What Would Jimmy Do?

We were looking for rocks to put in one of our flower beds instead of mulch yesterday — or maybe we were looking for stones. Some places called them some kind of rocks (e.g., river-rocks) and other places called them stones (e.g., landscaping stones.)

Well, you’d probably never guess, but that got me to thinking… what the heck is the difference in a rock and a stone? The “things” we have in front of a wall in our front yard were always referred to as stones by a little girl (Sophia) that used to live a couple of houses away. Emily refers to the same “things” as rocks. Sophia’s parents were both of European descent, so the use of stones may be more of a European expression.

This seemed to be one of those questions that just begged for some extensive research. The dictionary is usually a good place to begin extensive research, although it seldom provides acceptable  answers. Checking the Merriam-Webster dictionary, here’s what I found:
Rock: a large mass of stone forming a cliff, promontory, or peak
Stone: a concretion of earthly or mineral matter: (1) such a concretion of indeterminate size or shape.
Rock is also listed as a synonym for stone….
So, Merriam-Webster wasn’t much help to me again.

I got to thinking about the terminology I use when handling or looking at these “things.” Since I’m not sure there’s much difference in the composition or material, I sometimes find myself categorizing them by size, like: if it’s really small, I sometimes refer to it as a pebble, if it’s a bit larger I might call it a stone, bigger yet I usually call it a rock, and if it’s really, really big or huge, it’s a boulder to me.

One theory that I uncovered is that while a rock is sitting undisturbed on the ground, it’s a rock; once you pick it up to use it, it’s a stone. I decided there really isn’t a satisfactory answer to my question, so….
I moved on to just thinking about rocks and stones. We use both rock and stone in our language fairly often and usually they don’t refer to those “things.”

There is rock music, like rock ‘n’ roll and it also refers to something we often do in a chair. A diamond is often referred to as a rock. Some of the phrases we use them in would really sound strange if we substituted stone for rock or rock for stone….
Between a rock and a hard place just doesn’t have the same ring if you say between a stone and a hard place. And remember when you were a kid you’d say, “sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me?” Do you think, “sticks and rocks may break my bones, but words will never hurt me” would have ever caught on?

Something can be hard as a rock or solid as a rock or steady as a rock; you can have your drink on the rocks or have rocks in your head, but don’t rock the boat and we’ve all heard about the hand that rocks the cradle. You probably think this blog has now hit rock bottom, but it hasn’t.

How about something being carved in stone, or leave no stone unturned or maybe kill two birds with one stone. One can be stone sober or just a stone’s throw away — of course none of this is cast in stone or should you cast the first stone.

Try substituting rock for stone or stone for rock in the expressions listed — they just don’t sound right, do they? So maybe the words were invented to help us express ourselves, not to describe the “things.” Truthfully, I don’t know — I’ve heard that a rolling stone gathers no moss, but a rock just rolls… and I really don’t want either, but I guess if I had to make a choice, I’d rather have a kidney stone than a kidney rock.
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We went to a friend’s house a few nights ago to celebrate the fact that he was retiring the next day. Like a lot of us, he probably thought he would work until one day he’d just decide to retire — on his own schedule and his own terms.

But then that inevitable thing got to him — change!

Change. That’s something that we all have to deal with on a continuing basis — nothing in life stays the same. But usually somewhere along the line a change that we can’t, or don’t want, to deal with comes along. Most of the people that I know, including myself, retired because of a change that was unacceptable, for whatever reason, to them.

Most people don’t like change unless they’re uncomfortable with the present situation and then they demand it. Knowing that change is part of life doesn’t make learning how to deal with it any easier or more natural. Change can be hard — especially since we tend to be creatures of habit. Some habits, or ruts, can be comfortable. That’s not a bad thing, but sometimes it’s necessary for things to change.

Why should you deal with change? The answer is — because it’s coming. Change is always coming. Change almost always triggers something called “stress.” Some people handle it better than others, but usually most of the stress in anyone’s life is somehow related to change.

All during my working career, I dealt with change in the work environment, and I think over that time I heard every known reason not to change — like — it’s too ambitious, it’s impossible, we don’t have the equipment, it’s too expensive, I don’t have the authority, that’s someone else’s responsibility, it will take too long, we’ve always done it this way, it’s too complicated, it’s too political, it’s contrary to policy, it can’t be done, it needs more thought, we tried that before, I’m all for it but…., it’s too visionary, they don’t really want to change. Anyhow, you get the idea.

I’ve heard it said that people don’t resist change, they resist being changed. Maybe that’s true, but like it or not, change is here to stay. As you get older, you’ll learn to accept it or embrace it and realize that if you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always got….
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One hundred and fifty years ago today, a three-day battle that changed and set the course of our nation began — the Battle of Gettysburg. Generally acknowledged as the turning point of the Civil War, it’s only about an hour from where we live.

