Dr. Metablog

Dr. Metablog is the nom de blague of Vivian de St. Vrain, the pen name of a resident of the mountain west who writes about language, books, politics, or whatever else comes to mind. Under the name Otto Onions (Oh NIGH uns), Vivian de St. Vrain is the author of “The Big Book of False Etymologies” (Oxford, 1978) and, writing as Amber Feldhammer, is editor of the classic anthology of confessional poetry, “My Underwear” (Virago, 1997).

DR. METABLOG’S
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  • The Holy Lance

    In 1098, crusaders were trapped inside the walls of Antioch and their mission to capture Jerusalem was gravely jeopardized. When things were at their worst, one of the crusaders — a Provencal peasant named Peter Bartholomew — was visited by St. Andrew, who revealed to him that the lance with which the Roman soldier Longinus had pierced the side of Jesus was hidden in Antioch's Basilica of St. Peter. St. Andrew informed Peter that "he who carries this lance into battle shall never be overcome by the enemy." 

    Bartholemew's claim met with initial skepticism because it was an established fact that the Holy Lance lay safely in the relic collection of the Byzantine emperor in Constantinople. Nevertheless, the authorities agreed to investigate. Twelve men dug until overcome by exhaustion at the spot to which Bartholomew pointed, but they could find nothing. Finally, Peter himself dropped into the hole and brought forth a shard of metal. "All across the city there was boundless rejoicing." Suddenly invigorated by the possession of this powerful relic, their morale euphoric, the crusaders broke out of the city, overcame the armies that surrounded them, and proceeded to Jerusalem.

    Some months afterward, Peter Bartholomew had another vision: that the entire crusade  was compromised because some of its soldiers were polluted by pride or cowardice. He announced that he himself would choose and put to death soldiers of the cross who were steeped in sin. There was a backlash against Peter and the authenticity of the Holy Lance was challenged.

    Peter decided to prove his truth in a trial by ordeal. After fasting for several days, he ran, carrying the Holy Lance, between two piles of burning olive branches four feet high and thirteen feet long. He was severely burned and died several days later. The Holy Lance lost its magic and morale plummeted. The crusaders were forced to seek an alternative. The ingenious Raymond of Toulouse dispatched his follower Hugh of Monteil to Latakia to retrieve a fragment of the cross on which Jesus had been crucified. In the end, the discrediting of the Holy Lance proved to be only a temporary setback.    

    The facts in this and the previous essaylet come from Thomas Asbridge, The First Crusade, a New History (Oxford University Press, 2004). 

  • Adolf Award for Worst Person of the Century

    The winner of the Adolf for worst person of the century goes to Pope Urban II. The century in question is the first one of the previous millennium, or 1000-1100. Like many other Adolf award winners, Urban perpetrated evil deeds that have continued to provoke hatred, war and suffering even to the present day.

    HIs principal crime: Pope Urban fabricated a litany of Muslim atrocities in order to incite Christians to wrest Jerusalem from a “race” that he called “absolutely alien to God.” In November, 1095, in Clermont in the south of France, Urban told an eager audience that Muslims had circumcised Christians and spread their unspeakable blood on baptismal fonts; that they had “cut open the navels of others, tearing out their vital organs” and that they had committed appalling atrocities upon women “of which it is more evil to speak than to keep silent.”

    Some say that his catalog of mutilations and barbarities was based on faulty intelligence but most think it was his own invention. Urban did not just incite and condone warfare, he sanctified it. His crusade would be a pilgrimage — and therefore a form of penance. Combatants who died in its course would be purified. God, it was claimed, has instituted “holy wars” so that knights might find a new path to salvation.

    Roughly one hundred thousand crusaders answered his call and set out for the Levant to take Jerusalem from the infidels.On the way, they warmed to their task by conducting genocidal attacks of unprecedented brutality upon the Jewish communities of the Rhineland (communities that had been in place before the advent of Christianity). These quasi-sanctioned raids are now known as “the first holocaust.”

    The passage of the crusaders to the middle East was made easier because the Muslims were divided into two factions –Shiite and Sunni — that were perpetually at daggers drawn. The crusaders laid siege to Antioch in October, 1099, and when they took the city, slaughtered its entire Muslim population. In possession of Antioch, they found themselves entirely surrounded by hostile armies. But God was on their side. The timely intervention of “countless armies with white horses… led by the saints George, Mercurius, and Demetrius“ allowed them to fight their way out of the city.

    The crusaders headed south and in midsummer of 1099 besieged Jerusalem. Muslim defenders taunted the crusaders by setting up crosses and urinating on them; in response, the Christians catapulted the bodies of captured Muslims over the walls. When Jerusalem fell, the celebration was euphoric. The Provencal crusader Raymond of Aguilers reported that “some of the pagans were mercifully beheaded, others were tortured for a long time and burned to death in searing flames. Piles of heads, hands and feet lay in the houses and streets. Infants were seized by the soles of their feet from their mothers’ laps or their cradles, and dashed against the wall, breaking their necks.” Covered with gore, weighed down with plunder, “rejoicing and weeping from excessive gladness," the crusaders "worshipped at the Sepulchre of Jesus the Savior.”

    Although Pope Urban II died just two weeks after the fall and sack of Jerusalem, there is no question but that his Adolf was well and truly earned and that his legacy lives on. 

  • “Within” Again; Backbiting

    On March 10 of this year, I registered an objection to use of the word "within" in sportscaster-slang. Here's my complaint: "Why in the living heck do they say that the Nuggets are "within" two points of the Lakers?  "Within" means less than than the proclaimed margin — 1.9 points perhaps. Why not say that the Nuggets are two points behind?  Or trailing by two points?  But not — goodness gracious — 'within'."  Now, at the website Language Log, an accomplished young linguist, Benjamin Zimmer, has independently offered a theory of the origin of this idiom. He claims that "within" is short for "pull within," as in the case of a rower plying his oars to literally "pull" within a certain distance from his opponent. Over time, he says, "pull within" migrated from sports such as racing and rowing, which measure advantage in distance, to sports such as baseball and basketball, which measure advantage in discrete numbers, and where, he concedes, "the metaphorical fit was not exact." It's an interesting theory, and it might very well be correct. It's consoling to imagine that there's a reason for the irrational use of "within."

    Zimmer is less persuasive when he moves from linguistics to chronology.  He claims that "it became common by the mid-20th century for announcers and reporters to talk about teams pulling (to) within a certain number of runs, points, goals, or even games in the standings." He offers no evidence for the "mid-20th century" assertion. I can't say that my memory supports his version of history. I've been listening to basketball games on the radio since just after World War II, when the NBA succeeded the old BAA, and I'm moderately sure that I didn't hear the idiom "within two points" until the 1980s at the earliest. It was an unpleasant innovation in language that stuck painfully in my ear. To the best of my recollection, "within" was the relatively recent invention of Marv Albert  — one of his limited repertoire of linguistic tics. Others: "from downtown," "served up a facial," " yesss," "a spec-tac-ular move."

