wordaday

My colleague Emily Veinglory wrote an interesting entry on the gesture described by the adjective “steepled” here, wherein she notes:

The word I am thinking of today is ’steepled’, specifically as it relates to hands. Spellchecker assures me that the word ’steepled’ is a non-word, it fails to be, it is without existence in reality as defined by our friends at Microsoft.

Emily Veinglory points out that she can find steepled used, with specific reference to the gesture, in a variety of print sources, fictive and non, and asks:

So, what do you think? “Steepled” hands: corrupted and incorrect language, weird post-Doyle Sherlockian jargon, or a correct but modern usage

I note that while the AHD does contain steepled, the lemma is used entirely in terms of architecture, not in reference to hands:

1. Having steeples or a steeple: picturesque, steepled villages; a tiny, steepled church.
2. Steeply inclined: steepled roofs.

The OED, however, is quite helpful:

5. Of the fingers or hands: brought together in the form of a steeple. 1971 P. O’DONNELL Impossible Virgin x. 212 Tapping the tips of his steepled fingers together. 1981 ‘L. EGAN’ Miser (1982) ii. 26 ‘Not much criminal practice,’ said Jesse, brooding over his steepled hands.

My private theory, that the reference to “steepled” fingers is derived from the children’s game of “This is the church, this is the steeple, open the doors and here are all the people,” played with one’s fingers interwined, with the exception of the forefingers, which form the “steeple,” while the thumbs make the “doors,” which, when opened reveal the remaining, intertwined, wriggling fingers as the “people,” is in part supported the often unsatisfactory Urban Dictionary, which gives us:

The act of putting your fingertips together, most likely to indicate thoughtfulness.

So named because this action makes one’s hands look vaguely like a steeple.
The following children’s hand game shows an example of steepling:
This is the church; this is the steeple; open the doors, and there’s all the people.

It’s that time of year when most particularly I think of the nativity story in Matthew. I was always fascinated, as a child, by the passage that describes the gifts brought to the infant Jesus by the Magi, the wise men from the east. Matthew 2:11 in the King James 1611 version says:

And when they were come into the house, they saw the young child with Mary his mother, and fell down, and worshipped him: and when they had opened their treasures, they presented unto him gifts; gold, and frankincense and myrrh.

Here’s the same passage from the Latin Vulgate:

et intrantes domum invenerunt puerum cum Maria matre eius et procidentes adoraverunt eum et apertis thesauris suis obtulerunt ei munera aurum tus et murram

You will note that there is no mention of how many wise men there were; tradition has supplied three, based on the three gifts: gold, frankincense and myrrh.

Gold we know; frankincense is “An aromatic gum resin obtained from African and Asian trees of the genus Boswellia and used chiefly as incense and in perfumes.” (AHD).

Etymologically, Frankincense is from Middle English frank with the word encens, from Old French franc and encens. Franc means “free, pure”— it’s the same word as Modern English “frank,” as in “to speak frankly.” Encens is the French word that spawned Modern English incense.

Frankincense is a resin from a particular kind of tree, that, when burned or rendered into perfume, has a pleasant scent. The tree is deliberately scored, to produce sap, which then dries and is collected in the form of hard resinous nodules. Today Frankincense is more commonly rendered into an oil, but all over the Middle East, historically, it was burned, used as a perservative, and as a particularly rich gift.

Myrrh is

An aromatic gum resin obtained from several trees and shrubs of the genus Commiphora of India, Arabia, and eastern Africa, used in perfume and incense. Also called balm of Gilead (AHD).

Myrrh is derived from Middle English mirre, by way of Old English myrrha, from Latin, from Greek murrha, but it’s ultimately of Semitic origin; the Greeks borrowed the Semitic root mrr, “To be(come) bitter.” Like Frankincense, Myrrh is collected from injured trees, in the form of gummy, or dried, nodules of resin. Myrrh and Frankincense resemble either other visually, but the scents are completely different.

One of the interesting aspects of this passage, from an historical point of view, is that of the three gifts, the Frankincense and Myrrh were worth far more than the gold.

I was at a craft show the other day where a woodworker using a lathe had made exquisite boxes and lamps out of what he said was “spalted maple.” Now, I’d never heard of a maple species named that, and was about to ask him when he showed me another piece that he said was “spalted,” but wasn’t maple. So of course I had to ask him what spalted meant.

