Gardener

The word cruciform means in the shape of a cross.   Almost anyone could figure that out.   And if you heard that there was a class of plants called cruciform   plants, would you know what they were?   Perhaps if you are a gardener, you would.   You would have identified cabbage and broccoli and cauliflower plants as cross-shaped.   The young plants of these and other vegetables are shaped like a cross—specifcally, the Hugenot cross. Broccoli, cabbage, kale, Brussels sprouts, Swiss chard,   baahk choy, cauliflower, radish, kohlrabi, collard and turnip greens are just some of these cruciforms.   All of them have been found to be crammed with anticancer power. To paraphrase a pharmacist I know, If we ate nothing but cruciferous vegetables and fish we would nearly put the pharmaceutical companies out of business. But we want to talk about their names.   Let’s start with broccoli.   It is the diminutive form of an Italian word, brocco, which means shoot or stalk . So it means little

God’s Care for the Poor -- Martin E. Marty The text for today’s meditation comes from The Wall Street Journal , a quotation provided by a major novelist, whose newest work was being reviewed. The quote, first: “The Lord commands us to ‘do good to all men,’ universally, a great part of whom, estimated according to their own merits, are very undeserving; but here the Scripture assists us with an excellent rule, when it inculcates, that we must not regard the intrinsic merit of men, but must consider the images of God in them, to which we owe all possible honour and love.” The reviewer is Thomas Meaney, co-editor of The Utopian, who assumes that readers will be surprised to find that the author of that quotation, so typical of liberal Protestant rhetoric, “as improbable as it may sound, is John Calvin.” Not marginal to the Reformer’s thinking, this sentence appears in his classical, most deliberative, most studied and most frequently quoted book, Institutes of t

            I spent some time on the road the other day, and since it was April and the weather was warm and dry, tractors and farm implements were everywhere--gearing up on farmyards, already at work in the fields, and crawling along the highways.   Sometimes, when I get behind a tractor pulling a disc or a harrow or some other implement, I get impatient, especially if I'm going up a long hill.   I will occasionally pass on the hill in those circumstances, and, if a car is coming from the other way, that can be a harrowing experience.             You may have noticed that I used the word harrow twice in the previous sentence:   Once to designate a farm implement and once to describe a frightening experience.   Let’s look at harrow a bit more closely and also at some other farm implement words.             The first syllable of harrow like the first syllable of harvest comes from a word that means “to cut or shear.”    Harvest suggests the time of the cutting or pic

We were riding around, looking at some of the large new houses—mansions, actually--in town, when I said to my wife, “Some of these places are so large they must have drawing rooms.”   “Well, what is a drawing, and why is it called a drawing room?” she asked.   “I know it’s not a place where people draw pictures.   We read about drawing-rooms in English novels, but what, really, were they?” “And why do we call those little rectangular boxes where we keep our silverware or underwear, drawers?   For that matter, why do some people call their underwear drawers?” It was clear that in the ordinary words draw, drawer, and drawing-room, we had opened up a rich lode of etymology and so I will try to mine a bit of it here. The root word draw comes from the common Teutonic root dragen.   Its most basic meaning is to cause anything to move toward oneself by the application of force, to pull or tug or drag (note how this word also derives from the root dragen ).   The cowboy draws hi

                                                                Candidate and Senate As I look out of my office window, I see sky and the tops of trees.   That’s because a foot of snow sits on the outside sill of my window, blocking most of my view.   The world is blanketed in snow, giving off an incandescent glow; in other words, the world is white-robed.   In Latin that would be candidatus , white-robed.   Roman men who were seeking office had to wear white robes, candidates, to indicate to the people who saw them in the street that they were running for office.   This was before newspapers and TV, after all, and the people needed some way to identify them.   Of course, the symbolism of the white robe might be considered a bit ironic–at least if Roman politicians, like   some of ours, were not exactly snow-white in character or behavior. A related word, candid , has an equally ironic connotation when applied to certain political candidates.   Candid means “white,” but al