    Marv Albert, it may be remembered, was a protege of the late great Marty Glickman, sprinter and sportscaster, and (regular readers of these essaylets will be delighted to learn) as far as I know the only genuine celebrity to have set foot in the fabled P. S. 217 schoolyard. Glickman would not have been proud of Albert, who is less well known for his creativity in language than for his strange sexual exploits. In 1997, Albert plead guilty to sexual assault. He had proved himself to be a man without a tad of castration anxiety and of exceptional, perhaps unparalleled, courage, when he first bit a woman fifteen times on the back, drawing blood, and then forced her to perform fellatio. A spec-tac-ular move!! Just a couple of months after the Albert nonchalance, Mike Tyson bit Evander Holyfield on both ears, taking quite a chunk out of one of them — the left, I believe. I had high hopes for a great TV moment: the sportscaster Marv Albert interviews the boxer Iron Mike. Two Brooklyn boys discuss the theory and practice of oral incorporation. Yesss! 

    May 19: On Language Log, Benjamin Zimmer responds to my reminiscence that "within two points" was a creation of the 1980s. He offers comprehensive evidence that the idiom "pull within" was in print as long ago as the 19th century. Although he hasn't offered a chronology for "within" without a preceding "pull," and hasn't discussed radio basketball (how would he access radio archives, even if they exist?), he's certainly a thorough and imaginative researcher. But just because a phrase can be found deep in the archives somewhere, doesn't mean that it was in common oral usage.   

  • Angels and Fools

    "Earth Angel," by Jesse Belvin's Penguins, offered, or seemed at the time to offer, a succinct and accurate distillation of relations between the sexes. The song appeared in 1954, when I was a vulnerable 15-year-old, and was a monster hit, perhaps because of its ideological clarity. "Earth Angel" is of the genre that has lately come to be called "doo-wop"; in the P. S. 217 schoolyard, we just called it "juke-box music." Here's a pithy stanza: "Earth angel, earth angel, will you be mine/ My darling dear, love you all the time./ I'm just a fool, a fool in love with you." The heart of the matter, and the essence of life as we knew it — the simple-minded, retro-Victorian doctrine that  girls are angels, boys are fools.

    Looking back, I have no doubt that such an oppressive formula was painful for girls. It must have been hard for young women who knew themselves to be flesh and blood to pretend to be angelic. But I didn't concern myself with the effect of the song on them — girls were clearly and obviously different from us. Not that I knew anything at all about female culture; the world in which I lived was rigidly segregated by gender. I didn't have sisters and while the guys talked obsessively and ignorantly about girls, we almost never talked with them. Even in the high school lunchroom, girls sat to one side, boys the other. On the stoop, and In the schoolyard and the drugstore, we talked baseball, flipped cards, played softball and basketball and stickball, and practiced spitting for distance. I didn't have a clue what girls were doing — probably at home starching their crinolines. It was therefore easy to believe what "literature" told us: girls were or should be beautiful, aloof, distant, polite, ethereal, sugar and spice and everything nice, and certainly not sexual — in short, angels. Boys, on the other hand, were not just nasty and foul-mouthed, as we knew from first hand experience, but also pathetic, filled with longings that they gratified imperfectly several times a day, fumbling, awkward, big-eared, pimpled, and sloppy. The girls were all Bettys and Veronicas — desirable but unattainable. Perhaps in better neighborhoods there was an occasional Archy, but at the corner of Newkirk and Coney Island, there were only Jugheads. We were, in brief, exactly what "Earth Angel" had described: anguished adolescent fools.

    The notion that girls were unburdened by the flesh took a big hit when I found myself in one of those lower-level high school English classes where the disorder was such that weeks would go by without the teacher attempting a single lesson. Two very young but very tough girls (huge hair, pounds of makeup, stiletto heels, and bras so pointy that they could a bore a hole in the chest of any guy brave enough to risk an embrace) were discussing a "health" class in which chastity had been advocated by one of the maiden-lady teachers. One of the girls whispered: "She should take up a candle and see how it feels." Whoa, daddy! And then, a few days after I arrived at college, on a dark, moonless night, I overheard one "older" woman say to another, "there must be a mile of cock on this campus and I can't get six inches." At the sound of those words, "angels" all over America plunged to earth. 

    And a few months afterwards, "fool," too, gave up the ghost. 

  • Seven Years Later and Still Going Strong

    Here's a letter that I wrote to the local newspaper. It appeared in 1999 when AGGP retired.

    "I have read all sorts of commentary in this paper about the public school system — letters from parents, students, board members and from both grudging and supporting taxpayers — but I can't ever remember reading a letter from the spouse of a teacher. So here's the perspective of a person who has sat on the sidelines for almost forty years.

    'My wife, AGGP, retired this June from a career in teaching secondary mathematics that began at Warren Junior High School in Newton, Massachusetts, in 1960 and continued in the local schools, initially at the junior high school level and since 1977 at BHS.

    'In my considered opinion, public school teachers, especially secondary school teachers, rank among the genuine heroes of American society — right up there with hospice nurses, smoke-jumpers, and astronauts.

    'Consider the conditions of employment. Perhaps readers of this letter can bring themselves to think back to their own youth, or possibly they can remind themselves what it was like to share a home with one or two young people. Remember the mood-swings and the erratic behavior. Then try to extrapolate from this recollection and imagine two thousand energetic adolescents crowded into an ungracious old building where the air is always too hot, too cold, or too fetid. Imagine a world in which the girls are slightly more rounded and boys just a bit hairier on Tuesday than they were on Monday. Two thousand hormone-fueled young people who are so supercharged that they can't make it from history to English without playing keep-away with each other's shoes; whose normal mode of greeting is to shoulder their best friends into a bank of lockers. It is a world of games and exuberance but I'm sorry to say that it is also a world of troubles — of cliques, of alcohol and drug abuse, of private pain and of public disorder. And yet five times a day, five days a week, an accomplished teacher manages to keep thirty or so of these young ones focused for fifty minutes on conic sections or sinusoidal graphs.

    'A high school is also a place of increasing expectations and shrinking resources. Five teachers in an office suitable for one. Larger and larger classes. it was only a few years ago that BHS's mathematics department could employ a para-professional to xerox the exams and keep track of the textbooks and calculators and overhead projectors. Not too long ago there was released time for a department chairperson to make the schedules and screen prospective teachers and advise students. No longer: the public as said, "cut out the fat," and has decided that teachers can handle these chores between classes.

    'What happens after school is out for the day? Piles of exams and notebooks and homework to be read and returned tomorrow. Lessons to be prepared. I have seen with my own eyes that it is ordinary for a teacher to put in two solid ten-hour days on the weekend. And the phone calls. I'd be willing to wager that there are several hundred people reading this letter who have called our home between 5 p.m and 9 p.m. because Amber or Zack has stopped attending classes and hasn't handed in homework for a week, or just "can't get" hyperboles, or will have to miss school next week because of a family ski trip.

    'And what of that much-vaunted summer vacation? In my experience, the first half is spent in a state of profound collapse, and the second spent gearing up for the the one hundred and fifty new students who will roll in come August.

    'But let me report on AGGP's response to working conditions that would crush mortals not as strong as your heroic secondary school teacher. "I love my functions class. My algebra students are trying so hard. My basic students are great. They did a splendid job on matrices. I have such wonderful kids this year."

