cryoconite

Posted on March 19, 2013 | 1 comment

I heard this word spoken just this evening, in the documentary Chasing Ice, about the photographer James Balog and his Extreme Ice Survey, a project to photographically document shrinking glaciers. Interestingly, he puts the stress on the o, following a common model for dealing with polysyllabic Greek-derived words, but the dictionary pronunciation has stress directed by the morphology: cryoconite.

Very well, but what is it? You see the cry and you may think of tears, but you see the cryo and may think of cold things. And the conite – is it tears of contrition? Or is it some kind of cone? Or pneumoconiosis? Is the ite a signal that it is a mineral, or is it leading us into – or out of – nite?

The source parts tell one story, but the reality of it is more complex. The word comes from the Greek κρύος kruos ‘icy cold’ plus κόνις konis ‘dust, ashes’ plus that ite ending, also originally from Greek. So it’s cold dust. But it’s much more than that. And its significance has to do with heat.

Glaciers are dirty. Dust and soot and volcanic ash and so forth blows onto them from all over and settles. It is not distributed in a perfectly even pattern, of course; that would not be random (if all particles were evenly distributed, the distances between them would be highly consistent, not random at all). So there are little clumps here and there. And this dust and soot and so on is dark. So it absorbs heat from light. Which means that when the sun shines in the warmer weather, the ice under this dust melts, and soon the dust is sitting in a little pool of water. Which, being an indentation, draws more water and dust to it, and so it enlarges. Imagine a game of crokinole with the board slanted down towards the hole in the middle, and no pegs to bounce the little quoits out. Thus you have a cryoconite hole, which is a cylindrical hole with a diameter anywhere from less than a centimetre to more than a metre, filled with water (often deeper than the diameter) and with a layer of cryoconite on the bottom. Large areas of glaciers, especially closer to their leading edges, are a Swiss cheese of these holes, dotting them like the circles in the word cryconite.

So the cold dust creates warm tears as the glaciers melt into these little feedback cylinders. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust… But even if these holes are places where the glacier is dying, they are places where other things are living. Cryoconite is not dead and inert. It has bacteria in it, and sometimes algae too, and even insects, worms, crustaceans. Glaciers have whole ecosystems. They have millions of small ecosystems, each cryoconite its own little aquatic environment with pelagic and benthic zones, but taken all together they make up an ecosystem on the glacier that communicates from one part to another. In a delicious passage from “Possible interactions between bacterial diversity, microbial activity and supraglacial hydrology of cryoconite holes in Svalbard,” Arwyn Edwards et al. speak of findings that challenge “previous assumptions that glacial ecosystems are heterotrophic and dependent on an Aeolian flux of allochthonous organic matter” – in other words, previous assumptions that they rely on stuff blown in on the wind. Indeed, Edwards and colleagues find that there are complex contained ecosystems on glaciers, existing in these myriad cryoconite holes and communicating through melting and drainage.

So even as the glaciers disappear, we cannot simply sing “Dust in the Wind.” The fluid nature of existence means that as one thing goes another grows. As the glacier is less whole it is more hole, but those holes grow life, even as they further heat and kill the glacier. Once the glacier under and around them is gone, of course, the cryoconite will wash away too, the “cold dust” now a warm mud full of life on an ever-warming planet.

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acatalectic

Posted on March 19, 2013 | Leave a comment

I wouldn’t say this word is an eclectic catalogue of letters – more a lexically elect collection of selected characters. Three a’s, three c’s, two t’s, and le and i. Its rhythm makes a soft-shoe clatter like the clicking of an IBM Selectric. Now, how would you use it in verse? (I’ve bolded the stressed syllables to make the reading easier, because it changes abruptly halfway through.)

Dactyls and trochees make quick dialectic
when they are mixed and not acatalectic.
If you must write this way so you can show ’em,
watch that you change not the pace of your poem:
A switch to text acatalectic
could cause crises apoplectic;
are (they ask) you messing with ’em
when you don’t truncate the rhythm?

Whether the word acatalectic works with catalectic or acatalectic verse is thus a question of whether you say it with stress on the first a and on the lec (dactyl plus trochee, catalectic) or on the ca and the lec (upbeat plus two trochees, acatalectic). You see, verse is catalectic if, like the first four lines above, the lines drop the last syllable of the rhythm. It is acatalectic if it doesn’t – on other words, if it’s like normal verse that fills out the metre.

