Sunday Rest: The River of Death

 The Death's-head hawk moth doesn't wear the cutest jumper:

specimen from the collection of Laurent Schwartz. Image by Didier Descouens

Can you see the skull?

It's a big moth - its wingspan can be up 120mm (nearly five inches). Peculiarly enough, the skull-pattern is designed to be reassuring, if only to bees. What we see as a skull a bee sees as the face of a queen bee. This, the moth's stripy abdomen, and its smell of fat, encourages bees to welcome the moth as it crawls into a hive to steal some honey.

That's as evil as the moth gets, stealing honey, but even so few people welcome the poor beast. In France the moth is said to be a harbinger of plague (and the dust from its wings is said the make you blind). In Hungary the moth foretells death; in Germany its squeak is the voice of the devil himself.

This is all highly unscientific, of course, but even the scientists have fallen for the beast's horrific associations. To scientists it is Acherontia atropos, thereby managing to combine a reference Acheron, the river that borders hell, and Atropos, the Fate who snips the life-thread of people with her scissors.

But all the same...there isn't a moth anywhere that any of us would rather see, is there?

Word Not To Use Today: skull. This word arrived in English in the 1200s from Scandinavia. In Old Norse skalli means bald head or skull.

Saturday Rave: The School for Scandal by Richard Brinsley Sheridan.

 Richard Brinsley Sheridan (1715 - 1816) was an appalling man: a gambler, a drinker, a womaniser, a vicious enemy - and at times a vicious friend, too.

He was also a dazzling wit and terrific political speech-maker who wrote one of the most successful, funniest plays in the English language.

How could anyone not hate him?

Here's a piece of a scene from A School for Scandal. 

(As I said, Sheridan was a famous wit, which makes it extra interesting.)

SIR PETER. Madam, madam, I beg your pardon—there’s no stopping these good gentlemen's tongues. —But when I tell you, Mrs. Candour, that the lady they are abusing is a particular friend of mine, I hope you'll not take her part.

LADY SNEERWELL. Ha! ha! ha! Well said, Sir Peter! but you are a cruel creature, —too phlegmatic yourself for a jest, and too peevish to allow wit in others.

SIR PETER. Ah! madam, true wit is more nearly allied to good-nature than your ladyship is aware of.

LADY TEAZLE. True, Sir Peter: I believe they are so near akin that they can never be united.

SIR BENJAMIN. Or rather, madam, suppose them to be man and wife, because one seldom sees them together.

****

Hmm...

Sheridan famously never paid his debts (he said that would just encourage his creditors) and he died alone, having told his last, much ill-used, terrified friend that he was going to haunt her. So at the least we must say that he wasn't a hypocrite.

Richard Brinsley Sheridan was accorded the great honour of being buried in Poet's Corner in Westminster Abbey. 

He was a horrid man. But thanks for the plays.

Word To Use Today: scandal. This word comes from the Latin scandalum, a stumbling block, from the Greek skandalon, a trap.

Word To Use Today: tokamak.

 This word looks as if it comes from one of the languages of the far North. In fact it is northern, though not quite as northern as that.

A tokamak is a toroidal (doughnut-shaped) space:

Here's someone doing some maintenance inside a tokamak owned by General Atomic. Photo by Rswilcox

As you can see, something could fly round inside the thing for ever without getting to the end of the space, and for this reason a tokamak is used when you need electrons to go a long way without losing them.

Why might this be necessary? Well, in this case, in order to persuade them to fuse together. This process occurs all the time in the sun, and if we could manage to set up such a process on Earth we would have a source of limitless non-polluting power more or less forever.

We can't do that yet, but we are gradually solving some of the problems. One problem is that the plasma - the stuff with the electrons in it - has to be so hot that it will melt anything it touches (including the walls of the tokamak). Scientists have just managed to make a magnet so strong that it keeps the electrons safely in the right place.

So one day, you never know, I might not feel obliged to wear mittens as I type this in order to help save the planet.

