Laudator Temporis Acti

Michael Quinion, World Wide Words, Newsletter 590 (June 7, 2008), on the neologism staycation:

Ken Thomson heard this word on TV in San Francisco and thought it had a nice ring to it. It's a stay-at-home vacation. It seems to have first appeared in 2005 but has become significantly more visible in the past three months because of financial concerns as the economy weakens and the price of fuel keeps going up. Other reasons were given in an article in the Washington Times on 23 March: "Increasing concerns over the environment as well as the desire for more family time add to the staycation's popularity."

Stanley Crawford, A Garlic Testament: Seasons on a Small New Mexico Farm (New York: Edward Burlingame Books, 1992), pp. 192-193 (from a chapter titled Staying at Home):

But staying at home is the most ecological thing to do. There is no other way to grow your garden, tend your animals, your orchard, your streams and rivers, ponds and lakes, fences and roads, to study the accretions of time. This is of course mainly what most of humankind has done for most of history. The numbers are rapidly coming in to say that running around, driving and flying, on the scale now considered socially acceptable and even fashionable, is something the planet cannot much longer support.

Staying home is hauling water and chopping wood, mending your fences, hoeing your row, planting your tree, digging out your ditches, raising your children, milking your goats. For those who stay at home, there is no figure of speech here: these are lists of the real chores by which the notion of home, both of house and of landscape, is made and defined.

Sophocles, fragment 934 = Aeschylus, fragment 317 (tr. Hugh Lloyd-Jones):

The man who is truly fortunate should stay at home.

οἴκοι μένειν δεῖ τὸν καλῶς εὐδαίμονα.

Related posts:

• The Was an Old Man from Verona
  
• Lottites
  
• To Be Happy At Home
  
• My Little Zoar
  
• Happy the Man

Lew Dietz, The Allagash (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1968; rpt. Camden: Down East Books, 2000), p. xvii:

Once the gear was unloaded, Bud went for dry wood, cutting and fetching in ten-foot lengths of sound dead trees. John arranged the cooking gear and Dave began axing up the logs into usable billets, enough for the night fire and the morning. The lug pole was set on forked sticks. This frame built over the cookfire is called by Allagash men the "spunhungan," or at least this is as close as my ear could ever catch it—I've never seen the word in print. Crotched green sticks are hung from the lug pole with a nail tacked at its end to hold the bailed teakettle. This is variously called a lug stick, pothook, or wangan stick. The pole driven into the ground at such an angle as to extend over the fire is a wambeck.

Horace Kephart, Camping and Woodcraft: A Handbook for Vacation Campers and for Travelers in the Wilderness, 2 vols. in 1 (New York: Macmillan, 1917), I (Camping), 228, n.:

It is curious how many different names have been bestowed upon the hooks by which kettles are suspended over a fire. Our forefathers called them pot-hooks, trammels, hakes, hangers, pot-hangers, pot-claws, pot-crooks, gallows-crooks, pot-chips, pot-brakes, gibs or gib-crokes, rackan-crooks (a chain or bar on which to hang hooks was called a rackan or reckon), and I know not what else besides. Among Maine lumberman, such an implement is called a lug-stick, a hook for lifting kettles is a hook-stick, and a stick sharpened and driven into the ground at an angle so as to bend over the fire, to suspend a kettle from, is a wambeck or a spygelia — the Red Gods alone know why! The frame built over a cooking-fire is called by the Penobscots kitchi-plak-wagn, and the Micmacs call the lug-stick a chiplok-waugan, which the white guides have partially anglicized into waugan-stick. It is well to know, and heresy to disbelieve, that, after boiling the kettle, it brings bad luck to leave the waugan or spygelia standing.

If this catalogue does not suffice the amateur cook to express his ideas about such things, he may exercise his jaws with the Romany (gipsy) term for pot-hook, which is kekauviscoe saster.

For yet more additions to the catalogue, see Clive Upton et al., Survey of English Dialects: The Dictionary and Grammar (London: Routledge, 1994), s.vv. crane (p. 102) and hook (pp. 213-214), recording answers of informants who were asked, "What do you call that old-fashioned arrangement for hanging a kettle on to heat it over the fire?"

