Twenty English words: fall

Another fine simple English word, tracing itself through ME (Middle English) and OE (Old English) to G (German) and IE (Indo-European), -- a word which has only ever meant itself. Fallen, feallan, "to fall," fallen, "from the Indo-European base phol-, to fall." It has twenty-two definitions as a verb and twenty-one as a noun, of which "the season when leaves fall -- autumn" is the twelfth. Curiously, autumn comes from ME also, autompne, a sport thrown off like a rose branch (roses do this, I think) from OFr. (Old French) autompne, the ultimate derivation being from the Latin auctumnus, "prob. Etruscan." I like that. The Etruscans knew what we know.

A story: On the way upstairs after taking my old shoes out to the garbage yesterday, I met the neighbors on the second floor landing. There had been a party of three on the third floor balcony, I had heard the goodbyes. "Love you. Love you always. He'll help you down the stairs." Husband, wife, and woman friend who lives on the ground floor. She dresses in gauzy black with carved brown boots and silver jewelry, and wears her blonde hair up in a messy bun. 

"Do you have that expensive little blue sports car?" she asked me now.

"Yes...."

"Nancy, this is Sue," the man said, and I squeezed in "We've met" -- we had, in the laundry room months before, and subsequently when she has held the door for me occasionally -- while Sue kept talking.

"I was accosted in the parking lot yesterday. It was yesterday morning. A man pulled up next to me as I was parking my car, and he said, 'Hello?'

"Really?" I was distracted by wanting to get home and by her plunging black gauze neckline and the row of little crucifixes dangling off the black lace ribbon around her throat. And the gray roots.

"And then I drove to the Seven Eleven and he followed me. And he got out of his car and he said, 'Did you not hear me say "hello"?' "

"One knee up," the neighbor man said, and Sue said, "What?"

He raised his knee, as if to show how to injure a man. "Or do you have a whistle?"

"No."

"Do you?" He looked at me.

"I'm afraid not." By this time I had gone halfway up the next flight of steps. "A whistle," he went on, "a phone call. Anything. If you need anything, just call."

"And I thought, you effer -- I was thinking of all the profanity I could -- "

"Be safe. Be safe, be safe, be safe."

"And then I drove home, and I looked in my rearview mirror and he wasn't following me." 

"Be safe."

"Okay." I reached the landing and looked back as they walked on down the steps, her hand on his arm. "He's like my brother," Sue was saying.

A comment: Pay attention to the wisdom of old ladies. It may be deep in human nature to do so, though sometimes we resent that they know more, for no apparent reason, than we do. Consider how often blunt old ladies are the most interesting and refreshing characters in fiction and film. Miss Marple. Lady Grantham. Think of a few of your own.

Interesting, refreshing, but sometimes disheartening, too. When I was thirteen I sneered privately at my grandmother when she pronounced, "Morals are morals." So hidebound and judgmental, I thought. Of course it turns out she was right. Eight years ago, for her part my mother knew that Barack Obama would be elected president, and said so long before pundits had even begun to hash through all the political possibilities. "I think there's no question," she said. With saddened frustration.

Now she says Hillary Clinton will be the next president. "I think it's inevitable. There is no one else." I can't decide whether she's probably right given her track record and her participation in the wisdom of old ladies, or whether she is -- so far -- only demonstrating what an old-fashioned voter with no computer and no access to the new media still "knows." "Who do the Republicans have?" she asks. "There's no one." In fact there are quite a few, but local television news and the Chicago Tribune apparently don't say much about them. As far as Benghazi is concerned, "Why do they keep going after Hillary about this Benghazi?" she asks. "Why don't they go after her about something else?"

Such as? Is there a choice among Hillary scandals? As it happens, yes. However, my mother has also severed all contact with the Tribune, because she was outraged by the paper's new method of getting subscribers, so if They do go after Her for something else, she may not know much about it. The Tribune launched a customer subscription campaign by which, if you agreed to take delivery of eight weeks of the Sunday paper for free, you would then be billed for continued delivery of the paper beginning with the ninth week. Unless you troubled to call them and opt out. "That's terrible!" she said. "I have to call them to cancel?!"

"I've heard of that," I began to say. "It's the new thing. There's a word for it ...."

"Fraud?"

