by Roseanna White | Aug 13, 2012 | Word of the Week
The other day I was looking up “war zone,” and in so doing came across some interesting tidbits on zone. =)
The noun dates to the late fourteenth century, coming directly from the Latin zona, which means “a geographical belt, celestial zone.” The Latin in turn comes from the Greek zone, which was the word for “belt.” Originally this was used solely to talk of the five great divisions on the surface of the earth–the torrid, temperate, and frigid areas, separated by the tropics of Cancer and Capricorn and the Arctic and Antarctic circles.
It wasn’t until 1822 that zone was applied to any set region–so I could be pretty sure “war zone” wasn’t around yet in 1814, LOL. It was applied to sports in 1927.
Then we have the verb sense coming into play. “Zoning” land for a purpose dates from 1912.
Not to be confused with the oh-so-modern sense of “zone out.” This verb is from the 1980s, a back-formation of the adjective “zoned” that’s related to drug use, taken from the word ozone. I guess it implies that someone’s really high, which I’d never paused to consider. That use is from the 1960s. (Surprise, surprise, LOL.)
So there you go. Some really ancient uses, and some incredibly modern ones. =)
by Roseanna White | Aug 9, 2012 | Thoughtful Thursdays, Uncategorized
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| A Favor by Edmund Blair Leighton |
I’ve always liked August. It holds my birthday, after all, and has traditionally had lots of other fun things going on. But on the other hand, it’s the end of summer. The start of school. For any household with kids, August signals a change in seasons, even though the heat of summer’s still upon us.
This year, when the page in the calendar flipped, it kinda got to me. I looked down at the project that had been my primary goal, and I see that it’s not all that far along. And that feeling of failure swamped me. That feeling of What have I been doing? How have I wasted my time?
Then I remember that I haven’t been twiddling my thumbs. I’ve been editing a lot, which is great and necessary. I wrote a novella that I’m excited to get to use for promotion between the first two books of the Culper Ring Series. And I got a good chunk done on another project.
A project that got stalled, perhaps even nixed for good. Which thought still brings me a pang.
I’m a writer–I know rejection well. I’ve had to put aside countless projects over the years. But for some reason, this one still gets me down now and then. Primarily, I think, because it’s intertwined with a couple other projects in my mind, which have also been stalled. Put on hold. Which they’ve been on so long that they’ve gone from “paused” to “stop.”
I’m not sure I can really explain this echoey sigh that fills me when I think about these things lately. I can see where the way things have fallen out is without doubt for the best. I can see that the Lord has His plan in it and have to nod at the wisdom.
But still there’s just this sense of loss. Lost dreams. Lost time spent on them when I could have been working on the project that’s a sure thing.
I have to trust there, though, too, don’t I? Trust that that time spent was for a purpose too. That it wasn’t wasted.
The funny thing is that I have no problem looking at the years spent on that pile of books in my computer that are unpublished and give them a thumb’s up. Because I learned from them, because they made me who I am, because I still hope that some of them will have their day. So why can’t I look at the month and a half spent on these projects the same way?
I’m really not sure, but it’s something I’ve been giving to the Lord again and again. And again, and again, I have to remind myself that I haven’t failed. That I’m doing just fine, thank you very much, on my primary project.
With mere weeks left in my “free” time this summer–or at least before the home school year starts–I can’t help but number my days and try to figure out how to catch up with where I wanted to be. But the real task here isn’t to write a chapter a day and edit two books for WhiteFire. The real task is to lay these stalled dreams on the alter and trust. Trust that lost dreams and lost time and lost motivation are all part of God’s plan for me to find something better. To find His path for me. To find Him in new ways.
It’s hard, when those echoey sighs billow through me. But then . . . trust always is.
by Roseanna White | Aug 8, 2012 | Remember When Wednesdays, Uncategorized
A friend contacted me yesterday to ask if I would consider digging into the traditions of the garter-toss and bouquet toss at weddings for one of my posts. Well, ask and ye shall receive!
The garter-toss is a remnant from days of old. Back in the medieval and Elizabethan eras, no one just assumed that the bride and groom would retire to their room and consummate the marriage. No, no, they wanted proof–or at least a semblance of it. Back in those days, the wedding guests would accompany the bridal couple to the bed chamber. Taking the garter was considered “proof.” It was also considered luck. So things sometimes got out of hand with guests trying to derobe the bride so they could get at those lucky undergarments . . .
Yeah, that’s when the “toss” came in, LOL. Brides and grooms understandably wanted to distract those over-eager guests, so the groom would remove the garter and toss it to get people away from his poor bride. Kinda like tossing a steak at the snarling guard dogs… 😉
Over the centuries, that tradition has held on, though it’s been moved to the reception when seeing the couple to their bedroom went out of style. Funny the things that stick, isn’t it?
The bouquet-toss is rooted in a similar idea. Brides in Merry Old England (by which I mean OLD England), would carry bunches of aromatic herbs (think garlic) to fend off evil spirits (a common thread in many Celtic and Anglo traditions). These were eventually replaced with flowers as a symbol of happiness. And if the bride was so stinkin’ happy, well the guests wanted a piece of it too! They would try to snatch a piece of the bride’s gown or flowers for luck.
Go figure, the women weren’t too crazy about having their wedding dress torn to shreds (I don’t understand it…), so the bouquet-toss came about, much like the garter-toss did–to get people away from her, LOL.
