Factoids and bon mots in "The Overstory"

This is one of the books I read during my "blogcation."  I won't offer an extensive review here, because it is already well-known, having won the Pulitzer prize back in 2019 (and shortlisted for the Booker Prize).  This is a book about trees, but it's not the book to read if you just want to learn the facts about tree communication and mycorrhizal networks; for that there are a number of excellent popular science books.  The Overstory presents nine wildly-different characters whose lives are influenced by trees, then brings all of them together in the American Pacific northwest where they participate in activism for the protection of old-growth forests.  Some will find that latter part of the novel "preachy" and the methods of the tree-huggers to be repellant, but I do admire the knowledge base about trees that Powers utilized, which I've excerpted below in a series of "factoids" and bon mots.

"Each of the world's seven hundred and fifty species of Ficus has its own unique wasp tailored to fertilize it... The foundress laid her eggs and died.  The fruit that she fertilized became her tomb." (81)

"... growing conviction that the greatest flaw of the [human] species is its overwhelming tendency to mistake agreement for truth.  Single biggest influence on what a body will or won't believe is what nearby bodies broadcast over the public band..." (84)

"... the word beech becomes the word book, in language after language... beech bark played host to the earliest Sanskrit letters." (116)

(in preparation for winter) "Sap falls.  Cells become permeable.  Water flows out of the trunks and concentrates into anti-freeze.  The dormant life just below the bark is lined with water so pure that nothing is left to help it crystallize." (118)

"It’s a miracle,” she tells her students, photosynthesis: a feat of chemical engineering underpinning creation’s entire cathedral. All the razzmatazz of life on Earth is a free-rider on that mind-boggling magic act. The secret of life: plants eat light and air and water, and the stored energy goes on to make and do all things. She leads her charges into the inner sanctum of the mystery: Hundreds of chlorophyll molecules assemble into antennae complexes. Countless such antenna arrays form up into thylakoids discs. Stacks of these discs align in a single chloroplast. Up to a hundred such solar power factories power a single plant cell. Millions of cells may shape a single leaf. A million leaves rustle in a single glorious gingko.  

Too many zeros, their eyes glaze over." (124)

"She produces her loupe from her key chain and applies it to one stump to estimate the number of rings. The oldest downed trees are about eighty years. She smiles at the number, so comical, for these fifty thousand baby trees all around her have sprouted from a rhizome mass too old to date even to the nearest hundred millennia. Underground, the eighty-year-old trunks are a hundred thousand, if they’re a day. She wouldn’t be surprised if this great, joined, single clonal creature that looks like a forest has been around for the better part of a million years.

That’s why she has stopped: to see one of the oldest, largest living things on earth. All around her spreads one single male whose genetically identical trunks cover more than a hundred acres. The thing is outlandish, beyond her ability to wrap her head around. But then, as Dr. Westerford knows, the world’s outlands are everywhere, and trees like to toy with human thought like boys toy with beetles." (131)

"You and the tree in your backyard come from a common ancestor. A billion and a half years ago, the two of you parted ways. But even now, after an immense journey in separate directions, that tree and you still share a quarter of your genes. . . ." (132)

"She stands in the clearing at the top of the rise, looking out over a shallow gully. Aspens everywhere, and it boggles her mind that not one of them has grown from seed. All through this part of the West, few aspens have done so in ten thousand years. Long ago, the climate changed, and an aspen’s seeds can no longer thrive here. But they propagate by root; they spread. There are aspen colonies up north where the ice sheets were, older than the sheets themselves. The motionless trees are migrating—immortal stands of aspen retreating before the latest two-mile-thick glaciers, then following them back north again." (133)

"Her trees are far more social than even Patricia suspected. There are no individuals. There aren’t even separate species. Everything in the forest is the forest. Competition is not separable from endless flavors of cooperation. Trees fight no more than do the leaves on a single tree. It seems most of nature isn’t red in tooth and claw, after all." (142)

Chlorophyll and hemoglobin are nearly identical molecules (143)

"Lit by the streetlamp in front of her house is a singular tree that once covered the earth - a living fossil, one of the oldest, strangest things that ever learned the secret of wood [gingko].  A tree with sperm that must swim through droplets to fertilize the ovule." (146)

"Oak veneration at the oracle at Dodona, the druids’ groves in Britain and Gaul, Shinto sakaki worship, India’s bejeweled wishing trees, Mayan kapoks, Egyptian sycamores, the Chinese sacred ginkgo—all the branches of the world’s first religion." (215)

"La ruta nos aporto otro paso natural" is a palindrome

"In that dream, the trees laugh at them.  Save us?  What a human thing to do." (329).  [reminds me of a scene in After Yang when robot says man's question whether Yang wanted to be human is "such a human thing to ask."