"No, there's a word for when you have to opt out of things. Like, you're already an organ donor through having a driver's license, unless you opt out. Obama wants this so the government has more control of everything, figuring people are not going to bother insisting they not do something. I forget what it's called. It's psychological. Prompting ... trending. Nudging! That's it. Nudging."

"It's terrible. I got my book and a chair, and I called the Tribune because I was determined to cancel this thing. I knew it would take forever. And do you know how long I was on the phone?"

"How long?"

"Twenty-five minutes. On hold. I read an entire chapter of my book. Finally I got 'Henry' -- he was probably Mohammed -- and I said to him to cancel that paper. I will never look at the Tribune again. And he started to tell me maybe I should continue to get it and what a great deal it was, and I said, 'I do not want this and I have been on hold for twenty five minutes waiting to speak to someone because I had to call you to not get this paper. I do not want it.' So then he began to back down." 

We talked about more than that, of course. We talked about up and coming generations too loaded with student debt to buy homes or raise families, and about granddaughters in their thirties, unmarried, who are beginning to think they might want a baby after all. We talked about the days when she and her teenaged girlfriends could walk home from the movies in downtown Chicago, at night, "and not think anything of it. I don't know if we were naive or if things were just different. But," a sharp, determined eye here -- "I think they were different."

Pay attention to old ladies. Though perhaps not always fair with Henry, they hail meaningfully, by definition, from an era before "nudging."   
   

Twenty English words -- apple

The word apple is not on our original list, but we pursue its definition anyway because we have just learned how to drop a slice of apple into a gin sour, and then how, after dinner, to eat the rest of the apple for dessert alongside a tiny, tiny glass of tangy and half-sweet Madeira.

Apples and gin and Madeira. They seem so English, so colonial, so all-around-sturdy 18th century, don't they? It tempts us to set Pandora to harpsichord music -- "dainty Scarlatti," as Lucia would say -- and then to admire the Duchess of Northumberland's witnessing of the royal table, circa 1761. The king was the not quite twenty-three-year-old George III. (Our own George Washington was a young buck of twenty-nine.) The Dss. witnessed mostly meat, meat, and more meat.

Their Majestys constant Table at this Time was as follows, a soup removed with a large Joynt of Meat and two other Dish such as a Pye or a broyl'd fowl and the like. On the side table was a large Joynt, for example, a large Sirloin of Beef Cold and also a Boars Head and a Sallad; 2nd Course always one Roast, one of pastry and Spinage and Sweetbreads, Macaron, Scollopt Oysters or the like. Their Supper consists of two made Dishes usually composed of Poultry as Chickens, smore Turkey a la Bachomel, a Joynt of Cold Mutton, Buttered Eggs, Custard and constantly Veal and Chicken Broth.

Tucked in amid the meats, she saw also custards, broths, "Bachomel" -- bechamel sauce, probably? -- macaroni, butter, eggs. In other words she saw many things creamy and sweet-soft. Perhaps the 18th-century table still reflected the middle ages' enjoyment of pappy foods as a counter to salted meats and fish; note their Majestys eat not a single piscine creature in April 1761. Lent was over, Easter had fallen on March 22 and everyone was very likely still heartily sick of fish. Perhaps also, among those Joynts, the soupy, custardy spoonfuls represented not just a medieval carryover but a (time-honored) relief to weak teeth.

In any case I think food historians and cookbook writers have noticed, when it comes to old menus like this, that our not-too-distant ancestors either did not serve fresh vegetables much, or if they did so, chroniclers considered it too insignificant to mention. Or did royalty not deign to sup on cabbages at all, for instance? In the duchess' paragraph, above, nothing green is to be imagined except "Spinage" and "a Sallad," and even the spinach sounds as if it was part of a "made dish" with the pastry and sweetbreads. Another pye, maybe.

Fruits make as little an appearance as vegetables. Yet Harold McGee in On Food and Cooking (Scribner, 1984, 2004) says that the Western world has been eating fruit for dessert since antiquity. Apples, pears, cherries, grapes, figs, dates, and strawberries were all "Mediterranean natives, used BCE," he writes (p. 250). I google "English apple" and I find a list of seven just to start with. One variety is called the Codlin, used in a famed baked dish called Codlins and Cream. This instantly sounds lusciously 18th century, but the name now seems to have been bizarrely given over to a purple hairy-stemmed wasteground and swamp flower, Epilobium hirsutum. Nice people in rural Wales who call a blog Codlins and Cream show the flower, not the apple treat, as a header photo. Or used to. Coincidentally she had problems with Blogger, too, and had to reboot -- Codlins and Cream 2, why didn't I think of At First Glass 2? -- and to hope that people re-find her.