    'Is it a good job?  For those who are fortunate enough to have a genuine calling, as AGGP has so clearly had, and who possess tremendous physical stamina, and who can look with amusement rather than horror at an infected navel-ring, it's great; for others, better to choose an easier profession. 

    'And what are the rewards for four decades of teaching?  There is a warm retirement ceremony and a letter from someone in human resources, a plaque and a handshake and a very modest pension (health insurance not included).

    'But then there are the rewards that truly matter. The first is the pleasure of knowing that in an "I, me, mine" culture, a teacher has honored the precept that asks us to promote the general welfare. But more particularly, there's what happens whenever we stand in line at the movies or take a walk on the mall. "Oh, Mrs. P. You don't remember me, but I was in your algebra class a few years ago. I've been meaning to write to you and thank you. I learned so much in your class. Now I'm a doctor/engineer/chemist/businessperson." And not regularly, but every once in a while: "Oh, Mrs. P. You'll never guess. I'm a teacher now. it's exhausting but I love it. You're my model. And someday I hope to be as good a teacher as you."'

  • A Writing Family

    Yesterday we learned that my nephew Steven's book on the philosophy of martial arts will appear in July. Hosannas to him. Steven's wife, Terrylynn, has a book out on criminal justice.

    It's a writing family. The direct descendants of Isaiah and Eta have produced books on a wide variety of subjects. 

    It began when my father construed and annotated the standard form of real estate contract. And then my brother Jon published that novel about the dance and another family member of his generation wrote that introductory book about Shakespeare and a bunch of stuff on English literature. NGP''s book on election technology. My cousin Marian's twin daughters (upon whom I haven't set eyes since their grandfather's funeral, which was in 1965, I believe) have written a number of books. Nancy, a folklorist wrote about the hammered dulcimer and about musical instrument making in New York in earlier centuries. Nora, a medical anthropologist, has written a classic account of sign-language on Nantucket as well as volumes about third-world medicine. And then there's Eve's journalism (not yet in hardcover). If we look to the descendants of Isaiah's father, we can include Hiram C's book on global justice. 

    I bet there are other books — I've lost track of many members of the extended family. 

    Also:  my sister-in-law Ellen's book on the internet; my daughter-in-law's writings on advanced technology, and probably all sorts of other things by non-genetic family members.          

    I have no statistics, but I'd guess there's a higher concentration of published authors in our family than in most. Is there a gene for scribbling?

     It's interesting to me that except for the one novel, there are no other stories, poetry, screenplays.Our inheritance: facts rather than fantasy. 

  • A Rare Baseball-Shakespeare Confluence

    It's not often that there's an intersection of the disparate universes of Shakespeare and baseball. Yet even such distant areas of experience occasionally overlap.

    A contributor to a Shakespeare discussion group of which I am a member recently wrote about Jim Bouton's Ball Four (1970) (a very good baseball book), "Like Bill Bradley's excellent Life on the Road, it was written from the player's perspective." If I remember correctly from my own reading, it neither sensationalized nor glamorized professional athletics.

    This Shakespeare correspondent had "recently read Howard Bryant's earnest history of baseball in the 1990s called Juicing the Game (Viking, 2005) and was reminded that Ball Four did not make Bouton's fellow ballplayers happy." "Bouton revealed to the world what most everyone in baseball already knew, and what most people outside it suspected: Players took amphetamines…. They had girls in different cities.'  Ball Four sold two million copies but Bouton himself was ostracized and eventually harassed out of baseball."

    Now comes the baseball-Shakespeare confluence. Juicing the Game reports that sometime after Ball Four appeared, Bouton was "on the mound against Cincinnati… when he heard the voice of Pete Rose bellowing from the top step of the dugout, 'Fuck you, Shakespeare'. Literary criticism has seldom been more explicit."   

    It's a good story, but the correspondent to the Shakespeare list does not fully explicate its significance. "Fuck you, Shakespeare" uses the epithet "Shakespeare" as a generic term for a writer — almost as though Pete Rose could not think of the name of any other author. Under ordinary circumstances, to call someone a Shakespeare would be laudatory. This particular usage is either a very uncommon or a unique instance of the epithet serving as a term of derogation. In a way, it's a tribute to Shakespeare's prominence. "Fuck you, Flaubert," had such words been bellowed by Pete Rose, would have carried a dissimilar valence.

    I myself feel confident in surmising that Rose's acquaintance with Shakespearean drama — and with the written word in general — is less than profound. No one, even those who vastly admired the convicted rapscallion's skill with the bat, has ever confused 'Charley Hustle' with 'Bertie' Russell or Charley Dickens.

    "Fuck you, Shakespeare" reminds me of two of my favorite baseball/intelligence anecdotes. The first is the laudatory evaluation of Yale-educated Yankee pitcher Ron Darling by his teammate, center-fielder Mickey Rivers: "he knows the answers to things what I don't even know the question of."  A second anecdote has a similar valence. I 'll call the participants in the following genuine conversation Player A and Player B because I no longer recall who they were (although I do remember that both were Yankees). Player A: "That guy is a total idiot." Player B: "What are you saying? He has an IQ of a hundred thirty." Player A: "Yeah?  Outta what?"

    May 9.  My brother Jon called to say that Ron Darling never played for the Yankees. He hypothesizes a memory failure on my part: Darling was with the Mets and the center-fielder in question therefore must have been Mookie Wilson (former Rockies outfielder Preston Wilson's uncle and stepfather [note Hamlet reference] and the man who hit the grounder that went through Bill Buckner's legs). But the identification of Darling's admirer isn't crucial; let's just agree that he was someone with the linguistic competence of a Pete Rose.

  • What’s the Deal with Mike Yamagita?

    In Fargo, a tightly structured film, the extraneous Mike Yamagita episode might easily have been cut.

    Here’s the story (Fargophiles may bypass the plot summary). Mike is a high-school classmate and possibly an old boy friend of Marge Gunderson. He telephones Marge when he learns that she’s the police chief investigating the Brainerd triple homicide. When they  meet in a hotel bar in Minneapolis, Mike makes a half-hearted pass which Marge decisively rebuffs. Mike then reveals that he had been married to a mutual friend, Linda Cooksey, but that Linda died of leukemia. Because he’s lonely and, it would appear, because he’s embarrassed to have crossed the line with Marge, he breaks into sobs. A couple of scenes later, Marge is on the phone with a girl friend. She is surprised to learn that Mike never married Linda, that Linda is very much alive though she had been “pestered” by Mike for over a year, and that Mike’s been having psychiatric problems.

    The Mike Yamagita excursion doesn’t easily connect to the gruesome botched-kidnapping main story. What, then, is its reason for being?.

