Good Words

Today is the birthday of Eleanor Roosevelt, mother, teacher, writer, wife, first lady and activist, whose 2020 biography was unputdownable. 

One of Eleanor's many noteworthy traits was her capacity for growth. She was not afraid to plunge in, assess, take action, and, when necessary, reverse course. She was ahead of her time. 

Perhaps this quotation helps explain some of her courage: "You wouldn't worry so much about what others think of you," she said, "if you realized how seldom they do."

Good words to take into the day. 

(Writing about Eleanor gives me an excuse to feature a Washington, D.C. photo.)

Over Easy

Too often I'm distracted. I wait too long to flip them over. But this morning the timing was right and the eggs were perfect: just runny enough to coat the whites.

Over easy has a nice, free-and-easy sound. It says flapjacks in the morning, a pot of tea brewing, the whole day ahead. 

Never mind that most mornings aren't like that. So the words promise—but only occasionally do they deliver. 

Sauntering

Writing a blog called A Walker in the Suburbs means I've become familiar with all the lovely synonyms for walking: strolling, ambling, rambling, trekking, treading and wandering. By far one of my favorites is sauntering. But until yesterday I never thought much about its derivation. It was while looking up Thoreau on another quest that I found this, from his essay "Walking": 

I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who understood the art of Walking, that is, of taking walks — who had a genius, so to speak for sauntering, which word is beautifully derived 'from idle people who roved about the country, in the Middle Ages, and asked charity, under pretense of going a la Sainte Terre,' to the Holy Land, till the children exclaimed, 'There goes a Sainte-Terrer,' a Saunterer, a Holy-Lander.”

Although some would say the word "saunter" comes from "sans terre," without land or home, Thoreau continues, this is fine, too, because being without a home can also mean being equally at home everywhere — and that in fact is the secret of successful sauntering.  

I'm looking forward to more sauntering and more Thoreau. 

Fernweh and Heimweh

Homesickness is when you long for the place you know best of all. But what about its opposite? Wanting to venture to a place you've never been? It's a feeling deeper than wanderlust, stronger than attachment. Until the other day, I didn't know it has a name.

Farsickness —or "fernweh" from the German "fern" (far) and "weh" (pain) is when you yearn for a place you've never been, for the faraway. I heard about it on the radio, and a quick Google search shows me the word has been out there for a while. There are "Fernweh" t-shirts and "Farsickness" travel blogs.

Digging a little deeper I learn that the word "homesick" also entered our language from the German — "heimweh." It comes from a Swiss dialect and can also mean longing for the mountains. Ah, I think, just like Heidi. Remember when she's sent to Frankfurt and entertains Clara but all she wants is to go back and live with her grandfather on the mountain?

To have "fernweh" we need "heimweh." The familiar propels us to the faraway — then brings us home again.

War of Words

One of my favorite scenes in the movie "Darkest Hour" follows the rousing speech Winston Churchill delivered to Parliament on June 4, 1940. This is the speech where Churchill exhorts his countryman to stand firm against the Nazi threat, the speech in which he says, "We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets ... we shall never surrender."

This scene was constructed to give us chills ... and it does. It's by no means guaranteed that Churchill will be able to build momentum for his plan, which seems almost daft. A flotilla of pleasure boats to evacuate soldiers across the English Channel? Fighting Hitler's army to the death if need be?

The lines I loved most came right after Churchill's speech when a member of Parliament asked, "What just happened?" and Viscount Halifax responded, "He mobilized the English language and sent it into battle."

At a panel discussion about the film, Director Joe Wright said the movie is a "recognition of the power of the word and the power of political speech to move nations."

I tried to imagine that speech being given today, the sort of sacrifice it was asking for, the moral purpose it presupposes. It came from an era of words, not of pictures. Maybe that had something to do with it.

(Photo from "Darkest Hour": Wizardworld.com)

Read more here: http://www.thenewstribune.com/news/local/article190595739.html#storylink=cpy

Building Stuff

I work in a law school. Every day I use words to build articles, web stories, press releases and emails. The work I do is achieved with a click, a flick of the wrist.

Meanwhile, a block away, guys are roofing a major highway. For more than a year they've been moving utility lines and driving pillars into the ground. Now they're using a giant crane to hoist huge  steel beams. Eventually, they will entunnel this stretch of I-395 and build a small neighborhood on top of it.

And I — I will continue building towers of words, the sometime dwelling place of ideas but often just ephemeral constructs that vanish the moment they're sent.

Mottled Sky

Most color has drained from the earth. Now that our white snow cover is gone (though not for long perhaps?), we are left with brown leaves, gray trees — a monochromatic world. On walks these days my eyes are drawn toward the sky, source of light, source of color.

Here, from yesterday, a swirl of blue and white, which brings the word mottled to mind. Splotched, blotched, swirled, streaked.

I like the word mottled, mostly because it reminds me of soft skies like these. But also because I like how the word sounds. Like marbled, which reminds me of sleek granite or fine paper. And rhyming with coddled, as in egg, or child.

But mostly the word, like the sky, stands on its own.

150 Years and One Day Ago Today...

... President Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address. Yesterday's coverage of the event noted that the speech was 272 words and it took Lincoln only two minutes to deliver it. It was preceded by Edward Everett's two-hour oration, which is remembered now only because of what followed it: 10 perfectly crafted sentences that conveyed a nation's aspirations and ideals.

One score and three years ago, I wrote about the Gettysburg Address. About how I memorized it in school, promptly forgot it and wished I had remembered it (among many other things).

