Senior Moments

Sometimes I wonder what old people think about at the end of their lives. Do they smile with gentle satisfaction about what they did right with this time on earth? Or do they sit in their wheelchairs racked with regret? Do they think about the good stuff, or the bad stuff, and what went wrong, and how much they may have been to blame, and who they didn’t get to go the prom with, and who they did? Do they think about the money they made or didn’t make? Do they wish they had kissed their cousins that day in the upstairs room when they were playing spin the bottle? Do they think about all the places they saw, or do they think more about the places they didn’t see? Maybe they just think about lunch.

I don’t know yet. But as the silver touches more and more of my hair, I think perhaps I will find out sooner than now seems possible.

The word “senex” in Latin gives us several important words in English: “senior,” of course, means “older.” “Senile” is a not-particularly-kind word meaning “having lost one’s mind from old age.” “Senescence” is the state in which senile people find themselves.

And finally, there is “Senate,” the council of elders or old people--those who are supposed to be wise. Judging from how well the Senate has done in recent years, I’d say we might as well call them Senilators.

The opposite of “senex” is “juvenus,” youth. That one gives us “junior,” “juvenile,” and “juvenilia” (the product of a young artist’s first efforts).

The old man in the photo is my great-great-grandfather, Cornelius McCardell, a newspaper mogul from Middletown, NY. I don't remember a lot about him, or the stories I heard about him from my mother, but I still have some household things from his house. When I sit in my wheelchair, I will regret that I no longer have my mother to remember things for me; luckily my daughter got her memory, and I still have the pieces, so I’m covered. My girl can put a piece of china in my hand and tell me who I was and my son will spin me tales of his imaginary world. I think it will be fine.

Laissez Faire

I never thought I would need to know very much about the economy. After all, I’ve never had any money to speak of. I thought, let the economy mind its own business and I’ll mind mine, quietly, under the radar, paying my taxes and hoping not to have to retire to a shack on one of my brothers’ properties too soon.

Well! What fun the last week has been! And how much I have learned as Wall Street moguls stride, in all their pomp and circumstance, up to Capitol Hill to beg the citizens of the country to bail them out of their sinking ship---but also caulk the ship and let it sail on to the same destinations. And the ships’ captains? They want their own little retirement islands somewhere in an undisclosed location. And us, the taxpayers? Well, we get to fix their ships, cancel their debts, AND treat them to some very pretty gilded castles on their islands.

What we are seeing is the collapse, at least intellectually, of the idea that the government should be really, really, teeny--responsible only for, according to Wikipedia, courts, defense, police, prison, and taxes. The people who believe this are one version of libertarian. They think, I suppose, that every person in the world deserves exactly what he or she gets and should suffer the punishment if anything goes wrong. The larger public should not be the keeper of its weakest members, and government should never help the unfortunate. Let private entities do that if they feel like it. Otherwise, it’s every man for himself, yadayada.

But Wall Street got way too greedy, this time, persuading Congress (through its lobbyists) to remove restraining regulations on lending so that mortgage companies could lend money to borrowers they knew couldn’t pay back their loans, and then bundling the loans so no one could tell what was a good loan and what was a bad loan. I don’t pretend to understand the details, but I do understand that many people got loans they had no business getting, and that these loans were later packaged and sold to investors as though they were worth something. But they weren’t. Now the big companies are failing right and left, the whole lending mechanism has ground to a halt, and there is no liquid capital to grease the workings of business. It is a true crisis for an economy based on lending and borrowing. And it’s entirely the result of intellectually dishonest dealings by people who should have known and did know better but couldn’t resist the slickness of the maneuver. Now, what’s happened to these free-market enthusiasts? They’ve screwed up big time. Truth will, as Shakespeare said, out. It has outed. And now it’s to Mama Government that they are running for a suck at the great public teat. Intellectually as well as financially these masters of the financial universe are bankrupt.

But I rant.

Today’s word (or rather, expression): laissez-faire. The phrase means “Let it alone,” or “Let [the economy] be free to do what it does without fetter or restraint.” The idea harks back to the 18th-century Adam Smith’s philosophy, expressed in his book, The Wealth of Nations. In it, Smith argued for a new way of viewing self-interest. He said that a society’s economy functions best when the society’s members are all acting out of their own essential self-interest. According to The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics (see link above),

“Someone earning money by his own labor benefits himself. Unknowingly, he also benefits society, because to earn income on his labor in a competitive market, he must produce something others value. In Adam Smith's lasting imagery, "By directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention."

I think that many people, faced with a darn good image, assume the image to be the same, or virtually the same, as the underlying reality. But I think the “invisible hand” of Smith is not, as many conservatives touchingly believe, a sort of deus ex machina that will rescue them from their foolishness. In fact, when stock-market moguls did some very foolish things for the last eight years, I suppose they were hoping that the invisible hand would pluck their debts back up into the sky and hide the debts in its little vest pocket. Turns out, the hand did not appear. Only the great milky bosom of Government presented itself, and at that, the Secretary of the Treasury and the head of the Federal Reserve are busily begging for more na-na.

