Departments: There’ll always be an England

In the NYT on the 21st, this entertaining story by Sarah Lyall: “Common Gnomes Pop Up at Rarefied Flower Show, to Horror of Many”, where it is reported that:

it was not surprising that the staid Royal Horticultural Society‘s decision to allow garden gnomes — creatures commonly associated with the landscapes of the unrich, the unfamous and the untasteful — at the Chelsea Flower Show this year elicited a variety of responses.

… Gnomes, which are called “brightly colored mythical creatures” in the handbook governing the show, are not really part of the Chelsea aesthetic. (Nor are balloons, flags, “feather flags,” or “any item which, in the opinion of the society, detracts from the presentation of the plants or products on display,” the handbook reads.)

Four topics come up in the article: social class in the UK; the two words gnome (and gnomic etc).; conversion of proper names to count nouns; and playful gnome-related morphology.

Gamma linole(n)ic acid and borage

In Tuesday’s NYT Science Times, from “Really? The Claim: Evening Primrose Oil Soothes Eczema” by Anahad O’Connor:

It may not exactly be a household name, but evening primrose, a bright yellow plant native to North America, has a large following in the alternative medicine world.

The seeds of the plant contain essential fatty acids, which are used to make an oil that has a variety of uses as a dietary supplement and folk remedy. Its most popular use may be for eczema, the skin condition that affects as many as one in five people. Widely marketed and easy to find, primrose oil contains gamma linoleic acid, which is thought to help reduce skin inflammation without the side effects of other treatments.

digitalis / foxglove

Another showy plant of the season: digitalis, or foxglove, blooming now in several locations close to my house in Palo Alto:

Cultivars of the common foxglove, Digitalis purpurea. The etymology of the Latin name is straightforward, but the common name foxglove presents a puzzle.

ranunculus

On the heels of my primrose posting, here’s one on another seasonal flower in these parts, the ranunculus (a flower especially of the late winter and early spring). Very pretty in an overblown sort of way, and with an odd etymology.

primroses

As we slide into summer in these parts, the winter-blooming flowers are coming to the end of their season; from this posting, about cyclamens:

Winter in northern California is brightened by a number of flowers that thrive in that season: English primroses, anemones, violas (including pansies), and snapdragons, for example. And cyclamens …

(And cymbidium orchids, discussed here.) Now, while they’re still blooming, some words on primroses (including an etymological essay on the name primrose, which has nothing to do with primness.)

Abutilon and its relatives

Caught sight of in a neighbor’s (walled) front garden: bits of a pretty vining abutilon, in bloom for a good part of the year. Much like this variety (Firefly):

  (#1)

And for several years, just around the corner (on the northwest corner of Emerson and Forest in Palo Alto) there used to be a big concrete planter with a sweet upright abutilon growing in it — until the shrub was vandalized to death, and then the planter as well, alas. The color of this one was much like the plant in (#1); here’s a gorgeous deep red variety (Nabob):

  (#2)

Coming up: discussion of abutilon and the mallow family to which it belongs. Marshmallows and gumbo will eventually appear.

conclave

As the papal conclave proceeds in Vatican City, we turn to the word conclave, with its intriguing etymology:

late Middle English (denoting a private room): via French from Latin conclave ‘lockable room,’ from con- ‘with’ + clavis ‘key.’ (NOAD2)

Rebranding and mustiness

News reports before and after the Academy Awards ceremonies this year made much of the rebranding of the event — as The Oscars, with no mention of Academy Awards during the show or in its promotional materials. The problem with Academy Awards? It sounds “musty”.

scrimshaw

An impressive obit in the NYT today for Nevin Scrimshaw (by Douglas Martin), who by anyone’s gauge should count as a hero of medicine:

Nevin S. Scrimshaw, Pioneer Nutritionist, Dies at 95

Dr. Nevin S. Scrimshaw, a nutritionist who improved the health of millions of children in developing countries by creating low-cost vegetable-based foods for weaning infants, died on Friday in Plymouth, N.H.

Read the whole thing: a truly admirable life. Here I note his family name, a noun that is in its own way admirable.

Stehpinkeln

(Only a bit about language.)

[TMI Warning: The following posting contains information, opinion, or reflection that some readers might find uncomfortably or unwelcomely personal, private, or intimate in topic or content: too much information, as the saying goes. As a general observation, I’m willing to go almost anywhere in my postings, including some places that some readers don’t want to go.]

Despite the title, this posting is about the routinization of arrangements and activities, so that it becomes hard to imagine alternatives. Most of the household arrangements that got set up (rather hastily) when I came home from the hospital are like this. There were good reasons to do things in a certain way, but then my abilities changed, and maybe things could now be done differently — if only we thought about it.

The case at hand has to do with the 3-in-1 commode that came home with me from the hospital :

The three ways to use it are over the toilet, at the bedside, or as a shower seat. The point of the over-the-toilet use is to raise the effective height of the toilet; low chairs, including your typical (low) toilet seat, are bad news for my hip (were then and still are). After initial attempts to use the thing as a freestanding piece of medical furniture came to naught because my digestive system was not yet functioning normally, we turned to the raised-toilet use.

(Etymological digression from the Concise OED 11: commode is a euphemism, an 18th-century borrowing from French, literally ‘convenient, suitable’, used for “a piece of furniture containing a concealed chamber pot”, then in N.Amer. simply ”a toilet”. It’s a convenience, yes, but in a very specific way.)

There followed a lot of trial and error (the commode was simply delivered to my hospital room at some point, without any information or instructions), the goal of which was to set things up so that I could manage all the toilet stuff by myself, without the aid of family and friends. The arrangement then had the commode over the toilet, and all the toilet action was in the sitting position (there turmed out to be good reason not to use the commode with its seat down for defecation (I’m sorry, but neither pooping not shitting really works for me here) and up for urination.

Ok, in this arrangement, peeing was certainly possible, though a bit cramped. Then at Gordon Biersch for lunch on Wednesday I used a urinal there, and wondered once again about those commode arrangements. And a crucial thing had changed.