Meanwhile, Karen Hess in her great redaction Martha Washington's Booke of Cookery (Columbia University, 1981, 1995), explains briefly that the codling apple, hard, tart, and fit only for cooking, was known at least from medieval times and that its middle English name, querdelynge, may come from quert, "meaning sound or hard" (p. 95, the pertinent recipe being "to make a codling tarte eyther to looke clear or greene"). She thinks the word has nothing to do with codling, the fish, even though the codling apple is rather elongated (fish-like?) in shape .... All in all one hopes that Majesty, or anyone, might have savored once in a while simply a nice sweet apple, with a glass of Madeira.

We return to the second of our twenty English words: apple. Webster's: "from the Middle and Old English appel, meaning fruit, apple" -- I love words that only ever meant themselves -- "eyeball, or anything round; akin to the the Old Irish aball, meaning apple tree, and to the Latin Abella, 'the name of a Campanian town.' " No really? Why would ancient Irish, Latin, and English words all have to do with a fruit, the eyeball, and a town? Is the town the modern Avellino, in a southern Italian subregion of Campania that I'll wager we've never heard of? -- Irpinia? Italian travel websites make the legendary "green Irpinia" sound exquisite. They tell us,

It is best discovered gradually, on a journey through the wilderness that whispers of ancient times, when this land was inhabited by Samnites, Romans and Longobards. Ancient villages are nestled in the green of the valleys that begin at the feet of the Partenio and Terminio Mountains, covered by beech, fir, oak and chestnut. In addition to the archaeological sites, massive castles recall not only wars and plundering, sieges and battles, but also celebrations and elegant courts.

Exquisite. If ever I travel, I want to go to the little obscure places like this. I intend no slur. Since the point of travel is evidently to go and look at people who are home, why not do it wholly, and go see places where the people's home life is presumably not much disturbed by the surreality of visitors anyway? Rural West Wales. Irpinia. And, getting back to apple (again), why doesn't our standby Doctor Johnson know much more than we do? He says only that apple, from the Saxon æppel, is 1. the fruit of the apple tree [Pope's Odyssey], and 2. the pupil of the eye [Deuteronomy 32:10]. That "the apple of one's eye" should mean a favorite, and the aperture at the center of the eye literally, and should have links also to schoolchild, and little doll (pupilla), and the reflection of oneself that one can see in another person's eye -- itself akin to the Hebrew idiom "little man of the eye," which is what Deuteronomy actually says, not tapu'ach, apple -- all this constitutes some interior traveling which we will leave for another day.

Image from lifeinitaly.com

Amateur Tudors

2013 Jaffurs Petite Sirah, Thompson vineyard. Fresh Blackberry and blueberry fruit, compared to the brawny pepperiness of Jaffurs' Syrah (not pictured and also very good). Retail, about $40.

I was going to tell a story of a mistake I found on a Tudor history fascination blog, but on reading it over, it seemed snarky and unworthy of me. This is what I was going to say:

There is a very nice website, going great guns since 2009, called The Anne Boleyn Files. My fatheads know how I feel about the Tudors. And I respect people who say Hang it all, it may be unserious and much-too-well-trodden ground, but this is my passion and I am going to indulge it. Claire Ridgway says so, in her About page. She built an audience (I daresay mostly women) plus an online magazine, and recruits professionals (mostly women) to contribute to that. 

Or does she? Recruit professionals, I mean. Would a professional's work compel me to leave this comment, on Tudor Life's October issue page, following an article about Saint Edmund Campion? 

I did enjoy Beth von Staats' "Commoners of the English Reformation," but you'll want to proof her grammar, won't you? Five times at least she invents the word "reclusants" to mean Roman Catholics who opposed the Church of England. "Reclusant" sounds like "recluse," one who hides, so perhaps that is the origin of her mistake. The word surely is "recusant," from the Latin, to refuse or pretend [a cause]. 

