Opining Online

White House will host carp summit

No doubt the participants will “find fault in a disagreeable way and complain fretfully.”

Yeah, I’m not in the mood to write anything uplifting or illuminating or even entertaining.

Today I just want to complain.

My left shoulder hurts. There’s no reason it should hurt. It’s not like I’ve been engaged in any athletic activities that would promote this, unless you include sleeping as an athletic activity.

And… the tremor in both my hands has not lessened noticeably since I’ve been off Lexapro for five days. Nothing else has changed much either except that it’s been easier for me to *twist* my knees. I will be walking what I think is straight, when suddenly one of my knees will decide it wants to go left or right. This is sudden, excruciatingly painful for a moment and sore for an hour or so.

But, back to the tremor. It’s been diagnosed as an “essential” tremor, which means that essentially the cause is unknown. Discontinuing the Lexapro was my own idea… and it’s part of my idea of discontinuing all medications that do not have a proven effect. I’m staying on my blood pressure medicine and on Singulair. I’ve tried going off Singulair before, but I disliked waking up with my eyes swollen shut.

I’m also not liking what is a recent (within the past year) sensitivity to noise. I react to a slamming door almost as if it were a gun discharging.

But most of all, I’m tired of pain. Sitting, standing, prone in bed… there is not position that most of my body is not in pain of varying intensity. The worst is in my neck, shoulders, and upper back. Even when I’ve had surgery on lower parts of my body, the pain relievers given didn’t ease the aches in these areas.

Whether there is a diagnosis or not… the pain is here and nothing (not even opiods) helps long-term. I’ll live with it.

But… this tremor thing. That bothers me. It’s been bad enough a few times that I can’t type. I thought I was hiding this symptom (of whatever) quite well until relatives asked me… why is your hand shaking like that. Frankly, I hid this from myself so well, I wondered why they asked. I would reply “What shaking?”

The fact that I can put aside this pain to do what I must do… or what I truly want to do (hold a newborn grandchild in my arms without moving for an hour) leads me to think this pain is all in my brain.

Yet my brain is not that weak. When I push myself to a level of physical activity that my body does not like, it punishes me for a day or two with extra pain. When I will myself and muscles to hold my grandchildren, my body seems to find a few extra natural pain relievers.

Please remember that I’m complaining here…  Complaints are not necessarily meant to be alleviated, merely acknowledged. And, as far as cradling my infant grandchildren in my arms, no amount of muscle pain could possibly overwhelm the joy. In fact, there’s something emanating from the infant that mitigates whatever pain might be there… perhaps if we could bottle the joy, comfort, exhilaration, and awe that pours off a cuddled and happy infant we’d solve all the world’s problems.

All I ask is acknowledgement of the pain. I really don’t want sympathy. But I don’t want to be judged as wimpy or lazy when I must rest for a while.

And thus ends this complaint.

unidentified, first-time shooter trying out various handguns

UPDATE: What does mulch do?

• Retains water
• Inhibits weed growth
• Moderates temperature
• Prevents erosion

My talent (if there is such a thing) is in responding to others’ superior thoughts or astonishing stupidity.

One would think I’d at least be capable of generating the astonishing stupidity myself. Alas, I’m not even that talented.

So far, I’ve broken down and bought my second copy of From Dawn to Decadence. Dearest brother, I believe my first copy is buried somewhere in your pile of books or you left it in the patio “cabinet” that Dad took, contents and all, and burned like he’d been threatening to for years. Who to blame? You or Dad? hmm… it’s not like I would have loaned the book to Dad is it?

Again, dear brother, did the same thing happen with The True Believer?

The last I remember seeing of The Scotch-Irish: A Social History and How the Scots Invented the Modern World is when a daughter or two and a son-in-law or two were looking them over. I’ve since searched both daughter’s bookcases and not found my books. I’m at a loss here. I can’t help but wonder if they left them in their uncle’s care.

How is it that Born Fighting, a book I’m not as likely to re-read is still safely on my shelf?

Now I’m not really complaining too much here. My daughters and my brother have provided me with lots of reading material. It’s just that I can’t understand why books I refer to often disappear. Maybe there’s a bookmouse in my house.

Etymology. Callimachus explores word-pairs. His post led me to wonder what the etymology of “punish” is. That search led me to Etymologically Speaking, where I’ve spent the last two hours.

Some of my favorites:

Charlatan

From the Spanish “charlar,” to chat.

