This past week, I’ve been knee-deep in my craft room making flowers. I’ve made crepe paper flowers before, but these are on a whole new level: Giants, to be precise. So far, I’ve made three giant daisies that stand about two metres tall and two of four dandelions in different phases or similar size.
Dandelions are something everyone knows – you’ve seen them, you may have been irritated by their invasiveness in a garden, but honestly, have you ever stopped to look at them? In this project, I’ve needed to look at them in detail – where do the leaves sit on the stem? What colour is the stem? How do the bud leaves fall from the bloom? When does the yellow turn into white fuzzy parachutes?
I found a year-long timelapse of the growth of a dandelion, from seed to seedhead; click on the image below to watch the 3:46-minute video. What I find fascinating is the animation of plants that are only seen when we view them sped up; they stretch, move and grow – the movement is coming from the plant itself as this video was made in a controlled environment (no wind involved).
The edible plant has been used for centuries as a leafy green, leaf, flower or root tea, medicine, and as a source of nutrition for animals such as horses or ruminates (herbivorous grazing animals, such as cattle or deer). It’s an important plant for pollinators as it’s often the earliest flowering plant. For more information about its many uses, check out the Wikipedia article linked here. For a short but informative (and entertaining) video about the lion’s tooth, dent de lion, click here.
The next time you’re outside enjoying nature, stop and moment and appreciate the humble, often overlooked flower! And make yourself a dandelion salad.
Today, I went with a friend to a large second-hand warehouse; it’s an organized treasure hunt of sorts. Every section is well-defined, so you know where to look if you’re looking for something specific, and don’t need to waste time scanning isles of glass dishes when you’re looking for office supplies. But it got me thinking about the whole topic and the cultural differences around the world.
When I first came to Switzerland, “Brockenhäuser” (or Brocki, as they’re called here) were few and far between; Swiss people weren’t usually found in such shops. I think Swiss people (and I can only really compare this to the Zürich area – perhaps in other areas of Switzerland the sentiments were different) used to have a sense of embarrassment, as if one wasn’t successful enough to buy new. But nowadays the importance of recycling has grown, and people have discovered the fun of treasure hunting.
I grew up in a region of America where garage sales were every Thursday through Sunday during summer months; my father and I were the most frequent hunters in our family, searching for treasures amongst the junk. I once found a 1920s white gold, 24-diamond dinner ring for 10¢! Someone had cleaned out grandma’s house and had no idea what they had; I took it to a jeweller to have it examined, so I knew that what I’d found was the real deal. I once took my Swiss husband along on the cultural experience when we were in the States on holiday, and he found a stack of pristine Life magazines of the first moon landing. They now grace our library shelves among the astronomy books.
In Britain, I know of some roads where nearly every other shop is a charity shop; one had a sign in the window asking for books, because they were selling nearly a thousand a week. Whenever I’m in Britain, I fly with as empty a bag as I can manage to leave room for charity shop treasures.
Fraktur Script
Today when I was at the shop, I was looking for specific things, mostly to do with crafts; I got a few antique German books (with the Fraktur script, often generically referred to as “Gothic text”); I’m fluent in German, but even I have to really concentrate to decipher the old type-text, especially as spelling has shifted or become more standardised. So honestly, I’m fine with using them in crafts, though the antique book lover in me fights to preserve them! I also bought sheet music for the same purpose. I kept an eye out for things I could use to make gigantic flowers with – that’s the next prop I’ll be making for our church stage area for the spring/summer season. In this particular shop, by the way, there are very few items with prices; once you get to the register, they assess what you’ve got, and calculate the set prices (such as the antique books, which ran from 3.- to 8.-); usually the end price for everything is quite reasonable – after all, they need to make room for the new inventory being restocked every 30 minutes!
What is the culture of second-hand shops in your region? Even within a country, it can vary wildly. Do you have boot sales, garage sales, thrift stores, charity shops, meet & swaps, buy-sell-trade shops, street markets, or another variety? I’d love to hear about your experiences! And if you’ve done any of the above, what was your best treasure find? Please comment below!
