Tom Glenn's Blog, page 63

Month Names

As a linguist and author, I am intrigued by the words we English speakers use and how we use them. A good example is the way we have named the months of the year.

January is named after Janus, the Roman god of doors and gates. February is named for Februalia, a time period something like the Christian Lent, when sacrifices were offered to atone for sins. March gets its name from Mars, the god of war. April is something of a problem—I’ll come back to that month’s name. May comes from Maia, best known for being the mother of Hermes. June’s name comes from the goddess Juno, the queen of the gods. July and August are unique in that they take they names from real people, July from Julius Caesar and August from Augustus Caesar.

All months after that are named for numbers, but not for numbers that correspond to their current place in the year. September, the ninth month in the modern calendar, for example, takes its name from the Latin word for “seven.” October has a name that means “eight,” November one that means “nine,” and December one that means “ten.”

April’s name origin is a matter of controversy among linguists and historians. One train of thought is that the name came from the Latin word aprilis, which is derived from the Latin verb aperire meaning “to open.” That could be a reference to the opening or blossoming of flowers and trees, a common occurrence throughout the month of April in the Northern Hemisphere.

Another theory holds that since months are often named for gods and goddesses, and since the word aphrilis is derived from the Greek Aphrodite, maybe the intent was to name the month for the Greek goddess of love (the goddess that the Romans called Venus).

To me, April has always meant “opening” because of its similarity to the words that mean “to open” in Latin, French, Spanish, and Italian—aperire, ouvrir, abrir, and aprire, respectively. And I always think of it as referring to the opening of the welcoming season when it’s warm and comfortable.

Like so many other aspects of modern American English, the names we have given our months tells us great deal about who we are and where we came from. One day soon, I’ll take on another set of oddities: the origins of the names we give to the days of the week.

Endings

At this point in my life, I find myself constantly reminded that all things come to an end. September signals that the summer is over. The days grow shorter, the nights longer and colder. Autumn is here, a warning that the year is moving toward the dark days of winter. And with winter comes the end of the year.

 I look at the begonia plants on my deck at the back of my house, some now a foot tall and covered in brilliant red blooms, and I know their days are numbered. The first frost, probably sometime in November, will kill them. The dozens of mature trees surrounding the deck will lose their leaves and become living skeletons.

Outdoor gatherings of people, now already becoming fewer, will cease altogether. We’ll all huddle indoors and light fires against the cold and lamps against the darkness. When we must venture outdoors, we will cover our bodies for warmth, making us less distinguishable from one another.

Hence life itself. No longer a young man, I know my own end is coming. I try not to dwell on the subject, but reminders are constant. So I reach out to those I love to assure that they know that I cherish them. I hurry to get as much writing as possible done. And I seek peace.

I have lived a full and fruitful life. I served my country honorably for thirty-five years, repeatedly putting my life on the line for the good of others. I am the father of four fine children and the grandfather of four delightful grandchildren. Thanks to my years in government service, I am the beneficiary of a generous annuity so I never need concern myself with money problems. And, most important, I am the author of six books of fiction and seventeen short stories, all published after I retired from government service.

And I am very healthy and unusually active for my age. So while my end is coming, the likelihood is that it will be some years before it arrives. I still have time and need to make the most of it. Writing will be at the forefront.

Josh at the Door

I have been working, on and off, for several years on a novel that was to have been named Josh at the Door. The story was drawn from my relationship with Su which had lasted more than twenty years. Then, a year ago last March, Su died as the result of a stomach ailment. Work on the book stopped.

It’s obvious to me that the story I was writing is now fundamentally changed. It will end as Josh, the protagonist, learns to adjust to life without his beloved Mimì. And the name will be changed to Love in the Time of Coronavirus, inspired by Love in the Time of Cholera, a novel by Colombian Nobel prize winning author Gabriel García Márquez.

But so far, try as I might, I haven’t been able to resume work on the book. My grief at the loss of Su has stopped me. But since I was born to write and writing is why I was put on earth, I must find a way to resume my work on that book and another one I was sketching out on the 1967 battle of Dak To in Vietnam’s western highlands, one of the bloodiest battles of the war and one I was deeply involved in. My reason for existence is at stake.

So I’ll try again. Wish me luck.

