Gardener

My name is Dave and I am a story addict.   Last night my wife and I went to see The Hunger Games, and in two minutes, I was hooked.   I loved it from start to finish and I could see it again tonight.   I read the books and burned through them like a fire.   Couldn’t put them down.   Good writing, great characters, great plot and thematic depth that yields a surprising richness of meaning.   One of the chief pleasures of my life from as early as I can remember has been the experience of being hooked on a novel or a play or a movie.   Sometimes I feel a sort of guilt that I care so much about these non-real characters that when I am in the middle of their lives, I cry or laugh with joy as I read or view, but the tragedies and joys of neighbors and friends often elicit far mere tepid emotional responses from me.   I realize this happens because I have submitted to the world of the story and allowed myself to be manipulated by it.   But stil...

Have you ever taken umbrage at someone or at something someone said?   An unkind remark perhaps?   Umbrage.   It’s not the most common word in the language, but then it’s not unfamiliar to most of us.   We kind of know what it means.   Offense, resentment.   It comes from the Latin word umbra which means “shadow.”   The phrase “to take umbrage” follows a sort of metaphorical extension from shadow to suspicion and from suspicion to resentment. If I told you that we have other words from that same Latin word for shadow, you would probably think immediately of umbrella .   An umbrella is really a little shadow–from the Italian ombrella. Two other words familiar to us all come from combining the Latin sub meaning “under” and umbra: sombrero a nd somber .   Put on a sombrero and you are under a shadow; put on a sad face, a somber face, and you are emotionally under a shadow.   And then there is penumbra, the partly lighted area s...

It’s been llightly raining all morning which seems appropriate since today is World Day for Water—and March 22 has been so since 1993.   I did not know that until this morning.   The General Assembly of the United Nations urges us to turn off the tap for the day and my wife and I are trying to do that.  One doesn't want to get in a fight with the UN. We found several containers of water in the refrigerator, boiled some of it to wash and shave this morning.   But I wanted to rinse out my toothbrush and my double bladed razor, so I poured a couple of ounces from the drinking pitcher into a cup and swished them around in it.   Using the tap—the faucet—is nearly as instinctive as breathing.   We do it almost without knowing it, so this little exercise in water awareness is good for us.   (Question:   Does the toilet count as a tap??) The message about World Water Day came from my church’s social action committee.   It says that ...

I was handed a folder with about two hundred pages in it, and when I opened it I saw hundreds of hours of work I had done over a period of about four years.  Each page was a little essay on the etymology of an ordinary English word.  I had written them and then taped-recorded them at the KDCR studio for broadcast on a little five minute spot I did called "What's the Good Word?"  About two years ago I stopped doing the show and now, here was the KDCR secretary, probably on a house cleaning kick, handing me the written transcripts of the show.  How thoughtful. I had sort of forgotten them even though I have them somewhere on my hard drive.  Reading through them I had an idea:  Why not put one up on my blog every week--say on Tuesday?  So here goes: Awesome             Recently I heard a speaker suggest that the word awesome , one of the most popular exclamations of our day, e...