“Spalted means it’s just started to rot. The wood isn’t soft yet, but the rot has colored the wood.”

I went home and looked up spalted. I had to resort to the OED; spalt and its relatives weren’t in the AHD. The OED offers

To split, tear, splinter, etc. To become spalted. 1977 Fine Woodworking Summer 51/1 “Apple spalts, but oh boy does it crack!”

Hence spalting vbl. n.

You can’t quite tell from the OED, but spalting or spalted in the context of woodworking means wood that has been affected by fungi, specifically white rot fungi, and hyphae fungi. They cause white discolored areas like those in the picture to the left, but sometimes, they add pigment to the wood, often blue. Spalted wood, because of the patterns created by the fungi, is often quite lovely, and used very effectively in lamps, furniture, and decorative woodworking of all kinds. Lighter colored woods—maple, birch and apple—are more likely to be spalted. You can read more about it here.

It’s the time of year that in America, we’re all thinking about Turkey, even those of us who don’t actually eat the bird, Male Eastern Wild Turkey since images are all around us, in preparation for Thanksgiving. We’ve all heard the stories about the Pilgrims and the first Thanksgiving. But I suspect fewer of us have actually seen the native wild American turkey; Meleagris gallopavo silvestris. This is the Eastern Wild Turkey, and the sub-species that the Pilgrims would have seen.

In the wild the Toms, or males, (sometimes called Gobblers for their call) are really quite lovely, with a variety of colored plumage—some of the prettiest I’ve seen have very definite blue feathers. The females are often a little drab, in comparison to the larger, showier males. The males will fan out their tails in a display, much like a male Peacock will do. They’re smart too, they can fly, and they are very very clever about hiding. Mostly I hear Turkeys before I see them; both males and females make a lot of noise while eating. The variety of calls they make sounds almost as if they’re conversing while dining.

Turkey as a the name for these birds was the result of a mistake; the Pilgrims assumed these large birds were a species of Guinea Fowl, then often called Turkeys under the mistake assumption that the birds came from Turkey.

You can see pictures of the Eastern Wild Turkey here and here, and here, as well as in the image in this post.

Image credit: Pennsylvania Game Commission

Falmouth Cranberry Bog
© 2001Kathy Sharp Frisbee

It’s that time of year when we put things like cranberries on our shopping list. The cranberry is:

1. A mat-forming, evergreen shrub (Vaccinium macrocarpum) of eastern North America, having pink flowers and tart, red, edible berries.
2. The berries of this plant, used in sauces, jellies, relishes, and beverages.
3. Any of several similar or related plants, especially Vaccinium oxycoccos.

Cranberries are relatives of the blueberry, and the rhododendron, and are packed with antioxidants, so the nutritionists tells us. We’ve been eating them for hundreds of years, though the name cranberry or “crane berry” is a translation of Low German Kraanbere : Kraan, crane (from Middle Low German kran; see ger-2 in Appendix I) + bere, berry. Until c. 1686 , according to the OED, cranberries were known as “marsh-whorts, fen-whorts, fen-berries, marsh-berries, moss-berries.”

The berries grow naturally in low-lying marshes, and are cultivated in carefully tended artificially created bogs, like the one above. You can even tour a working bog, if you’d like. Or you can try some of these recipes instead.

There’s universal agreement today that a Penguin is:

Any of various stout flightless marine birds of the family Spheniscidae, of cool regions of the Southern Hemisphere, having flipperlike wings and webbed feet adapted for swimming and diving, and short scalelike feathers that are white in front and black on the back.

But not too long ago, penguin was used for a Great Auk as well.

It’s likely that penguin is of Welsh origin; it breaks down very neatly into pen + gwen/gwyn, with pen meaning “head,” and gwen meaning “white,” and there are species of penguin with white heads.

However, the etymology isn’t at all certain. The OED offers two early quotations in context:

1577 F. FLETCHER Log of ‘Golden Hind’ 24 Aug. in N. M. Penzer World Encompassed (1971) 128 Infinite were the Numbers of the foule, wch the Welsh men name Pengwin & Maglanus tearmed them Geese. c1588 N. H. in R. Hakluyt Princ. Navigations (1589) III. 809 The Port of Desire… In this place we had gulles, puets, penguyns, and seales in aboundance.

