Musings
To a great degree, our vocabularies reflect the kinds of things we feel a need to express. In other words (haha), the words we originate, use and keep current in our languages reflect the things we feel a need to say. Thus, unfamiliar words judged archaic by our dictionaries are words for things we no longer talk about—or for things for which we have other or newer terminology.
One category of words that are now uncommon in American English refer to landscape features. A quick glance at place names across the British Isles reveals myriad examples, which include holm, -stead, and heath. Suffixes -bridge and -ford remain current in our vocabularies and thus are self-explanatory.
Today’s vocabulary*: holm
a flat piece of ground adjacent to a river that floods when the water level is high
Today’s vocabulary: -stead
suffix referring to place or town, of Germanic origin and related to the Dutch stad
Today’s vocabulary: heath
an area of open, uncultivated land vegetated with low vegetation like gorse, heather, and grasses [differs from forests or cultivated lands, for example]
* Definitions adapted from Apple dictionary.
Posted at 6:40 PM |
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Ok. Here’s another popular culture version of prehistory, this one the movie 10K BC. With trepedation, I checked out the NYTimes review and immediately a word I’d never seen before jumped out at me. Was this an archaeology term I’d missed (and how?)? Or popular culture I’d missed—maybe a insurance commercial or two?
Ah, Google informed me—the latter. A.O. Scott’s word snuffleupagus is a lower-case corruption of the name of a character on Sesame Street, Aloysius Snuffleupagus—a superhuman sized puppet that looks something like a tuskless mammoth/mastodon.
And, yet, Scott uses the word as if it is a synonym for mammoth/mastodon, or as if it is a real species term:
…the Yagahl, a tribe of snuffleupagus hunters…
and:
…the big, climactic fight, complete with an epic snuffleupagus rampage…
FYI NYT and A.O. Scott: mammoth≠mastodon≠ snuffleupagus (or even Snuffleupagus).
Note: this etymological snafu bothered me so much I was distracted from the other prehistoric misinformation I’m sure the movie dispenses….
Posted at 11:39 AM |
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Good thing it was downhill for miles back to the car…. This loop, around and through The Pocket, totaled 9.71 miles. Whew!
It’s still the earliest of winter/spring transitions up in NW GA. We found only three sets of wildflowers, although I saw non-blooming greenry almost constantly along the path.
For Googlers and other researchers, there are two hiking areas/landforms called The Pocket in NW GA. The other one is on the edge of John’s Mountain in the Armuchee Ridges (that looks like you’d say are-moo-chee, but locally they say are-murr-chee; go figure). This one is nestled up next to Pigeon Mountain. Cherokees took refuge across this area when Intruders began to proliferate across this continent, and they have contributed substantially to the surviving place names….
Posted at 10:22 PM |
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Mostly I avoid pondering where our elected representatives choose to allocate our federal tax dollars, but then I poke around in the Smithsonian web site and I feel a bit less cynical.
John White made a watercolor of this Roanoke leader in 1585, and this is an old photograph of it. Love the curled-up toes!
After checking a few more images, maybe this is just how White drew feet…. Perhaps he trained in shoe-drawing and not foot-drawing…. On the other hand (har), his fingers look a bit floppy, too….
Posted at 10:22 PM |
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Currently, Atlanta’s version of the national (multinational, but not global?) economic slowdown can be difficult to discern. Here’s the old White Provision Company (mmm, meatpacking, aka slaughterhouse*), originally built in 1910 and now listed on the National Register, being transformed into mixed use: commercial space and housing units.
The building is not far from GA Tech, and college/university towns/neighborhoods seem somewhat insulated from this downturn.
Note, too, the rain (the iPhone camera’s really better than this example—crappy light). VGood! Yea! We’re especially happy that it swept in Leslie à la Mary Poppins (not really) via Amtrak’s Crescent route (here on the Amtrak site, and here on Wikipedia).