I felt compelled. Amateur or professional, who spends lifetimes mooning over Tudor history without encountering the word recusant? 

But, no matter. It's a fine site and they give away Tudor fridge magnets with membership in the Society. You can even go there to order a good looking "Tudor Year" 2016 calendar! I can be generous. It's probably better than mine.   

Playground -- with Chateau d'Armailhac

Before we start: note the great interview with Matt Drudge, on the demoralizing effects of Facebook and YouTube ('I'll never have 2 billion followers'), on the fact that the internet itself means we will always have documentary evidence of free speech in "former" ages, and on the need for all of us to leave behind the "ghettoes" of comment sections anywhere, and treat the internet as the vibrant, controversial maelstrom-playground it ought to be. "Make your own playground."

Okay. I always like to listen to shrewd men, who made real changes in the world, speak on matters both within and without their fields of endeavor. "The reality of the situation is life on Earth has not changed. We need facts; we need events; we need specifics on things."

"Not all this confusion," Drudge goes on to say, although I differ with him there. Some confusion is good. In the public square it can mean that many ideas are on offer and everyone feels free to speak his mind. Far better that than to live the gently firm but gently ghastly lyrics of, for example, John Lennon's "Imagine," when "the wo-o-o-orld will live as one." Or else, one presumes.
  

Above, 2012 Chateau d'Armailhac, Pauillac (a subsection of Bordeaux); as the back label explains -- in French, which we will try to tease out -- Chateau d'Armailhac traces its origins to an 18th century family named Armailhacq (and we love the extra q, it looks somehow so medieval or Celtic), neighbors to Chateau Mouton Rothschild. In the famed Bordeaux classification of 1855, the Armailhacqs' "Chateau Mouton d'Armailhacq" earned "fifth-growth" status, which is to say, it was deemed one of only 18 chateaux, out of thousands in Bordeaux, excellent enough to warrant reckoning even among the fifth and last of the five groups classified. The upper four "crus," or growths, in ascending order, each included only ten, fourteen, fifteen, and four chateaux respectively.

Among the fifteen "second growth" chateaux was that neighbor of Armailhacq's, Mouton Rothschild. This latter has been the only chateau whose original classification was ever changed. In the 1920s the legendary Baron Phillippe de Rothschild took over his family's property and began, among other innovations, his lifelong campaign to persuade the French government to promote Mouton Rothschild from second- to first-growth status, a rank he thought it had always deserved. A decree was at last signed by the then minister of agriculture, Jacques Chirac, in 1973. So, wine books that give you easy-to-read charts of the 1855 Bordeaux classification will list fourteen "second growths" and five "first growths," to reflect Mouton Rothschild's unique promotion.

Along the way, Baron Phillippe also bought out two of his neighbors, our Armailhac (no q) in 1933, and Chateau Clerc-Milon in 1970. By the 1950s, our wine was called "Chateau Mouton Baron Phillippe," and then from 1975 to 1988, "Mouton Baronne Phillippe." Note the change in gender, from Baron to Baronne. One presumes this honors M. le Baron's wife, Pauline -- Madame la Baronne, "Mrs. Phillippe" you might say -- since his almost equally legendary daughter, also a baroness and also taking her turn as the chateau's director, was Phillippine.  In any case in 1989, the wine was rechristened as we see it: Chateau d'Armailhac.

But have you tasted it? I have, now. I will go out on a limb and try to make judgements about a cinquieme cru, fifth growth Bordeaux, not because I have so much experience of sampling these wines and therefore know what I'm talking about, but because the wine seems so assertive that it's almost impossible for anyone to misread. It would be like misreading Donald Trump. Barons and baronnes will be horrified at the analogy, but there it is. You don't have to have a wide experience of financiers/property developers/television stars/presidential candidates to decide what Donald Trump is saying and doing. It's the same with Chateau d'Armailhac. I can tell you, even though I've never deliberately cellared a wine in my life unless you count the bottle of Fenn Valley Capriccio that I neglected for a year and just opened a week ago (an aged Michigan chambourcin! Not bad. Not a lot different, and no worse than, many a simple, berry-like Italian ten-dollar red) -- I can tell you, I say, that today's Chateau d'A. is going to be excellent, -- perhaps in five years, or ten. But I can tell you it is far too young and leathery to be enjoyed now. The opening whiff above that inky-black pool in the glass, of barnyard, barnyard, and more barnyard, and we don't mean in a bad way, tells you that. Plan to have it with beef, garlic, and acorn squash on a fine autumn day in 2025.

