Not since the Vagina Monologues has such a comprehensive list of words for the female parts been assembled. It showed up on my Twitter stream, via The Blogess.
The word poverty originates comes from the Latin, paupertatem, via Old French, poverte.It is first recorded in Old English around 1225, as mentioned in a book published in 1868, Old English Homilies.
We use the word poverty, and its cousin, poor, casually, meaning broke, perhaps, or cash deficient. Yet we know true poverty when we see it, don’t we? In people who are homeless. Or people who debate between heating their houses in the winter and eating.
Growing up, I thought we were poor, my single mother and I, but she worked steadily, at the same job throughout my childhood, a good job by many standards — a job with the City that had good benefits. I didn’t have the same clothes or sneakers as some of my classmates, or a piano, and my mother slept in the living room of our one bedroom apartment in the Bronx. But in reality, by the definitions set out for us by the U.S. Government, we were not “poor.”
According to the U.S. Health and Human Services Poverty Guidelines for 2008, a family of two, like ours, would have to be making less than $14,000 a year in the contiguous U.S. to be below the poverty line. We lived in New York City. It is unfathomable to me to think someone could live on that amount of money and still eat, get clothing, and use transportation to and from a job on that income in New York.
Apparently it is also unfathomable to the human services providers, too, because you qualify for food stamps at 130% of the federal poverty limit, for WIC at 185%, and often for Medicaid (depends on the state) at 200%. According to Columbia University’s National Center for Children in Poverty, “Research suggests that, on average, families need an income of about twice the federal poverty level to meet their most basic needs.” So if the guideline doesn’t even determine what we consider poor, why set it at falsely low levels? Seems to me there can only be one reason: to deny people benefits. (But I’m a cynic. If you can think of another, please speak up.)
I’m taking three steps against poverty, starting today. I urge you to find three things you can do to stop poverty, however you or the government defines it. Here’s what I’m going to do:
Educate myself. In addition to the research I did for this post, I’m going to read a book that’s been on my to-read list for too long: Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich.
Vote. You heard it here first. And I’m not a non-profit, so I can say vote for That One, please. If you don’t, please don’t tell me about it.
This word, maverick, derives from a surname — a surname that survives to this day.
“I’m just enraged that McCain calls himself a maverick,” said Terrellita Maverick, 82, a San Antonio native who proudly carries the name of a family that has been known for its progressive politics since the 1600s, when an early ancestor in Boston got into trouble with the law over his agitation for the rights of indentured servants.
In the 1800s, Samuel Augustus Maverick went to Texas and became known for not branding his cattle. He was more interested in keeping track of the land he owned than the livestock on it, Ms. Maverick said; unbranded cattle, then, were called “Maverick’s.” The name came to mean anyone who didn’t bear another’s brand.
The rest of the article goes on to detail some terrific activities of this lefty family, including serving in the Roosevelt administration, defending draft resisters and atheists, attacking the Iraq war, and serving as a board member for the Texas ACLU.
Says Terrellita, “Every time we hear it, all my children and I and all my family shrink a little and say, ‘Oh, my God, he said it again.’”
There are lots of words that derive from names. Here are a few others:
Boycott - after Captain Boycott, an Irish land-agent who was shunned by neighbors — they would not speak to him, buy from him, nor sell to him — after refusing to lower rents for his tenants
Dahlia - from Anders Dahl, an 18th-century Swedish botanist who introduced the flower
Dunce - from John Duns Scotus, an unstupid philosopher whose ideas went out of fashion in the 16th century, and were from then on thought to be idiotic
Guillotine - after Dr. Joseph-Ignace Guillotin, a French assemblyman during the Revolution, who called for a universal method for capital punishment
Lynching - after Charles Lynch, a judge in Virginia at the time of the Revolutionary War who exacted strict punishment against English loyalists
Mausoleum - for the tomb of King Mausollos of Caria, a monument of such stature as to be one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World
Quixotic - after Don Quixote, the famous character in the Spanish novel of the 1600s
Tawdry - from St. Awdrey, who gave her name to a fair at which you could buy lacy clothing that was later deemed cheap and of poor quality
Maybe some descendants with these names also cringe when they hear their birthright misused, who knows?
One thing is abundantly clear, however: McCain is no Maverick.
I have to admit, when my ex-girlfriend first told me about Car Talk, I was skeptical. As she was the consummate driver, we were probably in the car when their show came on the radio, and she was probably, in her undeniable wisdom, telling me how great Click and Clack were. And I probably said something like, “A show about cars?”
But I listened, and she was right (she would say I was often wrong). It was more than a show about cars.
