Sarah Angleton's Blog, page 2

At Some Point I’ll Be Back to Title This Post

In 1880, led by then University President Charles W. Eliot, Harvard began a program of granting sabbatical to its professors. A concept derived from Old Testament Biblical tradition, this year of rest from the demands of teaching would include half the normal salary and could only take place once every seven years. 

Not how I’ve been spending my time. But wouldn’t it be lovely? Image by Lukas from Pixabay

Though Harvard was the first to apply the concept, several universities followed suit over the course of the next few years. Today, of course, the sabbatical is a common occurrence in university settings, but it is also surging in the corporate world, where more and more companies are recognizing productivity benefits in allowing their high level employees to take a little time to switch directions and clear their minds a bit.

I’m a big fan of taking a minute, and have from time to time found in my own creative journey, the need to do so. Sometimes when the creative juices are less willing to flow, a walk or a day spent in some other kind of work, has often been helpful to get them going again. But the notion of a full year away has always been a lot to imagine.

It turns out that even though corporate sabbaticals are beginning to become more common, a good percentage  still begin with unplanned events, like an unexpected  health challenge or family emergency. I can’t claim either was the impetus for the sabbatical I have recently found myself on.

Also not how I’ve been spending my time But it probably should be. Image by Pexels from Pixabay

I’m sure that those of you who follow this blog very closely have noticed that I haven’t posted in quite a while. I apologize for disappearing without explanation, but I honestly didn’t realize how much I needed to step away. 

Many of you know that this school year I took on a full-time position for the first time since my children were born, the youngest of whom is a high school senior. I knew that in doing so, I would be limiting the time I could spend writing. I just didn’t know how much I would benefit from that. I also didn’t know that it would extend to the blog. 

I do sometimes miss writing, but for the moment, I’m happy putting my creative energy elsewhere, and I’m hopeful that when I return it will be with renewed enthusiasm. There is a book simmering away on the backburner, perhaps growing thicker and richer for the neglect. There are jotted notes about potential future blog posts and essays and short stories, their flavors melding in the back of the fridge. And though I have thought up several excellent mixed metaphors, there remain exactly zero poems on the horizon.

This break has not been a resignation nor a retirement. I’ve come to think of it as a necessary sabbatical. I’m not sure precisely when yet, but I’ll be back.

A Preposition Proposition

There’s a video put out by the folks of Miriam-Webster that has been floating around. It’s worth a little thinking about. It suggests that, despite what your third grade teacher taught you, a preposition might not be the most terrible thing to end a sentence with.

In fact, these language experts who, mind you, have now decided to include the nonsensical “irregardless” in their dictionary, point to the history of English to rest their case upon. They suspect it began with a little known 17th century grammarian named Joshua Poole whose work, The English Accidence, does mention that one should use prepositions following only the natural order they should appear in.

England’s first Poet Laureate John Dryden apparently agreed with him, and once took critical aim at poet Ben Johnson’s use of the line: “The bodies that those souls were frighted from.” Because Dryden used to translate his own work into Latin as a way to revise for concise and elegant language, the assumption is that he preferred the grammatical rules of Latin to force English into.

If you want to get creative with prepositions, you’ll have to think outside the box. Or in it. Or on it. Or around it. Image by Agata from Pixabay

Whether this was the real reason for his preference, however, doesn’t totally shine through. Dryden did also once take himself to task for occasionally spotting a line or two in his own work where a sentence-ending preposition had slipped out.

All writers have preferences they rarely go against. It’s certainly not a habit that I can claim to be above. Still, it’s unclear why this particular preference of this particular poet became a hard and fast rule no student could live without. What is certain is that in the wake of Miriam-Webster’s claim that the rule never was a rule, the debate has been a furious one that it may take some time to get over. This is a topic that sure gets people worked up.

I do appreciate that language evolves and I try not to be too pretentious about it, but based on this brief experiment with lackluster, and maybe even just plain strange sentence structures, I don’t think I’m ready yet to throw the rule out. All I can say is that I will certainly think it through.

