Word

Wordsmithing: Spa

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When it is capitalized, this word refers to the mineral springs in Liège, Belgium, believed to have curative properties.  In the last several centuries the meaning of the word has been generalized to refer to almost any place that has curative mineral waters, according to OED, so that “a town, locality, or resort possessing a mineral spring or springs; a watering-place of this kind” is fairly known as a spa.

The generalization has expanded further in recent decades through commercialization, and as always OED’s tracking of the etymology is intriguing:

A commercial establishment which offers health and beauty treatment (esp. for women) through steam baths, exercise equipment, massage, and the like. U.S.

1960    Life 8 Feb. 111/1   The submerged specter above‥is getting a hydraulic underwater massage at a plush health spa near San Diego called the Golden Gate beauty resort whose customers are usually female.
1976    Vogue Dec. 214/1   Most American spas are designed exclusively for women.
1981    W. Safire in N.Y. Times Mag. 21 June 10/2   Only fuddy-duddies go to the gym,‥the upscale‥crowd goes to the spa.

Wordsmithing: Dictionary Attack!

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Another December 2010 addition to the OED brings to mind a phrase in our lexicon describing large books as “heavy enough to stun an ox”.

dictionary attack n.

While it is perhaps a matter for regret that the quotation paragraph for this term does not catalogue incidents of physical harm meted out by wielders of dictionaries—the 20 volumes of OED2, in particular, could cause someone considerable damage—it does provide an insight into one aspect of a very 21st-century preoccupation, the security of the information held on computer systems. Here the “dictionary” in question is nothing more than a word list held electronically, and although the attack for which it is used is unlikely to cause physical harm, the virtual damage might be very high indeed: if a dictionary attack is successful and an automated program correctly matches a password, the files on a computer network or system are at the mercy of the initiator of the attack.

Hold on to your words!

Biophilia: E.O. Wilson, from Thoreau to Theroux

/ Amie Inman / 20 Comments

In December 2010 the Oxford English Dictionary (fondly called the OED) added 2,400 entries, including “biophilia“.  But E.O. Wilson published the term (as well as it’s city kin) in 1984 in the book of the same name.

My attention was on the forest; it has been there all my life.  I can work up some appreciation for the travel stories of Paul Theroux and other urbanophile authors who treat human settlements as virtually the whole world and the intervening natural habitats as troublesome barriers.  But everywhere I have gone–South America, Australia, New Guinea, Asia–I have thought exactly the opposite.  Jungles and grasslands are the logical destinations, and towns and farmlands the labyrinths that people have imposed between them sometime in the past.  I cherish the green enclaves accidentally left behind. Continue reading →

Wordsmithing: Biophilia

/ Organikos / 13 Comments

Our usual thanks to OED, but a special one too this time.  One of the words we have been working into our sentences in recent years is this word that had two primary definitions different from the one we associated with one of our favorite biologists.  Now they have added a third definition, thanks to E.O. Wilson and everyone who follows his ideas and words, and repeats them:

3. A love of or empathy with the natural world, esp. when seen as a human instinct.

 

Wordsmithing: Possibilian

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Breaking with the tradition established several Wednesdays ago, we will not adhere strictly to the OED definition for the word we want to consider today.  We could not, even if we wanted to, because according to OED it does not yet exist.  A close cousin does, and it is worth noting that possibilism (which neither MS Word’s spell-checker, nor WordPress’s, recognize as legitimate) has a meaning somewhat close to what we want to highlight.  The second sense of that word, anyhow, does:

2. Geogr. The belief that human freedom of action is not limited by the natural world.

A possibilian may be a person who does not let the natural world get in the way of doing things.  But it is actually much more interesting than that.  When you have twenty minutes set aside for some intrigue and inspiration, take a look at this for a fuller understanding of the word (from the smith who coined it):

Comforting Words

/ Organikos / 1 Comment

Everyone who has lived apart from the culture they associate with “home” is familiar with the notion of comfort food.  Sometimes it is nourishing, like oatmeal, and other times more of a guilty pleasure, like this one:

As with all guilty pleasures, you avoid thought.  You just enjoy.  It brings you home, for a moment, wherever that may be.  But sometimes, your eye is caught by the glint on the packaging and you learn something new.  By the good graces of modern technology and thanks mainly to the requirements we place on companies to share helpful information about the things they produce that they call food–we may have unexpected vocabulary-enriching experiences, like this one:

Continue reading →

Wordsmithing: Respect

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This post from a few days ago brought the phrase “respect your elders” to the fore, because the man presenting those ideas commands respect.  Not in the Napoleonic sense of command, but in the gentle, humble sense.  Not to mention the witty sense.  So, if there are variations on how to command, are there also variations on respect?  Of course. And they are just as surprising as some previous wordsmithing investigations have discovered for other well-worn words.

If you are musically inclined, you might go with Aretha’s definition.  It probably gets at the common usage definition that most North Americans of a certain age carry around with them.  But in OED territory “giving propers” can be seen in a different light with the first two entries for respect:

1. n. regard, gaze; visual attention.

