Day 126: Language oddities, and NOLA!

I often stub my ear (as it were) on words or phrases which suddenly appear, out of nowhere from my perspective, and are everywhere right away.  I've been thinking about two of those recently.

One of them is the word "kiddo", usually co-occurring with "my", especially spoken by teachers, as in: "I told my kiddos today that they should get ready for their next test."  This one has been around, I think, for maybe five or six years.  It appeared out of nowhere, and then I was hearing it everywhere.  The girls' teachers, Kivrin's tutor, my students when they do their field placements.  Everywhere.  I really don't get it.  It sounds strange to me.  I wonder if it's a replacement for the oft-called-out "kids" ("they're not baby goats", which is honestly ridiculous, as if language didn't change), seen as better than calling them "children", or "students".  Has anyone else heard this one?

The other one kind of makes me roll my eyes.  When ordering a salad at a restaurant, I am often asked if I want to "add a protein".  For example, today, I ordered a salad (make your own) to which I added, among other things, chickpeas, eggs, and nuts.  The person then asked me if I wanted to add a protein.  Of course, there's already lots of protein there.  Here, protein seems to be a euphemism for "meat" (because it's almost always steak, chicken, and some kind of fish on tap).  Isn't that weird? 

Other than that, I'm in the truly insane time of the semester, and yet Rick and I are going to New Orleans this weekend for no other reason than that we really want to, and this was when tickets were affordable (and, to be fair, it was our 25th anniversary this summer, so).  Anyone have any recommendations for us while we're there?

Day 120: Toes!

So, I don't know if I've mentioned, but our cat Bastet is polydactyl (she's lucky she didn't end up with a name like Polly or Digit)(although I'll be honest and mention that one of her nicknames is "Toes"). 

We often joke that she has to work pretty hard to keep track of all of those toes.  Evidence of this assertion includes the following:

(The evidence consists both of the overlapping and central toe placement, and also the prevalence of napping behavior.)

Meanwhile, Rick just treated me to an afternoon pick-me-up as I struggle through an endless pile of some delightful essays.

Happy Friday, all!

Day 101: Pink flamingo update

Thank you, Ellen, for finding out more about pink plastic flamingos.  If you all are interested, you can check this out.  What really caught my attention (aside from the fact that the creator of the pink plastic flamingo and his wife dressed alike for 35 years)(and the fact that his pink plastic flamingo is based on a photo from National Geographic)(and the fact that they come in pairs, one with its head up and one with its head down - did you know that?), is the fact that this guy worked for a company that made plastic animals.  Not just flamingos - animals.  Which begs several questions: one, why did flamingos take off (get it, get it?)? and two, where are all those other animals?  I mean, I don't think I've seen other plastic animals on people's lawns - have you?  And what animals?  Chickens?  Cows?  Goats?  The mind boggles.

Day 96: Pink flamingos

Yesterday was a thirteen-hour juggernaut, at the end of which it didn’t even occur to me to turn on my computer and post.  But there is something that has captured the attention of the magpie: pink plastic lawn flamingos.

Where do they come from?

I mean, I get that, at this point, they are largely kitschy or ironic, or both. But surely they weren’t, to begin with. Surely there was some origin point at which someones, somewhere, thought that real flamingos on lawns was a really awesome thing, and that having pretend flamingos on lawns would be a cool second-best?

Or something?

I haven’t had a chance to go poking around into the origin story of pink flamingos (although I think I have to, at some point, when students aren’t panicking about midterms, and I’m caught up on grading, and my conference presentation is written, and and and), but meanwhile, maybe someone has some inside knowledge that will shed light on this pressing question?

Inquiring magpies want to know.

Day 94: Morning song

Lying awake in the pre-dawn darkness, an explosion of bird-sing, then silence. 

Hsht, hsht, I imagine a beleaguered bird mother saying, hsht!  You'll wake the neighbors!

Both of us wishing for just five more minutes - five more minutes, little ones, hsht!

Day 79: Mulling

I have been mulling - for some time, really, but quite a lot recently - systems of thought and/or practice which have been robbed of their transformative or radical potential, and how to reclaim that potential.  I started to write about it, knowing that this is a many-post sort of thing, but it turned into a screed more than an exploration, and I want to think about it a bit more. 

