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 Semper Ubi Sub Ubi readme:
Just under the wire again. Awesome. Hey, your high school didn’t issue the yearbook in the first week of class, did it? It took a while for April to sink in.
First up, thanks to all the folks who have generously contributed to my upkeep and the continued existence of this site. Special super-duper thanks to S, J, and E for their ginormous generosity. Your cats are in the mail.
I’ve been noodling around the internet for a long time, long enough that, when I started, the first thing I bought was a primer on Unix commands. I think the reason I’ve managed to avoid a major disaster so far is my natural skepticism, which some people call paranoia, but you can call raspberry jam for all I care. It works. Thanks to my deeply suspicious nature, I managed to use Windows computers for more than ten years and never caught a virus, trojan or spyware. Yeah, I probably deleted a boatload of unopened hilarious and touching digital greeting cards from friends and relatives, but one must be strong.
Lately, however, I’ve felt a weird, inexplicable craving to join Facebook. It comes on at strange times, often in the wee hours of the morning (which, for me, is nine or ten am), and manifests itself in a ravening desire to see what that kid from fourth grade has been up to for the past [mumble mumble] years. I also know gazillions of people who have Facebook pages, and, since I’m famous for not answering email from them, being on the damn thing might make life easier.
But then I actually look at Facebook and it creeps me out. The thought of being asked to “friend” people I barely know and may not actually … like … is bad enough. The stress of just thinking about it makes me wish I drank. Then there’s the distinct possibility that someone I “friend,” just to be nice, will turn out to have also “friended” the Pol Pot Fan Club or something similar.
But then I forget all that and just want to join and not be missing something.
Fortunately, about once a week for the past month, Facebook has stepped up to the plate and proven that I’m not the one missing something. See also this. And especially this. And they’re not even good at being evil. Long story short, these creeps are not your friends, and their promises are worthless.
But let’s look on the bright side of the net. Futility Closet is always fun. The Browser and Give Me Something to Read are good sources of things to, uh, read. And Harper’s offers consistently good stuff.
The Journal of a Disappointed Man is fascinating. The author, W. N. P. Barbellion, was an English diarist diagnosed, in 1915, with what is now known as multiple sclerosis. The preface to the book (free to read at that first link) is by H.G. Wells.
Onward, ready or not. I try to look forward to the coming of Spring, I really do. But I think it’d be a lot easier to do so in New York City. Last week I noticed that (a) our neighbors had apparently been mowing their lawns for a couple of weeks (maybe since January, who pays attention to that stuff?), and (b) our lawn was starting to look more than just a bit feral, like maybe there could be wolverines lurking in there. Snakes, definitely. Plus which Pokie would wander out there and get lost. Of course, Pokie wanders into the living room and gets lost, but this was worse, because she’s both deaf and demented, so even if you spot Pokie and call really loud and wave your hands, she looks at you like she’s never seen you before and goes right back to licking the tree. Pokie likes to lick trees. Pokie also likes to lick the gravel in the driveway. And the rug in the living room. For hours on end.
Anyway, it was about his time that our neighbor stopped by and asked if I needed help fixing My Little Tractor. This is about as subtle as it gets around here, but I was sharp that day and caught his drift. So a couple of days later I pried the garage door open and fired up the beast, or tried to, but the battery was dead. Rats. Well, maybe next year, eh?
Continue reading this post » » »
Shoes for industry!
Dear Word Detective: How did a type of shoe come to be called a “pump”? — Adsaka.
That’s a good question, albeit a short one. I actually prefer questions with a bit of backstory to them, such as “My mother says that the kind of shoe called a ‘pump’ got its name because in the early days of motor cars all the gas station attendants were female, men being considered unsuitable for the job because they smoked cigars. Anyway, these female pump attendants supposedly all had to wear special shoes called ‘pumps’ that were designed not to slip on oily pavement. Is Mom right, or should we have her committed?”
I have the horrible feeling that someday soon I’m going to run across that paragraph on the internet, copied and pasted as fact. The funny thing is that the kind of shoe called a “pump” actually may be connected to “pump” in the “gas pump” sense. By the way, the fancy word “albeit,” seen in my first sentence, is simply a Middle English shortening of “although it be.” Go forth and impress your friends.
The word “pump,” as one would expect in a world where most of the water you’d like to drink is underground, is very old, first appearing in English in the 15th century with the basic meaning of “a mechanical device for raising water.” Almost all pumps consist of a cylinder of some sort, within which moves a tightly-fitted piston or plunger that draws the water or other fluid through the tube, and a valve that prevents the water from going right back out when the piston goes down again. There are, of course, types of pumps that don’t involve pistons, but for our purposes that piston is the part to remember.
