Semi Precious

Felix turned the key in the door of his jewelry shop and, as always, double checked to make sure it was locked. He glanced through the window to make sure the red “armed” button was blinking on the alarm system panel. Then he used another key to lower the chain wall that protected the glass door. It latched with a satisfying clank, the padlock snicked shut, and Felix set off down the sidewalk toward home, satisfied that his jewelry store was closed and quiet for the night.

He couldn’t have been more wrong.

The first up were, as usual, the zirconiums. They hummed softly as they did their square dances, which led into the cube dances they practiced nightly. This woke the diamonds, whom nobody liked. The diamonds were, not to put too fine a facet on it, racist thugs. They jeered at the sapphires and rubies, taunting them with insults about being “impure corundum” and “copperheads” (or titanium-, chromium-, iron-, or magnesium-heads, depending on their color). They wouldn’t even speak to the jade, sniffing that they “wouldn’t associate with mere metamorphic rock”. They had really gotten to the emeralds with their “girly beryl” taunt, at least until the emeralds got over it, which took some heavy counseling sessions from the blue garnet, who was so rare she’d never met another like her. This somehow seemed to have made  her completely immune to the opinions of other gems, no matter how offensive or unyielding. When she first arrived in the shop and the diamonds started in on her, she simply gave them a blank stare, lustered over to the nearest metal hinge on one of the display cases, and demonstrated that she was not only rare, but magnetically attractive. The diamonds were so astonished they actually shut up for a few minutes, which made the blue garnet quite the heroine among the other gems.

The diamonds, of course, made a great deal of the fact that they were the hardest of the gems — they liked to boast about the fact that they never changed in the tiniest way. The other gems gave them a hard time about this just for something to do, but the diamonds didn’t seem to even take much notice. The pearls, who were all about progressive change, were the most scornful of the diamonds, but only rarely engaged with them. As soon as they woke up every night they rolled over to the shelves at the side of the store to visit with the many decorative pieces ornamented with nacre, which the pearls insisted on calling “mom”.

The gold had the most complex relationship with the diamonds. The other gems were pretty sure the gold despised the diamonds even more than the diamonds hated the gold for being soft and ready to alloy with almost any other metal, but gold and diamonds were so often forced into the close quarters of settings that they’d developed the ability to tolerate each other, albeit in a somewhat reserved, frosty sort of way. Even when stone and metal were in the intimate forced relationship — almost a marriage, as they said — of a setting, the most the other gems ever heard was that when the diamonds began to get uppity the gold would tend to loosen a bit just to show the diamonds they could easily be dropped at any opportune moment — over a sewer grate, for example — and spend the next few millennia at the bottom of a sea of sludge.

The only gems who ever really stood up to the hated diamonds were the opals. The opals tended to keep to themselves for the most part, holding their own weird and mysterious rituals while the other gems watched, puzzled. The diamonds had once taken offense at this, calling it “impure silicate idolatry”, but later that week the opals had surrounded the diamonds and out-refracted them all night, showing some spectacular effects that had the whole store — except the humiliated diamonds — cheering. When the sun came up, the opals dispersed without a word to anyone. Since then the diamonds had been moderately more reserved, but every once in a while they found themselves surrounded by the opals again — it seemed more like a reminder than a threat — and even though the opals just sat there silently before leaving, the diamonds were cowed.

The jewelry store’s most extreme example of segregation was the costume jewelry section. Every night saw parties there with music, dancing, and other festivities, and even though the costume jewelry had welcomed the other gems “come party any time”, only the topaz (and often the pearls, after their visit with mom) ever took them up on the offer. Some of the gems — including the diamonds, of course — didn’t think much of the topaz, but the rubies, sapphires, and emeralds acknowledged that the topaz did seem to have more fun than they did, and if you took the time to really talk to them they had the most amazing stories to tell. Much more interesting than the standard “darkness, heat, and pressure” tales that the gems had grown up listening to.

The night progressed like clockwork — everything monitored closely, as always, by the clocks and watches, who argued amongst themselves about microseconds, the proper volume of ticks and tocks, and the relative merits of arabic, roman, unmarked, or (shudder) digital faces. The cuckoos hooted in amusement from their wall and those with alarms answered back from the shelves and cases.

Everyone faceted back home as the sun came up, and as they settled in they heard the rattling and clanking of Felix opening up the chain wall and the door.

“Time for the store to wake up again,” he muttered to himself. He couldn’t have been more wrong.

