Man up!

I ran across a tweet this morning which suggested that "manned" as in "manned spaceflight" was derived not from "man" (the word commonly used for a  male human being) but from the Latin for hand "manos[sic]".  In other words the tweet suggests, it is related to manual, and so doesn't actually have sexist roots.

The Latin for hand is manus, and indeed it is the root for things like manual and manuscript and manufacture (and perhaps even manuensis). All referents to things done (or once done) by hand, and all with the stem manu-.

But it is not true that manus is the the root for manned . Historically manned does mean "something done by a group of dudes." The OED has a clear explanation of the origins of the word. The root is mannen from Dutch and Germanic sources. The link expressed by the tweeter to doing things by hand is a folk etymology, and one that I suspect has its origins in actual and overt sexism. I can trace it back to a letter from James Daniels in Physics Today (51(10), 11 (1998). He doesn't give a source for his etymology, and two issues later he will be forcefully corrected by an Oxford linguist.

Why do I think it's overtly sexist? Ah, because that letter from Daniels also makes snide remarks about women and LGBTQ physicists.

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Interestingly "innocent" suffers from a similar etymological mix-up of its Latin root. It's not from noscere (to know) but from nocere (harmless).

The epitome of epithymy

Dictionary in the library at Jesuit Center in Wernersville.

The son known herein as Crash recently pointed out to me a feature of the online version of my beloved¹ Oxford English Dictionary which I hadn't noticed before.  Words are assigned to one of eight frequency bands.

Bands 7 and 8 are common words in speech and writing, appearing with a frequency of one word in a thousand or more.  Band 4  comprises words that appear less commonly, roughly one word in a million, but "most words remain recognizable to English-speakers, and are likely be used unproblematically in fiction or journalism." Example - bipartisan, which may appear more often these days than one might be led to assume from this.

I'm working on an essay for Nature Chemistry on chemists' tendency to use epithymetic language when talking about atoms or molecules.  Epithymetic is the perfect word to use in this context. It is also in Band 2, which the OED describes thus (emphasis mine)

Band 2 contains words which occur fewer than 0.01 times per million words in typical modern English usage. These are almost exclusively terms which are not part of normal discourse and would be unknown to most people. Many are technical terms from specialized discourses. Examples taken from the most frequently attested part of the band include decanate, ennead, and scintillometer (nouns), geogenic, abactinal (adjectives), absterge and satinize (verbs). In the lower frequencies of the band, words are uniformly strange or exotic, e.g. smother-kiln, haver-cake, and sprunt (nouns), hidlings, unwhigged, supersubtilized, and gummose (adjectives), pantle, cloit, and stoothe (verbs), lawnly, acoast, and acicularly (adverbs), whethersoever (conjunction).

Yeah, no. I won't be using epithymetic anywhere in that piece.

On the plus side, I'm adding some uniformly strange and exotic words to my vocabulary this week. Urusula La Guin's essay on the use of the word f*ck in discourse added swounds and gorblimey. Swounds is a euphemistic shortening of God's wounds; gorblimey, is another shortened oath, God blind me. Swounds is Band 1 - the zebras of the word world.   The frequency band information gave me sprunt, for spruce and smart. My office at home is pretty sprunt these days, after my summer's efforts to clean things up.

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I would like to state clearly that I did not marry Math Man merely to get the two volume OED with the magnifying glass in the little drawer, though it made a very nice dowry (Band 5), I must say.

Epithymetic means "connected to desire, about appetites" - and this piece is about the language of desire, about electrophilicity and nucleophilicity and electron affinities.  See, it's perfect.

At a loss for words - Hapax legomena

I was trying to find a term in a document that had a concordance today.  Because I was wrestling with a difficult issue in a book that I'm working on (which is what I was doing digging in the concordance in the first place), I was, to put it charitably, distractible. The concordance offered a link to statistics about the text, including word frequency. Huh. I clicked. (Yes, I know, not on task, but charity begins at home).  Oooh.  Hapax legomena.  Click.

Did I mention that I was dealing with a difficult writing problem?  Down the rabbit hole I went. A hapax legomena is a list of words that occur only once in a work or corpus, coming from the Greek for a single utterance. A great spot to find those weirdly apt words I love.  Like allochthonous. I managed to pull myself back from the brink and though still at a loss for words, tackle the issue in my text.

