runcible gardening

For no known reason, on Friday I was thinking about runcible spoons, as I pottered in the garden. I thought I remembered that the word runcible was a nonsense invention by Edward Lear. I had been on a 'weed walk' led by Adam Grubb, and had bought a copy of his  book The Weed Forager's Handbook, but I don't see why that should have got me musing about runcible spoons.

Anyway...today I was browsing Adam's book and came to the page about Sow Thistles. We have lots of this weed in our garden, so I thought I'd also read about the plant in a book I bought decades ago, Weeds of Forests, Roadsides and Gardens. I love comparing information, because it seems to help knowledge 'stick' in my head.

Since I don't have a background education in botany, I find the text in this latter book hard to understand. But when I read that the leaves of Sonchus oleraceus (sow thistle) are thin and runcinate, my attention sharpened.

So what, I asked myself, does runcinate mean? The Free Dictionary defines it as:

a leaf having incised margins with the lobes or teeth curved toward the base; as a dandelion leaf.

Now I wondered whether Lear's made-up word might have had some connection, even if subconscious on his part, with this botanical term. Was Lear a botanist? No. But he did illustrate natural history books, so it's possible he was familiar with the term runcinate.

The Guardian has a collection of suggested origins for the word that are much more likely than mine, but why shouldn't I, too, have fun imagining the mind of Edward Lear?

I've written about weeds previously. To me there's no such thing as a weed. They're just plants. Oh, maybe I'd make an exception for moth plants. I really don't like them. No, I shouldn't do that. They're just trying to make a living, like everything else in my garden.

hoping to be equanimous after learning about meditation

It's a strange thing, as an adult with a fairly extensive vocabulary, to use a new word  before being quite certain you know how to spell it.

I've recently done an eight-week course in Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, which was just the thing I needed to get some sort of handle on life, and also attended a screening of The Connection film. Somewhere in all this activity I heard that I should approach life in an equanimous manner.

I looked it up just now, and found I had the right idea about what it means and how to write it. There are many definitions of it on the internet, but the one that strikes me as the closest in meaning to how it was used in the meditation lessons was on Wikipedia - not usually my reference of choice - defining the related noun, equanimity.

Equanimity (Latin: æquanimitas having an even mind; aequus even animus mind/soul) is a state of psychological stability and composure which is undisturbed by experience of or exposure to emotions, pain, or other phenomena that may cause others to lose the balance of their mind. The virtue and value of equanimity is extolled and advocated by a number of major religions and ancient philosophies.

The article refers to many of the streams from which the current MBSR has drawn its ideas:
 Hinduism
Yoga
Stoicism
Buddhism
Judaism
Christianity
Islam
Baha'i Faith

The Wikipedia article points across to Wiktionary for the related adjective, equanimous.

Attempting to face the good moments and the 'bad' moments in a spirit of acceptance is an empowering strategy, especially in the face of all the awfulness in the media. I hope I can continue to develop my strength in this area.

Thomas Jefferson said then and not than about his slaves

Recently, when I received a daily bulletin from delanceyplace.com, I was interested to see that Thomas Jefferson had used the word then where we nowadays would use the word than.

Here's the link to the particular article in the archive: http://www.delanceyplace.com/view_archives.php?2258

In a chilling assessment of the economic value of slave ownership, Jefferson said:

A child raised every 2. years is of more profit then the crop of the best laboring man.

I wondered if the word 'then' was a typo, so I looked around the internet and found what I take to be a reliable article, on the Smithsonian website. The article, The Dark Side of Thomas Jefferson, was a revelation to me about the disgusting practice of slavery. Whippings; selling of children 'down the river', never to be seen again; hypocrisy; brutal overseers doing the work Jefferson professed to detest - all these were part of a gripping article that I felt compelled to read to the end.

I've posted previously about the mixed history of these two spellings. I still think it's likely that in the future we will spell both words as 'then'.

concision in fiction

An article on AVClub in January introduced me to a new word - concision. In defence of short story writing as a stand-alone career (asserting the right of authors to not write novels), Kevin McFarland said: 'There is nothing wrong with concision in fiction.'

