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The first English bastard appeared in 1297, although you can be sure people were born out of wedlock before that.

Today people get called bastards all the time without reference to their parents’ state of marriage, and increasingly people are being born of non-married couples and find it offensive to be called bastards.

Around the time when bastard first appeared in English William the Conqueror was known also as William the Bastard.  This isn’t because he was a dirty rotten conqueror—the word bastard hadn’t taken on its insulting meaning yet—he was William the Bastard because his parents hadn’t been married.

Having babies out of wedlock has until very recently been something to be terribly ashamed of and downright impractical.  So it makes sense that bastard has been used as an insult for some time, but it only made it into print as an insult in 1830.

The root of the word is from Old French and grew out of bast,  the name for a packsaddle, which was the structure used to load packs onto a mule.  Travelers with romantic intention and opportunity may not have had a convenient bed nearby so the blankets and saddle would serve as bedding and pillow.

Thus children who were not conceived in the marriage bed, were said to be conceived “on the bast” and were therefore bastards.

At least that’s what the Oxford English Dictionary says.

But there, the entry for bastard is perhaps not the most up-to-date.  This word has not yet received the repeat scrutiny of the third edition now in progress.

As such the citations given there for bastard are mostly more than a century old.

Other fresher dictionary etymologies decry this pack-saddle theory, saying the chronology of appearance of the supposed source and resulting words are wrong.  A better guess (they say) might be a Germanic source word bost meaning “marriage” and that somehow bastards relate to offspring from polygamous marriages.

This is a case where accuracy and advancement of research has struck a blow against entertainment value.

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If you remember that slapstick comedy duo Laurel and Hardy, you may remember Ollie’s standard line

“another nice mess you’ve gotten me into.”

Stan Laurel was the thin one and Oliver Hardy was the fat one.

This might bespeak a larger appetite on the part of Oliver Hardy and if so there might be an etymological explanation for Ollie’s quote.

Around the year 1300 the word mess made its first appearance in writing in English.  This date points to a possible source of the word from French since it’s within a few hundred years of the Norman Conquest and it would have taken a few centuries for a French word to have been first picked up and adopted into English, and then eventually to find its way onto paper.

Sure enough the Oxford English Dictionary traces mess back to Anglo-Norman and Old French before that.

But what a hungry Oliver Hardy might have found interesting about a mess of 700 years ago is that it didn’t mean “a spot of trouble” as he might have meant in reprimanding Stanley, at first a mess was a serving of food, a meal.

This connection between the word mess and food is preserved for us in the military where soldiers, sailors and pilots eat in the mess.

As with most French words mess actually goes back to Latin and the OED even takes it back further to Indo-European.

Back those five thousand years or more the Indo-European root mittere meant “to send” and the idea here is that the food was sent to the table.  So from Indo-European to Latin the meaning was “to send” but while in Latin a meaning of “food” evolved that was carried into languages including French and Italian.

English adopted the “food” meaning but English was the only language to mutate the meaning again into our current meaning of “disorderly,” “untidy,” “cluttered” or “dirty.”

Here’s how that worked:

After that first appearance in 1300 the word mess changed its meanings in English a little bit.  In one case it went from meaning “a meal” to meaning “a single portion.”

In another case it went from meaning “a meal” to meaning a specific kind of meal, something soft, liquid or goopy; porridge or soup would have been called mess by some people as early as 1330.

This is the meaning that matters to us because it is this mixed-up-stew kind of meal that gave rise to a meaning of mess by 1738 as feed for an animal and by 1828 as an unappetizing mixture of foods.  Somewhere about this time the undesirable state of “things mixed together” lent the word mess to applications outside of the world of food.

The OED’s first citation for mess meaning “a predicament” or “troubling state of affairs” is from 1812.  So by the time Stan and Ollie were getting into messes in the 1930s the principal meaning of “food” had been somewhat obsolete for a century or so.

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According to John Ayto’s A to Z of Food and Drink:

“These new-moon-shaped puff-pastry rolls seem first to have been introduced to British and American breakfast tables towards the end of the nineteenth century.”

He goes on to cast aspersions on the stories told about the invention of these yummy baked goods. Wikipedia disses the stories too.

I’ll tell that tale in a moment, but I want first to point out that Ayto accurately called croissants new-moon-shaped.

John Ayto has written several books about words and their origins and so I’m sure that he chose his words there very carefully.

