In Plain Engel-ish

GATHERED TOGETHER  In the ninth grade, we learned how to write a business letter. We were taught to always begin with “Dear Sir.” Dear? If I wanted to write to the Acme Squidget Company to complain that their most expensive Model A Squidget utterly failed when I tried to attach it to my Whatchamacallit, I was supposed to address the scoundrel who headed this dubious business as “Dear”?  It turns out that we owe this very strange usage of “dear” to the Middle Ages when the word meant “highly esteemed” rather than our modern meaning of “beloved.” It was the...

With last night being the first night of Hanukkah and with Christmas just ten days away, the delightful topic of gifting has come to my mind. And with my having minored in Classics as an undergraduate, my mind has wandered from the Judeo-Christmas gifting tradition to the mythological one.  Has there ever been a creature more literally gifted than the first woman of Greek mythology? And by “first woman”, I mean the “Eve” of the ancient Greeks. When the most powerful gods on Olympus got together to create her — by committee! — each of them gave her a special...

England’s first king was a man named Aethelstan, who took the throne in the year 925. His line ended with him (with a name like that, is it any wonder there was never an Athelstan the Second?), but as of this year, there’s always been a king or queen on the English throne for exactly the last 1,100 years. With one exception. When the Parliamentarians won the English Civil War against Charles The First and beheaded him in 1649, England became a republic, and Puritan Oliver Cromwell was named Lord Protectorate. Eleven years later, the English begged Charles’ son, Charles...

Clergymen have been called “men of the cloth” since 1600. The term was originally coined because their ceremonial robes were made of distinctive and very expensive wool and silk cloth. It wasn’t until 1865 that the church decided their clergy needed a more specific sartorial statement. In that year, Presbyterian Reverend Donald McLeod in Glasgow, Scotland, invented the clerical collar — a stiff, white collar with no opening in the front. It was quickly adopted by all Protestant and Catholic clergy. By 1900, even some rabbis in England were wearing collars. Not all clergy were enthralled with it. Many called...

PLEASE, SIR, I’D LIKE S’MORES Thanks to the Biblical baby Moses, I learned as a child that bulrushes could be found in marshes. I had also seen beautiful water lilies growing there, with their pretty leaves spread on the surface. I learned in elementary school science class that muskrats, badgers, and frogs were plentiful in marshes. Thus, I had thought of marshes as rather cozy bodies of water, where Kermit might like to nestle with his banjo when he sang “It’s Not Easy Being Green” or “The Rainbow Connection”. What a surprise it was to learn on our first family...