An abecedarium is an alphabet book, which we more commonly call an ABC book. The origin of the word, dating from the 17th century, is obvious from its spelling. It’s pronounced like the first three letters of the alphabet–ay, bee, see–followed by dairy-um. The slightly earlier, related word abecedarian refers to a person learning the alphabet, or, more broadly, anyone learning anything, i.e., a novice.
Because my twin grandchildren would be abecedarians, I created an abecedarium for them during the time my daughter was pregnant. It’s sewn from off-white canvas. Each letter is appliquéed to a page, along with an appropriate word. A is for, you guessed it, apple, and so on.
Because my sewing skills are primitive (you might call me a sewing abecedarian), this project saw me through many months of the COVID lockdown, from 2020 through much of 2021. As I worked, another safely solitary project glommed on to the first; I began chronicling what I was doing and what I was thinking. I was imagining those prenatal twins, gestating in New York City, while I was cutting out letters and troubleshooting sewing machine snafus in my Cleveland bedroom, and wrote them an adult book for the future, when they’ve fully mastered the alphabet.
The result, A Grandmother’s ABC, should be appearing in a few months. It’s in the last stages of preparation. This post is a heads-up. I’ll be sharing more about it in the weeks ahead.
Everybody knows that medical terms, including names for parts of the body, are frequently borrowed from ancient Greek and Latin. Often, the terms derive from what the body part looks like. The tibia, or shin bone, comes from the Latin word for “flute,” for example.
The hippocampus, tucked into the middle of your brain, helps move short-term memories to long-term storage and aids in controlling emotion. In 1587, when Giulio Cesare Aranzi discovered and named this little item, he had no idea of its purpose and so named it based on its shape.
The hippocampus looks like a seahorse. (Here’s a great photograph to illustrate.) Hippo, as you might know, was a Greek horse. (Hippopotamuses are water horses.) The –campus ending meant “sea monster.” The Romans borrowed this word from the Greeks, which gave it the Latinate –us ending and plural (hippocampi).
Maybe you think seahorses are too cute for the “monster” moniker. I’ve always found them to be creepy, as well as cute.
As I’ve said before, sometimes people ask me how I choose what I’m reading. The easiest answer is to mention my book groups, which choose about eighteen titles a year for me. (One group meets every month, and one every other month.)
I’ve now read Ann Patchett’s essay collection These Precious Days three times. One book group chose it a few months ago. The other selected it for this month, and I finished rereading today. The first time was when it came out in 2021, because I read everything Ann Patchett produces as soon as I can. It’s a testament to her writing that These Precious Days gets better with each rereading.
My “It’s a testament” sentence above reminds me of “To the Doghouse,” an essay concerning Ann’s love for Snoopy and “Peanuts.” Once, she writes, a “smart, zealous, young copy editor” at the Atlantic told Ann to cut out the “it” at the beginning of a sentence, which Ann defines as a “syntactic expletive that has no meaning.” The “it” is a place filler, in other words.
Ann wonders if the editor would have counseled Dickens to find another opening sentence for A Tale of Two Cities (“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times”). The editor concedes that he would. And, she asks, would Snoopy have been allowed to write, “It was a dark and stormy night”?
“Not if he was writing for the Atlantic,” the young man replies.
The book is full of wisdom and grief and insight, but is also replete with amusing and witty passages like this.
After finishing These Precious Days, I stopped at the library to collect the books I have requested, some of which, I should say, I might not finish reading. I came home with a stack of five, recalling, as I always do, leaving the North Canton library as a kid with my sister and mom, happily weighed down with books.
Here’s how I chose the titles. Ann Patchett writes a whole essay recommending Kate DiCamillo, a children’s writer. I have heretofore read only Because of Winn-Dixie. Now I have Raymie Nightingale and The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane to look forward to.
I believe a YouTuber–either the Minimal Mom or Joshua Becker–recommended The 5 AM Club by Robin Sharma, a self-helpy kind of book that may or may not help my self develop the habit of rising earlier in the morning.
Reader and friend Fran suggested I read Why Fish Don’t Exist, by Lulu Miller, an NPR science reporter. This memoir, subtitled A Story of Loss, Love, and the Hidden Order of Life, sounds like it’s in my, ahem, wheelhouse.
