Gizmos and Thingamabobs

Posted on February 1, 2024 by Kathy
Photo by Luca Laurence on Unsplash

When my book group was leaving my house the other night, I offered, with a smile, to get them their wraps. When they noted that quaint locution, I recalled my fourth-grade teacher Mrs. Bender suggesting we put on our wraps before recess. I added that Mrs. Bender also advised us to “red up” our desks before leaving for the day.

Nobody knew that expression. The Internet explains that red up (sometimes spelled redd up) has a Scottish origin and and is common out Pittsburgh way. It’s short for readying up, as in “getting ready” or tidying. Maybe Mrs. Bender was from Pittsburgh. Another source traces the phrase to rural Pennsylvania and posits a Pennsylvania Dutch root. Grammarphobia cites the Middle English verb redden, meaning “to rescue, to clear.”

Whatever its source, I like it. I like regional usages and don’t think they should be disparaged as non-standard, not that anyone in my book group did that.

Dana K. White, one of my favorite YouTubers, helps me red up my house and clear out the clutter. A Texan, she uses some charming idioms. What I might call a thingy or a doohickey or a thingamajig, she calls a dololly. My grandmother’s term for such a thing was whatllIcallit, but that was more for when she couldn’t think of a thing’s name than for things that don’t have a name. The housekeeping goal, as you might imagine, is to get rid of as many dolollies as you can.

When I tried looking up Dana’s word as doolally, based on her pronunciation, I learned that doolally is British slang for “crazy.” Take care in your writing to distinguish dololly from doolally to avoid both confusion and possible offense.

Do you have some favorite local expressions? What’s your favorite word for a thingamajig?

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An Absolute Pleasure

Posted on January 26, 2024 by Kathy

The Latin verb solvere, like English’s to put or to take lends itself to multitudinous idioms. It can mean “to untie,” “to release,” “to unbind,” “to loosen what restricts,” “to throw off,” “to pay,” and on and on. The word’s entry in my Latin dictionary is over four inches long. (Yes, I measured it.)

To solvere a ligatam is to untie a bond. To solvere a funem can be to loosen a rope, as in setting sail. To solvere pecuniam debitam means to discharge a debt. (Set it free!)

The English derivative that jumps out, of course, is solve, and don’t you feel unbound when you land on the answer to the daily Wordle? You’ve untied that knot and are free to go about your day! And what is your answer called? It’s a solution, and, guess what, the participle of solvere is solutus, which means, literally, “having been released.”

A chemical solution is a homogeneous mixture in which the two (or more) combined substances can no longer be differentiated. Where’s the unbinding? Vocabulary.com explains, “Think of solution . . . as a loosening of the chemical bonds that make something solid––when you loosen the structure of salt by mixing it into water, you create a solution.”

Now perhaps a bunch of other English derivatives are coming to mind. Insolvent. Dissolve. Dissolute. Resolve.

An absolution is a formal release from guilt or punishment, emphasis on the release. The prefix ab means from or away from. So absolution frees you from guilt. I’ve been on the library waiting list for Alice McDermott’s new novel Absolution for weeks; she’s one of my favorite writers. As you can see, it finally came in, and I’m looking forward to starting it when I finish some other reading.

McDermott is a Catholic, although a dissident and unsettled one like me. The priest releases one from the confessional with an absolution. I’m sure McDermott’s take on the word will be more nuanced, tentative, and complicated than a simple “Go and sin no more.” I’m looking forward to finding out.

If you’ve read it, don’t tell me anything. But do tell me what you’re reading.

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No Trouble in Bubbleland

Posted on January 20, 2024 by Kathy
Photo by Drew Beamer on Unsplash

Here’s a writer you’ll not only probably enjoy but who will make you feel a little bit better.

I learned of R. Eric Thomas through our mutual friend (just kidding) Ann Patchett, the novelist, who featured his new book in a little promotion for her Nashville bookstore, Parnassus Books. I requested Congratulations! The Best Is Over! immediately after viewing that video. I can’t re-access the Tik Tok video but you can read Eric’s giddy account of a joint appearance by the two of them here.

Both writers are funny and humane.

Congratulations largely concerns Eric’s reluctant move from Philadelphia to Baltimore, where, he says, “all the ghosts of the unhappy person I used to be still lived.” He and his husband eventually buy a house and build a pond, where noisy frogs drive Eric to distraction. He’s able to describe frog-induced insomnia hilariously.