Maybe this is something you’ve never stopped to think about, but everything we use on a daily basis was, at some point, invented, discovered or developed by someone. Before shoes, people walked barefoot, or wrapped leather around their feet in colder climates; before plastic, well, the world was far better off. But no matter where they lived in the world, or what their climate was like, people found ways to entertain themselves, or to have fun social interaction with board games, or with simple stones, sticks and rocks.
Even prehistoric people developed games to pass the time: The Mesopotamians had the Royal Game of Ur; in Egypt and across the Middle East, they played a game referred to as Fifty-eight Holes. A game that goes back thousands of years, with many different simultaneous versions across the world, is Mancala / Sungka / Congkak, played with hollowed dips (which could be made in dirt, wood, or stone) which players fill sequentially with stones or shells or nuts (whatever was readily available in their region of the world). As reading and writing became more widespread, word games and written riddles became popular.
In 1913, the journalist Arthur Wynne, working for the New York World newspaper, submitted the world’s first Crossword Puzzle (image below), which appeared in the Sunday paper on 21 December. An immigrant from England, Wynne based his idea on the magic square (in recreational mathematics, this is a square arrangement of numbers in which the sum of numbers in each row, column and both main diagonals is the same). In this concept, a given set of words would need to be arranged so that they form a square; but in Wynne’s version, the words had to be discovered first. The first puzzle contained 31 terms, with the word “fun” already filled in as an example.
In the beginning, crosswords (originally called Word-Cross Puzzles) were in a diamond shape; within a few years, the crossword craze had taken off, and eventually, the shape morphed into a square grid with blank or black cells where voids occur.
Today, crosswords have more competition: word search puzzles, scrabble, anagrams, ciphers, and various forms of Sudoku are the strongest contenders for puzzlers’ free time.
What is your favourite word puzzle type? Please comment below!
Picking up from where I left off in February, here are a few more everyday phrases that have been gleaned from the times when ships at sail were the most influential source of importing new ideas, foreign words and catchy tunes (such as shanties). The first of these phrases might be recognized by Star Trek fans, as the captain usually used this term or something similar to hand over the authority of the ship whenever he left the bridge.
Take the Conn: A term used to take over navigational duties on the bridge of a ship (this comes from the mid-1800s, during the age of iron-clad warships). Idiomatically, it means to take control of a situation. The word conn is either a noun or a verb and comes from conning tower – a raised platform from which the entire deck and surrounding environment can be observed.
Sailing Close to the Wind: Strong winds can be just as problematic at sea as no wind; strong winds can unexpectedly shift and take control of a boat’s direction, and many sailors will lower their sails until more favourable conditions exist. To use strong winds for sailing is risky and unpredictable but sometimes necessary; the modern term refers to taking risks that may be unreasonable, being close to breaking the law or going too far.
All Hands on Deck: A call to action – everyone must assist in resolving a problem or addressing a situation. During inspection or trouble, all hands were called to the deck; everyone needed to be present or accounted for, and working as directed.
On the Right Tack/Track: The correct course while sailing requires you to tack or move the sail to catch the wind to keep you on course. To take the wrong tack means to be off course, heading in the wrong direction. Tack has changed to track in a more modern language. Today it refers to Taking the line/course of action that leads to the correct conclusion.
Overboard: If cargo or people went overboard when sailing, the call “overboard” would be yelled out to draw attention to the event. With luck, the items or people could be recovered, but unfortunately, this was not often the case.
Abandon Ship: When a ship was sinking or being overrun by an enemy ship, sailors would need to abandon their posts and escape. The call to abandon the ship was considered a last resort.
As the Crow Flies: After crossing the oceans, sailors would watch for birds to detect nearby land. Following the direction of birds, such as a crow or seagulls, got them closer to shore to follow it to a port. Crows fly straight, and so it refers to the shortest distance between two points.
Tide Over: When a ship could not get under sail due to poor winds, they would ride the tide until the winds returned. If something tides one over, it will last until new provisions can be obtained or until conditions change.
High and Dry: If a ship was caught in low tide or ran up on the shoals, it might end up being stranded with no hope of recovery. The term was to be caught high and dry, as in up out of the water. It’s used today to describe the feeling of being abandoned, stranded, or helpless.
