Is it me...

or should they not look so pleased with her touching that thing?

(I have depended on Qiagen kits for most of my preparations for the past decade or more, and recommend them highly, but their ads are something else.)

Yesterday's Word-of-the-Day was, "Monadnock". It's come up before, and always makes me smile, since we go to New Hampshire every summer (except the last two years — don't even mention it to the kids!) and have scaled Mt. Monadnock. The view from the summit is rivaled by the sense of accomplishment at reaching it, especially on a sunny, midsummer's day. Margaret had woven many tales of clambering up "Mou-na-na-nock" as a child, and recalled the view of the mountain from Keene, NH, and how it had seemed to call to her from its lofty perch. My first ascent, we had a friend from Chicago staying at the lake with us, who fancied himself a photographer and wanted desperately to capture the view from the top of Margaret's fabled peak. At the trailhead, he asked an elderly couple coming down the mountain if there were more than the one trail to the top. "I think the Pocka Trail goes all the way up." Only later, after almost getting lost and consulting the map did we learn that our guides were visiting from Boston. "Clamber" was an accurate description of the first half of the ascent, regardless of the trail chosen. But it was worth standing atop the geological survey marker and looking for the Boston skyline in the haze.

I also enjoy seeing Monadnock as the Word-of-the-day, because its etymology has always bothered me. According to Wordsmith, Mount Monadnock is "a peak in New Hampshire, whose name in Algonquian means isolated mountain." What bothered me was that monad in English meant "a single, isolated unit" and knock in English meant "hill", so somehow the Algonquian and English languages had undergone some sort of crazy convergent evolution culminating in a single word, Monadnock, that meant the same thing in both languages. So today, I did some research and found, "Algonquian Names of Some Mountains and Hills" by William Wallace Tooker in The Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 17, No. 66 (Jul. - Sep., 1904), pp. 171-179 (available through JSTOR). Tooker says:

man, or mon, is a significant prefix to many word combinations... meaning "wonderful," "wonder," "vision," "revelation," "marvellous," etc. It is from the primary verbal root -an, "surpassing," "going beyond," "is more than the common," with the indefinite impersonal m prefix added, which with its generic -adn, "mountain," and the locative -ock, "place," gives as a synthesis of Man-adn-ock, "land or country of the surpassing mountain."

So, Monadnock is the land of the wondrous mountain, and Mt. Monadnock is the mountain of the land of the wondrous mountain; and the colonists who first heard the locals call the area Man-adn-ock probably felt the same sense of linguistic convergence as I did and assumed Monad-knock was Algonquian for isolated hill.
Next post: as a child I spent a week at the Grand Tetons...

Ned Gulley sent me Dark Side of the Whip over the e-mail system. Its' a mashup by Jim Bumgardner of "Whip It!" by Devo and "Breathe" by Pink Floyd.

As I replied to Ned, I find it strangely disturbing — those parts of my brain normally don't talk much, so listening to the mashup was like a roadtrip with my father-in-law.

I realized that in all my (sporatic) days of blogging, I've yet to post a family picture! Here's my descent from the blognoscenti, including one pet:

I came across an interesting article on Yahoo!News, today: "Playstation 2 component incites African War." According to the article, one of the rare minerals used in the manufacture of modern electronics is Tantalum, which is mined as an ore called coltan (short for columbite-tantalite). And, the demand for electronics components created by the success of the PS2 drove up the price of tantalum, prompting the leaders of Congo and Rwanda to send newly-acquired POWs and children into the coltan mines of the East African Rift.

I had recently been wasting my free time doing the memory games at Sporcle, and could not for the life of me complete the Periodic Table. One of the elements that I always miss is Tantalum – Niobium I could remember, but Tantalum I couldn't. To my Western eyes, it was just another one of those forgettable transition elements in the wasteland between chemistry and nuclear physics – if you can find a use for it, good for you. To East Africa, it's a reason to go to war. As small as the world has become in terms of information and economics, we are all still pretty provincial in terms of information and economics. I won't forget Tantalum, next time I'm looking at the Periodic Table, but more importantly, the table looks different now; where else are suffering and injustice hiding in that pretty wallchart?