I’m currently reading his earlier book, Here for It, or, How to Save Your Soul in America, which I may like even better. One essay, “There’s Never Any Trouble Here in Bubbleland,” directed me to a Mister Rogers episode called “Mister Rogers Makes an Opera,” for which I will feel eternal gratitude to R. Eric Thomas. I love and respect Mister Rogers as much as the next person, but, really, the word unhinged sometimes comes to mind. Thomas says affectionately that Mister R. was “relentless in his pursuit of eccentricity.” Watch the opera and see.

One of the episode’s songs, “There’s Never Any Trouble Here in Bubbleland,” gave Thomas’s working-class Black family a catch phrase:

[This] became my mother’s frequent ironic refrain, a sardonic way of expressing frustration at a situation that was set up for my parents to fail. Our neglected neighborhood was rumbling around us; my parents worked tirelessly but still struggled financially their parents were ailing. When the weight of it all threatened to overtake her, my mother, with a lightness, would sigh, ‘There’s never any trouble here in Bubbleland.’ It became a relief valve, a code word, a cry for help. It also served as a guiding metaphor. The world outside was troublesome, but the house and the world my parents built for us within it was a bubble. A delicate, permeable utopia.

Which gives you a taste of Thomas’s graceful writing. Check him out.

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A Scottish Play on Words

Posted on January 17, 2024 by Kathy
A red herring (Photo by Tomas Martinez on Unsplash)

As the credits rolled, I leaned toward my companion. “Is the Maltese falcon a MacGuffin?” I asked.

“Um,” he replied, “I always sort of forget what a MacGuffin is.”

That evening, referring the question to Mr. Wikipedia, we learned that a MacGuffin is an object or person needed to move the plot forward, but insignificant in and of itself. In the renowned 1941 film, the Maltese falcon could have just as easily been a ring or a fleece or a chalice (all arguably MacGuffins in other works) and is therefore often cited as an example of a MacGuffin. The point is not that it’s a falcon. The point is that the characters are after it, relentlessly.

I guess by this definition Moby-Dick is not a MacGuffin, even though Ahab’s pursuit of him drives the plot. The white whale has significance in and of himself. So much significance! I submit in evidence the chapter entitled “The Whiteness of the Whale” and the copious scholarship examining Moby’s meaning.

(On second thought, maybe for all those desperate Ph.D. candidates, Moby-Dick perfectly embodies the MacGuffin–the meaningless object of a futile chase.)

Some websites help draw distinctions among other common, similar devices. A red herring, for example, distracts you from the heart of the matter. At the beginning of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, Marian (Janet Leigh) has a pile of cash. On first viewing, you think the cash is consequential, but it disappears along with Marian’s body, never to be seen again. Hitchcock is a tricky dick.

Red herring‘s history is murky. It has something to do with the smell of a smoked fish used to distract (or possibly train) hounds going after a fox. Or horses. It’s not entirely clear.

Another term: Chekhov’s gun represents perhaps the exact opposite of a MacGuffin–an item appearing early in the story and exploding (eventually) with significance by the end. It’s full of meaning, and you’re supposed to pay attention to it. Anton Chekhov’s play Uncle Vanya famously reveals a gun in the first scene, which you worry about the whole play. It turns out you’re right to worry about it.

A screenwriter named Angus McPhail, who worked on Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much and The Wrong Man, among other films, originated the term MacGuffin. Hitchcock adopted it enthusiastically, and it’s most commonly associated with him.

In an interview with the director Francois Truffaut, Hitchcock offered a puckish alternative etymology for MacGuffin:

It might be a Scottish name, taken from a story about two men in a train. One man says, ‘What’s that package up there in the baggage rack?’ And the other answers, ‘Oh that’s a MacGuffin.’ The first one asks ‘What’s a MacGuffin?’ ‘Well’ the other man says, ‘It’s an apparatus for trapping lions in the Scottish Highlands.’ The first man says, ‘But there are no lions in the Scottish Highlands,’ and the other one answers ‘Well, then that’s no MacGuffin!’ So you see, a MacGuffin is nothing at all.

Which is either a red herring or a shaggy dog story. Or both.

