Shanghai-ed by her Family

Mom once admitted in a moment of exasperation that she felt "shanghai-ed" into the move from her home to the retirement apartment at Merrill Gardens. I've never forgotten her use of this expression. At the time, I understood by context what she meant but it wasn't until this past weekend that I looked up the origin of the word.  Mary Margaret and I have had some interesting talks about Mom as we've worked like dogs sorting through all the treasures, family memorabilia, and outright junk at their former home this past week.  An emotional journey to be sure.

Right about now, I'm feeling a bit "shanghai-ed" myself. I don't relish another hard day at the task and would much rather lie in bed writing and reading and surfing the internet.

From on line Miriam Webster Dictionary:

Definition of SHANGHAI

transitive verb

1

a : to put aboard a ship by force often with the help of liquor or a drug b : to put by force or threat of force into or as if into a place of detention

2

: to put by trickery into an undesirable position

Origin of SHANGHAI

Shanghai, China; from the former use of this method to secure sailors for voyages to eastern Asia

First Known Use: 1871

"Giving Up the Ghost..."

While on the topic of alternates to the verb "to die"  (see yesterday's post), I remember Nora, our Caribbean housekeeper, nanny, and second-mother to me refer to death as "giving up the ghost". I thought it strange, asked her about it, and in typical fashion after ignoring my inquiries for a good long time, she eventually clued me in on the meaning of her words. She used many phrases unfamiliar to me; derived either from the Bible or her youthful days on the island of Carricaou. I took them all in but it would be years later that I'd understand their meaning.  So it is with "giving up the ghost".

No surprise; Nora's terminology came from the Bible. She was a deeply religious woman and I'd often find her reading the worn pages of my maternal grandmother's Bible (gifted to her by my mother which is a separate story). In the King James version of the Bible, "giving up the ghost" means: a dying breath and is found in both the Old and New Testaments.

I took the phrase about the ghost and incorporated it into my vocabulary, expanding the usage of the term to include the demise of inanimate objects like alarm clocks, radios, car batteries and the like when they'd go on the fritz or forever surrender function.  I remember my dear friend and college roommate, Ms. MBJ loving the phrase but never quite remembering it, referring to it as, "dropping the ghost" on more than one occasion. Good times, all.

Because synonyms for "to die" are as prevalent as synonyms for the jailhouse (see my recent post about Durrance Vile) and because I dearly love the particularly edgy expressions, I'll pour forth here.

Croaked
Bought  the farm
Bit the dust
Went belly up
Breathed his last (much like the ghost, no?)
Departed
Passed away, Passed on
Left us
Checked out
Bit the big one
Went to the happy hunting ground (one of Mom's favorites)
Pooped out
Shorted out

And, jillions of other terms; if you have any interest go here.

More on the term shorted out later; I'm just getting started. I love words.

"Can You Pack the TV in Your Suitcase?"

Last night at 10 PM I got a text message: "You still up?"

My response: "Yes, what's up?"

Then my cell rings and what transpired was at first incredulity (on my part) and then (sigh) my proverbial internal "Oy".

I sometimes wonder if I'm allowed (strong word when perhaps I mean is it OK?) to use the word "Oy" since I'm not of Jewish heritage. The problem is, there's often no better word for certain situations than one from the Yiddish dictionary. Does it count that I grew up with a copy of the The Joys of Yiddish by Leo Rosten on the family bookcase? Does it count that I attended college at Cornell and had mostly Jewish friends from the city who intrigued and imprinted my young brain with tales punctuated by all manner of wonderful, new words?  I used to dip into Rosten's book as a high school kid and then was fortunate to live the words in context via roommates, classmates, and boyfriends for four years of college. Nevertheless, I often feel out of place using Yiddish expressions because I'm so clearly, what my friends, back in the day called me: shiksa. That word is not exactly a compliment but in context was proclaimed in gentle jest. Years later, I  limit my Yiddish vocabulary  to one word, culled from the dozens of wonderful words, that I particularly love. That would be "Oy" because....well, it's just so perfect a word.

I digress. Back to the 10 PM telephone call last night....

She, on the phone, asks me: "When you come visit this weekend (I'm flying), could you pack the TV (a 26 inch flat screen high definition, perfectly flawless piece of equipment) in your checked luggage?" 

Huh?  WTF?

Granted, she has agreed to purchase this TV which we are no longer using. Granted, she would like to have the TV sooner than later. Granted, she suffers from the "need it now" gene that afflicts me and other loved ones in this family.

My response? I really can't remember exactly what I told her but I do remember my brain generating a one word response......"Oy"  and a probing question that was left unasked...."How many drinks have you guys had tonight?"

I didn't need to utter these words because she knew.  I knew she knew by the giggles, the fits of laughter, and the background laughter of her boyfriend. I think they'd had a few and were in the mood to prank Mom.

