My dog Bandit was, in the vernacular of my people, “a caution.” I imagine that this term is related to the phrase “a cautionary tale,” which means, “listen while I tell you what this person did, and then go do something, anything, except that.” And truly, dear Bandit did many things that I would not […]
Category: Musings about Language and Life
My version of “what’s it all about anyway?”
The Weird Sisters
Now, here’s a word for you: weird. I looked it up and found a trail back to around 1400 C.E. (C.E. stands for Common Era, a secular way to say A.D., which, by the way, means “Anno Domini,” or the “Year of our Lord” in Latin, and NOT “After Death”). Anyway, an online search gives […]
Of elephants and paper clips
Oh my, but I do love a good sturdy paper clip, the bigger the better. Having thought about this phenomenon at some length, I have come to believe that a really skookum paper clip, keeping a stack of like-minded papers safely organized, is a visual representation of putting up firewalls in one’s brain. The human […]
Percussive maintenance
This morning, while checking in at the airline counter for yet another mad adventure into the hinterlands of Alaska, I noticed that the young woman helping us was having trouble getting the boarding passes and luggage tags to print. She struck the device sharply several times with her open hand, and, much chastened, it began […]
A good steward
Some years ago, the term “janitor” was quietly upgraded to “custodian.” Being the type who gets a huge kick out of words-and-where-they-come-from, I looked first at the word “janitor.” Fascinating! The first definition uses “custodian” as a synonym, while the second digs a bit deeper into the etymology. Apparently, this word first came to us […]
I double-dog dare you
For a raging introvert, I am remarkably likely to accept a dare. One of the arenas in which I will rise to the occasion is for cultural exchanges. I’ll be the first to join the friendship dance at an Alaska Native potlatch; and be right up front to put on the Korean ceremonial dress or […]
Facial recognition software
Take a good look at this picture of my bathroom sink faucet, and tell me it doesn’t look just like Jar-Jar Binks: Human brains go out of their way to construct faces where there are none. (Read more on this phenomenon on the link below.) This house is looking at something surprising on its right: […]
As common as violets. . .
One Christmas some years ago, during a visit to Virginia, I sat drinking wine with five women I had grown up with. I hadn’t had as much of the libation as the rest of them, but I was always a cheap date, and I was feeling blurty. “Hey!” I shouted. “Raise your hand if you […]
A retrospective on running
In 1976 I spent what my mother termed a “young fortune” (i.e., $17.00) on a pair of Nike running shoes, and thus was born a 40-year, on-again-off-again, “It’s complicated” relationship between me and this activity. I gave it up numerous times, but always went back until about five years ago when my left foot and […]
October
Author’s note: I have been looking for this bit for a while now! Evidently, I wrote it in the late nineties because I couldn’t find it on any of my computers, and the printed copy that I eventually discovered is in dot matrix. Here it is, verbatim, except for one parenthetical insert in the last […]