Thinking, Congresscritters, and Weariness

I’m feeling tired. Not in a general sense, though; more like the kind of tired you are when you’re “sick and tired” of something. What am I tired of, though? I’m not exactly sure. I’m certainly tired of the idea that you need to overlook some things in order to…well, again, I’m not exactly sure. Some people who profess to be great patriots insist on ignoring some of the worst things in the history of the US — but some don’t. Some religious people ignore things on purpose, but then again, some don’t. Some parents and would-be educators want to avoid teaching children about some things so that they…well, so that they stay ignorant, I guess.

Maybe that’s it. The idea that willful ignorance is a desirable state of mind. Willful ignorance and refusal to correct it, or to even try to think clearly about it. Maybe it’s just that lack of thinking that I’m tired of.

You see a failure to think all over the place. And the worst part, to me, is that sometimes I’m pretty sure a public figure failing to think is actually thinking perfectly clearly, but decided to fake it. I guess this is because the public figure, especially if they’re public because of being in politics, wants to appeal to a particular audience, and believes that the audience will demand whatever form of faulty thinking is involved. You hear rumors about this if you read about the national politics in the US. Some very smart people have been elected to Congress, after all, but they seem to do everything they can to act as if they’re not smart at all. They just repeat slogans, or parrot “talking points,” or present remarks they seem like they’ve rehearsed and memorized. They’re acting. Playing roles that they think are required in order to, I guess, get elected again. Anything but reveal that they’re highly educated and intelligent.

I’ve watched Congress at work, thanks to C-Span, and it’s a mystery why anybody would want to get elected to it, or even worse, get re-elected. It exerts a powerful draw on some people, though. Why do they do it?

The conventional wisdom is that they do it for money and power, and there’s probably some truth to that, at least in some cases. You make a good salary as a representative or senator, of course, but it’s the money you get through other channels that’s really significant. And yet I’ve also read that — at least for newly-elected representatives — the majority of their time has to be spent calling backers to ask for more donations. Not the kind of thing I’d like to spend any time doing.

And yet, and yet. They put up with the fund raising, and they put up with sitting through sessions of Congress, which do not, to put it plainly, look like they’re any fun at. I go to business meetings all the time, and these government meetings look to be an order of magnitude worse. And if what you want is money, I think there are probably quicker and easier routes, especially if you’re able to abide full days of calling prospects on the phone to try to sell something (even if it’s yourself).

So maybe it’s prestige. Being a representative or senator certainly comes with some prestige, at least in certain circles. As far as I can tell, I’ve never had an urge to acquire prestige, at least not that kind. So I don’t know whether I can really speak to it. But prestige is probably on the list of motivators.

And yet it still seems like there must be more. Is it power? If so, you must be able to construct for yourself a pretty flexible notion of power, because the average senator or representative doesn’t really have very much. Sure, there are some few who do, usually because they’ve spent years or decades working their way into positions of power within the Congress — but again, if what you really want is day-to-day power over people, coaching a sports team or starting a business are probably better choices.

So there it is: members of Congress have pretty well-paid jobs (but nowhere near corporate CEO levels) that require them to act pretty constantly, put up with daily boredom, spend hours on the phone asking for money, and in many or most cases have to say, with a straight face, notions and ideas that they probably know are nonsense at best. It just sounds like a bad deal all around. And I’m tired of it.

I think the idea of representative government is a good one, and we shouldn’t give it up. But maybe a few changes would improve the whole situation. I’m no scholar of government, and I don’t really have any original ideas. But I’m just tired of the way things are handled — and have been handled for basically my whole life.

Looking at another branch of government besides Congress, I was around for Criminal President #1, Nixon, and now I’m around for Criminal President #2, Trump, and the people in Congress in both cases — mostly — didn’t do much to make things any better. I can’t argue about which Criminal President is worse — for one thing, I was just a kid in the Nixon years, and I didn’t follow the events of the day in all that much detail. There’s no need to pick and choose though; having a Criminal President at all is a pretty big problem. And having a Congress thats not much help is another one.

Like I said, I don’t have any ideas for how to restructure a representative government so it works better than ours does. There are plenty of examples out there for anybody willing to consider them. I do have an idea, though. It has nothing (directly) to do with government or education; it has to do with individuals. You. Me. My idea is this: the next time you find yourself thinking “I just don’t understand this,” don’t accept it. Think it through, research it, figure it out. And the next time you find yourself saying (or even hear someone else saying) “I don’t know,” make it your business to find out whatever it is so you do know. I think we need to stop being so accepting of willful ignorance and willingness to avert our eyes from facts and truths we don’t like.