So, really, acatalectic is an abnormal way of saying normal, an overfull way of saying complete. It’s a cattle herd where a cow might do. It’s four morphemes, all from Greek: a, ‘not’; cata, ‘off’, lect, from légein, ‘end, stop’ (not the same as the lect related to reading); and that adjectival ic. It’s a word that doesn’t leave off. Unless it does…

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A Word Taster’s Companion: Syllables 2: Breaking words

Posted on March 17, 2013 | 3 comments

Today: the sixteenth installment of my how-to guide for word tasting, A Word Taster’s Companion.

Syllables 2: Breaking words

OK, the words I talked about in “Syllables 1: The basic bits” are all one syllable, so they’re not that hard. When we get to more than one syllable, now, that’s where things get interesting. Try this word – a very appropriate one: breaking. It’s made of break plus ing. But how do you say it?

Slow it down. Now sing it on two notes. Now put a space between those notes, just a slight gap. Now speed it up, keeping the gap.

If you’re now singing brea, king, brea, king, it probably sounds quite normal and feels easy enough to do. If you’re now singing break, ing, break, ing, it more likely sounds unnatural and feels more difficult to do.

But why would the [k] go and attach itself to the suffix when it belongs to the root word? Because it’s just easier to do it that way. Consonants tend to prefer onsets over codas, given the chance. Oh, there are many things that can keep a consonant on the end of a syllable rather than migrating to the beginning of the next one. I won’t be so tedious as to make a long list of them here; much better if you just explore syllables yourself and see how they really break, and try to sort out why they break where they do. But be aware that there are many places where what you may have always thought was the syllable break actually isn’t.

“But we hyphenate it between break and ing!” Yes, we do. In English, we don’t always put hyphens at the actual syllable boundaries. We also take into consideration the parts the word is made of (morphemes – I’ll get to those) and the relation between the spelling and the pronunciation. Breaking is made of break and ing, and even though we actually put the /k/ at the start of the second syllable we still think of it as being at the end of the first one. But also, we don’t know how brea- should be pronounced until we see the next letter: Brea…thing? Brea…ding? Brea…king? So we hyphenate it as break-ing, because those are the constituent parts and because if you see brea- at the end of one line it may be a surprise to see king on the next.

We run into another problem in English because of how we think about vowels. English has tended to have “long” vowels in open syllables – syllables without codas – and more notably has a strong tendency to have “short” vowels only in closed syllables – syllables with codas. A word such as break shows that we can have a “long” vowel in a closed syllable (but usually it will be indicated with multiple written vowels, often with a “silent e” after the final consonant, showing us that the final consonant was originally the onset of another syllable). But whereas we can have open/closed pairs with “long” vowels – bray/break, be/beat, buy/bite, bow/boat, boo/boot, cue/cute – just try to find an open match for bit, bet, or book (bat has bah, though open syllables with [æ] are uncommon; hut has huh, but most places you hear that vowel sound are unstressed; there are many words with [ɑ] in open syllables – it’s an exception).

So “short” vowels generally need to be in closed syllables. But! As already observed, consonants tend to shift from coda to onset when they can. Look at latter and later. In later, dividing it is easy; la-ter. But in latter? Don’t even bother thinking the syllable splits where we hyphenate it, lat-ter. There’s no long (or double) [t] in there – nothing like you hear in hot toddy or cat-tail. No, this is a case where we think of the /t/ as being at the end of one syllable even though it’s attracted to the start of the next syllable – since there’s no onset on the next syllable, and it’s in the middle of the word, there’s a natural tendency to shift.

So does that mean, then, that latter really divides la-tter? Well, some people say so. Some intro linguistics professors will tell you straight out that, for instance, Christmas breaks phonetically as Chri-stmas (as a rule we don’t say the t, so the [s] is naturally pulled to the onset because it can go before the [m]). But say it slowly and forcefully. Are you sure the [s] is all the way with the next syllable? When you say latter, does it seem as though the /t/ – which is usually said by North Americans not as a [t] but as an alveolar flap, making it identical or very similar to ladder (the [æ] may be slightly longer in ladder) – is as much with the first syllable as with the second? Some linguists think that’s not an unreasonable way of looking at it. They call this ambisyllabicity: it goes with both syllables. Not everyone agrees that it exists. But this is an important thing to know about linguistics: although it seems very scientific, with all its technical terms and structures and codifications and so on, in fact there’s lots of disagreement about all sorts of things, even basic issues such as phonemes. You learn things in one linguistics course and are told they’re wrong in the next. Eventually you get far enough that you can start making up your own mind and disagreeing too. See? Language is a sport not just for those who use it but for those who study it, too.

