearl Harbor (December 7, 1941). So before the United States entered World War II. As his poem suggests, he had to memorize the names of the nine muses in school (or maybe he did not have to, but was a very eager student who took it upon himself to do so).

I was born at the end of World War II, exactly nine months and two weeks after V-J, Victory over Japan, Day (August 15, 1945). And since memorization had become unfashionable in education, a discipline much swayed by fashion, I did not have to memorize the names of the nine muses, although I had to have read their names over at least once and learned where to look them up.

So, I think, as I hear the poem on the radio or read it over for myself, who are they, these nine muses? What are their names and what creative endeavor is each associated with? There is something to be learned here, and, since it's classical, probably something with some interesting follow-ups. Wikipedia to the rescue: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muse!

So we have Calliope (epic poetry), Clio (history), Erato (love poetry), Euterpe (song and elegaic poetry), Melpomene (tragedy), Polyhymnia (hymns), Terpsichore (dance), Thalia (comedy), Urania (astronomy). Soon enough, you will notice that I rarely pass up an opportunity to spoon up (or force feed) the classics.

And what of import did we learn here? Well, sadly, not much. But my faith in the knowledge of the classics remains unswerving, and, the next time I post, I will be sure to call upon my muse, Thalia.

The Wicker Cage

Suppose I am a prisoner of war being held by the Viet Cong. I have nothing to do. I have little to eat or drink. Worst of all, I have nothing to read. A little dramatic? Maybe. But as a word nerd I feel the need to plan for times like these.

When I was in grade school and high school, my teachers, who had had to memorize and perform set pieces like Chaucer's prologue, "whan that aprille with his shores soote," Shakespeare's Hamlet's speech "to be or not to be," or the last nine lines of Bryant's "Thanatopsis,"made an important change in American pedagogy, one of several changes which, to my mind, have not been for the better.

Students were no longer required to memorize famous passages.

Why? I don't know. Memorizing a famous passage is not easy and reciting it in front of people, at least for me, harder still. (Is it my turn yet? Oh, God, do I go now?) Maybe my teachers experienced this same kind of performance anxiety.

They also seemed to think that memorization was not a challenging mental activity. A parrot could do as much.

And they already had the shards of our civilization knocking around in their pockets and nobody was sure which ones were important and which ones were not and maybe it was time to let all that go.

But memorization is good practice, and of a different kind than other kinds of learning. (Give it a try, if you don't believe me.) As Sherlock says in "The Long Fuse" (Season 1, Episode 8, November 29, 2012, Elementary, CBS, Television) "The brain is a muscle, Watson, and needs to be exercised regularly, lest it turn flabby."

And the passages you learn by heart when you are young, will, if you are fortunate, stay with you. Or, as I have done with a scant few, can possibly be recovered if you study them again. Then you will have a little piece of beauty to take out and admire from time to time. For those times you find yourself suspended in a wicker cage in the middle of a jungle with nothing to read.

Queen of Hearts

Did you know that a free ticket is called an "Annie Oakley"? (I didn't either, and maybe, since ticket takers no longer punch holes in tickets, this usage is becoming outdated.)

When you get an admission ticket for free ahead of time, it is hole-punched just like it would have been had you used it to gain entry. And then it looks just like Annie's Ace of Hearts: one of her most famous sharpshooting tricks was a bullet through the center of a playing card, the Ace of Hearts, at 90 feet with a .22 caliber rifle. (She could also split the card edge-on.)

Annie was born to a poor Quaker family in Ohio in 1860. She taught herself to shoot when she was 8 years old and supported her family by selling the game she bagged to families, restaurants, and hotels in Southern Ohio. By the time she was 15, she had paid off the mortgage on her mother's farm.

For two of those years, 1870 to 1872, her mother could not take care of her and her sister and sent them to Darke County Infirmary, where she learned to sew and embroider. (Later, as a performer, she made her own costume, according to her idea of modesty: long-sleeved blouse, below-the-knee skirt, and leggings.) She was put out as an indentured servant to a couple she later called "the wolves"; they abused her physically and mentally and treated her like a slave.