Tom and Ray Magliozzi, or Click and Clack, as they call themselves in honor of aging cars, are brothers who have been solving people’s car dilemmas on the radio since 1977. They became mechanics in 1973, originally opening a do-it-yourself garage that became The Good News Garage, a more traditional garage. Says their NPR biography:
In 1977, Tom and Ray were invited to the studios of NPR member station WBUR in Boston, along with other area mechanics, to discuss car repair. Tom accepted the invitation, and when he was invited back the following week, he asked, “Can I bring my brother, Ray?”
The show is a combination of commisseration about cars — from brand names to mechanical quirks — to real problem-solving. Their advice is human and opinionated, and often the brothers disagree with one another. More than once I’ve heard them settle bets between spouses and friends. And my own personal favorite part of the show is the Puzzler. For example, this one from July 28 of this year:
There is a series of nine numbers: 335 443 554 __ followed by a blank. What’s the blank, and why?
Thanks to Doug at Car Talk who was kind enough to write back to me with what Tom and Ray were reading! Authors themselves, Tom and Ray have a new book out: Ask Click and Clack - Answers from Car Talk.
Traffic is something I think about frequently, and at great length. I think (and speak) in phrases punctuated by expletives worthy of my Bronx childhood, as I address other drivers from the safety of my vehicle, which is invariably crawling along I-5 or SR-520.
Mary Roach from The New York Times says of Traffic, “My solution to the nation’s vehicular woes would be to make this good book required reading for anyone applying for a driver’s license.”
The driver of this book has a blog, How We Drive, that’s worth checking out, too.
The book Tom is reading, The Singularity Is Near by Ray Kurzweil, held me hostage. I looked it up on Google Books, and I found there were a good number of pages available to me. Within minutes I had lost track of the task at hand, and I was convinced that our destiny was to become human-computer hybrid beings.
The Singularity, as Kurzweil describes it, is the consequence of the speed with which technology is advancing. He predicts that technology and biology will merge. On page 9, Kurzweil says, “There will be no distinction, post-Singularity, between human and machine, or between physical and virtual reality.”
Futurism of this sort is perfectly familiar to us — in the realm of the fantastic, books and movies that we categorize as science fiction. But this is not a novel, and it’s not sci-fi. There is a Singularity Summithappening this October 25 in San Jose. Speakers include representatives of MIT, Berkeley, Intel, and IBM. It’s put on by the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence, whose mission is: “In the coming decades, humanity will likely create a powerful artificial intelligence. The Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence (SIAI) exists to confront this urgent challenge, both the opportunity and the risk.”
Bill Gates said of Kurzweil that he is “The best person I know at predicting the future of artificial intelligence.” And Janet Maslin in The New York Times says the book “is startling in scope and bravado. Mr. Kurzweil envisions breathtakingly exponential progress, and he is merely extrapolating from established data.”
It does not escape my notice that Tom is reading a book by an author named Ray, and Ray by one named Tom. Even in their reading material, Click and Clack are inseperable.
I used the word schadenfreude not long ago in an IM conversation regarding Sarah Palin. It was the early days of her addition to the ticket, and I was relishing her scandal, yet simultaneously ashamed of my glee at someone else’s difficulties. Sort of.* The next day, the person I was messaging told me she’d seen that same word multiple times within the last 24 hours in friends’ blog posts. At first I blamed the collective unconscious. Avenue Q was too long ago — even when it finally made it to Seattle — to be a direct influence. Then I realized it was likely Sarah Palin who was making us all feel joyous at another’s pain.
[Editor's note: As I said, this was in the early days of her campaign, when it seemed natural to assume that someone who'd advocated the losing proposition of abstinence-only education would feel saddened when, as expected, it didn't work at all -- even in her own privileged Christian home.]
If you’re not completely clear on the word, or just need some video entertainment, here’s someone’s Disney-altered version of the Avenue Q song, “Schadenfreude.”
Of course, my schadenfreude regarding the Palins was limited to Mom. Toward poor Bristol, I felt something quite opposed to schadenfreude.
Back when I was working in the mental health system, there were strict rules around the use of prefixes, when it came to the client’s feelings, especially their pain. We were allowed to empathize, but never sympathize.
What’s the difference? It’s slim, to be sure, and I would argue that friends can do either, and both, at the same time. But to maintain a professional distance, empathy was required over its fraternal twin, sympathy.
1. a. To put into or onto: encapsulate.
b. To go into or onto: enplane.
2. To cover or provide with: enrobe.
3. To cause to be: endear.
4. Thoroughly. Used often as an intensive: entangle.
1. a. Together; with: synecology.
b. United: syncarp.
c. Same; similar: sympatric.
d. At the same time: synesthesia.
2. a. Same; similar: sympatric.
b. At the same time: synesthesia.
The base of both words is the root, path, which is related to pathos, the quality of evoking compassion or pity. It comes from the Greek, páthos, or suffering.