John Gould, Maine Lingo (Camden: Down East Magazine, 1975; rpt. 1980), p. 310, doesn't mention wangan stick in his discussion of wangan:

Found by Fr. Sebastien Râle in the St. Francis Indian language, this word meant the effects a brave carried on a wilderness journey. It remains today as the term for the gear and duffle of a canoe trip, and in general all the food and supplies needed for wilderness travel. It has come to mean the company store in a lumber camp, and also the traveling kitchen that accompanied river drivers down a stream. Besides the company store, it has also come to mean the account there, usually charged against wages, until a man will say he has to "pay his wangan." Maine woods people, to whom the word has long been second nature, tend to pronounce it wong-'n, with perhaps a little carryover of the g, thus: wong-g'n. Always remembering that Maine Indian terms came into our English through the French, we should perhaps note that French-Canadians, to whom the term is equally easy, give it a whang-g'n sound. The Minnesota embellishment of "wannigan" is sheer bosh; the word has only two syllables. The quickest definition of wangan is woods supplies; Maine canoeists have rope-handled wooden boxes for carrying their wangan, and these are wangan boxes.

But, pace Gould, the entry in the Oxford English Dictionary is the trisyllabic wanigan, with the following etymology:

Shortened from Montagnais Indian atawangan, f. atawan to buy or sell. Cf. Cree and Odjibwa atawâgan, 'ce dont on se sert pour acheter ou pour vendre' (Lacombe).

John Clare, Shadows of Taste, lines 97-124:

The man of science in discoverys moods
Roams oer the furze clad heath leaf buried woods
And by the simple brook in rapture finds
Treasures that wake the laughter of vulgar hinds
Who see no further in his dark employs
Then village childern seeking after toys
Their clownish hearts and ever heedless eyes
Find nought in nature they as wealth can prize
With them self interest and the thoughts of gain
Are natures beautys all beside are vain
But he the man of science and of taste
Sees wealth far richer in the worthless waste
Where bits of lichen and a sprig of moss
With all the raptures of his mind engross
And bright winged insects on the flowers of may
Shine pearls too wealthy to be cast away
His joys run riot mid each juicy blade
Of grass where insects revel in the shade
And minds of different moods will oft condemn
His taste as cruel such the deeds to them
While he unconsious gibbets butterflyes
And strangles beetles all to make us wise
Tastes rainbow visions own unnumbered hues
And every shade its sense of taste pursues
The heedless mind may laugh the clown may stare
They own no soul to look for pleasure there
Their grosser feelings in a coarser dress
Mock at the wisdom which they cant possess

Sir Thomas Browne, Christian Morals III.23:

Live happy in the Elizium of a virtuously composed Mind, and let Intellectual Contents exceed the Delights wherein mere Pleasurists place their Paradise. Bear not too slack reins upon Pleasure, nor let complexion or contagion betray thee unto the exorbitancy of Delight. Make Pleasure thy Recreation or intermissive Relaxation, not thy Diana, Life and Profession. Voluptuousness is as insatiable as Covetousness. Tranquillity is better than Jollity, and to appease pain than to invent pleasure. Our hard entrance into the World, our miserable going out of it, our sicknesses, disturbances, and sad Rencounters in it, do clamorously tell us we come not into the World to run a Race of Delight, but to perform the sober Acts and serious purposes of Man; which to omit were foully to miscarry in the advantage of humanity, to play away an uniterable Life, and to have lived in vain.

Gary Snyder, "Doctor Coyote When He Had a Problem," Danger on Peaks: Poems (Washington: Shoemaker Hoard, 2004), p. 59:

Doctor Coyote when he had a problem
took a dump. On the grass, asked his turds where they lay
what to do? They gave him good advice.

He'd say "that's just what I thought too"
And do it.        And go his way.

