Man Martin's Blog, page 217

G, g November, The Alphabet Project

During the month of November, I'll be blogging about etymology and the origins of the alphabet

G, g: By all that is reasonable and logical, G should derive from the Phoenician Gimel , "throwing stick," pictured left.  However, it does not.  Rather, it is the only letter in the alphabet attributed to a specific individual.  If we are to believe Plutarch, a freedman turned grammar-school teacher, Spurius Carvilius Ruga (parenthetically, the name Spurius means "false" or "illegitimate") created G from the Greek Zeta, (I) which resembles a majuscule I and is pronounced /z/.  Latin having no /z/ sound, Spurius reassigned it the hard /g/ of gold and glimmer.  (Plutarch also credits Ruga as the first Roman to get a divorce.)  In time, the leftward bars were lopped off, giving the letter a bracket look ( [ ).  Almost as if under the gravitional influence of C, which did descend from Gimel , G curved into a bow, retaining as a fish-hook bend in its lower half, the bottom bar of the original zeta.  The soft /g/ sound of gem and giant did not occur until Late Latin. 


God: By definition indefinable, the most that can be said is what God is not. For example, God is not a chipped white mug of Red Zinger Tea. Nor is God a vagrant standing at the access road to 285 with "Will work for food" written on cardboard with a magic marker. Unless God actually is those things, in which case, we're back where we started. Derived from the Old Norse goth and ultimately from the Proto Indo-European, gheu, "to invoke, or call upon." Hence, God is "the one prayed to."

_____________

Coming November 31st, THE RETURN OF THE STOOPID CONTEST!

F, f November, The Alphabet Project

            During November I'll be blogging about etymology and the origins of the alphabet.


            F, f: From the Phonecian Waw, "peg."   Originally it seems to have been designed to drive slant-wise into the ground, but the Greeks straightened it up and twisted the top over to resemble our own F.  They called the result digamma, but it didn't catch on, and by the time of Socrates the letter had disappeared, but not before being picked up by the Etruscans and passed to the Romans, who changed its sound from /w/ to /f/.  A less-altered version of waw, the Greeks called upsilon (U), which became the immediate ancestor of Y.  Chopping the stem off yielded U, V, and W.
Factoid: An unlovely neologism from the Latin fact and the Greek suffix –oid, a bastardy compounded by almost universal misuse as "a small fact."  Logically, the word does mean "a fact," but something that resembles one.  An asteroid is not a small star, but something that resembles it, and a humanoid ony resembles a human; it is not a dwarf.  Genuine factoids include such generally accepted nonsense as domestic violence's rising during Super Bowls (it decreases), the Eskimo's having twenty-four different words for snow (Eskimo per se is not a language, but the Aleut and Inuit have about the same number of words for snow as English.), and during the equinox its being possible to balance an egg on end (It is always possible to balance an egg on end; it merely takes repeated attempts.)  Add to the examples of factoid above, the mistaken definition of factoid being "a small fact."_______________Coming November 31st, THE RETURN OF THE STOOPID CONTEST!

E, e November, the Alphabet Project

During November, I'll be blogging about etymology and the origins of the alphabet.
 E, e: From the Phonecian He, an ideogram shaped like a waving flag, meaning "prayer" or possibly "jubilation." (See hallelujah?  Haleil "praise"+ya "Yahweh.")  If the order of  the Phoenician alphabet reflects the progress of the Late Stone Age, mankind...

Built Shelter
 Domesticated Animals
   
 and Built a Door for the Shelter


Developed Weapons











before anyone got around to being grateful to a higher power.

English: The language this happens to be written in, as well as the name of the people who speak it, from the Old English englisc or anglisc, "of the Angles."  It seems unlikely that Angle, as in Anglican, Anglophile, and Anglo-Saxon, would have anything to do with the geometric concept angle, but in fact, it does.  Angle comes from Angul , an angular-shaped spit of land, now Swasburg, whence the Angles migrated, the word's meaning taking an abrupt right turn once they arrived in what is now England - "land of the Engles, or Angles."
_________
Coming November 31st, the RETURN OF THE STOOPID CONTEST!

D, d: November, the Alphabet Project

November I'll be blogging about the alphabet and etymology

D, d: From the Phoenician Daleth, "door."




day: The interval between sunrise and set. The d- rises straight up before falling to a squinting -a-, after which –y sinks below the word's horizon, curving back again toward d-. The Proto Indo-European root for day, déi-no-, is unmistakably kin to the root for god, déyw-o-, that is "shining." From these two derive, therefore, not only date, dial, and diary, but deity, theology (owing to a consonant shift d > th) and divine.

door: The sideways lid of a room. The ideogram for door itself opens the word (See D), a down-stroke with a knob on one side. We pass the portals of two -o-s before reaching -r, a panel with a latch on the far side closing the word. The Proto Indo-European root, dʰwer , leads back before doors themselves, to the late Paleolithic, evidently a meaning assigned existentially, its creators not knowing what lay behind it.

---
Coming November 31st, the RETURN OF THE STOOPID CONTEST!

