Alexanders

Oh Pet, I see you brought your clarinet… “Alexander and his Clarinet,” Irving Berlin

It had been an April-showers afternoon. When Sonny and I left for rehearsal at 6:45 the sun was lowering in a split sky: clear and blue in the west, clouds colored silver to slate in the east, with a few fine, glistening raindrops still falling. We turned east out of the driveway to the most vivid rainbow I have yet seen, each color glowing like stained glass. Sonny got out his phone to take a video, while I tried to concentrate on the road while stealing glances at the sky.

We had 13 miles to go, mostly eastward. It’s a half-hour drive if you take the twisty back roads, as I always do. A few of those twists put the rainbow out of view, but soon we’d make a turn and see it again. About five miles into the journey, the rainbow had acquired a pastel shadow of itself, the two separated by a deep blue band. A table-runner for the gods. A double rainbow, the second I’d seen in my lifetime.

A double rainbow is considered to have a similar “meaning” to single rainbows, intensified. Many cultures attribute some kind of significance to rainbows. They remind us of hope, promises, or the cycle of life and death. They portend a change for the better in one’s luck. They promise a pot of gold, or serve as a bridge to heaven or a higher state. Pretty much a jumble that allows any meaning or no meaning at all beyond the experience of the beauty. What meaning might I choose?

Let’s start with the science, insofar as I can understand it. A double rainbow tends to happen when the sun is low in the sky, in late afternoon or early morning. Sunlight gets reflected twice within the raindrops, and therefore—this is so fricking cool—the secondary rainbow reverses the Roy G Biv (red-orange-yellow-green-blue-indigo-violet) sequence. The secondary rainbow is not as bright, but it takes up a bigger part of the sky. The dark band between the two rainbows is known as Alexander’s band. I like to be in bands!

The first association that popped into my head was Alexander’s Ragtime Band, but the rainbow component is named after a different Alexander: Alexander of Aphrodisias, a Peripatetic philosopher who flourished in Athens around the AD 200s. Alexander was a prolific writer. I like to write! At some point he took some time off from commentating on Aristotle, founder of the Peripatetic school, to produce the earliest surviving description of a double rainbow. Peripatetic means walking or given to walking about. I’m given to walking about! So was Aristotle, who often walked while lecturing.

It’s a bit of a pity that it’s not the ragtime-band Alexander. That 1911 tune by Irving Berlin revived the ragtime genre. Alexander Adams fronts “the bestest band what am” and plays “the leader’s pet”—a clarinet. I play clarinet! This wildly successful song is sequel to a less successful tune from 1910, Berlin’s “Alexander and His Clarinet.” This piece fits in a problematic genre of songs that depicted African-Americans in “humorous” ways that could be also demeaning. This work does have some salacious elements and dialect, but in my opinion the characters and the clarinet maintain their human and instrumental dignity. Berlin’s song was inspired by his friend Jack Alexander, a band leader who played the cornet. In the song Alexander and Miss Eliza Johnson, his significant other quarrel on Sunday, but they make up on Monday when Alexander serenades her with his clarinet. “My pet,” says Eliza, “I love you yet, And then besides, I love your clarinet.”

Astonishingly,  the rainbow was still arching over us when we got to rehearsal. It hadn’t faded much. Evidently most rainbows dissipate in less than an hour. Guinness lists the longest rainbow as nine hours. Most of the choir members got to see it. A couple of hours later, after the rehearsal, the dark had descended. Of course the rainbow was gone. The lights at the church door had gone dark as well, as if in sympathy. Beauty, bands, writing, walking, and clarinet—I couldn’t pick just one. We drove home in a happy, crowded cloud.

Honorificabilitudinitatibus

April 21 is Big Word Day, so here’s a tribute to the 27-letter, 13-syllable  “Honorificabilitudinitatibus,” which means honorableness. For your eyes and my typing fingers’ sake, I’ll shorten it to the H-word. For a time this was the longest word in English language dictionaries. I suspect it’s survived for hundreds of years because Shakespeare used it in Love’s Labour’s Lost; it was by far the longest word in any of his plays. There are longer words around these days, many of them technical or medical terms. My favorites are words that are in on the joke, like Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious (a long word, no meaning attached, that can make a person sound smart) and floccinaucinihilipilification, (the habit of estimating something as worthless). Even with the big words I like, my brain don’t process them well. Just looking at them makes my eyes hurt. 

Love’s Labour’s Lost is a comedy about King Ferdinand of Navarre and a trio of his courtiers who want (as the productivity bros of 2023 might put it) to 10x their knowledge. Therefore they swear to study and fast for three years. To avoid distractions, they foreswear the company of women.  Ferdinand hires a tutor and imposes a no-girls zone around the castle. Antics ensue, and by play’s end everyone is in love and at least one of the female characters has gotten pregnant. Interestingly, as well as the longest word the play has a couple of other extravagances: Shakespeare’s longest scene and his longest speech.