Snyder's source may have been Jay Miller's introduction to Mourning Dove, Coyote Stories (Caldwell: Caxton, 1933; rpt. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990), p. xii:

As he bestowed every one of the powers, the leader also gave out medicine powers. He would point to the center of a person's body, to the heart, which is the seat of thought and emotions, and proclaim what that power would be. Typically, Coyote misunderstood this gesture, assuming that the leader was pointing to his stomach. Thus, by virtue of the creative force granted to his thoughts, Coyote received a special power different from other beings. The representatives of his power lived in Coyote's intestines until he summoned their help. At that moment, they came out and took the form of five feces or, as polite Colvilles say, turds. Coyote called them his younger siblings and asked their advice, which they always gave wisely, although each encounter ended with Coyote, suddenly brilliant, claiming that their help was superfluous because, after all, he had known what to do all the time. If his younger siblings were slow or reluctant to offer advice, he bullied them into cooperation by threatening to cause a rainstorm which would melt them.

One could classify Coyote's method of asking advice as scatomancy, which the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) defines as "Divination or diagnosis based on the examination of the faeces." The OED gives the following quotations:

1569 J. SANDFORD tr. Agrippa's Van. Artes lxxxiii. 145b, For this cause Scatomancie, Oromancie, Drymimancie, be called the diuinations or Prognostications of Phisitians, gathered by ordures and vrines. 1861 READE Cloister & H. xxvi, I studied at Montpelier... There learned I Dririmancy, Scatomancy, Pathology [etc.]. 1897 in Syd. Soc. Lex.

The OED also has an entry for scatoscopy, defined as "Inspection of the faeces for the purpose of divination or diagnosis."

One of the other modes of divination mentioned by Agrippa, in the passage from his De incertitudine et vanitate scientiarum atque artium cited, is "oromancie," i.e. uromancy, divination by urine. Samuel Butler, Hudibras 2.3.609-612, doesn't use the word, but obviously refers to the practice:

Your modern Indian magician
Makes but a hole in th' earth to piss in,
And straight resolves all questions by't,
And seldom fails to be i'th' right.

Related post: Matshishkapeu.

John Updike, The Tried and Treowe:

I have yet to be persuaded that the information revolution, so called, is anything but an exercise in reading and writing wherein evanescent and odorless PC screens take the place of durable, faintly fragrant paper and ink.

Samuel Johnson, Preface to Shakespeare:

Antiquity, like every other quality that attracts the notice of mankind, has undoubtedly votaries that reverence it, not from reason, but from prejudice. Some seem to admire indiscriminately whatever has been long preserved, without considering that time has sometimes co-operated with chance; all perhaps are more willing to honour past than present excellence; and the mind contemplates genius through the shades of age, as the eye surveys the sun through artificial opacity.

....

What mankind have long possessed they have often examined and compared, and if they persist to value the possession, it is because frequent comparisons have confirmed opinion in its favour. As among the works of nature no man can properly call a river deep or a mountain high, without the knowledge of many mountains and many rivers; so in the productions of genius, nothing can be stiled excellent till it has been compared with other works of the same kind.

....

The reverence due to writings that have long subsisted arises therefore not from any credulous confidence in the superior wisdom of past ages, or gloomy persuasion of the degeneracy of mankind, but is the consequence of acknowledged and indubitable positions, that what has been longest known has been most considered, and what is most considered is best understood.

W.S. Merwin, Witness:

I want to tell what the forests
were like

I will have to speak
in a forgotten language

Many thanks to E.J. Moncada for the following comments on wounds:

    "When Anthony, the orator, pleading for Aquilius, suddenly tears the habit of the accused and exhibits the [frontal] wounds he had received in fighting for his country, the Roman people cannot resist the spectacle, but absolve the criminal." Urquhart. Comment on Classical Learning. (Apparently from Quint. Inst. Orat. II. xv. 7., hence my addition of frontal.)

    Is (Sicinius Dentatus) pugnasse in hostem dicitur centum et viginti proeliis, cicatricem aversam nullam, adversas quinque et quadraginta tulisse. Aul. Gell. Noct. Attic. II. 21. 2. (Enough body space for such?)

    Sallust writes of leader Sertorius as having many scars on his breast (adversis cicatricibus). Loc. cit. II. 27.

    Ausonius has kind words for Thrasybulus (Lacedemonian) who fell fighting most bravely: That thou receivest seven gashes all in front... (Excipis adverso quod pectore vulnera septem)... Epigram XLIII (From Anth. Pal. VII. 229). Related epigrams: Dioscorides AG VII, 329 and Hegemon, AG VII, 435.