The last volume is called Shortcomings, a graphic novel by Adrian Tomine. I don’t read graphic novels as a rule. As I checked this book out, I struggled to remember why I had reserved it. I often have this problem, especially if I’ve waited a long time for the book to arrive at my neighborhood branch.
With a little online sleuthing at home, I figured it out. I recently saw a Newshour interview with Randall Park (to Northeast Ohioans, by the way, the name of a very large, now defunct shopping mall), who starred in the sitcom Fresh Off the Boat and, by the way, had a brief but funny role on The Office as a temporary replacement for Jim. Park has now directed the film Shortcomings, based on the graphic novel. That PBS interview inspired me to request the book.
Now I have five books to read, to add to those already waiting for me. Just as when I was a child, I sat in the library parking lot for a while, opening each book to look at the authors’ pictures and read the opening paragraphs.
We took a couple of weeks hiatus because our website was down. My friend Pete resuscitated us by updating some things (and I played hooky for a couple of extra days), and now we’re back and pretending it’s Wednesday, the day we talk about words and etymologies. (Thanks, Pete.)
The word bailiwick raised some questions in a recent conversation. When I wanted to verify the definitions of lunar eclipse and solar eclipse, Jewel, my beloved friend and esteemed editor, informed me that science was not her bailiwick. Perhaps it was in her wheelhouse, I suggested. When I asked what a bailiwick was, anyway, Jewel quipped that it must be a wheelhouse. Sadly for me, eclipses were in neither her bailiwick nor her wheelhouse. Lucky for me, the Lissemores came to the rescue, science being in their wheelhouse.
In my book about Father Dan Begin, I asserted that writing an entire book was not in his wheelhouse, an expression which provoked opposite reactions. One reader liked the expression but had never heard it before. Another reader recommended cutting it because it’s a cliché. What was a writer to do? Unfamiliar or too familiar?
Cliché or not, wheelhouse is one of those metaphors that most of us use without thinking. A wheelhouse is not a home for wheels, but denotes the part of a boat that shelters the person at the wheel. Pilothouse is another word for this space. The pilot, or steerer, is not concerned with the rigging and the stern and the gunwale. They are not in his wheelhouse. The wheelhouse is his or her bailiwick, in other words.
Bailiwick is a bailiff’s special domain. Wic-, an Anglo-Saxon suffix, means “village.” A bailiwick is the geographical area where a bailiff–an employee of a British sheriff–can make arrests and generally throw his or her weight around. Today’s court bailiffs have a smaller sphere of influence and may not even be aware that they have a bailiwick.
I would have surmised that bailiff derives from Anglo-Saxon, but I would have been mistaken. In Latin, a baiulus is a porter, and the verb baiulo means to carry a burden. A British bailiff’s job was frequently to deliver writs and summons, carrying those documentary burdens to and fro within his bailiwick.
Both wheelhouse and bailiwick describe your sphere, your area of expertise, what we might today commonly term your “comfort zone.” Comment below: What is yours? And which term do you prefer?
I just learned about a restaurant whose mission includes “conviviality,” in addition to good food and service. Naturally, the Latin root word came to mind.
Vivere is Latin for “to live.” Think of some other -viv- words, and chances are that most of them will connect to life and liveliness. Vivacity, vivacious, vivid, vivify, the musical notation vivace, and viviparous (bearing live young, as opposed to eggs), are members of the family.
The prefix con- derives from the Latin preposition cum, meaning “with.” When you’re convivial, you’re “living with.” You’re lively along with someone. No doubt the restaurant hopes there will be lots of customers for you to be convivial with.
An exceptionally lively fellow diner might be named Vivian!
My twin grandchildren turn two today, and I got to make the cake for their party yesterday. They don’t eat sweets often, so they were pretty excited. The recipe seems like a good fit for a Monday Meals blog post today.
A little controversy preceded the choice of cake. Among the adults, that is, not the twins. My husband and son are particularly fond of Best Chocolate Cake from Betty Crocker’s Cookbook. It’s their perennial request for their birthdays. A few weeks ago, I baked one for my daughter’s birthday, and the babies (as I’m still wont to call them) enjoyed having some. My husband and son were convinced that if I didn’t bake this favorite for the little ones that the little ones would be disappointed. (Whose actual disappointment were they worried about?)
I replied that if you’ve tasted cake only a few times in your whole life, there’s no way you’re going to be “disappointed” in whatever cake you’re given. I fixated on carrot cake, another specialty of mine that I don’t get to prepare often, since Betty Crocker’s chocolate cake has elbowed everything else out.
