Rodney Roe's Open Salon Blog

Easter Past

Mon, 9 Apr 2012 07:04:17 -0400

Leaf buds at full stop,

Low and in the canopy,

Hide the mountain top.

What to wear today?

Easter frocks and blue kneed girls.

Shall I wear my pealrs?

Nothing is so vain,

As Azaleas in full bloom,

Sparkling after rain.

Sorry, I couldn't catch them after rain.

The Etymologist's Corner: Lying in a Mare's Nest

Sun, 8 Apr 2012 06:04:33 -0400

Warning: if you are not fascinated with words, if your family has not given you a dictionary of Indo-European roots as a Christmas present, you may want to read something else.

The etymology of etymology:

etymology

late 14c., ethimolegia "facts of the origin and development of a word," from O.Fr. et(h)imologie (14c., Mod.Fr. étymologie), from L. etymologia, from Gk. etymologia, properly "study of the true sense (of a word)," from etymon "true sense" (neut. of etymos "true, real, actual," related to eteos "true") + -logia "study of, a speaking of" (see -logy). In classical times, of meanings; later, of histories. Latinized by Cicero as veriloquium. As a branch of linguistic science, from 1640s. Related: Etymological; etymologically.

From The Online Etymology Dictionary.

I’ve met one etymologist in my life. I took a survey of western literature that substituted for a philosophy class under her. I only found out her background when I misspelled “guardian” by switching the “u” and “a” on a Blue Book exam. She wrote the etymology of the word in the margin and pointed out the connection to words like warden and warranty. Fascinating! Here was one of those people who actually write that little blurb that goes in a Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary entry.

It’s interesting that the form of the word etymology has changed little from the Greek origin while its usage has changed from a study of meaning to one of history.

Etymology is a sort of archeology of words. Having written this I’m almost overwhelmed by an urge to go look up the origins of archeology.

Speaking of overwhelm, have you heard anyone say, “I was underwhelmed?” Underwhelmed is used in the context of unimpressed. Here is why it makes no etymological sense.

Overwhelm is what I like to call an orphan word. It lives, but its parent whelm is dead, no longer in use.

overwhelm

early 14c., "to turn upside down, to overthrow," from over + M.E. whelmen "to turn upside down" (see whelm). Meaning "to submerge completely" is mid-15c. Perhaps the connecting notion is a boat, etc., washed over, and overset, by a big wave. Figurative sense of "to bring to ruin" is attested from 1520s. Related: Overwhelming; overwhelmingly. From the online etymology dictionary.

The use of underwhelm appeared in 1956 as a facetious comment. It is currently considered slang.

My father used to use the term mare’s nest that was a puzzle to me. It would be used to describe a terribly messy place. Mare’s sleep in stalls not nests. A few years ago the search began for the root of this form. I started with nightmare, imagining that the mare might have the same root. It seems that they do.

Nightmare is from night, straightforward, and mare, not. Mare is an Old English form for a succubus, an evil spirit that comes in your sleep, lying on top of you and suffocating you. It ultimately derives from the Indo-European root mer, to do harm, which is also the root of murder.

(The word nightmare makes its appearance c.1300 in the St. Michael (Laud) manuscript:

Þe luþere gostes...deriez men in heore slep...And ofte huy ouer-liggez, and men cleopiet þe niÈÂt-mare.
(The wicked spirits...injured men in their sleep...And often lay on top of men, and men called them the nightmare.) From wordorigins.org.)

There are cognates of mare in other languages. My great grandfather was Austrian. Perhaps “mare’s nest” was a transliteration of some word in German. Maybe it’s an old English term forgotten everywhere except in my family. I’ve never heard anyone else say mare’s nest, but I’m guessing that it meant a goblin’s lair.

Other ideas are welcome, as well as news of this term in the speech of other families.

An Experiment in Uploading Video

Thu, 5 Apr 2012 21:04:19 -0400

This is an experiment. I have been trying, unsuccessfully to post video in posts for some time. What should follow is a Blondie video of Rapture, one of my all time favorite videos.

Voila!