We Don’t Need No Hatchetations

On June 7, 1900 the clientele of Dobson’s Saloon in Kiowa, Kansas got something of a shock when a tall, possibly slightly unhinged woman entered the establishment with a hymn on her lips and bricks in her hands. Following a vision she believed to be from God, Caroline Amelia Nation greeted the bartender with a “Good morning, Destroyer of Men’s Souls,” and proceeded to smash up the place. She claimed she was perfectly within her rights to do so because the business should have been illegal anyway.

Carry A. Nation with a Bible in one hand and a hatchet in the other. N.N., Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

A decade earlier, Kansas had become the first state in the union to outlaw non-medicinal alcohol. Almost immediately, and to the disappointment of the temperance movement, a US Supreme Court issued a ruling that allowed for the interstate importation of alcohol in its original packaging. That weakened the law significantly and created a loophole for places like Dobson’s Saloon.

Political passion is important, and persuasive and open dialog is essential to a thriving democracy and to just generally being good humans. However, smashing up a lawful business, even if you don’t believe it should be such, is probably going a little too far.

Caroline, more often Carrie, had survived a bad first marriage to an alcoholic husband and became a fervent speaker against drink, founding a local chapter of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. There’s a lot to admire about a person who crusades for a strongly held political belief, even one that turned out a few years later when the US enacted prohibition, to be kind of a bad idea.

Carry A. Nation, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Carrie Nation, who eventually changed her name to Carry A. Nation soon traded her bricks for a hatchet. Despite more than thirty arrests and a lifetime banishment from Kansas City, she kept on spreading her message through a series of unlawful saloon “hatchetations,” while also marching and speaking for women’s suffrage, establishing a women and children’s shelter, and feeding and clothing the poor.

I think it’s safe to say that in many ways, she was a pretty good lady, with a heart full of fire for the things most important to her. She certainly seemed to think so, and boldly titled her 1908 autobiography The Use and Need of the Life of Carry A. Nation.

In some ways, she’s right. A nation needs passionate people to carry it forward. Of course we in the United States are feeling keenly this week the reality that passionate, pretty good people don’t always agree on which way the nation needs to be carried.

It’s okay to disagree. It’s probably even a good thing because none of us is right all the time, and we do need to engage in purposeful, respectful conversations about the things that matter most to each of us. We just also need to leave our hatchets at home.

The Dark Days Ahead

It’s election season once again here in the United States, with early voting already in full swing, and most people convinced that the nation will fall if their pick for president doesn’t win. I’d say something reassuring, but alas, I’m not totally immune to the hysteria. One thing I can say for sure is that no matter what happens, next Tuesday will be a dark day for all Americans.

That’s because in the early hours of Sunday morning time itself will suffer a stroke when our clocks fall back an hour. The early evening will suddenly become the blackest depths of nighttime, my dog will fail to sleep a second past 4:00 in the morning, traffic accidents will see a slight uptick, and everyone will be universally miserable for a good week or two.

The US first observed Daylight Saving Time in 1918. In 1919 Congress scrapped it because of the universal misery, and because apparently at that time Congress cared. It wasn’t implemented again until World War II when it once again proved temporary on a federal level, though some states and cities embraced the misery and adopted some version of it. Then in 1966, the Uniform Time Act signed by Lyndon Johnson, standardized the practice across the country, except in a couple of states that didn’t feel like it and decided to stay on standard time.

The awful tradition has been tweaked several times since, with the dates of clock changing moving around a little, but the most exciting development came in 2022 when the US Senate passed, by unanimous consent, a bill to eliminate standard time. Everyone cheered and looked forward to the first Sunday of November, 2024 when Daylight Saving Time would become the standard across the land.

Everyone, that is, except the House of Representatives where the bill has still not been voted on because it has proven weirdly controversial despite not dividing along party lines. 71% of US citizens want to stop the biannual insanity, which is pretty much a slam dunk for politicians who claim to want a less divided nation. Granted, 40% favor keeping to Daylight Saving Time while 31% are incorrect. I guess maybe 29% just didn’t understand the question?

20% of the members of my household, and NOT a fan of time changes.

I don’t know, but it is true one has to be careful with polling results because they can be pretty heavily manipulated based on how a question is worded or a sample taken.

For example, I recently conducted a highly scientific poll of a fair cross-section of the American population, consisting of the members of my household and found that 80% of participants were entirely unpersuaded by political gripes on social media. I know that can’t be right because pretty much everyone I know is still spouting their opinions from their keyboards.

