"Chocolate"

       It takes a Travel section of the Sunday newspaper to give you a flavor of where certain words come from.  Here is part of Jode Jaffe's journalism today from the Yucatan peninsula in Mexico where the word "chocolate" came from:


       The term "cacao" comes from the Olmecs who pre-dated the Maya....

       But it was the Maya who came up with chocolate--both the name and the drink.

       Combining the words chokoh, meaning hot and ha, meaning water, Maya chocolate was a drink that mixed ground-up cacao with chile, vanilla and other spices.

       To the Maya, cacao was crucial.  They thought it was a gift from the gods and drank it for religious ceremonies.  So cherished, the beans were their currency.  A rabbit cost 10 beans, a slave 100.

       It was xocolatl, the Aztec version of the Maya drink, that the Spanish first encountered -- and hated.  One of Hernan Cortes' conquistadors called it "a bitter drink for pigs."

       Nonetheless, Cortes brought the cacao mixture back to Spain.  That's when the magic happened.  They added cane sugar, which turned it from something for pigs to what Cortes called "a divine drink which builds up resistance and fights fatigue."

       It quickly became a favorite in the Spanish court, then swept through Europe and eventually the world.

       Once the secret of chocolate got out, other places started cultivating it.  Today more than 80% of cacao is grown in Africa and Indonesia.  Less than 2% is grown in Mexico.  But the vestiges of the cacao culture remain and there's an effort to make the Yucatan the center of the chocolate world again.

            L.A. Times

Reading and Writing are Done in Silence

       Watching a program tonight with Connie, The Fifty Year Argument, about The New York Review of Books magazine.

       Connie and I were both in New York City when it began during our first year or so there; it was born during a newspaper strike!

       One statement made during the program I knew I wanted to quote in its entirety for the blog:

       
        Reading and writing are done in silence.  But you must have the idea that other people are reading the books you're reading, and that other people will read the novel you're writing.  And the idea of community within a world which depends on silence is so fundamental, although we don't think about it or remember enough how important it's been, if we don't join forces as readers in some strange way (also inside), our reading becomes a strange dessicated Mr. Casaubon sort of activity forever about to produce a book that, you know, nobody will read.

              Colm Toibin, a contributor to The New York Review of Books

The L.A. Slackers?

       The L.A. Dodgers have met their nemesis in each of the last two postseasons:  The St. Louis Cardinals put the kibosh on 'em and ended their year before they could claw their way into the World Series.

       Here's a sentence from an article in the L.A. Times this morning by Zach Helfand:


       "Few teams have hit Kershaw as well as the Cardinals, whose success against him has become the central mystery of L.A.'s lack of postseason success."


       I suppose I'm crazy, I know, but I keep reading a couple words there as "L.A. slack."

       The Dodgers meet St. Louis today. . .this weekend. . .for the first time since last October; I'm hoping they see they need to take up the "slack" before they can beat a really fine team like the Cardinals.  

Words Enhancing Pictures

       On May 25th, 2015, I illustrated how vivid words from a journalist can capture the artistry of photographs we don't even see.  It's also true that vivid description can help our appreciation of photographs we are actually looking at.

       This is often true with the work of the "legend" writer in National Geographic's 2015 Engagement Calendar, "Beautiful Landscapes."
 

click on image to enlarge

    
       Here is how Abbe Pascal began her legend to this extraordinary Carr Clifton photograph for the week of May 25th, 2015:

"In Desolation Canyon, Utah, weathered roots of sagebrush radiate outward like fingers embracing claret cup cactus in full spring bloom."

The "priestly blessing"

       Naida, our part-time caregiver, told of a five or six-year old who was suspended from public school for a certain number of days for saying "Bless you" to a fellow student.  Both Naida and I wondered how benighted could those responsible for the suspension have been.  Was that youngster perpetrating "religious" expression on another student in a public school?!

       I told Naida that this very day we happened to be studying the "priestly blessing" from the Torah in a class at our temple.  It's beautiful in Hebrew and in most translations, I imagine.

          The Lord bless you and keep you.
          The Lord make His countenance shine upon you and be gracious unto you.
          The Lord lift up His countenance to you and give you peace.

I asked our rabbi whether only "priests" should say the blessing, or could we as well to one another?  She asked me what I thought; I said I thought we could.  And she nodded.

I once consciously exchanged blessings with another man after each of us had expressed our hopes and aspirations for the coming year.   The blessing and support we gave each other felt very good indeed, and maybe even more in the giving than the receiving. 