Retail, about $50. 

Twenty English words: starting with pink

It may have been some novelist -- or it may have been me -- who said during a moment of self awareness 'he had only ever really been interested in two things, the English language and, at a distance, people.'

The part about the English language certainly applies. Remember when we discovered truth trees, and wondered about the etymology of those two words -- remember we imagined the day and the scene when the words might have taken on their meanings, when some Oog the caveman thumped a tree and made some pronouncement that he said was as firm as this? When languages develop, surely some one person, Oog perhaps or some modern engineer, has to be the first to speak a particular sound to mean a particular thing. And it sticks. "Sky." "Email." Like Adam naming the animals.

The etymologies of very basic words have always intrigued me too, ever since I learned how often it's the vital simple words, so alike in modern languages, that are traceable to an Indo-European root, or sometimes two or three weirdly corresponding roots. Like truth and tree. (It seems one must nod here to Sir William Jones, 18th century philologist, who suggested the existence of Indo European, this lost ancestral tongue.) Mother, father, cow, heart, winter (from the same base as water, or to make wet), wolf. All the numbers, one through ten. It's pleasant to think that, once upon a time, our ancestors lived together long enough, somewhere in the Caspian grasslands, for Oog's decisions on words like these to stick. Then we split up, and we became Goths or Hittites or whatever, and began calling less vital, primeval things by culture-specific names. Glass, painting, butter dish. Like the Tower of Babel.

Anyway when you look up any word, a dictionary which includes etymology will cram into the space between the parentheses all sorts of abbreviations. They work backwards in time. They go from OE, say (Old English), to G (Gothic) to OHG (Old High Germanic) to L (Latin) to Gr. (Greek) and often to IE (guess), sprinkling in also the symbol <. It means "derived from." Sometimes it's <?. That's intriguing, too. How can a word be used and spoken despite its basics being utterly unknown? Once only I happened to find a word of no derivation and having "no cognates in any other language." I presume others exist, but this one happened to be toad. Old English, all the way. It only ever meant toad.

So I thought I would devise a new project, called Twenty English Words. Let's look them up. These are the first twenty that came to mind, either randomly or because I thought they might prove simple enough to have deeps and cataracts in their background. Or possibly I was hungry.

pink                                                            book
butter                                                          bread
rice                                                             water
milk                                                            cat
lemon                                                          chair
garlic                                                          lamp
cream                                                         daughter
thyme                                                         son
cup                                                             moon
peach                                                           sky

First on the list for research is 'pink.' I look it up, and what do I learn?

[<?]

No origin, no derivation, no etymology. Of course the word has definitions. It is a flower of the carnation family, a "pale red" color, it's a verb meaning to cut a cloth with a jagged scissors (a pinking shears) so that the hem will not unravel, and more. But why does the sound pink mean all these things, and why does no one know why? For heaven's sake, we seem to know shoe and sky are related ("a covering"), as are mouse and muscle (<L. musculus, little mouse, "from the fancied resemblance between the movements of a mouse and a muscle," and I am not making that up). But pink is a [<?] mystery.

When my Webster's fails me I turn to the great hero of lovers of English words, outranking even the good Sir William Jones by far I should think, and that is Samuel Johnson. It is amazing how in his Dictionary he can still fill in gaps. And he supports every definition with usage in literature; even my abridged facsimile-presentation copy crams in the explanatory annotation "-Shakespeare" or "-Dryden" with every entry. The full, original edition (1755), which scholars in BBC films are permitted to look at but not touch, includes appropriate lines from this play or poem or that. By contrast when modern dictionaries tell us shoe and sky both have to do with "a covering," we must take them at their word.

Here is Johnson's (abridged) pink.

PINK, n.s [pink, Dutch]. A small fragrant flower of the gilliflower kind. Bacon. An eye; commonly a small eye; as, pink-eyed. Shakesp. Any thing supremely excellent. Ibid. A colour used by painters. Dryden. [Pinche, Danish; pinque, Fr.] A kind of heavy, narrow-sterned ship; hence the sea-term pink-sterned. Shakespeare. A fish -- the minnow. Ainsworth.