Memorization seems even quainter now than it did in 1990. Why remember words when you can look them up on your smart phone? 

Perhaps the reason I gave so long ago is still true today. Learning a passage or a poem "by heart" liberates us, I said. "Once we know the words we carry their wisdom around with us; we are freed from the printed page."

Lincoln's words liberated us — in more ways than one. 

Brown Study

In Victorian novels characters are apt to be caught in a brown study. It's a state of deep thought, a reverie, perhaps with a slightly gloomy cast, though more abstracted than anything else.

I put the phrase "brown study" in the same category as "wool gathering" -- though the latter means indulging in idle fantasies or daydreams. It's less furrowing of the brow and more staring at the clouds.

Both conditions have a certain fuzziness about them, though; both connote a cocoon of thought, whether stimulating or soothing.

Both are lovely, fanciful ways of taking leave -- even if just momentarily -- of the here and now.

Rhapsody

Choose a word, a favorite word.

It was the first assignment of a writing class in college, and it didn't take long to come up with "rhapsody" — a highly emotional utterance, a highly emotional literary work, and a musical composition of irregular form. Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue. Not everyone's favorite word but a fair representation of the romantic English major I was at the time.

The professor's favorite word was "deliquesce" — to become soft or liquid with age or maturity — a verb I've come to appreciate more of late. He not only liked it for its sound and spelling, he said, but also because it contained the word "deli."

Another student, the pet, picked "level." A palindrome of perfect symmetry, a word that walks its talk, the two "l"s bolstering the structure, the "e"s in between and the "v" equally open to each side.

Next to "level," "rhapsody" looked silly and sophomoric. But when I heard it on the radio this morning (Brahms Rhapsody in E Flat Minor), I have to admit that it still has a hold on me. And if I had to pick a favorite word again, I don't think I could find a better one.

Before the Walk

Before the walk comes the poem, a verse or two to take along the path.

I see more clearly with downcast eyes, pondering a private line.

Words tilt the sky, straighten the trunk, unmask the liquid

line of the horizon.

There is still much more unnoticed than revealed.

Birds Take Flight

"Every day,  I walked. It was not a meditation, but survival, one foot in front of the other, with my eyes focused down, trying to stay steady."

This is from Terry Tempest Williams' new book When Women Were Birds. A few pages later, Williams writes: "I am a writer about place who is never home."

I link these two passages. The walking and the writing about place.  Each essential to the other. One to prime the pump, the other to fill the jug with cold, clean water.

So where do the birds come in? Williams meets her husband at a bookstore, as he's buying a bird guide. Williams finds her voice through a special teacher who reads to her about the winter owl. A peregrine falcon once slit the corner of Williams' eye. Another time, Williams sees a painted bunting that arrived in a wintry Maine on the cusp of a fierce winter storm.

"When dawn struck his tiny feathered back, he ignited like a flame: red, blue and green. ... I have not dreamed of white birds since."

When I finished Williams' book I flipped through the pages with my thumb — and saw the birds that illustrate the outer edge of each page fly back and forth as if alive.

Birds take flight. So do words.

Willow Rill

The word "rill" has been on my mind. I thought of it one day when I was walking, savored the quaintness of it, the smallness of it; how it sounds like what it is: a small brook or stream, water running quickly across a bed of rocks, mud or beaten grass. The word is linguistically kin to "rivulet" and is also close to "run," another word for creek in southern places.

We drove past Willow Run in Emmitsburg, Maryland, over the weekend, and I was delighted to see the word in print. Not knowing why I thought about "rill" in the first place, here was a rill in real life. (Sorry, I couldn't resist.)

But all I could glimpse of Willow Rill was the bridge that led across it. So now I see the creek in my mind's eye, a stream of clear water flowing beneath a curtain of green, not as raucous as a brook, slower and more meandering, slight-banked. There is a lilt to its passage through the landscape (the word "rill" is mighty close to "trill"). It sings as it courses down the mountain.

Checking My Email

The significance of the title is not the meaning of the word email. It's the lack of hyphen. Until recently, according to the editor's bible — or one of them, the AP Stylebook — email was e-mail. Then e-mail went the way of Web site, and things haven't been the same since.

The magazine I edit bases its style on AP's, and so I dutifully changed Web site to website when that alteration was announced last year. But I missed the memo on email. This morning's newspaper tells me why. The Washington Post has kept the hyphen, so I remained oblivious to the change.

Why do these things matter so much? The fine article in today's Post explains that, too, quoting David Minthorn, deputy standards editor of the Associated Press. "We're not a bunch of old fogies sitting around in our ivory tower. We're alive to changes and new ideas. We have a real sense that new words and changes in language reflect the culture and give us an inkling to where society is headed."

Think of editors as warriors, standing guard over a culture where standards don't matter, insisting — with their sharpened pencils — that they do.

Lengthen

Today is Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent. I heard a few years ago — and have since confirmed — that the word "lent" comes from the old English for "lengthen." Lent happens in spring when days grow longer and light grows stronger, when we leave winter darkness behind. In this way, then, Lent is more hopeful than often portrayed. It is about moving ahead not just leaving behind.

I am never ready for the penitential parts of this season, for Lent's fasting and denials. I usually give up chocolate, which isn't easy but seems increasingly beside the point. Surely more is asked of us. So I seek an ally in etymology. When I think of Lent as Lengthen I concentrate on spiritual stretching, on growth.

I imagine the trees about to leaf, the seeds about to sprout, the grass about to green. All around me is the restraint of nature, a restraint that makes profusion possible.