I promised a while back to explain why Xmas is not “taking the Christ out of Christmas.” This spelling doesn’t need to be controversial or offensive.
The X may look as though it’s eliminating Christ. People may think that modern, secular, supposedly anti-Christmas folk don’t even want to say or spell Christ. In fact, the X is not eliminating Christ. It means “Christ.”
The Greek alphabet represented “ch” with the letter chi, pronounced kye and shaped like an X, as in fraternity names such as Sigma Chi (ΣΧ). As early as 1021, a scribe used the letter to represent the first syllable of Christmas to save space on expensive parchment. The poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge used it in a letter in 1801, and so did Lord Byron in 1811. It was in common use by the Catholic Church from about the 16th century on.
You may have seen the symbol pictured above, the chi rho, which puts two Greek letters together to represent Christ. The chi, or X, is superimposed on the rho, which looks like our P. These are the first two sounds of Christ. Emperor Constantine popularized the chi rho by waving the image on military banners. (I know. Eeeww.) That was in the 4th century.
Everyone has a right to her or his feelings and may continue to be offended by Xmas. Bear in mind, however, the term’s long, respectable history. It’s worth explaining to someone who’s offended, but then maybe stop arguing about a letter. As one of my sources points out, we probably should just follow the holiday’s namesake and turn the other XIK.
I like watching America’s Test Kitchen videos on PBS or YouTube. Sometimes the recipes are too fussy, with lots of steps I can’t be bothered with. But when Becky, one of the chefs, tells me to do something, I’m willing to try it, because she’s so cheerful and sincere and the dishes usually turn out well.
Her extra smooth hummus is an example. You have to boil the canned chickpeas for 20 minutes with a little baking soda in the water and then skim off the skins. When you process them, you add lemon juice and garlic and water and tahini in stages.
I can make pretty good hummus by dumping all the ingredients into the food processor at one time, no boiling required. But this hummus was extra good, I thought, and extra smooth, and worth the trouble. I had no pita bread but laid out some veggies and regular bread to accompany the hummus. Tonight I finished off the leftover hummus.
Here’s a hint about finding America’s Test Kitchen recipes. If you don’t want to subscribe to ATK, you can usually find their recipe filched by another YouTuber or website. When the recipe is featured in a YouTube video, of course, you can get it directly. Watch here to see Becky prepare the hummus and cut her vegetables into oh-so-attractive wedges.
What’s your favorite hummus? Canned beans or dried?
To review: Monday posts are about food, Wednesday posts are about language and word history, and Friday/weekend posts concern books or reading. Monday Meals, Wednesday Words, Weekend Editions. Subscribe and share!
How true to life should a memoir be? Is bending the facts or changing chronology allowed? How about just making stuff up?
Many of us remember the controversy arising from James Frey’s 2003 memoir A Million Little Pieces, which, after being celebrated and Oprah-fied, was found to contain exaggerations and outright fabrications. The Smoking Gun titled its Frey expose A Million Little Lies. Oprah, the media, and the publishing industry excoriated Frey, and he was cancelled. (For a while. He’s since published more than ten books.)
Other purported memoirs, stacked among the non-fiction, also tamper with the literal truth. An acquaintance of mine swore off Henry David Thoreau and Walden when she learned that Thoreau’s mother is rumored to have done his laundry during his supposedly solitary sojourn in the woods. Fiction writer Judy Blume admitted she invented parts of her 2002 memoir Breaking Clean. Bob Dylan is notorious for making stuff up about his past, including much of his memoir Chronicles.
When should we care, and how much?
About thirty years ago, I heard writer Annie Dillard address an Oberlin English class. Dillard’s 1974 memoir, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, is one of my favorite books. It recounts her sojourn, a la Thoreau, living alone for a year near Tinker Creek in Virginia. Her book explores nature, spirituality, good and evil, and the search for meaning.
The earnest Oberlin students peppered Dillard with literalistic questions. What was it like living alone? Weren’t you afraid? Did you get very lonely? How did you acquire food and other necessities? After a while, the author shocked her audience by saying, “You know, I was high most of the time I was writing that book.”
She went on to refer to the work as “a document,” something crafted, a creation, a work of art. “It’s not me,” she said. “It’s something I made.” She was telling them it wasn’t true. I could feel the confusion and disillusionment in the room, because I, in part, shared it. But I was intrigued, and I have always remembered that word “document” and the gesture that accompanied it, as though she was holding something in her hands.
