Bahar injas

That's the Farsi for "spring is here."

That's not to say it couldn't have the occasional relapse into zemestan, as we are on a mountain and all, but for most intents and purposes we're in a springy sort of season.

The snow has melted in all but the deepest and shadowiest crevices. Daylight comes through my bathroom window again by 6:30 in the morning, and it's still light after six at night. We've gotten up to or past fifty degrees most of this week, and everybody's still wearing their winter coats around out of habit.

My office plants--Bertie Woozle the schefflera, and my palm tree (nameless here forever more)--are leaning hopefully toward the window, through which cloud-filtered sunbeams no longer quite make it. We only get sun inside during the wintriest months, when it stays so low it can reach under the eaves. The palm tree and I both need to go sit in the sun for a while. We're getting pale.

But the worst of it is, with spring comes spring fever. Who wants to stay inside on a day like this? We've got Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald playing on the radio, which only makes things worse. They had a live jazz pianist at that little seafood place in Alexandria, the day Ben and Lisa and Jonathan and I went.

I think Princess Amy expressed it well, after Perry dropped her off at her parents' castle. She thought summer would never come. But in the meantime, she had an endless array of dress fittings and thank-you notes to write!

Lavendar's blue,
Rosemary's green,
When you are king,
I shall be queen...

Quote of the day

"We're pressing ahead toward total domination of his dentition." --the good doctor

If ye will not brush, ye will be drilled.

Word of the day

Today's word of the day is "bee." I'm rather excited because we've translated it into three languages. I knew the Farsi because Angelina taught it to me ages ago; Rebecca knew the Spanish; and a passing-by Russian patient was kind enough to oblige with her language. :-) (Gratia, can you give us Italian, too?)

Spanish: abeja

Russian: ptcholka

Farsi: zambor

Bzzz!

On the recent rash of atheist books

I just read Dr. David Aikman's Faith & Reason lecture. It's been around a couple weeks, but it's good. If you haven't heard/read it yet, I definitely recommend it.

Practicality strikes again

I almost caught an adult playing today. I really thought I had. She was dressed for an office job, but I met her by a bridge in a woodsy bit of sidewalk across from the pool. She was walking along, arms out, putting one foot in front of the other like on a balance beam.

She looked up, saw me, and stepped onto the sidewalk. "Watch out!" she said. "It's really icy."

Practicality strikes again. Sigh.

I met her again on my way back to work. "So you didn't fall?" she asked, kindly enough. "Oh, no," I answered. "And you?" "Oh, I'm good too," she said.

A minute later I met an elderly man walking. "Watch out," he said. "There's a terrible lot of ice down there." I thanked him for the warning.

I'm sure grownups must play. They just don't do it in public. Much.

Song of the day

Frogs at School

Twenty froggies went to school, down beside a rushy pool,
Twenty little coats of green, twenty vests all white and clean.
"We must be on time", said they; "First we study, then we play;
That is how we keep the rule, when we froggies go to school."

Master Bullfrog, grave and stern, called the classes in their turn,
Taught them how to nobly strive; likewise how to leap and dive;
From his seat upon a log, showed them how to say "Kerchog!"
Also how to dodge a blow from the sticks which bad boys throw.

Twenty froggies grew up fast, big frogs they became at last;
Not one dunce among the lot; not one lesson they forgot;
Polished to a high degree, as each froggy ought to be,
Now they sit on other logs, teaching other little frogs.

On formal pronouns

Becca-here-at-work is taking Spanish. She's also got some Latin background, so we've been able to have some good grammatical discussions. Today we got into formal and informal pronouns. Her question: did Latin have formal and informal for the second person?

I didn't recall that it did, particularly. But Romanian (Latin's close relative) uses the second person plural as the second person singular formal, so I wondered if maybe Latin did and I just wasn't remembering it. Because that's what Spanish does, as well: "Como estas tu" becomes 'como esta usted.'

That led naturally into the archaic English formal and informal. "You," back around the Restoration, was rather the more formal construction, but if you were familiar with the person, you'd use "thee" and "thou." And even now English sort of retains a first person formal with the royal we. (As Megan K. said, the only people who can get away with the royal we are kings, editors, and people with tapeworms.) So in the first person, when you want to be formal you make it plural. But you assuredly don't do that in the second person. "O y'all, please hearken unto mine humble plea." No.