To find that Scrivener (my writing software) will do a statistical analysis of my text.  Which I proceeded to do. It's a great way to (a) procrastinate (not that I was having much difficulty with that) and (b) to find your typos. Bornze is not the alloy I was looking for.

In the end, I found the words I was looking for, resolved the problem in the least interesting way possible, finished my writing session for the day and had lunch. The End.

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For those of you too young to know what a concordance is, it's the pre-digital equivalence of ⌘-f (or if you're not Mac based, Control+f).  Not the same as an index, either.

allochthonous wasn't in the concordance I was looking at, but was in my Nature Chemistry Thesis hapax legomena, created over lunch (it beat reading the news, my usual habit). It's a delightful word, was perfect for the context and easier to say than it looks.   Still, I was surprised that my editor had let it through. Thanks, Stuart!

And yes, there are unique terms for words that appear twice and only twice (and three times and four times...): dis legomenon, tris legomenon, and tetrakis legomenon.  I'm chagrined to admit that "armamentarium" is a tris legomenon in my published corpus.

Hapax legememon can make trouble for lexicographers trying to translate works from ancient languages for which we have only small samples.  They are also at a loss for words, I suppose.  Mental Floss had a short piece on hapax, in which they note a word once translated as "bowel" turned out instead to be "latrine." I could see the connection, but imagine how this changed the text.

Sliding scales

The Egg bought me this slide rule, I also have the somewhat 

more sophisticated K&E slide rule that my mother-in-law, 

Gai Hamburger Donnay, bought with them money she 

earned tutoring Jackie Robinson in chemistry during her 

undergraduate days at UCLA. The log tables are from my 

father's, in his CRC Handbook of Mathematics.

I've been playing with scales off and on for the last couple of weeks. Not musical scales, or pay scales, or sliding fee schedules, but logarithmic scales on a slide rule for an essay I'm writing about computational methods.  What do we use, what did we use, and how do these options affect what we do in research and what we teach?

As part of this effort I learned to add and subtract on a slide rule.  I mentioned this to a younger colleague who seemed unimpressed, why not, weren't slide rules just the equivalent of the calculator, instead of pressing buttons, operations were done by some sort of sliding algorithm?

Ah, but the miracle¹ of using logarithms to do computations was that you could multiply two numbers by adding two numbers. To multiply two numbers, say 2378 and 3467, you looked up the logarithm of each in a table — 7.774 and 8.151 respectively — added them together (15.925) and found the number corresponding to this new logarithm to arrive at the answer:  8,240,000 (to 3 significant figures, the exact answer is 8,244,526).  Put in symbolic form LOG(A x B) = LOG (A) + LOG (B).  These "logs" didn't help with addition in any way.

But you can use multiplication to add in an admittedly roundabout way.² To add A and B:

• Divide A by B.
• Add 1. (Ok, yes, this is addition, but trivial to do in your head).
• Now multiply the result by B.
• The result is the sum of A and B.

This is supposedly handy if you are mid-calculation on a slide rule and don't want to pull a number off to paper, then return to working the rest out on the slide rule.

With a bit of practice, I'm once again getting quick with doing equilibrium problems for general chemistry, faster mid-lecture than pulling out and unlocking my phone to use the calculator on it (and my last standalone calculator bit the dust this week, after a long, long, useful life.)  Then again, when I have a quadratic to solve, these days I can just say "Hey, Siri...."

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There were other methods for doing multiplication of two number by adding two numbers based on trigonometric relationships, which led me to learn the word prosthaphaeresis.

I note that one should be impressed with the tables.  It took Napier 20 years of calculations to construct those tables.

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1.  And a miracle they were thought to be from the very first, John Napier's book describing his invention (published in 1614) was titled  Mirifici Logarithmorum Canonis Descriptio (A Description of the Wonderful Rule of Logarithms).
2. For the algebraically inclined,  this translates to A+B = B (A/B + 1)

Column: Advent 2: O nata lux

I wrote the first draft of this while listening to Morten Lauridsen's Lux Aeterna, which includes a setting of the traditional hymn for the Tranfiguration, O nata lux, but which seemed as appropriate for Advent. It is, to quote a friend, an ineffable piece of music. You can listen here and if your week is anything like mine, do!

