by Roseanna White | Oct 14, 2013 | Word of the Week
Nearly forgot it was Monday! LOL But lucky for you, I remembered. 😉 And so, I’m hear to talk about acute.
This will be a quick one, but I found it kinda interesting primarily because of my own weird thought-processes. See, when I was learning about angles back in middle school, I taught myself to remember that acute = under 90 degrees, because small = cute. So acute angles were small angles.
Worked well enough in math class…but not so well in vocabulary, LOL, when I began reading books that used acute in a non-math sense. When I first came across it, I naturally thought that “an acute case of the flu” meant a SMALL case of the flu.
Um, er…brilliant, Roseanna. Just brilliant. 😉
I quickly learned I was wrong, but I never bothered looking up why. As it turns out, it’s pretty simple. Acute in its math sense doesn’t mean “small.” It means “sharp.” Makes total sense, right? The Latin acutus is “sharp, pointed.” Interestingly, though, the original meaning in terms of a disease or whatnot was “coming and going quickly” more than “intense,” which didn’t come about until 1727. Between those two, though, was the expected “sharp, irritating” meaning that evolved by the 15th century.
Makes much more sense with the angle meaning than my “small.” 😉
by Roseanna White | Oct 10, 2013 | Thoughtful Thursdays, Uncategorized
You know, life these days is pretty crazy. We’re all running, running, running, trying to keep up with this and that and the other thing, with kids’ activities and our own, with our complicated lives, jobs, church commitments, you name it.
Rarely do I have a season lately that I don’t deem “crazy.” But October is always the worst for me. And this year, for some reason I thought it would be fun to schedule a ton of fall releases for WhiteFire, LOL, so I have a bunch of editing on top of it (I’ve been prepping five different books). I’ve got Octoberfest (last weekend), family reunion (this weekend), my daughter’s birthday, an extra night of ballet starts next week for Nutcracker rehearsal–and this year, her physical therapy twice a week on top of it, not to mention that whole moving thing that still isn’t finished.
Yeah. Wee bit crazy around here. I’ve been getting up at 5:30 every day, scheduling every minute of my day, and falling into bed exhausted every night. And I still don’t feel exactly on top of things. But the schedule helps. A block of time for writing. Then blogging. A block for exercising, showering, eating, and reading my Bible. School. Running out and about. More school. Editing. Picking up the house, cooking, evening activities. Somewhere in there I’m trying to squeeze in a research book. And laundry, LOL.
I know, though, that I’m not the only one with one of those crazy-beyond-comprehension months–October just happens to be mine.
What time of year are you busiest? Christmas? Summer? Some random month like mine? What are your tricks for keeping your head above water?
by Roseanna White | Oct 9, 2013 | Ancient World, Remember When Wednesdays
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Medieval Miracles, from a 13th century abridgement
of the Domesday Book |
We live in a world of doubt. With special effects and computer graphics, folks can make pretty much anything look real. Look like it happened.
But we know better. Right? It’s all just show. Made up. Pretend.
We’ve been conditioned to doubt. Not just what we see on television, but everything. We’re hard pressed to ever accept anything that looks miraculous, because come on–it’s more likely a hoax. Sleight of hand. Misdirection.
I mean, sure, there were miracles in the Bible. Healing the blind. The lame. Feeding the five thousand. Walking on water. Sure. But that was Jesus. Maybe the apostles. That’s different. And that’s not weird. It’s an accepted kind of miracle, those ones in the Bible. Easy to accept, right?
Then I read it all more closely, and a line of Jim Rubart’s Soul’s Gate comes to mind. “What,” one of his characters says (I may be paraphrasing slightly), “have you only been reading the boring parts of the Bible?”
I mean, seriously. Look at the Old Testament. Saul goes to a medium and calls up Samuel–who appears!
Um…our comfy little spiritual boxes get a little chafing at that one.
On the day Jesus died, the graves opened, and the dead were seen walking about.
Um…that surely means something other than what it sounds like, right? (I included this in A Stray Drop of Blood, and apparently some folks thought I was getting weird and making it up–until they looked it up, LOL.)
In Acts, we read how Paul grew frustrated with a girl with a spirit of fortune-telling and turned around and cast out the demon. Okay. Nothing too worrisome there…until we read on that her master was furious because now he had no way of making money.
Which implies that it worked. She really could tell the future, at least in part. We don’t like that at all, do we? The other side shouldn’t have power like that.
This time of year, you can’t go out in public or turn on the TV without seeing a lot of Halloween stuff. My kids think it’s all grand fun, and they love to ask questions like “Is this real? Or is it pretend?”
And you know…sometimes it’s hard to know how to answer them. Is it real? Mostly no, the things on TV. Mostly not. But then, there’s so much that goes beyond our comprehension, largely, I think, because we’re so quick to doubt. We dismiss everything.
