Onomastication, or, chewing on names.

I'm having one of my periodic eyerolls at some of the stuff at the Harry Potter Lexicon. Their contributors often display a great deal of hard work and creative thinking, but sometimes they don't get the proportions right. One particular bit that's lodged under my skin for ages is the persistence of their claim that Ginny Weasley's full first name (Ginevra) is an Italianate version of "Guinevere". It isn't. This isn't to say that JK Rowling might have thought it was-- I have no idea whether they've asked her, though they may well have the access to've done so-- but even if she did, it still isn't. Or at least Hanks and Hodges don't think so, instead describing it as the Italian form of "Genevieve" (namesake examplar, the patron saint of Paris, a nun who rallied her fellow Franks to resist the invading Huns; speculatively traced to Celtic roots meaning "woman" and "tribe/people"?). Of course, during the brief interval just now when I couldn't locate my copy of Hanks and Hodges to double-check my memory, I ended up checking my old paperback of Dunkling/Gosling instead, which does support the origin from "Guinevere", and through it (presumably) to the various Findabhair/Gwynhwyfar tangle of etymologies and Kewpie-heroines. Bah.

Of course, now that I've just imploded my intro, onward to snippiness about their listings of freshly dug-up twigs from the Black family tree. ( Read more... )

And more haiku.

The last leaf lies still,
Half-curled like a dead sparrow.
No one notices.

Plum blossoms: white silk
Splashed with thin red streaks, outward
From the bee's soft kiss.

They found robins' eggs.
A half-cabochon of sky
Spills a broken sun.

Warm as bare skin, mud
Breathes out its own fragrance: loam,
Buds, sleepy earthworms.

The last one is the aftermath of an extremely frivolous discussion I had with the wombat-consort a few weekends ago about what the heck is supposed to make for good haiku. "If it's mainly about seasonal markers and the impermanence of earthly delights," one of us said, "why do cherry blossoms and snowdrifts get all the glory? What about the thaw-out of the first spring mud?" And then we went into weird interactive fugues for the rest of the hike about having reverent mud-viewing gatherings, or alternately, boisterous street parties in which the loincloth-clad multitudes jostle around with ceremonial mud floats (or perhaps ceremonial mud splats).

I still have to jot down the name of that festival-music CD I borrowed from the library at some point-- wonderfully thwappy, percussive chants that're nothing like the usual "plink plink twang" (with or without thin pentatonic wailing) of most of the formal Asian music I've heard, and I say that as someone who was occasionally lugged to performances of the Peking Opera as an urchin. I think they were at the Kennedy Center, where the Nutcracker usually was. Sadly, the bulk of my relevant childhood memories involve deliberately scuffing across as long a stretch of plush red foyer I could manage before the plush red lint stopped fluffing onto my patent-leather shoes, at which point I'd explode it all off by discharging my accumulation of static electricity onto the nearest shiny brass railing. Or my brother. (I only got him once. It was glorious.)