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A Christmas Carol in January

Posted on January 14, 2024 by Kathy
Photo by Taha on Unsplash

It’s no longer the holiday season, but, because I’d been thinking for a while about rereading Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, I finally did it today.

Like (I imagine) many people, I supposed I knew the story. I recalled the outlines, of course, and remembered parts vividly. The ominous atmosphere surrounding the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come has stuck with me best: Scrooge foreseeing the future, including the death of Tiny Tim and a vision of his own grave. I retained the spookiness.

But that’s only ten pages of a fifty-page novella and only one-third of the ghostly visitations. I had forgotten how varied the other experiences are, how joyful some of the visions, and how essentially compassionate the Ghosts. Too many dramatizations on stage and on screen (and in cartoons!) have come between my last reading some decades ago and this one.

Someone recently commented to me that the story really doesn’t have much to do with Christmas, except for the time that it takes place. I didn’t feel I could contradict the person, but I do now. The story is filled with Christmas sounds, smells, sights and family gatherings as we know them and as Dickens largely created them. Here’s Scrooge’s walk in London with the Ghost of Christmas Present:

By this time it was getting dark, and snowing pretty heavily; and as Scrooge and the Spirit went along the streets, the brightness of the roaring fires in kitchens, parlors, and all sorts of rooms, was wonderful. Here, the flickering of the blaze showed preparations for a cozy dinner with hot plates baking through and through before the fire, and deep red curtains, ready to be drawn, to shut out cold and darkness. There, all the children of the house were running out into the snow to meet their married sisters, brothers, cousins, uncles, aunts, and be the first to greet them. . . But if you had judged from the numbers of people on their way to friendly gatherings, you might have thought that no one was at home to give them welcome when they got there, instead of every house expecting company, and piling up its fires half-chimney high. Blessings on it, how the Ghost exulted!

Aside from sensory and sentimental associations, the lessons of Christmas and of Christianity, in its best sense, imbue the whole novella. Christmas and Christianity, in their ideal manifestation, are about love, generosity, compassion, and redemption. After the Ghosts’ tutelage, Scrooge, “a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner,” has transformed into “as good a friend, as good a master, and as good a man, as the good old city knew, or any other good old city, town, or borough, in the good old world.” When people laughed at Scrooge, his “own heart laughed, and that was quite enough for him.” Dickens is conveying the hope essential to the Christmas story.

Of course, I’m not insisting that A Christmas Carol has to be read as a religious text. It has truths and pleasures for everyone. I will politely object, however, the next time anyone asserts in my presence that it has nothing to do with Christmas. 


							

	
			

									
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Thrown a Curve


			

				Posted on January 10, 2024 by Kathy			


					

				

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YmJuBia6cWY





Lots of delightful reading the past few weeks, and some interesting turns of phrase therein. 





The Uncommon Reader (2007), an entertaining novel by Alan Bennett, is veddy, veddy English, concerning, as it does, the Queen herself. An expression struck me (so to speak), and, sure enough, it’s thoroughly British, deriving from the game of cricket. 





The story’s partially fictionalized Queen takes up reading late in life, and her new obsession throws her courtiers and family off balance. Bennett, who starred with Jonathan Miller, Dudley Moore, and Peter Cook in the comedy ensemble Beyond the Fringe, and who wrote The Madness of King George and The History Boys, gets off lots of droll commentary on Brit lit and current events. His language is waggishly clever. 





Because of her job, the Queen has always been adept at small talk. Meeting so many strangers, she’s developed the social skill of saying nothing but putting people at ease. Reading evokes a more curious side in her: she begins asking her subjects what they’re reading. 





What? Is the Queen going to judge me if I’m reading the latest Sophie Kinsella? What if I’m not reading at all?’ Her interlocutors are tongue-tied. In their embarrassment, they resentfully suspect that the Queen has bowled them a wobbly. 





“Bowling,” as it turns out, is what our baseball pitchers do, i.e., throwing. A “wobbly” is a pitch that wobbles as it approaches the batsman. Like baseball’s curveball or screwball, the wobbly confounds the batsman.  The pitch’s physics is quite a science and quite a hot topic. See here to learn more. 





I’m way behind the wicket, of course. Cricket is big everywhere, even in America, as this PBS Newshour story makes clear. At first, as I was reading, I bobbled Bennett’s wobbly and resorted to Google, but have now volubly cobbled some twaddle here to toggle your noggins. 