* And also, if you believe the White Provision building web site, the building hosted Brad Pitt and David Duchovny et al. for location shooting for Kalifornia (1993).
Posted at 6:33 PM |
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Biodiversity—the variety of all life, from genes and species to ecosystems—is intimately linked to Earth’s climate and, inevitably, to climate change. Biodiversity and poverty are also inextricably connected. For instance, changes to natural ecosystems influence both climate change and people’s ability to cope with some of its damaging impacts. And in their turn climate change, as well as people’s responses to it, affect biodiversity. Unpicking all these strands clearly shows that conserving and managing biodiversity can help natural systems and vulnerable people cope with a shifting global climate.
Is this assertion by Hannah Reid and Krystyna Swiderska in the abstract of a paper for the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) correct? Certainly, the first instinct is to say yes.
But.
Let’s start with biodiversity: it is not fixed, but instead something that has always fluctuated, both through time and across space. The assortment of species we see today and their home ranges have no special or sacred qualities—in fact, they were different five hundred years ago, ten thousand years ago, etc. (let alone, say, thirty million years ago).
So, yes, among the many factors that influence biodiversity, climate is one.
Here’s where I start to struggle: “people’s ability to cope with some of its damaging impacts”…. Climate change is both damaging and enhancing, because those words evidence judgemental perspectives. “Damaging” assumes any change is only negative. Not so.
You sorta have consider the history of the human species as a long, complex trail of significant human-induced landscape change (maybe more of a spreading blotch). These alterations accelerated with the shift away from subsistence that was exclusively from gathering and hunting, and with concomitant demographic increases. Duh. The flip side of all this is that humans are around in such numbers as we see today because we are good at this adaptation stuff, aka coping. But. [Hope I don’t come off as flip.]
It is virtually impossible to prioritize preserving biodiversity as the most important or wisest goal in our reaction to climate change. It may be a wise goal to promote the preservation of biodiversity as leverage to induce people to be more responsible about impacts on the environment within their control, but otherwise the argument evinces more rhetoric than logic.
Posted at 5:16 PM |
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Over at the High on Val’s Day I learned a new word— oinochoe, sometimes spelled oenochoe.
I knew krater (sometimes crater; Greek*: κεράννυμι)—those are the big vase-shaped vessels (sorta) with vertical sides and big open mouths (usually), with paintings on those straight sides (the art museum versions, anyway).
What I hadn’t retained was how kraters were used: they’re the Greek version of wine party-kegs. That’s where the wine was cut with some water, then the liquid was dipped out for the partiers. I guess kraters were probably important and central to the party scene, somewhat like a huge functional floral arrangement….
The oinochoe (Greek*: οινοχόη) was another part of the wine-party ritual and ceramic assemblage. It’s a smaller jug used to transport watered wine from the krater to the partiers. It has a curvier shape than the krater, and the examples I saw also had painted scenes on the shoulders and bulbous sides, and sometimes were decorated near the rims, too.
Anyway, the big take-home message here is that the Greeks (the haves, anyway) were big into the party scene complete with an assemblage of wine vessels, both decorative and functional. The partying was for more than simple pleasure (whoopee!). The various vessels also were placed in burials, so wine-feasts were linked not only to religious rituals but to funerary activities, too…. In a sense, this connection to wine undergirded the ancient Greeks’ sense of self and cultural identity, and they shipped wine to their colonies so they could continue to, well, be Greeks.
A corollary is that in the art museum setting, lovely archaeological artifacts lack their context (there I go again!), and are, for the most part, reduced to being just objects. Pretty, sometimes. Interesting, sometimes. But soulless. Spot-lit for aesthetics and little more….
* Greek translations are from Wikipedia….
Posted at 6:03 PM |
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As the link mentions, the bookstore is in the former Advance Gloves building….
