Random Thursday: Five Words

[hrj]

So...my brain is kind of dead (not enough sleep the last two nights), and while I had a couple of blog prompts scribbled down, they started going to Bad Places and I decided they weren't a good idea. So I asked on twitter for five words to turn into a philosophical essay and ritaxis came through. I think this is going to be more free association than philosophy, though.

Lily...plum...bowl...ether...rice

One of these words is not like the others.

After getting home and having a chance to do some more poking around in genealogy, I've managed to tie the five words together more continuously. My additions to the original essay are in italics.

My middle name, Rose, was given in honor of my great-grandmother, Rose LaForge Maxson. Rose was a twin, and her sister was named Lily. Did you know that if you put "Rose Lily Maxson" into Google, those two are the top Google hit? Maxson isn't all that common a surname. I've always wondered what twins feel about being given "matching set" names like that. Lily was actually named something else at first and then it was changed to Lily after a few days, though I'd have to check the books at home to remember what it was. So there may have been some debate as to the choice.

Rose (my great-grandmother, remember) married a tree-named man, Holly Whitford Maxson. But Holly's aunt Josephine Maxson married into an even more tree-loving family. She married one of three brothers, named Quincey DeForest Greene. No, don't look for the trees in DeForest, it's more subtle than that. Quincey's brothers were:

Orange DeGrasse Greene
Lemon D'Estaing Greene

Note that they three were not triplets, they just had parents with a whacky sense of humor. The brothers were born in the 1830s, so for those who grouse about people who name their kids silly things, it's nothing new.

As it happens, I have quince, orange, and lemon trees planted in my yard. When I was a kid, we grew a whole bunch of fruit trees in our yard in San Diego. To some extent, that's why my notion of a proper yard includes a whole bunch of fruit trees. Gradually over the years, each of us kids picked one tree to be "our" tree, and the plum tree was mine. I love plums--especially the tart, red-fleshed kind that aren't popular in the stores these days. When I bought my current house in Concord, I hadn't actually noticed that it had a plum tree in the back until I moved in just as the plums were coming ripe. If I believed in signs, it would be a sign. The property also has several of those ornamental red-leaf plum trees that put out fruit the size of a large cherry. I have all the plums I could want.

Sports that involve interesting properties of physics attract me, even when I'm not good at them (or, in some cases, haven't tried them). One thing I like about steering the dragonboats is the interaction of the steering oar position and angle and the speed of the boat and the momentum of the turn and the unseen currents in the water. I like billiards, even though I'm not very good at it, because of the challenge in trying to get the caroms right. I'm utterly fascinated by curling. And I sometimes think it would be fun to do enough bowling to get the kinesthetics down just right to reliable make strikes. In theory, there's no reason why one shouldn't be able to bowl a perfect game every time. Perfect games must have been harder, though, back when bowling was done on DeGrasse. There would always be an imperfection lending unpredictability to the physics. That version of the game has left relics of public sports venues using the name Bowling Green. There are at least eight towns in the USA named Bowling Green

Sometimes, looking at the history of medicine is terrifying--until you consider what the previous alternatives were. My great-great-aunt Lily had cataract surgery around the turn of the 20th century (again, I'd have to check the records to be more precise). Thinking about the state of the surgical art at that time, it's hard to imagine considering the risks to be preferable to blindness, but she and a lot of other people did. (She survived.) Despite a number of earlier experiments, the mid 19th century was when medical anesthesia for surgery became a serious focus. Ether was one of those developments, although it largely gave way to chloroform in part due to serious flammability issues. There might not have been much point to developing good surgical anesthesia techniques much earlier than that, as an understanding of sepsis had to scramble to keep up with the expansion of surgical techniques.

