Nine Eleven Plus Two   The neighborhood continues to recover. There is little, probably nothing, noticeable if you're not near the WTC site, and even that just looks like a large construction site now. The last remaining vacant lots in Battery Park City continue to be filled in, with all of North End Avenue now built up. At the WTC site, the temporary rail station is nearing completion, and its winged roof is visable on Church Street. Business seem to still feel the pinch, and there are ads in the paper for all kinds of restaurant specials. We didn't get involved on the two-year anniversary, although the commemoration came to us in two ways.

At 10:29 in the morning a large group of boats in the river began sounding their whistles. Out the window I could see, on our right and facing the site, about 20-30 mid-sized pleasure craft stationed in a fan-shape like they were in an amphitheater. After the ceremony, they dispersed in every direction.

In the evening I went down to the building lobby to get our mail, and one of the concierges asked if I had seen the beams of light. I had heard about them last year when they were lit for several weeks. Now I understand they will be lit only on Nine-Eleven itself. I went out into the darkness on South End Avenue, and you could see the two shafts of light pointing upward a few blocks north. Because of the height involved, there is an optical illusion that they're leaning toward you.

Back in the apartment, where we're on both the 6th and 7th floor, I went out our back door on our upper level to the breezeway above our courtyard, where we used to have a view of the towers above the roof of our building, and from where I watched them collapse, one by one. The two beams were there now instead.

"And the blind shall read the writing on the wall ..."   That sounds either biblical or literary, but I made it up. We have several large prints on the wall with European scenes. I've said recently that Bev and I have always liked Edith Piaf, and missed hearing any of her songs at the Lapin Agile. The set of three prints above our couch go together and show a continuous streetfront in Paris, stone and stucco buildings, courtyards, doorways, shopfronts marked "Antiquités", "Vins & Liqueurs", "Fleuriste", "Lingerie". They're very pleasant and I really like them.

They were hanging there for a couple of years before I became curious about a tiny (2 inch by 1 inch) poster on the wall next to the wine shop in the center print. It showed a woman's profile in black and white. I had never paid attention to it. This time, I looked real close. It said:

I couldn't believe I had had a poster-within-a-picture of Piaf on the wall for a couple of years without knowing it. Her greatest triumphs were at the Olympia Music Hall, which we drove by for the first time on this visit to Paris. Her real last name was Gassion. When she was starting out her career, she appeared so tiny on stage that she got the nickname "Kid Sparrow", "La Môme Piaf", and it stuck. So the blind person sees the writing on the wall (double image: wall-in-picture on wall-in-livingroom). But that's not the end of the story.

The very day after coming home after just having been in Paris again after many years, I took another look at the Paris street scene and looked closely at the right-hand print. Sure enough, on the wall above the lingerie shop, semi-faded in the stucco, it clearly said:

Right on our living room wall, also "hidden" in plain sight.

The Milennium Year   The year 2000 was a turning point for the two of us in several ways. We started European travel again that summer. I bought Bev's first transporter (small-wheeled) wheelchair on March 24 of that year, just twelve days after her 63rd birthday. Our mutual funds dropped 18-20% in a short period. Changes on April 1 at the Eden Bay Condominium eventually got me and others quickly involved, and it led to me establishing Eden Bay Ventures the following year which is becoming a second career for several of us.

Saying Yes   Be careful with the phrase "everyone knows". "Everyone knows" that Spanish and Italian use "si" to say yes. OK. Actually, Portuguese does, too, but uses a nasal version spelled "sim".

"Everyone knows" that French uses "oui" and doesn't use "si" to say yes, but watch out. Of course French can use "si", but you've just got to know how it's done.

French uses oui under normal circumstances, but it uses si to say yes to reverse something negative:

So be wary.

Duck Tape   There's another kind of duck than the “quack-quack” kind, and this word has become rare. It does not mean "cloth", it means a kind of cloth. Duck is apparently a finer and thinner type of canvas, so fine that you can make clothes out of it. No longer popular, apparently, are the kind of pants called "white ducks" made, obviously, from duck. If you see a picture of a young gentleman from a past era and you're told he's wearing white ducks, expect to take note of his trousers, and don't expect to see him wearing goofy bedroom slippers with feathers and beaks.

This word duck is related to German Tuch and Dutch doek (pronounced DUKE), but again these words mean "cloth", whereas duck is a kind of cloth.

You can put glue on all sorts of things to make tape. If you put glue on canvas, you'd have canvas tape, wouldn't you? But canvas is too thick to make good tape, so let's take a strip of duck instead and put glue on one side (and silver waterproofing material on the other). What shall we call it? How about duck tape? I saw on TV recently two "experts" pontificating on the fact that it's called duck tape because it's waterproof. They said so in an "everybody knows" tone. Beware.

If you ever listen to Garrison Keillor's "Prarie Home Companion" on Public Radio, you know he has pseudo-advertisers, and one of them is the "American Duck Tape Council (quack-quack)". Everytime he mentions the council you hear a duck. It's cute.