"... as friendly as a retriever covered with ticks..." (415)

“The Greeks had a word, xenia—guest friendship—a command to take care of traveling strangers, to open your door to whoever is out there, because anyone passing by, far from home, might be God. Ovid tells the story of two immortals who came to Earth in disguise to cleanse the sickened world. No one would let them in but one old couple, Baucis and Philemon. And their reward for opening their door to strangers was to live on after death as trees—an oak and a linden—huge and gracious and intertwined. What we care for, we will grow to resemble. And what we resemble will hold us, when we are us no longer. . . .” (498)

"... when the songs are finished, he adds, Amen, if only because it may be the single oldest word he knows,  The older the word, the more likely it is to be both useful and true...: (501)

"...the word tree and the word truth come from the same root." (501)

I also encountered two uncommon words that drew my attention:

"There are ancient prophecies that scry the seeds of time and say which will grow and which will not."  To "scry" is to supernaturally predict the future by using crystal balls or other magic items.

",,, where your horse stops to slather a drink from icy water..."  An uncommon usage of a verb that usually denotes applying something thickly, like jam on toast.  Also used as a noun to mean "drool."  Odd usage here seems to conflate those two.

A brief history of "chestnut blight" in North America

Pages 12-13 from The Overstory, by Richard Powers, which I have briefly reviewed in a separate post.  There are of course entire books on this subject, but I thought this page brought the disaster into shart focus.  The chestnut blight was one of the greatest ecologic disasters ever to hit North America.

And I've just discovered that the world's largest remaining stand of genetically pure, mature American chestnut trees is near West Salem, Wisconsin.  I believe that's the town where one of my aunts was born.  Perhaps I can find an excuse to visit the trees this summer.

"I am somebody!"

An iconic 1963 speech by Jesse Jackson.  A decade later PBS invited him to do a reprise of that call-and-response to introduce the letter "I" on Sesame Street.

"...what they are being told is that they are people. They are not learning to be people. They are not playing at what it will be like to grow up and become people. They are people already, with the same entitlement to dignity as any towering grown-up....  Here, he does not speak with the fire of a protest leader or a politician. He’s like a hip teacher or youth group leader. He engages and encourages the kids in the tones of a classroom. 

The message of Jackson’s litany is the beginning of education, and the beginning of democracy. It says that you have worth as a person, simply because you are a person. It says that you have a voice. And it says that your voice is most powerful when it joins with other voices.

Jesse Jackson (1941-2026) was a memorable force for those of us coming of age in the 1960s.

Urban tree risks in a snowstorm

The media will be flooded with pix and videos from the current "snowpocalypse" hammering New England now.  The article in the New York Times that incorporated this image did not discuss the mechanics behind the windfall, but I think the cause is obvious.  Urban trees, like those on the perimeter of forests or woods, overgrow toward available light.  The uneven distribution of weight following snowfall is enough to bring them down.  I have no doubt there will be lawsuits for incidents like this, but I believe most city ordinances apply fault to owners of dead trees left standing, not living trees.

The title of Finnegans Wake

Found on Facebook and fact-checked as best I can.  Apparently this is true.  Interesting (not that I'll ever read the book, but interesting nevertheless).  Posted for other English majors and copy editors, who are the only people who will care.

Capitalle - new online geography game

I found this game today I think via Metafilter.  The game chooses a random world capital city and invites you to guess it within 6 tries.  After each guess you are informed whether your guess involved the correct continent, the correct hemisphere, whether the city is coastal or inland, how far off your guess is in term of distance, and whether the correct answer is a larger or smaller city.

So, in today's game my first guess was Kinshasa.  I then guessed Lima for a southern capital in another continent (forgetting its coastal location).  The final stage was to use the distances (see map at top of embed).  Sucre was closer, Asuncion even closer, but Buenos Aires further away, directing me to Brasilia.

I had to use a map for assistance.  

Sorry for providing a spoiler for today's answer, but you can go to the Capitalle app home page and click the "practice" button for a different random capital city.