When I read this word, I knew it meant the writing was concise, but I had thought the noun for this concept was  conciseness. 

The Australian Macquarie Dictionary defines conciseness as 'the quality of being concise' and concision as  'concise quality; brevity; terseness'. So I guess I can add this new word to my vocabulary as a synonym for the word I already knew. 

WordReference Forums, which appears to be north-American based, has a discussion of these two words, and the consensus seems to be that conciseness is the more usual term, with concision seeming pretentious and somewhat old-fashioned. One interesting comment is that concision implies an action (like words such as decision, incision, division), while conciseness implies a quality.

desire lines

I noticed this poster the other day.

I seem to recall that you have to encounter a word or expression a certain number of times before it enters your vocabulary. So perhaps desire line will soon become an everyday expression for me. I've come across the word twice now.

The last time I wrote about it I used the slightly different expression desire path, so I thought I'd better check out the definition at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art. They say:

The title Desire Lines refers to the wayward, improvised tracks created by walkers and others who defy the ways designed for them by urban regulators and councils. Sometime known as ‘goat trails’ they show the preferable path, and indicate our more maverick and intuitive navigations. 

Yes, that about describes the situation in Clifton Hill where the council seems determined to regulate our favorite short-cut out of existence.

It sounds like an interesting exhibition:

Extrapolating from this premise, the exhibition takes us on a number of unexpected journeys, unleashing many lines, both actual and conceptual, pragmatic and poetic. Geographies, geometries and g-force elements are all activated in works that form poetic encounters and memorable moments, as artists seek to follow their hearts, minds and navigational desires. Including work by more than thirty artists, this international exhibition features important and seminal works by Samuel Beckett, Bruce Nauman, Lawrence Weiner and Richard Long, videos from the significant ArtAngel commission Seven Walks by renowned artist Francis Alÿs; new projects by Mel O’Callaghan, Steven Sutcliffe, Charlie Sofo and Dan Shipsides, rarely seen works by Pierre Bismuth, Marcel Broodthaers, A K Dolven and Catherine Yass and introduces many more new artists to Melbourne audiences.

Desire Lines will also feature several key performances, including

• British artist Dan Shipsides will create one of his renowned climbing based artworks on the exterior of the ACCA building.• Sydney artist Mel O’Callaghan will create a moving sculpture of rocks on ACCA’s forecourt.

Desire Lines – 15 December, 2012 to 3 March, 2013.

what is a quintile?

Today a family member asked me about a word in The Age newspaper - quintile. I asked her to read the sentence containing the word and she read:

The preliminary results showed the richest quintile of households received about 12 per cent of social assistance benefits while the second richest quintile got 11 per cent. 

I sounded like the word quartile, which I knew had something to do with quarters. [Here's the definition from Math Dictionary.] So I suggested quintile might relate to fifths.

And it does. The opening line of the article in The Age said:

The richest fifth of households receive nearly half of all the wages paid in Australia - but also get about 12 per cent of all government handouts, new research by the Bureau of Statistics show. 

Here's a more exact definition of the word from the Merriam-Webster 

more about the word misogyny

Further to yesterday's post about misogyny, misanthropism and misandry, I've noticed an article in The Sydney Morning Herald reporting that, since our Prime Minister's recent speech about misogyny, there are moves afoot to refine the meaning to reflect its modern usage.

The Macquarie Dictionary has announced it is broadening the definition of the word "misogyny".
As it stands, the reference book says misogyny is a hatred of women, the kind that's pathological.
But editor Sue Butler says it's time that changed to reflect what Ms Gillard really meant last week when she accused Opposition Leader Tony Abbott of sexism and misogyny during a speech to parliament.
Not that he needs a session on the psychiatrist's couch, but that he merely has an "entrenched prejudice against women".
That will be the official second definition in the next updated edition of the dictionary.
"We decided that we had the basic definition, hatred of women, but that's not how misogyny has been used for about the last 20, 30 years, particularly in feminist language," Ms Butler told ABC radio on Wednesday.
"Sexist does seem to be moving towards this description of surface features and misogynist applies to the underlying attitude."
It was the underlying prejudice that gave rise to these instances of sexism, Ms Butler said.
Misogyny was like sexism, with a "stronger edge to it".

misogyny and misandry

This afternoon I asked a group of teenagers whether they had noticed any new words this week. I pointed out that a love of words would be very useful if they aim to improve their essay writing - which I assume they do, seeing they were spending a lovely sunny afternoon in an essay-writing class.

