Drawing-room

Reading Proust has made me wonder: what does drawing-room mean? Could the word have originally referred to a room in which accomplished young ladies worked on their sketching? Alas, no. Here's a charmingly quaint definition from the Oxford English Dictionary of the word's meanings then and "now":

1. a. orig. A room to withdraw to, a private chamber attached to a more public room . . . ; now, a room reserved for the reception of company, and to which the ladies withdraw from the dining-room after dinner.

The OED records the word's first appearance in 1642, as a shortening of withdrawing-room, which itself goes back to 1591. The even older withdrawing-chamber dates to 1392.

So I began to wonder about withdraw, which suddenly looked rather odd. Why does it mean what it does? The explanation is found in the word retire, which comes into English from the French retirer, "to withdraw," from re- and tirer, "to draw, to pull; to take out, to extract" (Cassell's French-English Dictionary). So to withdraw is to retire.

I shall now retire to the drawing-room.

Oops, it's ladies only.

Proust: "that supernatural instrument"

Proust's similes are always a delight:

And I went downstairs, hardly stopping to think how extraordinary it was that I should be going to see the mysterious Mme de Guermantes of my childhood, simply to use her as a source of practical information, as one uses the telephone, that supernatural instrument before whose wonders we were once all in awe, and which we now use unthinkingly, to call our tailor or order an iced dessert.

Marcel Proust, The Prisoner, translated by Carol Clark (London: Penguin, 2003), 24

Proust posts, via Pinboard

Hardy Mums

My dad's a master in small spaces. This punning collage arrived in the mail today. In real life it measures 1 7/16 inches by 3 1/4 inches.

[Pen and ink illustration and colored pencil, by James Leddy.]

_L

Orange Crate Art just had its fifty-thousandth visitor. I'm teaching the Aeneid on Wednesday, so I'm marking the visit with a Roman numeral. The bar above the numeral indicates multiplication by 1,000 -- a lot simpler than 50 Ms.

The fifty-thousandth visitor was from Redmond, Washington, from some company called Microsoft, going to my post Cool laptop via a link at Lifehacker.

Overheard

"You're the only person I know who could be frightened by a radish."

"Overheard" posts (via Pinboard)

Achilles and stochastic

How could I not look at the text of a spam message titled "Achilles and stochastic"? A small excerpt:

Ten years ago a crack commando unit was sent to prison by a military court for a crime they didn't commit. But when I end up in the hay it's only hay, hey hey. Round, all around the world. Maybe tomorrow, I'll want to settle down, until tomorrow, I'll just keep moving on. 80 days around the world, we'll find a pot of gold just sitting where the rainbow's ending. Ulysses, Ulysses -- fighting evil and tyranny, with all his power, and with all of his might. He's got style, a groovy style, and a car that just won't stop. In search of Earth, flying in to the night. Thunder, thunder, thundercats, Ho! Thundercats are on the move, Thundercats are loose. Top Cat! The indisputable leader of the gang. He's the boss, he's a pip, he's the championship.

Today, still wanted by the government, they survive as soldiers of fortune.

And now it's back to reality (grading).

stochastic (Merriam-Webster OnLine)

Tea (take 4 times daily)

I take delight in any "study," no matter how small the sample (75 tea-drinking men in this case), that confirms the wisdom of doing what I like doing anyway:

Regular cups of tea can help speed recovery from stress, researchers from University College London (UCL) said on Wednesday.

Men who drank black tea four times a day for six weeks were found to have lower levels of the stress hormone cortisol than a control group who drank a fake tea substitute, the researchers said in a study published in the journal Psychopharmacology.

The tea drinkers also reported a greater feeling of relaxation after performing tasks designed to raise stress levels.

And now back to grading midterms (and drinking tea).

Beat stress, drink tea (Reuters)

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In a memory kitchen

I rarely drink water from a juice glass. At work, I drink my way through a 32-ounce Nalgene bottle. At home, I drink water from large tumblers or Dixie cups. But this morning we were out of Dixie cups, and I wanted just a sip of water. So I filled a juice glass at the kitchen sink and had a moment of what Proust calls "involuntary memory," the unbidden return of the past via sensory stimuli.

Drinking this glass of water brought me back to the details of my grandparents' Brooklyn kitchen. The juice glass brought to mind my grandparents' glassware, most likely made by Libbey, with floral designs baked on. Water from my grandparents' tap would turn to a gray cloud in a glass and then clear. Whatever the reason -- aeration? the softness or hardness of the water? -- it doesn't happen at my sink. (And right now I am also remembering being fascinated in childhood by jelly glasses, the way whatever stories they told -- usually of the Flintstones -- ended and began again and again as one turned the glass, like a childhood version of Finnegans Wake.)

Looking around this memory kitchen, I recalled four other details -- cutlery with red plastic handles, a aluminum percolator with a glass knob at its top, a black- and grey-speckled metal roasting pan, and the fluorescent ring that seemed at one point synonymous with "kitchen," anybody's kitchen. I thought about aprons and anisette, but only vaguely. I thought of my grandparents as being in the living room, right next to the kitchen.

Later this afternoon, my wife Elaine made espresso, and the metallic coffee smell put me in my grandparents' kitchen all over again.

Crate art, orange

The Crate Label Museum has lots of orange crate art -- other fruits and vegetables too.

Crate Label Museum (via Armand Frasco's notebookism)

Overheard

"You're like a mental backspace."

"Overheard" posts (via Pinboard)