My other posts about online geography games (with links): Geoguesser, Where in the U.S.A. is this?, Worldle, and Ghent University's test.  Several of these links are decades old and I haven't checked to see if they've undergone linkrot.

A guaranteed win for a "bar bet"

Bet someone they can't name the country with which France shares its longest border, and give them three or four guesses... "Germany? Spain? Belgium? Italy?..."

The answer is Brazil (on the border with French Guiana, which is as much a part of France as Alaska is part of the United States).  Map of "constituent lands."

Reposted from 2020 because I found it while browsing my old geography posts.

MAGA turning on Trump?

The embed is from Facebook, which is often unreliable.  But I found confirmation in The Guardian.  

The 21-year-old man who was shot and killed after having entered Donald Trump’s Florida resort on Sunday – while carrying a shotgun – came from a North Carolina family of the president’s supporters and had reportedly become increasingly fixated on the so-called Jeffrey Epstein files.

The focus of the FBI’s investigation into the intrusion attributed to Austin Tucker Martin is tightening on his movements and motives. Martin was confronted by Secret Service agents and a local sheriff’s deputy inside the secure perimeter of Mar-a-Lago and killed after he had raised a shotgun into the shooting position at about 1.30am on Sunday, law enforcement said...

Martin’s cousin told the Associated Press that the family was staunchly pro-Trump.  "We are big Trump supporters, all of us,” Braeden Fields said. “Everybody.” He added, though, that Marin tended not to talk about politics.

There has been evidence of Trump's support eroding among voters, especially evident in some statewide elections where Democrats have easily won districts that were solidly Republican in the last presidential election.  But those results didn't clarify if the change was just in enthusiasm and turnout.  This looks different.

If this young man's focus was on the Epstein ties, I would bet his grievance is with pedophilia, rather than the (unproven) possibility that Epstein's entire operation was a honeytrap aimed at politicians and businessmen in order to influence national legislation and policy. 

Seeking help from my readers

Lots of stories this week about Olympic skater Alysa Liu, including a feature article in The Atlantic on "The Alysa Liu Effect."  The article focuses on her hairstyle ("raccoon head") and clothing, but didn't mention her teeth (photo cropped from a source somewhere else).

This old guy wonders what's going on here, because these look like dental implants rather then stick-on ornaments.  I'm quite aware that children getting braces can now have their braces painted, or can use colored rubber bands, as a cosmetic compensation for what is otherwise perceived by their schoolmates as unattractive (similar to "pimple patches" I suppose).  

So is this a new body modification that will become more common?  Do the arrows represent something from comics or a meme I haven't seen?  I'm turning to my readership for answers because it will be faster than looking this up.  Thanks in advance.

(Well, that didn't take long.  A dozen replies within an hour.  Thanks again.)

Question answered.  Comments now closed.

"Careen" vs. "career"

Yesterday while I was doing the across clues in a crossword puzzle, the error checker alerted me to a mistake.  I had entered "careen" but it wanted "career."  Not understanding the difference, I took a screencap and moved on.  This morning I was still puzzled, so I turned to Merriam Webster for info:

"The similar-sounding verbs careen and career are often used interchangeably, meaning "to move at top speed," often in a reckless or out-of-control manner.

Despite their one-letter-off resemblance, careen and career are not etymologically related. Career finds its origins in medieval jousting tournaments. Before it came to be the preferred term for one's professional path, the noun career (from Middle French carriere) referred not only to the courses ridden by knights but also the act of riding a horse at a rapid clip in short bursts.

The verb careen, meanwhile, originally described the action of putting a ship or boat on land, usually in order to clean, caulk, or repair the hull. So how did this verb get conflated with career?  To careen a boat, you need to tilt it on its side. Careen gradually became used to describe the act of a boat tipping over in rough waters, or the similar tilting of other things... As motor vehicles became commonplace, careen became a useful word to describe the lurching, side-to-side motion that a vehicle would make when it was racing out of control, thus the overlap between careen and career.

Traditional usage commentators frown upon this overlap, insisting that careen shouldn't be used for something that is only moving at a headlong pace without any kind of side-to-side motion. But popular use tends to drown out those objections. Nowadays, careen is actually the preferred verb for rushing forward, particularly in American English.

Illustrative examples at the source.  Very interesting.  You learn something every day.

Do "oak" and "door" come from the same ancient word?