In fact, Dillard wrote half of the book from her home, a regular house, with her then-husband, Richard Dillard, and the other half in the Hollins College Library. She spent many hours at Tinker Creek and kept a lengthy journal about her walks there, but she now describes herself as a suburban housewife during the writing. The book begins and ends with her cat, an “old fighting tom,” jumping through her window onto her chest, leaving bloody pawprints. This was a story she heard from someone else.
Calling Pilgrim a “memoir” is inaccurate. (1987’s An American Childhood is a memoir.) It’s a meditation on “mystery, death, beauty, (and) violence,” as the back cover of my paperback says. Did Annie Dillard have a responsibility to tell readers that her book wasn’t “true”? Should she and others who fictionalize nonfiction be held to account like James Frey? How angry or disappointed are you when you learn that dollops of fiction have been mixed into your nonfiction book?
Last Wednesday you were left in suspense as to the etymology of dichalcogenides, a chemical something or other into which molecules can be intercalated, or (in the interest of saving syllables) added. Let’s dispatch dichalcogenides before moving on to other matters.
Dichalcogenides (a word I have copied and pasted rather than typed three times) illustrates the value of breaking a word down into its various components in order to understand it. If you focus on the syllable -gen-, you find the Greek and Latin word meaning “birth” or “origin,” as in genesis, genes, pathogen (giving birth to illness), and so on. Moving backwards to chalco-, we find the Greek root khalkos, meaning “copper” or, more generally, “ore.” You probably recognize di- as a prefix meaning “two,” as in dichotomy.
A group of elements in the periodic table (oxygen and sulphur, for example) are referred to as “chalcogens,” because they’re frequently derived from copper ores; they’re “born from ores.” A dichalcogenide contains two atoms of one of those elements. Di + chalco + genides.
You’ll have to consult your favorite chemistry professor if you’d like to delve into this further.
As to the calendar, where all of this started last week, you’ll note that the month we’re about to enter, December, is a misnomer, because decem means “ten,” and December is the twelfth month. You may have heard that Julius Caesar added two months in the middle of the year, July and August, thus throwing off the numbering system. That’s not quite right.
The early Romans began the year with March, celebrating Mars, the god of war. April may have come from the Latin verb meaning “open,” as in the opening of spring buds. May took its name from Maia, a goddess who represented nurturing and growth, and Juno, queen of the gods, gave her name to June. Starting with July, the months were named for numbers. July was Quintilis (5), August was Sextilis (6), and September, October, November and December were named for the numbers 7-10. Caesar renamed Quintilis after himself when he, and his sidekick, the mathematician Sosigenes, revised the calendar. Julius’s successor, Augustus Caesar, renamed Sextilis after himself. Later emperors tried to memorialize themselves as well, but the new names, such as Neronius, did not stick.
According to tradition, the Roman king Numa Pompilius in 713 BCE replaced March as the first month of the year with January, named after Janus, the god of beginnings and doorways. He also added February, giving us a twelve-month calendar but neglecting to correct the names of the last four months.
To correct the error, September, October, November, and December would have to become November, December, Undecimber, and Duodecimber. What do you think? Should we do it?
We had two family dinners on Thanksgiving, neither of them at my house. My contribution consisted of pies: a pecan pie and a pumpkin pie.
Making pecan pie comes naturally. My mom didn’t often bake, but when she did, pecan pie was one of her go-tos. She always said that it was simple to make but impressive in its presentation. It seems fancier than it is, in other words.
Pumpkin pie is pretty simple to prepare as well, especially when you rely on canned pumpkin. I’ve started from scratch by cooking the actual pumpkin once or twice, and it’s worth doing for the experience, but the end result is not noticeably better for all the trouble and mess, at least to me.
Holiday pies and other baked goods are omnipresent on Instagram and Facebook pages, but I’ve resisted posting my creations this year, except to accompany this post. Some years ago, when my generation began joining Facebook in order to keep up with their college-age or twenty-something children, such posts became a meme. Early on, I posted a photo of the pies I’d made for Christmas, and my daughter commented something like, “Facebook used to be for us to share social events and parties. Now it’s for our mothers’ pie pictures.” Which I thought was funny.
By this time, my generation has pretty much taken over Facebook. Not only pie pictures, but memes about the good old days. Remember when Hershey bars cost five cents? Remember record players? Remember Jello salads? Who still has an eight-track tape player? I may post the occasional pie photo, but I resist answering or reposting those nostalgia questions. Just reading them makes me feel old.