I recalled the Our Father in so many languages on the wall at Sagrada Familia in Barcelona. I thought, too, of the mosque I visited in Abu Dhabi years ago where one gold splashed and white wall was covered with words, ninety-nine attributes of God:  the All Merciful, the Truth, the Maker of all things.  Peace.

A column for the first week of Advent which appeared at CatholicPhilly (along with some suggested materials for additional reflection) on 7 December 2016.

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What came to be
through him was life,
and this life was the light of the human race;
the light shines in the darkness,
and the darkness has not overcome it. — John 1:3b-5

“And by light you mean photons, right?” asks the student in the first row. “Yes, I do.” At least in this context. There is always a bit of irony in these last classes of the semester. I’m lecturing about light as the winter darkness grows deeper. Or maybe not.

As I packed up to return to my office, the lines from the Prologue to St. John’s Gospel ran through my head, “the light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it.” Chemists see light as active. It doesn’t just illuminate, driving away the darkness, it can fundamentally change what it touches. One molecule becomes another. Yet more wonderfully, once the light has soaked in, it can shine forth again, in new ways and new directions.

The Light has shone in the darkness, and we are fundamentally changed. But to those who did accept him he gave power to become children of God. What’s more, we are called to be beacons of light: You are the light of the world.

We have been kindled, we hear in St. Matthew’s Gospel, not to be hidden under a bowl, or within the walls of our parish churches, but to shine forth, banishing the darkness around us.

Reflecting on these lines from John in his “City of God,” St. Augustine tells of St. Simplician, a late fourth century bishop of Milan, who recalled a pagan scholar once told him that the opening lines to John’s Gospel “should be written in letters of gold and hung up in all the churches in the most conspicuous place.” This is where our faith begins. In the darkness, yearning for light, life and God to come among us.

As Advent moves more deeply into the darkness, I imagine John’s words, written in letters of gold, shimmering on the walls of churches everywhere. And the Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us, and we saw his glory … full of grace and truth.

I look for the Light dwelling among us, praying that it might change me; that I, too, might be aflame with the Word, filled with grace.

Ding Dong

Not as in Avon is calling.

In the afterglow of the Great Graduation Event (Crash's backyard party), The Boy suggested a game of Bananagrams. I am good at Bananagrams. It would be false humility to claim otherwise.¹ I don't. In fact, I tell everyone in the room. I'm really good at Banagrams.

So I join Favorite Facebook Nephew and The Boy in a round. I win. FFN is frustrated.²

We play again. Same result. In the middle of round 3, FFN resigns his position in favor of his mother, No-No, and Math Man takes over The Boy's spot. (FFN and The Boy go off to play some game at which I do not excel that resembles chess and uses lasers. They don't care who wins as long as it isn't me.) No-No and Math Man are at a serious disadvantage; not only are they taking over midstream, but are both novices.

Geek Guru tries to level the playing field by distracting me with a secondary conversation. I am mistress of the universe. I can talk and make words on the floor. "Bananagrams!" I exclaim proudly (not that this victory merits such).

Suddenly No-No looks closely at my tiles. "QUINTY?" she inquires.

Oh. No. I had created "SQUINTY," then siphoned off the S to use elsewhere. There is no redemption in Bananagrams. Should you declare victory under these circumstances, the round resumes, but without you. "Noooooo...."

From the sofa, Geek Guru begins, "Ding-dong, the wicked witch, which old witch, the wicked witch...." The rest of them join in.

Pride. It goes before a fall.

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1. I am good because the game favors those with larger vocabularies, good spatial skills and lots of practice. I spent a lot of time playing it with The Boy on vacation a couple of years back.

2. Note that FFN could destroy me in under two minutes with his eyes closed in any videogame. Probably in under 30 seconds. We all have our strengths.