Disgusting.

Deluge and Diluvium

As the people of New Orleans (now evacuating from that city) await the arrival of Gustav, a potentially devastating hurricane, my friend, action reporter Bill Capo of WLTV in New Orleans, reports that the mood is of “feelings of disbelief and dread citywide as we prepare to go through it again, and it could even be worse this time.”

The word “deluge” comes directly from Latin (via French) “diluvium” (flood). Diluvium, in turn, comes from de-luere, or to wash away. We have relatives of “luvere,” “to wash,” in our words “laundry,” (what one washes) “lavatory,” (the room where one washes), “lave” (to wash, but antique), and, surprisingly, “lye,” which has been used since the 12th century to produce soap.

One of the most quoted remarks about floods, “Apres moi, le deluge,” (“after me, the flood”) was not actually about flooding at all, but about the terrible situation created when King Louis XV ruined the economy of France by high living while his people suffered in poverty. The result was the French Revolution. In that case, the floods were not of water, but of blood.
A succinct explanation of the French situation follows (copied from a Paul Jay’s entry in the Save Our Wetlands website):

The leader of the most powerful country on earth, with an unquestioned faith in his divine right to rule and the absolute power of the centralized state, was the namesake for Louisiana.

When he died in 1715, Louis XIV had built France into the dominant power in Europe, but he bankrupted the nation, forcing him to levy high taxes on the peasantry while the nobility paid none at all. Most people lived in poverty while the King built an empire.

During the empire’s demise his great great grandson Louis XV ruled France and its possessions, which included the colonial city of New Orleans. He lived for indulgence and luxury as his people descended further into despair. It is said near his end he uttered the words "Après moi le deluge." After me come the floods.

(September 5, 2005
By Paul Jay, Chair,
Reprinted from: http://www.iwtnews.com
Independent World News)

My thoughts are with the people of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast.

Lapse and Collapse

This is a beautiful image, but I don't know whom to credit for it. My apologies.




I first fully understood the meaning of “lapse” when, one summer, I was reading Virgil’s Aeneid with the brilliant Wayne J. Holman. I was doing my best, but frankly, Latin was hard for me. There was, I think, a reference to the Greek myth of Daedelus and his son, who rose on fabricated wings secured with wax to escape their prison in Crete. Icarus, the son, flew too near the blazing rays of the Mediterranean sun, wishing to reach the sun’s chariot. But he fell -- lapsus est -- and drowned.

Collapse (con-lapsus), then, means “to fall together,” and that seems to be an appropriate word for what is happening now in our environment, but so slowly that our hummingbird senses cannot fully appreciate it.
Here in East Tennessee this summer, we have had “air quality alerts” on more days than we have not had such warnings. The air is not easily breathable, though of course we must breathe or die, so we gasp on. My friend AS must stay indoors because her asthma is irritated by the air. The sky is white, not blue, a sort of muddy white. There is a stickiness in the air. East Tennesseeans do nothing about it because they are too fractious to do anything together except, perhaps, collapse (except for Chattanoogans, who have somehow learned the art of cooperation; Knoxvillians keep “knoxing” their heads against each other for no discernible reason).

So a “lapse” is a momentary fall; you can recover from it if those around you remain standing. But a “collapse” is total, and there is no easy recovery from it because there is no one left standing to pull you back up.

An interesting (and fully documented) take on this topic appears in “Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed,” a book by Jared Diamond. I highly recommend it. At least, if we are walking into collapse, it would be good to have our eyes open while we do it.

The word “draw” is such a common word, but it has many meanings, and at first they seem irreconcilable: To draw a picture. To draw a gun.To draw a crowd. To draw and quarter a prisoner. Drawers (meaning both underwear or the compartments we pull out of a chest). Drawing room. To draw water from a well. To draw a plow (Br. plough). To draw a bath.

And then, there is the word “drag,” which is essentially the same word as “draw”--To drag a river. To drag something behind you. To drag on (continue). To take a drag of a cigarette. To drag one’s feet. Bedraggled (having been dragged through mud, as in a lady’s skirts).

And then there is the word “draught” or “draft,” in American spelling:
Draft beer
To sit in a draft
Draftsman (draughtsman)
Dray horse.

All of these words come from Old English dragan “to drag or draw” and that is from Proto-Indo-European *dhragh (the asterisk indicates that the exact form isn’t known).

Related to "draw," there is the ancient Latin word "trahere," (try pronouncing the "t" as a "d"), which is again, the same word. Its past participle form is "tractus".
Attract
Tractor
Tractor-trailer

So what is the common factor? All of these words mean, in some way or other, “Pull.”

* You “pull” a pencil across the page.
* You pull a gun out of its holster.
* You pull a crowd toward you.
* You pull the guts out of a prisoner (if you’re a medieval or Renaissance despot) and then cut the body into four parts. Not one of Western civilization’s shining moments.
* You pull your underwear up.
* "Withdraw” means “to pull back,” so a “drawing room,” where in the past the ladies withdrew after dinner so that the men could enjoy their cigars and brandy, was really more of a withdrawing room.
* You pull a bucket out of a well.
* You pull a plow behind the horse.
* You pull a stopper or turn a faucet handle that lets water into a tub.