Next: The rhythm method

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rodomontade

Posted on March 17, 2013 | Leave a comment

Bellicose professions lend themselves to boasting rants. Boxers, wrestlers, and other fighters are known for loudly heralding their prowess. “When my opponent steps into the ring, he’s sealing his own doom! I’m gonna demonstrate that I’m a demon in human form! I’ll ram him down and drum on his head! There will be no redeeming him!” And so on – a mordant montage. The same may be found in many more figuratively combative lines of work, such as stock trading and mergers and acquisitions. Tests are met with testosterone and attestations.

There are a few different words for this bellicose chest-beating, but the most sonorous is surely rodomontade. The very sound is like a flourish on a drum: roll in with ro and then three strokes, hard, softer, then sharp: do-mon-tade! It’s sure to awaken the dormant. It’s a word for someone who rode in mounted on his ego.

It tells such tales, too: its eleven characters can produce doom, demon, madder, dormant, ardent, mordant, moaned, tandem, odor, and several others, and but for the lack of a letter it could make matador and mastodon – a battle appropriately sized for this kind of braggadocio. You can see the eyes popping and the mouth gaping, o o o, and the bared teeth m n and drawn scimitar t…

Scimitar? Well, why not? There is a larger tale that this word tells. It is from a name, Rodomonte, the original bearer of which was a character in the epic poems Orlando innamorato by Boiardo and Orlando furioso by Ariosto, written in the late 1400s and early 1500s (respectively). Rodomonte was a Saracen king, a loud, boastful, arrogant man, given to supreme confidence in his skills and certain to assure his enemies that they would be slain and dismembered by him, the most illustrious of warriors.

Boiardo was, we are told, so happy with coming up with the name for this character that he asked for the church bells to be rung. The name Rodomonte is sonorous, certainly, but what else? In Boiardo’s dialect, it means ‘roll-mountain’ – one who rolls away the mountain. Of course, to anglophones generally it’s not semantically transparent. It might as well be Rhadames. Or perhaps some warrior from Rhodes. Which is why so often you will see this word spelled as rhodomontade. Also, perhaps, the rh makes the word seem extra hairy.

One more thing we should remember about this word: it refers to over-the-top boasting, but it does not automatically imply that the boasts are empty or that the boaster is a coward, a miles gloriosus to use the Roman term. The annoying fact is that in the poems Rodomonte actually is a highly skilled warrior who generally lives up to his press releases. He is only finally lain low near the end. Don’t you hate that – when someone declares loudly how good he is and actually turns out to be good?

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A Word Taster’s Companion: Syllables 1: The basic bits

Posted on March 14, 2013 | Leave a comment

Today: the fifteenth installment of my how-to guide for word tasting, A Word Taster’s Companion.

Syllables 1: The basic bits

Of course, we don’t normally say phonemes in isolation. We speak them in streams. And when we do, there’s a certain rhythm to them. Oh, most of the time it’s not an especially evident rhythm; it just bumps and bops along with little enough in the way of a prominent pattern that we don’t pay it much heed. But if we’re singing – or rapping or reciting metered verse – we not only notice it but make pointed use of it. And it can affect our word choices even when we’re not thinking about it.

So what is the minimal unit of rhythm in speech? This is one you almost certainly know at least a little about. The syllable.

OK, so now tell me: what is a syllable?

Well, what do you need in order to have a syllable?

The one thing you definitely must have is a nucleus – a peak of sonority and emphasis. This is usually a vowel, either a single vowel sound or a diphthong or triphthong. But it’s not always a vowel! If you were paying attention in “Lovely, lyrical liquids,” you know that /r/ and /l/ can also sometimes make up syllables by themselves – and they can be the nucleus, or peak, or a syllable with other parts. Say murder. Odds are you had /r/ as the peaks of both syllables. Say bottled. The second syllable has no vowel sound! (The e may be written, but it’s not said, so there is no actual vowel there.) Nasals can also serve the turn. Say button – the way you usually say it, not the careful way. Your second syllable is most likely just [n], syllabic.