    One, Cleonnis --"and though he had received many wounds, he had got them all in front, thus providing the fullest proof that he had given way before no one of his foes." But, as a matter of fact, Cleonnis, so wounded, is arguing with Aristomenes (who emerged from the same battle unwounded) for the need of valor. After listening to both sides, the judges voted for Aristomenes (so, lack of wounds not necessarily a sign of cowardice). Diod. Sic. Frag. VIII. 12. 2.

    Petrarch (anachronistic here but assuredly a classical soul) in a letter to F.M. (?) writes: "No one chooses for a captain someone with a sword wound on his back."

    Bassus on the Spartan dead at Thermopylae: When Hades receives the boat load of 300 men aboard, all slain in war, he cries, "id' os pali prosthia panta,/ traumata, kai sternois deris enesti monois..." See again how every wound is frontal and the mark of battle is nowhere but on the breast. (As I typed this it occurred to me how easily (and incorrectly) one might think 'sternois' here might have some derivative connection with English (naval) 'stern.') A.G. IX. 279. Someone termed this a "wretched epigram, but I don't rightly recall who. Since I used to read the Gow and Page A.G. before settling in with Loeb, they might have been the commentators.

    M. Manlius had received twenty three wounds on the front of his body (XXIII cicatrices adverso corpore exceperat). Pliny, HN, VII. 28.103.

    BUT MY FAVORITE is Quintilian's account about Pomponius showing a wound on his face which he had received in the rebellion of Sulpicius and which he boasted he had received while fighting for Caesar and thereupon Gaius Caesar (cousin of the father of C. Julius Caesar) retorted,"You should never look round when you're running away." Quint. VI. iii. 75.

In Wounds, Honorable and Dishonorable, I made the following (by no means original) observation:

A wound in the back is generally disgraceful, because it means that the man struck was fleeing, and it is shameful to flee in battle. Examples in the Iliad include 5.38-42 (Agamemnon slays Odius), 11.446-448 (Odysseus slays Socus), 16.307-311 (Patroclus slays Areïycus), 17.578-579 (Menelaus slays Podes), and 20.487-489 (Achilles slays Areïthous).

I may have missed a striking example, discussed by Robert Renehan, "The Heldentod in Homer: One Heroic Ideal," Classical Philology 82.2 (April 1987) 99-116 (at 109):

Patroclus is not given a chance to die heroically in the full sense (16.786-857). First Apollo strikes him senseless with his hand—from behind. His eyes spun, says the poet. The god then knocks off Patroclus' helmet and disarms him completely; he stands stupefied, στῆ δὲ ταφών. Next, Euphorbus takes advantage of this divine intervention and hits Patroclus in the back with a spear—again from behind. Patroclus tries to shrink back into the throng of his fellow warriors and avoid death (Homer is explicit on this), but Hector sees his opportunity, rushes up to him as he retreats, and drives his spear deep into his flanks. That is the fatal blow. How a warrior who is killed while he is running away in an attempt to save his own life can be said to have died defiantly and heroically—looking death in the face, as it were—is not readily apparent.

In Richmond Lattimore's translation of this episode from the Iliad, Hector strikes Patroclus "in the depth of the belly," which implies that Patroclus is facing Hector. Likewise A.T. Murphy ("in the nethermost belly"). But the Greek says νείατον ἐς κενεῶνα, and Renehan's "flanks" seems more accurate. Liddell-Scott-Jones define κενεών as "hollow between ribs and hip, flank," and one of the definitions in Autenrieth's Homeric Dictionary is "small of the back."

One word used by Homer for "belly" is νηδύς, and a relevant quotation is Iliad 13.288-291 (Idomeneus speaking to Meriones, tr. Samuel Butler):

If you were struck by a dart or smitten in close combat, it would not be from behind, in your neck nor back, but the weapon would hit you in the chest or belly as you were pressing forward to a place in the front ranks.