The full dictionary entry, to be found online here and what a very honorable project it was of one Brandi Besalke to scan the two original volumes in their entirety and put them there, carries on. We learn it's in Romeo and Juliet that Johnson found pink to mean 'supremely excellent' -- "I am the very pink of courtesy" -- though Johnson allows "I know not whether from the flower or the eye, or a corruption of pinacle."

I know not, either. What a nice coincidence that we also recently embarked on our project of a line of Shakespeare a day, because affectation is fun. In thumbing through the Bard, we are doing a little of what the Great Cham (Johnson) did. The BBC scholars tell us that he did not think of a word, and then painstakingly consult literature to descry usage; he browsed literature, found usage, and then assembled the word list.



"...Commanded by such poor passion as the maid that milks." Antony and Cleopatra, IV, xv.

 

"Not fizzy enough"

Late in the workday.

Customer return.

"Not fizzy enough."

What do you think of this? 

We pour a little into a plastic cup. I sniff.

Wow. Biscuits and almonds, and toast. Fizz up your nose.

I sip. Bubbly, satiny, golden. Fruit metaphors pale to uselessness. The fruit of the tree of the garden of Eden, perhaps.

My, that's good. What are people thinking?

They don't know what they're buying. We'll see if we can get this capped up and you can take it home. Try to get a replacement for it.

Okay then. And thank you.

When I get it home I peer into the dark bottle with the oddly thin neck and realize it's half full. So the complaining customer sampled quite a bit before deciding it wouldn't do.

I take out a champagne flute, peer at that to make sure it's clean, and pour in Gosset Brut Grande Reserve. Nose in the glass, sip-and-savor routine. Think. Assess. But it's so enjoyable it seems beyond mere description. You just have to close your eyes in bliss and laugh. Doesn't matter that no one's watching. Wouldn't matter if anyone was.

Research: Gosset. Oldest Champagne house of all, founded in Ay in 1584. (Now the French were not Tudors, but the Tudor history geek in all of us rises up with a yelp at that year. Wow! Four years before Armada. Queen Elizabeth was fifty-one. Shakespeare was twenty. And so on. The French Renaissance, same time, was an entirely different matter. There's a gaminess to it. Wine goblets carved with erotic scenes at the bottom, so that maids-of-honors' reactions could be judged as they drained the cup at banquets -- younger royal sons raised as girls so they wouldn't be a threat to the heir -- the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre. And so on.) Chardonnay, pinot noir, pinot meunier. No malolactic fermentation permitted, which means the tart malic (green apple-ish) acids in the grapes do not transmute into softer lactic (milk-like) acids. Which means, if you think you taste creaminess, you are likely mistaken, or need to work on your rhetoric, or both. I've seen "baroque" offered up for Gosset, but what does that mean? Solitary blissful laughter, and gold bubbles?

Retail, about $70. Maybe it means that.

Psst. One tiny, tiny thing. It did kind of go flat in the glass pretty quickly. Like, in ten minutes. Is that secretly a sign of legendary quality?

Wine as psychological fun

I had the pleasure of attending a professional wine tasting earlier this week, and again I remembered Esteemed Colleague's words at Ye Olde Wine Shoppe, ever so long ago. He's the one who had already logged thirty plus years in the industry, retail, wholesale, and crush level, -- the man who had tasted Chateau Petrus before only big-game-hunting orthodontists could afford it, the one who remembered a time before wine "certifications," almost before sommeliers even. He said:

"Folks. Please. It's just wine."

The world is awash in so much wine, it is so soundly made and it may be had so cheaply -- I say it may be had cheaply -- that, when we professionals sit down to "taste and see" as the hymn goes, I can't help noticing that the afternoon quickly becomes a fairly amusing psychological study. Even though we are happily tasting far more than good, sound-but-cheap bottles, there really is very little to be said about them once a half-dozen or so adjectives are used up. The wines will have tannin and acid, fruit and alcohol, and it is salutary to be able to recognize all these. It's nice also to be able to recognize that climate and soil both matter: cool growing areas generally make lighter wines and hot climates make plusher ones, and grape vines prosper in difficult, rocky soil. (Not forgetting something I only just learned from the interwebs: since ancient times, man has had to compel grapes to prosper in poor soil because he needed the good earth for food crops.) Beyond these earthy basics, one can only offer pleasure judgments or food experience references entirely one's own; speedily we use up words like grippy or apple-y or pretty or whatever. My new favorite snark is to say "there's nothing under the hood."

