Jacob's Cattle

I have been wrestling with Jacob's angel all night long. (More like weeks, really.)

How can I explain that a folk belief, which we in the twenty-first century know is only partially true, worked to Jacob's advantage? Of course, we know that Jacob has God's favor. But we also find out that, typical of our savvy trickster hero, Jacob makes a plan so he will come out ahead.

Here's the story. In exchange for Leah (whom he marries by Laban's trickery) and then Rachel (whom he loves), Jacob has promised to work seven years for each sister.

During his service, just in case Laban asks Jacob to take his share when they part ways, Jacob practices selective breeding. He makes sure that the strongest sheep and goats breed with each other, in the hope that he will get strong offspring. (True.)

And he makes sure that these sheep and goats gaze upon branches carved with mottled, striped, and spotted patterns during conception, in the hope that, according to an old wives' tale, his flocks will have mottled, striped, and spotted offspring as his own and he can pick them out. (Not true.)

Several years into service, Jacob asks Laban to let him go home. Laban reworks their deal and agrees to give him everything he asks for, all the mottled, striped, and spotted sheep and goats he has hoped to take with him, and to move his camp, all the way not home, but close by.

Now there is a white bean, Phaseolus vulgaris, marked with mottled, striped, and spotted patches of maroon and known by the lovely old name, "Jacob's Cattle." It is the bean used in traditional New England baked beans and is now sold as an "heirloom" seed.

So I was concerned that I could make these ideas all come together, and then: Synchronicity! I was reading a book called The Coat Route (New York: Spiegel and Grau, 2013), by Meg Lukens Noonan, about the bespoke tailoring of a luxurious overcoat, and ran into the word "flocculent." Rule Number 1: look up unfamiliar words. Flocculent means "fleecy."

A sign! It was a sign that I should write this post straightaway and an assurance that I could, in some small way, pull it off. Call it superstition or synchronicity, we still want to impose an order on the not-so-orderly.

Triage

The word triage comes to us from the French trier, meaning to sort or cull, originally used by eighteenth-century French merchants in sorting wool or coffee for quality. So triage coffee is the heap of broken beans you are left with after sorting out the good beans and the best beans.

Dr. Dominique Jean Larrey (1766-1842) first used triage in a medical sense as surgeon-in-chief of Napoleon's armies from 1797 to the battle of Waterloo in 1815.

The great doctor sorted battlefield casualties into three groups: 1) patients who would probably die, no matter what; 2) patients who would most likely live, no matter what; 3) patients who would survive with immediate treatment, but would not survive without.

And, using the model of artillery carriages, drawn by two- or four-horse teams, that "flew" over the battlefield into position, Dr. Larrey came up with flying ambulances, ambulances volantes. The crew of the flying ambulances administered first aid to the wounded and then rushed them to nearby surgical waystations, the forerunners of MASH units, for emergency treatment.

In World War I, English and American medical personnel heard the French using triage for this effective method of saving badly wounded soldiers and so, thanks to the wonderful flexibility of the English language, it became our word as well.

Wounded men by the side of the road, Battle of Passchendaele.

Frank Hurley - State Library of New South Wales file:a479035.

Buffalo Bill

Buffalo Bill, also known as William Frederick Cody (1846-1917), won his nickname in a bet against William Averill Comstock (1842-1868) in the spring of 1868. At the time, Cody was a Civil War veteran, civilian scout for the Third Cavalry Regiment, and contract buffalo hunter for the crew laying track for the Union Pacific Railway in Kansas. Comstock was also a Civil War veteran, great-grandnephew of novelist James Fenimore Cooper, and chief of scouts and interpreter for Custer's Seventh Cavalry, the regiment stationed at nearby Fort Wallace.

The officers at Fort Wallace put up $500.00, wagering that Comstock could kill more buffalo on horseback in one day's time than Cody could.

On the day of the bet, the officers arranged for an excursion train to travel from St. Louis to the end of the track at Monument. Cody's wife Louisa and baby daughter Arta were on board with the rest of the audience. The officers provided champagne and lunch for contestants, bettors, and spectators.

Cody rode out on his horse Brigham and shot his favorite Springfield Model 1863. The rifle, which he named Lucretia Borgia after a popular Victor Hugo--and Renaissance--villainess, was possibly the one he was issued in the Civil War. Cody had had the rifle factory-upgraded to breech-load and fire .50-.70 cartridges. Comstock rode I-do-not-know-which-horse and used his 16-shot Henry rifle.

The hunt started at 8:00 a.m. and ended around 4:00 p.m, with Cody the winner. He shot 68 or 69 buffalo (reports vary) to Comstock's 48. Buffalo Bill describes the event most vividly in his autobiography.

Comstock already had a cool nickname, Medicine Bill, so he was stuck with that. He had earned this nickname several years earlier when he had saved the life of a Sioux woman with a deadly rattlesnake bite on her finger. He bit the finger clean off.

We get the word buffalo from Greek boubalos, originally a kind of African antelope. The word came into English through Latin, maybe Portuguese, and Middle French, by 1580.

William Frederick Cody, "Buffalo Bill."

United States Library of Congress's Prints and Photographs division under the digital ID cph.3a21252.

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.