To be clear, my interest in carrot cake has nothing to do with health and wellness. I wasn’t thinking carrot cake would be good for the kidders. I like it, I like making it, we haven’t had it for quite a while, and my son-in-law is especially fond of carrot cake. So that’s what I made.
This recipe came from a home-ec teacher at Lake High School in Hartville, where I taught forty years ago. It’s easy, although I’ve complicated it a tiny bit. There are also similar versions online, like this one. The shortcut is that you use baby food carrots instead of grating actual carrots.
3 of these 4-ounce containers
Ruth Kardos’s Carrot Cake
Grease and flour 9 X 13 inch pan. Preheat oven to 300 degrees.
Sift or whisk together: Beat together:
2 cups flour 4 eggs
2 teaspoons soda 2 cups sugar
2 teaspoons cinnamon 1 cup vegetable oil
1/2 teaspoon salt 12 ounces baby-food or junior
carrots
Add liquid ingredients on right to dry ingredients on left and beat thoroughly. (Add 1 cup walnuts and 3/4 cup raisins if you like. I never do.) Pour batter into pan. Bake about 50 minutes in 300 degree oven. Let cool before frosting.
My revision is to add an actual grated carrot or two to the batter. I like seeing actual strands of carrot in the cake, and it adds to the texture and moisture. The salt is also my addition to the recipe.
For the frosting, beat together one pound of confectioners sugar (sifted if it’s lumpy), a quarter cup (one half stick) of softened butter, two teaspoons vanilla, and one package (eight ounces) softened cream cheese until smooth. Schmear all over the top of the cooled cake.
The target audience seemed to enjoy the “happy birthday cake.” Daddy’s quiches plus Mommy’s scones plus Grandma’s cake provided energy to play with the new toys, like this raceway from Uncle Doug:
(Readers–I revised this post a little, not realizing that it would have to re-post and re-publish. Sorry you’re receiving this slightly changed version of this in your email.)
Imagination is the beginning of creation. George Bernard Shaw
As I continue to think about Women Talking, the novel by Miriam Toews (rhymes with saves) and the movie directed by Sarah Polley, I read reviews and watch interviews on YouTube. I’ve also checked out some of Toews’s previous books.
Swing Low: A Life (2000) is classified as non-fiction, though it’s unclassifiable. It’s a memoir created by Miriam but narrated (fictionally) by her father Mel. He was a gifted teacher and a quiet, cautious Mennonite man. In 1998, he walked out of the hospital where he was being treated for depression and killed himself. Miriam was 34. The book records his thoughts, imagined by Miriam, during his last hospitalization.
Mel’s voice in Swing Low is earnest, sometimes funny, and self-deprecating to a fault. Miriam seems able to feel, and make us feel, the grief and illusions of his sadness. He could infuriate his nurses, his wife Elvira, and his attentive daughters, but Miriam seems able to transplant herself into her father’s tormented mind.
As I read, I recall that the elders of the Mennonite community termed the sexual violence in their midst“the result of wild female imagination.” Toews slyly steals the phrase to describe her own Women Talking as “an act of female imagination.” That phrase also describes Swing Low, a book unlike anything else I’ve ever read.
March, or Martius, was the Romans’ first month of the year for a long time. Mars received this honor because he was the father of Rome’s founders, Romulus and Remus. (Their mother was Rhea Silvia, a Vestal Virgin raped by Mars, the god of war.) March became the third month of the year in about 153 BCE.
Our month March, with its warlike connotations, is related to martial, as in martial law, when the military patrol the streets. The Romans named the fourth planet from the sun Mars presumably because of its blood-red color.
I have always thought that march, as in a parade and as in what the ants do one by one and two by two*, also derived from Mars. I thought that parades and marches (also march music) have a military origin. You know, soldiers marching along in close order, on their way to war, or, we would hope, on their way back to their barracks.
Thanks to you and our Wednesday Word, I looked up “to march” and learned that marcher is an old French word of uncertain parentage meaning “to walk.” No military connection. Yet more misinformation I have passed on to students over the years.
*This morning, I watched some very militaristic marching ants with my grandchildren in this YouTube video many, many times. If you’ve forgotten that song, it’s actually pretty mesmerizing. Let me know what you think.