What's left is the psychological fun. There is only one's taste, mine or yours. I think that my perceptions of the wines on the list are exactly right, exactly reflecting what is chemically, physically in the bottle and what the winemaker would say he intended to put there if we had him by the short hairs. But, dear things, my [professional] fatheads -- are you as confident of your perceptions?

We tasted pairs of reds, from California and France.

Ca'Momi Napa cabernet 2012 and Fleur Haut Gaussens Bordeaux Superieur 2010

cedar box                                                                       soap/no scent
 acid!                                                                             much less sugary-spicy
currant jelly                                                                  much chalkier
 -- clove -- cake                                                             acidic 
purple                                            "Classic vintage: cool summer, less fruit, restrained" 
$18                                                                              $12
                                                  
                                                                  
Frog's Leap Rutherford Merlot 2012 and Chateau Pavie Maquin St. Emilion Grand Cru Classe

slightly green                                                         wood
slightly vanilla perfume                                         wood (aroma)
very soft --                                                              light bodied
slightly prickly --                                                   silky
juicy, not sugary                                                     chewy -- slightly
 light bodied -- a bit plain                                     a bit plain
 $37                                                                          $60


Sterling Napa Diamond Mountain Cabernet 2013 and Chateau Larose Trintauden Medoc 2009

warm                                                                                       fuller
chocolate berries                                                                    juicier
velvety                                                                                    dry dark fruit 
soft tannin                                                                              chewy 
light acid                                                                                         
$20                                                                                                 $20

Mayacamas Mount Veeder 2009            and               Alter Ego de Palmer Margaux 2010

olives                                                                               inky black
barnyard                                                                         cola!
cherry candy                                                                 chewy tannins
acid-prickly                                                                   fruit 
licorice, light tannin                                  *at $90, this reaches Ca'Momi's level  ($18!)
$80                                                                                      $90


Stag's Leap Wine Cellars Cask 23, 2012      and          Chateau Ducru Beaucaillou St. Julien 2011

burnt toast                                                                              gentle cola 
thick tannin                                                                            elegant 
deep deep baked fruit                                                            gentle tannin 
pie crust                                                                                gentle acid
$200                                                                                      $130                                                                                 

Note how the California column boasts more vivid descriptors, and more of them, than the French column. I'm sure I'm right about it all, but I suspect my [professional] fathead/colleagues lack confidence in their ideas, because the silence, the abashed looks, and the hurried yet limp agreement as soon as anyone says anything about the red liquid in the glass, is all so obvious. Everyone still, still -- and I noticed this even at Ye Olde Wine Shoppe, ever so long ago -- everyone wants to be perceived as having innate, classy, yet malleable and un-snobby taste. We can spot a stereotype, delightfully untrue to form; we can spot a stereotypical disappointment, this time delightfully good. We want to recognize the king instantly and yet be respectful of the peasant. But who knows whether one can?

I suppose all this explains why there are blind tastings. It's informative to eliminate at least one trigger of prejudice or anxiety -- namely, the identity of the wine -- from what should be a simple evaluative process. Better yet, a parlor game.

Of course when it comes to speaking up confidently, I'm as big a fathead as anyone. Scribble my notes and arrange them in columns as freely as I may, do you think I told a soul that "it took a $90 Bordeaux to reach the quality level of an $18 Napa cabernet?" Certainly not. What if I'm wrong? Do you think I told a soul that the two paired merlots, each first class and each bearing a hefty price tag, struck me as interchangeably dull? Certainly, no. Did I throw in a mention of Michael Broadbent and his "global red"? No. And as for the next-to-last sample of the day, the legendary Stag's Leap Cask 23, do you think I raised hell at the pronouncement that "this isn't at all the jammy California fruit bomb we'd expect, is it"? Of course it was, I wanted to raise hell. More than a fruit bomb, it was a Hostess frosted-fruit-pie bomb. I'll bet its residual sugars stand at Apothic Red levels, and I would pair it with no food at all. Too overwhelming. This is a cocktail, and a safe, legendary label to tuck beneath the Christmas tree for your orthodontist father-in-law who Knows a Lot About Wine.