2. v. to postpone, to suspend; to relieve temporarily.

Neither form of the word, especially the verb form, matches what we thought if we had Aretha’s (or Napoleon’s) definition in mind.  Nor is either a definition we had ever even heard of.  Yet when we gaze at those water-collecting and storage devices of old in the desert, we regard them in awe; and they do, temporarily, relieve us of our belief that innovation is only forward-looking.

Wordsmithing: Market

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Amie has written about market in various contexts, making use of both its verb and noun form.  In our day to day activities, we are motivated by entrepreneurial conservation, by which we mean market-oriented solutions to complement the efforts of NGO, philanthropic and governmental efforts to preserve ecosystems and maintain the vitality of cultures.

We abhor all things fundamentalist, so the cliche of the University of Chicago notion of markets is not one we cling to (nor is the cliche apt anymore; see their contributions in the realm of behavioral economics to get a sense of where this great institution is heading in terms of hegemonic ideas).  The same goes for the fundamentalism that has prevailed in the world of conservation–a belief that markets cause environmental problems but cannot provide solutions.  So, in the spirit of tamping down fundamentalism of all kinds, we might look at the marginalia of this word’s definition, rather than OED‘s definition itself, as we otherwise systematically do:

Proverb: you may know how the market goes by the market folks.

We adapt this, in our daily work, to mean: let’s be realistic while we attempt creative, fun approaches to serious problem-solving.

A Different Good

/ Organikos / 2 Comments

To get to a basic meaning of good using music, plenty of choices were available beyond the “folk,” “ska” and “world” categories. Bach, Handel, Mozart and Beethoven among many other classical composers had more than enough to say musically that helps us get a grip on good.  The point was more about Pete Seeger’s character, and his choice to not back down and his ability to not become embittered by the injustice; the choice The Specials made to sing to protest a hero’s unjust imprisonment, or Raghu Dixit’s choice to celebrate virtue through a young girl.

For a cinematic rendering of good, Wim Wenders film Until the End of the World comes to mind, which brings the topic back to good music.  Lou Reed does not normally evoke good the way Pete Seeger does, but his contribution to the soundtrack of this film, What’s Good, is worth a listen.  It approaches the subject by pondering inexplicable loss.  Another contributor to that soundtrack is even harder to associate with the word good, but if you listen to him in conversation, he sure sounds like he knows something about good.

Are there equations predicting good behavior other than George Price’s?  If so, please share.  Meanwhile, you might find Laurie Anderson’s Let X = X, a fine diversion.

The Meaning of Another World

/ Michael Muller / 3 Comments

I experienced monstrous difficulty getting this piece written. The difficulty was that of synthesis, which eludes one all the more deftly when one searches for it too seriously. Almost desperately, I wanted, both for my own sake and for the sake of this, our burgeoning compendium of tidbits and travel tales, to provide a perfectly comprehensive explication of my two months in Kumily. But I have to give up the ghost, and I always have to think more humbly about writing.

So after several drafts, I submit an account more prosaic than I’d hoped for, which is the price of my liberation from this imprecise living–both here and there and in neither hemisphere entirely. I have had reason and time to think about travel, specifically about travel and writing, the collection and formation of disparate experiences for the creation of something meaningful. Growing up, I tended to believe that writing just happened–that a writer, when faced with a given circumstance, simply reported what was before him, and that his metaphors and imagery arose spontaneously from the content of his impressions. I don’t believe that any longer. Writing is hard, and writing honestly is harder.  Continue reading →

Wordsmithing: Good

/ Crist Inman / 6 Comments

So sly, this one.  Let’s leave OED out of it.  Good comes to mind on enough occasions that we do not notice it; just the sound of the word is enough to lull.  Any one reference would be pointless.  Even without a point, here is a recommendation: listen to this podcast.  There is a good formula and there are plenty of stories of good people.

If you are a regular Radio Lab listener you are likely already familiar with that episode (one of their most listened to, and for good reason, so to speak), in which case find yourself a recording of The Weavers in reunion at Carnegie Hall in 1963.  Listen to Guantanamera and consider this: some years prior Pete Seeger had serious legal problems due to his political views (search it and the story will reward you with a colorful illustration of what “land of the free and home of the brave” really refers to) and yet chose, at the height of Cold War tensions with Cuba, to sing about and quote Jose Marti.  Whether you like the music or not, and regardless of your ideological perspective, listen to Seeger’s voice: no malice, nor fervor; just what sounds to be, by some aural definition, good.

Alternatively (in the ska sense), find The Specials’ original studio recording of Nelson Mandela.  Good sounds and good pleas about a good man.  And for a completely different aural rendition of good, find the original studio recording of Raghu Dixit’s Mysore Se Aayi.  YouTube has some live performance versions of both, but the original recordings are a better place to start.  And it is good to own them.

Trope Talk

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In another short burst of wisdom, Mr. Egan brings attention to the remarkable risks that accompany forays into wilderness, quoting one of the elders of the field:

Yosemite’s most lyrical advocate, the naturalist John Muir, anticipated the urban hordes as the population moved away from field and farm. At the dawn of the 20th century, he saw the parks as places to escape “the stupefying effects of the vice of over-industry and the deadly apathy of luxury.” But Muir also expected people to have some basic understanding of the outdoors.

