Personal Blogs

Coming home mist hanging

Low over the fields tonight.

Yesterday it was summer.

Now autumn’s caught us out.

If a chicken crosses a road and there's no one around to see it, how do we know what side it started on?

Knock-knock!

Wooden chair.

Wooden chair like to know?

When I first visited Greece, amongst friends who did not know English, they would politely gesture to a chair and say Kathiste = be seated. The meaning was clear and intuitive. And later I learned that a cathedral is called a cathedral because it has a special seat - a cathedra - where a bishop sits in office, and it comes from the same Greek root.

But only tonight did I realise that English chair, French chaise, are from the same root. Obvious now, and probably why all those years ago I straightaway understood Kathiste.

English has borrowed from French then; but we still have stool (German for chair is Stuhl) and sit (German for sit is sitzen, Dutch is zitten). Which reminds me...

Knock-knock!

Clog.

Wooden shoe like to know?

Olaf Falafel tweeted

https://twitter.com/OFalafel/status/1274256607405375489

But where does mint (in the sense of a bright shiny new coin, not the herb, which has its own story, to follow) come from anyway? Our best guess it’s connected to money and that this word comes from the name of a Roman goddess Moneta (probably the same deity as Juno) who had a temple on the Capitoline hill in Ancient Rome, at which place Roman coins were originally produced.

Our refreshing caffeinated brew knows no bounds. We call it INFINITea. 

Suppose I row out into a circular pond and suddenly fog falls. All sense of direction is lost (and I left my phone at home, so no help there).

What is my best strategy, in terms of (a) is sure to get me to shore and (b) get me there in the shortest distance? I don’t think this is obvious at first.

But now suppose instead I row out to sea from a straight coastline and the same thing happens; suddenly fog falls. All sense of direction is lost (and I left my phone at home, so no help there).

What is now my best strategy, in terms of (a) is sure to get me to shore and (b) get me there in the shortest distance?

I read this the other day; “I couldn’t be asked to fill in their stupid form.” Possibly a linguistic relative of “shedloads”, which I take to be a euphemism, and the OED mentions this as a possibility.

When Uncle Ebenezer died and was buried we were all very sad. But worse was to come.

We found a document amending his will. He’d wanted a full Victorian-style send off, horses, pall-bearers, black mourning dress, the lot. 

What could we do? After a long legal and ecclesiastical process we gained permission to disinter him and re-run the funeral. To make sure it would all go as planned we asked everyone to come to a practice, wearing the somber clothing they would wear at the repeat funeral. Pall-bearer appropriately costumed would lift the coffin. It would be a dress rehearsal.

I'm always fascinated by word origins. Tonight I idly wondered where the names of common kinds of tree came from. The first that popped into my head was 'beech'.

So I headed off to the Oxford English Dictionary, and began a long journey. The word in Old English was bóeke, similar to the tree's name in many Germanic languages. But going back further it is related to Latin fagus, 'beech', and to Ancient Greek φαγος or φηγος (modern Greek φηγος).

But here is an interesting bit. The root of the Greek word is from eating*. It seems to have originally meant 'a tree with eatable fruit'. You can eat beech nuts, 'mast', and they are quite tasty, though small and therefore fiddly. I've heard they might be hallucigenic, although I think you would have to pig a lot to notice anything.

Now we come to 'book'. This is a highly contested but still strongly supported and very plausible origin. Germanic peoples wrote on strips of wood (rather than papyrus or wax tablets). Collections of such wood-strip writings were called bóeken (I think that would be the OE plural, I haven't checked.) And Modern German for beech is Buche.

So if all this is right, the word 'book' ultimately goes back to ancient words connected with food and eating. So we could say, that in a sense, books are food for thought.

* One of the first Greek expressions I learned was να φαμε, let's eat, which I think is the same verb stem.

Asked to write about fireflies. I gave them a glowing review.

“Do keep still while I’m taking your picture”, said Tom snappily.