Gotcha, hon. At least you don't mind me blogging about you. XOX
 

Had to Buy a JawBone

Earlier this month, state law in Washington changed with regard to cell phone usage while driving. Get caught driving and texting and you'll be pulled over and fined. Get caught driving and using a cell phone without a hand's free device and you'll be pulled over and fined. $124 per offense. I'm all for the new law. Driving is hard enough without all the distractions inherent to cell phones, not to mention the radio, chit chatting with passengers, and (god forbid) stuffing our mouths with a meal on the road.

Denny bought me the perfect hand's free device last weekend and the name is delightful: JawBone. This is a word I use constantly in my everyday vocabulary; truly. Never used in the context of facial anatomy but as a verb, "to jawbone". I'm not exactly sure where it comes from. Wikipedia and Dictionary.com have no description of the word used as a verb except in the context of persuasion.

"The President jawboned the steel industry in to postponing price increases."

In my personal (weird) dictionary, to jawbone (often shortened to jaw) means to talk excessively, going on and on and on, embellishing. Sometimes good, sometimes annoying, the context will tell all.

But when I admit that I "got jawboned", I've been talked to death by someone over eager to tell me how the clock works when all I asked was for the time. LOL.

What's That Awful Smell?

What a relief! What I've got is parosmia, not phantosmia.

Say what? Come again? WTF? What craziness is this now?

It all started in mid August when I started smelling something awful in our house. I smelled it mostly on the main floor of the house; the kitchen, the hallway, the stairs leading up to the second level, and the foyer. The smell got worse daily and the fact that I could not track it down nor eliminate it even after laundering the kitchen rug, spritzing the air with Fabreeze mist, and washing all dirty clothes stacked up in the laundry chute was making me crazy. I began to worry as I am wont to do.

No one else was smelling this stench of rotten, old olives that greeted me every time I opened the door to my house, my haven, my palace, my solace. Not good.I was driving my nearest and dearest absolutely nuts with my woeful complaints because he could smell nothing amiss. And Laura, the only other resident in the house was rarely around long enough to question.

I continued to stew and worry. Worry because I knew from my medical school neurology days that one who smells odors that others do not may have a brain tumor or some other undesirable intra-cranial lesion accounting for the mixed up signals greeting the olfactory receptors in the brain. In years past, I was prone to having all the afflictions we studied in medical school; infected heart valves, aneurysms ready to burst, tumors of one type or another. I had them all until we moved on to study the next pathologic lesion. If I thought this tendency to panic had been quelled, I was obviously wrong. The more I smelled the rotten olives in my house and was reminded that "no one else can smell it, Kate", the crazier I felt.

Two weeks into this ordeal, feeling worsening nausea from the fumes, imagining the findings on my MRI of the brain (such drama!), I found myself in Laura's room helping her pack for school. Mind you, I hadn't been in her room in weeks (on purpose); leaving the laundry and daily cleanup to her. Her room smelled of rotten olives. I still couldn't put it all together until I spied a plug-in air freshener underneath her desk. Yanking it out of the wall, I took it apart and took a good, long whiff from the oily reservoir. Bingo. Praise God.

I was ecstatic to solve the mystery......after two weeks of convincing myself that I had phantosmia. Phantosmia is a worrisome symptom; the brain is fabricating smells that really are not there at all (phantom odors) and that's usually because something is not-so-good in the squash. On the other end of the spectrum, parosmia occurs when a legitimate smell is misinterpreted, usually in a negative sense. Glade's lovely Sweet Pea scented room freshener which all in this household thought quite lovely was absolute stench to me.

Turns out parosmia is a fairly common side effect of the medication I started for migraine prevention last month. Thank goodness this is the only thing that has smelled weird so far.

Reading the Dictionary

I don't know if it's the cold medicines (anti histamines, decongestants and the like) that I'm eating or just the state of my mind after lying in bed for two days with a miserable summer head cold but one thought seems to lead to another and to another. And, out of that mush, a new post is born. This one's about Reading the Dictionary, something I'll never do but something (certain) people consider from time to time and an even fewer actually do. But now I know of two that have.

Denny just returned from a 3 day trip to Washington's coastal town of Ocean Shores where he spent a few relaxing days alone, walking the beach and unwinding from the traumas of the last few months (Law School graduation, the Bar Exam etc). Musing about Ocean Shores took me back to early April 2002 when D, Laura and I spent a few days in that same motel, right on the beach over Spring Break. Chris was off to Tijuana, Mexico on a school mission trip, painting houses so it was just the three of us on that little adventure to the coast.

I remember lots of little things about that trip to Ocean Shores, snippets mostly. We went into the deserted Visitor's Center and were the only people in there at the time. The guy in charge, either bored, or weird, or a little of both struck up a conversation with Laura. He asked her about school, what grade she was in (8th at the time), and then asked what she was planning to do with her life. Huh? This seemed like an odd question for a random person working in a visitor's center to ask my daughter. My ears perked up a bit but I just listened to their conversation. It went something like this.