Tell us about your Thanksgiving. How was the company? More important, how was the food?
Listen with the night falling we are saying thank you we are stopping on the bridges to bow from the railings we are running out of the glass rooms with our mouths full of food to look at the sky and say thank you we are standing by the water thanking it standing by the windows looking out in our directions
back from a series of hospitals back from a mugging after funerals we are saying thank you after the news of the dead whether or not we knew them we are saying thank you
over telephones we are saying thank you in doorways and in the backs of cars and in elevators remembering wars and the police at the door and the beatings on stairs we are saying thank you in the banks we are saying thank you in the faces of the officials and the rich and of all who will never change we go on saying thank you thank you
with the animals dying around us our lost feelings we are saying thank you with the forests falling faster than the minutes of our lives we are saying thank you with the words going out like cells of a brain with the cities growing over us we are saying thank you faster and faster with nobody listening we are saying thank you we are saying thank you and waving dark though it is
Our word calendar comes from the Latin word kalendae, or kalends, which named the first day of the month. (For a while, Latin used k instead of c before the letter a. Try not to pay attention to this right now. We have more serious obstacles ahead.) Those wacky Romans didn’t number the days of the month consecutively as we do, 1 to 30 or 31, but instead named three days of the month, based on phases of the moon, and counted the days backwards from those dates. Hence, the last day of November was not November 30 but the day before the kalends of December, or, pridie Kal. Dec. November 29 was the third* day before the kalends of December, or, ante diem III Kal. Dec.
Today, Wednesday, November 23, is ante diem IX Kal. Dec., the ninth day before the Kalends of December.
Are you still with me?
In this tripartite division of the month, the Nones fell about a week after the Kalends. Then came the Ides, which Julius Caesar’s assassination made famous (“Beware the Ides of March!”) It landed about the middle of the month.
There’s plenty more to say about this demented timekeeping, but you’ve probably had enough. If you want to know more, look here.
From my recent reading, I learned yet another derivative from kalendae. To intercalate is to insert a day into a calendar. You can see the connection to calendar, plus the prefix inter, meaning “between.” The Romans used to intercalate days in February to adjust the calendar, which would get out of whack every few years. After Julius Caesar’s calendar modifications in 46 BCE, we have only one intercalation, February 29, every four years. We still rely on the Julian calendar.
Once again, the scientists among you are probably way ahead of me. A scientist, in fact, set me on the path to this convoluted post. Catherine Raven, a biologist, uses the word intercalation in her memoir Fox & I: An Uncommon Friendship, but in a different sense. In its non-calendar sense, intercalation can relate to inserting new elements or layers into a substance or system. In chemistry, a “guest molecule,” as it’s courteously called, can be introduced, or intercalated, into a compound. An editor can intercalate new chapters in an old book. In geology, layers of sediment are sometimes said to be intercalated.
Huh, I thought, when I had progressed about halfway down this rabbit hole. Kalends must have more to it than the first day of the month. I had never investigated the etymology of kalends. Turns out kalends derives from the Latin verb calare, “to announce.” Roman priests, observing the new moon, solemnly announced the kalends of every month from the Capitol. The original kalends were the announcement itself.
Announcing a day (calare) gave rise to kalends, the first of the month, which gave rise to calendar, which gave rise to intercalating (inserting days into a month), which gave rise to a more general intercalating (inserting something into something), such as intercalated discs in cardiac muscle or, you know, the intercalation of copper atoms into transition metal dichalcogenides.
So let me know. For next Wednesday, choose whether we should:
Take a deeper dive into the Roman calendar;
Examine the etymology of dichalcogenides;
Find out why it’s not really insulting to write Xmas instead of Christmas;
All or none of the above.
*Why the III (three)? The first day of the month was regarded as “1.” The day before that was #2, the pridie. The day before that was #3. I know, right?
When you create meringues, you have egg yolks left over. When you bake crème brulee, you have egg whites left over. Might as well make both!
The meringues were going to a friend who recently suffered a loss in her family. She’s gluten free and has other dietary restrictions, but she can handle egg whites and sugar, which whip up into meringues. I’ve learned I can sneak a disk of melting chocolate into some of them. This makes for a tasty surprise for someone who’s largely estranged from baked goods.
