It's that fabulous day of the week!

It's time for words and phrases. Today the material comes from John Ciardi's "A Browser's Dictionary: A Compendium of Curious Expressions & Intriguing Facts". You should buy one. It's great for browsing. I've pulled a few interesting terms out of Ciardi's hat for you today. Have a look.

Influence. n. An affective power; v. To affect. [Root sense: "a flowing in, to flow in upon." From the Latin in- in; fluere, to flow. Whenever this word is encountered in writing prior to circa 1800, it is reasonable to ssume an astrological reference to the influence of the stars.]
NOTE: One of the most graceful effects of poetry (or of any precise writing) occurs when the author sets a word in a context that allows a counterpoint of the root sense and the extended sense. Assume the poet to be standing on an eastward-facing beach just at dawn with the surf running high. Then assume him to have written, "And dawn is all one rosy influence." The surf, tinged red by the level rays of the new sun, flows in (root sense) rosily; and it has (extended sense) an affective power upon the beholder. Language is rarely used at this depth, but the rareness of excellence should not be made into an excuse for the failure to recognize it. In the days when the school system still taught languages (and sometimes even English), the recognition of root senses was as common as it is now rare. This book is in part an effort to reawaken an awareness of the root depths of words.

[Note from Keith: Don't you love Ciardi even more after that?]

Midwife. A woman who attends another at childbirth. (Because hospital birth has become standard in the U.S., it may be well to say that until very recently almost all births occurred at home with only a midwife in attendance. Midwife delivery is still standard in most of the world.) [Root sense: "with-wife: a woman who is with another (at childbirth)." Old English mid, with, wif, woman. Note: Latin obstetrix, midwife; from stare, to stand, prefixed ob-, before, and with agential suffix -ix: literally "she who stands before (another woman at childbirth)."]

Keep one's powder dry. Be prepared to fight. [With reference to muzzle-loading guns into which loose gunpowder was poured from a powder horn and tamped in. If the powder was allowed to become wet, it would not be fired by the spark of the flint.]

Take a powder. 1. To clear out fast. 2. As a command. Get out of here! Scram! [In the days before modern methods of pill-making and encapsulation, powder was a standard usage for "medical dosage," and medical powders were commonly folded into small paper packets to be dissolved in water or mixed with it. So a headache powder. The powder at the root of this idiom is a laxative, and by intention, a strong one, the root sense being a crude joke: "Take a (laxative) powder and clear (yourself) out."

Spitting image. An exact likeness. He is the spitting image of his father. [A corruption of spit and image, spit 'n' image, which were formulas of the most ancient practices of black magic and the casting of spells by hex dolls, in which any harm done to the doll is transferred ot the hexed person. The two basic principles of such hexing were: 1. Anything that was once part of a person, or that was intimately associated with him, retains a power over him. Hex dolls, therefore, were made as symbolic resemblances (power 2), and bits of his or her hair, spit, feces, nail parings, clothing, etc., were incorporated into the material of which the doll was made (power 1). Spit, therefore, on the first principle; image, on the second. See Rosetti's "Sister Helen" for a late hex poem; Sister Helen, in melting the wax doll she made on these principles, causes her victim to waste away.]

Spoof. A mild hoax or good-natured satire. [Spoof, name of a half-nonsensical, bluffing card game invented and popularized by English comedian Arthur Roberts (1852-1933), the name being his coinage. Give Roberts credit for an excellent ear: his coinage somehow manages to sound like what it means, and in being so accepted, it has survived to become a standard word in British and American English.

Aunt Ellie and the big questions

I owe at least some of my direction in life to one of my aunts. Her name was Eleanor Jannuzzi and she was a freethinker way before it was fashionable. Beautiful, funny and wildly intelligent, she was a painter, sculptor and interior designer -- and did all three while raising five small children. She's not alive today but her spirit lives on in me and many others.

My favorite memories of her come from when I was 11 or 12 years old. My family had moved to the braindead borough of Queens, much to my horror, while Ellie still lived in our old neighborhood in lower Manhattan. (And when I say "lower" Manhattan, I mean it. It's so low that no one knows it's there. Behind the Municipal building is an entire world known only to local residents. If you're a Manhattanite, walk through and check it out sometime. You may be surprised by what you find on the other side.)

Ellie was a lightning rod for me at a time when my almost-teenage mind was just waking up. I gravitated toward her for one reason: she was as interested as I was in the big questions: What is life? What is reality? And what the heck is really going on?