20% of the members of my household don’t use social media, were just happy to be a part of the conversation, and thought they deserved a treat. And he’s right, because he’s a very good boy, even though starting this Sunday, he is not going to let me sleep a second past 4:00 in the morning.

One thing I can confidently state is that 100% of the residents of my household do pretty much despise the biannual time change. I was shocked to discover that we don’t all agree on whether we prefer Daylight Saving or Standard Time, but when it comes down to it, I suspect we’d be willing to set our differences aside and agree that we’d just like to stick to one or the other.

Alas, as with all things political, not all of us can get exactly what we want, which can feel a little dark and frightening. But when it comes down to it, at some point, we’re going to have to at least try to set our differences aside if we don’t want to be universally miserable.

This Post is Fire. No Cap.

Lately I’ve been feeling my age pretty keenly. It’s not that I’m old, but I am solidly middle-aged, not yet quite to the morning/evening pill divider, but well beyond the days of waking up without back pain. For the most part, I don’t mind too much. Getting older, after all, beats the alternative, but I do sometimes marvel at the fact that I have no idea what the young’uns are talking about.

I mean, I’m definitely young enough to enjoy a good birthday cake, but I’m also old enough there’s no way anyone is lighting that many candles. Image by Marco Apolinário from Pixabay

Because middle age also falls somewhere between no longer being able to hear what the kids are saying and no longer understanding it. This, more than anything except perhaps for the regularity with which I ask my sons to help me fix whatever stupid thing I’ve done to my computer, makes me aware of my age.

It doesn’t help that I celebrated a birthday last week, in that way middle aged mothers do. The hubs, bless him, slaved away over the grill to make me a special meal that we ate alone because my teenage sons each made plans to not celebrate their mother’s birthday.

That’s fine because they’re sigmas with rizz and they got that drip, so it stands to reason they’d have plans extending beyond their dad’s bussin steak. Too bad for them because it slapped. No Cap.

Yeah, I don’t know what I just wrote, either, though I’m fairly certain I used every bit of that gen Z slang just a little bit incorrectly.

I find myself longing for the good old days when we said logical things like “totes magotes.” Image by Chräcker Heller from Pixabay

And that’s kind of what it’s for anyway. The term slang has existed since at least the 1740s when it referred to the speech of thieves and beggars rather than teenagers, but I’m betting the concept has been around pretty much since the dawn of speech, with each generation’s drive to distinguish itself just a little bit from its elders.

Personally, I used to really enjoy slang. I was a totally rad preteen in the 1980s. Then as a teenager in the 90s I was all that and a bag of chips. I chillaxed through my twenties in the 2000s, and in the 2010s this thirty-something was a little bit extra.

But now in the 2020s, I’m mostly just tired of all this skibidi Ohio brain rot. As far as I’m concerned all these sus kids are delulu. But now I’m just talking out of pocket.

I think.

One Wicked Omission

A few weeks ago in this space, I posted a piece about Taylor Swift and the history of public education in the United States. Except that apparently I didn’t. A few hours after the post went live, I received a text from one of my aunts saying, “Am I the first to point out a spelling error?…”

She was the first, and the error was unfortunate because instead of typing public education, I had accidentally left out a very important letter l. Fortunately, I was able to fix it quickly and if any of the rest of you noticed, you were gracious enough to cut me some slack.

Whales. Image by M W from Pixabay

I try to be a meticulous editor, but anyone who has followed this blog for very long has probably spotted the occasional error that gets through. Often either the hubs or my eagle-eyed mother will discover them and point out the mistakes spell check won’t catch. One time a reader I don’t know personally was kind enough to politely point out that the country of Wales is spelled differently than the marine mammal with a similar name.

You’ve all been very kind over the years, and as far as I know none of my silly typos have led to any controversy. Royal printers Robert Barker and Martin Lucas were not so fortunate. In 1632, they stood trial in the court of King Charles I for a mistake that made its way into their 1631 re-printing of the King James Bible. The mistake occurred in Exodus 20:14, which should read: “Thou shalt not commit adultery.” The problem was that this printing omitted the word not.