So, instead, a few bullet points for you:
- It's raining here, off and on
- Yes, in Southern California
- I'm glad, we need it
- And it's not lightning-type rain, so it actually reduces rather than increases, the risk of wildfire
- It means that I didn't ride D this morning
- But I did get a pile of grading done, and prepared for Monday morning's class
- So maybe I can sit down with my spinning wheel this afternoon?
- After I make a pot of minestrone soup
- And maybe take pictures of the socks I just finished
- But I'm not going to block the shawl I finished this week, since I'm not sure it'll dry all that well
- I really need to cast on for a baby sweater for a friend who's due in November
- I'm thinking a Baby Surprise Jacket, since they're so much fun to knit
- But my stash is packed away during our latest construction stuff, and I'm having trouble with the idea of buying yarn when I know I've got to have something in stash, right?
- On the other hand, is it so bad to buy yarn?

All right.  I'm off to make soup and spin and watch the rain.  Happy Saturday!

Day 78: My family knows me so well

On the family group chat today:

Tess:

Tess:  I saw this on Tumblr and honestly, this describes you to a T, mom

Rick:  Should be "a subversive force of construction"


I think this is a compliment...  ?

Day 77: Thoughts on the word "strident"

Except not my thoughts.  Read Deb Cameron's piece about the word "strident" (in this case, as applied by a male Twitter user with regard to Greta Thunberg) today, and thought it was worth sharing.

Meanwhile, how about that political chaos, eh?

Day 76: Octopodes follow-up

I told my students about the plural of octopus (octopodes, for those who missed the earlier post)(or who missed the footnote about this).  They always find it entertaining (or, they find me entertaining because I'm so entertained by the whole thing)(I take what I can get).  The next class, one of the students indignantly informed me that her partner, upon being told about octopodes, asked what that meant for the plural of centipede?  She was annoyed (he harshed her buzz).  I was delighted.  What a great question!  I love great questions.  But I told her that I don't think it changes anything for centipede, because I believe that centipede derives from a Latin root (rather than a Greek one). 

Yep.  I just checked. Latin, ergo (ha!) centipedes.

But still octopodes*.


*With, in case I forgot to mention it, antepenultimate stress. 

Day 67: axolotl

The NYT published this poem in its Magazine on Sunday, and I just loved it.


axolotl
   - ire'na lara silva

          little warrior
almost imperceptably
     scarred
from so much healing
          how many regrown limbs
          how many repaired organs
even precious
     brain tissue
          created anew
teach me this
          little warrior
how you remain
     tender and
infinite
          soft and eternal
          in the face of struggle
how is it the healing
     has already begun
          even before the wound

Day 45: Pool drain update

So, I finally asked Rick about the pool drains.  (He's a hydrogeologist; it's kind of in his wheelhouse.)  I'd kind of thought the answer had to be pumps, and I'm right. 

Just in case any of you were actually perplexed by the whole thing, or were worried that the pool was going to drain while I wasn't looking.

Day 43: Lingering childhood misperceptions, Part 2

(Not my misperception this time!)

Imagine the scene:
A ten-years-younger me, more energetic, svelter, in front of about 35 students, in an aging classroom with blackboards, big windows open onto a quad.  I'm leaning against the desk up front, leading a discussion about I don't remember what - something incredibly insightful and educational, for sure.  Students are lively and engaged (except the dude in back who was attending carefully to his fantasy football picks, but there's only so much I can do), asking questions, offering answers.  Basically, your standard college classroom.

A student raises her hand and asks, a propos of I can't remember what, why the symbology of Easter has all those rabbits and chicks and eggs and things? 

An aside: my students know about my magpie brain.  They know that I delight in finding lovely shiny thought-objects and taking them home and turning them over and poking at them.  They also know that I can be easily distracted by a new bright and shiny object, like an interesting question.  And they know (because I tell them) that I think curiosity is the number one hallmark of a lifelong learner, and that I really want them to be lifelong learners even more than I want them to be linguists.  So they ask random questions, and I answer them.  The one thing that saves me and them is that I tend to be unexpectedly excellent at relating apparently-disparate bits of information - so whatever distraction they think they're offering almost invariably leads us right back to whatever it is that we're covering in class.

