From Kim Darnell today, a Christmas tree, which she then decorated to suit my household:
(#1) O rosemary, my rosemary
I’d admired these little rosemary bushes at Whole Foods: pretty, wonderfully scented, useful in cooking, and an excellent evergreen container plant for my patio garden (rosemary shrubs are widely used as border and filler plants locally).
At the top: a purple glass star by Elizabeth Daingerfield Zwicky and a rainbow triangle. Mardi Gras beads. And the penguin from my 7/5/18 posting “The multi-speed rainbow buttlight penguin (in blue)”.
The rainbow was an accidental effect.
Otherwise, Kim left everything in my house as it was, rather than setting up the scene. So you get my purple folding umbrella, a pile of New Yorkers (in the background), and (on the left) a pile of books for me to consider posting about — from the top on down:
Linguistics: Why It Matters, by Geoffrey K. Pullum
The Prodigal Tongue, by Lynne Murphy
The Joy of Syntax, by June Casagrande
Friends of Dorothy, by Dee Michel
Grammaticalization Meets Construction Grammar, ed. by Evie Coussé, Peter Andersson, & Joel Olofsson
I’ve already posted, on 4/13/18 in “The Prodigal Tongue”, about Lynne’s book on “the fiction and reality of the special relationship between British and American English” (from the publisher’s description). A bit more to come soon.
Meanwhile, there’s the song “O Christmas Tree” (German original “O Tannenbaum”, at first with no holiday connections but now treated as a Christmas carol). The first verse in German:
(#2) What became “O Christmas tree, my Christmas tree”
Some might recognize the tune from “Maryland, My Maryland” (the state song of Maryland); “Florida, My Florida” (the former state song of Florida); “Michigan, My Michigan” (often treated, erroneously, as the state song); “The Song of Iowa” (the actual state song); “O Parador” (the national anthem of the fictional country Parador in the 1988 film Moon over Parador); and more. Tannenbaum, Christmas tree, rosemary, Maryland, Florida, Michigan, Iowa, Parador — dactyls rule.
December 8, 2018 at 8:46 am |
My mother had a plant that we called “the orange tree” (its provenance, and why it was called that, is a rather involved story); it was about six feet high (I think it would have been taller if it hadn’t kept running into the ceiling), and was sparsely adorned with thorns a couple of inches long, which along with the branches were suitable for hanging not-too-heavy Christmas ornaments. For a few years we used it alongside a regular conifer as a supplemental tree, and then my parents decided this was silly, and we just used the orange tree as a Christmas tree.