C, c: November, the Alphabet Project

November I'll be blogging about the alphabet and etymology.
[image error] C, c From the Phoenician Gimel, "sling" or "throwing-stick." Hence, the three great achievements of the Neolithic, as represented by the first three letters of the alphabet, were domestication of animals, man-made shelter, and warfare.



calque: A word formed by translation from another language. Typically English adopts words wholesale, as in déjà vu, amuck, or kindergarten, but calques especially picturesque or apropos phrases, as in "losing face" from the Chinese diū liǎn , or "scapegoat," possibly a mistranslation of azazel , a demon of Hebrew mythology, for 'ez ozel , "the goat that escapes."

cliché: I will forego the whimsical catalogue of clichés a lesser lexicographer would mistakenly think witty and original. French printers called a ready-made phrase cast as a single piece of type a cliché, onomatopoeia for the liquid slap and hiss as a hot letter mold drops into cold water.

---

Coming November 30th, the RETURN OF THE STOOPID CONTEST!

B, b: November Alphabet Project

November 11, Come see me at Peerless Books in Alpharetta
All November I'll be blogging about the alphabet and word origins.

B, b: From the Canaanite Beth , "house," eg: Bethlehem, "house of bread." The Greeks inverted the letter, renaming it beta and adding a lower story room in the uppercase: B.


Babel: The legendary site of a biblical tower threatening to reach "unto heaven itself," until God "confounded the tongues," of man, creating the profusion of languages we know today. As tempting as it is to imagine otherwise, babble does not descend from this, but from baby and the Germanic suffix –le, connoting small repetitive actions as in wobble, twinkle, and gobble. Babel is derived from Babylon, an ancient city whose cuneiform script was cousin to the Canaanite alphabet, whence all Western alphabets are derived.
---
Coming November 30th, the RETURN OF THE STOOPID CONTEST!

A, a: November Alphabet Project

November 11th, 7:00 PM, come see me at Peerless Books in Alpharetta!
All November I'll be blogging about the alphabet and word origins.


[image error] A, a The first letter of the alphabet, from the Canaanite Aleph ,"ox." The Greeks renamed it Alpha and turned the ox's head so the horns pointed downward. In the lowercase, we see an ox head in profile, a single horn curving over its head like a cricket's antenna: a.

Alpha and Omega: The first and last letters respectively of the Greek alphabet (A and Ω) Metaphorically, God, ie, the "first and last," from Revelations (1:8), "'I am the Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the ending,' saith the Lord."

Alkahest: A substance sought by Medieval alchemists believed capable of dissolving anything.  Why would anyone search for such a thing?  What would you keep it in?

Alphabet: The letters of a language arranged in an established order. From alpha+beta, the first two letters of the Greek alphabet.

---

Coming November 30th, the RETURN OF THE STOOPID CONTEST!

Grousing About the Core Curriculum

First of all, let me say I'm an Episcopalean.  We Episcopaleans are famous grousers.  Grouse, grouse, grouse, go the Episcopaleans.  When we adopt a new prayer book, half the congregation grouses because they preferred the old prayer book.  The other half grouses because they still preferred the prayer book we had before the old prayer book. Never satisfied, that's us.
So this rant probably comes under the heading of my being a grouse-prone Episcopalean and should be given no further mind, but here goes.
Georgia is joining 47 other states in adopting what is called a Common Core Curriculum.  The thrust is to integrate the curriculum so that there aren't such sharp divides between, for example, what's taught in math class and what's taught in social studies. All subject matter is relevant to all other subject matter.  Also, the CCC, as it's being called (we teachers love our acronyms!) is to instill more rigor into the curriculum.  Rigor is a very popular word in teacher meetings these days, and is fast replacing "paradigm" as the mot du jour.
All of this is good, and actually, I'm 100% behind it, except that I've also noticed that the CCC is going to change the balance between literary, ie fictional, works and informational, that is, nonfictional ones.  Boiled down to the small, there's going to be a whole lot more nonfiction read, and a whole lot less fiction.
I have to admit, that as an author, I sense my ox is about to get gored.  If the CCC delivers what it promises, we will be raising a generation of students much less apt to read fiction than nonfiction.  This is happening in an era when fiction sales are already trounced by nonfiction, when the only people going out of business faster than fiction publishers are bookstores themselves, when even jaded tv producers find it easier and more profitable to spin out one reality show after another than just to do what they've always done before, which is rewrite old episodes of The Honeymooners and rename it King of Queens or Everybody Loves Raymond.
But I'd like to think my objection goes deeper than that.  My deeper objection is incohate, unformed, and unsubstantiated, and I'm either too damn lazy or too damn busy to go around substantiating it, so if you want to challenge me on it, I'll back down like the most spineless jellyfish that ever crawlt.  But I have the feeling - again, I cannot and will not even attempt to prove this - that while nonfiction is very good at all sorts of things, it is fiction that feeds the soul.  Nonfiction may tell us how to program our dvrs - the clock on my VCR was always flashing 11:00, and the thing was obsolete and in a landfill before I ever learned how to change it - but that things like truth, beauty, and the aspiration of the human spirit are the provence of literature.  Again, this is not something that I can prove, but is there any evidence youngsters need more nonfiction?  I don't know if Gibbon, Darwin, or Freud were tutored under the CCC, but they did okay for themselves in the nonfiction department.  Surely most of what Galileo read was Dante and Virgil and most of what nonfiction he did read - ie Ptolemy - might as well have been fiction.  Which brings up another point in favor of nonfiction - unlike mathematics, science, and history, fiction doesn't change.  Hamlet is Hamlet, but the War of 1812 is, at best, our current understanding of the War of 1812.  Maybe instead of Fiction and Nonfiction, we should label them Imagination and Guesswork.  At least the field would be tilted a little more in my favor.
But again, I'm probably just an irrational grouse.  After all, I am an Episcopalean.