A rule of thumb: If it’s singable, it can be the nucleus of a syllable.

There can be consonants before and/or after the nucleus. The ones at the start, if there are any, are the onset; the ones at the end, if there are any, are the coda. The nucleus and coda together are the rime (normal people spell this rhyme, but linguists go with the more nonstandard spelling, because they can – and to make it clear they mean the technical term).

So. Identify the onset, nucleus, and coda in the following words: bad, bird, bra, alp, scalp, eye, strengths.

How did you do? Let’s go over them:

b/a/d – Should be easy enough.

b/ir/d – Remember, when we talk about vowels, we mean the sounds, not the letters! Here the ir represents a syllabic /r/ for most North American speakers and a mid-central vowel (without [r]) for the millions around the world who “drop their r’s.”

br/a – No coda!

a/lp – No onset!

sc/a/lp – You’ll notice that we can put /s/ before most other consonants in the onset, but not after them, and we can put liquids after most other consonants in the onset, but not before them. Remember that these rules are specific to English! Other languages have other rules. Some can use almost terrifying clusters of consonants; others can use very few or only one, and some don’t allow any codas.

eye – There is no onset or coda; this is just a diphthong, [aɪ]. The fact that we spell it with two “vowels” around one “consonant” is just to mess with your head – though it does sorta look like two eyes around a nose, doesn’t it?

str/e/ngths – I included this one just because we can really stack them up in the onset and coda in English, as long as they’re in the right order.

Next: Breaking words

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giblet

Posted on March 14, 2013 | Leave a comment

Visual: Six letters but a lot of little appendages sticking up and down – only one letter (e) without an ascender or descender. A mix of rounds and lines and one little dot.

In the mouth: When I was a kid, I thought this word was pronounced with a “hard” g, like give and gimp. But no, that doesn’t gibe; it has the voiced tongue-tip affricate that makes me think of biting little grains between my front teeth. Not that the teeth are involved in this sound; it’s just that the jaw is in that position. After that start, this word gets the tongue and lips working together before a final crisp tap of the tongue again. The vowels are mid-high and front.

Etymology: This word is said to come from Old French gibelet, which seems to have been a game stew; compare modern French gibelotte, which is a rabbit stew. Where does gibelet come from? No one is sure. It’s just one of those odd bits that appear from somewherever.

Collocations: It doesn’t go with ’n bits; that’s Kibbles. And not Green Giant, either – that’s niblets. No, you’ll find it with gravy and broth and, in plural, with chicken and turkey and sometimes other birds. (You don’t hear of it with larger critters. Why not? Because their innards don’t get included in little paper bags when you buy their meat.) And you’ll often see it near remove and discard – because that, according to many recipes, is what you do with giblets.

Overtones: This word has a variety of echoes, louder and softer. Aside from Kibbles (which may, I suppose, have giblets in them) and niblets (corn) and assorted bibelots (odd little items – giblets may be bird bibelots), you will likely get gibbet, a place where executed criminals were hung for public display and decay – the ostentatious discarding of the offal of society – and perhaps gobbet (a little mouthful) and maybe jib (related to gibbet) and glib and nibble (nibble gingerly at a giblet? If you feel obliged) and perhaps even Gibran, though there’s no profit in that one. The /bl/ might make you think of blood or of humble and umbles and maybe shambles (originally the name of the butchers’ street in old York).

Semantics: Giblets are innards, those bits of the bird you probably discard before roasting (though some people use them in gravy). The first use of this term in English, however, in the 1300s, was to refer to “an unessential appendage” (per Oxford), which to my mind makes the gibelet derivation odd. After that, in the 1400s, “garbage, entrails.” And then by the 1500s it’s those bits of the goose (or other bird) that you toss before cooking – including the feet, though those are not usually part of the giblets now.

Where to find it: You will find this word in conjunction with recipes for cooking whole birds. Also occasionally in literary prose in some cute reference to a person’s guts – perhaps “Dana was a cute bird, but if she kept on with these guys she’d end with a knife in her giblets.” It occurs to me that in reference to a human it almost sounds more suitable to small severable appendages found on only half of the species, but that’s not really concordant with the standard sense.

