Miss me much?

Friday night, I left work full of melancholy, considering it a good thing that I had to meet friends. Otherwise, I most likely would've sucked into myself and spent a lot of time lying around, brooding, and reading fantasy lit and notes.

That's how I spent the next three days.

I'm not sure what happened. I felt so good after drinks at my place with ottr4bear, monshu, and Rubeus and dinner at an audaciously cheesy Vietnamese restaurant afterwards that I was ready to hit the bars. All the rest of them were ready to head on home. So that's what I did, too, and--after a moment's consideration whether to call someone up and head back out--I picked up a book and started reading. I was up till one.

The next morning, I just felt sluggish and blah. I didn't want to go out or even eat. I just sat in bed napping, snuggling with the cat, and doing some desultory reading. Same the next day, until monshu came over in the afternoon and helped me talk myself into going out for dinner at Riques. I went back with him, we heated up the fantastic bread pudding I made for New Year's out of an old loaf of sourdough, and then I tramped back home through the snow.

Monday morning, I felt terrible and spent it sleeping. Then more abulia and brooding until I forced myself out in the evening for Vietnamese take-out. I discovered that my wine glasses had arrived (quality stemware at $2.50 a glass--thanks to danlmarmot for the tip!), which awakened a brief burst of activity until I started to get dizzy and crawled back into bed again.

So I'm here. I'm not happy about it, but my hirelings are back tomorrow and I need to have one or two things ready for them. At least this way, I'll get out and eat something semi-nutritious.

Geek thrills: L'histoire de 'chaumette'

When monshu stopped by on Sunday, he was kind enough to bring me some things I'd left at his place. We'd had a little show-and-tell the day I got back from STL. He'd displayed the contents of the big box o' gifts he traditionally gets from his family and I'd whipped out what I had of the swag brought back from my family. One of these items was actually a much-belated birthday gift, a bottle of wine my sister and her husband picked up at a tiny winery near Ste. Genevieve.

What's it taste like? Who knows! As usual, I was captivated by the wrapping--in this case, the label, which is decorated with a spattering of tiny cottages. The producer's name is Chaumette, a name neither of us had heard before. Last week, at monshu's, I'd looked it up in the Larousse and found an entry for chaume meaning "thatch" or "thatched roof" (from Latin calamus, itself a borrowing of Greek kalamos "reed". The derivation is really quite regular if you keep in mind the stress in Latin: cálamu(m) syncopates to *cálmu, the initial consonant palatalises to ch and the final vowel becomes a shwa, i.e. *chalme, then the l vocalises to u and--voila--chaume). The meaning concords well with that given on the inevitable website which defines it as "little roofs" (even though it's singular in form, but whatever).

Only one thing bothered me about this tidy explanation: Despite the ending, chaume is masculine. From what I know of French morphology, the expected diminutive form would be, too, i.e. *chaumet. On Sunday, I pulled down the Harrap's and went on a fishing expedition for other French words that were masculine but had feminine diminutives. No luck; I needed bigger guns. Today, I spent some quality time today with Coromines, whose exhaustive multivolume etymological dictionaries of Catalan and Castilian are my idea of pleasure reading. I had a backlog of words I wanted to look up in them, high on the list the curious term páramo--variously definied as "moor" or "dry plateau"--that popped up in monshu's Latin dictionary under the form paramus while I was looking for something else. Scholar agree that it doesn't appear to be Latin, or Greek, or Basque, or Celtic, or any other language we know at all well, leaving the field wide open for speculation.

One of the few solid facts about the word is that it's only found in western Iberia; there's no evidence for it in Catalan, Aragonese, or Murcian. In these places, the correponding term is calm, -e, -a from a proposed Celtic *calmis "barren field, desolate place". Something clicked: The regular development of this in French would also be chaume, but with one crucial difference: It would be feminine, not masculine. Sure enough, the Dictionnaire de l'ancien français lists exactly this form. La Chaumette isn't named for a thatched roof, it's named for a crappy piece of land. Let's hope that doesn't describe its American namesake and that Hank Johnson is a better winemaker than onomastician.