One student mentioned a word he'd heard bandied about in the world of Australian politics - 'Miss... miso... something like that,' he said.

Oh, misogyny.

Typical teacher that I am, I wrote it on the whiteboard and said that the prefix mis- relates to hatred. I added misanthropy to the board and said it relates to hatred of humans.

One of the boys frowned. He leaned forward, a mystified look on his face and asked how could a person, being human, hate humanity.

That's something to make me think. I did explain that it could be just a preference for the way other species deal with life, or it could be a dislike of humanity's actions, rather than outright hatred. But it's still a great question.

Another boy asked why anyone would hate women. Another very good question. One I couldn't answer. In an attempt to balance the discussion, I attempted to add 'hatred of men' to the list, but I'd forgotten what the word is.

I've looked it up now. The Merriam-Webster gives the word misandry. There's a discussion amongst commenters that this word is generally not known, compared to the almost universal understanding of misogyny.

Interesting!

then or than?

It's interesting to observe a word changing its spelling. I think sooner or later we'll be spelling than as then.

On Sunday morning I was listening on my car radio to The Big Backyard, a gardening program. I might have misheard, but it seemed the presenter (I think her name was Millie) said 'then' in a sentence where I would have expected 'than'.

This is the first time I've noticed this usage in speech, and maybe I misheard.

However, it's quite a frequent written transposition. For instance, when I was at the Royal Melbourne Show recently, I say this sign:

Daily Writing Tips, like many other internet sites, explains the difference between the two words. Basically, 'then' is used for time-related concepts and 'than' for comparisons.

But... this video clip from the Merriam Webster Dictionary puts the cat amongst the pigeons! Apparently they were previously spelled the same and it's a relatively modern practice to treat them differently. And 'than' can be used in some time-related concepts.

The Online Etymology Dictionary dates the differentiation from about 1770.

So I say, don't worry about it if you're confused. Just tell the critics you're a traditionalist and prefer the older spelling.

words we don't have in English

I've been noticing the word renowned all over the place, since I posted about its use.

I wondered if there's a word in English to describe the way we start to take notice of a phrase or object once we get sensitised to it. I feel there is a term for this experience, but I can't think of it. Perhaps I've seen it in a psychology book.

Being an inquisitive person, I looked around the Internet trying to find such a word. I had no success. But I did come across a great site with lists of words from other languages that we might wish we had in English.

I loved most of them, but one will certainly have to enter my vocabulary right now. The Scottish word tartle describes:

  The act of hestitating while introducing someone because you’ve forgotten their name. 

A further search finds lots of references to this word, but the only authoritative one I could find was the Collins Dictionary,  where someone has submitted it for consideration as a new word. It is marked 'under consideration'.

I've taken ages to write this post because I've been roaming around the Net looking at lists of great words we should have. Here's another list I particularly like.

What's happened to the word 'renowned'?

Lately I've noticed people using the word renown as an adjective. Here's an example from The Age newspaper today:

A western suburbs real estate agent who rorted more than $156,000 from the ANZ bank in a property scam has asked for his licence not to be revoked - on the novel grounds that he is an internationally renown accordion player who often performs for charity. 

I've been mystified as to why such a strange mistake would arise. At first I thought it was a typo, but I've seen it too often for that to be the case.

To me it's weird. After all, I would think the word renowned is an adjective, formed from a past participle. I can't see why you might insert a noun where the structure of the sentence calls for  an adjective.

