April 2009

  • Sheepish Idioms

    By lisala on 4/30/09 11:55pm
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    Sheep with bellSheep with bell

    When idioms are built on metaphors of daily life, and those metaphors die because we no longer live as we once did, those idioms stop being understood. I've noticed of late in both online and printed publications, references to someone being "died in the wool." What they meant, of course, was the other "dye," the one related coloring cloth. Dyed in the wool means "Thoroughgoing; out-and-out: a dyed-in-the-wool populist." Dyed in the wool is almost always used in terms of politics; Kennedy was a dyed in the wool Democrat. But it can be used for other fields as well; I'm a dyed-in-the-wool Macintosh fan. The idiom is derived from the practice of dying wool that is clean, and has been combed or "carded," to remove tangles and bits of trash, but not yet spun into yarn. Wool dyed in this way tends to be more thoroughly, permanently colored.

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  • Tawdry and Saint Etheldreda

    By lisala on 4/15/09 3:06pm
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    Tawdry is one of those words that are fairly familiar but which have odd, Image of St. Etheldreda from a stained glass windoweven delightful stories in their etymologies. Tawdry is a synonym for gaudy, though the connotations of tawdry are slightly more negative than those of gaudy. The formal definition of tawdry is

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  • Easter

    By lisala on 4/11/09 6:54am
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    Easter is

    A Christian feast commemorating the Resurrection of Jesus.

    2. The day on which this feast is observed, the first Sunday following the full moon that occurs on or next after the vernal equinox.

    3. Eastertide.

    That seems straightforward enough, aside from the difficulties of calendrical calculations. Those were so obscure that a special church conference was convened to determine which calculating system would be used to determine the date of Easter. Once that was settled, sort of (you will note that Eastern Orthodox dates are different), the feast itself is not controversial.

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  • Maundy Thursday

    By lisala on 4/8/09 10:24am
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    When I was a kid, and the family church celebrated Maundy Thursday, I thought they were saying "Monday Thursday," which I thought was very odd. I suspect I'm not alone in that. Maundy Thursday is actually "The Thursday before Easter, observed in commemoration of the Last Supper of Jesus. Also called Holy Thursday." "Maundy," or in Middle English "maunde" refers to the ritual of washing the feet of the poor, a rather common event on this day even now in many churches. Middle English maunde derives from Old French mande, from Latin mandatum novum , or "new commandment," a reference to Jesus' words to the Apostles after he washed their feet, as described in John 13:34.

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