Babu Yetu

Long ago, when I was in college, working on a linguistics degree, I had to take two years of a non-Indo-European language. I chose Kiswahili, in part because I had friend who spoke it and I could practice with him, and partly because the structure of the language fascinated me. Plural nouns are fomed by prefixes, instead of English's "s" suffixes. Nouns that refer to objects that are alive are treated differently from nouns for objects that are and have ever been inanimate.

The Boy and Crash's choral group sang this piece for this final concert and I enjoy seeing if I could follow the Our Father in a language I haven't tried to speak in almost three decades. (For the record - no.)


Baba yetu uliye mbinguni,
Jina lako litukuzwe,
Ufalme wako uje,
Mapenzi yako yatimizwe,
hapa duniani kama huko mbinguni.
Utupe leo riziki yetu.
Utusamehe deni zetu,kama sisi nasi tuwasamehevyo wadeni wetu.
Na usitutie majaribuni,lakini utuokoe na yule mwovu.
Kwa kuwa ufalme ni wako, na nguvu, na utukufu, hata milele.Amina.
(Our Father in Kiswahili)

A camel awakened at dawn

My associations with camels are admittedly eclectic. They range from the obvious (deserts) to links most people would consider dubious (Ignatian retreats and the Liturgy of the Hours). So I was delighted to find this sentence in a book on language that a friend gave me for my birthday:

"Have you ever heard a camel being awakened at dawn, cinched up, and introduced, as if for the first time, to the notion that camels are beasts of burden? The camel's response begins way up high like a teakettle at just-boil and works its way down through the expostulation of an archbishop being contradicted, the gurgle of ancient plumbing, the cry of an emeritus member of the Explorers Club being violated in his leather chair, and on down down down into some deep body cavity unknown to man." — Alphabetter Juice by Roy Blount, Jr.

It's a heady and laugh inducing melange that evokes Gerard Manley Hopkins ("just-boil"), Ralph Steadman's caricature of a cardinal (which does not reflect my opinion of my archbishop, I hasten to say!), and Elizabeth Peter's dryly periphrastic Amelia Peabody ("the cry of an emeritus member of the Explorers Club...").

Blount's entry on Hopkins, filed under "foil," describes his use of sprung rhythms to "generate more torque" than one might imagine possible — poetically or otherwise. I have a sudden image of Hopkins under a poem with a wrench, tightening the language until the chassis groaned.

Verbing weirds language

One consquence of my wide ranging interests is an ever expanding vocubulary (something which at least one of my editors regularly twits me about), and an interest in how words are created and repurposed for new endeavors. Canonical in one part of my life has to do with canon law and in another place has to do with a particular set of functions in statistical mechanics. Last week I added two nouns turned verb to my lexicon. Verbing, the linguistic transformation of a noun into a verb, (you can google that if you don't believe me) is a productive process in English (think googling and accessing). That said, to quote the venerable Calvin (not that Calvin, the friend of Hobbes Calvin), verbing weirds language.

The Catholic Standard & Times will have a two page spread on the Stations of the Cross in its Lent issue, which comes out tomorrow. It's a collaborative effort. Sarah Webb visited more than a dozen churches in the archdiocese to photograph the stations. The team selected one station from each parish to feature, along with a short point of meditation. When I visited last week (to bid farewell to the marvelous Sabrina) I got to see the piece in progress. The photographs were in place, and the graphics, but the text was mocked up using lorem ipsum.

Lorem ipsum is standard dummy text, in use by printers and graphic designers since the 16th century. It looks like Latin, but isn't. Your eye registers it as "readable text" but your brain doesn't get distracted by actual content. Using this sort of text in layout is called "greeking" — as in "it's all Greek to me."

Encountering another verbed coinage, frogging, is what finally drove me to do some reading about this form of linguistic production. (I've got a couple of books on this in my sabbatical stack, as the period I'm reading in was very productive in terms of new chemistry terms, including names for elements.) Frogging is a knitting term, mean to rip out completed work. Why frogging? "Rip it, rip it...." Definitely. Verbing weirds language.

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Read the sign carefully to see what happens when placeholder text doesn't get replaced! "Approval for this trial has been given by [Insert ethics/committee and/or regulation authority]." (lower right hand corner, there are two other insert prompts in the text!). I saw this billboard ad on the platform at 69th Street yesterday morning.

