PARVUM OPUS

Number 137

______________________________________________

ROAD TRIP

Word Puzzle

I've gotten in the habit of stopping to eat at Cracker Barrel restaurants when I travel. Food is pretty good, familiar and consistent, plain American country food. I enjoy looking at the antiques on the walls, old photos, ads, farm implements, toys ~ and things I do not recognize. When I used to teach English composition to American college freshmen, I thought it would be a good exercise to have them write a description of an object without using any points of reference ~ what it's used for, what it looks like, etc. ~ but just stick to pure physical description, and see if readers could figure out what it was. I never used that idea, but I'm going to try a variation of the idea here, because I saw something at a Cracker Barrel that I could not identify. I'm going to describe something I did not recognize. Maybe one of you can. Here's the clearest description I can give:

Hanging on the wall was an unpainted wooden object that resembled a very shallow box about two feet square, with sides about one inch high and a quarter of an inch thick, and no lid. There was another thin layer of wood inside the frame (what would be the bottom of the box if laid flat on a table) a couple of inches smaller than the outside perimeter, and no more than a quarter of an inch thick. Inside this square were painted or incised (I couldn't see that closely) three thin white concentric circles about two inches apart. In the center a circle was cut out of the top layer of wood, about the size of a silver dollar. (When's the last time you saw one of those?) There were nail holes within the circles ~ I know they were nail holes because one nail remained sticking out of its hole. In fact, at first I thought this item might have been a primitive, home-made dartboard, but it wasn't because the holes were spaced in a regular pattern, and there was, of course, the nail. Four pairs of nail holes were in between the outer two circles. If you drew another circle in between those two circles, the four pairs would lie on that imaginary circle, each pair nearer a corner of the box than the sides of the box. Six evenly spaces holes were on the circumference of the second circle. There were four evenly spaced holes between the second and third (inner) circle (not the cut-out circle). The holes did not go all the way through the wood.

Was it a game of some sort (not a dartboard)? Something for winding yarn? It didn't quite look like yarn winders I've seen, and the nails would have been too short anyway. If anyone can tell me what this is, I will publish your answer and be most grateful. If you can make a drawing following the description and send it to me, I'll publish that too.

Hrobak's Beverages

One of the metal advertising signs on the Cracker Barrel wall was for Hrobak's Beverages, which included a pale ale and something called Lithiated Lemon. I want to try that Lithiated Lemon. Lithia is a mineral found in underground spring water, and is the same thing as lithium. You know, of course, that the original Coca-Cola was made with coca, or cocaine. Drug stores aren't what they used to be. But what I'm really interested in is the Hrobak company. Why don't we have words in English that begin with "hr"? It's actually an easy combination to pronounce. Try it. Maybe I should start spelling my name "Hronda" instead of Rhonda, and pronounce it accordingly. Just for a change.

Our Business

On a Valvoline T-shirt: "Premiumness is our business." Well, we know it's not Englishness.

WHAT COLOR IS YOUR KHAKI?

Last year, my 12-year-old French student insisted that khaki is olive drab. Apparently in France they call that dull green, khaki. She didn't want to believe me when I said khaki is tan. I know it is, for three reasons. One, my father was a military man and wore khaki uniforms. Two, casual cotton slacks are often known as "khakis". Third, I looked it up. The English army in India wore uniforms that wouldn't show the dust ~ khaki color ~ and the word came from a Hindi word for dust or dusty.

HEARD AND READ

# Talking about the current Supreme Court nominee, John Roberts, George W. said, "He will make all Americans proud to be a member of the Supreme Court." Well, I for one could use a better-paying job.

# "No one picks on a Marine unless they wear [or were?] digital." Anyway have a clue about this one?

# "A 1960s contemporary style home gets a makeover." This one would be easy to miss, but it is redundant, if nothing else. It's enough to say "1960s style home". "Contemporary" can mean "modern" but while the modern style of the 1960s can look modern today, it is still not a house that's contemporary (with the times) today.

# On child care: "He's toilet shy and we're just real anxious for closure." This anxious parent is unnecessarily using the psychological term, meaning "achievement of a sense of completeness and release from tension due to uncertainty; as, the closure afforded by the funeral of a loved one; also, the sense of completion thus achieved." That's a bit heavy, and a bit off-track, for the feeling of finally having a child toilet trained. And you just don't want the child closing up.

# Reader of a recorded book: "Blink is an audiobook...." Apparently the printed book said, "Blink is a book...." It wasn't necessary to change it to "audiobook" since "book" as a published piece of writing, not the medium of publication, is the essential idea. It's still a book.

# Unreal blonde on only too real TV: "Well, it's not rock science!"

# A writer whose name I failed to note used both "toe the line" and "tow the line" in the same piece of writing. The first is standard usage, to start a race with a toe on the start line. But some people think "tow the line" comes from pulling a canal boat by ropes, or lines, from the canal bank. The meaning most people intend is the first, to be on the mark, to be precise, to follow a rule. The second would mean working hard while staying on a narrow path. There's just enough similarity in ideas to see where the confusion comes from. But it's "toe". (By the way, a towhead is a child with hair like tow, or flax fiber, which is very light in color.)

CONSTITUTIONAL

Have you ever taken a constitutional? Do people still use this term? It means a walk taken to improve one's constitution, or health.

GOOGLE CALCULATOR

Dave DaBee turned me on to a fabulous new Google feature, its calculator.

You can type all kinds of stuff into it and get real answers. Just go to Google (regular old Google) and type:

pi times 3 squared

and you'll get 28.274339. (Or if you know geek-speak you can type "pi * 3**2" or "pi x 3^2" or various combinations.)

Then try this:

1.5 cups in tablespoons

and see what you get. [24 US tablespoons]

Or type in a UPS tracking number, like this: 1z5680640141562086 , and see what you get. (That's an obsolete one so you won't get the actual information, but you'll get the idea. For a real working number, it works.)

Excellent and amazing. Read more on this and other Google functions.

Link here to look for books on Amazon.com!

NEED A SIMPLE WEB PAGE? WOULD A NEWSLETTER, ELECTRONIC OR PRINT, HELP YOUR BUSINESS? TALK TO ME ABOUT PROFESSIONAL EDITING AND WEB WORK.

I have a contribution in a new anthology about the "center of life", Changing Course: Women's Inspiring Stories of Menopause, Midlife, and Moving Forward, edited by Yitta Halberstam.

Go to Babelfish to translate this page into Chinese, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, or Spanish!

Parvum Opus is a publication of KeithOps / Opus Publishing Services. Back issues may be found at http://www.keithops.us/. Feel free to e-mail me with comments or queries.

If you don't want to receive Parvum Opus, please reply with "unsubscribe," "quit," "enough," or something like that in the subject line, and I'll take you off the mailing list.

Copyright Rhonda Keith 2005. Parvum Opus or part of it may be reproduced only with permission, but it is permissible to forward the entire newsletter as long as the copyright remains.