Wife of Jupiter and queen of the Roman gods, Juno gave her name to our brand-new month, Iunius Mensis, the Romans’ fourth month (with Martius as the first). Junio and Juin are two of her Romance language legacies. Juno is identified with the Greek goddess Hera.
June replaced a Middle English phrase meaning “earlier mildness,” which is a great name for summer’s first month. June itself might mean “young,” as in iuvenis for “youth”: Juno was goddess of the new moon.
Juno famously harassed Aeneas, protagonist of Vergil’s Aeneid. She was the patron of Queen Dido and her city Carthage, which became Rome’s bitterest rival. Aeneas famously threw over Dido in order to pursue his fated founding of the Roman civilization. Juno whipped up a storm to prevent Aeneas landing in Italy at the beginning of the Aeneid and never stopped bothering him.
The goddess represented women, marriage, and childbirth, but is largely known, unfortunately, for her jealous rages over Jupiter’s infidelities. To hide his adultery, for example, Jupiter changed the beautiful nymph Io into a heifer. Juno wasn’t fooled. She sent a gadfly to harass poor Io, who ran across the world, trying to escape the wicked bites, giving her name to the Ionian Sea. Her travels are also memorialized by the Bosphorus Strait, the boundary between Asia and Europe. Bosphorus means “cow-bearing.”
Juno is still on Jupiter’s case. NASA’s Juno mission flew past Jupiter’s moon Io last month, bringing all three characters together for a big pirouette in space. That’s not the end of Juno, though. Since 2016, she’s been keeping her eye on Jupiter, and will continue her surveillance far into the future, just like in the old days.
As of today, A Grandmother’s ABC is available for purchase, with text by me and photos by Margaret Ewing. Order it from Shanti Arts, the publisher, or from your local bookstore. Bookshop.org is another good option. Amazon is also an option (though not a particularly good one.)
I thought it might be nice to share an excerpt, to give you a flavor of the book. Each alphabet letter has its own chapter, written while I was creating a fabric alphabet book for my then in-utero grand-twins. I should say that the book was composed during the COVID lockdown and is addressed to the twins, to read when they’re older. The fabric book I created, pictured on the cover, was for babies. This published book is for grownups.
N is for Nest
At the back of our Cleveland Heights house is a second-floor porch that looks out on an overgrown apple tree in the backyard. Visitors have commented that the porch feels like a tree house. Over the years I’ve gone to the porch to think or cry, to read or just to enjoy a lovely day or a peaceful rainfall. A few times every summer, we cart plates and silverware and bowls of food upstairs for supper on the porch. Sometimes we celebrate birthdays there.
At home so much because of the lockdown, I spend many 2020 afternoons sitting on the porch doing needlework or reading. Grandpa and I both make it through Don Quixote, a 900+ page tome, for the first time, in a translation by Edith Grossman, which I recommend (I who know nothing of other translations or of Spanish, for that matter) because it is readable and the notes informative and not intrusive. It is my second or third run at Don Quixote. Previously put off by its epic length and by some of the antiquated language in other translations, this time I push through the long, sometimes repetitious speeches, enjoying the humor and realizing that the story really does move along if you give it a chance.
As it chugs along and I realize how modern the book seems, I ponder, What does modern mean as applied to a book written more than 400 years ago? Cervantes enables us to see the interior lives of his characters, not merely their adventures, as in other romances of his era. The author himself, or at least the narrator, demonstrates a wry self-awareness. In the second half of the book, his characters critique the first half. We moderns usually take credit for such sly self-referencing. Don Quixote is modern in that it reflects back on itself. In part, it’s a story about stories, a book about books. It’s writing about writing. It’s like a book about the alphabet, about the letter N from the Greek nu (Ν), from the Semitic word nun, which meant “eel” or “fish.”
What does this have to do with Ns or with nests, you may be wondering. As I sit on the porch making my way through Don Quixote, counting 200 pages, 300 pages, directly in my line of sight whenever I look up from the page, in a cozy fork in the apple tree, is a blue jay nest. It takes a while for me to notice it. We frequently have blue jays in our yard and put peanuts out for them to snack on. I notice that the birds seemed to be zeroing in on one spot in the middle of the tree—duh—and suddenly the nest materializes before my eyes. It looks a mess, with a white plastic filament dangling crazily from one side that resembles the plastic string I occasionally replace in our border trimmer. In reading about blue jays, I learn that they frequently incorporate one white material in the outer part of their nest. Our blue jays have apparently read this website.