I feel like sushi

I've been reading about multiple ways of "reading" a text in a couple of places, particularly in Thomas Moore's Care of the Soul and in some of the stuff I'm browsing for my sabbatical project. Today I began to suspect that all this reading about multiple readings is warping my ability to read things.

On the back of the Wired sitting on the table in the little alcove where I eat lunch is an ad (for Siri) with the text "I feel like sushi." My first thought? I do feel a bit like sushi these days, all wrapped up in my red down coat and shawl. From there my mind swept on to thinking about how my (very raw) hands feel like sushi. Do I feel like eating sushi? Not particularly...thanks for asking.

And yes, those are what you think they are. Peep sushi.

Weather prediction

I'm playing with text analysis for my sabbatical project, and my blog provides a ready source of data. One of the top search queries that lands at my blog is "snow day prayer" which lands at this column I wrote for the Catholic Standard & Times last winter (when it was much snowier).

Several years ago, Google noted that they could use search queries to track influenza cases. (For all the gory details, read the paper in Nature.) If I look at where the queries originate, I can do the same thing with respect to the snow prediction.

A well-wintered life

(WARNING: substantial chemistry content. Theologians and others take a deep breath, I promise there will not be a quiz and that there's a point beyond the chemistry.)

The other day the Boy (who I'm coaching in thermochemistry for Science Olympiad) wondered why the freezing point of water on the Fahrenheit scale was 32^o, and the boiling point 212^o? (The Celsius scale is pinned to the freezing and boiling points of water - a sensible scheme.) I admit I had never given it much thought. Turns out that zero on the Fahrenheit scale is defined as the temperature of a "frigorific" mixture of water, ice and ammonium chloride in a 1:1:1 ratio. (There are many such mixtures, which produce baths of a particular temperature, useful in the days before refrigerators when you needed to produce artificial cold.)

I had never encountered the work before despite years of teaching thermodynamics (frankly, it sounds a bit too pseudo-sciency for my taste - and I do have opinions about what sounds good in a science term) and headed for the OED (the online version, not the one that Math Man brought as his dowry), to find that it is attributed to Robert Boyle in the 17th century.

As it turns out, I was more intrigued by a turn of phrase in one of the quotes given under the figurative meaning: "a well-wintered life..." I tracked down the 19th century reference in Google books to find that well-wintered meant reflective. Winter was a time to be indoors, a time of darkness, a time of year that encouraged — nigh on insisted upon — introspection and stillness: no central heating, no electric lights in those days. You stayed indoors if you could and wrapped up.

How well-wintered is my life? I'm on sabbatical leave, wrapped up in my writing and in my research, but also trying to spend some time in reflection about life. And I'm starting to warm to the idea of wintering over, of letting some things sit out this time. What will happen if I let the ground in which these seeds are planted heave up with the frost, be blanketed with snow, and softened by the melt? God knows.

[Aside: The author rather appallingly posits the opposite as well, those living in the tropics, where light and warmth abound no matter what the season are doomed to shallow living.]

Photo is from a well-wintered walk at Wernersville.

Billy Collins on lanyards and helminthology

I'm reading Billy Collins' The Trouble with Poetry. I love the rich imagery and dashing snark that characterize Collins' poetry -" The Introduction": "And you're all familiar with helminthology? It's the science of worms." It's good commuting reading, there's time to make friends with a poem or two on each leg of my journey. Beside the seriously refusing to take itself seriously "The Introduction" the collection includes "The Lanyard":

No cookie nibbled by a French novelist
could send one more suddenly into the past —
a past where I sat at a workbench at a camp
by a deep Adirondack lake
learning how to braid thin plastic strips
into a lanyard, a gift for my mother.

That stanza gave me a Proustian push into the past as well. I can see the picnic bench set out at the summer rec program, the spools of plastic strips, smell the warm blacktop and feel the whisper of my seersucker sundress in the early morning breeze that still held a touch of the cool of the night. I can't remember how many of these I made, and as far as I know none survived, but I can remember my delight when I mastered a spiral form, rather than the simple square. I wondered if kids still made these, or if like the translucent plastic flowers we made by dipping wires into a solution that smelled like my dad's lab, they were creations of memory only.