Oh, and now that I think of it, it does have something to do with government and education. And thinking. And I’m tired of the alternative.

Word of the Day

How come feeling “listless” means you’re lethargic, unwilling to move, or indifferent to just about everything, but it doesn’t mean “I lost my list”?

“Listless” has been in use since at least the 1400s, when it was included in something called the “Promptorium Parvulorum Sive Clericorum.” It’s had the same meaning for the past seven centuries, which if nothing else indicates the word has been too listless to shift meanings in the slightest. But in fact “listless” doesn’t really have anything to do with a list. In fact, if you were to make a catalog of all the meanings of “list” that most of us have probably never heard of), “listless” be pretty hard to connect to any of them. Well, except for one…

Back around the year 1000, when Old English was in use, “list” meant hearing. I’d paste a quotation here, but it would be in Old English and too hard to understand (that is, I can’t work out what it means). But you can still hear that old meaning of “list” in the word “listen.” For a while, “list” was also used to mean “ear”. That’s what Chaucer meant in “The Canterbury Tales” when Wife of Bath says “He smoot me ones on the list.”

Then there’s the “list” that also dates back to Old English, and means “by art or craft”. The oldest quotations of this are also in Old English, but by about 1400 Middle English had arrived and “The Seven Sages” included “This was a dede of queint list.” Possibly because someone was working behind the scenes with list, that meaning seems to have disappeared by the 1500s.

Old English seems to have experienced a shortage of words that made them assign more meanings to the ones they did have, because in Old English “list” also meant a border. Particularly the kind of border on a piece of cloth, like a hem — but also any sort of border. Richard Hooker’s 1597 book “Of the lawes of ecclesiasticall politie: the fift booke” includes this passage, which explains it pretty well: “[They] haue thought it better to let them [sc. the books of the Apocrypha] stand as a list or marginall border vnto the olde Testament.”

Remember how “list” meant “ear” in Chaucer? Well for a couple of centuries afterward, “list” was also used to mean specifically the earlobe. “ They haue giuen it me soundly, I feele it vnder the lists of both eares,” wrote Thomas Dekker in his 1631 “A tragi-comedy: called, Match mee in London.”

Sometime in the 1800s there seems to have been some sort of substance — probably a kind of cloth you might make things out of, say, slippers — that was called “list”. In Charles Dickens’ “Little Dorrit,” “Mr. Casby rose up in his list shoes”, and as recently as 1908 Enoch Arnold Bennet’s “Old Wives Tale” referred to it as well: “Sophia wore list slippers in the morning.”

Remember how the Bride of Frankenstein had black hair with one prominent streak of white? And remember how haircuts back in the 1960s tended to have very straight, clear parts? Back in the 1800s the “divisions of a head of hair or a beard” were called “lists” too. In fact, any strip of distinguishing color could have been called a “list”, as Sir Philip Sidney used it in “The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia” in 1590: “His horse was of a firie sorrell, with blacke feete, and blacke list on his back.”

Starting to feel listless yet? I hope not, because we’re not even halfway through the list of “lists.” In fact the only really surprising thing is how many of these meanings of “list” are no longer in the list of “lists” we list as current usage. But I’ll skip to the one we started with. “Listless” is a remnant of the version of “list” that’s really a variation of “lust”, in the sense of “appetite”. Chaucer used this one too, although he tried to distinguish it from ears by spelling it “lest”: “In curteisye was set ful muche hir lest.“ This meaning of “list” seems to have been very common up until about the 19th Century, and that’s the version that still survives inside “listless”, because if you’re feeling “listless” you have no appetite or passion for anything.

The “list” we know today as a series of rows or items is a comparative newcomer; it first appears in this sense in Shakespeare, who used it in both Hamlet and Henry VIII. Its popularity started expanding steadily after that, and nearly all the other meanings of “list” gradually disappeared. By now, gigantic multinational companies (Oracle, for one; SAP, for another) can thrive by selling products that are really just fancy ways to make and keep lists. Nearly everybody has their own daily lists, too, whether they’re to-do lists, contacts in their phones, or the groceries you plan to buy. Don’t buy too much, though, if you commute to the market by boat — otherwise you might notice your vessel listing to one side.

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