At about 4:30 this morning, I awoke to hear a friendly bird outside my window. My heart brimmed with whimsy as I whisked off my quilt to begin the day!

Image courtesy of Bumble Button

Okay, clever girl, did you catch the literary device I employed in the sentence above?

It was neither alliteration nor hyperbole,

not metaphor or simile …

So, what could it be?

The repeating short “i” sound I used to describe my morning is an example of assonance, a rather tricky technique involving the repetition of words that share vowel sounds but have different beginning and end consonants.

Told you it was tricky. And I’m not even sure I have it right.

It can be tough to pin down instances of assonance (it probably slips right past most of us), but ambitious writers have been known to rely on this device to set the mood of their text. Long vowel sounds tend to s-l-o-w the energy of a passage, making the tone more somber, while short vowel sounds lend a literary lift.

Assonance has been used by all sorts of famous wordsmiths …

Frost:

“He gives his harness bells a shake

To ask if there is some mistake.

The only other sound’s the sweep

Of easy wind and downy flake.”

Poe:

“Eagerly I wished the morrow; vainly I had sought to borrow

From my books surcease of sorrow—sorrow for the lost Lenore.”

Sandburg:

“Poetry is old, ancient, goes back far. It is among the oldest of living things. So old it is that no man knows how and why the first poems came.”

Do you dare to come up with a line or two of your own using assonance?

If I told you I had a new damson scarf, would you know what color it is?

How about if I told you that at my farm, come September, we’re in damson heaven?

Here’s a clue …

(DAM-zuhn, -suhn)

Turns out, the plum I love so much is also a color—the same deep purple as the signature skin of the little damson plum. Here at my farm, I have an abundance of these tasty little purple beauties. They’re sometimes called Italian prune-plums, and each little plum is a egg-shaped delicacy, with smooth, purple skin that pops in half, exposing a golden, sweet flesh that separates easily from the pit, lending itself to effortless eating, canning, and drying. They’re an ideal fruit tree for regions with fickle spring weather, and grow well in Zones 4-9. They do ripen late, from September to October, but a slight frost only sweetens them.

Plums are widely cultivated throughout the U.S., since there are varieties suitable for growing in every state. Some varieties have been developed from the earlier wild forms, some have been bred for maximum fruit production, others have been bred for larger and more abundant blossoms, and some for decoration alone. But the variety I inherited when I bought my farm is on the wild side. They’re prolific producers and reproduce easily. Pests don’t bother them at all. The deer eat the fallen fruit, but really nothing seems to deter the trees’ determination to multiply. However, if a shoot sprouts where I don’t want it, it’s no problem simply to weed it out. I suspect some of my trees, with big thick trunks, are well over 100 years old.

And since they grow fast, I’ve begun to transplant some of the shoots that sprout up around the older trees along my fence lines. In some cases, they just show up right where I want them and start growing. All I need to do then is prune the lower branches and keep the saplings woven in and out of my existing wire fences. So, by the time my fenceposts start to rot from age, I’ll have a permanent, care-free, deer-deterrent barrier that provides an abundance of food.

“The mind I love must have wild places, a tangled orchard where dark damsons drop in the heavy grass, an overgrown little wood, the chance of a snake or two, a pool that nobody’s fathomed the depth of, and paths threaded with flowers planted by the mind.”
– The Journal of Katherine Mansfield, 1927

Soon, we’ll be up to our elbows in luscious, ripe, damson plums!

… Time for plum jam,

and plum coffee cake!

To purchase damson plum saplings, try Nature Hills Nursery.

Today, I ran across the word “stellenbosch” (ste-len-bosh). Of course, I’m a sucker for anything that sounds like Stella, my adorable 7-year-old grandgirl, so this word nearly jumped off the page at me:

“What happened?” Todd whispered to Ariel. “I thought Becca was going to lead the class.”

“I’m not sure,” Ariel said, “but I’m guessing that after she blew that lab last week, Muldrow stellenbosched her.”

Turns out, stellenbosch is a toponym, a word derived from the name of a place—think bohemian (after Bohemia), Chihuahua (after Chihuahua, Mexico), or ottoman (after the Ottoman Empire).

Herter Brothers Ottoman, High Museum of Art, by Wmpearl via Wikimedia Commons

At one time, a person’s surname was part of his identity … more than just a family name, it might tell where he lived, what he did for a livelihood, or even describe a physical or personality trait. Think Miss London or Mr. Fisherman or Miss Smiley.