I bring binoculars to the porch and learn to focus on the nest. I wait for a parent to alight and then train the lenses on the birds’ sheer perfect pattern of blue and black and white. After a week or two of watching the parents take turns sitting on the nest, I hear faint peeping. Eventually I can discern tiny open mouths, three or four, pointing up to the sky as the parents gracefully swoop toward them. After a feeding, the parent bird scooches in, back and forth, right on top of the babies. Every now and then, I worry that a big storm will knock the nest out of the tree or that a squirrel or predatory bird will attack it. I watch for weeks, while I read and sew.
Then a few sultry days pass by, too hot to sit outside. When I return at last to the porch, the nest seems deserted and there are no blue jays in sight. Either something catastrophic has befallen them, or they have fledged that quickly. If they left the nest, we should have six blue jays flying around our yard, but they seem to have all vanished at once.
A day or two later I am nosing around the flower patch Grandpa planted in the back corner of our yard. Our little dog Roxie is with me. A lot of squawking erupts from above, and when I look up into the trees, I see a bunch (a flock?) of blue jays hanging out. They don’t hold still long enough for me to count them. I figure that the fledged young are practicing flying close to home, learning from their parents, but I’m unable to make out who is who. One bird swoops right above my head, clearly wanting me and Roxie out of there, so we beat a retreat. I guess soon afterward they move into their own neighborhoods because I don’t see four or five blue jays at a time anymore. A couple of them still stop by to pick up peanuts. I assume they’re the parents, and they’re left here in our old backyard while their young have moved on to new homes and adventures. It all happens in a matter of months.
Your mom sends us ultrasound pictures of you today, as I’m writing in November. Each of you is visible, with the profile of a head clearly outlined. When your mom’s looking at the screen, she can see you moving around, the girl situated lower, close to the cervix, and the boy higher up. The pictures look like full-sized babies, but you’re still tiny, only about five inches long. We don’t know your names. But we can see you with our technology, we know you’re there, being nourished in your nest by your mom. All four of you are far away from us in Cleveland, though you’re in my thoughts all day as I stitch a yellow border around the outside of the nest page.
Your mom flew away to Brooklyn to live and raise her young. She and your dad will teach you to survive, and in twenty years or so, more or less, you’ll fly away. As you read this, someday in a vague future, you may have already fledged.
Therapist Lori Gottlieb in her excellent book Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, Her Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed defines ultracrepidarianism as “the habit of giving opinions and advice on matters outside of one’s knowledge or competence.” How have I survived so long without this extremely useful word? How many ultracrepidarians have I encountered in my life? (How many times have I myself exhibited creeping ultracrepidarianism?)
People have advised me to write books about various subjects I have no interest in.
Years ago, a friend of my husband gave me several second-hand dresses, because he thought they looked like what I should wear. Rather than what I did wear. He also advised me as he watched me bake cookies, that I should add more salt. Needless to say, he did not bake.
Sometimes I tell my husband how much he should charge for a movie he’s showing.
While you’re thinking of your own examples, let’s take a look at the word’s origins. The Roman writer and naval commander Pliny the Elder (24-79 CE) recounted the story of the Greek painter Apelles and a cobbler who criticized his artistic rendering of a shoe. Apelles accepted the correction, but the emboldened critic found further fault with the painting. “Ne supra crepidam sutor iudicaret,” Apelles reportedly told the upstart. That is, “Let the shoemaker not judge above the sandal.”
Burn!
Pliny pointed out that this line became a Roman aphorism: Sutor, ne ultra crepidam, meaning, “Shoemaker, not beyond the sandal.” An English proverb, “Cobbler, stick to your last (the mold for a shoe),” expresses the same sentiment.
Nowadays we would say, “Stay in your lane.” See photo above.
Share your ultracrepidarian examples in the comments.
Valerie Fridland’s new book Like, Literally, Dude: Arguing for the Good in Bad English provides enough material for an eternity of Wednesday Word posts. Literally.
Yep, Fridland takes on not only the non-literal sense of literally, but also um and uh, the pronoun they as a singular, and even the detested and abhorred vocal fry. She finds some good in all of these, and in like, dude, and many other linguistic shibboleths. As a linguist, she analyzes the need these usages are filling, or, if not a need, their usefulness in social interactions.
