August 23, 2006La Mirada, Santa Monica, Sacramento, Ashland, Seattle. Along the way: The Olive Pit in Corning, CA, your stop for olive products of all kinds; and Hyampom, CA, quietly gorgeous at road's end.

In Seattle: the annual Ayurvedic introductory weekend marathon for Bastyr students, and a fine performance of Richard Strauss's opera Der Rosenkavalier. We got there a bit late, just in time to hear the aging Princess's sing to her juvenile lover, over his callow protests, of her certainty that he would soon leave her for one younger than she. To my ear, the very sounds of the vocalizations amply contributed (to my mind) to the music; how much more meaning-rich it must be for a listener who can actually speak German ...

In the Beginning was the Word-which elaborated itself into words. And yet, wherever I travel I find, to my continuing, yea deepening, dismay that Americans simply do not know the meanings of words. Item: a few years ago a Washington, D.C. councilman found himself under fire for using the word "niggardly," which despite its deceptively KKK-ish exterior actually means "stingy," derived as it is from the Old Norse nigla, "to fuss about small matters" ("niggle" is also a child of nigla).

Merriam-Webster's online dictionary site cites the following as its ten most frequently looked-up words: integrity, refugee, contempt, filibuster, insipid, tsunami, pandemic, conclave, levee, and inept.

Challenge: use all these in one sentence.

Specimen solution: We could not but feel contempt for the lack of integrity displayed by the filibustering government conclave in its inept, insipid response to calls for aid for refugees made homeless by the tsunami-induced levee breach and ensuing pandemic.

Already more than a quarter-million people are reported to have sought an on-line definition for "integrity" this year alone. Can it be that integrity itself is becoming so scarce in American society that the very word for it has become unfamiliar? God forbid ...

In this spirit of prolixity, as we approach this month's second syzygy (conjunction of three celestial bodies, esp. sun, moon, & earth; both the new and full moons are syzygies), here are nine randomly selected words that you may wish to add to your vocabularies (unless you have already done so):

entelechy
erumpent
flummox
hypostases
hylozoism
inspissate
kenosis/kenotic
orgulous (or orgillous)
uxorious

In the Beginning was the Word ...

August 8, 2006Last month's airline warning was for DL. This month we consider CO & RG. There are many reasons that I like to fly on Continental Airlines; their baggage handling is not one. At the very least, CO was complicit in preventing my luggage from making it to Pisa with me in June; their culpability was undeniable when my bag & box failed to accompany both to and from Fort Lauderdale.

In its defense, Continental does usually seek to redress complaints, often with discounts on future travel. Should you ever however be tempted to fly on Varig airlines, please rethink. First Varig cancelled on Friday its Saturday flight to Sao Paolo that I and Max & Molly Raby, my i miéi due nipoti acquisiti, or 'acquired niece & nephew' (it has a pleasant sound in Italian) were booked on; on Saturday, we learned that that flight had indeed departed, without anyone bothering to try to inform us. Sunday morning we went early to the airport, only to be told that only on the morrow would there be a next flight. We thus departed from Florida two days late, on a flight that left two hours late, that made an extra stop. We arrived in Sao Paolo at midnight, well after our connection flight to Argentina had left, and were there told by a Varig rep to spend the night in the airport, so that at 5 am Varig could endorse our tickets over to a 7am Lufthansa flight to Buenos Aires. 5 am came, and then 6; and then, as the Lufthansa flight was loading, we were told that there was no place for us on it.

No one from Varig had any idea of when we might be able to get to Argentina that day. Fortuitously, I had earlier that morning met two gentlemen from the Indian state of Gujarat who were traveling to visit friends living in Uruguay. They were taking a Pluna flight to Montevideo, which is just across the (extremely wide) Rio de la Plata from Buenos Aires. This suddenly seemed our best choice, so I talked our way onto that flight, at the last minute. Once in Montevideo, the Pluna man got the Varig man there-the nicest of the Varig employees who interacted with us-saw to it that we got boarding passes for BA. Our luggage did not, of course, arrive with us; happily, Pluna (the Uruguayan airline) saw to it that it did make it to us the next day.

And so, at long last, we rendezvoused with Dr. Carmen Frigerio, and were welcomed to Argentina (two & a half days late) with an intense (and apparently for that area, very uncommon) hailstorm, some stones the size of golf balls. Meteorological conditions improving thereafter, we proceeded to take pleasure in excellent meals, places of interest (including the Recoleta Cemetery, with its extraordinarily expensive monuments, and reinforced tomb of Eva Peron), and dance lessons. All four of us (including Carmen) relished the tango tutorials, presented with panache by noted dancing couple Rosa and Cacho. When next you are in Bs. As., do yourself a favor, if you are between ages 6 & 90, and phone in to schedule a session: +54-11-4702-5740.

It being winter, Buenos Aires was frosty, so we three northerners went north for a few days to Missiones, home of Iguaçu Falls, which I had earlier viewed, awe-filled, six and a half years earlier during its southern summer, high water season. This year I was astounded to see large swaths of it nearly dry, water volumes only a few percent of peak, lowest in fact in forty years. Despite this deficiency, the falls remained amazing, from both sides of the river, Brazilian and Argentine. Max & I appreciated a visit to the village La Aldea (in the Guaraní language, Fortín M'Bororé); Molly, less enthused, felt bad for the natives putting themselves on display before us. Though I did & do appreciate her sentiments, I did also quite enjoy meeting Roberto, the chief of this band of Guaraní, who finds himself in the unenviable position of trying to balance his desire to keep his clan together enjoying their life in what remains to them of the wild with trying to intermingle with the outer world sufficiently to obtain those things that are now essential for them in modern times. Roberto appeared to handle this unwelcome task with dignity; I salute him.

I made it back to Texas in time for the full moon of Raksha Bandhana, and that night said a prayer of protection for endangered indigenous cultures ...

Link to News of the Past