In Which I Start In One Place, And End In Another

You know how you meet people from time to time who are like siblings? I used to work with someone who could have been my brother. He and I got on famously, bickering all the time. I invited him to a party at my apartment, which both of my real siblings attended. They were both smitten; they too saw that he was clearly our brother-from-another-mother. He came for Christmas every year and he performed the ceremony at my sister's mock wedding (she'd eloped and this was the party for the masses, it needed a theatrical gesture).

More recently, not long after I started this blog, I found a sister-from-another-mother - Sarah, from Splitting Infinitives (though you might remember her as Slouching Mom). There are eerie coincidences in our lives, and we had similar mothers, and, it's hard to explain but we just share an odd cosmic bond. Last week, Sarah flattered me enormously and asked if I wanted to be next in line in a writing meme, #mywritingprocess, writing about how and why and what I write.

Here's the thing. I'm not a writer. Oh, I write. And I know that I'm a better writer now than when I started blogging. Even my husband says so. But I'm not a writer. I'm a woman. I'm a gardener and an occasional sewist, I'm a cook and a daily commuter. I'm a mother, I'm a wife. I'm a Horrible Mensa Bitch and the Director of Everything Else - those are my favorite alternative titles that I threaten to put on my next business cards, because my actual title is sort of dull and doesn't convey all of the things I do at work. But I do write. I write letters to the editor, and I write employee handbooks, and I write advertising copy, and I write recipes. And I write about the things my child does, and I write about my mother, and I write about words that annoy me, and I write about the delight one can find while merely walking down the streets of New York City. And I write tiny little book reviews, and I write emails to the PTA, and I write so many paragraphs and sentences and novels in my head that never even get anywhere near a piece of paper.

It's exhausting just thinking about it.

But I'm not a writer. I'll prove it to you: I am constitutionally incapable of answering the following assigned questions.

1) What are you working on?
Nothing.

2) How does your work differ from others' work in the same genre?
It's mine.

3) Why do you write what you do?
Because it's what occurs to me.

4) How does your writing process work?
It just comes. Like the gravy.

But what I do know is this: the more you write, the better it gets.

Two of my favorite writers - writerly writers - are next up.

The first is one of my oldest dearest friends, someone who writes and edits all day long, and blogs in her spare time: Julia of Lotsa Laundry. The other is an American in Paris Barcelona: Maggie of Maternal Dementia.

Let's put it this way. If I'm zooming through Feedly reading posts, I never ever hit "mark all read" on their posts. In fact, I usually "save for later" so that I can savor and ponder their words. You will too.

Piet Piet, Magpies and Toast

My sister-in-law forwarded to me an OED word of the day email, with a note: "Hey! Do you know this word?"

The word was "piet", and as I scrolled through the various definitions, I was delighted to find that one of them was "the magpie, Pica pica."



I loved learning that a piet was a magpie. The only other piet I knew of was Piet Hein, a Danish polymath whose poetry I'd been given by my sixth grade teacher, one Mrs. Gordon. They're tiny little poems, snips of wisdom perilously close to doggerel, but fun none-the-less.

That book of poetry is somewhere in my house; I know not where. Happily, his "grooks" are scattered hither and yon about the intertubes. Here's one, silly but full of truth:

TIMING TOAST

There's an art of knowing when.
Never try to guess.
Toast until it smokes and then
twenty seconds less.

Frenemies

The other night at dinner, my child told me that someone in her class was her "frenemy". My child is 7. She is in second grade. Second graders do not have frenemies. Oy.

When pressed, she told me that the boy had made up the word "frenemy". It's friends and enemies put together, mama. No dear, he didn't make that up; Jessica Mitford's sister did.

Its Precision, It's Complexity

I stopped in my tracks at the top of the subway stairs. There, pasted to the wall, was a huge billboard, all black type on a white background. I looked at it. I looked again. There in the middle was an errant apostrophe.



But it's not just any errant apostrophe: it was placed there after the billboard went up, carefully hand-drawn, in ink. Someone decided that "its" needed to be "it's" - even though "its" is right and "it's" is wrong. Please to note, also, that the artist didn't add an apostrophe to the "its" before precision.

So - instead of correcting an apostrophe abuse, the artist created one. Is it ironic and perverse? Or idiotic and unknowing?

There are mysteries everywhere.

Accuracy At All Times

I have trouble with language sometimes - I'm too precise or it is or we both are but at cross purposes. How do I refer to my husband, who happens to be the father of my child? "We" means her daddy and I, or, my husband and I, or really both of those things. If I call him her Daddy, it sounds like we're not married; but if I refer to him as my husband, it can sound as though she's not his child. So complicated, this language of ours.

On Language

Dear C&B2:

"Cylinder" is not a verb.

Yours,

Magpie


The news that William Safire has died leaves me a bit wistful. On the one hand, his politics were execrable. On the other, his explorations of language both written and oral were erudite and entertaining, not to mention a reason to open the New York Times magazine every Sunday. And, though it was words for Spiro Agnew, you have to respect one who can pen such an ace archetype of alliteration as "nattering nabobs of negativism".

I do believe that he would have agreed that "cylinder" is not a verb.

Sight Words

Years ago, I got a free sample of some Post-It "Sight Words". I tucked the package away, figuring that someday we'd be working on teaching Miss M. to read. The time has come.

We've been having fun with them - they're the super sticky Post-Its, so they don't fall off the wall. They're up near our kitchen table, and we move them around trying to make sentences. Alas, there are very few sentences that work with just the existing words, so I resorted to an index card with a modified noun.

Using the following ten words with no added nouns, how many sentences can you make?