Barker and Lucas had to answer for the slip-up to the tune of £300. That’s roughly £56,000 today, or about 75,000 US Dollars, which is a pretty steep price to pay for three little letters. To make matters worse, the gentlemen lost their publishing license.

But think about how many words they got right! Image by Pexels from Pixabay

While nearly all of the one thousand misprinted Bibles were confiscated and destroyed before they had a chance to tear apart too many families, at least fifteen copies still exist today—seven in England, seven in the United States, and one in New Zealand.

A British rare book dealer named Henry Stevens obtained one of the copies in 1855 and called it the Wicked Bible, a name that has pretty much stuck since then. In the last decade, copies have changed hands for somewhere around $50,000, which means that if the descendants of Robert Barker and Martin Lucas still had a copy, they’d need to wait a few years yet to come out ahead.

I doubt any of my typos would fetch that kind of bling, and so my promise to you, dear reader is that I will continue to do my best to catch all the irritating little typos on this blog. I can assure you that if I ever suggest adultery as a good life choice, then you can assume it’s a terrible mistake.

I do feel for Barker and Lucas, though. It may be true that none of the errors that have occasionally popped up in my little corner of the blogosphere have been so grievous or costly. Still, I’m certainly aware that no matter how cautious an editor one may be, it can be a big risk to put your words out there in a pubic space.

It’s Out There

Lately the hubs and I have been on something of a quest. For the last dozen years or so we’ve lived happily in a rapidly growing suburb of St. Louis. It’s been a great community for us with excellent schools for our sons, easy access to the city and its amenities, by which I mean baseball, and some of the best neighbors ever.

I’m really not in that much of a hurry. There are definitely some parts of moving that I’m not excited about. Image by jacqueline macou from Pixabay

But our youngest son is a senior in high school and almost a year ago, the hubs took a job that requires an hour long commute, so not too distantly in the future, it might be time for us to settle on a new home base.

We’ve been casually searching. Fortunately, we don’t have to be in a hurry, but I admit we’ve looked at quite a few properties and I’m starting to get a little frustrated. We’d like a bit more elbow room—space for a larger garden, a few fruit trees, and some chickens.

If we find a great plot of land and have to build a house, that would be okay, but ideally there’s a pretty little old farmhouse out there somewhere with a wood-burning fireplace and a good settin’ porch. Most importantly, though, it just has to feel right. Around every corner of windy country road, I hope that we’re going to spot this as-yet-unidentified perfect future home for us.

You just never know what might be waiting for you around the next bend in the road.

And it could happen, because you never know what a windy road will reveal. Last spring, on a family trip to Chattanooga, Tennessee, we rounded the corner of a windy road on Signal Mountain and discovered a UFO.

Actually, as much as it surprised me, I did have a pretty good idea what it was, because I had read about Futuro Houses, designed by Finnish architect Matti Suuronen in 1968. These structures were prefabricated plastic homes constructed to resemble the Hollywood version of a flying saucer. Designed to be easily portable and to fit seamlessly into any terrain, the small houses contained a fireplace, a kitchen, a bathroom, and a bedroom, all behind a hatch door.

About one hundred of the UFO houses landed around the earth by the time the oil crisis of 1973 made the plastic structures cost-prohibitive to build. It also seems unlikely to me that there were ever more than a hundred people on Earth that might want to live in one.

A Futuro House just fitting in seamlessly with its surroundings. Henning Schlottmann (User:H-stt), CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

About sixty or so of the Futuros still exist around the world today, but I was surprised to discover that the flying saucer house on Signal Mountain just outside of Chattanooga isn’t one of them. Constructed in 1972, the Signal Mountain spaceship house certainly comes from the same cultural era as the Futuros, but with three bedrooms, two bathrooms, a full bar, plenty of custom curved furniture, and around 2,000 square feet worth of floor plan, there’s a lot more space in this spaceship. And as it’s constructed of bizarre building materials like steel and concrete, it’s probably less likely to actually take flight.

Much like its plastic Finnish cousin, to say that the flying saucer house of Signal Mountain fits seamlessly into its environment might be a stretch. Perhaps it would be better if it had a nice settin’ porch, and were located on a pretty piece of land in Missouri. I’m convinced it’s out there.

