#55 Musings Beyond the Bunker (Friday June 11)
Friends,
Today, let’s speak of “mountweazels.”
Last week, I described Albert Pujols as “the man.” Only one person (yes, Mark, you…) noticed that this was close but not actually correct. While Pujols indeed may be the man, in St. Louis he resisted that title. He noted that Stan Musial, the great all-star Cardinal, was “Stan the Man” and there could be no other. It is with that statement that he henceforth became known, instead, as “the machine.” The machine is still going strong. The statement that Pujols is “the man” is a mountweazel.
MOUNTWEAZELS
I’m reading The Liar’s Dictionary, by Eley Williams. A good bit of the plot involves Mountweazels, which are words (and definitions) planted in dictionaries, encyclopedias and other reference materials in order to protect copyright. If someone copies massive amounts of information, such theft of intellectual property presumably would also duplicate these made-up words and the crime could be easily identified.
The term “mountweazel” came from the fictitious entry of one Lillian Virginia Mountweazel, published in the 1975 edition of the New Columbia Dictionary to trap copyright thieves:
“Mountweazel, Lillian Virginia, 1942-1973, American photographer, b. Bangs, Ohio. Turning from fountain design to photography in 1963, Mountweazel produced her celebrated portraits of the South Sierra Miwok in 1964. She was awarded government grants to make a series of photo-essays of unusual subject matter, including New York City buses, the cemeteries of Paris and rural American mailboxes. The last group was exhibited extensively abroad and published as Flags Up! (1972). Mountweazel died at 31 in an explosion while on assignment for Combustibles magazine.”
When you read this biographical entry, it is hard not to chuckle. It obviously offered the author the opportunity to play around with the semi-absurd in creating this trap.
Similarly, mapmakers, including Thomas Brothers, would add little cul-de-sacs to nowhere on their maps, so that the illegal reproduction of the maps could be identified. These are called “trap streets” (as in creating a trap for the copyright-stealing culprit). Sometimes, elevations of mountains are listed incorrectly and small towns in the middle of nowhere are added for this purpose.
Some of the best mountweazels are made to sound believable and, sometimes, humorous. Here are several:
Esquivalience: the willful avoidance of one’s official responsibilities
Jungftak: a Persian bird, the male of which had only one wing, on the right side, and the female only one wing, on the left side.
Zzxjoanw: a type of Maori drum
FLAVORS OF THE SUMMER
As I sit here enjoying a juicy piece of cantaloupe, I am reminded how wonderful fresh locally grown fruit tastes. Many of us recall our childhood, when our winter fruit consumption was restricted to pears (bosc and Anjou), apples and other hearty cold weather fruits. The late Spring would bring and all the “summery” and “sugary” fruits—the peaches, plums and nectarines—along with the various melons. It was a special treat that came with Spring.
Now we can get Spring and Summer fruits all year long. The only trouble is that it comes from South America, Italy, Spain, and Israel and it has to get here picked too early and schlepped halfway around the globe. What finally arrives often is devoid of the “real” taste of the fresh locally grown varieties. For a taste test of what long-term transit does to the flavor of the food, try a true locally grown heirloom tomato side-by-side with the insipid tomatoes generally available at the market.
We should be eating fresh fruits—actually as much locally grown foods as we can—either from a local farmers’ market or our local grocery and taste the difference. Do we really NEED the anodyne fruits from far away all year long, transported at great cost not only to flavor, but the environment? Yet another example of “just because we can doesn’t mean we should.”
Back to the melon…
Happy weekend,
Glenn