εἴ περ γάρ κε βλεῖο πονεύμενος ἠὲ τυπείης
οὐκ ἂν ἐν αὐχέν᾽ ὄπισθε πέσοι βέλος οὐδ᾽ ἐνὶ νώτῳ,
ἀλλά κεν ἢ στέρνων ἢ νηδύος ἀντιάσειε
πρόσσω ἱεμένοιο μετὰ προμάχων ὀαριστύν.

Seneca, Letters to Lucilius 41.3 (tr. Richard M. Gummere):

If ever you have come upon a grove that is full of ancient trees which have grown to an unusual height, shutting out a view of the sky by a veil of pleached and intertwining branches, then the loftiness of the forest, the seclusion of the spot, and your marvel at the thick unbroken shade in the midst of the open spaces, will prove to you the presence of deity.

si tibi occurrerit vetustis arboribus et solitam altitudinem egressis frequens lucus et conspectum caeli densitate ramorum aliorum alios protegentium summovens, illa proceritas silvae et secretum loci et admiratio umbrae in aperto tam densae atque continuae fidem tibi numinis faciet.

Ivan Shishkin, Forest Reserve, Pine Grove

George Gissing, The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft, VII:

"Homo animal querulum cupide suis incumbens miseriis." I wonder where that comes from. I found it once in Charron, quoted without reference, and it has often been in my mind—a dreary truth, well worded. At least, it was a truth for me during many a long year. Life, I fancy, would very often be insupportable, but for the luxury of self-compassion; in cases numberless, this it must be that saves from suicide. For some there is great relief in talking about their miseries, but such gossips lack the profound solace of misery nursed in silent brooding.

A footnote in Pierre Charron (1541-1603), De la Sagesse: Trois Livres, ed. Amaury Duval, Tome Premier (Paris: Rapilly, 1827), p. 284, attributes the Latin quotation to Apuleius, but I can't find it among the works of Apuleius.

Giovanni Alberto Colombo, Naturalis Philosophiae Elementa, Liber Primus (Physica Generalis) (Patavii: Typis Seminarii, Apud Joannem Manfrè, 1772), p. 435, gives a fuller quotation but no attribution:

Est enim homo animal querulum cupide suis incumbens miseriis, & ubi veris malis haud premitur suopte se macerans ingenio.

Man is a querulous animal, eagerly brooding on his own miseries, and, when he is not troubled by genuine evils, tormenting himself in his own imagination.

This is the second in a series of notes to myself about some flowers recently planted in my yard.

Narrow-Leaved Purple Coneflowers (Echinacea angustifolia)
Linnaeus originally classified purple coneflowers in the genus Rudbeckia, but Conrad Moench, Methodus plantas horti botanici et agri Marburgensis a staminum situ describendi (Marburgi Cattorum: In officina nova libraria academiae, 1794), p. 591, gave them their own genus, Echinacea, from Greek echinos (ἐχῖνος) meaning hedgehog and also sea urchin. In Latin, echinus occurs as a fairly common loan word, with the same meanings as in Greek.

Augustin de Candolle, Prodromus Systematis Naturalis Regni Vegetabilis, Part 5 (Paris: Treuttel & Würtz, 1836), pp. 554-555, recognized nine species of Echinacea, among them Echinacea angustifolia. The compound angustifolia comes from the Latin adjective angustus, -a, -um (narrow) and the noun folium (leaf). All nine species of Echinacea are native to North America.

Britton & Brown (III, 475) describe Echinacea thus:

Perennial erect branched or simple herbs, with thick black roots, thick rough alternate or opposite, 3-5-nerved entire or dentate, undivided leaves, and large long-peduncled heads of tubular and radiate flowers, the rays purple, purplish, crimson or yellow, the disk green or purple, at length ovoid or conic. Involucre depressed-hemispheric, its bracts lanceolate, spreading or appressed, imbricated in 2-4 series. Receptacle conic, chaffy, the chaff carinate and cuspidate. Ray-flowers neutral, or with a rudimentary pistil. Disk-flowers perfect, the corolla cylindric, 5-toothed. Achenes 4-sided, obpyramidal, thick. Pappus a short dental crown. [Greek, referring to the spiny chaff of the receptacle.]