Sink or Swim: Tossing a person overboard resulted either in them sinking or swimming. The term was made popular in swashbuckling movies featuring pirates deciding on whether they should spare their captives or not. Today, it refers to either failing (sinking) or succeeding (swimming) in a task or an endeavour.
For those outside of the US and/or Millennials, the term “Burma-Shave” might be new to you – which is why I’d like to “undust” this fascinating little piece of history.
The 1920s was a time of change; World War 1 was over, and the following Spanish flu had wiped out more people than the war itself; the survivors just wanted to celebrate life. Out went the starchy mentality of Victorian dresses and in came the flappers; innovations and scientific breakthroughs fed the hunger for the new and anything that made life easier.
At the time, men shaved themselves with shaving cream applied to the face with a brush and a straight razor blade (still common into the 1950s, when the double-edged safety razor began to gradually take over).
Enter, the Burma-shave brushless shaving cream: Introduced in 1925 by the Burma-Vita Company in Minneapolis, Minnesota, it was purported to have come from “the Malay Peninsula and Burma.” It was, in fact, a result of chemical experiments by chemist Carl Noren. The monicker was a marketing gimmick, much like products touting to be “Swiss” that are unknown here (even “Swiss cheese” – which one of the hundreds is meant?). The cream didn’t really take off, and while other similar products were coming out of larger companies such as Barbasol and Gilette, Burma-Shave managed to beat the odds when their clever advertising campaign was hit upon.
Around this time, the Ford Model T had become a huge success, with millions of new automobiles on ever-expanding road systems. Roadside signage was taking off, and the advertising gimmick was destined to go down in history as one of the quirkiest success stories.
Burma-Shave ads were a series of signs along the road that concluded in the sign saying “Burma-Shave”. The first couple of years, the signs were rather prosaic ads for the company; but as they began bringing in repeat customers, the signs became bolder and more experimental. They became more humorous rhymes – usually five signs, with a sixth ending the series as “Burma-Shave”.
Here are a few examples:
Shaving brushes / you’ll soon see ’em / on the shelf / in some / museum / Burma-Shave (1943)
Uncle Rube / buys tube / one week / looks sleek / like sheik / Burma-Shave (1930)
A shave / that’s real / no cuts to heal / a soothing / velvet after-feel / Burma-Shave (1932)
Shaving brush / and soapy smear / went out of / style with / hoops my dear / Burma-Shave (1936)
The Burma girls / in Mandalay / dunk bearded lovers / in the bay / who don’t use / Burma-Shave (1937)
As cars began to speed up, safety messages increased around 1939:
Hardly a driver / Is now alive / Who passed / On hills / At 75 / Burma-Shave (1939)
If you dislike / big traffic fines / slow down / ‘till you / can read these signs / Burma-Shave (1939)
At crossroads / don’t just / trust to luck / the other car / may be a truck / Burma-Shave (1939)
Don’t pass cars / on curve or hill / if the cops / don’t get you / morticians will / Burma-Shave (1940)
At intersections / look each way / a harp sounds nice / but it’s / hard to play / Burma-Shave (1941)
When World War 2 came around, the signs reflected the social conscience:
Maybe you can’t / shoulder a gun / but you can shoulder / the cost of one / buy defence bonds / Burma-Shave (1942)
Shaving brush / in army pack / was straw that broke / the rookie’s back / use brushless / Burma-Shave (1942)
Slap / the Jap / with / iron / scrap / Burma-Shave (1943)
Tho tough / and rough / from wind and wave / your cheek grows sleek / with / Burma-Shave (1943)
A few humorous signs:
She kissed / the hairbrush / by mistake / she thought it was / her husband Jake / Burma-Shave (1941)
We know / how much / you love that gal / but use both hands / for driving pal / Burma-Shave (1947)
I use it too / the bald man said / it keeps my chin / just like / my head / Burma-Shave (1947)
Road was slippery / curve was sharp / white robe, halo / wings and harp / Burma-Shave (1948)
If you think / she likes / your bristles / walk bare-footed / through some thistles / Burma-Shave (1948)
A man / a miss / a car – a curve / he kissed the miss / and missed the curve / Burma-Shave (1948)
Our fortune / is your / shaven face / it’s our best / advertising space / Burma-Shave (1963)
Toward the latter part of the signage, they began recycling earlier messages. Road signs and maintenance became increasingly expensive, and cars sped by faster than ever. The signs disappeared from the roads in 1963 when the company was sold to Phillip Morris and they discontinued the marketing campaign, which turned out to be a mistake; sold once again, the product eventually disappeared, but the term “Burma-Shave” can still be heard, referring to short, quirky rhymes.
