Rudyard?

A medical day for us had me sitting in the doctor’s waiting room—just observing. The procedure is that you sign in. That involves handing over, every time, one’s driver’s license and insurance card. These are Xeroxed, every time, and filed away. Then, having signed the sign-in sheet, one settles facing a translucent but still opaque glass door where the nurse will appear. When the nurse approaches from the other side, her shadow provides a welcome heads-up. The door then opens and one sees one of five or six different nurses, differently attired but each in uniform, and each is holding a clipboard. This is a large practice. Finally the nurse looks out over the waiting figures and says: “Annemarie?” “Lisa?” “Frederick?” — or something along those lines. After the nurse came and called “Brigitte?” I was left alone. The odd thought then occurred to me. You explain how such thoughts rise. It occurred to me that if Mr. Kipling had been an American and would have needed to visit our Dr. Larose, he would have signed in, would have been carded, and after a reasonable wait, the nurse appearing, as shadow, then as image, would have looked out over those waiting and would have called out: “Rudyard?”

The Taxi Mom

Peggy and Baldy, on a recent trip to Europe, rounded out their trip with a visit to Baden Baden, our last residence in Germany before we went (as I then naively imagined) to the Land of the Cowboys. They observed, among many other things, grade-school children going home—and not a Mom in sight. Okay. Check. That hasn’t changed. Indeed in the Land of the Cowboys it was pretty much the same when we arrived—except that we saw a huge amount of neon but no cowboys at all. In 1951 the past-3:00 p.m. traffic jams (middle schools let out at 3:17, elementary at 3:38) were still in the future; suburbia still in the womb. Now that school has started here, its time to re-adapt. Congestion of certain busy arteries is now in force as the latest in fancy SUVs stand in endlessly long rows—so that children actually must walk, sometimes a whole (shudder) block, to find Mom staring at her smartphone behind the wheel. The curious thing is that quite a few children still do walk, both to and also from school. Significant distances. I know. I’ve observed them. Have not yet changed the times of my walks—which give me views of about six schools of various gradation. And some may also be found waiting for the bus, believe it or not, the Municipal, not the Yellow kind. “Soccer Mom” has gone out of style; I don’t hear the phrase used nowadays. It needs a replacement. “Taxi Mom,” however, is sort of a perennial.

Peggy and Baldy? Peggy Jenkins married Boldizsár (Balthazar) Darnay, my brother. And in the Land of the Cowboys this man, with plenty of healthy hair all over his head, got renamed gradually. Balthazar was too difficult for the products of our vaunted educational system. It didn’t help exactly that we in the family, products of the vaunted European educational system, had trouble enough with Boldizsár ourselves so that we called him Boldi long before we arrived. Baldy and I both have odd first names. Arsen? The name was far too long for one of our friends going back a ways. She always called me Arse.

What’s in a Name?

Looking up some statistics concerning Egypt this morning, which I’ve put up on LaMarotte here, I came across a fascinating discussion of the country’s name on Wikipedia. That got me to looking elsewhere as well. In the midst of my researches, I received a comment on my LaMarotte entry. Trying to discover the roots of that name takes one way, way back into the past, but the comment tipped me into the current moment again—and suggested this post. More on that comment at the end.

The people of Egypt, I learned, originally called their country Kemet or Kermet meaning Black Land; they had the rich Nile-fertilized fringes of the river in mind, of course. Another name, also appropriately grounded in experience, was Dershet, meaning Red Land—by which the inhabitants had in mind the vast rest of arid Egypt. In course of this excursion I also discovered that the region owed its development to climate change anciently. It pushed herding peoples south and east as the Sahara region dried out and became a desert around about 3400 BC.

The actual name of, Egypt, was originally associated with the city we now call Memphis. Its name was Hwt-Ka-Ptah, meaning the Temple of the Ka of Ptah. Other renditions of this name are Ha(t)-ka-Ptah, Hikupta, and, in late Egyptian E-Ka-Ptah, Linguists tell me that the hard consonants in this name, k, p, t were modified into q, p, t and eventually g, p, and t. The Greeks, who traded on the Nile a great deal, came to speak of Memphis as of Egypt, and they rendered the name into Aigyptos—which is the name that appears in Homer’s Odyssey. The Romans, who in most cultural ways aped everything Greek, rendered that as Aegyptvs. From there it got transformed, in French, into Egypte, and in Old English into Egipte.

Now in the Bible Egypt is referred to as Mizraim, who was the son of Ham and, by extension, the land of the son of Ham. Today’s Egyptians call their country using the Arab word Misr. It simply means “country.” Misr itself is thought to be of Hebraic derivation.

To this I might add that Ptah was the creator god of people who lived anciently in today’s Memphis. The word ka means soul. The Temple of the Ka of Ptah is thus the Residence of the Soul of God—so highly did the inhabitants of that city think of Memphis on the waters of the Nile: nothing but desert to the west. To see how little water Egypt has, check out the stats on LaMarotte.

Finally the comment. It came from Michelle in France this morning. She said: “Did you know the word Egypt is no longer available on Chinese search motors for fear of extension of the revolutionary energy?” Interesting! Well, I thought. I think I’ll give the Chinese a few other names to search on.

The Times, the Names…

In an e-mail comment on the last post, Michelle (la sage-femme and funny ghost-writer of Pontoon Pirates) had this to say among other things:

Just for fun : in Paris there are two streets like Die Grosse and Die Kleine Freiheit. They are rue de la Grande Truanderie and rue de la Petite Truanderie in the 1st arrondissement. They, like rue de la Brèche-aux-Loups in the 12th and rue de La Grange-aux-Belles in the 10th, have often made me wonder dreamily where those names came from... Much more inspirational than Main street, no? But Grand rue also exists in France, in Etueffont as a matter of fact.

Wonderful. A truanderie is a swindle. Next we have “the Breach of the Wolves,” thereafter the “Barn of the Beauties.” Now concerning the wolves, I wonder if the original name referred to a huge or an especially wide breach or opening, this because in French wolf is also used as a word of emphasis. In that language, like in English, you’re hungry as a wolf; but in France you can also be cold as a wolf.

Michelle also commented on the dissonance that sometimes appears between the cover and the content when the intention is to-draw-attention-for-profit. She comments on the three book covers I’ve trotted out in the last few days:

Those covers look great today, don’t they? Vintage 1970s sci-fi creativeness! I remember thinking, back then, that they were, how shall I put it, a bit loud for my taste and mostly not at ALL what I had imagined when hearing the books [read out loud]. Those brash, colorful covers were light-years away from Darnay genes. Strange, huh?

This reminds me of a true story told by Idries Shah regarding his forays into publishing Sufi materials to a western audience. Shah’s writings have been very successful, but not so in the beginning. His first books had very formal and scholarly covers; they were intended for a scholarly audience. Sales were nil. Shah then had the covers changed; now they were vivid, colorful, and showed intriguing, romantic images. Sales—still from the scholarly community, first targeted in mailings—suddenlyshot up. And then stayed up thereafter.

Does that suggest that I should to change the cover of Ghulf Genes (the novel)? A gyrating belly-dancer? A Conan-like muscle-bound half-naked hunk charging a monster?

What’s in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet.

Smell? You’re right enough about the smell, Bill, but I was talking about sell. Get it? Sell!