endonymy

From one of our favourite weekly features, Nag on the Lake’s Sunday Links, we are invited to ruminate over the fact that while most countries are named after one of four things—often tautologically, especially in translation—that are sometimes not very consequential to present geopolitics, there are some notable mavericks that defy or really lean into categorisation.
With nearly all countries named in deference to either a cardinal direction, a distinguishing geographical feature, a tribe or clan or an important personage, we’d wish that the campaign to make America great again was an effort to improve scholarship on the Latinised name of a fifteenth century Florentine cartographer from the Vespucci family but alas and alack.  There are nonetheless some notable (and notably disputed too) outliers as well. Our favouites being Malta named for bees (Μελίτη, honey-sweet), Mexico after a simplification of an Aztec city (Mēxihtli) that meant in the navel of the Moon and the Pacific island nation of Nauru, possibly derived from the native conjugation anáoero, I go to the beach.

чеховское жвачка

Our thanks to Memo of the Air for referring us to this low-stakes version of the dramatic principle of narrative parsimony and the clearing away of MacGuffins and red-herrings that’s come to be known as Chekhov’s Gun—appearing in the collected correspondence of the renowned Russian playwright.
Like the host not wanting to presume that we need the joke explained to us, but as Anton Chekhov implored his interlocutor, fellow author A. S. Gruzinsky, to “remove everything that has no relevance to the story. If you say in the first chapter [act] that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third it absolutely must go off. If it is not going to be fired, it should not be hanging there.” Contrarily, other writers—like Ernest Hemingway—have put extra stock in these incidental details, insisting that the reader wants and deserves a subject to read into even if there’s no payoff, like bottle-episodes and (see above) Monster-of-the-Week.  Read the rest of the comics from Ruben Bolling (previously) at the link above. 

half-staff

We enjoyed this informative graphic by xkcd (aka Randall Munroe, previously) on flag interpretation and special hoisting protocols to signal distress, mourning, respect and apparently also bewilderment—the flag lowered, at least in accordance with some traditions, to make room for an “invisible flag of death” on the flagpole to fly above it. Visit the link above to see all the panels and discover more of Munroe’s comics.

gouden eeuw

Similar to an ongoing restoration of a Johannes Vermeer work in line with the artist’s intent, Cynical-C directs our attention to a work by Dutch Golden Age painter Judith Jans Leyster (*1609 – †1660), an avowed talent among her peers and accepted into the Haarlem Guild but rather tragically forgotten after her death, called The Last Drop.
Somewhat rehabilitated and recognised as a pioneer among her cohort around the turn of the last century (though this painting was still misattributed until a keen observer noticed her JL* monogram on the tipped tankard), it is thought that a dealer committed the act of overpainting the skeletal figure brandishing an hourglass—which surely held significance as the dissolution that revelry ultimately brings as there was an accompanying genre piece called the Merry Trio (one dropped out apparently) that depicts an earlier phase of drinking, to make the work more marketable and less moralising when it was acquired by the Guildhall gallery in London in 1908. After extensive research and x-ray analysis, curators were able to bring back the original scene in the 1990s.