Number 100
I'm sending Parvum Opus 100 off early before I get on the road again. As you celebrate this Thanksgiving, remember what William Blake said: "Gratitude is heaven itself."
Thanks for reading.
Being a recently married woman, it occurred to me to wonder about the etymology of "husband" and "wife". I remembered reading long ago in Louisa May Alcott's Little Women that "husband" came from "house band" ~ "a faithful friend, who is, in the true sense of the good old Saxon word, the 'house-band'" ~ that is, the one who holds the house together, but I thought that might have been a fanciful invention on her part. Actually, she was pretty accurate in her etymology. It was "wife" that surprised me.
These definitions come from www.dict.org:
Husband
OE. hosebonde, husbonde, a husband, the master of the house or family, AS. husbonda master of the house; hus house + bunda, bonda, householder, husband; prob. fr. Icel. husb[=o]ndi house master, husband; hus house + buandi dwelling, inhabiting, p. pr. of bua to dwell; akin to AS. buan, Goth. bauan. See House Be, and cf. Bond a slave, Boor. [D. boer farmer, boor; akin to AS. gebur countryman, G. bauer; fr. the root of AS. buan to inhabit, and akin to E. bower, be. Cf. Neighbor, Boer, and Big to build.]
Wife
OE. wif, AS. wif; akin to OFries. & OS. wif, D. wijf, G. weib, OHG. w[=i]b, Icel. v[=i]f, Dan. viv; and perhaps to Skr. vip excited, agitated, inspired, vip to tremble, L. vibrare to vibrate, E. vibrate.
The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology further shows that "wife" is related to "waif" (a piece of property found ownerless) and "wave" (waving, wavy, wavering).
So we see that the husband is a bondsman, bound to the land or the household; the "master" of the house is a servant to his household, in the sense of holding responsibility for its well-being. Husband means a protector, the band that holds things together, particularly his vibrating wife. One feels freer to vibrate if there's someone there to keep one from vibrating off the edge of a cliff. And of course, some agitation is good for the housebound fellow. Sounds like fun to me.
Speaking of true marriages, in the 1957 movie Desk Set with Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn, Tracy plays a computer nerd who's installing an "electronic brain" ~ a room-sized computer ~ in Hepburn's office. Merriment ensues. Someone asks, "Did you see it translate Russian into Chinese?" You may have noticed the simple translator on my Web page (below), downloaded from babelfish.altavista.com. It does Chinese to English and English to Chinese, and Russian to English, but not Russian to Chinese. I'm sure there's a computer somewhere that does.
I like to collect osage oranges in the fall and keep them in a basket on the porch for as long as they'll last, which is weeks or months. They're brilliant green, they smell good, and they're believed to repel insects. Somehow the origin of the tree in the Plains states, home of the Osage Indians, gave them their name, though they're nothing like oranges. They're also called, among other things, hedge apples, because the trees used to be planted thickly to make hedge rows. I used to call them tree brains, although that's actually the name of a fungus.
At last I've found an excuse to quote this pithy line that I remembered from college: "Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny." It means that the development of the individual mimics in some ways the development of the species. Ernst Haeckel said it, and it seems this idea is discredited now, and other of his ideas have unpleasant (Nazi) associations.
In yet another school experiment, the Waldorf system, "The curriculum is designed so that the child going from grade one to eight recapitulates the experience of humanity," said Jodi Harris of the Cincinnati Waldorf School.
So how does the child do that? By studying fairy tales and folk tales in the early years (archetypal history); Hebrew scriptures in third grade; in fourth and fifth grades, the development of legal systems a la the Roman Empire; and the Renaissance in seventh grade.
Seems like a harmless enough fad, but oddly enough, though, while looking stuff up, I find that the Waldorf theories are based on the teachings of one Rudolf Steiner, cut of the same sort of century-old, anti-Semitic cloth as Haeckel. The Waldorf schools even have a defectors' organization.
Nothing is simple. That's why you (or I) can make what appears to be a simple, innocuous statement of fact or opinion, seemingly unrelated to anything else, and listeners will extrapolate a whole world behind it: You're obviously a Nazi! A Communist! A Fascist! A fundamentalist religious fanatic! Sometimes it's true, sometimes not.
You may remember Victor, the poetic (and now late) parakeet in PO 45. Victor's owner, Ryan B. Reynolds, also analyzes reverse recordings. (Sort of like "Paul is dead" that supposedly could be heard on the Beatles' Abbey Road album if you played something in reverse, but of course he wasn't and now it's John and George who are dead.) Reynolds has a sound clip of an interview with Scott Anderson, plus recordings by lesser known people. If you have too much time on your hands, check it out. Something to do when the post-turkey tryptophane kicks in. If you really stuff yourself, take consolation in this bumper sticker: "Fat people are harder to kidnap."
Remorizing
Regarding the Kentucky expression, "remorizing" (PO 98), meaning a child clinging to its mother, Bill says that "remorizing" probably comes from the remora. "Around here we call it "velcro" ~ "Judy must be getting sick, she's velcro."
I was wrong when I said Lawrence Welk had a Scandinavian accent all his life. He grew up speaking German at home, in the U.S.
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