I hate to end / this fun article / but time is short / so here’s what’s possible / Burma-Shave examples from Pinterest:
This illustration is from “A History of the Burma-Vita Company”, written by Frank Rowsome Jr. and illustrated by Carl Rose (published by the Stephen Greene Press in 1963).
The topic of this article has been on my mind for the past two weeks; last week flew by so fast I barely had time to blink, let alone order my thoughts into coherent sentences. The topic was sparked by coming across an article online about what is known as the “Milan Conference” or “The Second International Congress on Education of the Deaf” (though it was, in fact, the first), held in Milan, Italy in 1880.
To give you a bit of my personal background, I learned BSL (The Glaswegian dialect) and translated for the deaf when I lived in Scotland. Being as close to that community as I was, I’d shockingly never heard about the Milan Conference until a fortnight ago.
When I first moved to Switzerland, I wanted to continue working with the deaf and began taking Swiss German sign classes. I immediately began hitting brick walls: The crux of the matter was spelled out – they didn’t want hearing people in their world. It made little sense to me back then, and it was frustrating. Also at that time, my husband wasn’t yet hearing impaired – which would have made a difference in their attitude toward me, as people with family members affected by hearing loss were more acceptable to them. In light of the Milan Conference, their reticence makes perfect sense. I never was able to break that barrier, and I’ve lost much of the sign language I once used fluently.
The conference was an international gathering of (hearing – with only ONE exception) educators of the deaf and mute. The imperialist arrogance of the discriminating resolutions passed profoundly wounded and damaged the deaf community for nearly 100 years.
To sum up the conference’s resolutions briefly, the majority decided that sign language was disadvantageous to integrating the deaf into the hearing world, and they banned – yes, banned – sign language from the education of the deaf in favour of “oralism” – forcing the deaf to read lips to make them assimilate to the hearing world’s culture. Deaf teachers lost their jobs, and an overall decline of deaf professionals resulted – they were no longer allowed the tools to communicate in their own language, and communication professions such as artists, lawyers and writers fell silent. Here in Switzerland, there was a two-fold impact: Deaf children were forced to sit on their hands and learn to lip-read from High German-speaking teachers; but when they went home on holidays, they couldn’t lip-read their own family’s dialects of Swiss German, and so they were isolated from society both in school and at home. The anger and resentment to the hearing world still runs deep.
Most disturbing for me is the fact that Alexander Graham Bell, whose own mother and wife were deaf and who worked with the deaf throughout his life – including helping bring Helen Keller out of her silent world as a blind and deaf girl – was one of the strongest proponents for oralism at the conference. The most famous picture of Bell and Keller is one in which Keller is finger-spelling on Bell’s hand. It is a form of sign language. Yet he advocated to eradicate it.
The resolutions of 1880 held their ground until they were overturned in 2013 when an official apology was issued to the deaf community. Eleven years ago. Let that sink in. Inroads were made to teach sign in pockets here and there; in America, most schools for the deaf only began teaching sign language again in the 1960s; in the UK it was around a decade later. Generations suffered under the restriction. [For those who have been deaf their whole lives – what’s known as pre-lingually deaf – it means that sign language is their first language, while spoken English is their second; this can lead to difficulties in understanding complex or abstract messages in English. Imagine being denied your own native language…] Only in 2003, the British government recognised BSL as a minority language – but so far, Scotland is the only country in the UK that has given BSL legal recognition. The shift in understanding and recognition had already been set in motion by the time I’d moved to the UK, which is perhaps why the Milan Conference was no longer a topic when I was involved in the deaf community.