    The Coens like to toy with audience expectations. When we first hear Mike on the phone, we recognize the same flat upper-Midwest accent with which we've become familiar — and so, we're taken aback to discover that Mike is Asian-American. But is it a gimmick or does it matter?  Mike himself plays against type. Almost everyone in the film (although not Carl Showalter, the excitable talkative funny-looking guy who's destined for the wood-chipper) is laconic and stoical. Mike's bawling opposes him to both the stereotypical impassive Asian as well as to the stereotypical low-key Swedish Lutheran. But can his display of sentiment be trusted? Mike is no less insane than Gaear Grimsrud, the psychopathic killer, but he’s addled in a sweeter way. He wants desperately to be part of a family. It's because of this longing that he harasses Linda Cooksey and fantasizes a romance with Marge. In its own Coenesque way, Fargo is a film that extols families. Although the Lundegaards are not a good model, Marge and Norm are emphatically in the process of creating a good and decent family. So perhaps, taken all together, the Mike Yamagita episode adds an unexpected quirky element to the film, challenges ethnic assumptions, and reinforces, in a 'funny kind of way,' Fargo's family values.

    The Mike Yamagita subplot also deepens the character of Marge Gunderson. Although she’s interested in Mike–she primps for their "date" — she’s not a bit flirtatious. There must be hundreds of policiers in which the tough cop engages in gratuitous sex, but Marge is not that kind of policeperson. When she confines Mike to his side of the table, she reinforces her status as the moral center of an otherwise amoral film. But Mike catches her off guard and she’s not nearly as discerning in fancy duds as she would be if she were in uniform. The Fargo screenplay describes Mike as “bald, paunching.” (The coinage “paunching” must mean “becoming paunchy.”) By changing direction and casting the handsome Korean-American actor Steve Park,– a native of Vestal, New York, by the way — in the role of Mike Yamagita, the film makes him less pathetic and more sexual. While Marge does resist, she’s curious enough about him to make it her business to investigate. She ably balances restraint with curiosity. 

    Finally, there’s a broad sketchy parallel between the Mike Yamagita sequence and the main action of the film. Jerry Lundegaard attempts a scam that eventually kills his wife; Mike Yamagita attempts a similar scam when he tries to insinuate himself into Marge’s life by, so to speak, 'killing' his own imaginary wife. Marge thwarts both scams.

    Three different approaches, then: one about Mike, one about Marge, and one about plot parallels. But has the heart of this mystery been plucked?  Do we now know what Mike Yamagita is doing in Fargo?  I don't think so. Is there anyone out there in the cinemablogosphere who can improve on these suggestions?

  • Baseball Purity

    My father played excellent tennis and basketball — he was a guard on the CCNY team under Nat Holman until he left school to put a few cents in the family coffers.  During the 20s and 30s he also played some semi-pro baseball. He'd make $5.00 or $10.00 a game as a "ringer" — and in those days, an extra buck or two went a long way.

    He was a catcher and had the busted-up fingers to prove it. He paid for the broken bones when the arthritis caught up with him. Although he had been an unusually strong man, in his last years he didn't have enough left in his twisted fingers to pull the match out of the matchbook to light his pipe. But he could still discuss "inshoots" and "outshoots."

    Sometime in the early 80s (it was after mom died), he was in the hospital recuperating from a hip replacement. He was not a good patient and the confinement left him testy and bored, but he could be a little cheered by watching whatever sports were on the TV. One day I visited him and found the television off.

    "Pop, there's a Yankee game on. Why aren't you watching it?"

    He waved his gnarled old hand. "American League. DH rule. Not baseball."

    I'm glad he didn't have to see the changes since he left the scene. It's a new, impermanent, history-hostile, TV-friendly, high-scoring production: franchises jumping all around the country; new stadiums with mighty short porches; players coming up to bat wearing not only gold necklaces and earrings, but also helmet, gauntlets and greaves; the incredible shrinking strike zone; pitchers no longer allowed to knock down the over-aggressive batter; an epidemic of steroids that has led to  unnaturally bulked-up sluggers; balls flying out of the park as if the guys were playing Sunday-afternoon slow-pitch softball; mediocre hitters slamming 40 hr's a year — not to mention baseball played in the thin Colorado atmosphere where the batted ball takes off like a rocket and where curve balls can't curve.

    I know exactly what my father would have said: "Not baseball." 

  • A Little Spellcheck Humor, Maestro

    I first stumbled over Spellcheck's wayward sense of humor years ago when I was writing about Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. Spellcheck rejected Capulet, which is Juliet's family name, and presumptuously instead offered the choice of either "co-pilot" or "copulate."

    Spellcheck is deeply offended by proper names, uncommon words, neologisms, words in a language other than English, etc., and sometimes makes its impatience known by suggesting dadaist or absurd substitutions.

    For example, everyone (everyone except Spellcheck, that is) knows that Muggletonians are members of a religion founded in England in the 1650s by Lodowick Muggleton which held, among other doctrines, the idea that heaven was only slightly above the reach of our uplifted arms. Spellcheck has an irrational animus toward this harmless, near-extinct religion and proposed as substitutes for Muggletonian, the words "Argentinian," "Miltonic," "Macedonian," "Justinian" and (as a pure instance of spellcheckian whimsy) "melatonin."

    Apparently untutored in geography, Spellcheck rejected the ancient north African and modern upper New York state city of Utica in favor of "Attica," which makes a kind of sense, but also "Utah," which is a bit off-the-wall, "Utopia," which is nowhere, and the imaginative but bizarre "erotica."

    A recent entry on berries provoked an orgy of spellcheckian absurdity. For fenberry, "Canberra"; for crowberry, both "crowbar" and "crockery"; for lingonberry, "linguine," "lingerie" and "nunnery"; for whortleberry, "wheelbarrow";  for earthberry, "authoress"; for cloudberry, "glittery" and the truly wild, out-of-left-field "Goldberg."  Speaking of left field: for rbi's, Spellcheck proposed both "ribs" and "rabbis"; for Ebbets (as in Ebbets Field), simply "beets";  for Newcombe, as in the great Dodger pitcher Don Newcombe, "encumber."

    In another recent post I invented the word "mccranwichorama," defined as a display of inferior coinages of words in which detached segments (such as the wich in cranwich) acquire new meaning. I knew that when I batted mccranwichorama over the net, I would probe the outer limits of Spelllcheck's powers, but I must say that the program rose to the occasion when it parried with a transcendent absurdity: for mccranwichorama:  "mercurochrome."    

  • Three Cheers for the Blue, White and Red

    It's been a Krzysztof Kieslowski festival here the last few days. We've watched, two times each and with concentrated and astonished attention, Kieslowski's Trois Couleurs films: Bleu, Blanc, and Rouge. Individually (which is how we viewed them in 1993-94 when they first appeared) they're splendid; taken together, they're an even more wonderful achievement. 

    Kieslowski tells complicated stories with economy and precision; I don't know any filmmaker who can make every corner of the frame count for so much. It must be his training as a maker of documentaries that accounts for the rich, factual surface of his narrative. And yet his chosism — his thing-ism — is always in the service not of plot only but of the enigma as well. Kieslowski knows what accomplished novelists also know — that an object, studied closely, becomes a metaphor. The three films share a common theme — that it's impossible to find happiness outside of society  — but the presentations are so various and imaginative and the characters so rich that philosophical questionings are as unobtrusive as they are omnipresent.

    Kieslowski swore off directing when he finished Rouge, but had apparently relented and had started on another trilogy (Heaven, Hell, Purgatory) when the heart attack killed him. But there's the earlier work; we'll track backwards to watch, once again, The Decalogue and The Double Life of Veronique.       