This was about 1959 or so, perhaps five or six years before the advent of hippies. Back then we had beatniks and I guess Aunt Ellie was one of them. Her black hair was very long, she had a permanent cigarette in her mouth and she dressed like a hippie before such creatures existed. Each day, she held court at her wonderfully messy apartment, welcoming anyone who stopped by. Her paintings were stacked along the walls and a paint-spattered easel always held her current work, though it would remain under a cloth until she was happy with it. Sketches, sticks of charcoal, tubes of paint, brushes and overfilled ashtrays were scattered throughout the apartment, and if she had been sculpting that day, there might be a bust drying out in a corner. It was such a friendly place to visit.

She always seemed to be creating, darting around in a sea of ideas and she would readily share her insights, always with laughter and kindness. You could see a vast intelligence peering out at the world through her eyes. She was fast, always taking in everything around her without missing a trick. She was life itself, bubbling over with creativity and happiness and her apartment was a grand place for a young person to visit.

Now and then she would invite fascinating, brilliant people over for a candle-lit evening of coffee, cigarettes and soaring conversation. I was only an occasional visitor at these events so when I was invited, I jumped at the opportunity. She would actually invite specific people because she knew I'd enjoy them. How many aunts would do such a thing for a 12-year-old? It was great. I'd hop on a subway and head for her apartment with two fresh packs of Pall Malls in my pocket, knowing I had a wild evening of philosophical conversation ahead. (Yes, I smoked a lot when I was 12; I've since stopped.)

It seemed the beatniks had all studied philosophy and we regularly discussed the greatest thinkers of all time. We went through them one by one. What did they believe? Did their arguments make sense to modern ears? We smoked and drank coffee and laughed and talked about everything in the universe, often into the wee hours of the morning. Ellie's kids were welcome at the table and sat with us at first. She would never push anyone away. If you were alive, you were welcome in her world. But after a time, the kids grew sleepy and retreated to their bedrooms. I had the opposite reaction: these evenings were like speed to me. I couldn't get enough.

We pondered the meaning of life and sharply questioned the accepted version of reality. Could we really trust our senses, our minds? And what is a mind, anyway? We didn't take anything at face value. And of course we wondered whether there could possibly be a god. Nope. 

To get a real sense of these evenings you have to understand that the beatnik thing wasn't a put-on. Sure everyone wore black; there was a union rule about that, or something. But it was serious business. In each beatnik there was a fierce drive, a pressure to understand it all -- right now, this very second. It wasn't comfortable being a beatnik. We (I included myself in their number after a time) were unsettled and suspicious, and rightly so, we believed.

Our discussions roamed everywhere. Nothing was sacrosanct. Could it be that we are all asleep and our existence is only a dream? Can we be sure that we have ever been awake? And if not, what might "waking up" mean in such a context? We talked about these things endlessly, intensely interested in the conversation. I was never bored.

Aunt Ellie wouldn't reveal my age to the others at the start of the evening because they might think I was too young for "serious" conversation. As long as they weren't told, they seemed to think I was in my late teens or early twenties, and accepted me. I was already 6'4" and looked nothing like a child at 12, especially since I was a heavy smoker.

At evening's end she would reveal the shocking secret: they had been talking to a 12-year-old all night. The beatniks would ooh and aah in wonder that they'd had such an involved conversation with a child. In other words, she was praising my intelligence to them. She was proud of me and she let me know it, publicly. She always did things like that, reinforcing the good in everyone around her. What a great person she was.

Sadly, no one seems to talk like this anymore except philosophy students and their teachers. From what I can see of the world from my present perch, most people no longer wonder about life's meaning. Apparently that is no longer an interesting question. They either hold tight to pinhead religious beliefs, refusing to think about anything at all, or they "think" but don't do it well and end up believing a lot of mush -- or at least saying that they do. These folks don't even know there are questions out there. It seems that only atheists, scientists, artists and liberals think anymore. It's quite sad.

Aunt Eleanor is gone now and as I've said, a lot of people miss her. I'm just one of many. It would have been great to continue our conversations down through the years. But her ripple effects are still felt by many people. I know because I hear from them all the time. She pointed me toward the interesting questions that eventually led to my having a richly satisfying mental life. I might have gone this route without her but she was kind enough to point the way. I will always be grateful for that.

Was there someone in your life who influenced your intellectual development in a positive way? Go ahead, give them some props in the comments.