One year while working as volunteer staff for the Viable Paradise writer’s workshop on Martha’s Vineyard we discovered a local farm, Morning Glory farm, with locally grown produce, including fresh cranberries from nearby Cape Cod Massachusetts, and Carver (in Eastern Massachusetts), both places where commercial cranberry bogs are carefully cultivated, and the wild native cranberry…
Category: Language & Lingusitics
These are posts about language & linguistics and philology. Indo-European languages are much more common than any other language group in terms of my interests and posts.The actual languages might be English, Old English, Middle English, Old Norse, Medieval Welsh, Modern Welsh, Old Irish, Middle Irish or even Modern Irish. Sometimes I drag in French, too. It’s hard for me to use words without thinking about their etymology, so language & linguistics creep in to otherwise unrelated posts.
Mistletoe
Mistletoe, while celebrated at Christmas for reasons that are, historically speaking, distant enough to be unattributable to a specific cause, is unfairly held in disdain the rest of the year. The green small-leaved white-berried plant, dismissed as a parasite most of the year, is, at Christmas, gathered in small bunches, woven with ribbons, and suspended…
Mead
Mead is essentially honey wine, made by fermenting watered honey, and sometimes, adding additional flavors like spices or fruit juice. Mead was a fairly popular alcoholic beverage in the European Middle ages, and earlier. Mead residue has been found in vessels in Celtic ritual burials, and even in the tomb of King Midas of Phrygia,…
Gorse, Furze, and Whin
A few years ago, an acquaintance emailed me in extreme frustration because he’d looked up furze, a word he encountered while reading a mystery set in Scotland, in a dictionary. The definition for furze was “whin; gorse.” When he looked up whin and gorse their entries referred him to furze. I’ve had similar and equally…
Poet
The Greeks called him “a poet,” which name has, as the most excellent, gone through other languages. It comes of this word poiein, which is “to make”; wherein I know not whether by luck or wisdom we Englishmen have met with the Greeks in calling him “a maker.” Which name how high and incomparable a…
Memento Mori
The phrase memento mori is usually used in the context of a literary topos, that is a commonplace, or a motif in art. The New Latin (i.e. not Classical, but late Medieval or Early Modern Latin) is derived from Latin mementō, singular imperative of meminisse, “to remember’ + Latin morī, “to die.” Memento mori is…
Buckles, Cobblers, Grunts and Slumps
It’s blueberry season in Maine. The abundance of blueberries got me thinking about my mom’s blueberry buckle recipe. What, pray tell, is a buckle? Buckles Fruit buckles are very much associated in my mind with New England, but my quick check of southern recipe collections suggest that that’s not the case historically. Southern recipes for…
Asterisk
Asterisk is one of those words in English that began as a noun, but is often used as a verb, with the meaning “To mark with an asterisk” (AHD s.v. asterisk). An asterisk is: n. 1. A star-shaped figure (*) used chiefly to indicate an omission, a reference to a footnote, or an unattested word,…
Coulee
If you know anyone from Eastern Montana, you likely have heard them refer to coulees. In Montana and most of the Western U.S., a coulee is “A deep gulch or ravine with sloping sides, often dry in summer” (AHD s.v. coulee). While coulee means different things in other places (a stream bed or even a…
Welsh
The word Welsh can refer to the Celtic language of Wales, called Cymric in that language, or it can be an adjective referring to items related to “Wales or its people, language or culture” (AHD s.v. Welsh. The etymology of Welsh is interesting. Etymologically, the word Welsh entered Modern English via the Middle English Walische,…