The recipe came from my 1955 Good Housekeeping Cookbook, which I bought used somewhere. The recipe, as I prepared it, appears below.*
The meringues left me with six egg yolks. I sneaked a couple into our scrambled eggs this morning and then ran across some recipes for crème brulee, which I’d never made. Turns out it’s easy. And it uses up egg yolks. You just beat four egg yolks with one third cup of sugar, heat two cups of cream until little bubbles form around the edge of the pan, and mix them all together with a teaspoon of vanilla, adding the cream to the eggs slowly so as not to create more scrambled eggs. You should strain out any curdled egg or skin that formed on the heated cream, but I skipped this step. Pour into ramekins (or any ovenproof dishes) and bake at 325 degrees for about half an hour. You can broil the tops, sprinkled with sugar, for a minute or two for those dark crispy tops.
Both these desserts look pretty fancy but whip up easily. They’re fussy for Thanksgiving fare, but nice for a holiday party. We’re entering that eating season. What are your favorite dishes?
*Meringue Glacee Heat oven to 275 degrees.
1/8 teaspoon salt 1 teaspoon vinegar
6 egg whites 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
2 cups sugar (chocolate disks/chips if desired)
Add salt to egg whites and beat to stiff-ish peaks. At low speed, add sugar, about 2 tablespoons at a time, beating about 2 minutes after each addition. (I did not, ahem, follow this advice to the letter.) Add vinegar and vanilla to meringue, and beat at high speed for about 10 minutes more. Drop by heaping spoonfuls onto buttered (or parchment-ed) baking sheet. Bake about 45 minutes. Reduce heat to 250 degrees and back 15 minutes more, until meringues are creamy white and delicately firm. Remove to rack and cool. (Many are naturally cracked at this point, which makes room for some chocolate to be tucked in.)
In November, I have read two new celebrity memoirs: Matthew Perry’s Friends, Lovers, and the Big, Terrible Thing and Geena Davis’s Dying of Politeness. Lest you judge me, I have also finished rereading Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy, a famous writer, if not a celebrity.
If either of these books were excessively mean, crude, or illiterate, I would have put them aside. Instead, they have a few virtues. First, they are not badly written, and, even better, I’m pretty sure Perry and Davis wrote them themselves. As famous people, of course, they benefit from big advances and tons of skilled editing, but, still, the authors seem to be the people pictured on the cover, not ghost writers. Perry (Chandler in the TV sitcom Friends) apparently submitted an initial 100 pages of his own writing to his agent, who encouraged him to keep writing. His editor said in an interview that he was the only celebrity memoirist she’s worked with who submitted his final manuscript on time.
Though not quite gossipy, both books include juicy inside stories. Davis, for example, rats on Bill Murray, who bullied her on the set of 1990’s Quick Change. (Davis also starred in The Accidental Tourist, Thelma and Louise, and A League of Their Own, among many other films.) She recounts several incidents of sexual abuse and harassment. Perry reveals that in 1996 he broke up with girlfriend Julia Roberts, not the other way around. This revelation isn’t ungallant. He admits that he habitually ended relationships prematurely, to avoid being dumped first. He regrets these decisions.
Both Perry and Davis are admirably self-aware and self-critical. Both of them have a mission as well. Perry believes his addiction story, with many stints in rehab, might help other addicts. And he seems to be using his current recovery to help other addicted people one on one. Davis is working with the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media, which she founded, to lobby for gender balance in media. (Watch the excellent This Changes Everything on Netflix, which features Davis and her organization’s work.)
Both books are engrossing and easy to read (despite Perry’s harrowing addiction experiences). They’re a nice break from more arduous works. While reading them, I never felt the need to count how many pages were remaining, as I may have done with a certain lengthy Russian classic.
Have you ever wanted to write your own story? Have you started? What would you want people to know about you?
It’s time for leaf-raking in Northeast Ohio, or for “leaving the leaves,” if you’re ecologically inclined. Leaving the leaves brings thoughts of composting, which is a good use for them. And composting brings to mind its verbal cousins compose, composite, component, and compote.
The mother of this word family is the Latin ponere, which means “to put.” The Latin preposition cum, meaning “together with,” has transposed* into com-, a common English prefix. If you compose something, you put it together. A composer puts notes, or music, together. The “s” in composer and these related words comes from the ponere’s participle, positus. (You’re probably thinking, Composition!)
A composite wood is a bunch of woods smushed together. The various components have been composed! A compote, a dish of stewed fruits, is a bunch of fruits smushed together, which also came to mean the dish that holds them. And compost is decaying organic matter smushed together. Usually compost is not just leaves or food scraps or grass clippings. It can be all three and more! Compost is a composite.
This word family is very exciting, I know, but try to keep it together. I mean, keep your composure!