Name: Last of the Annamese

My novel set during the fall of Saigon is named Last of the Annamese. Those who have read the book understand very well what “Annamese” is, but those who haven’t often ask me what the name means or who it refers to.

“Annamese” is the adjectival form of the Vietnamese place name An Nam  (安 南 in Chinese), an ancient name for what we now call Vietnam  (越  南). The Chinese chose the name “Vietnam” for the non-Chinese rebellious tribe in southern China who eventually moved south into Vietnam. The name means “those who cross over in the south” or “the trouble makers in the south.” The Vietnamese adopted that name for themselves but called their new nation by a series of different names. One of those names was An Nam, meaning “peace in the south.”

One of the principal characters in the novel, Last of the Annamese, is the South Vietnamese colonel named Thanh. He dislikes the name “Vietnam” because of its meaning and prefers “An Nam” because he considers himself both a southerner and a peace maker. By his way of thinking, his wife and son are also citizens of An Nam. The reader is left to answer the question who is the last of the Annamese referred to by the title.

Given the etymology of “Annamese,” the reader can understand why the name appealed to me, a dyed-in-the-wool linguist comfortable in seven languages other than English. The close relationship between the Vietnamese and Chinese languages has fascinated me since I first studied Vietnamese as a young soldier, well before the Vietnam war.

And I, like Thanh, prefer the name for a place I love that means “peace in the south.”

Aging

I’m getting on in years. No point in denying it. But aging hasn’t undermined my most important work, writing. As noted here earlier, while getting old has slowed down my body, including my brain, my creativity grows stronger every year.

But the body that has to be used to get the writing done isn’t functioning as well as it once did. I sleep more than when I was younger. I move more slowly. I’m not as sure on my feet. And I’m more careful than ever to avoid falling, a disaster waiting to happen.

But for all that, I remain a pinnacle of health. My primary care physician admires my vigor. And I claim credit for it. I watch my diet and assure I eat only healthy and nutritious foods. My body weight remains ideal. I lift weights for a couple of hours every other day. I nap every day and allow as much time as I want for sleep at night.

And I don’t look my age. People assume I’m much younger than I am. As a friend observed recently, I don’t look a minute over sixty.

I can’t say that I welcome age—I’d much prefer to have the body that was mine when I was twenty. But it’s not the curse so many people make it out to be. I’m willing to accept all the bodily failings that age brings in return for the expanded ability to write. Writing is what I was put on earth to do, and as my ability to think and create grows, my writing gets better.

I have much to be thankful for.

No-Accounts (3)

As I promised yesterday, here is the story behind the word “no-accounts”:

When I was growing up with my mother (separated from my father) and grandmother on a West Virginia farm, I was a hillbilly if there ever was one. I didn’t realize how countrified I was until my mother and father were reconciled and I moved to Oakland, California. My West Virginia twang attracted all manner of unwanted attention. People from kids my age to adults laughed at the way I talked.

My vocabulary set me aside as much as my pronunciation did. My speech was littered with references to “y’all,” “you’uns,” and “I reckon.” Among the terms I got from my grandmother was “no-account,” meaning a useless or irresponsible person, a no-good. So when it came time to write the story about a straight man taking care of a gay man dying of AIDS, I modeled the character of Alicia, the gay man’s mother, on my grandmother. Unaware that her son, Peter, is homosexual, when she learns that the daughter of Martin, Peter’s caretaker, is attending the George Washington University, she warns about “undesirable elements at GW . . . I don’t mean to be biased. It’s not that, but you do have to be careful nowadays . . . All those foreign students. Arabs, and Iranians, and God knows what. And the blacks, for heaven’s sake. And those gays . . . those people don’t live by the same rules as folks like us. They just don’t, now.”

Peter, in his despondency, tells Martin that both he and Martin are what his mother would call “no-accounts,” good-for-nothings, useless creatures. Grieving over his own wasted life, soon to be over, Peter yearns to redeem himself. Much of the book is devoted to his struggle.

Hence the book’s title. Both Peter and Martin do find ways to overcome their “no-account” status. Toward the end, when Peter’s death is imminent, he tells Martin, “We’re not no-accounts any more. We’re men now.”

