mountweazel

Taking a cue from Paul Anthony Jones celebration of forgotten words, The Cabinet of Linguistic Curiosities, the BBC’s Culture section has curated a selection thirty terms rescued from obscurity by a dedicated panel of academics pouring over antiquated reference materials and there’s plenty to delight and worth returning to common-parlance from all sources.
One of our new favourite ideas came with the title’s turn of phrase: like the cartographer’s phantom trap-street that were embellishments added to maps which didn’t exist and would catch plagiarists in the act, a mountweazel is a fictitious entry added to dictionary or encyclopædia that would similarly expose a copy-cat researcher. The original Ms Mountweazel was given a professional calling and a tragic fate, due to an occupational hazard, and we wonder if the deterrent, if better known, might not be elaborated further and have biographical standing in her own right. Be sure to peruse the registers and let us know your new favourites and your plans to re-introduce them.

franksgiving

While we hope for our American readership that the family gathering presented an opportunity for constructive political dialogue and not abject avoidance of potentially incendiary topics that no matter how dicey do need airing, there was a time when the movable feast of Thanksgiving was itself an even more a divisive, partisan issue, as Atlas Obscura recalls.
With the US still recovering from the economic downturn of the Great Depression, president Franklin Delano Roosevelt conceded to the pressure of retailors, fearing a shorter Christmas shopping season had the tradition of proclaiming the last Thursday of the month of November to be a national day of thanksgiving been kept, and changed the date of the holiday. FDR’s decision caused disruption, as expected, and drew ire that followed party lines with twenty-two states celebrating the on the new date and twenty-three on the old date that year. The move garnered the president a lot of criticism with some claiming it represented an abuse of executive powers and earned sobriquets like the “New Deal Thanksgiving” or “Franksgiving,” an affront to the “Republican Thanksgiving” as Abraham Lincoln had intended it, with some states still observing the old style date until the mid-1950s.  As with most legislation, it took an act of congress to settle matters and align the whole country’s calendars.

liminal

Kottke directs our attention to the new publication by microbial researchers Scott Chimileski and Robert Kolter called Life at the Edge of Sight, an exploration of the profusion of activity that just barely resides on our level (unaided) of the perceptible and how studying that world has led to a greater understanding of our own macroscopic lives. The book also showcases the photographic talents of the former in framing and capturing such displays whose patterns and organisation seem universal and scalable.

fuglehuse

Specialising in installations that incorporate up-cycled materials, Danish artist Thomas Dambo and crew has since 2006 constructed more than thirty-five hundred bird houses in urban centres. Though the majority are concentrated in the artist’s home turf of the ARKEN museum campus outside of Copenhagen, the Happy City Birds project has built shelters in towns across Denmark and expanded abroad to include places such as Beirut and Berlin.

gratitude - don't give me no attitude

Wishing you and yours a very peaceful and bountiful Thanksgiving. As always, we appreciate your stopping by and there is room at the table.

virgula divina

Remarkably, ten out of twelve UK water utilities admit to resorting to dowsing when it comes to looking for leaking pipes. Despite volumes published to discredit the pseudoscience behind this type of divination, belief in its efficacy has persisted for centuries and the nervous energy, the ideomotor effect, that causes the rods to dip is the same sort of pretend-mediumship that pushes a planchette around a ouija board and probably ought not be the basis for diagnostics or repairs.