So, student raises hand, asks question, and I take it as a totally legitimate turn in the conversation and hop up to sit on the desk and start talking about spring and the return of life after the winter and Eostara and fertility and how this relates to resurrection in Christianity and in other religious-symbolic systems as well, etc etc.  As you do.  And then I say that nothing really symbolizes fertility like rabbits (which, I point out in an aside, breed like, well, rabbits) or like seeing a little chick hatch from this seemingly-lifeless oval rock-like lump.

And this young man in the front row, right smack in the middle, gets this dawning look of horrified enlightenment on his face.  He may even have made a sort of mumbling oh no really sort of noise.  All I know is that his neighbors and I all looked at him, and I asked him what he'd just realized.  And he, in tones of embarrassed misery, says:

"I always thought the rabbits hatched from the eggs!"

People, you'd be proud.  I did not laugh.  I didn't even snicker or make smirk-like motions with my mouth or eyes.  I did say that no, rabbits are mammals - and that they aren't echidnas or platypuses, so no body-external eggs involved in their birth. 

And then I went home and promptly ensured that both of my daughters knew very clearly that rabbits didn't hatch from eggs.

Because, of course, I totally know where he got that idea - from the Cadbury egg commercials, right?  And all the Easter bunny delivering eggs stuff.  And he just never revisited it in light of later information (like, mammals bear live young - barring, as I'd mentioned, the echidna and platypus).  It stuck around there, in the recesses of his mind, until the dawning light of a random classroom conversation got him to put two and two together.

I suppose one moral of this story is that my willingness to entertain apparently-random questions has broader educational implications than I give credit for.

Other morals to this story will be addressed in Part 3 of my little narrative.

Day 41: Question and answer

So, I've been wondering, as you do, where the water in the pool goes after it splashes over the wave-reducing edge.  I mean, it has to get back into the pool somehow, right?  Or we'd run out of water (some of the lap swimmers are really splashy). 

Lucky for me, Kivrin is of an equally curious turn of mind, and dove down to the bottom of the pool this morning to confirm: the water is returned through these round white vents (would we call them vents?) that are strategically placed across the pool bottom.

Now my next question is: how is sufficient pressure maintained in whatever lines lead from the drainage troughs to the bottom of the pool to keep the water coming into the pool rather than draining out?

(Please tell me I'm not the only one who spends time wondering about things like this...)

Day 40: Instructions on not giving up

Instructions on Not Giving Up

More than the fuchsia funnels breaking out

of the crabapple tree, more than the neighbor’s

almost obscene display of cherry limbs showing

their cotton-candy-colored blossoms to the slate

sky of Spring rains, it’s the greening of the trees

that really gets to me.  When all the shock of white

and taffy, the world’s baubles and trinkets, leave

the pavement strewn with the confetti of aftermath

the leaves come.  Patient, plodding, a green skin

growing over whatever winter did to us, a return

to the strange idea of continuous living despite

the mess of us, the hurt, the empty.  Fine then,

I’ll take it, the tree seems to say, a new slick leaf

unfurling like a fist to an open palm,

I’ll take it all.

- Ada Limon

Day 38: Dinner table conversation

"Bluefin tuna can weigh 1500 pounds."
"That's bigger than our horse."
"It's kind of scary to think about something that big swimming around in the ocean, don't you think?"
"Like sharks."
"No!  Not like sharks!  Everybody gives sharks a hard time, but you're more likely to get hit by lightening or killed by a vending machine falling over than get bitten by a shark! They have an important role to play!"
"Bluefin tuna look like Pepperidge Farm crackers."
"That's true.  And college students will worship anything."
"I don't think college students would worship bluefin tuna."
[scornful look]
"No.  The fish crackers."
"Oh.  I'll buy that."

Day 37: Where there is wool...

there will be a cat.

