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...

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.         ...

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 ...

                                                                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...

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...