Just Don’t Tell the Historians

Many things likely happened in the year 1404. Numerous babies took their first breaths and plenty of people surely took their last. Battles were waged and both won and lost. Some powerful people became more powerful, while the power of others began to decline. And in Korea, the second king of the Joseon Dynasty, King Taejong, fell off his horse.

Taejong was on a deer hunt when it happened. As he drew his bow, his horse stumbled and the king took a tumble. History knows of the incident because of the Veritable Records, an important feature of the Joseon Dynasty, the last royal house to rule Korea. The records, written in Classical Chinese, were maintained by hired historians tasked with extensive and entirely neutral preservation of events related to the monarchy and the state.

And I mean the truth is, if Taejong hadn’t asked the historians not to write about the fall, they still might have, but we probably wouldn’t be talking about it 620 years later. Image by Joachim_Marian_Winkler from Pixabay

Historians in this role were guaranteed legal protection from the king for what they wrote, and in fact, he wasn’t allowed to see them at all. Only other historians could take a look. They were sworn to secrecy and faced severe punishment if they failed to keep it under wraps. To avoid any potential royal interference, the documents remained sealed until after the king’s death and the new king’s coronation.

So when Taejong fell from his horse that fateful day, we not only know that it happened, but we also know that he tried to hide it from the historians. Because they wrote about that part, too.

It’s an astonishing story, not that a powerful man fell from his horse, as I’m sure that could happen to anyone. And not that a powerful man would want to hide an embarrassing incident from history. But that powerful people believed so firmly in the importance of free and accurate reporting that they took pains to ensure it could happen, even when it meant they might wind up being the butt of the joke.

The Veritable Records are now digitized. With the exception of the those of the last two Joseon monarchs, which are believed to have been unduly influenced by the Japanese and are considered less reliable, they are part of the National Treasures of South Korea, and are included in the Memory of the World register of the the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).

I’m cynical enough not to suggest that the Veritable Records are one hundred percent impartial. History is, after all, always written from the perspective of whatever imperfect human recorded it. It honestly wouldn’t surprise me if the story was thrown in just to lend credibility to the rest.

Um, yeah. Probably not. Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

But I still find it astonishing from a modern perspective. Because today it’s not uncommon to find out that a story that could show a powerful person in a bad light has been ignored, suppressed, or tweaked by an allegedly free press to suggest a secret organization of assassin horse trainers clearly has it out for a powerful person. Probably because the powerful person is racist. Or something.

Or, just as bad, that this allegedly free press has amplified, distorted, or misrepresented a story in order to make it seem like a tumble from a horse might just be a character-revealing act of animal cruelty by a person undeserving of power. And who is also probably a racist. Or something.

It’s a confusing place to be as a society, not to know if there are any trustworthy media sources out there, free from influence of the powerful attempting to control the flow of information to those of us schlubs that make up the confused masses.

I’m just cynical enough to believe that there aren’t.

Overcoming the Hangries

It was sometime in about 1840 or so that Duchess of Bedford Anna Maria Russell found herself getting a little hangry. At the time, surging industrialization had begun to transform the daily schedule of the English, the wealthiest of whom tended to eat breakfast around 9:00 in the morning, luncheon around noon or so, and then dinner not until around 8:00 PM. There might also be a late morning coffee or tea break referred to as elevensies, which I recently learned is not just for Hobbits. That still left a long stretch of time between meals in the afternoon and into the evening.

Anna Maria wasn’t having it. As a lifelong friend of Queen Victoria, serving as a Lady of the Bedchamber (which because my knowledge of aristocratic life comes only from The Crown and Downton Abbey, I assume is just the officially recognized BBF to the queen), she didn’t have to just accept her fate. She was a pretty important lady, so she decided to so something about it.

The duchess began ordering herself a cup of tea and a light snack sometime in the mid-afternoon, and soon found that made her day a lot more pleasant. It became such a habit that she started inviting other important ladies to join her. They liked it, too.

When Anna Maria occasionally took leave of the queen and traveled back to her countryside home in Wobrun, Bedfordshire, she continued enjoying afternoon tea, invited her countryside pals to join her as well, and the tradition of afternoon tea was born.

Then one sunny August afternoon in 2024, a group of pretty important ladies in the United States decided it was high time they participated in the grand tradition of afternoon tea, too.