  • Predators Then and Now

    There's more neighborhood mountain lion news: yesterday a seven-year-old boy, walking in the rearward of a group of six or seven hikers, was pounced upon in the mountains just west of town by a big guy. The child was bitten and clawed but is now recovering. Family members drove the lion away.

    In my view, they should never have allowed the child to pull up the rear. 

    I’d been thinking about predators even before this last attack (see the entry for April 8).  By one of those curious convergences that make life so rich, I just happened to be reading Bruce Chatwin’s The Songlines (New York: Viking, 1987), a travel narrative ostensibly about the sacred but invisible paths along which the ancestors of the Australian aborigines traveled and 'sang the world into existence.'  The thesis of this quirky, self-indulgent and intermittently brilliant narrative is that human beings are by nature not sedentary but migratory.

    But the book isn't only about migrants;  n one of The Songlines' many meanders, Chatwin writes a few pages on the age-old interaction of human beings with big predators like the mountain lion. He takes issue with the much-loved claim of right-wing thinkers that human beings are naturally territorial and aggressive — that we are nothing more than naked apes who must continually strive to control larger and larger dominions. Instead, he offers the alternative view that because of our long history of fending off predators, human beings are naturally not aggressive but defensive  — and, moreover, that It's the defensive imperative that caused our species to move from savagery to civility. He asks us to think of the situation of the earliest humans. "The first men were humbled, harried, besieged — their communities few and fragmented… clinging to life and one another through the horrors of the night."  "Might not," he asks, "all the attributes we call ‘human’ – language, song-making, food-sharing, gift-giving, intermarriage… have evolved as stratagems for survival, hammered out against tremendous odds, to avert the threat of extinction?"  It's a challenging, overarching hypothesis — and whether or not there are facts to validate it is beyond my ken.

    It's certainly true that first humans in Africa had to cope with a variety of nasty predators — lions were there long before people — and that when  our ancestors migrated to Europe they walked into a wild, dangerous country. The European lion, panthera leo, widespread from 900,000 years ago to the end of the last ice age, was a third taller and longer than surviving African lions, which themselves can weigh 450 pounds and reach a length of 8 1/2 feet. The lions in the virginal land that our ancestors crossed the Mediterranean to colonize would have been as tall as a fully grown Paleolithic man and might have weighed as much as 880 pounds.  And remember that for 99% of our time on earth, humans were either entirely unarmed or possessed only of the hand ax — a palm-size piece of sharpened but haft-less flint. No matter what theory of the origins of civilization we embrace, we should remember that our genes were selected in a world of woolly rhinoceroses, mammoths, aurochs, and wolves and that we competed with the big bears for what were then the best residences on earth– the limestone caves in the Ardeche region in France.

    It's in these caves that the memory of European lions is beautifully preserved. Thirty thousand years ago, a long tradition of animal representation climaxed in the paintings in the Chauvet Cave. There are beautiful representations of European lions on the hunt and at rest in Jean-Marie Chauvet's The Dawn of Art: The Chauvet Cave (New York: Abrams, 1995) –  irrefutable evidence that our forefathers knew them at first hand.  It's unquestionable that many a child — and many an adult — fell prey to these adversaries. And perhaps Chatwin is right; perhaps those humans who survived to reproduce were selected not for aggressiveness but for congeniality and especially for artistic ability. How else can we account for our species' continual preoccupation, or perhaps obsession, with all the many forms of beauty?

    April 17.  The authorities tracked and killed an 80-pound female panther. I sincerely hope that it was the offending animal and not an innocent bystander. 

  • More on Prayer Science

    In my post on the Templeton prayer study, I did not mention the outcome least congenial to prayer enthusiasts: not only did prayer do no good, it also caused real harm. “A significantly higher number of the patients who knew that they were being prayed for — 59 percent — suffered complications, compared with 51 percent of those who were uncertain [whether or not they were being prayed for”]. 

    How could it happen that prayees did worse than patients who were just let alone?  Dr. Charles Bethea, co-author of the Templeton study and cardiologist at the Integris Baptist Medical Center in Oklahoma City proposed that "it may have made [patients] uncertain, wondering am I so sick they had to call in their prayer team?"  It's a possible scenario — it’s no secret that depressed and anxious patients do worse than happy ones. But the “patient is anxious” explanation doesn’t work for those who didn’t know that they were on the receiving end of prayers.  Among the group of unwitting prayees, “18 percent suffered major complications, like heart attack or stroke, compared with 13 percent in the group that did not receive prayers.”  Researchers offered no hypothesis for this unanticipated result except to say that it was a chance outcome.

    So let us review: when prayees know that they’re being prayed for, their decline is a product of anxiety; when they don’t know that they're being prayed for, their decline is the result of chance. In both cases, the unwanted phenomenon is explained by natural rather than supernatural causes.

    Let us now imagine that the study produced contrary results and that the prayees had lower rates of complications than the unprayed. Would there not have been banner headlines in newspapers and on Fox proclaiming that prayer has been proven to be effective remedy for the complications of surgery?

    The error in logic is enormous and obvious. When prayer fails, it's for natural reasons. If and when prayer succeeds, it's because of supernatural intervention. It's a flagrant double standard where a symmetrical standard should be mandatory. If prayer succeeds because of divine intervention, it's only logical that it must fail because of symmetrical supernatural intrusions — because, for example, malificent demonic forces located the prayer providers, hijacked their prayers mid-flight, and turned good into evil. It's a difficult hypothesis to prove, it's true, but it's exactly as credible as the ideas that are put forward by prayer science.   

  • Prayer Science

    According to The New York Times (3/31/2006), the world of prayer science is all in a dither. A new study has apparently demonstrated that "prayers offered by strangers had no effect on the recovery of people who were undergoing heart surgery." The study was a big, expensive deal: ten years of work at a cost of $2.4 million (contributed by the ever-zealous Templeton Foundation, a powerful supporter of prayer research). The details are utterly and weirdly fascinating. "Researchers monitored 1802 patients at six hospitals who received coronary bypass surgery. The patients were broken into three groups. Two were prayed for; the third was not. Half of the patients who received the prayers were told that they were being prayed for; half were told that they might or might not receive prayers. The researchers asked the members of three congregations — St. Paul's Monastery in St. Paul; the Community of Teresian Carmelites in Worcester, Mass.; and Silent Unity, a Missouri prayer ministry near Kansas City — to deliver the prayers, using the patients' first names and the first initials of their last names. The congregations were told that they could pray in their own way, but they were instructed to include the phrase "for a successful surgery with a quick, healthy recovery and no complications.'" The shocking result: "researchers found no difference between those patients who were prayed for and those who were not." Prayer, it would appear (or intercessory prayer as this variety is called), does not change things. 