Her overarching theme is, “Chill.” (Or possibly, “Dude. Chill.”) Our apoplexy over language change is frequently built on sand. When you hear grammatical errors, does your head literally explode? In fact, Shakespeare, Dickens, Joyce, and Austen used literally in this intensifying sense. The word’s meaning is shifting, like very and awfully before it. We’re expending a lot of mental energy over an inexorable historic process. Language changes, and it always has. Ain’t nothing we can do about it.
Yes, Shakespeare also employed ain’t, as well as double negatives.
Language changes most often climb up from the bottom of society’s ladder. Young women, especially, often drive this evolution. Fridland writes, “It’s a good bet that whatever . . . eventually makes it into the grammar books probably started with the very folks whose speech is most criticized and reviled. The disenfranchised? Check. The young? Check. The female? Check. And while many of the curiosities heard in the speech around us may die out as quickly as a trending TikTok, some will go the distance and become the speech that our grandkids rebel against. And yes, that is a sentence-ending preposition, the likes of which Shakespeare, preposition strander himself, would be proud.”
Of course, you can still edit out the likes from your sentences and restrict your use of literally. You can still be annoyed by others’ speech habits. Just try not to frame your annoyance as the end of civilization, or as snobby put-downs of other people’s speech habits.
In the comments, you can share what drives you crazy, with the understanding that I will respond as Valerie Fridland, with charming history and explanations. I told you. I can draw on this book, like, forever.
I was hoping that my new book, A Grandmother’s ABC Book, would be available by Mother’s Day, but it’s becoming clear as the day passes that’s not going to happen. (That’s a joke.) The release date of June 6th is fast upon us. You’ll be able to order it from your local bookstore or from the publisher, Shanti Arts.* Plenty of time for next Mother’s Day!
I myself have a little trouble going all in on Mother’s Day, because, as for a lot of people, that relationship was problematic. I had no problem buying a gift for my mom or taking her out for brunch with my sisters, but sometimes the greeting cards stumped me. They often had messages like, “You were always there for me,” or like this one from Facebook today: “Your mother is the sound of the rain that lulls you to sleep, the colors of a rainbow, she is Christmas morning.” Nope. I always kept looking until I found a generic Happy Mother’s Day! greeting.
It’s great that a lot of Mother’s Day messaging these days includes gay and transgender mothers, adoptive and foster mothers, and nurturers who were not necessarily mothers. We also need to acknowledge that not all mothers are the wind beneath our wings, nor are they necessarily supportive, attentive, smiling, patient, caring, selfless, helpful, inspiring, and understanding. (Some of us managed to be one or two of those things for about half an hour once a week, on average.) Certain mothers have their own struggles to contend with and fall far below the Hallmark standard. Some of you know the story from Missing: Coming to Terms with a Borderline Mother.
Share in the comments your own reflections on the day.
And if you have or had one of those Hallmark moms, or a close facsimile, I’m happy for you. Maybe she would enjoy A Grandmother’s ABC Book, particularly if she’s reached that milestone. Here’s how the publisher describes the book.
In September 2020 author Kathy Ewing and her husband learned that they would soon be first-time grandparents—of twins. Overwhelmed with delight and with time on her hands due to the COVID pandemic, Ewing decided to make a cloth ABC book for the twins and also write a companion book of family stories based on the alphabet. Entertaining and inspiring, A Grandmother’s ABC Book is about looking ahead—to the excitement of grandchildren, to the promise of a joy-filled future, and to the thrill of sharing one’s life and stories with the next generation.
*There’s always Amazon, too, but opt for an independent bookstore whenever you can.
A diminutive (from Latin deminuere–to make small) is a cute-ified word that expresses fondness or describes something little and perhaps feminine. In English, suffixes such as -ette and -y create diminutives. A drum major is the big guy wearing the giant hat at the front of the band. Majorettes are usually smaller and cuter. (Speaking in traditional, circa 1960s terms here.) Doggy is a sweet term for a dog, and Daddy implies a special attachment to Dad.
I’ve written about diminutives before, as in this post from way back in 2012. Latin has diminutives, too. A homunculus, for example, is a little man (from homo).
The Latin word for skin is cutis. You’re probably thinking of cutaneous and subcutaneous right now, meaning “referring to the skin” and “under the skin.” If you put a cute diminutive suffix on cutis, you get cuticula, which, you guessed it, gave us cuticle, the little bit of protective skin around our nails, a word which became prominent in English at the beginning of the 20th century.
Here’s how WebMD says to take care of your cuticles. Despite the word’s first syllable, no cutting allowed!
