Monthly Archives: July 2015

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Cut the mustard?

The other day, I was talking to my granddaughter, Stella, and I said something about “cutting the mustard.”

She stopped me mid-sentence.

“What does that mean, Nanny? Cutting the mustard?”

(Picture me scratching my head.)

Cut the mustard?

What a funny saying.

This mustard?

Photo by Petr Pakandl via Wikimedia Commons

That mustard?

Creole mustard, photo by Mwaters1120 via Wikipedia

Hmmm …

I told Stella that the saying means, basically, “to be good enough, to do the job well.”

But I also told her I’d investigate the origins of “cutting the mustard,” be it wild-growing or a zesty spread.

What I found was a series of suppositions:

1. Both mustard plants and their seeds are tough to cut, making success a high bar.

“When mustard was one of the main crops in East Anglia, it was cut by hand with scythes, in the same way as corn,” explains Phil Pegum in The Guardian. “The crop could grow up to six feet high, and this was very arduous work, requiring extremely sharp tools. When blunt, they would not cut the mustard.”

2. Culinary mustard is often cut (diluted) with vinegar to make it more palatable, which, one might presume, indicates a job well done.

3. “Another supposed explanation,” proposes Gary Martin of The Phrase Finder, “is that the phrase is simply a mistaken version of the military expression ‘cut the muster’. This appears believable at first sight. A little research shows it not to be so. Muster is the calling together of soldiers, sailors, prisoners, to parade for inspection or exercise. To cut muster would be a breach of discipline; hardly a phrase that would have been adopted with the meaning of success or excellence.” Well, now we can check that one off the list.

“Whatever the coinage, the phrase itself emerged in the United States towards the end of the 19th century,” Martin continues. “The earliest example in print that I’ve found is from the Kansas newspaper The Ottawa Herald, August, 1889.”

The quote read:

He tried to run the post office business under Cleveland’s administration, but couldn’t “cut the mustard”.

Martin surmises that the use of quotation marks in the clip implies that the saying was familiar to readers and already used in common speech.

While my findings may not exactly cut the mustard, I hope they at least pass muster.

Stella will be the judge.

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Statistical Atlas

Old maps have a certain charm, don’t they?

Sea serpents, buried treasures, lands yet to be explored …

Map of the northern part and parts of the southern parts of the Americas by Abbot Claude Bernou, circa 1681, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

They stir a whisper of wanderlust, even in the heart of this happy homebody.

Similarly struck by historical maps, a statistician named Nathan Yau has made it his mission to recreate maps of my favorite country in the world (this one, of course!). Yau’s maps are updated versions of maps he unearthed in the original Statistical Atlas of the United States, which was based on the 1870 census.

While these maps aren’t the sort that feature X’s marking moth-eaten mysteries, they do contain an abundance of fascinating facts rarely recorded until the late 1800s.

map_image

Statistical Atlas of the United States, 1880, Popular Vote, Census.gov

“Up to that point, cartographers mostly made maps that captured physical features of the landscape: a river here, a city there, and so on. But the Statistical Atlas did something very different: It also mapped things you can’t see directly, things like crop yields, the prevalence of disease, the provenance of people,” explains Greg Miller of Wired. “It freed data that had been locked up in lists and tables and made it spatial.”

When he learned that recent U.S. Census Bureau budget cuts thwarted a plan to publish a new atlas from 2010 data (the last one was made in 2000), Nathan Yau was inspired to start scouring government websites for data so that he could update the atlas on his own.

“Ever since I found out about the Statistical Atlas of the United States, historically produced by the Census Bureau, it annoyed me that there wasn’t one in the works for the 2010 Census due to cuts in funding,” says Yau. “I got to thinking, hey, I could do that. And if I did, I wouldn’t have to be annoyed anymore. So I recreated the original Statistical Atlas of the United States with current data. I used similar styling, and had one main rule for myself: All the data had to be publicly available and come from government sites.”

He combed the 1870 atlas and made 59 comparable maps and charts (rather lovely to look at) that covered the same features, from annual rainfall to ancestry. The maps are available for your trivia treasure hunting at FlowingData.com.