    I admire the dedicated men and women of science who put heart and soul into this project, but with all due respect, I must question both their conclusions and their protocols. For starters, the inference that prayer doesn't work is far too broad. Inasmuch as the scientists engaged only Christians to pray, all that they proved was that Christian prayer doesn't work. It's marvelously ethnocentric to suggest that just because Christians tanked, other religions could not succeed. It was Bailey Smith, the President of the Southern Baptist Convention, who authoritatively proclaimed that "God does not hear the prayer of a Jew." And yet, in a stunning theological upset, the scientific evidence now proves that God Almighty does not hear the prayers of Christians. But such a conclusion is itself far too hyperbolic. In actual fact, all that the study established is that God did not hear the prayers of three particular groups of prayer-providers. It's certainly a black mark against the Teresian Carmelites and their friends, and it will be a cold day in hell before they see another Templeton prayer contract, but there's nothing to say that Southern Baptists, even Bailey Smith himself, with his private line to the Almighty, might not have had more sway with the Great Jehovah.

    If the researchers had not been so blindly and thoughtlessly ethnocentric, they might have solicited the prayers of people of various faiths, especially those praying to different gods. Or even better: they might have assembled disparate groups of prayer providers. In one set, for example, there would be a Catholic, a Jehovah's Witness, and a Hindu; in another, a Muslim, a Wiccan, and a Methodist; in a third, a Scientologist, a Baptist, and a Muggletonian. Although the number of possible permutations is intimidating, the cause is noble: to determine impartially which of these groups can best cut the prayer mustard. It's wrong to put the entire burden on Christians. Scientists need to mix and match the various religions so that they can discover the most effective synergistic combination, or as it might better be called, the appropriate prayer cocktail.

    In addition, the study is guilty of flagrant mishandling of dosage. There was simply no control over the amount of prayer that was administered. Just as traditional medicines come in cubic centimeters, prayer comes in units of time. Let's say that one person praying for one minute yields one prayer unit.  Pending further study, there's no way to establish exactly how many prayer units a heart patient might need. For a bypass, fifty prayer units might be a minimum dosage, but perhaps twice or three times as many units might be necessary to alleviate the symptoms of a hallucinator of witches, extraterrestrials, or other supernatural beings. It's entirely possible that the prayers in this study failed simply because they didn't meet a minimum prayer-unit threshold. Moreover, it's important not to over-prescribe. For all we know, excessive prayer might precipitate iatrogenic illnesses. And it's also a question of efficiency: once an optimum dosage can be established, prayer providers can go about their business and not waste their time generating superfluous and expensive prayer units.

    Moreover, prayer scientists seem to have given no serious consideration to the group power of prayer providers. Given the present abysmal state of prayer science, it's still unknown whether prayers are more effective when delivered by just one or a very few providers, or in large choruses. Jews seem to think that a minyan, or quorum, is ten, but hard science has not confirmed this number. It's therefore imperative to experiment with different size groups in order to establish a proper medical-minyan. This is not easy, or inexpensive, but it's essential.  It would indeed be unfortunate if it turns out that a thousand prayer providers are necessary to improve the condition of just one bypass patient, but good golly, the Ancient of Days works in mysterious ways, and it's not for us to question His prayer needs.

    There are some other areas in which more scientific rigor is required. A)  different diseases: just because prayer didn't work for bypasses doesn't mean it won't work for scrofula. Perhaps some diseases are more prayer-responsive than others. B) fervor: prayer science has made the naive error of assuming that all prayer providers are equal. Yet the unalterable laws of random distribution determine that some people will pray more effectively than others. In point of fact, it's entirely likely that some prayer providers will be more effective with one disease than another. If I were a patient, I'd be mighty bent out of shape (and might even seek legal recourse) if I were assigned a prayer provider who had a proven track record with ulcers but who amounted to zilch for my hip replacement.  C) identification: prayer providers were given only the first name and initial of their prayee. But "Bob S." is entirely too vague– there might be hundreds of "Bob S"'s all over the world undergoing bypass surgery at any given time. How the blue blazes is the Lord of Hosts supposed to know which particular "Bob S" is meant?  Fortunately, there's an easy solution to this problem. Prayer providers should continue to pray for Bob S., but just remember to add the last four digits of his social security or major credit card number. 

    I'm not the only person disappointed with this study. According to the Times, "Bob Barth, the spiritual director of Silent Unity, the Missouri prayer ministry, said the findings would not affect the ministry's mission. 'A person of faith would say that this study is interesting,' Mr Barth said, 'but we've been praying a long time and we've seen prayer work, we know it works, and the research on prayer and spirituality is just getting started.'"  Bob B's assertion that "prayer works" is anecdotal thinking and has absolutely no merit whatsoever, but I can't imagine a single person who wouldn't agree with him that prayer science is "just getting started"– and also that it has a long bumpy road to travel. Fortunately, the Bush administration invested over $2 million of our tax revenues in prayer research, with more in the pipeline, so some revolutionary breakthroughs in the spiritual sciences soon might be achieved.  We'll be waiting.

  • Beast in the Backyard

    On the night of August 23, 1990, an eighty-pound, two-year-old female mountain lion wandered into our backyard.

    The story appears in a book on cougar-human interactions (David Baron, The Beast in the Garden [New York: Norton, 2004], 182-187) — a book which also contains a picture of "our" lioness, lying drugged on the ground (167).

    My strongest memory of that encounter doesn't appear in the book and deserves a report.  The lioness was crouching on a low branch of a box elder, and a goodly number of police loitered on the street and in the yards and alleys waiting for the wildlife-control officer and his tranquillizing dart. Eventually the marksman arrived and shot the lioness. The animal leaped down from the tree. As soon as she hit the ground and started to run, we could hear the sound, resonating throughout the neighborhood, of car doors being slammed shut as the officers rushed into their vehicles — to re-emerge only when the lioness collapsed.

    Last week, there was another mountain lion in a near neighbor's backyard. It was daylight;  the owner of the house had her video camera available and produced a very clear record of a magnificent animal — much larger and more formidable that the one we had seen. Two nights ago, the neighbors held a meeting and the author of The Beast in the Garden, who lives in town, came to tell us about cougars in our county and what to do if we encounter them. The good news is that the odds of being attacked are small: only one local person (a high school student jogging alone near Idaho Springs) has been killed — or taken, the word is — during the last decade. The author's advice: bring a companion with you when you go walking in the mountains– it's unlikely that a catamount will attack two people, and if he should attack, then there are two of you to fend him off. (He didn't repeat a familiar bit of local humor: "Always bring  a friend with you when you walk in mountain-lion country. Remember, you don't have to outrun the lion; you just have to outrun your friend.")  He also reminded the audience that it's wrong to run away (because you will look like prey) but that you should make yourself look big, make noise, throw rocks, etc. Do not, repeat do not, play dead — or worse yet, get down on all fours and try to crawl away. But on the whole it's not the mountain lion you see who's the danger; it's the mountain lion whom you don't see, but sees you. The one you feel.

    A jogger was in the mountains with his faithful pooch at his side.  He came to the top of a rise and there, on the road, was a big panther.  The jogger's dog immediately disappeared into the roadside vegetation. The man did everything right — shouted, threw things, stared the lion down. Eventually, and slowly, the big beast moved away and the jogger continued on his run. When he came to the bottom of the hill, Faithful Companion, who had taken the long way around,  reappeared and resumed running  with his master.

    Man's best friend, but within sensible limits.

  • Quintessence of Motherhood

    A friend, a retired nurse, was keeping watch when her ninety-plus-year-old mother was about to breath her last. The mother, who had not been coherent for some days, was either unconscious or sleeping deeply when she suddenly roused herself, looked closely at the daughter, uttered the words "you need rouge," and died. 