So if we were to understand the words based on their components, empathy would be to get into a feeling with someone, while sympathy would be to feel it with them, or at the same time. This is pretty close to the meanings of the words. From Dictionary.com:
empathy- (noun)
1. the intellectual identification with or vicarious experiencing of the feelings, thoughts, or attitudes of another.
sympathy - (noun)
3. the fact or power of sharing the feelings of another, esp. in sorrow or trouble; fellow feeling, compassion, or commiseration.
Still pretty similar ideas, but the clinical distinction was definitely one of distance. To empathize was to imagine how the client felt, while maintaining your own place in the relationship with the client. To sympathize would be to feel it right along with them, for example, perhaps telling stories of when similar things happened to you.
So while I have no sympathy, mere hints of empathy, and some schadenfreude for Mrs. Palin, I do feel some combination of sympathy and empathy for Bristol.
For example, I feel sympathy for her being pregnant for the first time, and aprehensive about what might happen next. I am able to get right in there and feel it along with her, as I am going through the same experience, at least as far as those aspects of it are concerned.
But I am twice Bristol’s age. I have a partner, and my baby was not only planned, but in some sense, engineered. My partner and I are both degreed and employed. Mine and Bristol’s situations are not, in fact, similar enough that I can truly sympathize with her. Yet I can empathize with being too young to make lifelong decisions like marriage and children. I can empathize with having no choice but to go obscenely public with what I will generously call her decision to become a teenage parent.
*Perhaps I should disclaim my schadenfreude, tell you that I am outraged by the McCain campaign’s insertion of a woman — any woman — on the ticket, in the hopes that as a lowly woman I would see no difference between Sarah Palin and Hillary Clinton. Perhaps I should ennumerate all of the ways in which Palin’s ideology is an assault on my life and everything I believe in.
But probably I shouldn’t, since this blog isn’t about politics. It’s about words.
Listening to NPR on the way to work this morning, my wife and I heard Ammon Shea, author of Reading the OED on Morning Edition. That book’s been on my reading list for awhile, as I am a fellow logophile who has been tempted to get neck deep in at least a few dictionaries, the venerable Oxford English Dictionary included.
The segment, which you can listen to on NPR’s website, is on the word bailout. The reference is to the dispute over whether or not the U.S. government is bailing out Freddy Mac and Fanny Mae by effectively taking them over with a large cash infusion.
As we probably all know, words have some weight, and I believe the argument is over whether or not the Treasury is putting too much into a lost cause. What Ammon Shea concludes is that whether or not you like the word, it’s appropriate to the situation — and you can tailor your definition by choosing the dictionary from which to draw its meaning.
Says Ammon:
Those who oppose the plan can point out that the Cambridge Dictionary of American English defines bailout as “the process of saving a company, plan, or other thing from failing by providing lots of money.” This would bolster their claim that the Treasury is subsidizing poor business practices and potentially throwing away billions of dollars that could help needy Americans.
Treasury secretary Henry Paulson could counter with the definition from the New Oxford American Dictionary. A bailout can also be an instance of giving assistance to a failing economy. That would bolster the claim that the government is acting to save the larger economy, and not simply trying to help the privileged few.
The dictionary wars continue on, and if you’re like me, you quickly lose track of which side is which, as the meanings blur together and collide.
For me, the most interesting part of the dictionary is not the fine lines between one meaning of a word and another, but the etymology of the word. In this case, the etymology is not out of current usage. To bail [out] still means the same thing it did when first used in the 1600’s: to dump water out of a boat that is leaking. The alternative, of course, is obvious — the boat would sink.
As an aside, I did learn about a new dictionary from the segment, the Merrriam-Webster and Garfield Dictionary. Who’s Garfield, you ask, and how did he get in on that exclusive dictionary team? Well, he’s a cranky orange feline, of course. [Editor's note: Personally, I prefer Garfield Minus Garfield.]
Whether you’re queen of the parade or too cynical for rainbows, chances are that if you’re queer, you have an opinion on Pride. For some it’s a day of celebration, others mourning and reflection, and still others, a great reason to get out of the city while the tourists invade. I feel all of those ways, and every year one or other of my opinions is center stage.
This year I’m celebrating. Celebrating nearly two years of marriage, recognized or not, to my wife, whom I love more very day. Celebrating my friends and community. Celebrating the fact that every year we gain legitimacy, get closer to being fully recognized citizens of our own country. This year California. Next year, perhaps my own state will wise up.
But why the word pride to indicate our holiday? Isn’t Pride a sin, and one of the worst, at that?
Word - “Ever since people have been able to communicate verbally with one another we’ve had to have had words, and what we call these little pieces of audible communication has had a common name for a very long time.”
