Glades, bees, and sneezing
TODAY’S medley moves from glades to bees to sneezing — loosely linked discoveries leading to two precious insights. Read on!
Woodland words
A reader asked about the woodland words dell, copse,
glade: do they name distinct things? Yes. A dell or dingle is a dip or hollow. A copse (shortened from coppice) is a clump, trees planted for periodic cutting. A dell is about terrain, while a copse is about trees. But a glade is an absence of trees, same as a
clearing. An area is ‘‘clear’’ or cleared of trees, which gives it more light. And glade relates to the idea of brightening, in glad or gleam.
Other glades
W.B. Yeats, dreaming of a getaway to the Lake Isle of
Innisfree, envisages Nine bean rows . . . and a hive for the honey bee, so as to live alone in the beeloud glade. His glade would be land he had cleared while building his cabin, of clay and wattles made. Since he would be
living alone, we might picture him eating all the beans himself, or learning how to bottle them. No, concentrate! Picture the bees on the lovely red flowers of runner beans: bees, beans, and bard, in blessed symbiosis.
Lithuanian bees
Speaking of bees, a webarticle celebrates their role in the lore and language of Lithuania.
These Baltic buzzers had their own pagan goddess called Auste´ja, goddess of bees. The word for a bee, biciu, gives the affectionate term for a good friend, biciulis (pal, mate, buddy). And the language has two verbs for to ‘‘live together’’, one used for people, the other for animals; but for bees, it uses the humans’ verb. Bees are our friends and benefactors.
Stop!
Now you might wonder if I know any Lithuanian? Could this be a pegpull? Well, April 1 has passed, and I did check Google Translate. And ain’t that the truth: surfing the ’net, you wade kneedeep through rubbish, only to find pearls of insight. Two such coming up now.
First pearl
Lithuanian belongs to the same IndoEuropean family of languages as English. We are its brothers (like those bees). It preserves more languages of the prehistoric features of our family language, notional *ProtoIndoEuropean than other languages. For example, Latin had six ‘‘cases’’ — modifications of a noun’s meaning by changing its ending. Mensa, mensam, ae, aˆ, and so on. Old English had four such, whereas now we have none unless you count the possessive apostrophe. Lithuanian once had 10, and still has seven. It takes us back to the speechhabits of our languageancestors, millennia ago, back before Sanskrit.
Sneezing
The second pearl concerns a feature of language which binds humanity together, namely sneezing. Now, of course, sneezes vary. Among my acquaintance, besides atchoo and atishoo, I hear harasha (fortissimo), and a gentle npptcha (mp), to name a few. They’re all spasms, involuntary. The sneeze takes over.
Disempowerment
And for that reason, because the sneezer is brought to a standstill, precluded for the nonce from rational intercourse, the bystanders commiserate. Whether it’s caused by a cold, or the plague, or pollen, or sudden sunlight (sneezing remains faintly mysterious), we the witnesses say ‘‘Bless you!’’ In your powerlessness and danger, may some greater power protect you. Atheists can say Gesundheit, since the German counterpart just wishes the sneezer ‘‘Health.’’ The idiom is philosophy, and humanity’s kindly kinship in action. Google <bless you atlas obscura>