Word To Use Today: tokamak. The first tokamak was designed by the Soviet scientists Igor Tamm and Andrei Sakharov, inspired by Oleg Lavrentiev. The first working one was built by Natan Yavlinsky in 1958. 

The Russian word токамак is an acronym of either тороидальная камера с магнитными катушками (toroidal'naya kamera s magnitnymi katushkami) toroidal chamber with magnetic coils, or тороидальная камера с аксиальным магнитным полем (toroidal'naya kamera s aksial'nym magnitnym polem), toroidal chamber with axial magnetic field.

Too Bright A Green: a rant.

 Look, I'm all for recycling, I really am. I even bring plastic bottles home from holiday so they can go in the municipal recycling bin.

I would have said that there was no limit to my enthusiasm until I saw some words embossed on a plastic yogurt pot top:

FIFTY PER CENT RECYCLED PET

it said.

And I realised that things really can go too far.

Thing not to do today: recycle a PET. Luckily in this case PET does not refer to an animal you imagine to be your friend, but to polyethelene terephthalate, a commonly-used plastic. The stuff is reckoned to be fairly harmless to humans as long as it doesn't get hot, when it can leak antimony.

Sails are also made out of it. 

Poly- means many; aithein means to burn or shine; -ene is a word-ending to do with stuff with hydrogen and carbon in it; tere comes from terebinthos, the turpentine tree, and phthalate comes from naphtha, which means wet. 

All these words are Greek.

Nuts and Bolts: mantras.

 Mantras have been used for thousands of years.

They sometimes use a real-world language, and sometimes a partial or invented one, and often a mixture of the two. The purpose of a mantra is to be a gateway to a new kind of perception. It might be to reveal something which can't be detected by the physical senses, or it might be to communicate with something which has no language (an animal, or a tree, or the sun, or some kind of god or devil). A mantra might be employed to cure an illness, spark love, make a task successful, cast a spell - or protect someone from a curse.

Some people might call this kind of thing magic, and a mantra, like magic, will often use words which only the initiated can understand. Secrecy is important. Even when a mantra uses the local language, meanings may well be ambiguous or deliberately misleading. 

When Islam came to Malaya, for instance, mantras carried on being used, but with the conventional formulae bismillahirrohmanirrohim at the beginning, and lailahailallah at the end, to make them sound Islamic.

Mantras tend to use chanting, and they tend to use repetition, both of which encourage a withdrawal from the thought-patterns of everyday life. They can also make the mantras beautiful - strange and familiar at the same time.

Nowadays few of us have time for mantras, and still fewer of us believe they serve any purpose.

But they're treasures of the world, all the same.

Thing To Consider Today: mantras. This word comes from the Sanskrit man- which means to think.

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Thing Not To Do Today: get in a stew.

 I try to be broad-minded, but I can't say I'd ever want to have cannibals as house-guests.*

Anyway, I hope you're not in a stew, either literally or figuratively, because if you are, you're in hot water.

I certainly hope you're not stewing in your own juices (that is, suffering from the consequences of your own actions). 

Isn't it odd that the English language should be so determined that a nice warm bath should be a symbol of muddle and worry? 

Still, I suppose it's a place where you get hot, if not exactly bothered.

Thing Not To Do Today: get in a stew. The word stew appeared in English in the 1300s, when it meant to have a steam bath. The word comes from the Old French estuver, to have a hot bath, but where it came from before that isn't entirely clear. The Latin extufare means to evaporate, from vapor, which means steam. 

On the other hand the Old English stuf-bæþ means hot-air bath, so stew-type words have been around for a long time.

People have been stewing in their own juices since the 1650s. 

*Though cannibalism isn't so bad if the joint has died of genuinely natural (and non-infectious) causes. But I'll still have the salad, all the same.

Spot the Frippet: thread.

 Well that Spot the Frippet was easy, wasn't it?

caramel threads holding a croquembouche pyramid together. Photo by Eric Baker

Now how about seeing if you can find a thread made by something not human?

silk worm cocoons, Vietnam. Photo by Ian Armstrong

Spot the Frippet: thread. The Old English form of this word was thrǣd.