Britton & Brown (III, 476) describe Echinacea angustifolia thus:

Stem hispid or hirsute, slender, often simple, 1°-2° high. Leaves lanceolate, oblong-lanceolate, or linear-lanceolate, hirsute, acute and about equally narrowed at each end, strongly 3-nerved and sometimes with an additional pair of marginal less distinct nerves, entire, 3'-8' long, 4"-12" wide, the lower and basal ones slender-petioled, the upper short-petioled or sessile; heads and flowers similar to those of the preceding species [Echinacea purpurea], but the rays usually shorter, spreading. In dry soil, especially on prairies, Minnesota to Saskatchewan, Nebraska and Texas.

Melvin R. Gilmore, Uses of Plants by the Indians of the Missouri River Region (1919; rpt. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1991), p. 79, wrote, "Echinacea seems to have been used as a remedy for more ailments than any other plant." The Native American Ethnobotany database has 84 entries for Echinacea angustifolia. It remains popular today as a remedy in alternative medicine, and it is so costly that thieves sometimes steal purple coneflowers. For almost ten years the following statute has been on the books in North Dakota (N.D. Cent. Code, § 4-24-12):

1. A person is guilty of a class A misdemeanor, is subject to court-ordered restitution to the landowner, and also is subject to a civil penalty of up to ten thousand dollars if that person willfully enters upon land owned by another and, without the express written consent of the owner, removes or attempts to remove a purple coneflower, Echinacea purpurea or Echinacea angustifolia, from the land.

2. A person is guilty of a class A misdemeanor, is subject to court-ordered restitution to the state, and is subject to a civil penalty of up to ten thousand dollars if that person willfully removes or attempts to remove a purple coneflower, Echinacea purpurea or Echinacea angustifolia, from state-owned land.

3. A person is guilty of a class A misdemeanor and also is subject to a civil penalty of up to ten thousand dollars if that person willfully possesses a purple coneflower removed from land in violation of this section.

4. Any vehicle used to transport a purple coneflower removed or possessed in violation of this section is forfeitable property under chapter 29-31.1.

For more information see Sandra Carol Miller, ed. Echinacea: The Genus Echinacea (Boca Raton: CRC Press, 2004).

Related post: Golden Alexanders.

I received the following email from Chris Dodge:

Michael, re: penises and pencils,

Penicillin should be an erection-producing drug, no? And it should cost but pennies.

I see that you post excerpts from Donald Culross Peattie occasionally. His son Noel was a friend of mine. Eulogy here: http://www.librarian.net/noel.html. Publisher of his poetry: http://www.regentpress.net.

With thanks for the brain food,

Chris

Chris wrote the eulogy of Noel Peattie.

Sara Stein, Noah's Garden: Restoring the Ecology of Our Own Back Yards (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1993), pp. 132-133:

The literature on mouth-to-mouth recycling is necessarily scatological: all animals suffer a degree of indigestion, and what is waste to one is food to others. At first the thought of caprophagy is repelling, but weighing the services of feces eaters against a landscape deep in dog doo, one is moved to benediction of the sanitation crew. The Australian range disaster occurred when cattle were imported without the dung beetles that customarily roll balls of cow manure into their underground chambers to feed their larvae. Left whole and baking in the sun, the cow pats dried to a crust that killed the grass and stayed undecayed sometimes for a decade. The problem was solved by introducing African dung beetles, which could cope with both wet pats and dry weather.

Caprophagy is obviously a mistake. There is a rare Greek word καπροφάγος (kaprophágos), defined by Liddell-Scott-Jones as "eating boar's flesh, epith. of Artemis at Samos." But what the context demands here is coprophagy, from Greek κοπροφάγος (koprophágos = eating dung), itself from κόπρος (kópros = dung) and φαγεῖν (phageîn, infinitive of ἔφαγον, used as 2nd aorist of ἐσθίω, meaning to eat).

Sara Stein is not alone in making this mistake. Google Book Search reveals nine examples of caprophagy from printed materials, and Google has over two hundred examples. You can also find caprophagous on the Web and in books, but it is likewise a mistake for coprophagous.