My bonus for forgetting my passport (which meant I couldn’t travel with JCB to Windsor to do errands, including snagging a case of Tanqueray in a lower proof than available in the US of A for my FIL) was several hours browsing in John King Books, the (almost) original downtown Detroit location. I wandered the first and second floors, skipped the third floor (looked like all fiction), and climbed to the fourth. I had my heavy coat. Ya gotta love a bookstore with limited heating and lights over each aisle that you turn on while you’re there and off when you leave.
I behaved myself and only snagged seven volumes; that’s restraint!
And, no, I didn’t see Jay Leno or Teller in the stacks….
Posted at 10:22 PM |
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A lovely bottle of bubbly we shared on Xmas Eve; hand-carried to us all by S. from Germany.
The OLPC laptops are making a (positive) difference, the WP reports; kids favor especially using the camera and video capabilities. Their story is from very rural Peru. Give one (or more) here. You can choose to get one for yourself, too!
The snooty discriminating French may bow to market pressure and expand the geographic area that can produce effervescent wines that can legally be called champagne. Well, at the earliest in 2009, and the vines won’t come on line until, um, at least 2015…leaving them plenty of time to reverse or adjust the decision….
The NYT has finally published (dated yesterday; hmm, I was too busy to read the paper and missed it then) an article that explicates the anthropologist’s analysis of Diamond’s “Collapse”—basically too much environmental determinism and an unbalanced argument about human decisions. Diamond is a geographer, and gets it a bit, well, skewed (you’ve probably gotten that from me eight or ten times; apologies for the repetition). Yes, climate change is a factor, but, the complexity of cultural evolution isn’t addressed properly in D’s volume. [Reminder to self: get that MS finished!]
Posted at 9:09 AM |
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If…*
You’d think that by now biologists agree on what a gene is and have moved on.
Apparently not.
And the reason is both historical and scalar.
It’s historical in that the term was originally used in biology and genetics in a particular way that made sense at the time. Then, as research continued, scientists uncovered additional complexity in the role of genes and genetics. In addition, they began to look at genes from new scales and perspectives.
Thus, while a geneticist tends to still see genes as locatable regions of genomic sequences, those who delve into phenotypes and function tend to find that an insufficient definition. For example, DNA, that old workhorse considered the master molecule of life, is now seen to be sometimes quite passive (meaning other factors can act or dominate), and just plain multifunctional in ways that weren’t known when the locatable regions concept was developed.
If you want to read more (I’m not being sarcastic!), check out this 2007 paper by Evelyn Fox Keller and David Harel in PLoS ONE, one of the free, on-line Public Library of Science journals (hence: “PLoS”).
My take on this: see, scale makes all the difference (sorry to flog this idea, but, as I’m sure you’ve discerned, this is one of my truths).
Corollary: it may be difficult to match your language and concepts to the scale of analysis. If you’re using the words already in use, they may no longer suffice if defined in old ways. On the other hand, if you introduce new vocabulary, you may introduce layers of confusion. Still, the latter may well be the best choice.
Philosophical question: does this topic link somehow to my current “off-duty” reading that has settings in China, Tibet, and Turkey?—three different volumes….
Keller, Evelyn Fox, and David Harel (2007) Beyond the Gene. PLoS ONE 2(11): e1231. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0001231 [Apologies to AFK if she’d prefer to be “Fox Keller, Evelyn”; I see both in the Google-able world.]
Sidebar: I see pink champagne, rechristened rosé champagne of course, is très chic, but I remain a prosecco gal! (Especially at those prices!)
Okay, one more. How could I not link to this, on a huge ice skating rink in Mexico City’s main plaza, created atop forty-six miles of chilling tubes, energized by ten truck-generators? Did they make the rink because the US border is harder to cross these days?—so they import the cold?
* If your eyes are sharp and your screen is good, you’ll see ice—the picture is from several years back, but right here in good ol’ ATL….
Today’s vocabulary—peripeteia
the sudden reversal of fortune or change in circumstances, often used referring to fictional narrative.
Posted at 7:16 PM |
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