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."

Uhura means freedom

As I was reading the introduction to The Granta Book of the African Short Story, I did a double-take at this sentence from literary critic Paul Zeleza's essay 'Colonial Fictions: Memory and History in Yvonne Vera's Imagination':

This generation incorporated in their literary imaginations disdain for colonialism and distrust of nationalism that had animated earlier generations of writers who bemoaned the cultural agonies of colonialism and the aborted dreams of uhuru.

Bemoan Uhura?  No way! Lieutenant Uhura? Who could forget her calm handling of any crisis on Starship Enterprise?

And then I noticed it was uhuru, lower-case, no letter A on the end. Looked like a chance to learn yet another new word. And where better to check it out than on a Star Trek site, with a quote from Spock, that compendium of all useful information? He said: 'And Uhura, whose name means freedom.'

Once I set off around the Net to research the word uhuru, I was overwhelmed by the wealth of sites devoted to it. If, like me, you are unfamiliar with the historical and societal implications of this movement, just search the term.

African short stories and the Internet

As I browsed the Melbourne City Library recently, I saw a book facing out, probably placed by a librarian who recommended it. The book was The Granta Book of the African Short Story. That sure looked interesting, but I didn't want to carry a book on public transport because I had my hands full already.

Next day, I wandered into my local library, and there, facing out on the 'recent returns and new books' display, was the same book. Obviously I was meant to borrow it.

So I'm reading it.

In the introduction, Helon Habila says:

With the coming of the Internet to many parts of urban Africa in the late 1990s, a new avenue for publishing was discovered and the African short story finally began to get its long-overdue moment of recognition. [This follows a discussion of the emphasis on novels at the expense of short stories.] The traditional publishing landscape, with its excessive restrictions, was suddenly superseded. The Internet is today doing what the newspapers and magazines did to the development of the short story in Europe and America at the start of the industrial age. It is worth pointing out that the Internet, due to its own peculiar restrictions, seems actually to favour short stories over novels, thereby reversing the restrictions that traditional publishing had placed on African fiction.

Food for thought. Is the Internet giving the short story new life everywhere in the world? I hope so.

In my opinion, eReaders also favour short stories. It seems ages since I bought a BeBook Neo. I didn't use it for a long time, until I had the bright idea of transferring to it the stories I download from my subscription to Beneath Ceaseless Skies. Now I can sit comfortably at the table with my eReader propped up on my Book Seat, or lie in bed and take in a short fantasy or sci-fi story.

squirrels and bowerbirds garden

In researching yesterday's post  about the word sidespies, coined by Dylan Thomas in his radio play Under Milkwood,  I came across a page on a site called WordSpy where Paul McFedries posts neologisms he has coined. He invented the expression squirrel gardening:

squirrel gardening, adj.

The accidental "gardening" that occurs when squirrels transfer seeds and bulbs from one one part of a garden to another, or even between gardens.

This word wouldn't work for us in Australia, but I think we have a synonym, bowerbird gardening.

Here's a link to an article about male bowerbirds in Oceania 'accidentally' growing plants when they build their intricate bowers  to attract a mate.