I was planning to write my Weekend Editions post (I’m late, I know) about the novellas pictured above, Small Things Like These and Foster, both by Claire Keegan. Then I saw the film Women Talking and also read the novel by Miriam Toews that it’s based on. All these works concern patriarchy and violence toward women.
I procrastinated in writing because I always imagine the impatience of readers, friends, and acquaintances. Kathy, enough already about women!! We know how you feel!! Can’t you write (think, talk, read) about something else??
Then, on Saturday night, I saw the silent version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, with Lon Chaney, at the Cleveland Cinematheque, after a few weeks of talking about the book with my husband, who was reading the novel. Thinking about how to write this post, my mind zoomed out to a larger view of the issues regarding abuse of women.
Small Things Like These concerns an Irish girls’ school and laundry where young women are exploited and abused. In Foster, a young girl is shipped off to a foster family by seemingly uncaring parents. She has no say in where she goes and how long she stays. (Both books are great.)
Women Talking grew out of an actual incident in which women in a Mennonite community in Bolivia were drugged and raped repeatedly over a period of years by their own male relatives and neighbors. Eventually, in 2009, men were arrested and convicted (though it’s not clear that the attacks have completely stopped). Toews in her novel and director/screenwriter Sarah Polley pick up the story after the arrests. In their fictional accounts, a small group of women gather to decide how to proceed. If the men come back, won’t the violence continue? How will they protect themselves and their daughters? What would forgiveness look like? Is forgiveness even an option? It’s an entire novel and an entire film of women talking.
I saw, of course, the common threads in these works, having to do with who has power and with how cultural conditioning over centuries has shaped our thinking (including women’s thinking). All these works concern power, who has it and how it is wielded.
My epiphany during Hunchback was to realize how integral such questions are to so much great literature and film. Victor Hugo makes sure that your sympathies lie with Quasimodo, the outcast seen as a monster by the world, and with Esmeralda, the powerless but generous girl he loves, who’s a mere object to the priest Claude Frollo and other men. Sure, the novel and film exhibit political incorrectness. Would we make a person with a disability as grotesque as Quasimodo today? Would we refer to Esmeralda as a gypsy and portray the Romani people as kidnappers? I hope not. But Victor Hugo’s heart is with the victimized and powerless. His Romantic imagination created these lowly characters to be the admirable and sympathetic ones.
So many examples came to mind. Like Hugo, Charles Dickens’s works inspire a love and appreciation for people at the bottom of the social ladder, who are frequently women. Same with Leo Tolstoy, whose compassion for Anna Karenina, for example, is heart-rending. (That these men may not have treated the women in their own lives with dignity is the topic of another post.)
Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Shakespeare’s Portia and Miranda, Vergil’s Dido, Salinger’s Phoebe and Zooey, Dostoevsky’s Sonia, Lewis Carroll’s Alice, Chaucer’s Wife of Bath, Thelma and Louise. These are all strong women, or certainly sympathetic women. And, yes, I’m choosing male creators,* because I realize that this theme is a through line in Western literature, right alongside the misogyny. Artists’ imaginations can encompass experiences different from their own. Artists like composer John Adams, whom I wrote about here, recognize that the best stories, the most engaging and moving stories, concern people who struggle. Those people are frequently women.
What women’s stories have moved you? Please share in the comments.
*A woman, Callie Khouri, wrote the screenplay for Thelma and Louise, but Ridley Scott directed it.
If you live in the Cleveland area, chances are you’ve heard of pączki (pronounced poonch-kee), fried Polish pastries filled with jam or custard. Pączki means “package,” or, more precisely, “packages,” because pączki is plural. Pączek is the singular form.
Cleveland is home to lots of people of Polish descent and other Eastern European nationalities. Our neighborhood bakeries and our media feature these ethnic specialties at this time of year.
Pączki are a pre-Lenten treat. (So today is too late). Their ingredients are, traditionally, all the goodies around the kitchen from which you must abstain during Lent: sugar, flour, jams, and so on. You pack all these things into a doughy package and enjoy them while you can.
In Poland, Pączki Day is celebrated on the Thursday before Ash Wednesday, presumably to give the family a week to consume all the pączki. America’s Pączki Day is Fat Tuesday, the day before Ash Wednesday, because we don’t mind devouring all the pączki in a single day.
I can’t vouch for this recipe, but it sounds delicious. How many pączki have you eaten in your life? How many in one sitting?
