As the Christmas season comes to an end — Twelfth Night, or Epiphany, is tomorrow — I have one more Christmas hymn to write about. The tune is a familiar one; in fact, it’s one of the few tunes in the Sacred Harp that are familiar to most people, though the tune name there, Portuguese Hymn, might be unfamiliar to many (who know it as Adeste Fideles), the text there isn’t the usual one in English (though it’s similar to it), and the harmonization is in shapenote style (in particular, with a descant in the treble line):
Came across a neighbor at noon today, outside our back doors (he lives on the second floor of our condo; I live on the ground floor). He was slowly coming down his back stairs, lugging a wheeled device.
Then I saw that his left foot and ankle were in a big cast, and that the device was one of those crutch replacements that allows someone with a lower leg disability to get around by putting one knee on a platform and propelling themselves forward with the other foot.
I commiserated with Benj over his mishap (on the day after Christmas) and, linguist that I am, asked him what the (enormously useful) contraption was called.
A Roll-A-Bout, he said.
(more…)
Today’s Bizarro, with a canine portmanteau:
That’s Rin Tin Tin, the great movie dog, plus Tintin, the boy hero of the comics (and now the movies), who goes on his adventures with his dog Snowy. (In the cartoon, the dog has the body of Rin Tin Tin and the head of Tintin, so there’s a visual portmanteau to go along with the verbal one.)
(Not about language.)
In my investigations into the Daingerfield family and their milieu, I came across a Graveyards and Gravestones site, with photographs of over 2300 gravestones, and a Find a Grave site, with a huge number of grave records, including many photographs of gravestones, among them four from the Daingerfeld family. No photograph of the grave of the Major (Foxhall Alexander Daingerfield), but I did find two of his sons, James Keene Daingerfield and Algernon Daingerfield, JKD’s son James Keene Daingerfield Jr. (Ann’s father), and Algernon’s son Foxhall A. Daingerfield Jr. (More about Algernon and Fox in a later posting, and some stories about JKD in another.)
First, JKD:
and his son, Keene:
Algernon:
and his son, Fox:
Interestingly, it’s often easier to find a photo of a gravestone than to get information about the life of the person buried in the grave.
Yesterday’s Scenes From a Multiverse:
Not Science Wizards, but Science Bastards. Hosted, of course, by a mad scientist.
Perhaps in the same vein as silent cowboy (here), in which the first element functions as N rather than Adj, I now offer annual labiate ‘labiate plant that is an annual’, not ‘labiate plant that is yearly’ (but the category identification is by no means clear, and the composite might be ambiguous).
A final big push of papers on my website — filling in gaps in things that people have asked about or that link to things already on the site or that I’ll want to refer to in coming postings. One short article that I added a little while back; 20 items scanned in by my impressive staff (my friend Ned Deily); and one more to come (the very first joint piece by Ann Daingerfield Zwicky and me, from 1973; I think that this will complete the set of our collaborative publications).
Another photo of Ann Daingerfield Zwicky (for her grand-daughter, Opal), this one taken in Lexington KY some time in the 1970s: Ann and me with Anne Brent Winn at her house on Fayette Park:
(We are all drinking bourbon. This was Kentucky.)
Now: a major name confusion. In my last Ann posting, I wrote about Ann’s aunt Ann, Ann Walcutt Winn, and her husband Jack, Judge John J. Winn. Now we have an Anne Winn, who happens to have been married to a John Winn, John Blandford Winn Jr. (To add some spice to things, when they were young, my Ann’s father, Keene, was a beau of Anne Mason Brent’s — as Anne Brent Winn was then.)
(Another posting about Ann Daingerfield Zwicky.)
The last picture I have of Ann, not long after she got the pronouncement of death from her oncologist, and about three months before she died:
Some words about the occasion and (some of) the people.