word: fair

Earlier today I happened upon a set of old articles on ALTA Language Services' Beyond Words blog thanks to the University of Chicago Magazine's twitter account.

October 2008's Ten most difficult words to translate was followed by May 2009's Five more difficult words to translate. This set of fifteen possibly untranslatable words comes from an eclectic set of languages (including a few with which I was completely unfamiliar). The only English word on the list was fairness, which was the subject of an Atlantic Monthly article and Beyond Words blog post earlier in 2009.

In Does fairness translate?: an economist and a linguist delve into the cross cultural variation of what we consider fair blog author Manny fulls together the various threads of the debate sparked by Bart Wilson's Atlantic Monthly article in what he refers to as a "nerdy linguistic mashup" and it's fascinating.

Is the concept of fairness uniquely Anglo-American? I don't think so, but I thought it might be interesting to take a look at our 1956 edition of A Dictionary of Americanisms on Historical Principles, edited by Mitford M. Mathews of the U of C Press's now defunct Dictionary Department.
The word fair's first appearance (p. 577) explicates its usage as a noun as in a country fair or a church fair, with a mention of American football's fair ("technical name of putting the ball in play from the side line when out of bounds" per P.H. Davis, 1911).
More relevant to the question at hand are fair's adjectival uses (577-578). Interestingly the first entry regards the classification of cotton by quality. The various baseball-related uses (ie. fair vs. foul) appear second and never stray from the technical into the philosophical (n.b. fair ball is substantial enough to warrant its own entry). The third entry pertains to the finish of leather on leather goods. The fourth and final annotation delineates a number of frequent compound words/phrases (fair catch, fair-haired, fair shake, etc.).

Mrs. Beeton's

For comfort reading and in preparation for One of our Thursdays is Missing, the sixth installment in Jasper Fforde's Thursday Next series, I've been rereading the earlier books. At the moment I'm on The Well of Lost Plots (book #3), which like all the other Thursday Next books is full of literary references. I was absolutely tickled to come across multiple references to Mrs. Beeton's Book of Household Management (unfortunately incorrectly cited as "Mrs. Beeton's Complete Housekeeper").¹ The mentions didn't mean much to me during my earlier readings, but we're big fans of Mrs. Beeton's at my new place of employment. My coworker even has a Mrs. Beeton's apron like the one pictured here.

Isabella Beeton (nee Mayson) was the Martha Stewart of her day² and Mrs. Beeton's Book of Household Management (1861) was her magnum opus (1000+ pages). For the contemporary reader Mrs. Beeton's is a window into the middle-class Victorian home. While the text is heavy on cookery, it also provides advice on any number of topics relevant to the mistress of the house (who is likened to the commander of the army). Readers learn how many and what type of servants one need employ based on one's income, what to feed an invalid, how to diagnose and treat thrush, the logistics of serving dinner la Russe, and myriad other things.

The original Mrs. Beeton's is out of copyright so the text of the book is widely available on the internet. MrsBeeton.com has a nice layout.

1. Here's the first one: "I went downstairs and explained to obb the rudiments of cooking, which were as alien to it as having a name. Fortunately I found an old copy of Mrs. Beeton's Complete Housekeeper, which I told obb to study, half jokingly, as research. Three hours later it had roasted a perfect leg of lamb with all the trimmings. I had discovered one thing about Generics already: dull and uninteresting they may be -- but they learn fast" (p. 13 of my British edition).
2. I cringed at that cliche even as I typed it.

more liquid shopping

As of yesterday everything is 50-70% off at Borders. Russell and I went again last night. This morning as I was filling out my expense report paperwork I noticed something interesting on my receipt (see image on right). The free space in our store is now filled with miscellaneous stuff (this post at The Book Frog will give you an idea) and it warms my heart that someone had enough spunk in reserve to make that snarky, but apropos adjustment.

While I did pick up one book for myself (One of Our Thursdays Is Missing by Jasper Fforde; I needed it since I have all the other books in the series), the shopping experience was more depressing than anything else.

I spent some time in the history section, doing some collection development work. At least this time others will benefit from our Borders-liquidation obsession.

• American Colossus: The Triumph of Capitalism, 1865-1900 by H. W. Brand
• Founding Gardeners: The Revolutionary Generation, Nature, and the Shaping of the American Nation by Andrea Wulf
• Stone by Stone; The Magnificent History in New England's Stone Walls by Robert M. Thorson
• Ten Hills Farm: The Forgotten History of Slavery in the North by C.S. Manegold
• Under the Black Flag: The Romance and the Reality of Life Among the Pirates by David Cordingly

We also picked up another book that I may end up donating to the library: Ghosts from King Philip's War by Edward Lodi. It ended up in Russell's pile during the pre-checkout sort.

As for Russell, he made out like a bandit:

• The Accidental Guerrilla: Fighting Small Wars in the Midst of a Big One by David Kilcullen
• Bloody Mohawk: The French Wars and Revolution on New York's Frontier by Richard Berleth
• The Peasant Prince: Thaddeus Kosciuszko and the Age of Revolution by Alex Storozynski
• The Pity of War by Niall Ferguson
• Teapot Dome Scandal: How Big Oil Bought the Harding White House and Tried to Steal the Country by Laton Mccartney
  (I exclaimed when I found this one and practically threw it at him; one of his forebears was implicated in said scandal and if that's not a good excuse to buy a book on the subject, I don't know what is)
• Worlds at War: The 2,500 - Year Struggle Between East and West by Anthony Pagden

And last, but not least, we got Minotaurus, the Lego boardgame, for both of us. We're going to try it out this weekend.

books from the library shelves: American Writers at Home

William Faulkner’s study at Rowan Oak.
The writing on the walls is an outline for Faulkner's
Pulitizer Prize- and National Book Award-winning A Fable.

