Entry 10:

Cinnamon,

I notice we both spent our lunchtime catching up on magazines. All those subscriptions you mention pile up when we're traveling. I was reading Nature (26 April 2001--I'm weeks behind). Great stuff. Russia facing a potato famine because of potato blight. A review of a collection of essays, The Origins of Creativity, with contributions from Gunther Stent, Howard Gardner, Francoise Gilot on her life with Picasso, Benoit Mandelbrot. The reviewer misses an essay on creativity ("or the lack of it," he adds) in computers and thinks Darwinian evolution should have been discussed since it's "the most creative process we know" even though it's "lacking in emotion." Is that scientist humor? Is evolution creative in the sense that the word applies to humans? God knows it has produced some extraordinary forms, including featherless bipeds that send e-mail.

I also liked a brief essay, titled "Scientist's Birthright,"on how scientists came to be called that. Up to 1843 they were "friends of science," "cultivators of science," etc.-- in French savans, in German Natur-forscher ("nature-poker," typical German formation!). Then the British friend of science, William Whewell, picked up on a suggestion of "some ingenious gentleman that, by analogy with artist, they might form scientist." None of the cultivators of science liked the idea, but here we are.

And: Three separate analyses of oral polio vaccine used in Africa in the late 1950s exonerated the Wistar Institute of having inadvertently started the HIV/AIDS epidemic, contrary to Edward Hooper's book, The River. Honeybees sleep except for those that have to nurse the new larvae; they have mechanisms to keep them going 24/seven. (Something medical interns could use? Or maybe clinical psychology graduate students?) And a phrase I like: "A phenomenological description of space-time foam." Might make a title for a play?

Thanks to the Frayer (Frayist? Fraynian?) who noticed my faun/fawn bollix. Just shows I should take my own advice about looking it up. I've never quite grasped the difference. I went to the O.E.D. and learned it: Faun is the mythological species, fawn the mammalian. Fawns eat your flowers, fauns seduce your daughters.

Speaking of words, our bring/take discussion will be obscure. Moving to the East from the Midwest 10 years ago, our ears clearly heard "Bring that to him" as dissonant; where we came from, we said, "Take that to him." Ten years later, I can't hear the difference anymore. Goes with all the other quaint New England words: cellar for basement, tag sale for garage sale, stone for rock. But "bring" is moving into standard English because people hear it on television. I'm not sure that's progress, so I thought I'd bring/take it up.

This is a good place to ride my "nonfiction" hobbyhorse: hate that word, a derivative negative invented by a librarian early in the 20th century to describe a category of narrative prose with a much longer and more noble tradition than fiction. So I've invented a dignified name for the kind of writing I do that I've been trying to get the, what else, O.E.D. to recognize as a new word: verity. I write verity; therefore I'm a veritist ("by analogy with artist" and "scientist"). It has the added virtue, since it means "truth," of subtly implying that the other guys write lies, which of course they do ("fiction" derives from "feign"). If people start using "verity" in place of "nonfiction" (yuck), it will catch on. Fraymanians take notice.

All that from one magazine on one lunch hour. Just keeping up.

You have to go see clients soon, no? I'll miss you. As the famous greeting card said, "It's been hard since you've been gone."

ox, ;))
Rhodeman