No-Accounts (2)

The experience of caring for men dying of AIDS moved me so deeply that I had to write about it. The result was my novel, No-Accounts. It is the story of a straight man caring for a gay man dying of AIDS. It has received more critical acclaim than any of my other books. It was the first book I wrote that was not about war or Vietnam.

The success of No-Accounts encouraged me to write about subjects other than armed conflict and Southeast Asia. My newest novel, Secretocracy, published last year, is not about war. It’s a fictionalized version of the story of President Trump persecuting an intelligence budgeteer who refuses to fund one of Trump’s illegal projects.

I have graduated from the confines of writing only about war. But I have one more novel on that subject waiting to be written. It’s set during the 1967 battle of Dak To in Vietnam’s western highlands, a confrontation I was very much involved in.

It’s a story I have to tell.

Next time: where the word compound “no-accounts” comes from.

No-Accounts

The book of mine that sells the best is my novel about the fall of Saigon, Last of the Annamese. But the book that critics have shown the most respect for is No-Accounts, drawn from the five years I took care of men dying of acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS).

Back in the 1980s when the AIDS epidemic was at its peak, I read in the press about men dying on the street because no one dared touch them lest they, too, contract the deadly disease called AIDS. I couldn’t tolerate the very idea of allowing men to die untended. I told my wife that I wanted to volunteer to care for AIDS patients. That might mean that I’d contract the disease. If I did, she would, too. Back then, it was always fatal. She told me to go ahead.

By the time we learned to counter AIDS and prevent people from dying, I had spent five years taking care of seven men, all gay, all of whom died of AIDS. I loved every one of my patients and still grieve over their deaths. It turned out that AIDS was transmitted not by touch but by the transfer of bodily fluids, so I was safe. I did, in fact, accidentally prick myself with a hypodermic needle I had just used to inject one of my patients, but AIDS never showed up in my bloodstream.

The experience of caring for these men and watching them die changed me. I realized that most of us are so afraid of mortality that we go to great lengths to avoid even a semblance of death. I had seen men die many times on the battlefield in Vietnam. My willingness to face death squarely set me aside from everyone I knew. I realized that the dying were too often ignored because everyone was so frightened of death. So I volunteered to work with the dying. For the next seven years—after my five years working with AIDS patients—I was a hospice volunteer and cared for more than thirty people on their death beds.

More next time.

Talking to Readers (2)

Saturday, I spent the entire day meeting and talking to readers of my books at the Fall Fest in Elkton, Maryland. I sat at a table outdoors on East Main Street displaying, selling, and autographing my books. It was a beautiful, clear day, and I even got a bit of a sunburn.

It was more than gratifying to me to converse with people who had read one of my books and were anxious to take on another. I lost count of the number of books I sold, but most were of my novel, Last of the Annamese, telling of the fall of Saigon and my escape under fire after the North Vietnamese were already in the streets of the city.

My interest is not in selling books. Writing is not a money-making proposition unless one writes a best-seller. But I care deeply about people reading my books. And nothing equals hearing the reaction of readers.

So Saturday was a day well spent. Let me express here my deep appreciation and gratitude to those who have expended the time and effort to read my writing. I am deeply grateful.

Mission BBQ

Once a month, on the Friday before our weekly meeting, my American Legion post members meet for lunch at the local Mission BBQ. The restaurant favors military members and veterans. Its walls are filled with pictures of us in uniform (including one of me), its décor stressing everything military. From the look of the patrons, I assume they’re mostly active duty, retired, or former armed forces members. We go there because we’re proud of our contribution to our country and cherish the brotherhood we formed with other soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines.

The active duty and former combatant population is thinning. Since the end of the draft in 1973, our numbers have been on a downward tilt. Whereas men my age are virtually all veterans—if we didn’t enlist, we’d have been drafted—there are far fewer veterans among men fifty and younger.

That said, there are still enough of us to keep Mission BBQ in business. There are two different Mission BBQs that I frequent, one here in Columbia, Maryland, the other in Ellicott City where I used to live. No matter what time I stop by, the restaurants seem to be busy. And, as I just learned, the two Mission BBQs that I know about are not the only ones. There are dozens of them, all over the U.S.

The fact that the Mission BBQ chain is prospering is good reason for me to put aside my concerns about the diminishing veteran population. We may be becoming fewer, but we’re still numerous enough to keep a military restaurant chain thriving.