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Jordan and Kyle’s Wedding

The first time we met Jordan, she was a senior on the girls’ basketball team that my hubby, Lucas, was coaching (they won state that year). Then she nannied for us and traveled to Toronto, Chicago, and Honolulu with us. She also worked in our brick-and-mortar store during her years in college. But she’s officially all grown up now!

Jordan with three of her flower girls on the eve of her wedding day.

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Giveaway: “Farm Girl Vintage, The Experiment”

In the Aug/Sept issue of MaryJanesFarm, “The Experiment” (on newsstands July 14), we led you here to my daily journal for a chance to win a free copy of the quilting book, Farm Girl Vintage, by Lori Holt.

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Relaxation Merit Badge, Expert Level

The adorable, always humorous MBA Jane is my way of honoring our Sisterhood Merit Badge program, now with 6,487 dues-paying members who have earned an amazing number of merit badges so far—9,234 total! Take it away, MBA Jane!!! MJ 

Wondering who I am? I’m Merit Badge Awardee Jane (MBA Jane for short). In my former life   

For this week’s Make it Easy/Relaxation Expert Level Merit Badge, I took my newfound sense of relaxation and clear-headedness to my local yoga studio. That’s right: I became a yogi.

photo, Robert Bejil via Wikimedia Commons

Well, kinda.

Turns out, some people really dedicate their whole lives to this pursuit of relaxation, so perhaps I didn’t become quite an expert while earning my Expert Level Merit Badge, but I gave it my all. Besides, my vast collection of yoga pants were under the mistaken assumption that they were created to lounge around on my couch, eat snacks, and participate in Netflix marathons. I had to have a little heart-to-heart with my pants.

What? You don’t have heart-to-hearts with your pants? Huh.

Back to what I was saying. I gave it my all. All my sweat. All my muscle mass. All my flexibility (or lack thereof). All my blood, sweat, and tears.

I.

Am.

Not.

Exaggerating.

Okay, I’m being a little dramatic, but only a little. You know how the infomercials and the girls in their organic hemp clothing, with their pseudo-messy buns and their nonfat lattes, MAKE it look?

They Make It (Look) Easy.

Haha! Just a little merit-badge humor there.

But truth be told, I was in way over my head. To be precise, I was in over my head with my legs twisted around my ears, my toes spread out like spider monkey’s, my bum poking the yogi behind me, and—artistically speaking—I was up a creek without a paddle. I had seen less complicated poses playing Twister. I was pretty sure I was going to need the Jaws of Life to remove my poor self from the Dragonfly Pose.

photo, Robert Bejil via Wikimedia Commons

Dragonfly Pose. Downward Dog. Eagle Pose. Elephant Truck Pose.

I needed a Sloth Pose. Or a Roadkill Pose. Can I get an Amen?

These were tough. I wasn’t entirely certain I was going to make it out of my class alive, much less earn my badge. The students around me were pros. They were twisted into shapes I’d only ever seen at the mall when I was buying soft pretzels. They oozed capability. I oozed wheezes and gasps and beads of sweat larger than a crocodile’s tears.

I wasn’t sure this was exactly relaxing me, and wished I had signed up for a nice watercolor class instead as I dipped my body into the Flying Crow Pose. Or tried to. I got tangled in my newfangled yoga toe sox (I was suckered into them because of the name, peeps!).

http://www.socksaddict.com

I accidently dangled my hair in my non-full-fat latte, and my yoga mat took on a life of its own. Basically, it transformed itself into a magic carpet. I took a ride—and a header—into my neighbor. Well, it IS called Flying Crow Pose.

Anyway, my new pal was very forgiving (something about yoga relaxing her temper, I think she said. It was hard to hear because I had latte in my ear, my messy bun was in my line of vision, and I was trying to untangle myself from my mat where it was attempting to murder me).

I made it through though, and although I didn’t feel precisely relaxed, I did feel accomplished.

And dare I say, so did my pants.