    This story is self-explanatory but nevertheless I feel compelled to embark on a course of no doubt supererogatory explications. The mother expresses a variety of emotions: some positive, some not so good.  Primarily she is affectionate and protective. She wants her daughter to take care of herself and be her best, so she proposes a practical cosmetic enhancement. But at the same time, she is intrusively judgmental, because the statement "you need rouge" clearly finds the daughter deficient and in need of cosmetic enhancement.

     The mother is also impolite — but only in the way that people who know each other intimately can sometimes be unmannerly. This particular mother wouldn't speak nearly so frankly to anyone in the world but her own daughter. In addition, she's competitive. "You need rouge" means not only "you're pallid, you need help," but also hints at "I never needed rouge."

    It's a humorous anecdote, because it's about the eternal continuity of mothering.  Even at the moment of death, the mother remains entirely and unequivocally maternal. The phrase "you need rouge" also makes us smile because it displaces other last words  — words of wisdom or serenity or love — that we might anticipate or for which we might hope.

    And what about the daughter?  Was she, or should she be, pleased, resigned, offended, amused?   

  • And Speaking of Berries…

    The cranberry, some say, is so named because it is eaten by cranes. Perhaps. But it's just as likely that the word derives from the similarity between the plant's stamen and the crane's beak –  as the common geranium or cranesbill is named after the flower's distinct enlarged pistil. (The American cranberry has an English cousin that is known, from its watery habitat, as the fenberry. The fenberry is neither eaten in nor by fens.) But if in fact cranberries were the food of cranes, what about the common bearberry (also known as crowberry, foxberry, and hog cranberry) — did this plant also derive its name from its consumers?  I'm skeptical, as I am skeptical about the derivation of the word lingonberry or cowberry, cows not being famous for berry eating. In fact, lingon means berry in Swedish, so the lingonberry is, etymologically speaking, a berryberry. Inasmuch as berryberries contain thiamine, they may help to prevent beriberi.

    The bunchberry, a member of the dogwood family, is also known as the squirrelberry, pigeonberry, and crackerberry (from crake = crow), but never as mooseberry, though it's prized by moose, who have themselves provided a name for a favorite food — the mountain maple or moosewood.

    The circumpolar cloudberry is sometimes called the salmonberry, but no one claims that it is nibbled by salmons. And what about the gooseberry?  There's no discernible relation between gooseberry and geese.  There are also gooseberries that have shed whatever goosiness they may once have possessed. The plant that was originally known as the Chinese gooseberry was transported to New Zealand, where it was selected, hybridized, and cloned, to emerge after commercial re-christening as the kiwifruit or kiwi — the name gooseberry not considered classy enough for international export. To the best of my knowledge, kiwis are not eaten by kiwis. 

    Blackberry and blueberry pose no etymological challenge, but raspberry is a bit of a mystery, there being no obvious rasp to the berry. The word raspberry was most definitely not derived from the slang term for a rude derogatory sound — a usage that is only traceable to the last part of the nineteenth century. The unpalatable bristly dewberry has no particular connection to dew. It's popularly said that the serviceberry is so called because, when it flowers early in the spring, the ground has thawed enough to bury — or conduct a service — for last winter's dead. But it's a false etymology — in fact, the service in serviceberry comes directly from its Latin ancestor sorbus (just as the mul in mulberry derives from Latin morus). The juneberry does in fact derive its name from its month of flowering. The loganberry is named for its hybridizer, James Logan, who crossed the blackberry and the raspberry. Although the name huckleberry — also known as a hurtleberry or whortleberry — is sometimes applied to the blueberry, it describes a botanically distinct species. The slang term huckleberry for a layabout — nowadays a slacker — was in use a generation or so before Mark Twain made it famous. Huckleberry Finn might just as easily be known as Whortleberry Finn. The bilberry is more distinguished when it is called a fraughan. The jostaberry is brand-new to the market; it's a cross between a gooseberry and a blackcurrant. (Currants are berries even though not called so; the word currant derives from their older name — raisins of Corinth.) The strawberry has nothing whatsoever to do with straw. Some think that name derives from the chaff-like external seeds or achenes which cover the fruit, but it's more likely that the name is drawn from the plant's habit of growth: runners stray or are strewn over the ground. A thousand years ago strawberries were called earthberries, a name not especially suitable for commerce. 

  • The Mayflower Hotel

    We're in Washington  D. C., this week and inadvertently wandered by the Mayflower Hotel.  

    A memory: in July of 1952, I stayed at the Mayflower for a few days with my father's sister, my peripatetic and eccentric Aunt Mollie. It was a rare and unique event. I came from an automobile-less family, and my parents were not in the slightest bit adventurous. The trip to Washington was the sole occasion in my childhood when I was in a city other than New York (and by New York I mean deepest Brooklyn, with an occasional foray to the Bronx Zoo or to the Museum of Natural History). It's hard to convey the full measure of the naivete with which this schoolyard boy approached a new city. I knew that Washington was smaller than New York and therefore assumed that it would consist of a smaller Brooklyn, a smaller Manhattan, etc. I had no conception that different cities had different geographies — let alone different characters.

    Highlights:  the Lincoln Memorial (I was exhilarated), the Jefferson Memorial, a boat ride to Mount Vernon. My strongest memory is of exciting and down-to-earth Harry Truman addressing a crowd from the base of the Washington Monument on the Fourth of July. The result of this voyage into the unknown was the realization that there were other cities, that they were accessible — in short, that there was a world elsewhere.

    I'm permanently indebted to my Aunt for allowing me the opportunity to grasp such a big idea.

    And also that there was such a thing as a restaurant. It might seem incredible, but from birth to college, I didn't enter a restaurant more than a half-a-dozen times at the very most. In our family, there was neither the money nor the inclination toward such extravagance. I still consider it a something of a miracle that a guy like me can walk into a shop, sit down, and that people will generously put food on my plate. All that I have to do in return is fork over a few bucks.  

    Exactly thirty-five years later, I stayed at the Mayflower a second time when AGP was honored and celebrated. At this Mayflower reprise, it was not Truman but Ronald Reagan whom we encountered. I remember the dyed hair, the unnatural orange skin, the ventriloquist's-dummy delivery of the speech that was handed him, and the undeniable inference that he was already deeply incapacitated by the Alzheimer's that would eventually kill him. 

  • William Merritt Chase; Makamah Beach

    The American artist most dear to me is the impressionist William Merritt Chase (1849-1916). Chase painted plein air scenes in Brooklyn's Prospect Park and Coney Island and also produced a truly wonderful series of landscapes set in the south fork of eastern Long Island. I knew nothing of these Shinnecock paintings nor of Chase himself until one day in 1987 when I happened upon an exhibition of his work in the National Gallery in Washington. Even though I was much taken with the paintings, I was too frugal to buy the catalog. By virtue of Amazon, I've at last located a copy (D. Scott Atkinson and Nicolai Cikovsky, Jr, "William Merritt Chase, Summers at Shinnecock 1891-1902 [Washington:  National Gallery, 1987]). 

