Rhymes with you and me: "charcuterie"

       When our friends Heide and Sally recently prepared an entire wonderful dinner and served it for us in our own home (what a beautiful thing to do), I heard the word "charcuterie" [shahr-KOOT-uh-ree] for the first time.  The main course was varied delicious dressed meats  purchased in a specialty delicatessen and called charcuterie.

       Of course in looking it up in Merriam-Webster online, I caught what I guess they thought would be helpful to a budding poet, words that rhyme with charcuterie.  Now how many staff plumbed their bottomless vocabularies to come up with the following list!  Probably everybody was out on deck for this one.

       The only thing more hilariously ridiculous than the list itself is the odds you'd find the need for it:
           

Rhymes with charcuterie

Adar Sheni, advanced degree, Aegean Sea, Agri Dagi, alienee, Amundsen Sea, biographee, bouquet garni, carpenter bee, Caspian Sea, casus belli, charivari, chincherinchee, chinoiserie, consent decree,
covenantee, cucumber tree, decision tree, dedicatee, delegatee, distributee, East China Sea, ESOP,
evacuee, examinee, exuviae, facetiae, fait accompli, felo-de-se, fortunately, HTLV, interrogee,
interviewee, jaborandi, Labrador Sea, millidegree, New Jersey tea, omega-3, Pasiphae, patisserie,
persecutee, poete maudit, prima facie, reliquiae, relocatee,               Sault Sainte Marie, Simon Legree,
skeleton key, South China Sea, to a degree, umbrella tree

The language of gesture

       Maybe we should have known from this--

Please click on photo to enlarge

the August 2015 debate of the Republican Presidential hopefuls.

       If the gestures alone could speak:

Trump:  I am your King.

Cruz:  MY people!  Arise with me.

Bush:  You're kind, no, YOU'RE the real leaders.

Ben Carson:  Where do I put my hands? 

   

From Tolstoy to trivia in a hair's breadth

       Connie and our caregiver Naida were clearing out the hallway closet of things that could be thrown away, and they had items they wanted to ask me about.  Connie found me giving my hair and beard a trim and said they needed my advice on some items:  "What are they," I asked.  "A lot of different things," and she mentioned something, but I took my hearing aids off in order to do the trim and wasn't sure what she had said.  "Are they books," I asked.  "No," she responded.  "I thought you said War and Peace," I said.  Amazed, she laughed, "No, warranties."      

Newspapers: Are they only "Extra! Extra!" or truly Part and Parcel?

      
       Thoughts for a Saturday morning.  I'm glad for the newspaper.  It's the world that you invite in the front door.  Yes, I know there are numerous ways to access that these days.  But how detailed is it, how selective are you being in what you read? 

       With the newspaper, you are handed the whole thing in four or five sections; you may have favorite sections but at least you're aware of what you're turning down and probably get a whiff of a dozen headlines that let you know, yes, that's all out there and happening, and I'm inviting word of that in my home and affirming my participation in life at large.

The Eight Days of Christmas/New Years (No, not THOSE 8 days)

       Language is odd sometimes, but then it's also interesting.

       I thought that recently when I realized "The Eight Days of Christmas/New Years":

       There's Christmas Eve and Christmas Day; and there's New Year's Eve and New Year's Day.  But none of these is either Christmas Eve day, or New Year's Eve day; nor, for that matter, Christmas Day eve or New Years Day eve!

It grabs you somehow: "turquoise"

       I was surprised to learn what the word "turquoise" comes from.  I guess especially surprised when realizing I should have thought of it at some time, but hadn't: "Turkey."

       It starts to get complicated when you realize the word derives from French.  The belief was that the colorful stone came from Turkey, thus the borrowed term into French; but it probably was that the stone was sold in Turkish bazaars, though originating in another Middle Eastern country.

       Yet, oddly, I learned of the word's source in an L.A. Times Sunday "Travel Section" article speaking of "Turkey's Turquoise Coast":

Click on Photo to Enlarge & Read its Caption

Incidentally, I want to swim in that ancient ruin.