"Letter from a Birmingham Jail": Three

       May 22nd's post presented a second excerpt from M. L. King's letter replying to a number of clergy critical of King.  The clergy had written a signed letter to a local Birmingham newspaper while King was in jail.

       This is my third and concluding excerpt from King's response:

 

Words Worth a Thousand Pictures?

       Nita Lelyveld does L.A. Times pieces on the City Beat.  Today's piece on a self-taught amateur photographer at the point of becoming a true professional was a funny and heartwarming one as well as conveying Rafael Cardenas's budding artistry.  Here are Nita's words about some of Rafael's photographs:

     
       He didn't think in themes.  He simply stopped for what caught his eye.  A man walking down the front steps of City Hall, looking as if he carried the weight of all L.A. on his shoulders.  The window of a store with two signs: Open and Closed.

       From inside his truck, in a downpour, he captured raindrops on his window as a cyclist passed under a traffic light.

       While leaving a Martin Luther King Day parade, he spotted a vintage yellow Chevy Monte Carlo with yellow starfish rims, stuck in traffic, hugging the road's yellow center stripes.  On the other side of the street was the yellow sign of a furniture store.  The road was wet.  The yellow was everywhere, so bright.  He caught the perfect moment when the woman behind the wheel turned her head his way and smiled.

       On Valentine's Day, he saw a young couple sitting on some steps, leaning into each other.  He clicked when the girl kissed the boy's cheek, cradling his chin with one hand.

Ads and land's sake, finally an appropriate holiday.

       I think it's definitely time to revive one of Connie's unquestionably superb bon mots.

       I had said something to the effect that with all the Sunday newspaper ads, you would think this holiday weekend was about nothing but shopping, to which Connie, standing at the kitchen sink, quickly replied,


                   "Sure, didn't you know, it's Memallial Day!"

"Unraveling"

       Looks like a good play and praised by a worthy critic, but the capsule review of The Other Place in the L.A. Times has a usage that leaves me hung up when I come across it.  Here's the quote:


       "Andre Barron's suave direction prohibits our getting ahead of the steadily unraveling plot . . ."

     
       Now I believe I know what the critic meant, something like skilled and smooth directing prevents us from leaping too quickly to mistaken conclusions about upcoming twists in the story; however, doesn't "unraveling" also suggest that the plot itself is disintegrating, "steadily" coming apart before your very eyes?

       That's the hangup I have with the use of "unraveling" this way, as one would if an untethered piece of yarn were pulled until the whole garment just disappeared.        

"Letter from a Birmingham Jail": Two

       On May 20th, 2015, I began three excerpts from Martin Luther King's Letter responding to fellow clergy who had expressed in print their skepticism and disapproval of King's activism in the face of racial injustice.

       Here is the second part:

"Clos du Bois"

       Make-up Mother's Day lobster dinner with Connie tonight:  she loved it as usual, i.e., every year.  I didn't think my lobster was bad either.

       We couldn't have the Pinot Grigio we liked and wanted because, I guess, they were out of it temporarily.   The waiter asked us, "Would you mind having [cloy du boys]?"  I looked skeptical.  He said it was the only other Pinot Grigio they had.

       It was the name that got me, didn't sound like anybody's good wine.  [cloy du boys] turned out to be [cloh du bwah], spelled Clos du Bois, and the price confirmed I was in good territory.

       You know if  it's wine and it sounds French and then it's spelled French, you aren't taking too much of a chance.  And it was good!

      Shouldn't a waiter in a pretty expensive restaurant know how to pronounce the wine list!    

"Letter from a Birmingham Jail": One

       I saw that Anna Deavere Smith had given a reading recently in Los Angeles of Martin Luther King's "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" and realized I had never read that letter. 

       King was in jail when he read an op-ed piece in a local paper, written and signed by a number of ministers and rabbis, criticizing his actions in open protest to segregation and racial injustice.

       In three parts, today and within the next several days, here are some of Martin Luther King's still powerful words:

 
      
      

The Voice can Hold the World

       Son staying over again after a first read-through of a play/musical he's been cast in.  Voice sounded a little weary when he got home from the evening reading.  I told him I envied him that.  I haven't been doing enough reading aloud lately.

       Your voice is weary after working it, but then that's strengthening it too and helping its flexibility and responsiveness to whatever material's being read or performed . . . next.