So these two tossing traditions are both ways of sharing the good luck of the bridal couple with the guests without offending modesty or ruining the gown, and both have since come to the mean that the lucky recipient would be the next to wed. (Which is, of course, the best fortune anyone could have. *grins*)
And hey, if anyone else has questions about words or history that you’d like me to research for you, it saves me some brainstorming, so I’m all ears!
by Roseanna White | Aug 6, 2012 | Word of the Week
From time immemorial–or at least since the rise of pencil and pen and paper–people have been scribbling nonsensical pictures onto the page when they’re thinking. We call it doodling. But apparently we’ve only been calling it that since 1935. I had no idea it was that new a word! I figured it wasn’t old, but I would have guessed a bit older than that!
There’s a fun quote here from a play of the era:
LONGFELLOW: That’s a name we made up back home for people who make
foolish designs on paper when they’re thinking. It’s called doodling.
Almost everybody’s a doodler. Did you ever see a scratch pad in a
telephone booth? People draw the most idiotic pictures when they’re
thinking. Dr. Von Holler, here, could probably think up a long name for
it, because he doodles all the time. [“Mr. Deeds Goes to Town,”
screenplay by Robert Riskin, 1936; based on “Opera Hat,” serialized in
“American Magazine” beginning May 1935, by Clarence Aldington Kelland]
And yet we see the word (not with the “draw aimlessly” meaning) way before that, right? It’s derived from dawdle, it seems, and has a meaning of “fritter away time.”
But in the 1600s it meant “a simple fellow.” It was, in fact, a derogatory term thought to have a, um, rather crude connection. Let’s just say it was extracted from “cock-a-doodle-do” as a euphemism for one of the other words in that sound effect… Yeah, see? Crude. So the British really weren’t being nice when they came up with “Yankee Doodle.”
At any rate, when my 1814 heroine has drawn absentmindedly upon paper, “doodle” is not a word I can use to describe it. 😉
by Roseanna White | Aug 2, 2012 | Thoughtful Thursdays, Uncategorized
When I came up with the idea of the Culper Ring Series, I didn’t have any great themes in mind. I just liked the premise, and soon got hooked on the characters. The plots were dictated largely by history. And I was rather surprised to release the themes ended up coming from history too.
Themes I had the pleasure of hearing echoed to a crowd of 60,000 people over the weekend. =)
Last week we drove to Texas for the Restoring Love rally, bringing the kids with us. Now, to be perfectly honest, I never listen to Glenn Beck, and I haven’t much watched him since he left Fox. Now, the reason for these “not”s is that if someone else doesn’t turn it on, I don’t bother with the TV or radio. And if someone else turns it on, they pick what we watch. So most of my watching/listening ends up being My Little Ponies or Chuck the Truck, LOL.
So yeah, I’d kinda wondered why my hubby kept saying, “You should send a press release to the Glenn Beck folks. Your new stuff is right up their alley.” I believed him, but didn’t fully grasp why. Not until I sat in the Cowboys stadium and heard that crowd roaring in response to the speakers giving voice to… to…
My themes! =) Themes that aren’t just for the pages of a book, but for my own life too. My family’s life. My church’s life. Themes about standing up, no matter what, and doing what’s right. More, doing what’s needed for others.
If you asked the audience what Restoring Love was about, you probably would have heard things like “service” and “charity.” We took our kids with us for our “day of service,” as they called it, a day when 30,000 volunteers flooded Dallas to do everything from fix roofs to cut up downed trees. We ended up in a nursing home, supposedly to plant flowers, but they hadn’t been delivered–so we ended up playing Bingo with the residents. =)
And my day was pretty much made when Xoe looked up at me on the bus ride there, after we’d explained what “volunteering” meant, and asked, “Can we volunteer all the time?”
See, that’s the lesson we all need to learn, and that I know I need to teach my kids. That they can reach out. That they should reach out. Not necessarily to do big things, but to do whatever needs done. That’s the message I got from the event, from the speakers, and that’s the message I’ve been contemplating for a year now as I develop each of my Culper books.
Sometimes the Lord calls us to a hard place. A place where obeying means risking everything we love. So what do we do?
Sometimes the Lord calls us to a dark place. A place where obeying means being kept forever in the shadows, where no one will see us. So what do we do?
Sometimes the Lord calls us to a towering place. A place where millions can see us…but where a single misstep can send us tumbling down. So what do we do?
The answer ought to be obvious–we do what we need to do, what He asks us to do–but is it? It certainly isn’t easy to. Which is why it feels like so often these days, things are left undone. Because it’s so much easier not to do them.
But history has already shown us these themes. Shown us the stories of people who weren’t so extraordinary, until they did what they had to do. Until they fought the hard fight, until they went where no one else dared to go. Until they risked hatred and reviling and even punishment to stand up–just stand up–for a cause.
That made them extraordinary, wrote their names in our history books. Not because of anything they tried to do for themselves, for their own glory–but for the things they did for others. For freedom. For faith.
Maybe I don’t see a cause before me quite so clear-cut as fighting for independence or rallying a nation to fend off invaders. But I see one just as daunting–raising my children to have the heart, to have the courage, to serve others above themselves. It’s a task that won’t be finished any time in the near future, but you know . . . I think I’m doing okay.
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.