Of course we call that shape of moon a crescent moon and of course the words crescent and croissant are really two flavors of the same word; crescent arriving in English from French in the 1300s and croissant along with the pastry in at the end of the 1800s, also from French.

But when I refer to a crescent moon I’m usually just intending to communicate its fingernail-clipping shape. It could just as easily be a waning moon as a waxing moon.

But new-moon-shaped refers only to waxing, or growing moons, and this is as is should be because the very word crescent has an etymology related to the growing moon.

A new moon begins with a very thin sliver of a crescent that grows and grows until it’s a full moon. It’s that growing we’re looking for.

I mentioned in the podictionary episode on recruit that an Indo-European root ker meant to grow. This same root turns up as crescere in Latin and was then applied to the growing moon. The shape thus took its name from this horned appearance of the moon.

This same shape is an Islamic symbol and the much discredited story of the invention of the edible croissant is tied to this Islamic crescent.

Supposedly the bakers in either Vienna or Budapest were up early one morning going at it with their bread dough and stoking up their ovens when they heard a digging noise.

They alerted the army who then prevented the Turks from entering the city by tunneling under the city walls. As a reward the bakers were allowed to, or asked to create celebratory goodies in the shape of the Islamic crescent.

Trouble is that these Turkish attacks happened back around the end of the 1600s and the first reference we have to the pastries doesn’t come until something like 170 years later. The first time the word was used in English was in 1899 according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

The user was a small time author from Alabama named William Chambers Morrow. He used it pretty enthusiastically too since it appears three times in his book about how students lived in Paris 100 and some-odd years ago.

But this use of croissant for the delicacy didn’t mean that was the first time English speakers were experiencing them. Crescent rolls are cited as an Americanism 13 years before.

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Outside my window there stands an oak tree. I’d rather watch birds but sometimes I’m entertained by the antics of squirrels.

For some reason most of the squirrels here in my town are black. Head out of town and they are red or brown and smaller. Where I grew up they were all grey.

But they all have one thing in common, a big bushy tail. In fact the entire species in named for it’s tail.

As often as not these little rodents are using my oak tree for a highway moving from a garage nearby to a pine tree next door. In so doing they fearlessly fling themselves into the air and catch onto a branch of the tree they are landing in.

I had always assumed that the reason a squirrel had a big bushy tail was that as they careened through the space between branches they used it to wave around and keep from tumbling out of control. And they do, I’ve seen them enough times to know.

I did a little web searching and found one site that claimed a squirrel uses its tail to communicate. That makes sense, my dog uses her tail to communicate too and it’s certainly true that we humans have various body parts evolved for one purpose and used as communication tools as well.

Think of people who wave their hands around when the talk. More to the point think of your eyebrows designed to keep dust and rain out of your eyes but very useful in sending signals to other people.

But last year I heard of a study of squirrels using their tails in a completely different way.

Rattle snakes like to eat squirrels and because rattle snakes are equipped with heat sensing organs to help them hunt, squirrels that live in the same environment as rattle snakes have evolved an ability to heat up their tails when confronted by a snake so that when the snake strikes it tends to misfire toward the hotter tail and miss the main meal.

These are ground squirrels so their tails aren’t quite so bushy.

Squirrels in South Africa have also been studied and found to be using their tails in another temperature related way.

These guys hang their bushy bottle brushes overhead like some kind of parasol to keep the sun off. The study found that tail shading in sunny 40ºC heat allowed the little tree rats to drop their body temperatures to 35 ºC and extend their nut hiding to a full 7 hour day.

Overheated rodents knocked off after only 3 hours.

And believe it or not this is exactly why a squirrel is called a squirrel.

When the French invaders arrived in England in 1066 the Anglos were calling the things aquerne. But the French soon changed that to esquirel which they had gotten from Latin.

The Romans before them had chosen their word because the Greeks before them had used skiouros to describe these little rascals.

In Greek skiouros means “shade tail.” In fact the uros part is related to our English word arse.

It’s worth touching on that Old English word for squirrel aquerne.

It, as most Old English words, came from Germanic and like the modern German word for squirrel essentially means “oak horn.” No one knows why these little guys might be called horns, but the oak part is obvious enough, I can see it through my window.

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It's Sunday, and you know what that means: time for a bit of quoteskimming.