       I directed and ended up playing the lead in a Readers' Theatre performance of Zangezi, which  I'd been studying for a couple years.  Finally I couldn't fathom how to pass on to a student performer all that was in that complex, linguistically/sonically sophisticated title role and chose, no doubt selfishly, to do it myself:  full of wonderful sounds, words and ideas about language for an hour and a half.

       A month or two later, I took a one-day workshop with performance artist Tim Miller.  A female and I were paired off to improvise on some kind of vocal sounds or word we'd been assigned. We stimulated each other, extending one another further and further, and I remember ending up so high and sonically free of ALL tethers into the far rafters of that building, there was room left only for stunned astonishment in the class, and a sort of gasping whistle from Tim himself.  I knew where my resources for that flight had come from.

      
      

"Blip"

       David here to help supervise placing of grab-bars by workers for assistance to Connie.  Naida our part-time care-giver also here today.  Both welcome as we, Connie and I, go about our business, reading, jig-saw puzzle assembling, paying back overdue phone calls to friends, exercising, watering, attending, and trimming plants.

       And with all this, not a single blip on the language meter all day.  Oh, wonder about "blip"?

       Merriam-Webster dates it from 1945.  [Imitative.]
 
       American Heritage Dictionary has:  1.  A spot of light on a radar or sonar screen indicating the position of a detected object, such as an aircraft or a submarine.... 2.  A high-pitched electronic sound; a bleep.

       And Merriam-Webster again:  a transient sharp movement up or down (as of a quantity commonly shown on a graph).   

       Bull's-eye.  

"Save SAVE. SAVE!!!!!!", Part 2

Provide, Provide


The witch that came (the withered hag)
To wash the steps with pail and rag
Was once the beauty Abishag,

The picture pride of Hollywood.
Too many fall from great and good
For you to doubt the likelihood.

Die early and avoid the fate.
Or if predestined to die late,
Make up your mind to die in state.

Make the whole stock exchange your own!
If need be occupy a throne,
Where nobody can call you crone.

Some have relied on what they knew,
Others on being simply true.
What worked for them might work for you.

No memory of having starred
Atones for later disregard
Or keeps the end from being hard.

Better to go down dignified
With boughten friendship at your side
Than none at all. Provide, provide!

Robert Frost

"Save SAVE. SAVE!!!!!!", Part 1

       Glancing through some "Free Writing" I did a number of years back--just writing without stopping and no going back, for ten minutes--I came across this segment I'll quote for you:

       My parents used to tell me of folks from the “old country” who wound rubber bands linto a ball, a arger and larger ball not to waste the rubbaerbands but use them again, maybe it became a ball you could play with, I don’t know and bouce it for your ids to use.  People saved string and wound it into bals so as not to waste, balls ao string, bigger and bigger and BIGGER yes, waste not want not, my mother oftensaid and taught ito to my kids, and they know it.  don’t leave a room without turning off the lights, don’t waste the electricity; wasteot want tnot.  Who needs that ligght after ou’ve eft the room.  so those sox get mended, and mended and mended.  Connie just throws them away, not worth it.  What family did she come from?  Not one with od word memories, not one that was pooror had pooess i the genes or knew that you didn’t come by thigs easily and might ose thigs any old time  Why am I so conservatie?  Don’t gamel, might lose.  Loo out, and peope are out to take thigs away rom you to.  Save SAVE.  SAVE!!!!!!

      (This passage reminded me of a Robert Frost poem, which shall be my next post.) 

Is THIS Sports Journalism?!

       Why does the L.A. Times sports page allow a Dodgers story,  appearing the morning after a game, to be so far afield from what the reader mainly wants to know:  what the Dodgers did yesterday; I mean like, win or lose?

       Instead, what did we have today?  Headline:  "Ethier playing like old self."  Oh, Goodie.   Ethier must have been prominent in the team's win!  You could read lots in that article before it came near mentioning that the Dodgers lost!  The sub-sub head, in gray print, Colorado 5 Dodgers 4, could have been easily overlooked while you went on reading about Ethier.

       The story of the game (in disjunctive, not sequential, order), is a hard to read,  gray-backgrounded, side-bar on page 5.  The Ethier, but hardly Dodger, story began on page 1.

William Zinsser, 1922 - 2015

       William Zinsser has died.  He wrote and edited for a number of well regarded U.S. periodical publications, taught non-fiction writing in the English Department at Yale, and is perhaps best known for his book On Writing Well that came out in 1976 and is still valued in its several thoughtful revisions.