Big Word enthusiasts hold that learning and using big words can provide numerous benefits, one of which is impressing other people. I dunno. In my experience big words can annoy as much as impress. Not that that’s a reason to forego the big word, if it’s the right one for the job.  Especially if it has a manageable number of syllables and is a fun word to say. Like montmorillonite (first known use in 1854), which is a kind of clay and which I’ll try to work into a conversation, someday.

Ferdinand and his gang impress one another mightily with their syllables and wordplay and what even I can recognize as shaky Latin. The rest of the characters—the servants, the women, and Costard, the play’s truth-telling rustic—are annoyed. The H-word itself comes in a mocking aside between Costard and Ferdinand’s servant Moth, after Moth notes that his master and friends “have been at a great feast of languages, and stolen the scraps.”  “O, they have lived long on the alms-basket of words,” Costard replies. “I marvel thy master hath not eaten thee for a word; for thou art not so long by the head as [H-word]; thou art easier swallowed than a flap-dragon.”

In reading that passage, my eye leaps over the H-word and heads straight to “flap-dragon.” A flap-dragon is a burning raisin or other small bit of fruit. Evidently it was a fun Elizabethan game of the same name to put fruit in brandy, set the thing on fire, and then fish the fruit out and swallow it whole (swallowing whole being yet another meaning for flap-dragon). 

Other benefits of learning big words include exercising our brains and improving our ability to express ourselves. Fair enough. I found the astonishing claim on the site of nationaltoday.com that words “give us personality.” I don’t think this is true, but if I accept the axiom, a possible conclusion could be the bigger the word, the bigger the personality. I don’t think I could manage an H-word-sized personality.

Before the H-word intimidated me and the word flap-dragon grabbed my attention, I was thinking about little words. About catfight, in fact, whose first known use, like montmorillonite, was in 1854. This morning, walking on Gold Street, I saw a catfight. There was a tuxedo cat standing very still at the back of a driveway, staring intently at a silver cat, equally still, at the driveway’s edge. As I drew closer both felines looked at me, and the silver took the opportunity to leg it, pursued vigorously but at a safe distance by the tuxedo cat until the silver disappeared into the next yard. The battle was short and silent, and not at all like my mental picture of a catfight.

Even the little words are proving themselves to be slippery, so I’ve decided to avoid big words for a few hours. Farewell to Big Word Day and hello to National Tea Day. I’m off to find some Earl Grey.

Althea

I was thinking about dogs and hoping to see some on my walk on Althea Road this morning. It’s a bad sign when I’m this much inside my head, rather than being open to what the universe has in store, but I needed some distraction from my Achilles heel. This is no metaphor: my left Achilles tendon— same side as the Achilles’ weak spot!—has been acting up for about a week now. I’d prepped with stretching and a couple of tablets of Aleve, but each step was still uncomfortable. 

It was a few minutes after seven. The gnats and birds were out in full force. A girl waited on the corner for the school bus. Somebody was moving a trash bin. Nary a dog was in sight. Not the pair of golden retrievers who remind me of our dear departed Watson, not Skye, the black lab who lives next door, not the Pomeranian triplets and their lady-with-the-hat.

When she was 29 years old, Emily Dickinson’s father gave her a dog for company on her walks. What kind of animal do you picture? I am slowly reading her Complete Poems and am up to #473, “Fashion My Spirit quaint – white,” with just 1302 more poems to go. Dickinson often describes herself as small, so I would have thought an embroidery bag-sized dog, tiny and a fierce yipper.

It turns out that the dog—which she named Carlo after a canine in the novel Jane Eyre—was a brown Newfoundland. This is a big dog that can weigh up to 150 pounds. It also turns out that Emily was not unusually tiny. She was probably around 5’3” tall, which is the same height as me on a tall day. On the short side, but very close to average, and people were a little shorter in Emily’s day. It’s all in the way you see yourself, isn’t it? Still, Carlo would have counted as a big dog for an owner of any size.

Finding out about Carlo shifted my perceptions of Emily a bit. It’s always clear that she loved nature and was sensitive to it, but she seems to have been quite outdoorsy, especially in the company of her “shaggy ally.” I wondered if Carlo was an asked-for present or a surprise. I used to think I’d prefer a little dog, or a medium-sized one, but by the time Watson grew into his paws and reached nearly 90 pounds, a giant of a golden, I felt he was the ideal size for a dog. 

Commuters beeped the locks on their cars. I was about a mile from home, with still no dogs sighted. A lady in a house dress did something to her plant pots. I took the next step and it felt as though Paris’s arrow had hit my ankle straight on.  I breathed, waiting for the pain to subside. And thought-thought-thought.