Okay, so these ladies might not be BFFs with royalty, but they are pretty important to me. I do also realize this may not have been the first time afternoon tea was ever served in the United States. In fact, I remember participating in a version of it in my eighth grade social studies class.

All I really recall from that experience was that we had to wear fancy clothes, had to eat kind of gross cucumber sandwiches right after lunch that I’m assuming consisted of rectangular cafeteria pizza, were warned not to add both milk and lemon to our tea, and had to take at least one no thank you sip. It was a highly educational experience.

When more than three decades later, one of my pretty important friends decided to invite a bunch of her equally important friends to afternoon tea, I didn’t entirely know what to expect. Thankfully, eighth grade social studies had prepared me for such a time as this.

I donned fancy clothes, including a big hat of the variety rarely worn these days by American ladies unless they are either going to the Kentucky Derby or to high church on Easter Sunday, and they happen to be six years old. I enjoyed my tea with milk, and no lemon, and I ate delicious goodies including some cucumber sandwiches that were excellent and very welcome after I failed to eat a lunch of rectangular cafeteria pizza. Truth be told, by the time afternoon tea rolled around, I was getting a little hangry.

Could Substitute for Ordinary Food

In 1748 in a stroke of genius, the French Parliament solved an important problem by banning a loathsome and gnarled vegetable that while perhaps suitable for hogs, was known to cause leprosy when consumed by humans. The French people probably didn’t mind so much, because no one in their right mind would willingly eat a disgusting, likely poisonous, potato from the ground anyway.

I now understand why people might have mistrusted these things. The ants sure did enjoy them, though.

Fortunately the Prussians weren’t quite as persnickety. They cultivated the starchy root vegetable and didn’t hesitate to feed it to humans. And as it was cheap and easy to grow, they certainly fed it to prisoners during the Seven Years’ War.

One such prisoner of war was French pharmacist Antoine-Augustin Parmentier who discovered, much to his delight, that he neither died nor developed leprosy on his potato diet and that in fact, with a little butter, sour cream, or cheese, the pig food he’d been given might not be half bad.

When he returned to France, Parmentier set about repairing the damaged reputation of the veggie by going to scientific institutions and soliciting statements touting the safety of potatoes as a food source. Then when the poor harvest season of 1770 threatened famine, as was not an uncommon occurrence in European history up to this point, Prementier’s “Inquiry into Nourishing Vegetables that in Times of Necessity Could Substitute for Ordinary Food,” won him a prize and some important attention.

They are kind of pretty. George Chernilevsky, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Soon King Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette jumped on board the potato wagon, adorning their royal clothes with the potato’s purple flower. They also set aside a plot of land on which Parmentier could plant his favorite spuds, which he placed under guard during the day to bestow upon the tubers the appearance of great value.

Under the cloak of darkness, when the guards were strangely scarce, hungry and bold Parisians managed to sneak a few of the highly valued vegetable that nicely bulked up a stew, filled up empty bellies, and didn’t cause any of them leprosy.

I think that’s my favorite part of the story of this transformation from starchy enemy to super veggie. The humble little potato that only pigs would eat became a highly desirable rock star of a vegetable that helped stave off the cycles of famine and became so ubiquitous that instead of substituting for ordinary food as a necessity, it eventually became kind of plain potatoes.

My garden was supposed to yield up a lot of plain potatoes this year, but alas, in our attempt to garden as organically as possible, we left them unguarded just enough that an army of ants managed to feast on them before we could.

The best part of writing this post was that I had to make my favorite potato casserole. Alas, I had to do it with store-bought potatoes.

What we ended up with was a whole bunch of wrinkled, disgusting, half-decayed vegetables that surely would have given us leprosy.

Okay, probably not, but I’m not a huge potato eater anyway. I only really like them prepared a few specific ways—generally either fried crispy or baked into a casserole with a lot of butter and cheese (turns out I’m a bigger fan of fat than vegetables).

But now that I don’t have my garden potatoes to eat, I can truly appreciate the genius of Antoine-Augustin Parmentier. After the ants got to my humble dirt vegetables, I was wishing I’d kept the garden under guard because all the other ordinary food I had to choose from just didn’t seem as appealing.

Guess I’ll get em next year.