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conclave

Posted on March 12, 2013 | 4 comments

This is a topical word as I write this: the cardinal electors are, during the day, being locked into their pressure-cooker, the Sistine Chapel, to determine who will bear the keys of St. Peter. They are all sequestered in the Vatican, that enclave in the middle of the Eternal City, locked in debate and prayer and voting. Literally locked in: the doors of the Sistine Chapel are locked.

That is why this gathering is called a conclave: it is held in a conclave. The place it is held is a conclave because it is locked. Here is the key to this word: con ‘together’ and clavis ‘key’. There’s that clasping coarticulation of the /kl/ – so good for occluded and occluding things: clasps, clutches, cloaks, closets of clothes, clouds, cloisters, cliques and clubs (but also clergy and clemency and many other less closed words). We see the clave root in other words too: autoclave, a high-heat, high-pressure cooker or sterilizer – from French marmite autoclave, ‘self-locking pot’ (if you own a pressure cooker, you get the picture); enclave, a territory locked in (surrounded) by other territories; clavicle, the collar bone – over which papal regalia may be draped, such as the keys of St. Peter.

Those keys, yes. They’re on the flag of the Vatican and in assorted other papal places. See a picture of them at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Emblem_of_the_Papacy_SE.svg. Did St. Peter carry those keys? No, they symbolize what Jesus said to Peter in Matthew 16:19: “I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.” It is perhaps fitting, then, that once the new pope is elected, the doors of the conclave are unlocked, opening once again to public view the vision of heaven painted on its ceiling by Michelangelo.

But that is not quite yet. The assembled hordes of newspeople outside (keeping their distance so their cell phones work – there are mobile phone jammers under the floor of the Sistine Chapel, preventing any cardinal from live-tweeting the event) will have to key in nothing more than bootless (and red-shoe-less) guesses. They might as well be standing above the Large Hadron Collider while it’s busy smashing atoms. Nothing is known during; only the result is revealed: God particle or God partisan, as the case may be.

The result, in this case, will be known by the colour of smoke produced by a special stove. The bells of St. Peter’s will also ring. I do not think anyone will blow a conch, but it would seem suitable, if it were done in the right key.

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Letters you may not have known

Posted on March 11, 2013 | Leave a comment

Regular readers of my word tasting notes and blog entries have probably heard about the old letter thorn, þ. As it happens, there are several other letters that are – or have been – used with the Latin alphabet in English and other languages. Come meet nine of them in my latest article at TheWeek.com:

9 compellingly strange letters you don’t know about

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I plight thee my troth

Posted on March 10, 2013 | 14 comments

This, obviously, is not one word but five. But these five travel together; indeed, one seldom sees plight as a verb outside of this statement, and troth is almost never seen elsewhere. Put together, this sentence is a magical formula. In the right circumstances, the simple act of utterance of it effects a state change: said in turn by two people, it turns two single persons into two married persons. I can vouch for its effectiveness. Aina and I said it more than 12 years ago and we’re still married, and happily so.

This is, then, what linguists call a performative utterance. It requires specific conditions of felicity: an officially enfranchised and suitably conducted ritual, led by a person vested with the power to do so by the necessary bodies (in our case it was the Estonian Evangelical Lutheran Church in Canada, and consequently also the applicable civic, provincial, and national governments). When we rehearsed the lines in advance, they did not make us married any more than an actor saying this to an actress on the stage as part of a play script would. Certain notions of witches require a magic cauldron to be simmering with the various animal bits before their incantations will have effect, and even Harry Potter must wave a wand. (And Samantha in Bewitched? She had to wiggle her nose or nothing happened.) Likewise, it was only when we were in the actual official ritual that the words worked their magic.

Ritual does not require tradition to be legally effective; it just requires legislation. But in order for a ritual to have personal emotional and spiritual significance, it is very valuable for the ritual to have a rich history, one established in the mists of past time. Many ritual incantations use an old, dead language, one that cannot be debased by being the common coin of daily usage. This is not utterly necessary; for many people, I do is a sufficient spell to change their matrimonial state. But there is a solemnity in a language that is worn with the sweat and dirt of ancient times but has no smell of the modern street. Latin is one such. The language of this spell, I plight thee my troth, is another.

But it’s English! Yes, it is. So tell me: how would you use plight, thee, and troth in a sentence – other than this one? Can you give me a good paraphrase of I plight thee my troth? This sentence is English like a Georgian farthing is money. It is money, yes, but not money you can use in circulation today, nor even money that adheres to the same system used today (a farthing being a quarter of a penny, but an old penny, of which twelve made a shilling, of which twenty made a pound). But, for just that reason – and its antiquity – although you can’t use a farthing at face value, you can exchange a good old one for much more than 1/960 of a pound now. And so likewise this spell lets a person in for not just an ordinary promise but a life-changing state change.

