We've Got The County Covered
We've Got The County Covered
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The nursery rhyme goes; Barber, barber, shave a pig! How many hairs will make a wig? Four-and twenty, that’s enough. Give the barber a pinch of snuff. I’m guessing that this nonsense is three or four hundred years old; that’s when rich people wore wigs. I also guess that there never was a time when any one pig could furnish enough hair or hairs for even one wig. But when did nursery rhymes have to be factual? As promised last week, a hog, or pig if you prefer, met its end yesterday. I had pictured this creature as Mr. Porker, a generic swine...
We don’t run out of these terms of which we might think there are only a few, but they crop up all the time. A few months ago, on my way to farthingale, I came upon fascet. It’s pronounced the same as facet yet is nothing like it. With the c, it means a tool for carrying glass bottles to the annealing furnace, a process in glass making. Without the c, it is a facet, a plane (flat) surface cut in a diamond to make it sparkle. Gambol and gamble look so much alike that it is a surprise to see the dictionary distinguish them from one other. The...
A good game one can play with oneself is to look at new words that crop up here and there and try to figure out what they mean, before consulting the dictionary.. A “tool kit” of basic Greek and Latin roots will take you a long way along the path of making friends with oddities such as acromegaly and vadose. How about proscenium? When I first ran into this utterly mysterious word in high school, I could not imagine what it might mean, nor that any normal person could pronounce it or understand it, still less ever find a use for it. The dictiona...
In an article written by a European for other Europeans, the writer said, “Americans dress like children.” What the general topic of the article was I don’t know, but this flat statement has stayed in my mind for months. It makes me laugh every time I think about it. Can we really argue with the writer’s thought? We have to admit that, for a start, virtually everyone, from newborns to bank presidents and teachers, to 80-something ladies, wears blue jeans. Where had that European writer gotten his ideas on what Americans wear? I know it wasn’t i...
By Kay Russo Alice and Weston arrived at Grandpa and Grandma’s house at lunch time. After some food, Grandpa took them out for a walk to enjoy the perfect spring weather. Grandma had a deadline and stayed home to do some desk work. Back in the house, a stack of board games left over from their parents’ time caught the children’s attention. “Herd Your Horses,” “Top Dog,” and “Mastermind” had to be lifted down from a high shelf and examined. Neither Alice nor Weston is even close to reading, so the main charm of the games seems to be throwing th...
Several years ago, the Blaine County Library withdrew from circulation a thick book titled Gestures. I found this book on the cart in the library entryway. Never before having seen anything on this topic, I gave the librarian my 25 cents and took the book home. How could I guess what to expect? The book was a surprise in more ways than one. Four scholars from Oxford University in England had made a detailed, in fact, minute, scholarly study in a branch of anthropology seldom explored. Let me quote the first sentences of the Preface: “The i...
A couple of days ago, a friend sent me a long e.mail with a link to a video of dozens of old abandoned steam engines. He is a train enthusiast and thought maybe I am, too. I watched this parade to the end. These sad remnants of past glories were photographed in their pitiful situs and present humiliation. Sic transit gloria mundi—thus passes away worldly glory, or something like that. Well, in those 15 minutes of the video, I learned more about rusty metal than I ever thought possible. I fear that for me trains have about the same mystique t...
The wooded lot needed sprucing (joke) up after several years’ neglect of the fallen trees and a record-breaking snowstorm the previous winter. Karl and Hubert are neighbors on a wooded mountainside. Over time, their respective tracts had become littered with fallen branches and dead, fallen trees. They decided to rent a machine that would chew, chomp, and grind up all that debris which was in the way and was a fire hazard but which held the promise of almost unlimited mulch for a new method of gardening which they wanted to initiate on their r...
The Victorians spoke of, if they were not actually speaking in, the language of the flowers. It seems that using the language of the flowers allowed courting couples to say things to each other that propriety forbade their saying in plain English. Much was said in those days without actually saying it. Indirection, for which read quite often, flirting, must often have been annoying, yet some people enjoyed it. Some would have said that all the mystery was taken out of life when plain speech (and beyond) became the way to speak in all situations...