It’s Mozart who owned the lapdog I’d imagined for Dickinson. He had two, actually, named Pimperl and Bimperl, and they often traveled with him. Mozart also kept some pet birds, most famously a starling that he bought at a Viennese pet shop on May 27, 1784, for 34 kreutzers. At the time Mozart was 28 years old, about Emily’s age. Starlings have extensive vocal ranges and are great mimics. This bird learned to sing the 17-note theme of the third movement of the Piano Concerto No. 17 (K. 453), which had been completed earlier that spring. The bird’s version was a little different than Mozart’s, which we know because Mozart transcribed it, noting the changes the bird had made, which included a fermata (hold) on the sixth note and a half-step up for the ninth and tenth notes, from G to G#.

After a bit I took a few small, careful steps, bending my left foot as little as possible. The gnats swirled, and I heard a crow caw—or maybe it was a starling, pranking me. There would be no dogs today, except in my imagination. I conjured Emily and Carlo. Fortunately they slowed down for me, Emily humming and Carlo sniffing at the daffodils, as I hobbled home.

A hill to die on?

Citing this headline—“Study on women’s dating preferences segways into X’s core business principle”—my husband Dave posted on Facebook that it’s time to give up the  battle. Segue (currently a verb, from the Italian seguire, to move directly from one thing to another) will inevitably come to be spelled as its homophone segway (currently a noun, from the English segue, referring to a personal transportation device).

I suppose it’s possible that inventor Dean Kamen will carry the day. Though that will be a sad day, indeed. Kamen, who had developed a self-balancing wheelchair in the 1980s, patented a self-balancing transportation device in the late 1990s and founded the Segway company in 1999. He picked the name Segway to highlight its smooth and seamless features, but spelled it in a way that would be easier to trademark.

The first Segway PT (personal transporter) hit the market in December of 2001, with tons of publicity and an annual sales target of 40,000 units, an estimate which the company and its deep-pocketed investors thought was conservative. Kamen predicted that the Segway would “be to the car what the car was to the horse and buggy.” The hype is curious in retrospect. At a top speed of around 12 mph, the device was slower than a bicycle or car. It offered no protection from the elements and could only accommodate a single person. Also there was nowhere to park or charge it. Actual sales reached about 1% of the target.

Possibly a lot of the people who write segway as a verb haven’t seen the word segue much—it’s commonly used in just a few fields—but they have seen the noun Segway or a Segway itself, in person or online. I myself have encountered a few Segways in the wild. Once I was visiting Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and saw a tourist group riding them around the town center, having a little trouble with the higher curbs. I’ve seen them in some malls and once attended an outdoor concert where a police officer was riding one. All the Segwayers stood with their knees locked and canted slightly forward, like Donald Trump in his shoe-lifts or charioteers in a Charlton Heston film.

Smooth wasn’t my first impression, from sidewalk level, but the machines were fairly speedy compared to the pedestrians. Segways weren’t particularly safe, as it turned out. It was easy to fall off of them, and quite a few users ended up with broken bones and  concussions. Perhaps most infamously, Jimi Heselden died in 2010 when he drove his Segway off a cliff—just 10 months after he’d bought the company. Segway was sold again in 2013, and again in 2015 to Ninebot, a company headquartered in China. Ninebot stopped making the Segway PT in 2020.

Segue is a common directive in musical theater. As a pit musician, I’m fond of both the concept—getting onto the next bit smoothly and without delay—and the spelling. It’s immensely helpful to know that a change is upcoming. Segue is an imperative verb, and I can be averse to being bossed around, but in this case I don’t mind. Transitions are hard! I need the reminder to turn the page and get the appropriate instrument near my face. Attacca, another imperative verb with Italian roots, connotes something similar, except that often what happens in a segue is a transition to more of the same, while attacca tends to imply a jump into a section with a different feel.

A segue isn’t always direct. Sometimes there are breaks for a line or two of dialogue, or applause. If a more direct transition is intended, it’s often written “Segue as one.” In real life I’m more of an attacca type, belly-flopping into the next thing, but I appreciate a good segue and wish I could move more smoothly through the world.

I also have aesthetic objections to the segway takeover, despite the argument that the respelled word would be less ambiguous in terms of pronunciation.  New users wouldn’t have to worry about what to do with the “gue”—pronounce it as as a hard g, as in gigue? or rhyme it with achoo, as in ague? Languages live and change, and so does orthography. No one hyphenates to-day, to-morrow, or to-night these days anymore, even though this was common practice from about the sixteenth through the early twentieth centuries. Still, I find segway so much uglier than segue.

So far the dictionary companies are on my side. Segway is “a trademarked name for a motorized two-wheel personal vehicle,” they admonish. When verbing, writers should use the segue spelling. But who knows what the dictionaries will say in another five years?

Dave’s post, thankfully for our marriage, was in jest, designed to garner responses such as “they’re is a spelling mistake in their.” Stage direction: segue-as-one into the future;  moderate waltz tempo.