The OED then notes:

It appears that the name was first given to the Great Auk of the seas of Newfoundland . . .
The penguin resembles the Great Auk closely both in appearance and in its habits. Both birds are large, flightless waterfowl with similar black and white coats adapted to life in circumpolar waters. It is therefore possible that the penguin, which was first named thus by British sailors, was mistaken for the Great Auk, or that a term for the most similar known bird was applied (compare Magellan’s reported use of ‘geese’: see quot. 1577 at sense 1a).
The attribution of the name penguin to ‘the Welsh men’ . . . and its explanation as Welsh pen gwyn white head, appears also in Ingram’s Narrative, and later in Sir Thomas Herbert’s Travels (in the edition of 1634 as a surmise, and in the edition of 1638 as an accepted fact). Since the bird was known in the far north of Europe under a different name (see GARE-FOWL n.), it is likely that the term penguin originated in North America. However, the Great Auk did not have a white head (though it had large white spots in front of the eyes).
Most references to Penguin Island in Newfoundland are due to Hakluyt (compare quot 1578 at sense 2).

Nonetheless, a Welsh derivation does seem to be the most reasonable.

It seems, from my informal poll, and a bit of research, that my initial opinion that “pull” or “draw” in the context of beer is a dialect choice. In the previous entry, I quoted a bit from an R. B. Parker novel that used “draw” to refer to obtaining draft beer from a tap.

I note that “pull” seems to be preferred in British use, and “draw” in American, though that is not, of course, universal. For the curious, I note that in the 1984 novel Dancing Nightly in the Tavern by Canadian author Mark Anthony Jarman “pull” is even applied to non-beer beverages:

A local saunters in and the waitress pulls him a diet Pepsi before the man has spoken.

I was reading a Spenser novel by Robert B. Parker; Hush Money. In the novel, the hero and his friend are in a Boston bar, and have requested a re-fill of the beer on tap at the bar–in other words, it’s draft , not from a bottle or can. Here’s the passage in question:

We emptied the bowl of cashews, and the bartender came over and filled it and drew us two more beers. Way upscale.

Aside from the fact that I’m very interested in locating a Boston bar that serves cashews (!), I’m curious about the use of “drew” for refilling the beer from the tap.

Have you heard or read, “drew?” or have you heard “pulled” or something else for draft (draught ) beer?

The core meaning of faith is embodied in the first three definitions:

1. Confident belief in the truth, value, or trustworthiness of a person, idea, or thing.

2. Belief that does not rest on logical proof or material evidence. See synonyms at belief, trust.

3. Loyalty to a person or thing; allegiance: keeping faith with one’s supporters.

4. often Faith Christianity The theological virtue defined as secure belief in God and a trusting acceptance of God’s will.

5. The body of dogma of a religion: the Muslim faith. 6. A set of principles or beliefs.

You will have noticed that the first three definitions revolve around the associated concepts of truth, and trust, or in the extended sense, loyalty. Faith entered English via Middle English, Anglo-Norman fed, from Latin fids. The ancestor of modern faith also cluster around “trust,”; a core meaning that goes all the way back to even the Proto Indo-European root, bheidh- , which means “To trust, confide, persuade.” Other words derived from * bheidh- include bide, fiancé, and infidel, in English.

Slew, meaning “A large amount or number; a lot: a slew of unpaid bills,” like slogan, is now a perfectly good English word, though you might be more familiar with it spelled slue. Slew, like slogan, comes to Modern English by way of Old Irish slúgh, a word that means “host, ” as in a multitude of people or animals. It’s’ not to be confused with any of the other slews in English.

There’s slew, the past tense of the verb slay; there’s the slew that’s a variant spelling of slough:

1. A depression or hollow, usually filled with deep mud or mire.
2. also slue A stagnant swamp, marsh, bog, or pond, especially as part of a bayou, inlet, or backwater.
3. A state of deep despair or moral degradation.

This slew, or rather slough, has a good English pedigree; it’s Middle English, from Old English sloh, and pronounced like “sloo.”