Rambles

Which really is the cruelest month? 

In The Wasteland, T.S. Eliot claims April.

 April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.

This strikes me as an utterly bizarre take but, I confess, I’ve never gotten past that first line. I imagine his reasoning, his point of view, becomes clear as the poem unfolds. 

 By the by, check out that T.S. Eliot link for some fun (as well as disturbing) bits. 

 An Esquire post disagrees, giving evidence that March holds the Most Merciless Month title.

e.g.
March 16, 1968 More than 500 noncombatant Vietnamese civilians die at the hands of American infantrymen in the My Lai massacre.
March 20, 1995 Nerve-gas attack on the Tokyo subway system kills 12 and injures 5,000.
March 24, 1989 The Exxon Valdez causes America’s worst ecological calamity when it runs aground and spills 11 million gallons of oil into Prince William Sound, Alaska.

They make a great case but, me? January has my vote. Why? 31 is the number of cold, short, dark, wet, dismal days. The only thing that makes February any more bearable is its relative brevity—28 days.

Words that amuse me?

Distelfink
Noun
a traditional Pennsylvania Dutch design motif in the form of a stylized bird. From Old High German—literally “thistle-finch.”

Sounds more like the name for a suburban snitch.

Bumfuzzle
Transitive verb
Confuse, perplex, fluster
Deceptive, bullshit ads were used to bumfuzzle naïve voters into casting their ballots for a fluorescent grifter.

We are not entirely certain where bumfuzzle comes from; one possibility is that it is descended from dumbfound, which became dumfoozle, and then bumfoozle, before settling on the spelling articulated in this article. (source)

Collywobbles
Plural noun
1. an upset stomach
2. an intense feeling of nervousness
What’s the derivation? It’s believed to be a friendlier-sounding transformation of cholera morbus (the New Latin term for the disease cholera) that was influenced by the words colic and wobble. (source)  

Abibliophobia
Noun
the fear of running out of things to read...EEEK!!!

Snickersnee
Noun
From the 1690s, originally "fight with knives," from snick-or-snee (1610s), from Dutch steken "to thrust, stick" + snijden "to cut.” (source) 

I only mention it but snickersnee sounds more like playground equipment or a carnival ride. 

i.e., Hey June, let’s go ride the snickersnee!

Weird place names?

Cripplegate is neighborhood in London. It was the northern entrance to Londinium’s (AKA Roman London) fort, erected around ad120.

There’s no solid origin story for the name BUT, in William the Conqueror times, the High Middle Ages, the area was known as Crepelgate. A crepel is a low opening in a wall; a burrow or den.

Over the ages spellings and pronunciations evolve and shift. Language creep.

Blue Ball, Pennsylvania was named after a building at the same location—the Blue Ball Inn—which got its name when it was struck by cannon balls from a British war vessel in 1777. 

NOT the salaciously fun genesis story I’d hoped for.

Braintree, here in Massachusetts and Vermont, is named after Braintree, Essex in England.

Elizabeth Allen, at the now defunct Blog of Stench, performed some dandy etymological sleuthing and came up with this—the original Braintree was known as Branchetreu back in the Middle Ages. The Great Vowel Shift strikes again!

Check out the detective work that led Allen from Braintree to Branch (of-a-River) Town. Cool stuff!