words | Reflections on the Teche

Posts Tagged ‘words’

Meditation on Empty

Posted in Poetry, Slice of Life, tagged meditation, poetry, words, writing groups on January 21, 2014| 10 Comments »

Meditation on Empty

In that gentle space above his left eyebrow,
I focus on the emptiness,
how emptiness is not empty.

I fill my empty cup with ginger-mint tea.
Cut yellow roses for the empty vase.
Invite friends to fill the empty table.

My hand opens, then closes slightly
holding your pinky finger, tiny and delicate.
I’ll rock you until this pain subsides.

We sit together like lotus, open hands
to the Abba Father, breathe the warm
body scents that fill the empty room.
–Margaret Simon, all rights reserved

I brought yellow roses to the writing retreat because I looked up colors of roses and their meanings, and yellow roses are for friendship and new beginnings. Then among writing friends, I polished this poem and read it for our sharing time. I’m not sure if you need to know what the poem means. It will mean what you need at the moment. For me, it’s about friends and opening myself up to being filled every day.

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Anonyponymous

Posted in Slice of Life, Teaching, tagged eponymy, word origins, words on March 3, 2013| 5 Comments »

Slice of Life Challenge Day 3

A mother of one of my students went to a garage sale last weekend. She selected a book to give to me, Anonyponymous, The Forgotten People Behind Everyday Words by John Bemelmans Marciano. She wrote, “I found this little book and I picked it up for you because I thought you would enjoy it.” When she was paying for the book, she struck up a conversation with the woman holding the garage sale. She told her she was buying the book for her child’s teacher. Come to find out! the seller is my husband’s cousin. Two things strike me about this gift: 1) This mother was thinking of me when she saw a book about words, and 2) What a small world!

Fun Facts from Anonyponymous: Anonyponymous refers to those people whose names, eponymous, have become so much a part of our language that the person of origin has become anonymous.

1) Cereal comes from a reference to the goddess Ceres, goddess of crops.

2) Frisbee comes from drunk Yale students playing catch with a leftover tin plate from Mrs. Frisbie’s Pies of Bridgeport.

3) Hooligan (I sometimes call my students this when they are acting up.) Patrick Hooligan was a bouncer at an Irish pub in the slums of London, but his legacy was the mentoring of young hoodlums in the arts of robbery and assault.

4) Blurb was a buxom cartoon character placed on the cover of books Gelett Burgess handed out at the annual American Booksellers Association Dinner in 1907. Burgess defined blurb as “a sound like a publisher.”

On further examination of the book, I realized it is not going on the shelf in my classroom. I’m afraid some of the words are inappropriate for classroom research.

To see what my students are writing for their Slice of Life Challenge, click here.

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