The earlier go-round: my 9/7/19 posting “Big sexy prime birthday gay ice cream”, with a section on the Marquis de Lafayette (among other things, a French hero of the American Revolution), because I share a birthday with him.
And now (note from Joelle Stepien Bailard) the Lafayette Trail organization. Its logo:
(#1)
With, as linguistic added value, the quite rare, but relatively learnèd-transparent N/Adj co-natalist ‘(someone) sharing a birthday with’. God is not my co-pilot, but Lafayette is my co-natalist.
The Lafayette Trail. From the Facebook page:
The Lafayette Trail is an endeavor that aims to memorialize the footsteps of General Lafayette during his Farewell Tour in 1824-1825 [at the sponsorship of President James Monroe, on a roughly elliptical route covering the territory from New England though New Orleans and covering all 24 states of the union at the time]. Our mission is to raise awareness about Lafayette and the ideals he stood for as well as to reinforce French-American longstanding friendship through education.
Instances of our action include but are not limited to historical research, interpretation, webmapping and web design. Our activities also encompass outreach to decision-making public figures and stretch as far as writing articles and delivering lectures across the United States of America to raise awareness about the achievements of General Lafayette as the Bicentennial of the Farewell Tour draws closer in 2024.
co-natalist. Created on the spot to describe my relationship with Lafayette, this useful word turned out to be very rare on the net — only one hit — and not attested anywhere in the OED, even in quotations for other words (co-natal and co-native are similarly absent).
That one hit on the net, from the Anecdotal Evidence blog by Patrick Kurp (of Houston TX) on 12/7/09 in ‘Beames the Blessed Onely See’, takes us far from Lafayette, but instead to that remarkable growly- / gravelly-voiced singer Tom Waits:
When I despair of civilization – of courtesy and wit – my reliable antidote is Nige [Nigel Saul, author of English Church Monuments in the Middle Ages: History and Representation (2009)], who today shares a 60th birthday with another agent of consolation, Tom Waits. Nige is fortunate in his choice of co-natalist. I share my day of birth with the former Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom, Andrew Motion. As a gift I offer Nige a favorite Waits ballad, “Time,” from Rain Dogs (1986); in particular, these lines:
Oh and the things you can’t remember
Tell the things you can’t forget
That history puts a saint
In every dream
You can experience a performance of the song here (#2). The cover of the album:
(#3)
Previously on this blog: in my 12/21/12 posting “Pocket reference to half-rhyme”, an analysis of the Tom Waits song “Ol ’55”.
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