On a related note, David Quammen, The Flight of the Iguana: A Sidelong View of Science and Nature (1988; rpt. New York: Doubleday, 1989), p. 203, has a tongue-in-cheek (dung-in-cheek?) adaptation of the Biblical book of Exodus, chapters 15-16:

And behold, in those days the children of Israel had taken their journey into the desert, and they were hungry and they were thirsty and they were sorely vexed, and so they murmured against Moses, saying, What is this nonsense? Moses, we are fixing to die out here and shrivel away like dried chilies if you don't do something, they said. So Moses cried unto the Lord and the Lord showed him a sweet spring where it flowed out of the rock. Fine, but what about some food? said the children of Israel. So the Lord sent overnight a great host of scale insects of the species Trabutina mannipara and Najacoccus serpentinus, this is true fact, and these insects fed upon the desert tamarisk bushes and then they shat upon the ground; a fine white layer of nutritious excrement, tiny granules that lay over the ground like hoar frost, did they shit. And when the children of Israel saw this stuff, they called it manna, and they did nourish themselves upon it for forty years.

Related posts:

• Noctes Scatologicae: Coprophagy
  
• More on Coprophagy
  
• Dove's Dung
  
• Puffballs
  
• Cowslip

Harold Wentworth and Stuart Berg Flexner, Dictionary of American Slang (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1960), p. 314:

lead in [one's] pencil, have     1 [taboo] To have an erection; to be capable of and eager for sexual intercourse. 2 To be full of energy and vitality.

Sense 1 is apt in light of the etymological connection between pencil and penis. See The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, New College Edition (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979), s.v. pencil:

Middle English pensel, pencel, from Old French pincel, from Vulgar Latin pēnicellus (unattested), from Latin pēnicillus, a brush, pencil, "small tail," diminutive of pēnis, tail.

and s.v. penis:

Latin pēnis, tail, penis.

Andrew Marvell, translation of The Second Chorus from Seneca's Tragedy, Thyestes:

Climb at Court for me that will
Tottering Favour's slipp'ry hill.
All I seek is to lye still.
Settled in some secret Nest
In calm Leisure let me rest;
And far off the publick Stage
Pass away my silent Age.
Thus when without noise, unknown,
I have liv'd out all my span,
I shall dye, without a groan,
An old honest Country man.
Who expos'd to others Eyes,
Into his own Heart ne'r pry's,
Death to him's a Strange surprise.

Seneca, Thyestes 391-403:

Stet quicumque volet potens
aulae culmine lubrico:
me dulcis saturet quies.
obscuro positus loco
leni perfruar otio,
nullis nota Quiritibus
aetas per tacitum fluat.
sic cum transierint mei
nullo cum strepitu dies,
plebeius moriar senex.
illi mors gravis incubat
qui, notus nimis omnibus,
ignotus moritur sibi.

Donald Culross Peattie, An Almanac for Moderns (June 2):

A man need not know how to name all the oaks or the moths, or be able to recognize a synclinal fault, or tell time by the stars, in order to possess Nature. He may have his mind solely on growing larkspurs, or he may love a boat and a sail and a blue-eyed day at sea. He may have a bent for making paths or banding birds, or he may be only an inveterate and curious walker.

But I contend that such a fellow has the best out of life—he and the naturalists. You are ignorant of life if you do not love it or some portion of it, just as it is, a shaft of light from a nearby star, a flash of the blue salt water that curls around the five upthrust rocks of the continents, a net of green leaves spread to catch the light and use it, and you, walking under the trees. You, a handful of supple earth and long white stones, with seawater running in your veins.

This is the first in a series of notes for my own use about some flowers recently planted in my yard. Photographs come from the web site of the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center. References to Britton & Brown are to Nathaniel Lord Britton and Addison Brown, An Illustrated Flora of the Northern United States, Canada and the British Possessions, 2nd ed. (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1913; rpt. New York: Dover, 1970). Ethnobotanical information comes from the Native American Ethnobotany database.