    In "At the Seaside" (1892), a group of women and children enjoy a lazy day on an otherwise empty beach. In the distance to the left is a sailboat and to the right, almost at the horizon, a sandy point. The costumes are of the 1890s, but the sea and the surf and the clouds are timeless. It's a busy but very peaceful scene. Similar Chase landcapes depict sea-grasses, scrubby trees, sandy beaches, empty roads. Many of his canvasses are populated by his wife and children. 

    Fully as idyllic as Chase's "Summers at Shinnecock" were my own Wordsworthian "Summers at Makamah Beach, 1947-1949." Although Makamah was on the Sound (on the north shore), it was as like as like could be to Shinnecock in the 1890s. My family spent three magical summers there — the best summers and by far the best times of my otherwise entirely citified, asphalt childhood. We rented a very simple wood-frame beach house. If my memory is correct, the house was mostly deck with a minimal kitchen and a few sleeping rooms. It seemed like a great distance to the nearest neighboring beach house, but, in retrospect, it was probably no more than five hundred or at most a thousand feet. But to a kid from the schoolyard, a thousand feet was more than plenty. I loved the emptiness — no trolleys, no radios, no people. I remember wandering alone for hours at low tide examining, with the patience of childhood, the crabs, snails, seaweeds and the infinite variety of dead fish. To my vocabulary, I added such novelties as inlet, point, cove, high tide, squall, blowfish, starfish, perch, sea urchin, shiner, sinker, fiddler crab, hermit crab, razorback, softshell, float, outboard and inboard, "sheared a pin," oarlock, dinghy — words and concepts previously beyond the outer limit of my imagination. There were porpoises almost every day — once I was all alone on the beach when two of them battled furiously for several minutes right in front of my astonished eyes. No one else saw them, and no one believed me. There was also an abundance of horseshoe crabs– not crabs at all, as I later discovered, but trilobites left over from the Paleozoic. I think it was the horseshoes that started me reading about paleontology. I remember also old Mr. van Etten, already more than a child when Chase was painting at Shinnecock, who took me out in his rowboat to trawl for bluefish.

    Wordsworth wrote about his childhood's "fair seed-time" and that he was "fostered alike by beauty and by fear." While it's easy to exaggerate the amount of fear back in 1950s Brooklyn, it's a fact that there was an almost absolute absence of beauty. Makamah Beach offered not only beauty and variety but also the possibility of different kind of life.         

  • No Ham in Your Hamburger? It’s a Cranwich.

    The word "alcohol" originates in Arabic as "al-kuhul" (said to mean "tincture of antimony") and comes into English through Old Spanish. "Alcoholic," as in "possessing the qualities of alcohol," is an old word, but "alcoholic" does not acquire the meaning "addicted to alcohol" until 1880. In recent years, "holic", which had no independent existence, has become detached from its word of origin and appears as an enclitic or suffix to produce such useful coinages as "workaholic," "shopaholic," "chocoholic, ""sexaholic."  Holic is now so well-established as an indicator of compulsive behavior that it's quite permissible to take almost any noun, slap a holic onto it, and invent a decipherable adjective. A vacationer, for example, could be a beachaholic, a swimaholic, or a sandaholic.

    A fate similar to that of alcoholic befell the word sandwich. Originally a town in Kent, Sandwich was later the name of a culinary-minded Earl. "Sand" is self-explanatory and "wich" designated a tract of salty land. Wich, like holic, has set out on its own career path and has generated such apparently essential new words as "bagelwich" and "croissantwich." A croissantwich consists of a quantity of something or other between two slices of croissant. If a bagelwich is made of bagel and a croissantwich of croissant, of what is a sandwich made? The obvious answer: bread, which, by a quirk of language, is signified by the morpheme "sand." 

    There's no precise linguistic term for words created by the addition of holic and wich, but they are closely related to a group known as "cranberry morphemes." (A morpheme is the smallest unit of sound that carries meaning.) Why cranberry?  Compare the two words "blackberry" and "cranberry."  Blackberry resolves into two free morphemes: black and berry. Cranberry, however, is a horse of another color, because "cran" all by its lonesome has no meaning at all. (It did, once upon a time; cranberries were eaten by cranes.) "Cran" is therefore a "bound morpheme." Unlike the black in blackberry, which functions quite well on its own, "cran" is "bound" because if it were free it would be meaningless. Technically, a cranberry morpheme is a bound morpheme that exists in only one lexeme. Workaholic is a variety of cranberry morpheme because, like cran, holic cannot stand alone; but while cranberry is unique, words containing holic and wich occur in numerous manifestations.    

    It's therefore the case that English does not have an adequate word for workaholic, bagelwich and their proliferating analogues. To supply this need, I nominate "cranwich" (a coinage that is less than minute old as this is written and is therefore a neonate neologism). The definition: a "cranwich" is a cranberry morpheme that has gone wild and no longer limits itself to a single appearance (like cran), but proliferates (like holic) — and is easily proliferable.   

    A hamburger was originally from Hamburg. At some point, burger detached itself from hamburger, went wild, and produced such cranwiches as cheeseburger, baconburger, bocaburger, and gardenburger. Along with these new words comes a rather paradoxical phenomenon. Just as the sand in sandwich now means bread, so the ham in hamburger means beef. This linguistic oddity will some day be a thing of the past: more and more, the word hamburger is being replaced by the less amusing but more precise beefburger. (Still beyond the horizon: breadwich.) It's impossible to say why the hamburger yielded burger while the frankfurter (from Frankfort) failed to cranwich: why do we have chicken franks and tofu franks rather than chickenfurters and tofufurters? 

    Other cranwiches of note: Dracula has produced blackula and chocula: "ula" seems to mean something both frightening and funny (although not in the case of uvula. A scary uvula would be a uvulula). Godzilla produced hogzilla and bridezilla, coinages which might lead the cranwich-naive to conclude that the god in godzilla means god, which it certainly does not. Marathon, the Greek word for fennel, was also the name of the city where the Athenians defeated the Persians in 490 BC and from which the messenger Phidippides ran twenty-six miles to bring the good news home. "Thon" has now severed its relationship with marathon and, as a suffix, has produced innumerable cranwiches such as as knit-a-thon, jog-a-thon, dance-a-thon, blog-a-thon, and, believe it or not, masturbate-a-thon. The "Mc" in McDonald's has not only generated "mcmansions" and "mcjobs," but has also opened up the possibility that an inferior or sub-standard cranwich could someday be called a mccranwich. A compendious display of mccranwiches would be a mccranwichorama.   

    March 24.   We're in Washington D. C.  On a cab ride we passed the Watergate complex, the presence of which reminded me that I'd failed to mention one of the major cranwiches of the last decade. The "gate" in Watergate has become a suffix that denotes a scandal, as in Korea-gate, Iran-gate, Plamegate or, my favorite (I like odd rhymes), debate-gate. Debate-gate, now largely forgotten, occurred during the 1980 presidential campaign, when the fatuous hypocrite and ex-Jesse Helms speechwriter George Will, using a stolen Democratic briefing book, coached Ronald Reagan for his debate with Jimmy Carter, then later went on TV to praise Reagan's "thoroughbred performance."   

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