On Sunday, the governor tweeted that “New York is directly in the path of a major storm set to become a nor’easter as it approaches the East Coast later tonight,” which had me thinking about the word nor’easter, which to me looks anachronistic and silly (like e’en or ne’er). As a contraction, it doesn’t make much sense because it doesn’t (1) make saying northeaster any easier or (2) reflect how people in relevant regions would say it (a New Englander, for instance, might say something more like nohtheastah). Apparently this is a fraught topic: fifteen years ago, the New Yorker profiled some cranky Mainer who wrote indignant postcards to whomever spelled the word nor’easter (rather than his preferred northeaster or, if he must, no’theaster). It turns out nor’easter is a British holdover; nor’ and noreast were ways of spelling the compass directions as early as the 16th century.
The first known instance of nor’easter in print, according to the OED, is from much later than that, in an 1836 English verse translation of Aristophanes’ The Knights by Benjamin Dann Walsh:
CLEON.
You shall not go unpunished, cheat,
By Ceres, after boning
So many hundreds!
DEMOSTHENES.
Slack your sheet!
A strong nor’-easter’s groaning.
Wikipedia didn’t list this translation in its entry for The Knights, so I added it, discovering in the process that Walsh is well-known for quite a few things, none of which have to do with his Greek.
Soon after publishing his translation, he abandoned his plans to join the clergy; left his fellowship at Trinity College, Cambridge; emigrated to Illinois; started a lumber yard; ran for city alderman to expose corruption and won, then resigned after rooting it out; joined a club of Radical Republicans; became the first State Entomologist of Illinois; and corresponded with Charles Darwin, whom he had met thirty years earlier over Darwin’s impressive beetle collection at Cambridge. His many letters to other fellow scientists are full of such gems as:
The human penis, like the Protozoa, is nothing but a sack filled with blood, & a hole at one end of it. Now look at the wonderful penis of Odonata [i.e., dragonflies], as illustrated by yourself, with all its auxiliary machinery, & then blush for the degraded race to which you yourself have the misfortune to belong!
In 1869, while out looking for insects, Walsh’s foot was crushed by a train. Upon being informed it would have to be amputated, he joked, “Why, don't you see what an advantage a cork leg would be to me? When I am hunting bugs I can make an excellent pincushion of it, and if I lose a cork from my bottle I can carve one out of my foot.” But upon amputation, he was informed that he would die. And so he said, “I fear neither death, nor man,” and died. Upon his death, the state bought his collection of over 30,000 insects for $2,500 and stored it in the fireproof facility at the Chicago Academy of Sciences. According to a local newspaper, Walsh “passed away on the morning of November 18, 1869 about ten o'clock while a blizzard was raging.”
Two years later, all of Walsh’s specimens, along with over three square miles of Chicago and some 300 people, burned to the ground.
ben tapeworm
on the turntable
Here are five more songs from the 2020 song countdown. (Listen back to 21-25 and 16-20.)
Musician and producer SOPHIE died tragically on January 30 at the young age of 34. “BIPP” was the first SOPHIE track I heard, back in 2013, and it was jolting and exciting, like a glimpse at some alien technology, some shimmering pop-music alloy that was constantly and noisily morphing around itself.
on the bookshelf
I recently finished The Book of Daniel by E.L. Doctorow and thought it was really great but ran out of time to say anything about it. Maybe next week.
from around the web
“Pretend it’s a living” by Daisy Alioto for Dirt is probably the best piece I’ve read on all the Fran Lebowitz blowback.
“QAnon and the Bright Rise of Belief” by Kelly Howley for NYMag (thanks, Matt) is a great, brief look at QAnon as a sort of emergent religion, and has a killer closing paragraph to put all those vague, shrugging closing sentences of the New Yorker to shame.
“QAnon and the Cultification of the American Right” by Melissa Gira Grant for TNR (thanks, Lucas), is another nice piece on QAnon. Rather than just another broad attempt at parsing out the conspiracy theories—Democratic elites harvesting adrenochrome from infants, etc.— it details the factions within QAnon and its origins in the Tea Party. It also contains the wonderful line: “a three-day crypto-revival organized by Glenn Beck, staged in July in Arlington, Texas, first at a megachurch and then at Cowboys (now AT&T) Stadium [...] called ‘Restoring Love.’”
from my incoming texts
“I listened to more george michael than i have in years SO”
“It’s good for a man to look this way”
“No just an all-afternoon zoom that includes drinking”
“Yeah, I think she forgot that there are people who don’t live in Miami”