American Writers at Home by J. D. McClatchy
Photographs by Erica Lennard

"This is not a book about writers, or about houses, or about America. It is a book about where and why and how American writers made a home for themselves--a place to live, yes, but above all a place to work—in a restless, rugged country" (McClatchy's introduction)¹

Featuring 300 lush and lovely full-color photographs of the homes of 21 American writers American Writers at Home is a glorious, yet substantive coffee-table book.

Like all (most?) coffee-table books, American Writers at Home inspires multiple visits rather than a cover-to-cover read. Readers will love seeing the space their favorite writers inhabited and hearing the author's take on how each of the authors' environments inspired them. American Writers at Home may also inspire some literary pilgrimages as all of the properties featured in the book, with the exception of Edna St. Vincent Millay's Steepletop, are open to the public.

While McClatchy does include a mini bibliography for each author/house at the end of American Writers at Home, he fails to provide references for individual quotes. This isn't a scholarly text, but the lack of citation drives me crazy and is probably the one thing that I do not like about this book.

One of the sites featured is Washington Irving's Sunnyside. McClatchy says of Sunnyside, "In one sense, the house [...] resembled the author's own past. It was a congeries of European motifs and pure American whimsy" (115). I think that's appropriate for an 18th century cottage to which Irving added Dutch stepped gables and a Spanish monastery-esque tower among other things.

The other authors and properties included in American Writers at Home (note how many of our authors hail from Massachusetts and Concord in particular):

• Louisa May Alcott: Orchard House (Concord, MA)
• Kate Chopin: Kate Chopin House (Cloutierville, LA)
• Emily Dickinson: Dickinson Homestead (Amherst, MA)
• Frederick Douglass: Frederick Douglass House (Washington, DC)
• Ralph Waldo Emerson: Emerson House (Concord, MA)
• William Faulkner (Rowan Oak, Oxford, MS)
• Robert Frost: Robert Frost Farm (Derry, NH)
• Nathaniel Hawthorne: The Old Manse (Concord, MA)
• Ernest Hemingway: Ernest Hemingway Home (Key West, FL)²
• Robinson Jeffers: Tor House (Carmel, CA)
• Sarah Orne Jewett: Jewett House (South Berwick, ME)
• Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: Craigie House (Cambridge, MA)
• Herman Melville: Arrowhead (Pittsfield, MA)
• Edna St. Vincent Millay: Steepletop (Austerlitz, NY)
• Flannery O'Connor: Andalusia (Milledgeville, GA)
• Eugene O'Neill: Tao House (Martinez, CA)
• Mark Twain: Mark Twain House (Hartford, CT)
• Eudora Welty: Eudora Welty House (Jackson, MS)
• Edith Wharton: The Mount (Lenox, MA)
• Walt Whitman: Walt Whitman House (Camden, NJ)

You can learn more about the book, and see sample pages, on its website at The Library of America.

Also, if you like this kind of thing, you might want to check out Write Time, Write Place. The blog features contemporary authors on their writing spaces (with snapshots!) as well as quotes about the act of writing.

1. I forgot to note the page number. Will edit it in after I get my hands on the book again.
2. While I love the fact that his property currently has 60 cats in residence (per house website), I'm not crazy about the taxidermied fish on display.

Motel of Mysteries

Motel of Mysteries by David Macaulay

In the year 4022 amateur archaeologist Howard Carson stumbles upon an unparalleled find, an exquisitely preserved chamber of a "funerary complex" that predates the great disaster of 1985. Closely following the work of Carson, Motel of Mysteries tells of that discovery and its aftermath.

By showcasing a truly misguided interpretation of late 20th century America, Motel of Mysteries clearly illustrates the perils involved in studying the past through artifacts.

A sample of Carson's analysis:

Surrounding almost the entire complex was a vast flat area, marked with parallel white lines. In several of the spaces stood freely interpreted metal sculptures of animals. To avoid the misunderstanding that often arises with free interpretation, each sculpture was clearly labeled. They were inscribed with such names as Cougar, Skylark, and Thunderbird, to name but a few. The importance of animal worship in Yank burial customs had never been more clearly illustrated. (40)

Motel of Mysteries is insightful and full of wry humor. As Carson and his compatriots excavate the motel, readers can't help but marvel at the lengths to which they must go to fit individual objects into their erroneous interpretation of the site.

Given the book's 1979 publication date, I suspect Macaulay is primarily poking fun at the archaeology/Egyptology craze spawned by the 1970s The Treasures of Tutankhamun exhibit (the motel's name is "Toot'n'C'mon" and there's a curse associated with the excavation). Regardless, Motel of Mysteries is still laugh-out-loud funny 20+ years later.

Motel of Mysteries is a must-read for any student of history, archaeology, or museum studies. We are getting multiple copies for our library.