The music of the '80s was one of my favorite periods in popular music. Don't get me wrong, music of the late 60s and early 70s was innovative and bands like Jefferson Airplane and musicians like Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton were all fabulous. It was the music of the 80s though, when my kids were becoming teens, that I enjoyed the most.

This Blondie song was interesting because it sort of mixed disco which was fading with rap which was coming on.

The guy in the top hat had some moves.

Here's another "talking" song. James Taylor did a great version, but this group did a great job, too.

I remember being stuck on I-17 in Phoenix in the 70s in a car with no air conditioning in stalled traffic listening to this song.

Obamacare and my Granddaughter's Kidney

Tue, 3 Apr 2012 15:04:18 -0400

My Obamacare story does not involve me, directly. It involves my granddaughter. My daughter could tell this story so much better, but I will give it a try. To protect our family's privacty our granddaughter's real name is not used. I've decided to call her Daisy.

Nearly 10 years ago our older daughter discovered that she was pregnant. She was excited. It would be her first child by her husband, and her older daughter would have a baby brother or sister, something she had always wanted.

Very careful about everything, the pregnancy was attended by a mid-wife and my daughter gave up caffeine, alcohol, ate “right” (she is a vegetarian) and waited for the big event.The delivery went without a hitch and we had a new granddaughter. Daisy didn’t gain weight in the first few weeks and the mid-wife urged our daughter and son-in-law to see a Pediatrician. She was examined, a careful history was taken, blood tests were drawn and everyone went home.

We got an hysterical phone call from our daughter. Something about, “her kidneys aren’t working.” Following a great deal of work-up it was determined that Daisy had hypoplastic/dysplastic kidneys. The kidneys were not only small, the plumbing inside wasn’t hooked up right.The immediate post diagnosis period was one of shock, disbelief, and all of the stages of grief outlined by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression and Acceptance. At times there is still anger and I don’t think depression has ever completely gone away.Genetic counselors advised them that they had done nothing wrong. This was just a fluke. Perhaps, the baby had been exposed to a virus during a critical period in gestation.

For several months Daisy was maintained on a strict diet, had a gastric tube placed to feed her because the diet was not very palatable and people with renal failure don’t taste things normally.

At about 8 months Daisy was in the hospital and caught parainfluenza virus. She ended up in I.C.U. on an airway, sedated and paralyzed for 3 weeks. When she recovered what little kidney function she had had was gone. She then went on peritoneal dialysis. A tube went into her abdominal cavity and every night fluids washed into and out of her abdomen taking the toxins away. The machine that did this was suitcase sized and the fluids came in large cartons that filled the bedroom. Going anywhere overnight was nearly impossible. Our daughter became, essentially, a full time nurse.

Our daughter and her husband were massage therapists in a suburb of Seattle, Washington. That is they were until Boeing moved its headquarters to Chicago, and much of its production facilities offshore. The plant in their little town suddenly had thousands of unemployed machinists and food and shelter became more important than a massage to most clients.

So, our daughter and her husband went on public assistance when the baby came and her care was provided by Medicaid since they had no private insurance.

No one asked our son-in-law whether he had a daughter with a pre-existing condition when he applied for a job because he was looking for construction work and the rest of the people in the application line were unemployed machinists. The family left Washington and moved to Arizona in search of work.

A little work was found but not enough to pay the bills at first. At age three (she was actually in pediatric intensive care when she had her third birthday) Daisy received a kidney transplant from a 22 year old auto accident victim who had had the generosity and forethought to make herself an organ donor. The post-operative period was stormy. Not due to the surgery, but because a full out assault on our granddaughter’s immune system had to be launched in order to prevent her from rejecting the kidney.

Immunosuppression is a walk on a tightrope. Too much suppression and a person falls victim to an overwhelming infection. Not enough and the organ is rejected.

Our little granddaughter was in the hospital for seven weeks. The transplantation was a success, immediate immunosuppression worked, and she was placed on long term (lifetime) immunosuppression.

