All illusion, really

It was such a harmless quote...

"Mommy's just filling in the corners."
"Which was a hobbit allusion, " I said, for Meg's benefit. Because she clearly needs to be fully acquainted with all of Tolkien's passing turns of phrase at the earliest opportunity.
Meg announced, "It was an OCCLUSION!"

We all laughed, and Jonathan started defining all the "--lusion" words he could think of.  Meg suggested "solution."
"Yes, a solution is a problem fixed," Jonathan agreed.
I added, "Or it's something dissolved in liquid."
"Yes, which solves the problem of nothing being dissolved in your liquid. Or you're about to throw it at a troll. Which makes him solvent. His bankruptcy creditors are delighted!"

"I'm going to be a laughingstock of linguists and alchemists alike." Jonathan

Quotes

"It slipped through my mental fingers like greased lasagna." Jonathan

I was narrating Meg. "A small burrowing mammal..."
Meg was outraged. "I am not a burro!"

Jane the invisible mousie, it turns out, has watched the Sonic the Hedgehog show, which I didn't even know exists. I said she was very avant-garde.
This puzzled Meg. "Jane's not a guard."

Again, and in SPANISH!

"Would you like to pray your bedtime prayer tonight, or shall I?" I asked. Meg always wants to pray for meals these days.
"You do it!"
I open my mouth --
"In SPANISH!"

So I did. Kind of. It's a good thing the Holy Spirit intercedes for us, when we don't have words!

A month and a day and another day

Kate's a month and a two days old. We're finally, finally having fall here. We had dew a few nights back, and this morning I woke up to condensation on the inside of the windows. There was some lovely fall color as I drove down Sycolin Road, the end out towards Ashburn, and it was bright and blustery and plenty cold enough for my puffer vest. I do like fall.

Meg held Kate for the first time this morning. We were all sitting in the big chair and I put her mostly upright in Meg's lap. Meg did a good job. Sadly I didn't get a picture, first because we were all in weird pajamas and unkempt-looking, second because it's hard to get a good shot of a chair you're sitting in, and most of all because the camera was clear at the other end of the house. So I wanted to make sure I mentioned it on the blog.

Meg is still fascinated by her sister. I call her Katherine, or Kate, or Katiekins. Meg calls her Kaffrin or Katie-kinsie. (Is Kaffrin like caffeine? Meg discovered slant rhymes and has been playing with them all week. "Caffeine" would be somewhat appropriate, if you are what your mother eats.)

I'm still kind of fascinated by Katie, too. She's charming. I love her little fists. I love the way she holds the frog wubba-nub pacifier with a hand on either side, to keep it from getting away -- when she can find both hands, of course. I love her curly little baby feet, which are straightening out and not going to be curly much longer. I love it when she looks straight at someone (preferably me) with those big eyes; and she makes the funniest faces. The best is with her mouth in an O and her eyes wide. What is she thinking?

Speaking of not knowing what they're thinking, Meg went in to her room this evening, theoretically to put on pajamas, and I hear maniacal laughter. "Ha ha ha ha ha! My destiny!" Just... what?

Not out of the bosque yet

I've finally gotten around to tracking down the connection between the Spanish word "bosque," as in the woods in the Rio Grande valley, and the English word "bosky," which I came across in Milton or Spenser or somebody and which also means wooded or bushy. I did what I could, but I had to rely much more on wikis than I would have liked. So I may have to correct some of this later.

My first guess was that the English was borrowed from the Spanish, or maybe both of them were descended from Latin. But it looks like that's not so! I think I've found one of those rare instances where the Latin and the Spanish both borrowed from Old Germanic.  According to this source there's not much agreement where the old Germanic term came from, and one expert thinks it originally came from the Latin "buxus," box tree; but nobody else thinks so.