"My son, he's a really smart kid. He did really well on his SATs and he's now a...." (something or other; that part I've since forgotten).

"He had his pick of colleges with those SAT scores; 750 on the Verbal", he boasted.

I don't think Laura had even heard of the SATs back then. The guy wouldn't quit with his chattering, hoping to keep Laura's attention and perhaps lend a bit of advice. Meanwhile I kept listening while pouring over pamphlets and other "stuff" looking for activities that might keep us entertained in sleepy Ocean Shores.

"If you want to score really high on the SAT Verbal, you can do one thing that will really pay off. You can read the dictionary, yeah.....I mean, really sit down with the dictionary, the big one, and read it faithfully, day after day as much as you can. You'll get really, really smart that way."

Laura wasn't the least bit interested but smiled politely and said, "Oh, ok."

Hmmm, I thought. Reading the dictionary. That's probably not a bad idea. Tedious work but an interesting thought. Doing so wouldn't have been Laura's thing but maybe there are kids out there that might. All this good advice on getting smart and scoring big on the SATs from a guy working in the Visitor's Center in Ocean Shores? Whoa.

Well now, where is my drug saturated mind going with all this? It all started with Denny's return from Ocean Shores and morphed into memories of our first trip there with this guy rambling on about reading the dictionary and then I opened my email to find the preview of the NY Times Book Review for this week featuring a new book called,"Reading the OED: One Man, One Year 21, 730 Pages". This guy (aka author), Ammon Shea, apparently did just that; read the entire Oxford English Dictionary and wrote about his experience. He had already read Webster's Second back in the 1990's (Might he be the son of the guy in Ocean Shores? I'm clearly losing my marbles here) but the OED was obviously a much bigger challenge. The book review is fascinating reading.

I don't think I'll be reading the dictionary anytime soon but learning about words like diepnophobia, the fear of dinner parties, may have some personal relevance. Had I known about reading the dictionary, I might have scored higher on my verbal SAT way back when. Do I have a point with this post? Not really. I'm just feeling mildly ADD, jumping from loosely linked topic to topic and burning time, trying to get over this cruddy upper respiratory thing. The book looks very interesting though and I put it on my library hold list.

** photo used with permission of author, Ammon Shea. Thanks!
*** It amazes me that I can email the author and get a response within an hour! He sounds really cool, this guy Ammon.

H.D.M.

One of my favorite phrases describes my physical and mental body perfectly today: "hammered dog meat". People always gasp and then laugh when I say this. I usually end up prefacing my remark with "as we say in Texas, I feel like"........hammered dog meat although I don't really know the origin of this expression. Seems as though Denny and I picked it up when we lived in Houston; perhaps we heard it come out of the mouth of infamous trauma surgeon "Red Duke" at Hermann Hospital during our training days. No offense to dogs (I love them) but somehow hammered any-other-meat just doesn't convey the meaning quite as well.

I have not slept well for three days. Last night there was a drive back into the hospital (rarely happens) to supervise an urgent dialysis which got me back home around 1:30 AM. I'm way too old for these hours and no amount of caffeine provided the beneficial effect that yesterday's jolt gave me. I'm fuzzy, frazzled and restless. But, the good news is that I'm off work until late March; between a few vacation days and my knee surgery, there will be a break from the work routine. Certainly other "stuff" will fill in the time but tending to kidneys won't.

As for "hammered dog meat", let it just stand as it is; an exhaustion beyond the usual, enough to qualify me as road kill. One good night's rest and I'll likely be good as new, like the cartoon characters who get flattened by the steam roller and "poof", appear lively and rejuvenated in the next frame.

Personal Dictionary

I've decided to create a new category of blog posts....."Dictionary". There are so many words that we've "invented" over the years; some of them are legitimate words or phrases but with new meanings and some are words we have created, our own family language perhaps. I believe that most of these terms derive from my messed up mind and have therefore populated the vocabulary of my nuclear family. I'll take the credit and the heat for the craziness. But, Miss Laura is not far behind.

Dictionary posts will define these words/phrases to the best of my ability with examples of how they are used in common, everyday communication in this family. Sometimes they spill over into the extended family but most of the time they remain the domain of the four of us: Denny, Kate, Chris and Laura. They are fabulous (in my opinion) and so they are fodder for the creative. It may get you thinking about what new words you've created over the years that aren't in the dictionary.

Trailer:
Ever heard of a "keek"?
What are the other meanings associated with the term "short out"?
"Geeze out"?
Getting "balded"?
Being plagued by "konks"?
Hinojosa?

I know Laura is following in my footsteps, especially with her famous work on the word "beast". Although a noun in the conventional sense, it is at once an adjective (Laura's addition) and a verb (my work). This is the beauty of it all; words becoming all they can be in the infinite, ofttimes playful language that we all create from the mother tongue.

Too heady for you? Relax. Let's explore.