The ban is the main reason there are so many regional dialects today: Even though sign language was officially banned, the deaf still needed to communicate among themselves, and so signs evolved “under the table” within each pocket of deaf students. There was no exchange of information; for example, “bread” took on the shape of the local speciality, so in the French part it looks like a long baguette, while in the Zurich region, it looks more like a half-sphere. There are 5 major Swiss-German dialects; in Scotland, there were at least 7.
Please click here to watch a ~13-minute video by Storied about the history of sign language and the Milan Conference. If you’d like to learn more about the timeline of sign language in Britain, please click here to visit University College London’s website, and to learn more about BSL in Scotland, click hereto read the Scottish Parliament’s article.
ASL, American Sign Language, also has a forgotten predecessor that was largely written out of history: The Plains Indian Sign Language, also known as “hand talk”. For an interesting video about that history, click here.
I hope you’ve enjoyed this brief insight into a long and tangled topic, and that it encourages you to look into it more.
Just as a parting trivia: Everyone recognizes the sign for phone; but did you know that it became a euphemism in some deaf communities for the restroom/loo? Back when restaurants had their public phones near the “small closets”, the Deaf would sign “phone” as a polite, covert way of saying they were going to the restroom/loo.
Below are the British Sign Language and the American Sign Language alphabets; I’d encourage you to learn one or the other and stretch those grey cells a wee bit!
It’s hard to imagine, but the Hawaiian islands a generation ago were not a hotspot of tourism and a bustling modern culture; most people lived simple lives with few amenities. It’s also hard to imagine a time when exotic fruits were not found in your local store year round – exotic being bananas, kiwi fruit, avocadoes or papayas. My Swiss mother-in-law remembers when bananas came to Switzerland, and they were exotic and expensive; in her house, they were only bought for her brother, who was very sick at the time, as a source of energy; that was during World War 2. Once, she confessed to stealing some money from her brother’s piggy bank to buy herself a banana.
By clicking here, you can watch a ~10-minute video of a series of short video clips from the 1920’s of Hawaii, interspersed with silent-film-era title cards. Not only is it an interesting glimpse into a simpler time on the islands, but it’s also an insight into what the rest of America “knew” about the islands, foods and customs. Back then, the world in general also knew very little about strange activities such as “surf riding” (surfing), and the footage of surfers is utterly tame compared to the monster wave-riding considered “for surfers” today! Volcanic activity also seems to have been a fascination; such footage may well have been the first time anyone had seen such a thing outside of volcanic regions; it still had to be described in colours, however, such as “cherry red” for the lava, as the footage was, obviously, in black and white.
The image below is of King’s Mansion, in Kealakekua, Hawaii, on the Big Island. As a student, I lived there in 1986 (my dorm window was the left bay window at the front). We had avocado trees in the back garden, and our neighbour’s horses, across a stone wall, would come trotting to the wall when they saw us in the garden, hoping for an avocado; we’d feed them, entertained as they carefully chewed away the flesh around the pit (reminding me of an old man chewing tobacco!), and then skillfully spit the seed out. At the bottom of our front garden stood a huge banyan tree [if you were standing on the covered lanai (porch) at the front of the house, it would be to your left – not shown]; it was a favourite tree to climb. At the bottom of our terraced garden was a volleyball court; it was popular, though we could also hike up the next hill over to the local school, where we could use their tennis courts. If you hit the ball over the high fence, you’d be hiking through the jungle to bring the ball back! Maybe the local students got tired of the same problem, as the jungle eventually gave way to a baseball diamond.