It’s disturbing to be writing about E. Jean Carroll’s 2019 memoir What Do We Need Men For?: A Modest Proposal the same weekend we attended a romantic family wedding. It was discomfiting reading the book in the Austin hotel room where we stayed, curled up in a chair during intervals between the rehearsal dinner, neighborhood explorations, and the wedding itself.
As Carroll’s title suggests, she is questioning the need for men and employing Jonathan Swift’s “modest proposal” idea (melting them all down for their chemical content) as an alternative to keeping them around. Carroll, now 79, hearkens back to the gutsy career girls of the 60s, 70s, and beyond. A beauty queen (pace Trump’s “not my type”), she was accustomed to fighting men off at every turn.
That’s why it’s hard to know whether to recommend the book and to whom. If you’re like me and obsessively following the New York defamation case against Donald Trump, fingers crossed for Carroll, you might want to read it. But be forewarned by author Dani Shapiro’s blurb on the front cover: “The most bitterly funny, fantastically furious book to explode out of the #metoo movement.” Funny and fantastic, but don’t forget the bitter fury.
Carroll organizes the book around the twenty-one most hideous men in her life (Trump is #20) and a tour of the country, visiting towns named after women. She cheekily asks people she meets what we need men for. Their answers are inconclusive.
Though she likes many men very, very much, Carroll shares some truly terrible experiences. She was abused by a babysitter and camp counselor, almost raped as a teen, molested by various famous men, and attacked by her then husband, yet she maintains a jarringly breezy style: the book is a very weird mix. Describing an ugly alleged encounter with Les Moonves, then CBS head, she admits she’s making herself sick. You’ll feel the same at times.
For all of her sprightly cynicism, however, E. Jean is a romantic at heart, as you can see from perusing hercharming advice columns, which ran for twenty-six years in Elle magazine. An Elle editor called her “modern, quirky, and cheeky.” Her quirky book jerks you from jokey anecdotes about her sweet dog, who came along for the ride, to ugly stories about the exploitation of women by (some) powerful men. It’s sui generis.
Consider this a recommendation and a trigger warning in equal measure.
Latin offers nouns in three genders: masculine, feminine, and neuter. As you may know, adjectives change their gender endings in order to agree with the noun they’re modifying: bonus puer (good boy), bona puella (good girl), and bonum consilium (good plan). Nouns have gender without regard to their meaning. The words for forest (silva) and tree (arbor) are feminine, while the word for leaf (folium) is neuter, and trunk (truncus) is masculine. These somewhat arbitrary genders must be memorized, but as Latin teachers for generations have been saying, once you’ve learned the genders of Latin words, you’ve also learned them for their French and Spanish derivatives.
In years past, I sometimes made sly comments about gender in my Latin classes. Nouns are stuck in a particular gender, I would say, but adjectives can go either way! A word that’s neuter, meaning “neither one,” can’t name a person, because people all have a defined gender, right? No neuter people, right? Hardy-har-har.
In one class quite a while back a student in her forties began stopping at my desk after class to chat. She shared with me that her adult transgender daughter had a female partner and that they had adopted a child. She told me that the adjustment to their daughter’s “new” gender in her adolescence had been difficult, especially for her husband, but that things were going well among all of them now. She seemed resolute in wanting to talk to me about these matters.
It came to me, belatedly, that this kind woman might be trying to raise my consciousness. From the beginning, I accepted her experience without any prejudice; I was open and encouraging about hearing about her family. But I had never questioned my little gender jokes, which had been going on for decades. Until gradually I did begin to question them. Gradually, I began listening to myself, and, gradually, I cut the comments out.
This all came to mind after reading “The Power of the Latin Neuter” by Margaret Somerville in the April issue of The Christian Century, sent to me by my friend Tricia. Somerville posits that creaky old Latin might actually have something to offer in the current debates about gender. Neuter actually means “not either,” the very definition of non-binary. She offers her students the option of calling themselves discipulum, a neuter ending on the word for student, if they want to identify as “not either.”
Similarly, she uses a poetic device called merism (from the Greek word for “divided”) to support her LGBTQ students and to broaden everyone’s perspectives. When we search near and far for an item, for example, we’re not looking near and then looking far. We’re looking everywhere in between. Merism is the device that implies everywhere-all-at-once by naming the extremes. In the elegant phraseology of linguist John Lyons, it’s “a dichotomized pair that conveys the concept of a whole.”