Apparently, they didn’t know about toponyms in Scandinavia, where until fairly modern times (the late 1800s), surnames were almost always patronyms (your father’s first name plus a suffix meaning son or daughter) like Anderson (son of Anders) or Andersdotter (daughter of Anders). Papa Anders could have been an Anders Johnson or Anders Anderson, didn’t matter—the name that was passed on was always his first name. But the Scandinavians were more modern than you might think: When a woman married, she didn’t adopt her husband’s name, since she could never be called someone’s son. She instead kept her birth name.

But I digress. Back to our original toponym: stellenbosch. And what did it mean that Becca was stellenbosched?

Our word comes from Stellenbosch, South Africa, near Cape Town. During the Second Boer War of 1899-1902 (between the British Empire and the Dutch settlers of South Africa), Stellenbosch was a British military base.

1904 World’s Fair Boer War Pprogram, Frank Mills via Wikimedia Commons

Officers who hadn’t done well on the battlefield were often sent to Stellenbosch to do menial tasks, like looking after the war horses stabled there. The officers usually kept their rank, but the reassignment to Stellenbosch was considered a demotion, and the term came to mean reassigning someone to a position of minimal responsibility where they would do no harm.

Hmmmm, think I’ll stellenbosch my farmhand, Johnny Johnson, who pulled out all the baby lettuces when weeding … to that nice big patch of thistles at the top of the garden.

If I said to you,

“I happen to have an eponymous magazine …

produced at my eponymous farm …

where I also dream up designs for my eponymous bedding line …

to sell in my eponymous store …”

Would you know what I’m talking about?

eponymous [uh–pon–uh-muhs]

something named after its central character or creator: the Beatles’ eponymous debut album

WARNING!

This post is not for those who are squeamish about …

Photo by Viki via Wikimedia Commons

See what I mean?

If you’re still with me, then you’re a trooper, but you’re probably also wondering why I decided to kick off today with a photo of a tarantula.

Let me give you an obnoxiously obscure hint:

What do tarantulas have in common with the picture below?

Photo by FlyGirl555 via Wikimedia Commons

Tarantulas … dancing … do you dare to hazard a guess?

The answer is a word of which I’d never heard:

Tarantism (TAR-uhn-tiz-uhm).

It refers, says Dictionary.com, to “a mania characterized by an uncontrollable impulse to dance, especially as prevalent in southern Italy from the 15th to the 17th century, popularly attributed to the bite of the tarantula.”

Okay, but …

This definition left me even more puzzled than before.

Upon further investigation, I found that the terms “tarantism” and “tarantula” both originated in the city of Taranto, Italy, a picturesque but purportedly polluted seaport where the bites of these spiders were once believed to cause wild spasms of frantic footloosery.

Why not?

Now you have an excuse the next time the desire to dance overcomes you.

“Tarantismo,” you can sigh in your best Italian accent. “Blame the spider!”

Put on your gab-a-lorious thinking caps, girls …

Photo by Harry Poulsen via Wikimedia Commons

Because it’s time for another wonderful word matching quiz!

WooHoo!!!

(I heard you whooping for joy.)

This week, I pulled a slew of wacky verbs from my trove of terminology and would love to know how many of them you can match to their definitions.

I’ll give you a word and its pronunciation, then I’ll list three definitions—only one choice is correct. Write down your answers as you go, then check them at the end.

QUIZ:

1. Honeyfuggle (HUN-ee-fuh-guhl):

A. To deceive or swindle, especially by flattery

B. To wink

C. To distract by means of confusion

2. Lallygag (LAL-ee-gag, LAH-lee-gag):

A. To herd geese

B. To sneeze

C. To fool around, waste time, or spend time lazily

3. Hornswoggle (HAWRN-swog-uhl):

A. To charm one into doing things your way

B. To laugh with gusto

C. To bamboozle, trick, hoodwink, or hoax

4. Nictitate (NIK-ti-teyt):

A. To wink

B. To chew

C. To smoke

5. Blandish (BLAN-dish):

A. To wield a sword

B. To coax with flattery

C. To cover one’s face with a kerchief

6. Bombilate (BOM-bi-layt):

A. To make a humming or buzzing noise

B. To guess

C. To overwhelm with kindness

7. Gam (Gam):

A. To kick one’s leg

B. To spend time talking

C. To chew with one’s mouth open

8. Agglutinate (uh-GLOOT-n-ayt):

A. To become gluten tolerant

B. To describe something thoroughly

C. To join or become joined as if by glue

All done?

Pretty confident?

Photo by Steven Straiton via Wikimedia Commons

If so—if you’re sure you know—then go ahead and check your answers …

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