       Meanwhile, as I understand it, the color "turquoise" derives from the stone, not those waters off Turkey.  And however confusing I find this, the stone, the waters, the color, the word all have me in their sway.

"Grandfathering"-in a Prescription

       I unintentionally amused my primary physician Dr. McKenzie when we were talking about my medications one day.   I told him that when I asked my urologist Dr. Abber recently an incidental question about selenium which Dr. Abber had prescribed 18 years before following a prostatectomy, he said, "You're still taking that?  That was believed back then; that's no longer true.  Stop taking it--you've got lots of other meds you need.  Stop taking it!"

       My primary Dr. McKenzie chuckled a little.   And then I told him, "I stopped selenium for one day, but having taken it for so long, I decided to follow the advice of the old Dr. Abber, I mean the young Dr. Abber, and not that of the older Dr. Abber."  And then he really laughed.

This couldn't have happened online.

       Connie asked if I knew the poet C. D. Wright; there was an obit in the New York Times she was reading.  I couldn't recall I'd read anything by her; Connie said she did interesting things with language, and she thought I'd like to see the obituary.  I would.

       She tore it out laboriously on a lazy Sunday morning and handed it to me.  In the midst of other reading, I folded it,  put it in my pocket for later.  That afternoon, I took it out, sat down, unfolded.  The article was  totally intact.  I read the headline:

Leonid Zhabotinsky, Strongman for the Ages, Dies at 77

My mind finally shifted gears, and as I glimpsed a photo of the large-bodied Russian weight lifter and turned the sheet over for the poet, I started laughing, told my son what had happened, and had one of those uproarious moments you can't contain easily, good for the soul and the system before I started reading of an artist I wanted to know, as too often happens, after her life was over.  

"Look, there are people without color."

        That is what one of the lost black boys says.  They get to a refugee camp after hundreds of miles of walking, escaping being turned into boy soldiers in Africa:  "Look," he says, "there are people without color."  And another of the boys says, "That's because they were born without skin."

         This from a wonderful documentary called Lost Boys of Sudan by Megan Mylan, which can be found at this cite.           

OK, you be the ump.

       Sounds have characteristics that can help a word into its meaning.  Consider the abruptness and curtness of these short words ending with a flat mid vowel, closed mouth nasal, and dead stop plosive.

       bump
       sump
       rump
       chump
       mump(s)
       lump
       hump
       jump
       dump
       grump
       Trump

       
       

Words sneak in their nice double meanings without charging you for overtime

       Unintentional irony, I think, appeared on a recent broadcast which included the following sentence:

       "Local air pollution in China and India is fueling solar and                  wind development."

Yes, indeed, "fuel" is not only a metaphor in this formulation.   The unbridled use of oil and coal for power is accelerating growth of the cleaner energy to replace them.  

A Pun that Makes You Say "Ooph" While Smiling

Please click on cartoon to enlarge.

Find these mad but often linguistically neat single panel cartoons at this cite.

What are YOUR two most intimate . . .?

       Is it the time?  I think it may be.  To pick up my blog again.  Just as a young girl captured on home video over 3 years ago crying that she didn't want any more "Bronco Bama" went viral and caught my fancy to refer to it in my very first blog entry, now another winning bit of language flashes across the horizon to prompt this post from my state of intermittancy.

       Patt Morrison does wonderful interviews for the L.A. Times on noteworthy but often surprising figures who have real impact on our world. Now Patt is doing those interviews in podcasts as well as for the eyes.  The headline on today's column in the Times is "I ask, you can listen," and the first words in one of her final paragraphs knocked me for a loop because it got me where I live:

"Two of the most intimate orifices in the human body are your ears."

Entirely unexpected and wonderfully true.  Now we can catch all the nuances of her interviewees' words by the tentacles of our inner ears.  I gathered-in L.A.'s police chief that way today and heard a lot more humanity in those words and easy but serious responses than I've realized before from his quotes in print.

       Patt's got it, and Patt's got me by my two "most intimate orifices."

(The podcast appears each Wednesday at this location.)