This paragraph is bounded by vignettes of sublime and ridiculous examples of nature providing refuge as well as danger. It is not clear why he validates a trope of ideologues–his point would have been made without the nanny state reference.  Or would it?

Wordsmithing: Valorize

/ Organikos / 3 Comments

The transitive form of this amazing, rarely used verb is defined in the OED:

To raise or stabilize the value of (a commodity, etc.) by a centrally organized scheme; generally to evaluate, to make valid.

In the work space of entrepreneurial conservation no single word captures more effectively what we are trying to accomplish with regard to natural and cultural heritage.  Oddly, the etymology OED provides for the word is stuck in the 20th Century.  Its roots extend back at least to the 19th Century (let’s see who knows their political theory), and the new branches of its meaning, for illustrative purposes, can be found on these pages.

Wordsmithing: Entrepreneurial Conservation

/ Crist Inman / 8 Comments

Two previous posts about words pointed out how common usage can alter the course of their meaning over time in surprising ways. We might not even recognize the original meaning today, some perishing in dungeons and others flying too high for their own good. The risk of writing these particular posts is when their intent seems anything other than constructive. Who wants to cast a stone, first or otherwise? We live in glass houses, and all that. In the spirit of focusing on that intent, this quick post draws together two words: entrepreneurial conservation.

As any phrase should, these words together build something more valuable, more effective, than either could on its own. If words can be cousins, as implied in a previous post, then phrases can be part of an extended family too: these two words, as a phrase, share linguistic DNA with social enterprise, but OED does not know it yet. The phrase (and our work) recognizes that for all the heroic efforts of traditional conservation organizations—The Nature Conservancy, WWF, Conservation International, etc.—not to mention incredible government commitments to national and state parks throughout the world in the last century, there is still a deficit of conservation.

The world still loses more wilderness than it protects. Ditto for intangibles in the domain of cultural heritage. So, what else to do other than pitch in and see what we can do? And if it can be shown that conservation is good business, then more people and organizations will pitch in. Watch Adrien’s posts for more on this in Patagonia, and Reyna’s upcoming posts from the Galapagos Islands. Those are two pristine natural wonderlands with limited human populations. But also watch for posts from Kerala, India — where the story is more complex with regard to population growth and wilderness conservation. Or from Nicaragua, where we feel Morgan’s Rock is leading the way in Central America with a robust mixed-use model that makes use of each idea we have put on the anvil so far: resort (old meaning), luxury (new meaning), entrepreneurial and conservation (combined meaning).

Wordsmithing: Luxury

/ Organikos / 1 Comment

Luxury is another word we avoid.  Odd since we often eat like epicureans, sleep on fine linens when we can, and comfort is generally a creature we adore.  But not odd, considering the work we do, and where we do it.  Not all things can or should be available in all places, especially if conservation is the point, and collaborating with communities is the means to the end.  Our friend and future Contributor Reyna hints that she will have a thing or two to say about this in the future.  With regard to rethinking luxury, the Galapagos Islands provide a superb vantage point.

Why rethink it?  That is, why do we avoid this ubiquitous word? OED tells us that this noun refers first and foremost to “lasciviousness, lust”.  That is a good enough reason, for starters.  By the third entry the definition eases up a bit, to “the habitual use of, or indulgence in what is choice or costly…” but still not much to write home about.  The first ray of light is in the fourth entry, depending on a snippet of Dryden to poetically license us to re-visualize luxury: “Hard was their Lodging, homely was their Food; For all their Luxury was doing Good.”

But we do not need to go back 300 years, get too poetic, nor be preachy about it. Liberating this word may start with the therapeutic effects of pristine wilderness areas; the opportunity to disconnect on occasion from our normal, wired modern lives; the privilege of getting to know communities of people whose lives are different from our own.  In short, some of the reasons why people travel.  And if we can consider this lust for life, luxury is inevitable.

Wordsmithing: Resort

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We do not take the word “resort” lightly.  In fact, we have studiously avoided it. Common usage in the past century has gravitated to the sprawling hotel complex associated with mass tourism.  But deep down, we love the word and its etymological roots.  We hope to liberate it from its lingual prison.

As a noun, this word is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary (hereafter OED) as “something to which a person has recourse; an expedient, a measure.”  As a verb it is defined in that dictionary as “recourse to a person or thing for aid, assistance, or the attainment of some end…also from a previous state or condition.”

Raxa, derived from the Sanskrit word (pronounced in that language to sound like “rock-shah”) — defined by the Cologne Lexicon to mean “guarding , watching , protecting , serving” — is a cousin of sorts to the word resort (in its older English usage).  So, in the spirit of our commitment to entrepreneurial conservation, we are always on the lookout for innovative resorts by which communities nurture their traditional cultures and are stewards for their natural environments–quite a feat in this modern world, and worthy of celebration.  Such resorts are at the heart of our mission–both a means and an end.