Folk Etymology I   The topic of duck, and duck tape, segues nicely into this topic. If you call it, or have heard it called (and you have), duct tape, you've seen an example of folk etymology. Etymology is the (accurate) retracing of where a word comes from. Folk etymology is the inaccurate tracing, and is a lot more fun. Folk etymology happens when something is unclear, and in a split second all these thoughts go through a person's head:

Duck tape? How can you get tape from a duck? Wait a minute! They wrap it around air ducts to prevent leakage! Stupid me! I've been saying it wrong all this time! I've got to start saying duct tape! And the language changes, assuming enough people go through this thought process.

Here's another one: the word "barrow", meaning a kind of box to carry things in, has left the language. But with a wheel and handles on a barrow, it does still become a wheelbarrow. But that can still be confusing, and some people call it a wheelbarrel, even though it doesn't look anything like a barrel. It's just that barrel is a familiar word. "Wheelbarrel" shows folk etymology.

Please realize that these folk etymologies can take root and become the only way to say it, with the original way dying out. A lovely main road going through Hyde Park in London has the unlikely name of Rotten Row. Nobody thinks a thing about it being a weird name, that's just the name of the road. It originally had the French name "Route du Roi (Route of the King, or King's Way)".

My last, and favorite one: there a town in England called Shotover. There's nothing strange about that, except it's not over anything in particular, and no one's doing any shooting of note. It must at one time have had a Green Castle, because it was also named, in French, Château Vert. Pronounce that, remembering that the last T is silent, and you'll see where Shotover got its name. Folk etymology is always more fun than the real thing.

Yours   The subject of letter etiquette comes to mind. Most of it is ultra-traditional, and I’ll have nothing of it. It is foolish to say "Dear" when you don't mean it, and the combination "Dear Sir" is about as nonsensical as it gets putting meaningless words together. I don't use any of them beyond the person's name, and don't use closings either, other than my name. But people who use the standard closings in English have no idea of what they're actually saying, I'm sure.

You may have seen letters where the last paragraph ends in "...and I remain", followed by something like "Yours" before the name. Keep that in mind, because it's important to realize that words like "yours" were originally the end of the sentence from the last paragraph.

You also have to realize that going back to the 1700's there were very flowery endings used. These endings corresponded to one person bowing to another with the implication of unworthiness. This whole unworthiness thing was of course nonsense, but it was the style of the day.

Corresponding to a bow of unworthiness was ending a letter with something like this (you may have seen pictures of real letters of this sort): ...and I remain your most obedient servant. B. Franklin

Keep that word "servant" in mind, since I see it as the answer to the entire question we're talking about. After a while, the "remain" part stayed in the text, and the rest above the signature. Still referring to the unworthiness of a servant, it went back and forth: I'm yours, no, I'm yours, in a kind of verbal bowing to each other.

The peculiar situation mushroomed by adding additional words, but still referring to "servant": I'm sincerely yours; no, I'm very sincerely yours, even though this sincerity is deeply in doubt. And where's the truth in: I'm truly yours; no, I'm very truly yours....

Now if you're writing a love letter, and say "I'm yours", well that's beautiful, since it means something quite different. Beyond that, I can't see why anyone would want to use the word "Yours" nowadays at the end of a letter, given its history.

Harvey & Bernadette   We went to see Hairspray, and waited outside the stage door. Harvey Fierstein plays the Mother in the show, and of course couldn't resist the wheelchair when he saw Bev, and I asked him to shake Bev's hand. He chatted a bit about Bev's condition, and I told him that we travel and go to shows. His response, in typical Noo Yawkese: The theaytuh! Live theaytuh is the best thing faw huh!

We also went to see Gypsy with Bernadette Peters. We didn't talk or shake hands, but there’s more to the story than that. A good number of years ago, Bev got it into her head that we had to see Into the Woods with Bernadette Peters. She dragged me up to the box office, where only box seats were available, and we took them. Box seats are the dregs. They're meant to be seen in rather than seeing. And you know what happened to Lincoln in his box seat. Anyway, we were in hard chairs, Bev with a 7/8 view of the stage and me further in with a 3/4 view. I hated the show, I hated the box seats ... and then something interesting happened. When the second act started, we leaned over to see the stage. Pretty soon, the spotlight hit our box, and who had joined us in the box not three feet away but Bernadette Peters, and she was singing down to the stage. At least I got this story out of it, but now I know how easy it was for John Wilkes Booth to sneak into the box at Ford's Theater.

Back to Gypsy and Bernadette. Going back to the days of Ethel Merman, Mama Rose famously enters the performance from the auditorium to where her daughters are auditioning onstage in a show within a show, shouting "Sing out, Louise, sing out!". In this performance, our wheelchair-accessible seats were on the aisle, but in the very last row. Before the show, I asked the usher which aisle Bernadette enters from, and she coyly told me she's not allowed to say, but then I noticed that only our right-hand aisle had steps up to the stage, so ...

About two minutes into the show, Bernadette took me by surprise again, even though I knew where she was going to make her entrance from. Bev was on the aisle, and just beyond her in the darkness was Bernadette, in a 1920's style outfit with hat and fur collar, holding a real lapdog under one arm, staring intently ahead ready to enter. The three of us were together again (?!). It was over after a moment, and down the aisle she went: Sing out, Louise, sing out!