But when I think about it, I don't know any verb 'to renown' or 'to renow'. So I looked around the Net.

A discussion at wordreference.com suggests that people may be comparing 'renown' with known (which has me wondering how they pronounce it).

  The Online Etymology Dictionary says:

c.1300, from Anglo-Fr. renoun, O.Fr. renon, from renomer "make famous," from re- "repeatedly" + nomer "to name," from L. nominare "to name." The M.E. verb renown has been assimilated to the noun via renowned "famous, celebrated" (late 14c.).

If it's a verb, I suppose it's transitive, so you might say, His fans renowned him. (They named him repeatedly.)

After all that thinking, I've come to the conclusion that I still think the sentence in today's Age newspaper should have said, '...that he is an internationally renowned accordion player.'

oh for the normalcy of a normal word!

I received an email today asking about the difference between the words normality and normalcy. (Thanks for the suggestion!)

I didn't know, so I had a look in the Oxford Dictionary and found they are acceptable forms based on the word normal.  Of course, I wanted to know more about it, because I would never use the word 'normalcy', and I found a discussion in which it was thought that 'normalcy' is an American usage and 'normality' an English usage.

On the other hand, the online Macquarie dictionary (Australian English) says:

normalcy:   noun     the character or state of being normal; normality: back to normalcy.

The Online Etymology Dictionary says:

normalcy (n.)

1857, from normal + -cy. Associated since c.1920 with U.S. president Warren G. Harding and derided as an example of his incompetent speaking style. Previously used mostly in a mathematical sense. The word prefered by purists for "a normal situation" is normality (1849).

Language Corner has more about the Warren Harding connection, saying the word was avoided in the past in the US but is now  acceptable.

After consideration, I think I'll stick to using the word 'normality'.

the meaning of suave

After I listened to a gardening program on the radio last weekend, I told a friend  I'd figured out that the word suave must mean 'sweet'. She didn't believe me. She felt sure it means 'smooth'. I began to doubt my detective work, because I also thought it had that meaning.

I'd come up with the idea of 'sweet' because the gardening expert, in referring to mentha suaveolens, said, 'As the name suggests, it has a sweet smell'.

Now that I've looked around the Net to check up the meaning, I'm pleased to say I was correct in my guess. A website about acacia suaveolens specifically explains the Latin meaning of the word suaveolens.

And then the lyrics of an old tune popped into my head.

The sweet scented wattle sheds perfume around,
Delighting the bird and the bee,
While I lie and take rest in my fern covered nest
In the shade of the currajong tree.
High up in the air I can hear the refrain
Of a butcherbird piping his tune
For the spring in her glory has come back again
To the banks of the reedy lagoon.

I always thought the song referred to any wattle with a sweet scent, but perhaps it's specifically about acacia suaveolens, 'the sweet scented wattle'.

There's a different version of the lyrics here, with the interesting explanation that the words were probably originally composed in the nineteenth century by a young man working as a jackaroo, who would have been expected to sing for the squatter's family in the evening.

And, as a bonus for my research, I now know that the mystery plant in my garden is variegated apple mint (mentha suaveolens variegata).

more about the origin of the word 'kangaroo'

Following a link on the 6Ablog, I found an informative little video clip about the word kangaroo.
A discussion on a forum called QI also has information about this word's origin. Judy Bennett says:

Lieutenant James Cook beached his 'HM Bark Endeavour' in what is now Cooktown, in 1770 having damaged his ship on the Great Barrier Reef. He remained in the area for nearly seven weeks. The word 'kangaroo' was first recorded in the ships' journals during this time, and the animal was also drawn by Sidney Parkinson. The journals are held at the James Cook Museum in Cooktown. The first sighting of the animal was on June 24th 1770. They tried to shoot one for quite some time, finally Lieut. John Gore succeeding on July 14th. It was eaten at supper the following day.

I've posted about this word previously.

a powerful prefix

As I walked along Trenerry Crescent in Abbotsford today, I was struck by the powerful message on this display board.