On 8 July, we were asleep in our dorm bunk beds; at around 2:30 a.m., I was awakened by what I first thought was my restless bunkmate – but which turned out to be an earthquake. The San Andreas Fault had slipped, and what had taken me 9 hours to fly took the earthquake 9 minutes to travel, hitting the Big Island. It kicked off a chain event of volcanic eruptions, aftershocks, and strange weather conditions: The heat of the volcanic air and the cool ocean created thick, milky white clouds at the level of our house (at the top of a hill) that rolled over our lanai and into the open classroom – soaking our books and the carpet the first time; after that, we got smart and put our books on our laps whenever the thick cloud rolled in. It also made gorgeous “sunsets” mid-day, as the volcanic ash dimmed the sun. I don’t know if they were connected, but soon after the volcanic eruption, Hurricane Estelle hit the islands; as King’s Mansion is up in the hills, we mainly felt the tropical storms, wind and rain, though it was creating 15 to 20-foot waves at one point, which we could see from our vantage point. I grew up in the heart of Tornado Alley and chased tornadoes for the fun of it as a teenager, so I took the earthquakes and storms in my stride.
One person deserves a special place in such memories: Gran’pa Joe Cho. He was a retired Hawaiian neighbour who enjoyed spoiling us rotten. He’d bring us treats and take us girls out on the town. He would admonish the boys to treat women right and then show them how to do it! One memorable evening, Joe Cho had taken a group of us girls out to get Kona Mud Pie, then to Manta Ray Point (aka the Kona Surf Hotel’s surf zone – the rays would swim around the underwater lights near the shore, catching the plankton attracted by the lights), and then we stretched out on a green of the Kona Country Club golf course, right on the edge of a rocky cliff, to watch the stars; we saw a meteor shoot so brightly that its reflection could be seen on the ocean waves.
It was a lifetime ago, but they will always be grand memories…
My past two articles have been about everyday phrases with maritime roots; not only is a language affected by sailors, but sometimes entire populations.
Around the British Isles, there have been countless shipwrecks. The waters can be treacherous, with islets and rocky outcrops just under the waves – splinters of divided continents worn down by the power of the sea until they become hidden snares. My husband and I were once on holiday on St Mary’s, Scilly Islands; with every tide, flotsam fragments of shipwrecks (nearly 1,000 known so far) from the 16th through the 19th centuries wash ashore, and I gathered a handful of beach pottery and glass, not knowing at the time that the worn but still decorated pieces could be centuries old. Buried beneath the sand, they’d retained their colourful glazing until washed ashore.
That’s the goods and plates aboard; but what of the people? Many sailors of past centuries couldn’t swim; if their ships foundered too far from shore, they sank to Davy Jones’s Locker. Those who were fortunate enough to make it ashore were not guaranteed a safe sojourn; if the island had scant supplies, it could get ugly – as it did for Spanish sailors on Fair Isle (more on that in a moment). But first, a brief background on the situation that led to the Spanish Armada being in British waters, and their shipwrecks:
The reasons the Armada moved to attack England are complex; let’s just say that Philip II, heir apparent to the Spanish throne, had married (in a political manoeuvre) Bloody Mary, the Catholic queen of England, who’d had her Protestant half-sister, Elizabeth, placed under house arrest to prevent any political ambitions from growing in the Protestant faction. When Mary died childless, Philip (King of Spain and Portugal, as well as of Ireland and England through marriage and until Mary’s death in 1558) returned to his own kingdom in Spain, and Queen Elizabeth I ascended to the throne of England. But being the daughter of King Henry VIII and his second wife, Anne Boleyn (whom he’d had executed when Elizabeth was two years old), Elizabeth was illegitimate in the eyes of many Catholics, as her parents’ marriage had been annulled two days before her mother’s execution. Ironically, confinement hadn’t taught Elizabeth any compassion; she had her Catholic cousin, Mary, Queen of Scots, imprisoned for nineteen years, and eventually executed in February of 1587. Mary had been Spain’s Catholic ally, and her death was the final straw for Philip II of Spain, as the religious tensions had been mounting between England and Spain. Philip prepared his Armada, sailing out of Lisbon in 1588.
If you look at a map of Europe, you will see that Spain is southwest of the British Isles; they had to sail through the Bay of Biscay, and then either west of England through the waters between England and Ireland, or east through the English Channel and French waters (and the French were usually at war with everyone) to reach the east coast of England.