Candidate

From the Latin Candidus word meaning, “bright, shining, glistening white.” The ancient Roman candidates for office would wear bright white togas. This same word also gave rise to “candid,” which candidates rarely are.

Cretin

From the French “Crétin,” which originally meant “Christian.”

Debonair

French for “of good air.” In the Middle Ages, people’s health was judged partly by how they smelled. A person who gave off “good air” was presumed healthier and happier.

Elite

From the Latin elire, meaning “to choose,” from which we also get the modern Spanish word meaning the same, elegir.

Genuine

Originally meant “placed on the knees.” In Ancient Rome, a father legally claimed his newborn child by sitting in front of his family and placing his child on his knee.

Heresy

Greek for “Choice.”

Kampf (German) Struggle

From the Latin “campus” — for their type of fortification, where the Roman soldiers had their military drills — from which we also drive the English words, “camp,” “campus” and “champion.” Thus, when we talk about a “college campus,” there are subtle militaristic overtones.

Knight

From the Old English “cniht,” which meant “boy, servant.”

Kopf (German) Head

From Latin “cuppa,” meaning “cup”; the Romans used the cup as a metaphor for the upper part of the head. Similarly, another Latin word for “cup,” “testa,” has now become the French “Tête,” for “head,” too. Note that both the Germans and the Celts used a “skullcap” “top of the human head”) as a drinking vessel; this was part of the honoring of the enemy ritual. Thus related to “chief” and “capital” (and “testicle” as well).

Liberty

The Latin words “Liber,” “Libera,” and “Liberum” — with a Long I — came from the root meaning, “to pour.” From this, we get the word “Liberty” (hence pronounced with a short I), from the freedom we feel when we get drunk.

Mistress

From the French “Maîtresse,” which originally meant “bride.”

Money

From the Latin word “moneta” which originally meaning, “warning.”

Nice

From the Latin “nescius,” for “ignorant,” and, at various times before the current definition became established meant “foolish” then “foolishly precise” then “pedantically precise” then “precise in a good way” and then our current definition.

Occasion

From the Latin Occasion, meaning, “accident, or a grave event.”

Old; and Alt (German) Old

“Alt” originally meant, “Grown up”; the participle of “growing”; related to “Alan,” which meant, “to grow” but no longer exists in modern German. In Old English, the word “Alan” was also used in this same sense of growing or nourishing. Related to the Latin “alt” meaning “high.”

Pagan

From the Latin paganu(m), for “someone who is not from the city, rather from the country.” In late Latin, this turned into pagensis, “one who is from the country,” and this utimately became the French pays and the Spanish País, both meaning “nation.”

Pay

Pay goes back ultimately to Latin, “pax” peace, by way of, appease, pacify. So “pay” originally meant “pay off,” to keep the peace.

Salary; Salt

In the early days of Rome its soldiers were given a handful of salt each day. The salt ration was subsequently replaced by a sum of money allowing each man to buy his own, and relieving the commisariat of the trouble of transporting it. The money received was referred to as their “salt money” (salarium in Latin). Eventually, the term would make its way into medieval France, where a soldier’s payment was known as his solde (which is still in use today as the term for a soldier’s or sailor’s pay), and it was in paid for with a special coin called a sol. By extension, the word also came to refer not only to a soldier’s wage, but also to the soldier himself, evidenced by the medieval French term soldat, which itself came from the Old French soudier. For its part, the English word “soldier” comes from the Middle English souder, which also derived from soudier [Footnote: Contrary to popular belief, salt--necessary as it was and unlike other spices--was never very expensive. It only became expensive towards the end of the twelfth century A.D., when it was used as a means of taxation and people often went without it, as a result--a fact not unconnected with the famines and deficiencies that afflicted so many generations of Europeans at the time).].

Senator

From the Latin “senex,” meaning “old”; thus related to “senile.”

Silly

From 1550 to 1675 was “very extensively” used in the sense of deserving of pity and compassion, helpless. It is a derivative of the Middle English “seely,” from the German “selig,” meaning happy, blissful, blessed, as well as punctual, observant of season.

Sinister

From the Latin “sinister” for “left.” Hence, left is evil. 

Sleazy

The Eastern European region of Silesia was known for its fine cloth. Eventually, so many low-quality imitations wound up on the market that Silesian turned into sleazy.

Utopia

Greek for “no where.”

Villain

From “Villaneus,” meaning, “inhabitant of a villa,” i.e., a “peasant.”

Wit

From the Old English “witan,” meaning to know; intelligence.

Oh, and “punish.”

Gue