I saw that assertion in The Overstory, but couldn't find the connection with my usual dictionaries, so I turned to artificial intelligence.  Twice.  Here's the first reply:

Yes, "oak" and "door" share a common, ancient linguistic origin, specifically rooted in the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) root *𝑑𝑜𝑟𝑢−**𝑜𝑟deru- (meaning "tree," "firm," or "solid") and the Celtic/Gaelic word duir (meaning oak).

$*doru-**or**$

This connection stems from the historic use of durable oak wood for creating sturdy doors.  

Key details regarding this etymological connection: 

• The Connection: The Celtic word for Oak, "duir" or "dair," is believed to be the root for the word "door," reflecting the oak's strength and its role as a solid, protective barrier.
• Tree of Knowledge: In Celtic tradition, the oak was seen as a "doorway" to the spiritual realm, further strengthening the linguistic link between the tree and the concept of an opening or entrance.
• Related Words: The same PIE root (*deru-) is believed to be the ancestor of several related words, including "tree," "true," "trust," and "Druid".
• Alternative View: Some linguists note that "door" (Old English duru) descends from a different PIE root (dʰwer-) and that the connection to "duir" may be partially driven by cultural or folkloric ties rather than strict linguistic derivation.

*Note: While many sources highlight the "duir" (oak) to "door" connection, the exact, direct phonetic evolution from that specific Celtic word is debated by some linguists who prioritize the dʰwer- root, though the cultural association remains strong.

Blogworthy for English major readers, I thought.  But when I double-checked before posting this to the blog, I received a rather different reply:  

The short answer is no, the English words "oak" and "door" do not share the same etymology. While there is a common folkloric connection between them, linguistically they stem from distinct Proto-Indo-European roots. 

Linguistic Origins

The confusion often arises because the Celtic word for oak sounds similar to the English word for door, but they are historically separate:

• Oak: Derived from the Old English āc, which comes from the Proto-Germanic *aiks.
• Door: Derived from the Old English duru, stemming from the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) root *dʰwer-, meaning "doorway" or "gate". 

The Celtic Connection

The perceived link is primarily found in Celtic languages and mythology rather than English etymology: 

• Daur/Duir: The Old Irish and Gaelic word for oak is daur or dair.
• Symbolic Meaning: In Celtic lore, the oak was considered a "doorway" to other worlds. Because the word for oak (duir) and the word for door (doras in Irish) share a phonetic resemblance, they are often linked in spiritual or "folk etymology" contexts.
• Druids: The term "Druid" is widely believed to be a combination of the root for oak (deru-) and the root for "to know" (**weid-), meaning "oak-knower". 

Root Comparison

Word	English Source	Ancestral Root	Meaning
Oak	āc (Old English)	*aiks (Proto-Germanic)	Oak tree
Door	duru (Old English)	*dʰwer- (Proto-Indo-European)	Doorway, gate

While the Irish word for oak (dair) is actually a cognate of the English word "tree" (both from the PIE root *dóru), it is not a cognate of the English word "door".

I think I used the same AI each time (Google), but I may have phrased the question slightly differently.  The information is basically the same in both replies, but the connotations are dissimilar.  Perhaps the first time I just inserted the phrase and the second time used the word "etymology."

Interesting and instructive re the proper use of this new technology.  I'll also note there are formatting glitches up above because I can't write or edit in code, so oddities sometimes spill over that I can't correct.

Blue snow is similar to yellow snow

Anyone who lives "up north" understands why you don't eat yellow snow.  But I didn't realize that blue snow has a similar origin.

“Eastern cottontails... sometimes eat buckthorn branches and bark, especially toward the end of winter,” Minneapolis Parks wrote on social media. “Buckthorn contains a phytochemical that turns urine blue after being exposed to sunlight.”

Buckthorn is a non-native, invasive plant that crowds out native shrubs and small trees that provide habitat for many species of birds, according to the Department of Natural Resources. So blue rabbit urine is a sure sign there are some plants nearby that ought to be removed. (Buckthorn is such a problem in Minnesota that it is illegal to import, sell or transport it in the state.)

In case you were wondering, Iowa-based Blue Bunny ice cream got its name from a child who saw blue rabbits in a department store window, not their brightly colored excretions.

Good for them for eating the buckthorn, which I have to repeatedly grub out from the small woods behind our home.  Image cropped for size and emphasis from the original in the Minnesota Star Tribune.

A relevant article from the Mayo Clinic on the rainbow of (human) urine colors.