A - Am - I - Is - Like - Me - On - The - To - We

Five words that I've had to look up recently

Quincunx

Chthonic

Usufruct

Liminal

Punctilious

It's not that I didn't know "punctilious", it's that some news commenter made a comment yesterday about Obama's parade running late, and said he wasn't as punctilious as Bush. I looked it up to confirm that, in fact, punctilious is NOT a synonym for punctual. Damn newscasters, using four syllable words incorrectly, when three syllables will do.

Anyway, here's a contest. Best paragraph, of less than 50 words, to use all five of the above words, gets a copy of The Mammoth Cheese. Have at it!

What's in a Name?

I've always had a nickname. Really, I was born with one - I was named something formal with the intent, acted upon, of calling me something else. But then, as names beget nicknames, my nickhame has begotten what are really secondary nicknames. My boss calls me Magnesium. Lots of people have called me Magnolia. But for as long as I can remember, one of my nicknames has been Magpie.

magpie (noun)*
Etymology: Mag (diminutive for Margaret) + Pie

1. any of a number of birds (genus pica) of the crow family, related to the jays and characterized by black-and-white coloring, a long, tapering tail, and a habit of noisy chattering
2. a person who chatters
3. a person who collects odds and ends

I'm not a bird. I'm not much of a chatterer. But I am very much a collector of odd bits and pieces. Did I become that way because of my nickname?




*Webster's New World Dictionary, Second College Edition ,1970

Wordplay

I like words. Nothing pleases me more than winning arguments about words. Our wedding invitation had a dictionary definition for marriage on it (the combination of the king and queen of the same suit, as in pinochle). Alas, our dictionary is still in a box – where it’s been since we moved nearly three years ago! Someday we’ll have bookcases and the dictionary will be returned to its place of honor.

Anyway. Mother Reader has a link to an entertaining vocabulary quiz. My score was 78%. What’s yours?

Sobeit?

Okay - you'll have to click on this here image and check out the upper right paragraph headed "Seasoning". What I want to know is, since when is "sobeit" a word? It's "so be it", people. It's THREE words.

The New York Times is going to hell in a handbasket.

Word of the Day: Stoloniferous

Nice word, huh? Very…mellifluous.

Yesterday, Miss M. and I were poking around in the garden. W. had recently patched some bare spots in the so-called lawn with grass seed, and I showed her how the new grass was coming up. She asked “how do we make grass?” It’s a common type of question of hers, and is always phrased that way:

• “How do we make cows?”
• “How do we make Jeeps?”
• “How do we make eggs?”
• “How do we make airplanes?”
• “How do we make ants?”
• “How do we make frogs?”

I like that she thinks all of those things are made by us humans. Anyway, in the strange way my mind works, I got from grass and grass seed to stoloniferous grasses and stoloniferous weeds. I have an evil weed in the garden, a stoloniferous evil weed called goutweed or bishop's weed. I get down on my hands and knees and start pulling it out, carefully so as not to break it off and leave the roots in the ground, following the root along to get as much as possible, muttering to myself “stoloniferous weeds, stoloniferous weeds…” It is the kind of weeding that is like eating peanuts; once you start, you can't stop.

Word of the Day: Omphaloskepsis

It means navel gazing. Try using it in conversation soon. "I'm going home to take a bath and indulge in a little omphaloskepsis."

Much blogging seems like omphaloskepsis, no?

An Eccentric Grocery List

The other day, I looked at the grocery list by the back door and noticed that the only two items on the list were garlic and tonic. I said to W., "we need more groceries ending in IC". He said aspic. We put out the call for more. Here’s what we’ve got so far, thanks to wordy family members:

Garlic
Tonic
Aspic
Picnic ham
Ethnic food
Alcoholic beverages
Turmeric
Boric acid
Acetic acid
Gum arabic
Vlasic pickles
Balsamic vinegar
Arsenic

And one piece of "cooking" equipment: alembic

And someone noted: “If you eat too much garlic, aspic and tonic, you might need a colonic. Or an emetic.”

Got any more?

Word of the Day: Beeves

I've been reading Michael Pollan's book, An Omnivore's Dilemma, and scratching my head at his use of "beeve". I could figure out what he means from the context, but it's peculiar enough (to me anyway) that I finally looked it up.

In addition to being the meat from a cow/steer/bull, a beef IS a cow/steer/bull. The plural of a beef is beeves. Granted, it's archaic. But odd, no? Especially because Pollan uses the singular back-formation "beeve" to refer to a single cow/steer/bull.

And just in case you were wondering, the meat of a pig is called pork, but "the pork" is not an archaic equivalent to "the pig". The pork is something that gets doled out in Washington and Albany.

Word of the Day: Pulchritude

Doesn't it sound ugly? I've always thought pulchritude just seems like it must mean something icky, ugly, not nice.

But no:

It's a noun, meaning physical beauty (especially of a woman), per WordNet. And the adjective form is pulchritudinous.

Word of the Day: Panache

Okay, you probably know panache as "flair" or "je ne sais quoi" - you know, he had that certain something.

But here are the definitions from Wordnet:

1. (n) dash, elan, flair, panache, style (distinctive and stylish elegance) "he wooed her with the confident dash of a cavalry officer"
2. (n) panache (a feathered plume on a helmet)

In other words, did you know a panache was the thing on the top of your hat when you were in the marching band in high school?

Word of the Day: Absquatulate

Absquatulate is one of my favorite words. Every time I use it in conversation, I get a "huh?". It means, no joke, get up and squat elsewhere.

The only definition I found on the web was at Wordnet:

(v) abscond, bolt, absquatulate, decamp, run off, go off, make off (run away; usually includes taking something or somebody along) "The thief made off with our silver"; "the accountant absconded with the cash from the safe"

"Get up and squat elsewhere" is better, no?