       Zinsser recently wrote a weekly blog for two years for American Scholar Magazine, hardly believing it when his first article received 16,000 hits. He thought he was absolutely wedded to paper but became an enthusiastic convert.

       Zinsser prized clarity. economy, and human warmth in writing.  Simplicity was a watchword for him.  He held that you should be grateful for every word that can be pruned:  "Clutter is the disease of American writing."   

     

When is a "mistake" almost right and nearly acceptable?!

       In an obituary today in the Los Angeles Times for the wonderful performance artist Rachel Rosenthal, the article tells us Rachel graduated from the High School of Music and Art in New York City and began to be friends with painters like Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns and joined the dance company headed by Merce Cunningham:


           "She was a dancer and fell in with an avant garde crowd at a time             of artistic fervent in the 1950s."


       Now a spell-check wouldn't catch the "fervent" as a mistake or misspelling because it's actually a word, and although it is an adjective when a noun is called for and "ferment" was no doubt intended, a churning, boiling time of artistic creativity is also clearly one where the artists are "fervent" about their art!  

"Mesmerizing"

       Just ran across the word again and realize how nice it is, I guess, to have a word coined out of your name.  Franz Anton Mesmer, an 18th century medical doctor, was a visionary and began believing magnets could cure or help patients in some way.

       Then he thought he had some of those powers himself, and got people to do things through what he hardly recognized as hypnotism; hence mesmerism is broadly understood as the equivalent of hypnotism.  American Heritage Dictionary's Word History continues:


One of [Mesmer's] pupils, named Puyse´gur, then used the term mesmerism (first recorded in English in 1802) for Mesmer's practices.  The related word mesmerize (first recorded in English in 1829), having shed its reference to the hypnotic doctor, lives on in the sense "to enthrall."

"Modicum"

       So the word "modicum" occurred to me the other day, sounded a little small on the tongue, and, of course, why not, that's what it refers to, something little, tiny, small, diminished, a bit.

       But there are other words that can serve the same purpose, refer to similar size things:  iota, tad, tittle. . . just to start such a list.

       It's good to have a quantity of words at hand to choose from, then to settle on one that seems to fit best.

A Restaurant I would Gladly Patronize

       Daughter Elizabeth told me today, Mother's Day, she and Grandson Micah went to a favorite restaurant she's loved ever since she's lived in Tucson, an unpretentious, neighborhood kind of place where the food is good, the wait staff is longstanding, and both they and the customers seem just glad to be there.

       I was struck with the unshamefaced straightforwardness of the restaurant's motto, which Elizabeth snapped today and mailed me:

"Homeland"

       Wrote this essay closer to the time the word first became prominent in the country.  The muse and thoughts I had then still seem to me to be pertinent regarding this almost-taken-for-granted word now:


                                                HOMELAND

       The term “Homeland” as in “Homeland Security” has bothered some people, including me.  Others seem to accept it readily.

       It was apparently first used in an American government context by a 1997 document of the National Defense Panel, then as part of the two-word phrase in the first Hart/Rudman report on national security in 1999, but most notably to the general public in President Bush’s October 2001 creation of an Office of Homeland Security which has now received its Congressional imprimatur in November 2002.

      The term, perhaps for one old enough, resonates from World War II and Hitler’s Germany.  Naturally the sound of it is not favorable for somebody with that association.

       But it’s what the term does (and maybe what it did for Germany!) that bothers me most:  it makes us into an isolated patch of soil in which we are all rooted, apart from the rest of the world.

       What happens to the “homelands” to which most of us trace our ancestry, i.e., the now widely disparate countries that gave us or our forbears their birth?  Those countries are cut off from contributing to our culture and our identities as we float ever further from our peculiar, distinct, and diverse origins.

       WE are now the “homeland,” barricaded and armored away from the rest of humanity, thus giving the lie to our welcoming and immigrant-built country, subverting our very appeal to the world.

Language is a Great Mulch!

       I finished lecture #36, the final one in John McWhorter's "Great Course" The Story of Human Language on CD, my first real introduction to linguistics and a worthy one indeed.

       I'll share a couple little "food for thought" items as given in print form in the little book that accompanies and consolidates the fuller actual lectures:


       Ask traces back to an Old English word acsian, but despite how we feel about the pronunciation "aks" today, in Old English acsian was as common as ascian, casually written in formal documents.  As so often, our contemporary senses of what is "wrong" are abitrary--even literate English speakers once saw nothing amiss in the alternation between these words.

