Words Rah Loves: Edible Dormouse

I wanted to start this blog post with the quote You never know what events are going to transpire to get you home. I know it by Jim Lovell, commander of Apollo 13 (I've mentioned my obsession with the Space Race, right?). It turns out it was also said by some dude named Og Mandino, author of The Greatest Salesman in the World.

I've never heard of Og, though The Greatest Salesman has sold 50 million copies and been translated into 25 languages. I don't know if Og stole the line from Lovell or vice versa or if they both borrowed it from a third party, but the actor Matt McConaughey has said The Greatest Salesman is the reason he became an actor, so I'm not going to be too harsh on old Og.

(The name Og, in case you were wondering, wasn't given to him in honor of his great caveman ancestors; it's short for Augustine.)

So you really never know where research might take you. Like to the edible dormouse.

I've been doing a lot of research that takes me into the realm of botany and zoology. There's a type of animal dormancy called torpor, kind of a hibernation-lite. Hummingbirds, for instance, go into torpor on cold nights to preserve energy. Their body temperature plummets, and their heart rate can drop from 1,500 beats per minute to 50 beats per minute.

It was in Discover Wildlife's article How to Tell Torpor from Hibernation that I read this:

Common dormice hibernate at ground level in woven nests partly covered by leaf litter or moss or in hollow trees. Edible dormice have been recorded under tree roots and beneath floorboards in outbuildings.

Edible what?

Everyone knows the Dormouse from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland—who, incidentally, keeps falling asleep during the tea party. I had no idea there were multiple kinds of dormice, much less some poor thing called edible.

So here's the deal on the edible dormouse:

Aren't I so cute?
Oh, wait! Is that a Roman?!

The largest of all dormice (five to seven inches long), the edible dormouse is also known as the fat dormouse and, less harshly, as the squirrel-tailed dormouse. Though it's a terrible threat to the woodlands and orchards of England, it is a native of western Europe, which is where the Romans got a hold of it and gave it its gastronomic name.

How'd I lose my nose? Well, I love a
crunchy little dormouse, I do, but
they're viscous.

The Romans used to catch these furry little rodents in the fall when they were fat. They kept them in pits and fed them chestnuts, acorns and walnuts, and then when it was time to roast them up, the Romans would stuff them with pork and pine nuts or glaze them with honey. Apparently, whole roasted dormice made a tasty snack.The Etruscans agreed.

You might think the edible dormouse is pretty happy, now that those pesky Romans are all gone and they have free rein in the UK, but, alas. They are still hunted and eaten in Slovenia, and it was there that the British celebrity chef Heston Blumenthal got the dormice for his 2009 Christmas feast. Chef Bluementhal called his dormouse on a stick, dipped in white chocolate, a "dormouse lollipop," and it was not a hit. Even Bluementhal admitted, "It went down a bit like a lead balloon," which is a lovely double entendre.

What does this have to do with etymology? Not a thing. I just love the phrase edible dormouse.

Words Rah Loves: Cabal

Cranky Rah has been using the word cabal a lot lately. Also, bifurcated.

(Don't ask why; when someone uses the words cabal and bifurcated a lot, it's safe to assume you should keep your distance from the mess that is that person's life at the moment.)

Anyway, cabal is a pretty cool word. A cabal is a group of individuals meeting secretly, usually for political purposes. One might use it like this:

The cabal summoned to Cranky Rah's cave during the new moon is scheming to take over the world.

(Please note: This is not a technically accurate usage of the word. If Cranky Rah was scheming to take over the world, she would not employ a cabal. She would just do it herself.)

Not this kind of madonna.

Anyway, cabal comes from the Medieval Latin cabbala from the even older Hebrew qabbalah. If one is of a certain age, one might equate the word with the Jewish mysticism tradition weirdly embraced in the 90s (that would be the 1990s) by the weird, multi-talented, once-upon-a-time-Catholic singer-actress Madonna.