Our son-in-law found a job working at a copper mine in Arizona. The job came with health insurance. And then the economy collapsed. The chief use of copper is to make electric wires and most of that was going into new home construction. He was let go, the mine closed, and it was back to Medicaid. The bind then became one of staying impoverished so that the Medicaid funding was not stopped. If that happened Daisy would be uninsurable because she would have a period without insurance at the same time that the family could not make enough money to afford private health insurance. The economy, being what it is, did not afford jobs that provided full coverage health insurance.

Then along came Arizona's conservative legislature and Governor Jan Brewer who launched a full out war on Medicaid recipients. Patients waiting for organ transplants were basically told to go home and die. The situation became so threatening that the family moved to Oregon, a state that grants Medicaid insurance to the needy and a graduated program for working from Medicaid to full private insurance as incomes increase.

This had barely been accomplished when Daisy had a full blown attempt to reject her kidney. More hospitalization followed with intensive i.v. treatment of drugs and blood products and she is now home. She is home, but still in danger of losing the kidney through chronic rejection.

Ironically, if Daisy went back onto dialysis she would be covered by Medicare due to a loop hole inserted during the initial institution of Medicare. Her life, however, would be much diminished. Because transplantation was not an option at the time that Medicare came into being it is not included in Medicare coverage. This is unfortunate because, while it costs about $80,000 a year for dialysis, the cost of immunosuppression is only about $20,000.

There is still a 10% unemployment rate in Oregon. Job applications warn not to apply if you don’t currently have a job.

The Affordable Health Care Act would have helped. Our granddaughter could not be refused insurance due to a pre-existing condition. There are other provisions in the bill that would also have been helpful.

Through all of this our daughter went back to school and has maintained a 4.00 average. She should graduate at the end of the year. Then it is on to graduate school provided that she is accepted.

The granddaughter will be 9 next month. Anger and depression have once again set in. It is like the whole family is drowning and there is no way to the surface to get a breath.

Awake. Or Is It Dreaming?

Sun, 1 Apr 2012 22:04:12 -0400

Somehow, in spite of its ambiguity, I’ve gotten hooked on the NBC television series, “Awake”. For those of you who have not seen an episode, the central character, Michael Britten, (played by Jason Isaacs) has survived a car crash, for which he was responsible, and either his son survived or his wife survived, depending on which subsequent experience is a dream and which is reality.

This concept, and the ambiguity that it produces, would upset me but for the fact that I was introduced to this concept long ago.

Always fascinated by myth, origin stories, and the fundamental beliefs of non-Western peoples, I was still not prepared for the Australian aboriginal people’s belief that dreams are a glimpse into a reality that they refer to as “the dreaming”, or “dreamtime”.

In the aboriginal view souls exist in eternity. In their belief, souls have existed for all of eternity and only became physical in the world in “the dreamtime”. The belief is very complex and involves a creation story that is in some ways familiar, in others foreign.

Souls have existed forever. In the dreamtime the souls became physically attached as plants and animals. The last soul became human and was appointed protector of the rest of the natural world. Souls are constantly being recycled. What is difficult for Westerners to understand is that creation is ongoing. Souls are constantly coming and returning to “the dreaming.” Aboriginal art is very symbolic.

Because the original human was made protector of nature, aborigines are, of necessity, very in tune with the natural world.

As a complete aside, I once read that geniuses are born with the same frequency in every race, in every part of the world. Recognition of the genius is dependent on a society that provides an opportunity for expression. Note the boomerang in the symbols above. The person who invented the boomerang was a genius.

Dreams aren’t just a way to understand the real world. They are regarded as equally real with the waking reality. Some have said that the aboriginal people regard dreams as reality, and our waking world as a dream. This may not be quite accurate, but it gives a way to view the T.V. series, “Awake”, in a way that makes sense.

We, in the West, are so tied to the waking experience as reality that it is hard to conceive of a reality in which both the dream and the waking experience may be equally real.

This is the “hook” in the T.V. series. We want to know which experience is the dream.

So far, there is no real clue. The protagonist is a police detective. He is involved in solving crimes. His dreams inform his waking time. Or, is it the reverse….?