       About came from a case of the rebracketing that we saw create the word alone [originally "all one," time and use reduced it to "alone"].  At plus by plus out, pronounced together rapidly over time, became the single word about, just as God be with you became Goodbye.

       

       

       

       

More on "The Ballad of Beautiful Words"

       Why is the poetry in yesterday's post so readable, listenable?  So Euphonious?  Is it more the rhymes, more the rhythms, is it more the individual words and their sound/image value?  Is it just a list of nice words in a "ballad"?  WITHIN each line, what are the colors, the shifting differences even when the letters are all the same that begin words?  I think the poem a marvel.  The selection process itself must have been a feast, not to mention the piecing it all together in a seamless sound and rhythmic package, each stanza.

       I can't tell for sure who made the poem; this is one-third of it, but I can find it for you and send you to it.  It's at Issa's Untidy Hut, the Poetry Blog for Lilliput Review.  Scroll down till you come to "The Ballad of Beautiful Words."

from "The Ballad of Beautiful Words"

Amethyst, airy, drifting, dell.
    Oriole, lark, alone,
Columbine, kestrel, temple, bell,
    Madrigal, calm, condone.

Emerald, swallow, tawny, dawn
    Silvery, starling, lane,
Radiance, rosary, garland, fawn,
    Pastoral, valley, vane.

Saraband, arrow, huntsman’s horn,
    Orison, organ, bairn
Meadow, madonna, moorland, morn,
    Colony, carol, cairn.

Crinoline, crimson, crystal, croon,
    Troubadour, flagon, flown,
Caravan, amber, laurel, moon,
    Tamarind, tendon, tone.

Anchorage, archer, astral, own,
    Barnacle, billion, bay,
Channel, communion, island, moan,
    Carnival, castaway.

Chivalry, convoy, clamor, cling,
    Hurricane, highland, dream,
Journeyman, mariner, sailor, wing,
    Mandarin, tarn, redeem.

       (more in next post about this poem)

Brain on "hold."

       Restrained from much energetic exercise at the moment, it's hard to maintain animated vitality.  Keep wanting to take another nap.  Good for continued recovery from my hernia surgery but less so for the life of the blog.
   
       I rest, seek respite, reset, yawn, stare at the screen, nod off...to bed. 

      

"Empty Nesters"

       Seeing two birds flapping and fluttering under the eaves of our patio to a location somewhere in the patio this morning reminded me of the bird I saw the other day just beyond our patio pick up and sort of weigh and balance and consider a twig and then take it and fly in.

       That made me think (and today it was confirmed) there's a couple building a nest in our patio--and I saw it.   
  
       It's exciting!  But mainly it made me think how for granted we take our relationship with other sentient and wild beings that accompany us on the planet.

       Do we notice that we say, "Yeah, our kids have flown.  We're empty nesters now."  They're hardly metaphors!  Fellow creatures are how we know some things, and it's in our language.

"Welterweight"

       So it was a welterweight contest in Las Vegas last night.

       But what weight is it?    Obviously more than a"fly"and more than a "bantam."

       "Welterweight" is between lightweight and middle weight and comes in at between 135 and 147 pounds.

       I grew up on the heavyweight fights of such figures as Joe Lewis, "The Brown Bomber."  I suppose heavier guys are more capable of committing greater mayhem on their opponents.

      But what is a "welterweight"?  Probably the name came from "welt," raised portion of the skin that's been bruised, typically by a blow to it. 

Fortune Cookie?

       One of those little moments that takes you aback.

       Chinese dinner delivered to home.  Three Fortune Cookies.  Chose.


                 "You and your spouse will be happy in your life together."


       Wait a minute.  Well, yes, but what percent of pride do you want for your prediction when we're already in our eighties and been happily married for 58 years?

Cut from a Different Cloth

       Purchased new toaster today at Bed, Bath, and Beyond.  I think I may have learned what the "Beyond" stands for when I read the directions that told me certain things I should do before starting to operate the toaster.  One of them was the following:


                    "Wipe the exterior with a damp sloth."


       I wonder if a sloth is damp most of the time; and also what a sloth might think of my using it in this way.  We usually figure a sloth is pretty lazy, but then it might take such use as a salve for its conscience.  It'd get the credit, but I'd be doing all the work!