On 3/7 (on this blog) I posted “The travails of etymology”, about the sources of some phrasal verbs meaning ‘to die’. Which elicited from Troy Anderson friendly but anxious e-mail on 3/8:
dai s’la (hello friend/cousin, in Miluk),
Your last post on Facebook makes me think you’re thinking you’re about done? I’m sad we haven’t kept the conversation going.
Know I’m here rooting for you.
(The reference to the language Miluk will get clarified eventually, when I tell you more about TA.)
— AZ > TA:
I assume that your anxiety was occasioned by my “Travails of etymology” posting, which was meant to be intentionally funny [it ended with an excerpt from Monty Python’s dead parrot sketch], though it was about expressions for dying [taking off from check out and peg out].
No, I am emphatically not contemplating kicking it (or even just giving up posting). This posting came in a burst of energy and good feeling, with 5 postings in 2 days, something I haven’t been able to do in years. My health and sense of well-being are in fact improving; be happy for me. But now I think I’ll do another posting on Sacred Harp 122 All Is Well, a song explicitly about welcoming death as a release from the pain of this world — a song I have long had a complex relationship to, because the sentiment is so totally not mine.
So here I am, 85 and a half, suddenly with more things to say than I think I’l ever be able to get to. A very good problem to have.
Who is Troy Anderson? Two postings on this blog:
— on 3/8/24, the posting “Howdy”
— on 3/11/24, the posting “Howdy Out”
From the second posting:
Troy was not only a Stanford football player (a huge guy who looks like the offensive tackle he was at Stanford) but also a high-ranking Go player, now a business executive, who got a BA in anthropology, and as a member of the Coquille tribe in Oregon compiled a dictionary of its lost language, Miluk, for his MA thesis in linguistics [also an indigenous language advocate and cofounder of a Coquille economic self-sufficiency corporation] [also a guy with a notably sunny disposition and, yes, gay, too]
It would be hard to make stuff like this up, but there it is. And he’s concerned about his friends.
SH122 All Is Well. About my 9/2/19 posting “More dream linguistics”: it’s mostly about Stephen Foster’s “Hard Times, Come Around No More”, but with a section on All Is Well, 122 in the shapenote hymn book The Sacred Harp, which is explicitly a hymn of triumph over death. Verse 1:
What’s this that steals, that steals upon my frame?
Is it death, is it death?
That soon will quench, will quench this mortal flame,
Is it death, is it death?If this be death, I soon shall be,
From ev’ry pain and sorrow free,
I shall the King of glory see,
All is well, all is well!
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