With “drag”
* You pull a net across a river (dragging a river).
* You “pull” smoke out of a cigarette by sucking and inhaling (taking a drag)

With “tractus”
* You pull a plow, as before, with a tractor--or a semi.
* You pull a trailer after the “tractor,” or “puller.”
* When you are attracted to someone, you are pulled toward that person by some emotional force.

With “draft” or “dray”
* You pull the lever on a keg to cause beer to flow
* You “draft” architect’s plans or a document, meaning you “draw” them
* A “dray” horse drags heavy loads behind it; hence, a large and strong horse.

All of these words, then, go back to Indo-European "dhragh," which probably sounded quite a bit like "draw" or "drag."

Business and Bizness and Bidness, Oh My!

There are some words that students always, always, always misspell, and “business” is one of them.
It shouldn’t really be hard, because business is busy-ness, the state of being busy. But somehow it usually comes out as “buisness,” which I guess is the students’ way of trying to smooth over the troubling fact that “busy” doesn’t sound like “buzzy” but “bizzy.”

The word “bank” goes back, as everyone should know by now, to the Renaissance, when Italian moneychangers had their offices on benches. The word for “bank” in Italian is “banca” and the word for “bench” is “banco,” showing their close relationship. When a moneychanger went out of business, the “bank” was “broken”--”ruptured,” -- hence the term “bankrupt.”

However, I didn’t know until consulting Funk (see previous posts) that banking originated in temples. Of course, I knew that Jesus had thrown the moneylenders out of the temple and broken their benches, but I didn’t know that even in Babylonia of 4500 years ago, priests were moneylenders, so it was not unusual at all for there to be money-changers and lenders in the temple.

What about the terms used in banking? One is “usury,” the practice of charging interest on a loan. This word goes back simply to Latin “usus,” or use, meaning that interest is charged for the “use” of the money. Myself, I think most moneylending is usurious (excessive, it means now) in the extreme, but that could have something to do with the amount on my credit-card bills every month.

And “money”? Money comes from the Latin “moneo,” “I warn.” Why? (That is, apart from the fact that any fool with money should be careful lest he be parted from it.) Well, that also goes back to a temple--Juno’s temple. In Roman mythology, Juno was among other things the goddess of warning and guarding. In her temple on the Capitoline Hill in Rome, the grateful citizens (grateful for what, we want to know) put up a temple to Juno, referring to her in that guise as Juno Moneta. And in the temple they put a mint for moneymaking, which she duly guarded. And there you have it. “Mint,” by the way, has nothing to do with juleps in this context. It also is derived from “moneta” -- still the word for “small change” in Italian” -- through Anglo-Saxon “mynet,” the place where money is made.

Who knew?

Oh, yes, about the title: “business” is the word, “bizness” is how you pronounce it, and “bidness” is what Cousin Nathan over in middle Tennessee (and old-fashioned people throughout the American South) call it.

Alligators and Possums and Porcupines

Wilfred Funk’s Word Origins and Their Romantic Stories is always worth a look on a rainy, cool summer day in Knoxville.

Today I happened on his wonderful chapter on animal names and found several surprises. For instance, I knew that “crocodile,” being an old-world creature, was probably Greek, and it is: “krokodeilos” from “kroke,” “gravel,” and “drilos,” “worm.” But I didn’t know that the word “alligator” was also from a European language (since it is a New World creature). In Spanish, “lizard” is “el lagarto” (pronounced “el laharto”). The word went through several transformations and spellings before it settled on “alligator.” I mean, does that sound Spanish to you?


Here’s another surprise: the word “antler.” Surely that is not from a European language. Doesn’t sound like it, anyway. Turns out the stag’s horn, seeming to come out of the skull around the eye, was called “ante ocularem ramum,” or “the branch before the eye.” This descended into old French as “antoillier” (“oeil” being “eye” even in modern French) and thus to “antler.” Actually, I think Funk must be slightly wrong on this one, because the article “l’” should appear before oeil, which would make sense because the “l” sound is preserved in the word “antler.” If Funk’s derivation is correct, the modern word should be “anter,” which it ain’t.


Opossum is, as I think I have heard before, an Algonquian word, “apasum,” or “white beast.” The opossum is unfortunate in that it cannot hide in daylight because of its white color, so it “plays possum” to avoid predators. These creatures can be scary, as I discovered one time when I found one in a garbage can I had carelessly left without its top.


Porcupines were another surprise. The original name for this in French was “porc d’espine,” or “spiny pig.” This was brought into English as “porkepyn” apparently after the French dropped the “s” in “espine” and it became “epine” (there is a telltale accent mark over the first e in this word, but frankly, I don’t know how to make it. If you ever see an accent mark listing from left to right on a French word, it is quite possible that in older French an “s” was concealed therein.

You never know when this bit of information might prove useful.