Condom - [Editor's note: definitively NSFW, and comes with musical accompaniment, but quite a thorough history of the condom, if you're interested -- and if you can make it past the no minors warning.]
“A variety of Latin etymologies have been proposed, including condon (receptacle),[55] condamina (house), and cumdum (scabbard or case). It has also been speculated to be from the Italian word guantone, derived from guanto, meaning glove. William E. Kruck wrote an article in 1981 concluding that, ‘As for the word ‘condom’, I need state only that its origin remains completely unknown, and there ends this search for an etymology.’ Modern dictionaries may also list the etymology as ‘unknown’.”
Bee - “Old English beo (before 900, in Alfred’s translation of Bpethius’ De Consolatione Philosophiae) earlier bio-wyrt, bee wort, a plant (about 700) and Beo-wulf a personal name (about 725, in Beowulf).”
Dagenham - “In this context dagenham is apparently to be taken as a synonym for ‘insane’, by a rather devious etymological route. Dagenham is a town in Essex, England. On the District Line of the London Underground, Dagenham is three stops beyond the town of Barking (after Barking are Upney, Becontree, Dagenham Heathway, and Dagenham East). To be barking mad is to be crazy; and being dagenham is therefore being three steps beyond barking.”
And finally, in honor of the summer, which has returned to Seattle like a deadbeat dad — everyone’s so happy to see him, we’ve forgotten how mad we were:
Swelter - “Latvian is somewhat close to the original etymology with gurt no swelmes (I took a linguistics class once in college where I learned that Latvian is probably the closest to the original tongue from which all the Indo-European family of languages evolved). However, perhaps the closest to the etymological source of swelter in the list above is the Norwegian smelte, (I think of smelting iron) and just one letter difference from svelte.”
Sex sells. It sells breakfast cereal and sports cars. It sells diets and beer. It sells software. Games. Shoes. Pickles. The City. And now words.
Here’s the etymology of umbrella, from Hot for Words:
[Editor's note: While this is technically not unsafe for work, I wouldn't want to be watching it when my boss came by and looked over my shoulder.]
There’s a new breed of sexy — actually, it’s an old breed, but it’s finally been noticed by the mainstream. But I’m not sure that Marina Orlova, a YouTube champion and Wired’s Sexiest Geek of the Year 2007, qualifies as geek sexy. I’m sure there are many of her devotees out there who care not one whit for philology — or any other ology, for that matter, but will watch and learn as long as there’s enough cleavage involved.
So how about some sex with your Kierkegaard? Why should sex be banished from the intellectual world? There’s not a carbon-based intelligence on the planet that can’t trace its roots back to sex. Are we so taken in by the Judeo-Christian split of the exalted and the base that we shun such unholy minglings? Cheeseburgers are evil. Unhand that jerky, it’s Friday!
Frankly, Marina’s not my type, but the ongoing video etymology series is a great idea, and she’s found a way to get a whole lot of viewers — 70 million YouTube views!
It’s not a question of the ends justifying the means, but more of a marketing coup. Even if I’m not the target audience, I have to respect the results.
Maverick - “Etymology: Samuel A. Maverick died 1870 American pioneer who did not brand his calves.”
Barrow/borrow pits and the Mormon R - “Mormon settlers who came West from Missouri brought with them a dialect that pronounced the letter ‘o’ as ‘a’ if the letter were followed by an ‘r’…”
Linguists call the phenomenon ‘the Mormon R,’ and it used to be commonplace in rural areas of Utah and in eastern Idaho ..
So Fort Hall was pronounced Fart Hall … Orange was arange … And borrow became barrow…”
Israel: “Over the past three thousand years, the name ‘Israel’ has meant in common and religious usage both the Land of Israel and the entire Jewish nation. The name originated from a verse in the Bible (Genesis, 32:2 where Jacob is renamed Israel after successfully wrestling with an angel of God. Commentators differ on the meaning of the name. Some say the name comes from the verb śarar (’to rule, be strong, have authority over’), thereby making the name mean ‘God rules’ or ‘God judges’. Other possible meanings include ‘the prince of God’ (from the King James Version) or ‘El fights/struggles’.”
Immaculate: “The crowding of the cone cells at the back of the eye where the image forms has a consequence that when the eye doctor looks into your eye, the part where the cone cells are most dense looks a little more yellow.
About 150 years ago, or maybe a little longer, physicians gave this yellow spot a name.
They called it yellow spot;
But in the Latin they liked to use that came out as macula lutea.”
Budget: “A bougette was typically used for carrying coins around, so the term became linked with the money which you had available at any one time, hence ‘budget’.”
Hamartia: “Hamartia is an element of greek drama which stands for ‘missing the mark.’ In modern lit, hamartia refers to a character’s “fatal flaw” though some say this is an incorrect use of the term as intended by the Greeks.”
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