On Poetry:

"Poetry began when somebody walked off a savanna or out of a cave and looked up at the sky with wonder and said, 'Ah-h-h!' That was the first poem. The urge towards 'Ah-h-h!' is very human, it's in everybody." ~Lucille Clifton

"Don't shackle poetry with your definitions. Poetry is not a frail and cerebral old woman, you know. Poetry is stronger than you think. Poetry is imagination and will break those chains faster than you can say 'Harlem Renaissance.'" ~Mark Flanagan

On Writing Poetry:

"One of the most definable characteristics of the poetic form is economy of language. Poets are miserly and unrelentingly critical in the way they dole out words to a page. Carefully selecting words for conciseness and clarity is standard, even for writers of prose, but poets go well beyond this, considering a word's emotive qualities, its musical value, its spacing, and yes, even its spacial relationship to the page." ~Mark Flanagan

"The imagery gets richer as I write. 'I walk the dog and it’s there' is fine for a rough draft, but I made it more specific in the final draft: 'I walk the dog and plot how it gets stamped on my ankle bone.' . . . I find this to be true of nearly all my rough drafts---the triggering words are mundane, the ending words, much richer. I get more 'live hits' the deeper in I go." ~Sara Lewis Holmes, in her notes about the construction of her poem, "Inked: On Memorizing Gerard Manley Hopkins". You can read Sara's poem, hear Sara read her own poem, and check out the rough draft and notes (from whence came this quote) at Sara's podcast site, A Cast of One.

"Writing a poem is like conducting an argument between your unconscious mind and your conscious self. You have to get unconsciousness and consciousness lined up in some way. I suspect that's why working to a form, achieving a stanza, and keeping to it—deciding that the first and third and fifth lines will have to rhyme, and that you're going to insist on so many stresses per line—oddly helps the poem to be born. That is, to free itself from you and your attentions to it and become a piece of art in itself. Heaven only knows where it comes from! I suppose working out a form diminishes the thousands of possibilities you face when you begin. And once you've cut down the possibilities, you can't swim off into the deep and drown." ~Anne Stevenson

On revision and critique:

This week, the lovely and talented Jennifer Hubbard spoke to a college class about the art of revising. "One interesting question that came up was what to do with criticism that seems to be based on a misunderstanding of your intent. I could think of 3 reasons for such criticism: 1) the person didn't read the work closely enough; 2) the person read into the work something from his/her own mind; 3) whatever was in your head didn't actually make it down on paper. Talking to the critiquer can help establish which one it is." You can check out Jenn's post and the comments here.

"Take a break. Let the story sit a week or two before you go back to revise. After all, 'revise' means 'see again.' You can't take a second look at something unless you first look away." ~David Lubar, quoted by Kate Messner in her speech to the NYS English Council. You can read more revision tips from others (including, well, me) in Kate's blog post.

On characters

What makes a memorable character, particularly in a children's book?

"'It has to do with an intensity of presence,' [Philip] Pullman says. 'Just as some people are so much there that you can sense when they come into the house, so some characters in fiction have the same authority or charisma. Some personal quality makes them more alive than their fellow characters. It has nothing to do with how good or friendly a characters is. They can be horrible, and you can still not lift your eyes from the page when they appear.'" From an article by Amanda Craig that appeared in The Times, called Creating Characters.

On character motivation, again from Jenn Hubbard (and if you aren't reading her yet, really, why aren't you?):

Some things that help me get in touch with the motivations of my characters--the secret and the not-so-secret motivations:

Asking myself, 'What does this character really, really want, more than anything?' (sounds obvious, but I can't believe how far into a first draft I can get before I remember to ask this!)
Writing some scenes from different characters' points of view
Writing scenes that don't appear in the final manuscript, but that help me see how characters interact in other situations
Rewriting scenes with different endings (I thought the scene went this-a-way, but what if it went that-a-way instead? What if the character said this, not that? Then where does the scene go? What am I learning about everyone?)

THE FIRST AUCTION STARTS TOMORROW! You can see precisely which flakes will be on the block this week at The Robert's Snow page. While there, you can find information on how to register to be a bidder, and can check out the bidding rules.

To check out the snowflakes featured in today's blogosphere, click on the Robert's Snow button. Jules at 7-Imp has posted two new 2007 snowflakes: an astonishing winged snowflake featuring "Cupid and Psyche" from Rebecca Guay, and Kathy Jakobsen's DC-inspired "Jefferson Memorial/Washington Monument". In addition, Jules and Eisha have also been keeping an ongoing list of blog posts thus far featuring snowflakes and the artists who created them.