Somebody is angry about the development on the riverside and simply by overwriting the prefix 'con' with 'de' they've made their point.

It was rather amusing to continue along from the construction/destruction site and see that nature hasn't been entirely forgotten in this street. There's fake grass,

and even a living plant,

and the plane trees are fighting the good fight to remind us nature is rarely tidy.

asterisms and poo bags

This evening I watched the first episode of Randling. In one segment, contestants were asked to make up a word for a concept that lacks a name in English. I enjoyed hearing their suggestions, some silly, some beautifully apt - especially the segment about the look on the face of someone who finds herself in public without a poo-bag when her dog has just defecated. In my opinion, you could tell which contestants were dog owners (as I am).

On the other hand, sometimes I think there is no word in English for a concept, and I find I'm mistaken. I didn't know English had a word to describe a pattern of stars that is not a constellation - asterism. I came across the word from a link on Coyote Prime's blog.

This is going to be a useful word to me, because here in the Southern Hemisphere we tend to notice a part of Orion that looks like a pot. Now I'll be able to call it an asterism.

Here's a blog entry by a visitor from the Northern Hemisphere:

The New Zealanders see an asterism in Orion called the "Iron Pot" where Orion's "sword" is the pot's handle and the stars of Orion's Belt are three burners under the pot. It really does look like that from that perspective. Also, the brightest star Sirius is at Orion's upper right instead of the lower left as we see here in Cleveland.

etymology linking emergence and emergency

What's the connection between emergence and emergency? Today at ACMI - what a wonderful place - I saw this sign:

When I first noticed the sign, I thought it said emergency. And that, of course, got me wondering how these two words are related. After a search on the Net, I'm still not quite sure. At SciForums there was a discussion about the relationship of the two words, but it was fairly inconclusive, in my opionion. However, one person did say this:

I find Dictionary.com to be as good an etymological reference as anything else that's available for free, if only because it usually lists more than one. Unfortunately all the etymologies for "emergency" refer back to "emerge," which IMHO does not do justice to the word's modern usage. It has moved far away from the origin of the emergency, i.e., "something that comes out of something else," and is now all about the appropriate response, i.e., "We gotta do something pretty dadgum quick or we'll be real sorry." That said, "emerge" does not mean exclusively "to come out of (something else)." It means, more generally, to arise, to develop, to come into existence. The notion of requiring an immediate response is a more recent accretion to the definition of "emergency," which makes a rift between that word and the word it was built from. This is hardly unusual in our language or any other.

Another said of the word emergency that it's :

a well-known medical adage: Someone bleeding [unexpectedly] from an orifice (ears, eyes, nose, mouth, navel, urethral orifice, anus, etc) should seek medical attention immediately. For example, someone in a car accident says s/he is okay, but is bleeding from his/her ears. This person should seek medical attention immediately. The etymology of emergency is from something "emerging" -- the same idea as something "cropping up" -- it is something that appears unexpectedly. It's the unexpected. The word seems to have taken on a pejorative sense.

MedlinePlus, the Merriam Webster Medical Dictionary, defines the word emergent:

Function: adjective : calling for prompt or urgent action

The definition I find the most helpful comes from The Free Dictionary:

emergency - Comes from Latin emergere (e-, "from," and mergere, "to dip, plunge") and first meant "unforeseen occurrence."

pareidolia - a word for a common human activity

Last week I was looking at pictures taken by my photography class, and one person showed a shot of some rocks in a pond. The rocks looked like frogs, and we talked about whether we like to 'name' natural features by how they look to us. Some like it, some don't.

I don't find that walking around a beautiful natural place and classifying everything by some arbitrary human-based attribute is a useful exercise, probably because I often can't see what I'm 'supposed' to see. I've sometimes thought this naming of geographical features is like our anthropomorphising of animals.

The Macquarie Dictionary says of anthropomorphise:

(say anthruhpuh'mawfuyz)
verb (anthropomorphised, anthropomorphising)
–verb (t) 1. to ascribe human form or attributes to.
–verb (i) 2. to ascribe human form or attributes to an animal, a god, etc. Also, anthropomorphize.