It occurred to me that when you want to be very respectful--at least in older English novels--you address them using the third person, with their title. "How is my lady this morning?" "Would Your Highness consider such-and-such?"

Isn't that interesting?

The sixth of Esfand

I'd never particularly thought of the sixth of Esfand, one way or another; it's a date in the Persian calendar. It's today, in fact.

But it sounds like what today is, which is exceedingly Monday-ish. It's the sort of day where your rubber band fizzles instead of firing, and you set a piece of paper on a countertop only for it to drift lazily to the chair seat, and thence to the floor.

Also, the phone has been ringing off the hook.

But then it would on the sixth of Esfand.

Three laments, kind of

First, from "Geoffrey Chaucer Hath a Blog": a lament for Ulrich von Liechtenstein, also known as Sir William Thatcher, also known as Heath Ledger. It'll probably be funnier if you liked "A Knight's Tale." A tip of the hat to Unlocked Wordhoard.


Second, from Wittingshire: the woe of the eel and the seal. (Parenthetically, who says the lament is an obsolete art form??)


Third, from my mother, an email forward. Yes: to such depths I have descended, as to put forwards on my blog. But it fit so well with this post, I couldn't resist. :-)

A Minneapolis couple decided to go to Florida to thaw out during a particularly icy winter. They planned to stay at the same hotel where they spent their honeymoon 20 years before. Because of their hectic schedules, it was difficult to coordinate their travel schedules. So, the husband left Minneapolis and flew to Florida on Friday, and his wife was flying down the following day. The husband checked into the hotel, and unlike years ago, there was a computer in his room, and he decided to send an email to his wife. However, he accidentally left out one letter in her email address, and without noticing his error, sent the email to the wrong address.

Meanwhile... somewhere in Houston, a widow had just returned home from her husband's funeral. He was a Minister who was called home to glory after suffering a heart attack. The widow decided to check her email, expecting messages from relatives and friends. After reading the message, she screamed and then fainted.

The widow's son rushed into the room, found his mother on the floor, and then glanced up and saw the computer screen which read:

To: My Loving Wife
Date: Friday, October 13, 2004
Subject: I have Arrived!

Dearest Love: I know you are surprised to hear from me. They have computers here now, and you are allowed to send emails to your loved ones. I have just arrived and have been checked in. I see that everything has been prepared for your arrival tomorrow, and look forward to seeing you then. Hope your journey is as uneventful as mine was.

PS ....... Sure is hot down here!!

A postmodern defense of Romance

Here's a grad student's musings on Hawthorne and Romance (in the fairy-ish sense, not the love sense). It's somewhat misty, to me--probably because it was written by a grad student, who has been writing too many misty papers--but he wants to bring Romance back as a viable and acceptable genre, as opposed to its current despised status.

But he seems to like Hawthorne and Romance in a postmodern way. Look at this.

The 'truth' of Hawthorne's Romances is dissimulation, and their effect is not a reassurance of recognition, or one's direct and holy spiritual continuity with the world, but the spectral rupture, the experience of unreality. The[y] begin their affective work in the way of all manner of thing which can bear a terrible
effectivity being neither living nor dead. This is to say, that at moments,
Hawthorne's more ghostly moments evoke/conjure the figure of the Derridean
ghost, or that ability to produce effects without having being. The airiness in Hawthorne is not a Platonic or symbolist kind of 'more real' reality in pneumatic things, but rather a gray pale fading away of Being.

He likes Hawthorne's romances because they illustrate the erosion of being itself. In saying, "Romance considers the possibility of affecting the reader's experience of reality rather than representing it," he is being profoundly postmodern: representation fails when reality fades, and power ("affecting the reader's experience") is all you are left with.

Personally, I want to bring back Romance as a genre because of its power to express a "more real" Reality; but Reality falls apart unless you have the Lord Jesus, the Logos, at the center. In Him all things hold together, and in Him we have our being. And, if we have Reality, we can then gain back reality as well, and representation with it.