(Note, each of those squares is surrounded by t-pins.  She is working very hard to be sitting in juuuust the right way!)

Day 36: The question I'm currently asking myself

How is it that we have so much stuff??

(This is pursuant to needing to empty out our fiber room - aka the TV room - and our bedroom in preparation for finally - finally!! - tearing out the disgusting carpet.)

Day 22: Prescriptive grammar is a weird thing

I mull this over quite a lot.  People of a certain generation and background (caveat here: I was taught to say them this way, too, but after doing all of my usual mulling, I got over it) tend to produce the following:

I am feeling/doing well.

where I would say:
I am feeling/doing good.

 As I said, I've thought about this a lot (this is what I do in my spare time) over the years, and then recently, I heard someone say, several times, "I felt badly about that", and it caught my attention, because I think it's doing the same thing.  Before I say why I have changed my ways, think about which of the following you prefer:

I am feeling sad.
I am feeling sadly.

I'm guessing it's the first one, right?  Assuming I'm right (I can hear y'all nodding from here), that's because "feel" is what we might call a linking verb (and in the sentences above, "do" is functioning the same way) - that is, a verb that links the subject to the predicate (in this case, the subject is "I", and the predicate is what I'm predicating about "I" which is that I'm feeling sad).  It creates an equals sign between "I" and "sad".  "Sadly", by contrast, makes the verb "feel" here into an intransitive verb, because "sadly" is an adverb, which modifies the verb and tells us more about the manner of the feeling.  In other words, a characteristic of the verbal action of feeling is sad.  But this sentence is really saying that sad is a characteristic of me, not of the action of feeling.

So, looking again at the first sentences, and at the newest object of my grammatical mulling ("I felt badly") it's the same situation.  In the case of "I'm feeling/doing well", it's a judgment of how good I am at feeling or doing, not a statement about my state of mind.  In the case of "I felt badly", the adverb "badly" says something about the verb - I'm not so good at feeling, or I knock things off shelves when I'm feeling for them.  But I would argue that we're really trying to say something about me, hence, I felt bad.

Just sayin'.

Day 16: Synchronicity

It was warm today.  I really shouldn't gripe about muggy weather - I know that our humidity issues aren't the same as those in other parts of the country (to be fair, neither do those other parts get humidity in the single digits, so I figure I get to complain a little bit when ours goes over 50%, right?), but the air just feels warm and heavy, in a kind of annoying way. 

At the barn this morning (where it was abundantly clear that there was no way to get there early enough that I could beat the heat), I figured it was a good day to give Disco a bath.  Not only did she really need it, but she's also been off lately, so it was going to be a handwalking day - a good time for a horse to dry after a bath (read: before rolling around in her stall to really grind the dirt in her wet coat).  You know it's hot when, instead of fussing about the hose, she stands quietly and looks almost happy (except for the face-spraying part - she's not so sure about that).

Afterwards, we walked around rather slowly.  She's off.  And I'm off.  And I don't know if I've mentioned, but poor Tilly has been limping lately, too.  All of us in our left lower/hind limbs.  It occurred to me today that we'd make a funny sort of conga line all walking along together - step, hitch, step, hitch!  (Or, with them, stepstepstep hitch! stepstepstep hitch!  but you get the idea.) 

We're all going to get better, I'm sure, but in the meantime, it's nice to know that the hitch in my gitalong and I are in good company.

Day 14: A question for the ages

Why do spiders insist upon building their webs across the paths where I walk?  (These are big spiders, but I honestly don't think they have any hope of catching a human.)

Also, why do they keep building their webs when things (read: me) walk through those webs and break them? (Please note: I don't do this on purpose.  I don't do this on purpose for two reasons, actually: one, it would be mean; two, I might end up with a spider in my hair.)

Does this mean that the kinds of things that spiders actually hope to catch and eat are flying along the same paths where I walk? 

I imagine that this must be frustrating for the spiders.  I can see the blog post now:

Weaving Spider
Day 14:  WTF?
Why do humans persist in walking into my web every morning??  I just finish getting the darned thing woven, and I settle down for a nice rest before the gnats start flying around, and bam!  Human!  You'd think they'd learn!