korkenzieher or exonymy

I remember when I was little, I had a light and fluffy block of cork wood that I thought was a very rare and exotic thing as part of a larger collection of stones, fossils and pieces of petrified wood. It was eaten with wormholes, and I think I only tried once floating it in the bathtub. Such an unusual grove must have its origins with the Irish second-city of the same name, I was convinced.

Of course, since then I learned that the cork oak is mostly cultivated in Portugal and the city is derived from the Irish Corcaigh for marshland and that wine corks are mostly plastic or rubber anymore--which is nice to a certain extent since one need not be as practiced at uncorking a bottle because the rubber stopper is not brittle and won't break apart into the bottle, but we did notice this unsung and ingenious hybrid that has a bit of plastic as a catchment for a tradition, fragile cork. It's strange how exonyms and making aboriginal place names sensible to foreign ears--or those of settlers to natives--can result in some creative folk etymology. The German (and of course Germany for Deutschland is one of the more prevalent exonyms and an invention of Julius Caesar) town of Pforzheim, for instance, is called so as a reduction, simplification of the Roman designation of Porta Hercynia, gateway to the ancient pan-European forest that remains as the Black Forest (der Schwarzwald) into modern times. Even a place named something seemingly straightforward, like Schweinfurt, having evolved from Suinurde (maybe meaning "man's land" or "divided land", connotes nothing about a place where pigs can cross the Main river. Such backformations have surprising and triangulated origins.

flory and fitchy or cross moline

The adult daughter of our neighbor has recently returned home to care for her mother and seeing to the considerable undertaking of getting her mother's household in order. The upper suite of rooms are beginning to look more livable and lived-in, and one afternoon, what I first thought was a Saint Stephan's or Patriarchal Cross, appeared in the window--almost like it was taped on. Another neighbour though it was the same thing, although he said it looked like a Saint Andrew's--which actually is the x-shaped one. Later, I was assured it was a bathroom shelf--but I wondered if it might be a sort of scarecrow--something to ward off the heathens whose terrace is just off their house.

I thought the daughter certainly did not want to get in a Cross Battle royale with us. I knew of the variations on cruciform symbols and a little bit about their associated lore and meaning, but I always thought that that the holy magazine was more like an armoury, gruesome and violent, like a museum of archery or spears, and ultimately telling of how saints were posed when martyred. I had not beforehand really associated the different symbols with the language of heraldry, like floried and fitched, reduced to ornaments but originally describing a cross with staves and stakes that could be fixed in the ground. The colourful and exacting terminology of charges, seals and coats-of-arms (Wappen) is a constant and unchanging thing, because there was no means to visually communicate the right tinctures and proportions of how a symbol should look without faithfully reproducing it in the first place. It's funny how a casual and accidental arranging can impart the same sort of associations.

ghost run

Not only does Atlas Obscura deliver postcards from the world's curious and esoteric locales, they also have a pretty nifty blog, which is celebrating thirty-one days of Halloween by featuring its creepiest and most haunting places. It is ghoulish--especially the tales of catacombs that ring of urban legend and highlighting the other consecrated sites that have a reciprocal relationship, a ceded and imparted spell-binding, with their visitors--and certainly worth investigating for raising holiday spirits.

mainframe

I consider myself fortunate to be of an age where my first exposure to computers was mediated by film (War Games, Ferris Buhler, TRON) and then in the classroom and was not prejudiced with the idea that off-line, a computer was not much use or conditioned to necessarily conform questions and answers the way programmers wanted them phrased. I remember in grade school, in Mister K-'s computer science class sitting with others at a bank of Apple IIE computers, writing simple programs but learning that one can set the rules and parameters—and not just cosmetically. I was never a serious programmer but I did pursue that as a hobby later on, and later on I can remember being enamoured with the range of sound-effects (and the graphics) that Apple computers were capable of when we used them to publish a student newspaper and yearbooks in journalism class. In addition to the genius and accessibility that Steve Jobs (EN/DE) brought to the world, we owe a great debt of gratitude to his unwavering vision of an interface that is determined by the user, aesthetic and functional and serving up the intangibles of electronic-data in a way that allows people a coordinated creativity and to accessorize. I have never felt that an Apple’s full potential went unrealized, a victim of some systemic fault or jingoistic jargon that a non-native could ever hope to penetrate (not discounting the real and valuable contributions of other innovators)--and do feel a great compunction to become smarter, not for the sake of better navigation and to become more attuned with the computers, so that the next generation's convergent evolution has something to greet and not only strive to make a better extension, a wetsuit, a pseudopod that encourages more virtual living rather than participating in limning all landscapes. I want to thank the team that Jobs brought together for this vision and freedom and I feel confident that his inspiration will go on.