More Chickens

This weekend Nancy and I picked up three new chickens while we were in Macon, Rhode Island Reds, good layers albeit Yankees.  Also, and I won't say this in front of them, they're not as g-o-o-d l-o-o-k-i-n-g as Sorche, my bantam barred roc.
Sorche, also, has not fully integrated with the new birds.  She keeps herself to herself.  They have not actively mistreated her, but I have the sense they never let poor Sorche join in their chicken games.
All this asid, I'm so happy to have some more chickens.  One chicken just does not a flock make.  And I'm looking forward to fresh eggs again.
One other thing that's been troubling me:
We've been watching Sex in the City reruns, and I've noticed something.   Carrie Bradshaw's supposed to be this hotshot writer with a column in a New York paper, then a job at Vogue, and finally a best-selling book, but the only thing we ever see her actually write are rhetorical questions like, "Are love affairs unfair?" or "If you get pissed on, do you feel pissed off?" and like that.
What's with that?

Me and Steak

The other night my sweet father-in-law took Nancy and me out for steaks, which reminded me of an incident from my courtship.
When I was dating Nancy, my mother, Mur, would have us over Sunday nights for an elegant dinner and to watch Upstairs Downstairs on Masterpiece Theater.  Mur had not turned out gourmet meals on a regular basis up to that time, nevertheless could put on quite a sumptuous spread when she chose.  My childhood meal growing up was a hamburger patty, boiled spinach, cottage cheese, and apple sauce.  Breakfast was oatmeal, or on special occasions, poached eggs.  Another thing Mur liked to make was steak; my maternal grandmother was a Montana girl, so Mur was quite the carnivore and passed on her tastes to me.  Steak was to be eaten as rare as you could stand it, salt and pepper only - no steak sauce.  Even to mention "ketchup" around a good cut of meat would have been an affront.
But during my courtship, as I say, Mur put one spectacular meal after another on the table.  I think Mur had sized Nancy up and decided I would need all the help I could get.  The meals and Masterpiece Theater were contrived to convince Nancy that the Martins were high-tone people a gal'd be lucky to marry into.  I think the campaign must've been a success because I was pretty impressed myself.
But then one Sunday night we showed up, and Mur met us at the door in her bathrobe.  She hadn't been expecting us.  Upstairs Downstairs had come to an end, and so, Mur wrongly assumed, had our visits.  But Mur was too good a hostess to turn us away.  She insisted we come in and let her fix us dinner.
Spinach was dumped from a freezer bag into boiling water.  Was there cottage cheese in the refrigerator, and applesauce in the cabinet?  Yes!  And even cinamon to sprinkle on the applesauce for that extra je ne sais quois!  No need to ask if there were steaks in the freezer, there were always steaks in the freezer!  Mur threw some coals on the hibachi, soaked them with Gulf Light and as soon as the flames subsided klunked three frozen-solid t-bones on the grill.
That night we feasted as I had feasted in days of old.  The cottage cheese was yummy and satisfying, but eat the applesauce first - technically a dessert, but you want it off your plate before the green liquid from the spinach has a chance to seep over and contaminate it.  And as for the steaks!  Done to a turn, they were!  Blackened charred on the outside, with that wonderful lighter-fluid aroma and aftertaste, and raw and pink inside with little crunchy ice crystals at the core.  Mur and I fell to the meat like neanderthals; after doing all you can with knife and fork, there is always that tantatilizing little tidbit on a t-bone that can only be gotten at by forcing the right angle of the bone against your face and gnawing.  Even little Charley, our dog, growled with happy impatience, waiting for us to finish our bones, reverting to some paleolithic racial memory, when packs of miniature schnauzers followed nomadic cavemen, chewing on caribou scraps thrown from the campfire.
Nancy, when I looked up from my greased fingers, had turned a color indescribable: imagine, perhaps, cottage cheese that has been unwisely left until spinach juice has mixed into it - that would have been her complexion.
But, to Mur's and my relief, she did not dump me on the spot, but ate as much as she could bear - "Are you going to finish that?" I asked, pointing at her steak.  She sweetly let me have her share.  Mur never subjected Nancy to another authentic Martin family dining experience, but nor did she extend herself to lay out another gourmet meal.  If Nancy hadn't left me after that, the damage had been done.
I'd won her.