							

	
			

									
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Combo (Words and Music)


			

				Posted on December 2, 2023 by Kathy			


					

				







Photo by Monika Grabkowska on Unsplash




My friend Leanne sent me an article about frisson as the word applies to musical enjoyment. In French, it means “shiver,” and its Latin root, frigere, means “to become cold,” as in the food in your Frigidaire. 





Every now and then, English has to borrow a word in order to communicate a concept. Ennui, for example, is not exactly boredom and not exactly dissatisfaction. It conveys instead a world-weariness, or what the poet Charles Lloyd termed “pale unrest.” It’s a feeling of jadedness, like, you know, French people. Instead of using all those words to describe the experience, we borrowed ennui from France, and it does the trick. 





Frisson is almost the opposite of ennui. It describes the feeling of surprised delight–chills or goosebumps–we can feel upon hearing a piece of music or having some other aesthetic experience. Back in the day, we could move the needle on a record (over and over again) to repeat “the good parts,” as my husband used to call them. Now we have to ask Alexa to play the whole song again.





Before now, I knew the word to mean a little thrill but had never heard it used in the context of music. The article links to a Spotify list (you can find many of the pieces on YouTube instead) of 715 pieces of music that give many people a frisson. The list’s diversity is cool, from Metallica to Mozart to Johnny Cash to a bunch of people I never heard of. 





This afternoon as I baked cookies I was frisson-ing over several pieces of music I associate with the Christmas season, even though they’re not technically Christmas music. I first heard Respighi’s Ancient Airs and Dances at a December concert years ago with the late lamented Red, An Orchestra and have associated it with the holiday ever since. I love it so much that I sometimes have to sit down during my cookie baking to regain my composure. The Bergamasca movement in Suite No. 2 is one of many good parts. Turn it up loud.





I also listened to soprano Kathleen Battle’s version of Pie Iesu on one of our Christmas cds. It’s from Gabriel Faure’s Requiem, so it’s not specifically a Christmas piece, but it’s about Jesus, so there you go. I’m sure other singers’ renditions are just fine, but I’m partial to this one. I don’t use the word sublime very often, but it applies here. I wonder how often a frisson occurs not only because of the music but because of the performance. I note for instance that some commenters on the article cite not Simon and Garfunkel’s version of “The Sound of Silence,” but the band Disturbed’s performance, which is indeed awesome. Watch it to the end. 





Finally, I connect Tchaikovsky’s Serenade for Strings to Christmas, because my husband played it at Christmas time in our first apartment on Fulton Road in Canton. Because he associated it with Christmas, I do too. It brings back our first Christmases together in that top floor place with our little Christmas trees and our old furniture and meager decorations. Also cookies. A nostalgic frisson. 






							

	
			

									
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From Me to You


			

				Posted on November 27, 2023 by Kathy			


					

				

I didn’t write about books over the weekend, because I’m still reading the Mozart biography and don’t have much to add to what I’ve said. Only about 200 pages to go. 





The best thing about the experience is pausing now and then to watch and listen to a performance of a piece Mr. Swafford so beautifully describes. Yesterday I watched The Marriage of Figaro, which I had never seen, with the book alongside to untangle the twisty plot. What a treat that was. 





So as we enter the gift-giving season, I bestow upon you one of the gems I’ve experienced, the Piano Concerto in D Minor, K. 466, performed by Mitsuko Uchida in Salzburg (Mozart’s hometown), no less. Curl up with a hot cup of tea or cocoa, snuggle under a blanket with your kitty cat, and watch her fingers fly. 





You’re welcome. 









							

	
			

									
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Five Things I Didn’t Know about Mozart*


			

				Posted on November 20, 2023 by Kathy			


					

				

*and I’m only on page 370





Photo by Free Walking Tour Salzburg on Un





I mentioned last week that I’m reading Mozart: The Reign of Love by Jan Swafford. I hope you didn’t expect me to have finished reading its 750+ pages by now. But I’m almost halfway! Time to share a few things I’ve learned so far. 





One. Wolfgang’s father Leopold, a musician and composer, wrote and published a successful handbook for teachers and students in 1756, called Treatise on the Fundamental Principles of Violin Playing. 