"Bosque" apparently comes by way of Catalan/Provencal/Old French, "bosc," from the proposed Germanic "busk," meaning brush or thicket.  The Latin "boscus, bosci" is a medieval (not classical) word meaning wood or wooded area. Fun fact: descendant words are "ambuscade," meaning an ambush set up in the woods, and "oboe," which is -- a woodwind!

I would like to see what the OED has to say about the English "bosky." Merriam-Webster just ties it to Middle English "bush" or "bosk," and I want more details. The whole business about the SH and SK at any rate makes sense - English apparently did that a lot. You see the same thing in "shirt" and "skirt," which are exactly cognates only one of them had more Norse influence. I think. If I'm remembering.

The simple things in life, like great words and watching your mother work

Meg handed me her sippy cup. "Wash my lid off, Mommy."
Me: "Wash it? What happened to it?"
Meg: "It got all butterdy!"
Me: "Butterdy? That is the awesomest word I've heard all day. I'll wash it just for that word."
Meg hoisted her tiny rocking chair and hauled it into the kitchen. "I'll watch!"

Meg quotes

Meg was describing the picture on the card to me. Jonathan was halfway across the room on the computer. "And I believe that is an ostrich. He's turning the light on and off! He's using his nose since he doesn't have no hands."

Reflexively and in unison, despite the fact he wasn't even paying attention, Jonathan and I both said, "Doesn't have any hands." Some corrections are so deep-rooted we don't even need to rehearse. :-) Incidentally, DRAT that Mr. Lunt. I don't care what VeggieTales thought they were doing: they are teaching my daughter lousy grammar.


Then tonight I was putting Meg to bed. She yelped, "No! Not yet! I need--" and looked wildly around the room for inspiration! I enjoy these iconic parenting moments.

Meggie's grammar

Meg is not yet aware that the word "my" exists, preferring "mine" in all situations. This results in "I need mine apple juice!" So Shakespearean. I'm certainly not going to correct her.

She also has a stock response to "How are you?", which is "Doing well." It's charming when you ask how she personally is, funny when you're asking about a toy, and hilarious when you ask how her blueberries or chicken nuggets are. "They're doing well."

Dinogad's Smock

Heavenfield linked me to this rather neat piece of historical detective work. "Dinogad's Smock" is an old Welsh lullaby that got incorporated into the Y Gododdin, and linguists dated the lullaby to the 500s AD.

The poem specifies Dinogad's father went fishing in "Rhaeadr Derwennydd," or the Derwent Waterfall. There are several Derwents on the Isles, but only one with a waterfall. There's also a "Hog's Earth" woods nearby suitable for bringing back "a roe-buck, a boar, a stag," and a Castle Crag just uphill from the falls with a post-Roman settlement of suitable age. Bing!

Wrong, wrong, wrong

Some people tend to get all twitchy when pictures hang crooked. For me, it's when bloggers use the wrong homonym. That tells me they don't understand what they're writing. Which is bad. This is especially distressing in metaphors like

"guild the lily" (should be GILD the lily, as in put gold on it, not put it into committees)

and

"give it free reign" (which at least makes sense, kind of, but it's actually REIN. Like, horses. Horses have reins, not kingdoms).

I also saw someone write "walla" for "voila." Today. Twitch, twitch.

Those are true stories from this week, but I didn't link them to protect the guilty. Thank you. You may now return to your previously scheduled life.

Words

I've been reading British books so long, it confuses me when American books refer to "jumpers." I always have to stop and try to figure out what kind of clothing they're talking about.

In other news, the word "starve" didn't use to mean dying of hunger; it was just a general word for dying. We watched A Knight's Tale with Heath Ledger the other day and obviously then had to read the real Chaucer's "Knight's Tale," and in it the characters were always "sterving" for love. They spent a lot of time "cryinge" too. The extra e adds something. However, I find myself unable to sympathize with people who duel to the death for love without ever talking to the lady in question. They fail.

Family trees

"If people have family trees, so have words, and tracing their branches through time and place reveals the complexity of their characters..." T.L. Simmons, as quoted by Chris's Collections.