“How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.” The poet means a person, but many people would say this about their downfall. Fortunate are you if you can take ‘em or leave ‘em—sweet things to eat, that is. One woman already of grandmother age says she simply doesn’t dare have a cookie or piece of cake, because the taste of one of these would result in bingeing on such goodies till the whole plateful is gone, “and I’d go looking for more.” Other people, granted, probably many fewer, are indifferent to the whole tribe of sweet things and actual...
The dinner conversation turned to food in general. “I’ve been wondering what people commonly ate a couple of generations ago that we don’t eat any more,” one hungry person said. “Rutabagas!” another one said jokingly. Well, did most people ever eat many? One person said, “When I was growing up, sometimes we would have plain rice with milk and sugar and cinnamon, for dinner.” In 2016 “dinner” is now called “lunch.” The family was not poor and the mother was a good cook who liked to cook, but some meals were very simple. In much earlier days in...
There once were two tails, one on each of two chickens, but they are irrelevant. This is a tale of two chickens. One chicken was big and one was small, analogously to great-grandfather and young teenager. They were not related to each other and lived on different farms. However, both were brought up with the minimum of human intervention and interference by the owners. Both were spared food full of things with scientific-sounding or unpronounceable names. Both were allowed to live in spaces where the fences were many yards apart and where...
It pays to have two dictionaries at hand. The old one will tell you what the words you run across used to mean. You need the new one to tell you what people are saying that words mean now. Strangely enough, meanings change so much and so often that the best we can do is say what “usage” says they mean. My old dictionary says that a pilot flag is one hoisted at the fore by a vessel coming into harbor and desiring a pilot. It was a “plate” of colored pilot flags that got me interested in flags at all. Curious as to how a newer dictionary would d...
Not yet. We’re still wandering around this beautiful campus looking for the art museum. These streets are not streets; they are simply beautifully designed and maintained brick walkways which students can march down ten abreast and not feel crowded. It is not clear where the walkway goes but it is not to the parking lot of the art museum. We’ll turn around here and hope not to back over any students or into the concrete posts that make it clear that we can’t drive any farther. The map of the campus seems to say that the art museum is just...
How little is little? In this case, little means age two but not yet two and a half, and four, but not yet four and a half. The girl is older. Parents were not on the scene; this was an overnight with Grandma. Grandpa was out of town, but Grandma is brave. Two is too young for some children of two to spend the night away from parents but somehow this little boy can do it. Grandma had had the foresight to stop at the craft store before picking up Alice and Edward Saturday afternoon. After mud, modelling clay, Silly Putty, and Play-Doh, now...
I don’t mean if you are deep in a crime novel and don’t want to be distracted. I mean if you are a character IN a crime novel, there are certain things you have to do. One is, if you are driving on a winding road to anywhere, with or without pursuers, you have to snake your way through the trees, the brush, or whatever the terrain offers. Gone are the days of winding roads; if they aren’t straight, they are snaking their way through the wilderness or up a mountain. If a mechanical object is a potential sound-maker, when someone uses it, it [d...
We’re going to put off the death part yet awhile. Taxes, not so easy. The dreaded packet came in the mail yesterday. They want to throw me off the scent so they try to pretend that there aren’t as many sheets of paper in the packet as I see. Do they think I am blind? First there are six pages, unnumbered, so they don’t count. Pages 1 and 2 come next, numbered, with all kinds of information about me that I already know. Quite a bit of it is wrong, either because it changed since last tax season or because it was already wrong. Who are these...
It’s funny about snow. No matter how often, how firmly, we tell ourselves that snow has nothing to do with Christmas, Christmas has nothing to do with snow, do we really, truly, deep in our hearts believe it? Being honest, I can’t say Yes. A boy or girl who wishes for snow at Christmas may be consoled if they get a bicycle or roller skates because at least they may be able to use the gift that day. If they get ice skates or snow toys of any kind, visible grass will seem almost a taunt. Some people in snow country are glad to get by without havi...
Christmas Day is past, yet the glow may still be lighting certain corners of our lives. The thought struck me a couple of days ago, “Candles are an important part of Christmas, from cultural tradition even if not part of the original story.” Wise sayings cluster around the use of candles: “Better to light one candle than to curse the darkness”; “How far that little candle throws its beams! So shines a good deed in a naughty world.” When Shakespeare said this, naughty meant worthless. Many churches have discovered that the lighting of Advent c...
