appellation d'origine contrôlée or blessed are the cheesemakers

Though I will be the first to admit that I am a woefully inadequate copy-editor and do a poor job proof-reading my own material, this apparent typo on the recently unveiled war memorial in Columbia City, Indiana seems mute testimony to sloppiness and the need for a second set of eyes for those situations where a squiggly underscore isn’t there to help.
But I say apparent because perhaps there’s an outside chance that the engraver is making a statement. Protections for regional—sometimes very, very specific locations, artisanal produce and delicacies are quite different than raging nationalism, but that difference is nonetheless by degrees and not in kind, I suppose. It’s still a dichotomy among vintners, cheese mongers and other specialists that creates an in- and an out-group that holds that there’s something imparted by the land and habitat where the food or drink is sourced. Is it placist and a sign of insecurity to believe so and to believe that those coming from elsewhere are somehow impure and of lesser quality? What do you think? I don’t believe that was the message, but most wars that anyone has prosecuted seem to be justified around the same narrative (land sometimes substituted with blood) and I wouldn’t be surprised if America didn’t enter into a trade war that informs future monuments—but not for those on the losing side.

ballot-stuffing

Chaired with distinction by his Viceroy whilst Dear Leader busies himself savaging the press with greater and great sophistication and unwavering maturity, the reception of his “election integrity” committee charged with the prevention of voter-fraud, which is cited as having cost Dear Leader the popular vote. Half of the governors of the states of the Union have either expressed that they have no intention of surrendering their voter rolls, to include names addresses, party affiliation and past voting history, over to the federal government for the commission’s inspection—or have only offered to compile that data that is already publicly available.
We hope this trend of not giving cowing to his whims endures.  Dear Leader questions what have those states (both those who supported him and those that rail against him) to hide—heralding more thinly-veiled threats to follow. Voter fraud is a far more specious bugaboo than terrorism and is not an endemic or significant problem any jurisdiction, and without a secret-ballot or political privacy there’s no means to safeguard an electorate from intimidation, blackmail or buying and selling votes. No doubt real task of this committee is to make voter registration a more onerous task for those of the wrong persuasion, and no doubt the 2020 US Census is not safe from such an unnecessary and partisan overhaul—especially when the lines of representation can be redrawn and drive dissenting voices further into the margins. Not only is Dear Leader’s investigation about consolidating power and gaslighting those with independent opinions, it also begs the largest breach of personal data of all time—providing hackers with a large, lethargic target easy enough to prise open.

halophyte

To be able to adequately feed ourselves, conserve our biosphere and transition away from fossil-fuels and release carbon that albeit isn’t without consequence but was only not sequestered for millions of years and so have a zero-sum effect on the atmosphere, we are going to have to be willing to cede lands back to Nature and no longer encroach on wildness.
One solution, as Æon magazine puts forward, is to expand into those brackish, liminal lands and coastal deserts and bring with us those few, little studied salt-water tolerant plant varieties to raise food crops or bio-fuels. Whereas most plant-species that we are familiar with a cultivated, agricultural sense wither and die in the presence of salt—sowing tracts of land with salt was from ancient times a way to discourage re-settlement, dying the death that’s on one level equivalent to the effects of carbon-monoxide poisoning for mammals. Interest is building slowly, but with limited fresh water supplies also creeping upwards in salinity, hopefully a new approach to farming could help prevent further injury to both flora and fauna.

hapax lexicon

The works of William Shakespeare gave us many nonce words—contrived for that specific occasion only, but later adopted into at least uncommon parlance, but there’s a linguistic form that fairly prevalent contextually but that the Bard only gives us two examples of: what’s called a hapax legomenon.
From the Greek for “only said once,” they are bedevilling instances of words—which may have been common enough in everyday speech but were only recorded in a particular corpus one time and usually very difficult to interpret. Shakespeare’s hapaxes are hebenon, the mystery poison in Hamlet used to kill his father the king and honorificabilitudinitatibus, meaning honourable or merit-worthy—and is in addition to being the longest occurrence of alternating consonants and vowels in annuals of English literature, some anti-Shakespearians take this word as an admission of authorship with one possible anagram being “hi ludi, F. Baconis nati, tuiti orbi” or rather “these plays, F[rancis] Bacon’s offspring, are preserved for the world.” Another from an older medieval manuscript is flother, a synonym for snowflake, and apparently preserved nowhere else. By extension, hapaxes can also be singular occurrences in a given literary tradition: the word for cheese (גבינה) for example only appears once in the Old Testament in the Book of Job, but has become the standard modern Hebrew term.