Sir Francis Drake’s Revenge, with Armada ships in the background. Credit, Wikipedia
The battle ensued; the English ships had superior long-range cannon, with which they harried the Spanish fleet. Weather and prevailing winds interfered; battle lines were redrawn, only to be scuppered again. In August 1588, the Spanish fleet had been defeated by Sir Francis Drake’s command of the English ships, and the remnants of the fleet retreated into the North Sea. By early September, seventeen ships had been lost to storms. Many of the ships not sunk by the British navy or taken out by the sea were blown onto the rocky shores of Ireland and Scotland; of the 150 ships that set out from Lisbon, only 65 returned.
Replica of the 16th century Spanish Galeón Andalucía. Photo credit, Fundacion Nao Victoria. Click on the image to see details about the ship.
Three of the ships were separated in the storm from the rest of the fleet: The Barca de Amburgo foundered off of Fair Isle, but the crew was rescued by the El Gran Grifón and the Trinidad Valencera. With the extra crew aboard, the El Gran Grifón tried to anchor to make repairs but was wrecked on the rocks of Stroms Hellier, Fair Isles (a steep, rocky outcrop of land halfway between Shetland to the north and Orkney to the south). According to historian Sir Robert Sibbald (1641-1722), the crew was on the island for two months (~August-September 1588); though they paid for their supplies, tensions were high with locals as food stores were meagre and “Spanish money doesn’t fill hungry bellies”. The island itself has never supported more than 400 inhabitants (today’s population is 65); the Spanish shipwreck brought 300 to shore. 50 of the crew either starved to death or were killed when the locals turned on them: Any Spaniard found alone was tossed over a cliff; when that wasn’t efficient enough, the islanders deliberately collapsed a flagstone roof over the sleeping crew.
The survivors fled; some to Shetland, and some to Orkney. Enter that dusty bit of history, the Westray Dons.
Westray is the northernmost island of the Orkney archipelago, a group of 70 islands*, 16 of which are inhabited (*or more, depending on who you ask – skerries or uninhabited islets may or may not count). They not only welcomed the Spaniards but intermarried with them. The men remained on the island, and their descendants became known as the Westry Dons. Spanish heritage is still seen in the Orcadian population today, though the Dons are no longer a separate community; Orkney has a higher percentage of dark-haired, dark-eyed inhabitants than any other Scandinavian-heritage region. Orcadian oral tradition, according to the Sanday folklorist Walter Traill Dennison, says that the Dons were exceptional seamen, many of whose descendants went on to become sailors and sea captains. The Dons largely adopted Orcadian surnames, the most common (but not exclusively) being Petrie, Hewison, and Reid.
I hope you enjoyed this quick dive; if you’d like to read and hear a Scottish song about the Dons, just click here (warning: It’s in thick Scottish brogue!).
To see a timeline of the Spanish Armada battle, just click on the image below.
Today’s everyday phrases can come in handy when you’re in a tight spot, avoiding danger, or reaching your goal (land ho!) Chockablock came in handy for me last week, as it described how I felt after having been sick for nearly two months (Covid into bronchitis, joy), and then catching up with all those little things in our household that had gone undone. Anyone who’s been married for any length of time will know that spouses tend to take over specific jobs – whether that’s carrying out the rubbish or doing the laundry, cleaning drains or watering plants. I’ll let you guess which jobs are whose. Catching up with those undone jobs stemmed the tide of accumulating chores, and helped me get our home back to shipshape and in Bristol fashion! So enjoy these phrases, and please share in the comments which ones apply to your life!
Chockablock: Jam-packed; overcrowded; completely filled, stuffed, or jammed tightly together. You may have heard the term block and tackle; This refers to a system in which a rope, chain or cable (= tackle) is passed over pulleys enclosed in two or more blocks, one fixed and one attached to a load (see image). When these blocks are pulled so close together that no further movement is possible, this is known as being chockablock (this is the usual spelling, which illustrates its meaning perfectly – no space, not even a dash between words!).
Stem the Tide: Try to prevent a situation from becoming worse than it already is. Nautically, it means to tack (steer) against the tide or oncoming storm to avoid being blown off course or capsized.