When she was 15, she won a shooting contest with a traveling Irish marksman, Frank Butler, who had bet a hundred dollars that he could beat any local fancy shooter. They were married soon after, in 1876. In 1885, they joined Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show, left the wild west show and toured Europe, and returned to the show. Her fellow performer Chief Sitting Bull named her Watanya Cicilla, or Little Sharpshooter.

In later years, Annie was injured in a train collision and a car accident and turned to acting. But she continued to set sharpshooting records. Although she did not think women should have the vote, she taught many women to shoot and occasionally supported young women who needed financial help. When she died, at age 66, her husband quit eating and died 18 days later: a real-life love story.

With much indebtedness to the Wikipedia article on Annie Oakley.

Spine Poetry

Think "spine poetry." Now close your eyes. What comes to mind? Turns out you're supposed to take book titles as printed on book spines and arrange them in a stack so that they can be read as poems.

Spine poetry is the creation of artist Nina Katchadourian, who began her "Sorted Books" project in 1993 and just published, with Brian Dillon, twenty years of her own images in Sorted Books (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2013).

I first heard about spine poetry during National Poetry Month, April, when the local city library I volunteer at had a brief presentation introducing the "Spine Art" installation at the Library of Congress. (Although I would like very much to create timely posts, for example, a just-pre-April post to coincide with National Poetry Month or the "Spine Art" installation, I'm not sure I can commit to that. And then, where does it end? Do I write a themed post for every calendar event in the fields of Literature and Language? You see the dilemma.)

My musings on spine poetry: First note that a picture person, not a word person, came up with it. A lovely idea, very fun, according to which books become objects, just like they do when interior decorators arrange books on the coffee table by cover photo or on the bookshelf by color or size.

Objects as opposed to what?  Of course books are objects. But they are, and especially were, also the keepers and purveyors of civilization. And the more we are aware of that, as we are during a time of extreme change, the more books also become objects, whether to be collected, published in attractive series (like Penguin's modestly priced "Hardcover Classics'), cannibalized (as by publishers who depart from the 500-year-old principles of book design by placing an index, for example, with the front matter), or used as building blocks for structures or works of art.

We (civilization, such as it is at this point) are in the midst of a change of untold proportions in moving our print archives to the Internet. Assuming, that is, that we can keep track of the technology, a nagging problem for those of us who have lived through the transition from slides to celluloid film to digital "film" or records to tapes to dvds.

Sweet Tooth

Long ago, from an etymological resource I can no longer find, I learned that people who enjoyed sweets were thought to have an extra tooth, the sweet tooth. People with a sweet tooth love--or even crave--sugar, candy, cookies, pastries, desserts, ice cream.

Test: do you find yourself standing at the kitchen cupboard, spoon in hand, eating the lumps that have formed in the brown-sugar bag? Do you know that you can actually create these lumps by adding a few drops of water to the bag ahead of time? No? Ahem. (Reclaiming dignity.)

Anyway, I inherited this sweet tooth from my Danish grandfather, all five feet four inches of him. (As the elder daughter of an only child, I also inherited boxes-ful of family information, including his naval record, which gives his barely regulation height.)

Somewhere in there is a letter he wrote home during the Great War. He enlisted right after America joined the war, April 1917, and set sail for France as the bursar of a naval troop-transport ship. He writes that his favorite thing to do is go up on deck with a box of chocolates and eat them all up.

Meanwhile, as for the things that keep a word nerd up at night:

Elder because in comparisons of two, your only choices are younger or older, the comparative form; in comparisons of three or more, you have old, older, and oldest, the superlative form. So if I had two sisters instead of one, I would be the oldest. And, as my sister reminds me, I will always be older.

As for giving my grandfather's height, I had several choices:
     five feet four inches
     5ft 4in
     5' 4"
I chose the version I did because it fit with the easy-to-read vibe of an informal essay.