One of the most commercially important grasses, world-wide, is rice. But "Rice" as a surname, most commonly derives from the Welsh masculine given name Rhys. Other Anglicized spellings of the name, such as Rees, Reese, or Reece, preserve a closer indication of the original pronunciation. Prior to the Great Vowel Shift in English (which took place gradually over the 14-16th centuries), the English spelling "Rice" would have indicated a very similar sound to the Welsh pronunciation of Rhys. Examples of the Welsh name spelled "Rice" can be found in English records during this period. Such is the way of language: in a literate society, spellings that were originally phonetic transcriptions become fixed and traditional as the language changes around them. Different spellings become fixed at different dates, preserving hints about the chronology of pronunciation changes. I sometimes get people asking me, "but how do we really know how people in history pronounced things?" And the answer is that we know because Rhys, Reece, and Rice are all the same name.

You know, this could be a fun new game. Can I take five random words and link them together in an essay while picking senses or contexts that are as unexpected as possible?

Comments

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

Well, that was random!

I like the way great-great aunt Lily works back in.

[hrj.livejournal.com]

If I had the genealogy stuff in front of me, I might have been able to tie in Rice as well. Hmm. Come to think of it, I could have tied the fruit trees in with the family that named their kids after fruit trees. I may have to comment further after getting home tonight. That would only leave "bowl"...or maybe it could be the word that isn't like the others.

[hrj.livejournal.com]

OK, here's the tie-in between Lily and plums:

Lily's sister Rose (my great-grandmother, remember) married a tree-named man, Holly Whitford Maxson. But Holly's aunt Josephine Maxson married into an even more tree-loving family. She married one of three brothers, named Quincey DeForest Greene. No, don't look for DeForest in the trees, it's more subtle than that. Quincey's brothers were:

Orange DeGrasse Greene
Lemon D'Estaing Greene

(The brothers were born in the 1830s, so for those who grouse about people who name their kids silly things, it's nothing new.)

I have quince, orange, and lemon trees planted in my yard. So there's the connection to word #2. If I wanted to get clever, I'd note that rice is a type of grass, and that originally bowling was done on a grassy green, and then I'd have all five words chained together. But it's late, and I'll just leave the rest as an exercise.

[legionseaglelj.livejournal.com]

In this country bowling is still done on a grassy green! (The indoor sort with lanes and alleys, we call "ten pin bowling, to distinguish). There are two sorts of outdoor bowls in the UK, "crown green" where the lawn isn't flat but the centre is a gentle dome a few inches higher than the sides and lawn bowls, where it's flat. Pubs sometimes have bowling greens behind them or municipal parks have them or places howl bowling clubs (often with tennis - I think there are even bowling greens at Wimbledon).

[heleninwales.livejournal.com]

To expand on that a little further (as hrj expressed an interest in the physics of sports), crown green bowls is generally played in the north of the UK and the flat green version in the south. The jack (the smaller ball you bowl first and which you have to aim for) in crown green bowls is black, in the flat green version of the game, it's white. Also -- and here comes the physics! -- the bowls used for crown green bowls have a bias, that is they're weighted on one side so you can curve them around the slightly dome shaped green.

[aryanhwy.livejournal.com]

This sounds like a very fun game!

I have to ask -- is the appearance of Maxson in your family history causally related to one of your brothers's SCA name?

[hrj.livejournal.com]

Directly related (although the surname Maxson and the given name Macsen have entirely different origins). The family surname is his middle name, so when he was browsing through my name articles looking for an SCA name and ran across Macsen, he was all, "Why didn't you tell me I could just have this?"

[aryanhwy.livejournal.com]

I figured they weren't related, but the similarity in sound was too much to be coincidence!

[patoadam]

Thank you for the Rice paragraph! As you know, the question of how we know how people pronounced things is one that has puzzled me for years, because different experts say different things. I guess it's one of those questions that has several right answers, that different experts weight differently. See, for example, http://thnidu.livejournal.com/1277539.html, especially 3:39 - 5:51 of the video. The linguist I mention in my comment is almost certainly you.

[katerit.livejournal.com]

I used to get telemarketers calling for rice (mispronouncing Rhys)and they were always confused when I informed them that I never let food staples answer the phone.

I like your connected meanderings and think this an excellent game.