Clean as a whistle

I had this dream recently where my doctor woke me from my colonoscopy exam and directed me to look at a high definition monitor up on the wall of the operating room. I was still a little groggy so it took a moment for me to realize that this was a live shot and that the camera was still inside of me. The doctor pointed to the screen and said, "just look at that." When my eyes came into focus I saw clearly what had him so disturbed. There, clinging to the walls of my colon, were hundreds of small colorful emoticons: smiley faces, sad faces, crying faces, winks, devil grins, puckered lips, the whole kit and kaboodle. "Wow," I said, "I had no idea. So this is where they end up." The doctor just shook his head. "It's going to take me all day to clean up in here," he grumbled. I watched as he got back to work, plucking a Facebook "thumbs up" emoticon from a dimly lit crevice of this heretofore uncharted territory. This place where the sun doesn't shine.

Word of the Day

A few weeks ago, I found my dictionary in the bathroom and started reading. The dictionary in question is a pocketbook-sized edition by Random House that dates back to 1980. Its pages are yellow from age, crumbly and folded from heavy use. Most of the time, it is stowed in a nightstand next to my bed along with a chaotic stack of books. Whenever I am reading in bed and need to look up a word, I can usually reach over without looking away from the book in my other hand and find the dictionary by its weathered feel.

I’m not sure how my dictionary ended up in the bathroom, but one morning I saw it there, picked it up and began flipping through the pages. It opened to a page seemingly of its own choosing. Two words in particular caught my eye, one right above the other: submerge and submerse. Submerge was defined as “to sink or plunge beneath the surface of a liquid.” Submerse was defined as “to submerge.” The question that came immediately to my mind was: why do we need two words, one letter apart, to say the same thing? I kind of feel bad for submerse, which seems to me like the underachieving and unpopular younger brother of submerge. Submerse? Oh yeah, we knew his brother submerge. Nice guy. He drowned, didn’t he? I am sure there is an etymological evolution that led to the “submerge versus submerse” distinction, but the pocketbook Random House volume simply does not have the space to devote to it.

Pretty much every day now, I pick my dictionary in the bathroom and allow it to randomly open to a page. Some days are more interesting than others. I am not so much looking to expand my vocabulary by learning long complex words. No, I am much more interested in the stories behind the words that point to the quirky nature of our language. The fact that there is a long word in English, sesquipedalian, that means “a long word” is reason enough for me to pick up a dictionary.

Sometimes, the words I focus on in my morning dictionary reading are words that I think I know, but always get wrong. Hoi polloi comes to mind. I always think that the word refers to “pretentious upper class people,” when in fact it means “common people, the masses, riffraff.” I wonder if the reason hoi polloi trips me up is because of its rhythmic pronunciation, not unlike highfalutin, which does mean pretentious!

Sometimes it is the second meanings of words that are more interesting to me than the first. Take “measly” for example. The first meaning, not surprisingly, deals with the infection commonly associated with the measles. The second meaning is “wretchedly scanty or unsatisfactory.” Huh? Waiter, this portion of lasagna you served me is measly, it reminds me of the red puss-filled sores that covered my body when I was younger. Take it away.

Then there are the words that I have never been able to spell. When I see them on a page of the dictionary it is as though I have turned the corner and encountered an old nemesis in an alleyway – Oh, you again! Despite my determined stare-down of the word, (damn it, I will get you this time!), despite projecting the word, letter-by-letter into my mind space using enormous bold fonts, I will still forget the correct spelling within ten minutes. That’s the way it is with bad spellers; it’s in our DNA. The other day, the dictionary opened to a page that contained the mother lode of words I can’t spell: the “bou” page. Bouffant. Bougainvillaea. Bouillabaisse. Bourgeois. Boutonnière. Hopeless, I tell you.

This morning was a great word: hors frost. It means simply “frost.” What’s the hors part? The Random House editors didn’t say. I could look it up in a bigger, more comprehensive dictionary. I could even Wikipedia it. Then again, the mystery is probably more interesting than the explanation.

What can I say? I like reading the dictionary. I have begun to look forward to my minute or two with the dictionary every morning. It beats the bad news of my morning newspaper. OK, one last dictionary gem: inestimable, "not able to be estimated." Seems straightforward enough. Would it be safe to assume, then, that the word estimable means the opposite: "easily estimated”? Well, no. Estimable means "deserving of praise." Go figure.

September 21, 2009

It was snowing hard on the last day of summer in the Rocky Mountains. I was with three work colleagues tired from a long day in the field. We were stopped in traffic at the entrance to the Edwin C. Johnson tunnel, the highest vehicular tunnel in the world, on our way back to Denver in the late afternoon. Freakish white-out conditions at over 11,000 feet. Too soon, even for up here. Through my fogged up window in the rear seat of our SUV, I could barely make out the dimensions of a tractor trailer in the next lane. The truck was squealing even though it was fully stopped, as we were. I wiped the condensation from my window with the sleeve of my jacket. It was a livestock truck. I wiped the window again for a better view. The trailer was filled with pigs. Little bitty pigs. Hundreds of them, on three levels. I had never seen a stacked array of so many animals like this before. They were agitated. I watched flashes of pink appear and then disappear through the slats of the container as the pigs maneuvered and fought for position. Flat noses pressed through the ventilation holes blowing steam into the freezing alpine air. Most troubling were the faces pressed firmly against the trailer wall, just a few feet away form me, bright eyes peering out of the holes, searching for clues as to what was going on out there. I was wondering the same thing.

Template Contemplation

There are a million new templates here at Blogger since I last checked. I'm going to play around.

Midterms

The mangy yellow stray lifted his leg and peed on a fire hydrant, covering the mark of the dog that peed there before him. He looked up at the median strip of grass that ran down the middle of the road and watched a man hammer a shiny red sign in the dirt that read "Sparky for governor." Directly in front of that sign was another shiny colorful sign, blue this time, that read "Max for governor." In front of that sign was another "Sparky" sign, and in front of that another "Max" sign. And then another "Sparky" and another "Max." On and on they went, one shiny colorful sign and then the other, for as far as the mangy yellow stray could see. He couldn't read, of course, because he was a dog. Nor did he know anything about the two party system in politics. But being a dog, he had a bladder that just wouldn't quit and a strong desire to participate.

Up, up and away

Grab a ruler. The plastic kind with a round hole directly in the middle. Now, grip a ballpoint pen in the palm of your hand, pointy side up. With your other hand, balance the ruler by resting it on the pen through the center hole. With a free finger give the ruler a flick. Watch it twirl. Do it again, a little faster. And again, this time slowly raising and lowering the hand with the pen while the ruler spins. Did you think to make a helicopter noise? Whop whop whop whop whop. Okay, well, I guess I'm blogging again. Write what you know, they say. That's what I know today. Tomorrow I may know something else.

Birds fly under your chair

"Get to work. Your work is to keep cranking the flywheel that turns the gears that spin the belt in the engine of belief that keeps you and your desk in midair."

- Annie Dillard (The Writing Life)

Go here for the whole passage. Actually I'm sure Ms. Dillard would prefer that you go out and buy the book.