Yes, they are still made. The stuff from which they are made is called by some gimp, the craft itself is called boondoggle or scoubi. Apparently it's recently been a rage in the UK to make zipper pulls from it. It sounds more useful than my lanyards.

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Photo is from Shutterstock. Used with permission.

Crossed genres

This molecule is called snoutane. In trying to track down the source of the name, I did a Google search. The Google was not much help, wondering as it did if I wanted to do a related search "what is a cassock?" for surely I had mistyped "soutane."

It's rare that my two lives intersect quite this sharply.

UPDATE: There is so little out there on snoutane that this blog post showed up 1 minute (!) later on the second page of the Google search.

Reflecting 2011

As I've done the last two years, I've dumped the text of the blog into a word frequency analyzer (Wordle) and made a word cloud. I'm struck by the consistency of my writing. Total words on the blog this year? 64840 Last year? 65299! 172 posts. God appears 297 times, prayer and its variants at 257. Last year's numbers are eerily similar, 311 and 258, respectively. I'm on message.

As one that longs to see God in all things, I'm amused that see is embedded in God. And I'm enjoying the accidental co-location of God's and Crash, which I can read several ways. Crash surely is God's (as I've written here, a column I was thinking about today when Crash again bore the cross into Church on a Marian feast). But in this season, where God crashed into time, I prefer to read it as a metaphor for the Incarnation.

And on what other blog might you find the words synchrotron and refulgence both in play?

Happy New Year!

Take a note, Siri

It may be some measure of the chaos in my life at the moment that I viewed the three hour drive down to Virginia yesterday as a contemplative moment. Time shifts are still plaguing my days and nights. Not just the physical desynchronosis of jet lag, but all the things that were put aside when I went to Japan (meetings, papers to grade, essays to finish drafting, Crash's college essays to read, The Boy's chemistry questions to answer, did I mention the meetings?) have popped back into this time line. It seems as if I still need to live the last two weeks of my life here, despited having lived those two weeks already in Japan.

My talk for the conference had been put together before I left, but I was still mentally rehearsing and polishing it on the way down. I wanted to talk out a couple of the transitions and remind myself to add a few bits here and there. In days past I would hit the speed dial on my phone and record 30 second tidbits to be transcribed by the mysterious souls inside Jott. Transcripts would appear in my email, jogging memory, jumpstarting writing.

Now I have Siri (yes, I caved and have a new iPhone — my old one being old enough that AT&T doesn't even give it away for free anymore). I held the button on the phone and asked Siri to "Take a note." We had a brief argument about what I wanted to do, but finally she conceded, "I can do that for you." I dictated away in spurts, trusting that her chipper, "Got that." meant my ideas were safely drifting in the cloud, waiting to descend on me when I had a keyboard handy. I ended and had Siri email the notes off to me. And this is what I said?

"What else to think about the purpose of writing or reading about Jesus is on right track oneself integrating the table I want to bring with the idea that template basis.they've the burning layers on the BlackBerry."

Oh dear. I couldn't decode most of the notes, I tried reading them aloud, to no avail. (The last reference to burning layers is to a quote from Teilhard de Chardin.) Siri is a beta release. I can tell.

More about the talk (Melville, Moby Dick, Gloucester and flame) when I catch up to myself!

Column: Lost and Found in Translation

The new translation of the Roman Missal launches with the First Sunday in Advent this year — less than two months from now. There will be things I will not miss in the old translation (some of the institutionally prosaic opening prayers, for one) and others I suspect I will miss deeply ("one in being"). Fr. Jeremy St. Martin (in the video) works with the deaf apostolate in the Archdiocese of Boston. I learned some ASL when I was on leave at Livermore National Labs (a colleague was deaf), and kept it up (useful for communicating with children in public places). As a result, most of the neighborhood kids learned "stop" and "bother" (as in "stop bothering your brother!")

For another, more poetic (and yes, there is poetry in ASL), interpretation of a setting of the Lord's Prayer, see the video at the end! Play it with the sound turned off...

This column appeared in the Catholic Standard & Times on 29 September 2011.