To be Shanghaied: A city in China, Shanghai implied a long voyage (just as Switzerland today implies neutrality in the collective conscious). When landsmen were impressed (volunteered against their will) into the British or American navies in the days of wooden ships of sail, to be Shanghaied meant to be impressed and sent away from home for a long time or extended voyage (not necessarily to China!).
Limey: Shortened slang for “lime juicer”, referring to the English naval ships and the practice of carrying barrels of limes or lime juice to ward off scurvy on long voyages. As the British navy was a dominant force on the seas, the term gradually came to mean British.
Shipshape (and in Bristol Fashion): Everything is okay and in good order. Bristol was, at one point, Britain’s main west coast port; the idiom was used to describe everything being in order with cargo and at the port.
Give a Wide Berth: Leave space for, veer around. Even when a ship is at anchor, it will move with the tide and wind, so the berth, or a docking space, for a ship needs to be ample for a safe mooring. The modern phrase still denotes the danger of steering too close to an unpredictable situation.
Loose Cannon: Unpredictable danger (can be said of a person or situation). When a cannon or a cannonball broke free from its mooring, it created a hazardous situation as it rolled around or across the deck during a storm or in battle.
Port, Starboard: This simple explanation is that these are left and right, respectively, on any ship or airplane. But simple is a bit boring! Buckle up: In the past, as today, the majority of people were right-handed; ships of sail had rudders centred on the stern (back of the ship), but the steering oar came up onto the quarter deck through the right side of the stern. This leads us to the term starboard: Old English steorbord literally meant steer-board, the side on which a vessel was steered.
When pulling into a port, as the steering oar was on the right side, they would anchor starboard out, port in. The port, the left side of the ship as seen from the stern facing forward toward the bow, was formerly known as larboard, from Middle English ladde-borde, meaning loading board (side); it was eventually renamed as the similarity to starboard was confusing in the loud life aboard.
Most airplanes follow this tradition today, with boarding being on the left (port) side. In fact, jet bridges are designed to match the left side of the plane, so unless you are climbing into a grasshopper flight on a remote island, you will board port side!
Ahoy: Used to hail a ship, a boat or a person, or to attract attention. Used today as a humorous warning of impending danger or inconvenience.
Land Ho: To call out “Land ho!” was to let the crew know that land had been spotted. It is a way to let everyone know that the end of a voyage is imminent.
Recently I came across an article on the phenomena of “The Hum” – a low-frequency sound heard by people across the globe. The hums are often given their location’s place name, such as the Taos Hum of New Mexico, the Auckland Hum or the Windsor Hum. While these sounds are clearly heard, no one seems to agree on the source of the sound: It could be produced by electrical equipment, an unfamiliar animal sound (such as the toadfish), the Jet Stream shearing powerline posts, volcanic eruptions, lightning static, ocean wave vibrations, or internal biological auditory signals.
If you stop and listen, there are sounds everywhere. But The Hum is not tinnitus, which has a much higher sound frequency. I’ve had tinnitus for years; when it’s quiet, I can hear up to eight tones of ringing in my ears. It’s something that affects around 15% of the population, but the only time it really becomes an issue is if it triggers a fight-or-flight response in a person – I’ve heard that the more you focus on the ringing, the more you hear it (the more it bothers you). In almost half of the people who have tinnitus, it can lead to phases of anxiety or depression, likely linked to that psychological fear response. Some people don’t even realize they have tinnitus – they automatically, subconsciously distract themselves with sound (music or television being common tactics). The causes of tinnitus vary, but in my case, I know exactly when it started: I was flying from London to Glasgow, and I had a head cold. The flight was just at that altitude where your ears almost pop, and it was excruciating. I can still hear fleas sneeze and “tell you if they’re male or female”, but the ringing is always present – I just ignore it for the most part. I hear so well that I sleep with earplugs each night – otherwise, I can hear electricity in the walls, and a battery charger at the far end of our home sounds like a car alarm to me!
Have you heard The Hum? Do you have tinnitus, and if so, does it bother you in any way or are you able to ignore it?
If you’d like to learn a bit more about The Hum, and what it could be or what it could mean, please click here for a 12-minute BBC report on the issue.
Stephanie Huesler 