But maybe we shouldn’t. Because if we don’t pay attention to it, we can’t fight it–and a lot of these “weird” stories in the Bible are of God’s servants having to deal with this stuff.
The spiritual world is baffling…but it’s there. And sometimes I wonder what our faith would be like if we were a little more open to learning the truth about it…and a little less quick to ignore all we don’t understand.
I’m delving into some of this in A Soft Breath of Wind…nothing resembling the cartoon ghost, LOL, but I’m reading the Bible carefully and with a point of looking at we normally dismiss as too “weird.” I’m prayerfully asking the Lord for understanding of some of these bothersome parts. And it’s pretty fun to see what new “weirdness” springs up every day in my reading. 😉
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by Roseanna White | Oct 7, 2013 | Word of the Week
Last week in the course of our homeschool day, somehow or another we got talking about what our different fingers are called, and my clever little Xoe asked me why the pointer finger is also called the index finger.
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| Closeup from Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam |
Insert Mommy going, “Um…because…maybe…it’s the one you trail down the page of an index when you’re looking for something?” LOL. At which point I added, “Don’t believe that, I’m making it up. Let’s look and see.” And so we did. =)
Index has meant “the pointer finger” since the 14th century. It comes directly from Latin, and the literal meaning is “that which points out.” So of course, it makes sense for the finger…and it also makes sense for the index in a book, a meaning which came along by the 1570s. Old in its own right, to be sure! So while the two are very directly related, coming from the same meaning of the same word, one didn’t derive from the other, but rather from the root. So I quickly corrected my guess, LOL.
More derivative meanings (like “cost-of-living index” or “heat index”) come from the sense of “indicator” that the word carries and started popping up in the 1800s.
Hope everyone has a great week!
by Roseanna White | Oct 3, 2013 | Thoughtful Thursdays, Uncategorized
I never considered myself a scientist. Growing up, I wasn’t the type to take toys apart to see their inner workings or do my own experiments. When I went to St. John’s College (The Great Books School), I didn’t quite get it when they said that the most important thing students had to learn was how to ask good questions.
After four years of hearing them, though, I get it. And I agree–it’s the most valuable tool my education gave me. The ability not just to question, but to question rightly. To question in a way that will lead me to answers, not circles.
And so now, as I look at the world around me, I ask “Why?” I ask “How?” I ask, “But what if it were this way? What would change?” And as events unfold, I try to find the reasons, the patterns, the keys. My questioning is always rooted in faith that God’s got it all under control, so my view is no doubt different from an atheist’s. My questioning is part of who I am. Part of what I do. Part of what makes me me.
I’ve asked a lot of “why”s lately. When we were presented with an unexpected answer to a vehicular need several months ago, I didn’t just accept it with a smile and go about my merry way. I began to pray. Because I knew, I knew quite certainly, that this wasn’t just God tossing me a boon. This was God preparing us for a change. This was God saying, “I’m removing some burdens,” not because they were too heavy then…but because they would have become so. There was a why to that gift, and to the gift of the house we just moved into.
Thank you, Lord, for helping me see that, so I didn’t squander it.
Earlier this week, my best friend texted me from the ER–her 3-year-old son had just had a seizure. The easy answer–that it was triggered by a high fever–was not the answer. He hadn’t been sick. And so they had to look for the why. Tumor? No, praise the Lord. Bleeding? No, which is another praise. But that leaves them with unanswered questions. What triggered it? Will it happen again?
No answers. And so we pray, and praise Him that little Connor is acting himself, with no lasting effects.
And then there are the career questions. Why do some things hit and others flop? Why do some of the most talented writers stay mid-list? Where do I fit in this publishing world? Will an award ever come my way? A spot on the best-seller list?
I don’t know, and I’m not a big fan of not-knowing here either, any more than I am when it comes to medical questions. I like answers. Preferably neat and tidy ones that are also solutions.
But learning to question rightly has also taught me that very rarely are the answers simple. For that matter, very rarely are they actual answers. Questions, true questions, don’t lead you to Yes or No. They lead you to more questions. They lead you on a journey.
Through faith, I can say that I don’t know what the path will look like, but I know where it ends. I know the goal. I know the One guiding me. I know my feet are traveling the road they need to travel.
I know there will be endless questions along the way. I’m never going to know all the Whys. And today, as I look out over the future and wonder what it might hold–for me, for my family, for my friends and their families–I see one of the greatest truths. That life and faith aren’t about knowing. They’re about seeking, and about bravely marching on despite the uncertainty.
The test of life isn’t about the answers. It’s about how we react to the questions.
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Roseanna M. White is a bestselling, Christy Award winning author who has long claimed that words are the air she breathes. When not writing fiction, she’s homeschooling her two kids, editing, designing book covers, and pretending her house will clean itself. Roseanna is the author of a slew of historical novels that span several continents and thousands of years. Spies and war and mayhem always seem to find their way into her books…to offset her real life, which is blessedly ordinary.