We are Parthians, Medes, and Elamites, inhabitants of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the districts of Libya near Cyrene, as well as travelers from Rome, both Jews and converts to Judaism, Cretans and Arabs, yet we hear them speaking in our own tongues of the mighty acts of God. Acts 2:9-11

I hadn’t seen Israel for a couple of years when I ran into him while visiting my dad in California, but I was still greeted with a cheery “¿Como estas?” when he saw me on the path. We talked about the work we were doing and as I struggled to find the words to explain — in Spanish — the little book I was finishing, he good-humoredly noted, “Your Spanish has gotten a lot worse!” “Es verdad,” I sighed. It’s the truth, and I mourn the gradual decline of my second tongue. It hinders not only my conversation with Israel, but my conversation with God.

“To sing is to pray twice,” St. Augustine purportedly said. I feel similarly about having multiple languages to pray in — they lend a depth and a life to my prayer, much as a cathedral choir’s rich harmonies shimmer and dance above the assembly’s firm unison.

With more or less prompting, I can still manage to get from “Our Father…” to “Amen” in five languages. Each time I pray the Our Father, no matter what the language, the other four weave their harmonies over and under the melody line. Pater noster. Father, first and foremost. The assurance that sounds in the strong beat of santificada sea tu nombre. The unadorned ordinariness of unser Brot - our bread. The hand that moves from forehead heavenward in the sign language version, an embodied reminder of where I look for help.

I relish the murmurs of multiple English translations, too. Three years ago, when I went on retreat for 30 days, the instructions said to bring only two books along: a copy of the Bible and a copy of St. Ignatius’ Spiritual Exercises. In my first meeting with the Jesuit would direct me in the Exercises, I sheepishly admitted that while I’d obediently left novels and science journals home, I’d brought not one, not two but three different translations of the Psalms along with me. The rich chorus of voices rang clearly amidst the silence of those weeks.

In mathematics, to translate something is to pick it up and move it to another place. In a few weeks time, we will move to use a new translation of the Mass. We will be reminded of our status as pilgrims — not curators of a static tradition, but followers of the living Word.

A part of me is braced for this journey into the wilderness, to a place where the words have yet to wear a smooth path through mind and soul. I will miss hearing aloud the words of the Eucharistic prayer that consoles me so deeply in my struggle to negotiate the demands of being wife, mother and teacher with the desire to “stone-still at God’s feet, listening to Him alone”: He stretched out his arms between heaven and earth. My tongue is sure to trip on the threshold of “consubstantial” — still hunting for “one in being.”

Yet I’m also looking forward to hearing new notes sounded in my prayer, to another layer woven into the glorious tapestry that is the Church’s public voice. No matter what language or what translation we use, how simple the melody or intricate the harmonies the words are set to, we are called to sound as a single voice. For we are a single Word, made flesh. The Body of Christ.

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If you are the body and members of Christ, then it is your sacrament that is placed on the table of the Lord; it is your sacrament that you receive. To that which you are you respond "Amen” and by responding to it you assent to it. For you hear the words, "the Body of Christ" and respond "Amen." Be then a member of the Body of Christ that your Amen may be true. — St. Augustine

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Another setting of the Our Father. Play with the sound off to better "get" the poetry of the ASL.

I digress

francl, v. intrs., /'fran səl/ to discursively digress with minimal prompting. Usage, "Did you know that you can use purple cabbage to make an acid-base indicator?" interjected into a conversation on coleslaw.

It's cold at night in the California desert - though the daytime temperature hovered near 100^o, the nights were in the low 50s. One night last week, we were sitting around the fire at my brother the Irreverent Reverend's house, roasting marshmallows (Do you know how many different types of marshmallows Campfire makes? Hint: it's more than just mini marshmallows and regular size.) Facebook Nephew wondered if we would see any meteors from the Pleides shower (without any humidity or significant light pollution, the viewing at the Reverend's is pretty amazing).

I responded (undoubtedly chirpily, but I'm taking the fifth here), "Do you have any idea how many objects the size of a minivan enter the earth's atmosphere in a year?"

From the darkness on the far side of the fire came the Boy's deep voice, "To francl, a verb. To describe in great detail. To answer questions no one has yet asked...." His monologue included a drop-dead perfect imitation of me, soon we were all laughing so hard we had tears on our faces.