The origins of the word “pump” are uncertain, but most authorities believe that “pump” was onomatopoeic (or “echoic”) in origin, simply formed as an imitation of the sound of a pump. “Pump” is, of course, also a verb, and apart from its literal uses, “to pump” has acquired an impressive array of figurative senses over the past few centuries. We “pump up,” strengthen and enlarge, our muscles at the gym, and we “pump” money or other things into places where they are thought to be needed (“The Fed is still pumping money into Wall Street”) or places where they are definitely not (“You never saw anybody that was deader. Must have had thirty pills pumped in him,” Dashiell Hammett, Red Harvest, 1929). Reporters “pump” (intensively question) sources for information, a usage that dates back to the 17th century, and a good speaker can “pump up” (excite) a crowd using nothing more than florid adjectives.
But even given the wide use to which “pump” as both a noun and verb has been put, it’s not easy to discern its connection to “pump” as a type of low-heeled, close-fitting women’s shoe, a usage that arose in the 16th century. It has been suggested that “pump” in this sense is derived from “pomp” meaning “display of splendor and magnificence,” although the “pump” is usually a pretty simple shoe.
It seems more likely that the “pump” shoe owes its name to the humble mechanical “pump.” The classic “pump” shoe lacks straps or other fasteners, and the key to the shoe staying on one’s foot is its snug fit, rather like the piston of a pump. In fact, back in the 16th century, such pistons in pumps were known as “pump shoes” from their vaguely shoe-like shape. It’s likely that the “pump” shoe took its name, in a 16th century pun, from these close-fitting “pump shoe” pistons.
No grils allowed.
Dear Word Detective: I have come upon the word “denizens” a couple times lately, used (as usual) as if it meant “resident of.” But why should it? If a citizen is someone who lives in a city, shouldn’t a denizen be someone who lives in a den? And does that mean you could use a word like “homizen” or “hoodizen” to mean “someone who lives around here, in the hood”? — Jeff, Toronto, Canada.
“Hoodizen”? I like it. In fact, I hereby deputize you to get out there on the streets of Toronto and popularize it. Speaking of “dens,” while you’re on your mission, can you ask around and see if you can locate the person who popularized the term “man cave”? It’s fairly recent term for a little den (usually furnished with a bar, TV, video games, action figures, etc.) set up in a basement or garage as a “boys only” sanctuary by a married (though probably not for long) man. Or should that be “boy-man”? I just can’t keep up with our cultural infantilization. Anyway, I have a banana cream pie I’d like to present to the inventor of that term.
A “denizen” is not, as you noted, a person who lives in a “den.” The American Heritage Dictionary’s definition of “den,” however, follows an interesting progression: “1. The shelter or retreat of a wild animal; a lair. 2. A cave or hollow used as a refuge or hiding place. 3. A hidden or squalid dwelling place: ‘a den of thieves.’ 4. A secluded room for study or relaxation. 5. A unit of about eight to ten Cub Scouts.”
“Den” comes from the Old English “denn,” which meant “a wild animal’s lair,” from Germanic roots that meant “a flat area,” the connection possibly being vegetation, etc., flattened by a sleeping animal. “Den” today is also used in the phrase “den mother,” originally meaning a woman who leads a “den” of Cub Scouts, but now applied figuratively to any person playing a caretaking role to a group (“… Linda McCartney, den mother to the Beatles,” 1976).
As cool as the word “den” is, there is, sadly, no connection between “den” and “denizen.” Although we use “denizen” today to mean simply “an inhabitant or habitual occupant of a place” (“The new Hello Kitty Beer was not a hit with the denizens of Bob’s Biker Bar”), the original meaning of “denizen” when it first appeared in English in the 15th century was a bit more specific. A “denizen” of a country was someone who lived inside a country; a resident, as opposed to a foreigner. The root of “denizen” was the Old French word “deinz,” meaning “inside,” derived from the Latin phrase “de intus,” meaning “from inside.” There even was a verb “to denize” in the 16th century, now long obsolete, that meant “to naturalize, to give the rights of a citizen to.”
“Citizen” doesn’t exactly come from the word “city,” but they do share an ancestor, the Latin “civis,” meaning “citizen.” This “civis” spawned “civitas,” meaning “community, city state,” from which we eventually got “city.” Meanwhile, in Old French, the related form “citeain” meant “citizen,” and was taken into Anglo-Norman in the form “citezein,” which became our English “citizen” in the 14th century. The sudden appearance of that “z” is probably due to the influence of the Anglo-Norman “deinzein,” our old friend “denizen,” which was often used interchangeably with “citezein.”
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Semper Ubi Sub Ubi
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