Somerville alludes to the Roman poet Vergil describing Rumor, personified as a “she,” wandering day and night, up to the sky and back down to earth, by which he means that Rumor travels everywhere all at once. Similarly, in Scripture, Somerville says, “God names darkness and light, day and night, heavens and earth, male and female. Surely, these powerful examples of merism were already opening the world to the totality of human expression.”
If anything is retro, one would think Latin would fit the bill. But here it is in 2023, relevant once again.
If you think you’ve already confronted America’s history with slavery, perhaps you should read Clint Smith’s How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America.
Here are some things I learned from the book.
Frenchman Édouard René de Laboulaye, who first conceived of the Statue of Liberty as a gift to the United States, was president of the French anti-slavery society. In an early model of the statue, sculptor Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi placed broken shackles in the lady’s left hand to celebrate emancipation and the end of American slavery. On the finished 1886 statue, her left hand holds a tablet, and small bits of broken chain peek out from behind her robe by her feet. Historians theorize that the abolitionist theme would have alienated American donors to the cost of the pedestal. “Centering the story . . . on [the two nations’] friendship made for a more compelling pitch to those with money, many of whom opposed Black freedom,” Smith writes.
Countering the claim that Southern states seceded from the Union in order to preserve states’ rights and not to preserve slavery, Smith quotes from seven documents from various Confederate states explicitly mentioning slavery. For example, Mississippi’s secession document says, “Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery–the greatest material interest of the world.”‘ The Confederate constitution proclaims, “In all new territory the institution of negro slavery, as it now exists in the Confederate States, shall be recognized and protected by Congress,”
James Roberts, who fought in the Revolutionary War and was afterward enslaved in Louisiana, asserted in a slave narrative, “From fifty to sixty head of women were kept constantly for breeding. No man was allowed to go there, save white men. From twenty to twenty-five children a year were bred on that plantation. As soon as they are ready for market, they are taken away and sold, as mules or other cattle.”
As you might imagine, much of this book is hard to read. But Smith, a poet and staff writer at The Atlantic, leads the reader adroitly through eight sites relevant to slavery, including plantations, Angola prison, New York City (which slaves helped to build), Goree Island, off Senegal, from which thousands of captured Africans made their way to America, and others. Smith’s tone is engaging and readable; he’s exploring the history along with us.
Rather than circumscribing what American schools teach about the history of race, we should be disseminating books like How the Word Is Passed. For so much of Western history, Black lives seemed not to matter. Immanuel Kant, the famous 18th-century German philosopher avowed, “Humanity exists in its greatest perfection in the white race.” To uproot that sentiment fully, there’s still so much work to do.
Idioms are not really idiotic, but they don’t make a lot of sense when taken literally. The two words have a common etymology. Idios in Greek means “one’s own, private, unique.” A Greek idiotes was a private person, that is, an uneducated workman or soldier, one who didn’t take part in public affairs like an educated man. You can see how the word came to mean “ignorant,” and developed into our word idiot. An idiom is a word or phrase peculiar to a particular language. English idioms are our own, private, and unique.
I always told my Latin students the following story in order to explain idioms. Our professor in my college French class asked us to write a paragraph in French describing something we had done over the weekend. As he read one student’s effort aloud in front of the class, he stopped short and then began sputtering and laughing over one hapless student’s attempt. When he regained control of himself, the professor explained that the student described a picnic with his family, during which they roasted hot dogs. Hot dogs in French momentarily struck my professor as “dogs in heat” (though the French actually have their own idiom for that). That’s where my professor stopped abruptly until he figured out the English equivalent intended by the student.
Wheelock’s Latin, our text at Cleveland State, introduces idioms with amabo te, literally “I will love you,” which means “please” in Latin. The book’s first example is adapted from the playwright Terence: Da veniam puellae, amabo te, which translates, “Give pardon to the girl, please.” Amabo te implies highly conditional love: Do this for me, and I will love you.
Idioms are vivid and useful, until they become cliches. That’s when we stop noticing how cool they are. “Read between the lines” was at some point startling, but no longer. “He ran off with his tail between his legs” originally created a word picture, but now it’s just trite.
Speaking of tails, Terence provides another of my favorite Latin idioms a few Wheelock chapters later. Auribus teneo lupum in literal English means, “I have a wolf by the ears.” It’s roughly the equivalent of having a tiger by the tail, or being on the horns of a dilemma. Thomas Jefferson once described American slavery as holding a wolf by the ears. He wrote, “We can neither hold him, nor safely let him go. Justice is in one scale, and self-preservation in the other.” Tragic and telling that he saw the dilemma so clearly but never attempted to resolve it.