Let us look at its parts. I will leave I and my aside; they are good modern English, descended from Old English ic and min. Thee is also a good old pronoun descended barely changed from Old English, but it is not used in Modern English except in texts that have survived from old times. And what texts are those? Generally texts associated with ritual, texts that were established long ago and have been retained. These texts, which were in contemporary – if poetic – English when they were written, have in the intervening centuries accumulated much of what may be called “beauty and mystery.” Do you know what else has been called “beauty and mystery”? The centuries of soot, grime, and failed restoration attempts that clouded the Sistine Chapel ceiling so badly it was dim and hard to perceive. Cleaning and restoration of that artwork to its original state was decried by some as a great loss. They did not want something fresh, bright, and alive; they wanted what seemed to them to have always been there, the dim hand of past ages. Likewise many people cling to the King James Bible, although it is now in archaic language. The texts it translated were not in archaic language for their time. They were in fresh, direct language. But it spoke of times when things changed, when old rituals were overturned and new rituals were established. Those new rituals of then have become our old rituals of now. Most people do not want old rituals overturned; they just want old rituals. So the dragonflies of past times are preserved in amber for present eyes to venerate.

Venerate! If you wish to venerate someone, what pronoun do you use to speak to them? Many people will say thou and thee, as they know it as the term one uses to talk to God. But thou and thee were in their time terms used to speak to one’s servants, one’s children, one’s friends; one’s elders and superiors were ye and you. Note that God was a thou. Nowadays, the wedding vow I plight thee my troth uses a friendly, familiar term – that sounds like a formal address in high-flown speech.

Now, what is plight? How have you ever used it? In the plight of the [something or other], I suspect. What is a plight? A perilous or dangerous or risky situation. A situation with a sense of fright, one that may have a person pleading. How do we seem to be using it here? To mean ‘pledge’. So is plight related to plea or pledge? Yes and no. The noun plight comes from two different sources, one an Anglo-Norman sense related to plea and referring to condition or state, the other a Germanic sense referring to risk and responsibility. The verb plight is based on the latter, and signifies putting someone or something under risk. It partakes of the [pl] not of pleasing and pleasurable but of plea, pledge, and the pleading please. It is a polite word, but it declares that the speaker is will to stand at risk.

And troth? It must be an old word; it ends in oth, like doth and Goth and reminiscent of all those eth verb endings. It has an echo of trough, but it seems not to feed on it much. You would do as well to bring in both, since in this phrase it binds two together. This phrase is an apodictic utterance: it establishes a clear, incontrovertible truth – it establishes it by creating it, much as saying “I am speaking” makes itself true. It is true that not everyone who has said I plight thee my troth has held true to their vows, but at the time of utterance it binds. So what is troth? Is it marriage? A person who is engaged is, after all, betrothed.

A person who is engaged is betrothed just because he or she has had troth plighted (the promise made in engagement, which could also use the same formula as the one made in wedding). A troth has been bestowed. But the troth is… you want the truth? It is the truth. Troth and truth are so much alike because they were once the same word. Troth is faithfulness, loyalty, honesty. Troth is not something you just trot out. It is something that is a commitment. It is something you plight.

So the magic spell could be I promise you I will be true. There’s nothing keeping it from being that other than the weight of tradition. Those who prefer to write their own wedding vows are free to use those words: I promise you I will be true. They are direct words in the language of today, and when you say them they have a direct connection to a meaning that you actually mean. They are money you can spend. Give someone a valuable old coin and it has history and beauty and a sense of timeless significance. Give someone a crisp new $100 bill and it feels like you’re giving them money. Both have their effects. You make the choice.

Aina and I were married in a Lutheran church (her home church), and so we happily went with their ritual text… after our prelude of music by Philip Glass, and after we walked up the aisle side by side to music by Vivaldi. And she did not change her name. It was a coming together of two independent beings, not an acquisition. But we like the phrase I plight thee my troth. It’s what we said. And we meant it. Even though it would have worked its magical state change even if one or both of us had fingers crossed.

Thanks to Jim Taylor for suggesting today’s theme.

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