His cousins and sib wondered if they could reproduce the "frindle" effect (from the book of the same name by Andrew Clements) and coin a new word. The Boy has threatened to add it to Urban Dictionary. He has high hopes; fueled by a text from a friend not present at the fire using the new word.

Update: The Irreverent Reverend has submitted "francl" to Urban Dictionary.

Bonus point: How many times did I francl in this piece? (Not counting the example in the definition!)

Come to think of it, this is why I keep another blog - it's a place to work off my urge to francl without driving my family crazy.

Hei-wa: still souls

Math Man and I were on a walk yesterday, and happened across an older neighbor, a regular reader of my column in the Standard. She had lots of questions for me, and one for Math Man. "How does she do all that writing?" Math Man: "She stays up late and she is very disciplined."

It's been a very disciplined month, as I finished out the semester and juggled a number of writing deadlines (about 7000 words sent out to three different editors, in eight different pieces, ranging in length from 250 words to just over 3000 words). I've missed writing in this space, with its lack of constraints regard topic, length, format or audience, but have missed more being able to read freely. Still, I've managed to stay on a relatively even keel, partly because, despite Math Man's comment, I've given up giving up sleep.

Patient Spiritual Director has been encouraging some discernment along these lines for some time, and so I've been experimenting with finding "the mean" in my sleep. I think I've found the sweet spot for now, but having done so, I've lost nearly an entire working day from my week. (You can do the math, but I'll save you the effort - an extra 1.5 hours of sleep a night times seven is...10.5 hours.)

One reason I've been juggling deadlines is because I'm off tomorrow on a 2 week trip to Japan. I'm teaching a course next fall on silent spaces in the context of Western contemplative traditions. It's one of a triad of courses looking at contemplative traditions: Eastern, Western and science. We are traveling with the students next fall, to Japan, to Wernersville, to a Benedictine community. This trip is to scope out some of the places and people we want to see when we return with the class. I'm blogging the course here, but will be chronicling travels as well as some of my reading on this blog, too.

What am I reading on the plane? Besides C.S. Lewis' Weight of Glory?

• Sacred Koyasan: A Pilgrimage to the Mountain Temple of Saint Kobo Daishi and the Great SunBuddha, Philip L. Nicoloff, 2007.

• Neural correlates of a mystical experience in Carmelite nuns. Mario Beauregard & Vincent Paquette, Neuroscience Letters 405 (2006) 186–190

And lest you think I'm all that high-minded, I've uploaded a season of Enterprise onto my iPad.

The kanji illustrating this post means "peace," and the two characters can be roughly translated as "still soul" - an layer of meaning I enjoyed discovering.

I've left some posts to appear while I'm gone, and posting on the road is likely to be erratic, I don't expect to have connectivity everywhere I go.

Practical periphrasis

per·i·phras·tic/ˌperəˈfrastik/

1. (of speech or writing) Indirect and circumlocutory.

2. (of a case or tense) Formed by a combination of words rather than by inflection (such as did go and of the people rather than went and the people's)

I'm in the midst of writing a piece for Nature Chemistry about scientific neologisms — the ways in new technical terms are coined (and why some last and some don't). The example that got me started was the coining of a linguistically economical term to replace a periphrastic one: "detor" for "Slater determinant wave function constructed from orthogonal normalized single-electron functions." The latter is most certainly a lengthy combination of words, if not truly circumlocutory.

I get periphrasticity, as the Boy is quite adept in its practice. The description he gave (at age 6) to his pediatrician of "a bouncing headache" was vivid and precise, and eminently practical, enabling the pediatrician to give him both a more economical term and a diagnosis: migraine.

There is a touch of the poetic in a pleasing periphrasis, which is perhaps what I enjoy about Chris' ability to deploy what words he has to hand to describe something for which he as yet has no concise descriptor. It is the sort of "close, naked, natural" language that the Royal Society long ago (1667) advocated for scientists.

An argument I would say, for teaching scientists to write poetry. To let them hone the ability to use close, naked language to describe something so well, we can ultimately put a word to it.