There. "Folks. Please ...." I didn't say that either. But I'm sure I'm right.

Image from foros.vogue.es

"Pfui."

When fictional detective Nero Wolfe offers an opinion without research or consultation, he introduces it with "Pfui." 

It is remarkable how little commemoration September 11th gets. Ordinary people wear patriotic t- shirts or fly flags from their pick-up trucks. A local car dealership conversely put its flag at half mast. But true commemoration, communal and natural, can still only really come from united journalists. If nothing else, they would announce masses and rallies and they would report on them. If there were no masses and rallies and they wanted them, they would create them. And they won't do it, I think, because at some very deep level they cannot believe that they, too, were targeted when New York was targeted. For God's sake -- their heart of hearts protests -- they report on the rubes and hayseeds; they aren't them. I think this also explains why journalists offered up to the world as soon as they could, adored and unvetted and as an act of atonement, an essentially Muslim president. No! No! Not us. Look -- here! We'll make it happen. Look how beautiful he is! 

All this is not to deny our own responsibility for events and reactions and votes. But future historians will look back and see these two things standing out. That's all.  

Vouvray

2014 Bernard Fouquet Domaine des Aubuisières Vouvray, Les Girardières. A Vouvray is a delectable, somewhat odd little wine. If sweet, it is sweet and full-bodied without the juicy, fragrant fresh-grape "crunch" of a good moscato. If dry, like our recent Champalou, it will have the mouthfeel of fresh peaches but a peculiar funk that seems to bring us up short and make us look at the label and exclaim, Oh I see. A dry Vouvray ....

We're still pursuing our Shakespearean affectation.

Let the birds fly, and like the famous ape,
To try conclusions, in the basket creep ....  (Hamlet, III, iv)

I love when editors' notes on Shakespeare are no help at all. For these strange lines, we learn only that the "famous" ape-in-the-basket story is no longer known.

Very small matters, quickly

Very minor points, but they struck me:

• a woman judge shows up in the courtroom scenes of an old episode of Perry Mason, which I watched late one night for the fabulous '50s clothes and makeup; who knew that such a thing could occur prior to our own enlightened era? 
• consider new meaning in the phrase "to have a pair." Nowadays it refers to testicles and courage, and is only vulgar. In the Nero Wolfe mystery Too Many Clients, Rex Stout uses it in an entirely different context. Wolfe's factotum (I guess) Archie Goodwin says to a helpful acquaintance, " 'Come off it. You haven't even got a pair.' " Any young person reading this today would probably laugh happily at such a startling modernism, but also miss the point. In 1956 it was a poker reference, wasn't it? And it meant "you haven't even got [so lousy a hand as] a pair [of any two cards]." 
• and, Archie's meals so far sound delightful, as cooked by Wolfe's chef, Fritz. Wolfe also employs an orchid valet, but more on that at another time. Chapter 3 opens with this:

"There was a bowl of chestnut soup, a cucumber-and-shrimp sandwich on toast, a roast-beef sandwich on a hard roll, home-baked, a pile of watercress, an apple baked in white wine, and a glass of milk."

I take it Archie's glass of milk is going to be a running gag throughout Rex Stout's series.

Finally, your Shakespeare quote for the day. We'll pick at random as usual. Perhaps it will, coincidentally, have to do with mystery or crime? People say everything is in Shakespeare.

Oddly, it might --

King Pandion, he is dead
All thy friends are lapped in lead

-- but it's from The Passionate Pilgrim, grouped in "Poems of Doubtful Authenticity."

A line of Shakespeare a day (because affectation is fun)

Falseness cannot come from thee, for thou lookest 

Modest as Justice ....

Pericles, V, i.

I have a chalkboard/bulletin board/message center on my living room wall, and so I decided to use the chalkboard to write down a line of Shakespeare a day. I flip open my big 

Complete Works and take whatever my eye falls upon. No reason, except chalkboards are fun and I don't have anyone around to explain myself to. Although I must say, I erase it before company visits. No point in explaining myself.

Maybe it's not entirely affectation. I end up reading one more line of Shakespeare, per day, than I would do otherwise. 

The wine is 2014 Field Recordings Hinterland Vineyard cabernet franc. Very good -- juicy and bright, lush without being sugary. Retail, about $18.