Read the full post here. My excerpt doesn't nearly do it justice. It's a lovely defense of learning Latin, among other things.

An average baby

We were amused on Monday to find out that Margaret is exactly average. We had no idea. But the doctor weighed and measured her and says she's at the 50th percentile for growth. She's up to 9 pounds, 7 ounces.

Yesterday, we experimented with ways to cheer up this average baby. Particular favorites were gentle bouncing, having hymns sung to her at great length, and having Daddy read Latin out loud. I think they were reading Virgil's eclogues. There really is something about the sonorous Latin periods, because having English read aloud just didn't do it for her.

This morning I needed to be taken on a date, so we packed her up and went on her first non-medical Real Outing -- to Starbucks! So, what with one thing or another, I think Meggie's cultural education is coming along splendidly!

Word games

Jonathan's parents came to visit Meg (and us), and this evening she decided to take a 4 1/2 hour nap. So the rest of us played games. We get pretty intense about Boggle, let me tell you. I won.

Regarding my use of the word "fere", with great disgust: "It's an archaic word. She got it out of a poem." Jonathan

Later:
"You sounded so affronted that I got it out of a poem." Me
"I was." Jonathan
"Kanary sent to me." Me
"And that makes it better?" Jonathan
"Yes!" Me
"Kanary had an Assyrian beard." Jonathan
"Yes, he did." Me
"Red herringed!" Jonathan

Well, despite such dubious provenance, it's still a good poem. I may have posted it on here before; I can't remember. In fact, once Jonathan read it (in a grand Sco'ish accent, nae less), he admitted it was awesome enough I was allowed to get the word from it. :-)

"Fere," incidentally, means companion or spouse. It's connected to "faran," as in to "fare forth" or "fare thee well," so a fere is apparently someone you travel with. It's quite a nice word, really.

Le siege parfait

Last week I was taking my lunchtime constitutional when I noticed that the corner furniture store had a display of chairs with a big sign, "Le siege parfait pour [something or other]." I meditated on this for a minute.

Aha! "Siege" must mean "seat" or "chair" -- like in Morte D'Arthur, the Siege Perilous! And that would make sense, because Morte was written during the Hundred Years War, when a massive chunk of English people spoke French anyway. And then I got off thinking about how Morte was the second book Caxton printed, after the Bible, and then thought about early printing in general, and then I was back to my office.

That evening, I shared my discovery with Jonathan. "So 'siege' must mean 'seat'"--
"Like the Siege Perilous?"
"Yes, exactly!" (We must hang out together too much. )

After that, of course, I had to start re-reading Morte D'Arthur. I even carried it to work with me. And today I made another discovery.

You see, my work chair and my back have been quarreling of late. I keep meaning to take a pillow or something, but haven't yet. Today I stuffed my nice hefty softcover Morte back there, and found it quite comfortable. As we learned in college, a thick book makes an excellent pillow. Le siege parfait, indeed. :-)

Today I learned

Any sentence beginning, "The Brench and the Fritish" is probably not going to succeed, and should be started over.

Lewis on language

"The Lewis/Tolkien collaboration that might have been (but never was)" - A fascinating post from Lingwe. I quite liked Lewis' Studies in Words, not to mention Tolkien's "On Fairy Stories" and "English and Welsh," and will definitely have to find a copy of this new manuscript when they get it published. :-)

Hat tip: Unlocked Wordhoard.

Yawn

Really odd things happen when you talk without being awake. Whose herb garden did you go into?

It spoke to my soul

Abraham Piper is so right.

We called our pending offspring "them"... once. Then we discovered what we'd said. :-)

English as a written language

"Some people have no concept of English as a written language." Ben A 3-15-09

I submit a few instances for your consideration. They affect context rather horrifically:

Losing/loosing
Bowls/bowels
Marital/martial

And my personal favorite: "heart faliure."

Well, I thought it was funny...