Two. Leopold, as many people know, was a hard taskmaster. He pinned his hopes on his brilliant son’s supporting him and the family, but Wolfgang as he matured had some bad luck with patrons and was not always practical or diplomatic. Despite his hectoring, Leopold in fact had saved up a nice nest egg from his travels with Wolfgang and his precocious sister Nannerl, a sizeable fund he kept secret from the children who had earned it for him.





Three. Wolfgang’s prodigious talents are well known, but the actual facts are always startling. In 1761, at the age of four, he began playing the clavier, his family’s keyboard instrument, mimicking the pieces he was hearing Nannerl play. Later that year, he began playing a piece his sister had never played; he began composing. He never stopped creating new music to the end of his life.





Four. In 1781, Wolfgang created a violin concerto (G Major, K. 379) between 11:00 pm and midnight the night before he performed it for the first time. He wrote out the violin part for a soloist and accompanied on keyboard from memory.





Five. Before Mozart, an opera’s libretto (the story and lyrics) was considered the salient aspect of an opera. The music was secondary. Wolfgang revised and collaborated on libretti more than previous composers, but after him–that is, after Ideomeneo, The Abduction from the Seraglio, Don Giovanni, The Magic Flute, and the rest–music, partnered gracefully with the libretto, superseded the story in importance. 





I’ll close by quoting a chapter’s ending I particularly liked. It ushers in the massive changes in Mozart’s life as he moved to Vienna from Salzburg in 1781 at the age of 25.





[Mozart’s new friends] came to know an inexplicable force of nature who could rise from a luminous improvisation at the clavier for a round of meowing like a cat and leaping over the furniture. They would remember the myriad fancies and gaieties of the little man with an overlarge heard and a pale pockmarked face who was forever drumming on things, tapping his feet, jabbering away, but who might also grasp your hand and look at you with something profound, searching, and melancholy in his eyes. Even in company there was often an air about Mozart of being in his mind not quite there. At table he might sit silently and unseeing in the hubbub, clutching a napkin to his face and grimacing. In Vienna it was as if he lived onstage and off at the same time, a character in life’s tragicomedy but also outside it, watching, studying, gathering material from the world around him for the fabric of his art. 

							

	
			

									
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Kiss on Our List


			

				Posted on November 15, 2023 by Kathy			


					

				

Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash





Some mysterious algorithm recently offered me a post about inosculation (in-ahs-cue-lay-shun), a naturally occurring grafting of trees. One tree seeming reaches out to another, and they grow into each other. They become conjoined organisms sharing nutrients and circulation. 





All very interesting natural science, of course, but what you, as a reader of this blog, are no doubt wondering is, “Where does that word come from?” Inosculation derives from osculum, the Latin noun meaning “kiss.”





This history leads, as happens so often, to other interesting facts. Previous posts have explored linguistic diminutives, that is, words modified to express smallness or endearment. For example, a drum major struts in front of the band authoritatively, while a majorette, though skilled and athletic, is usually pretty and feminine. The –ette makes her so. We may dislike a cat, but a kitty? Not so much. Certain suffixes serve to make the ordinary noun small, unthreatening, and even charming.





So it is for osculum. It builds on the Roman word for “mouth,” that is, os.  The -culum suffix makes the mouth small and cute and pursed.  A kiss, in other words, is a “little mouth.”  (Analogously, a homunculus is a “little man.”) In addition, I learned that sponges breathe through their oscula, their little mouths.





This article from the University of New Hampshire shows lovely images of tree osculation. It explains that when branches rub against each other, the bark wears away and then grows scar tissue, which can form a bond between the trees. This connection can even occur between trees of different species. 





To my delight, this source also recounts the mythological story of Baucis and Philemon, one of my favorites told by Ovid in his Metamorphoses. The devoted elderly couple shared their meager resources with the gods Jupiter and Mercury, visiting in disguise. As a reward, the gods granted them the gift of dying together and spending eternity as two connected trees. Reading this beautiful tale, I have always imagined two trees with their trunks intertwined, but now I love imagining a deeper dependent connection. Inosculated trees share resources and support one another, as Baucis and Philemon would lovingly do throughout time.





The article also cites Rembrandt’s painting of the couple hosting the gods, which resides in the National Gallery in Washington, and works by the artist Arthur Rackham and the poet Thom Gunn, who calls the couple’s embrace a “wooden hug.” Wrong etymology, but lovely image nonetheless. 






							

	
			

									
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