Golden alexanders (Zizia aurea)
On the etymology of the common name, see the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), s.v. alexanders (a different plant):

Cf. Fr. alexandre (Lyte's Dodoens), alisandre Palsg., alisaundre, alissandere Godef., med.L. name Petroselinum Alexandrinum, a synonym of P. Macedonicum. The note in Holland's Pliny (1634) II. 30 that alisanders is 'a corrupt word from olus atrum, as if one would say olusatres,' seems disproved by the 10th c. alexandre.

The only OED definition of alexanders is:

An umbelliferous plant (Smyrnium olusatrum), called also Horse-parsley, formerly cultivated and eaten like celery.

Note that the scientific name of alexanders (Smyrnium olusatrum) reflects the discredited etymology from olus atrum.

Linnaeus originally named golden alexanders Smyrnium aureum, but W.D.J. Koch, "Generum tribuumque plantarum Umbelliferarum nova dispositio," Nova Acta Academiae Caesareae Leopoldino-Carolinae Germanicae Naturae Curiosorum 12.1 (1824) 55-156 (at 129) renamed the plant Zizia aurea in honor of German botanist Johann Baptist Ziz (1779-1829). The second half of the binomial (aurea) means "golden."

Britton & Brown (III, 641) describe the genus Zizia thus:

Perennial mostly glabrous herbs, with ternate or ternately compound leaves, or the basal ones undivided as in Thaspium, and compound umbels of yellow flowers, the central fruit of each umbellet sessile. Involucre none; involucels of several small bracts. Calyx-teeth prominent. Stylopodium none. Styles elongated. Fruit ovoid, or oblong, glabrous, or nearly so, somewhat flattened at right angles to the commissure, the ribs filiform, not winged; oil-tubes solitary in the intervals, with a small one under each rib. Seed-face flat.

Britton & Brown (ibid.) describe the species Zizia aurea thus:

Erect, glabrous, branched, 1°-2½° high. Basal and lower leaves long-petioled, 2-3-ternately compound, the segments ovate, or ovate-lanceolate, acute, acuminate or obtusish at the apex, 1'-2' long, sharply serrate; upper leaves shorter-petioled, ternate; rays of the umbels 9-25, stout, ascending, 1'-2' long; fruit oblong, nearly 2" long, about 1½" wide.

In fields, meadows, and swamps. New Brunswick to Ontario, Saskatchewan, South Dakota, Florida and Texas. April-June.

Thoreau saw golden alexanders on his trip to Minnesota. See Frank B. Sanborn, The First and Last Journeys of Thoreau: Lately Discovered among his Unpublished Journals and Manuscripts (Boston: Bibliophile Society, 1905), p. 34:

This was a noble crop for the two botanists. Before dining with the doctor, apparently, Thoreau had found on the prairie Osmorrhiza brevistylis and a Thaspium, of the variety apterum; and he adds, "Dr. Charles L. Anderson [his host] has this variety, and also the Zizia aurea."

According to Huron H. Smith, "Ethnobotany of the Meskwaki Indians," Bulletin of the Public Museum of the City of Milwaukee 4 (1928) 175-326 (at 250), Zizia aurea was used as a headache remedy.

Joseph Epstein, The Middle of My Tether: Familiar Essays (New York: W.W. Norton, 1983), p. 117 (essay "Bookless in Gaza"):

Allow me my major premise for a moment: if there is a Heaven, will it contain books? Or will the very need for books be expunged? In Heaven, there may be no need to read about foreign shores or treasures hitherto undreamed of. There may be no need even to dream of such treasures; they will presumably be there, on the premises, so to speak. But if there are no books in Heaven, then—as John Sparrow once remarked of Heaven if his dear friend Maurice Bowra were not there—I do not care to go. My own view is that there will be books in Heaven, but only in foreign languages, ancient and modern and even lost, all of which I shall be able to read with perfect ease.

As for Hell, will there be books there? The Abbé Mugnier, friend to Edith Wharton and the artists and intellectuals of the Faubourg Saint-Germain, was once asked if he, gentle soul that he was, believed in Hell. He said that since it was Church dogma that Hell existed, he believed in Hell, though he also believed there was no one in it. But if the sweet-natured Abbé was wrong, it seems unlikely that there will not be something to read in Hell. My own guess is that there will be no actual books, but only bound volumes of the New York Times op-ed pages.

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