So I guess if I say a rock looks like a frog, I could be anthropomorphising. But I must confess that this word didn't really describe the phenomenon for me.

But now I've learned a new word, from Slavenka's blog - pareidolia - which she defines as 'a psychological phenomenon where human brains see familiar objects in random shapes'.

In looking for the word on the internet I came across a Flickr site devoted to pareidolia, and so far my favorite is this one.

There's a similar Flickr site devoted to random shapes that look like faces. Here are some:

ruderals in my garden have rights

Today I've come across a word I've been needing for years. But I didn't know I needed it. The word is ruderals.

I'm reading a book, Gardening Philosophy for Everyone, that has literally changed the way I see the world. I enjoyed the first chapter, 'The Virtues of Gardening', because it validates my belief that it is a 'good thing' to garden - more about that another time. However, it's chapter three, 'Escaping Eden - Plant Ethics in a Gardener's World', that has allowed me to realise that plants, too, are living, autonomous beings, entitled to consideration from humans.

I try to live in harmony with the environment, enriching the soil of my garden with natural substances and caring for the soil, but since I've read this chapter it's as if my eyes are open to the life force of the plants around me and I see them more vividly. I'm loving the experience.

What we call weeds are also entitled to our consideration.

In order to overcome exclusion and human mastery of the plant kingdom and the natural world, care, attention, and responsibility need to be extended outwards from our "cultivated" plants towards those plants that keep on coming back into our Edens from the wild lands outside... [This] requires giving over space to those plant lives that make their way into our gardens of their own accord: the wildflowers, grasses, climbers, and ruderals. It requires giving space and being open to the spontaneous arrivals and actions of plants that are not completely under human control. Setting aside space for plants to grow unchecked can help transform Eden from a human orientated space into one that is at the forefront of ethical reparations to the natural world.

Hmm...I will have to think about this. I've certainly got plenty of plants in my garden that arrived of their own accord, and when I recognise a seedling as useful to me, I tend it. But to allow that pesky Blue Periwinkle to spread around my garden is a big ask.

On the other hand, if I just keep it in check and let it have a corner of the yard, maybe I could make life easier for myself.

And what are these ruderals?

After consulting the Online Macquarie Dictionary I discover:

ruderal - adjective - growing near human habitations in waste places. [New Latin rūderālis, from Latin rūder-, rūdus broken stone, rubble]

Definitions.net says:

1. (adj.) ruderal
(of a plant) growing in waste places, along roadsides, or in rubbish.

2. (n.) ruderal
a ruderal plant.

Etymology: (1855–60; < NL rūderālis < L rūder- (s. of rūdus broken stone, rubble)

Aha! Those periwinkles are ruderals. They're creeping under my fence from the untended laneway at the back of our property.

Since I've learned this word I seem to see vacant land everywhere, carpeted with living green. (We've had good rain the last few months, thank goodness.)

It's all in the name, as I've said before about weeds.

the early bird gets the mulch

Every morning the birds get up early and scratch my mulch off the garden bed and onto the only neat path in the whole backyard.



I could find this aggravating. On the other hand, I could take the advice of Mary Horsfall, in The Mulch Book:

congratulate yourself on encouraging biodiversity, smile and push mulch back around plants. Place net over mulch if birds are a real pest.

No, the birds are not a terrible pest. On the contrary, they are pest-eaters. Thus I get to start every day with a smile. And with dirty hands.

The Online Macquarie Dictionary defines pest as:

noun 1. an organism considered harmful, as in agriculture, horticulture, buildings either domestic or commercial, etc.
2. a troublesome thing or person; nuisance.
3. Obsolete a deadly epidemic disease; a pestilence.
4. Obsolete a disease produced by the plague bacillus. [Latin pestis plague, disease]

How could anyone look at something as lovely as a bird and think of it as a plague on the garden?

Well, I'll admit that sometimes, when I see a hole picked in every piece of fruit on the tree, I do think a few bad thoughts about the birds...