The word qabbalah means, loosely, "something received," and the related mystic tradition is, like most mystic traditions...well, mystic and esoteric and kind of hard to pin down. In any event, some of the ideas of Jewish kabbalah-ism were embraced by a sect of occultist Christians during the Renaissance, and it seems to be at that point that the word took on its flavor of secrecy (occultism not really being mainstream in the world of Christianity).

The word retained a purely religious meaning until the 1660s and the reign of Charles II, he of, officially at least, England, Scotland and Ireland. Poor Charles Stuart had a rough time getting to the throne. When he was 19, his dad Charles I was beheaded, and II had to flee to France in order to retain his own gorgeous black tresses. (Those Stuarts had some good hair.) In 1660, after suffering the mind-numbingly boring rule of Oliver Cromwell (turned out that not only did Cromwell not have good hair, he was down on theater, sports and colorful clothing), the people of England asked Charles to pretty please come back and be king. Which he did, and on his 30th birthday no less.

Seriously. Check out
that hair.

Charles II was a man who knew how to party. When he entered London, bells rang, fountains flowed with wine, and the nobles got decked out in all the cloth of silver and gold they hadn't been able to wear during Cromwell's days.

But had II's luck changed? Not really. In the first years of his reign, England was hit by a plague that killed somewhere between 70,000 and 100,000 people in London alone—the year before the Great Fire burned through 373 acres of the city. And II managed to get himself into a war with the Dutch.

It was in part because of that war with the Dutch (the second of four Anglo-Dutch wars) that one of II's closest counselors lost the king's faith and was replaced by a group of five ministers: Thomas Clifford, Lord Arlington, George Buckingham, Anthony Ashley and Lord Lauderdale. These men got together (more or less; they weren't so much of the "all for one" ilk as of the "more for me" persuasion) and arranged a secret treaty pulling France into the fray against the Dutch.

So check out the first letters of their last names: CABAL.

Isn't that cool? It's just a coincidence, but it did help popularize the word at the time, and it's carried carried sinister connotations ever since.

II, by the way, kept his head and his crown on top of it. But he didn't leave behind a legitimate heir, so his unlikeable younger brother James took the throne, a misfortune that led directly, 60 years later, to the massacre of Cranky Rah's peeps on a desolate Scottish moorland and to the vote for Scottish independence happening today.

So it just goes to show that good hair does not a good leader make.

Words Rah Loves: Widdershins

In the novel I'm reading, one of the characters walks widdershins three times around a burned house, and he does this to keep the ghost who presumably inhabits the remains from following him.

Ah, widdershins! I love this word.

It comes from one of my favorite languages, German, and is used chiefly by my favorite people, the Scots. The Middle Low German weddersinnes comes from wider, meaning against or back, and sinnen, meaning to travel or go (or "in the direction of," depending on which etymological source you're looking at). So widdershins means to go in a direction contrary to the journey of the sun, or anticlockwise.

According to Wikipedia (who supposedly got it straight from the Oxford English Dictionary, the horse's mouth of dictionaries), the first use of the word comes from the early 1500s: Widdersyns start my hair. Which is a lovely way of saying your hair is standing on end.

It's almost onomatopoetic, isn't it? Widdershins sounds a little off kilter, like not only are you walking the absolutely wrong direction (because everyone walks clockwise), but you're probably a little tipsy while you're doing it.

This is a word clearly underused. I'm going to walk widdershins around my cave right now, just so I can tell someone I did it.

Unfortunately, I might come to a bad end if I do this. Walking widdershins around something, especially a church, is supposed to be very unlucky. Which makes me wonder why the guy in the novel I'm reading did that, especially because he is a Scot and should know better. Then again, he's left-handed, like me, and many of us take a...contrary view of this idea that right is somehow right.

Widdershiners of the world, unite! You never know the Good we might do, simply by being contrary. After all, Superman flew widdershins around the world to rewind time and save Lois Lane. That was pretty lucky.