There is a popular tale that Gettysburg was the site of the battle because of a shoe factory and warehouse located there. The fact is that there was never a shoe factory — the armies converged on Gettysburg via the ten roads that led into the town.

The first day’s battle ranks as the 12th bloodiest battle of the Civil War, the second day’s battle was the largest and costliest of the three days.

The Battle of Gettysburg is the costliest battle of the Civil War in terms of casualties but it wasn’t the largest — that “honor” probably goes to the battle at Fredericksburg.

There are more than 1,400 monuments, markers and tablets at Gettysburg. More than one-third of all known photographs of dead soldiers on Civil War battlefields were taken at Gettysburg. The battle started without the knowledge or consent of either army commander (Lee or Meade.)

The battle was fought on some of the hottest days of the summer — it didn’t rain during the battle, but a heavy downpour soaked the battlefield the day after.

The first couple of days didn’t look good for the Union, but on the morning of July 3rd, fighting raged at Culp’s Hill and the Union regained its lost ground. That afternoon, after a massive artillery bombardment, Lee attacked the Union center on Cemetery Ridge and was repulsed with heavy losses in what is known as Pickett’s Charge. Lee’s invasion of the North had failed.

So today, we don’t speak Southern, but thankfully we do speak American.
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Those of you that know my background won’t be surprised at what I think of Edward Snowden. In my book, he’s the lowest of the low — lower than used car and aluminum siding salesmen.

I have absolutely no problem with the fact that he disagreed with what NSA was doing. The problem I have is that he took an oath to protect that information when he started to work there. That’s his personal promise to not divulge the information he is working with — the fact that he chose not to honor that oath says a lot about his integrity and him personally. It also says a great deal about his loyalty to our country. I’ve been a lot of places and I guarantee that he’ll soon realize that there is no better place to be than the United States, even given all the issues and problems we, as a country, face.

If he did disagree with the NSA policy, there are established procedures to deal with it — Snowden didn’t even give the system a chance to work.

Soon after this country was established, it didn’t take long for the government to realize that eavesdropping on the communications of other countries and even its own citizens is a necessary evil in a dangerous world. That fact should be even more apparent today.

The United States is significantly less likely to order wiretaps than almost any other country. The most wiretapped country in the world is Italy. The country with the next most wiretaps is the Netherlands.

In the U.S., judges almost always only grant wiretap requests that are “specific,” meaning they have to have a list of numbers they expect the suspect to call and what they’re expected to talk about. So if you’re living in the U.S. and you think the government is listening to your phone calls, unless you’re dealing in illegal drugs or something like that, you’re probably just paranoid.

In 1929, President Herbert Hoover’s Secretary of State, Henry Stimson, shut down the office in the U.S. State Department responsible for breaking codes to read messages sent between embassies of other countries and their capitals. He’s rather famous for stating, “Gentlemen don’t read other Gentlemen’s mail.” Of course the only problem with a gentlemen’s agreement is that our enemies don’t always act like perfect gentlemen — and — they do read our mail.
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Happy Birthday(s) Dave and Chassie….

Love Ya!!

While driving on a secondary road a few weeks ago, Claire noticed a sign indicating we had just passed the entrance to a plantation. We got to talking and neither of us knew the difference between a plantation and a “large farm.”

Well, after some extensive research, turns out the difference is “not much.” Or, maybe, “none.”

I started with the Merriam-Webster dictionary:
Plantation — (1) a usually large group of plants and especially trees under cultivation; (2) a: a place that is planted or under cultivation; b: an agricultural estate usually worked by resident labor
Farm — (1) a tract of land devoted to agricultural purposes; (2) a plot of land devoted to the raising of animals and especially domestic livestock
So it seems that according to the dictionary, they are pretty much the same thing.

When I was growing up in Oklahoma, I don’t remember seeing plantations, but we had farms and ranches. Ranches produced or raised livestock. They might raise some hay to feed the livestock, but their livelihood was livestock. Farms raised crops, and sometimes they diversified into livestock as well. Where I lived, farmers might occasionally refer to themselves as ranchers, but ranchers never referred to themselves as farmers.

So I’m thinking this plantation/farm terminology is possibly a regional thing.

I think there may be more than one way to classify these differences — I used to think that a plantation specialized in just one crop, like rice, tobacco, cotton, rubber, etc.  I know that in Central America they have coffee plantations, in Cuba there are sugar plantations and I’ve seen pineapple plantations in Hawaii. Farms usually plant and harvest more than one main crop.

Cotton was grown on plantations in the south, but where I grew up, cotton was “farmed.” But I’ve never heard of a “sugar farm,” it’s always a sugar plantation.

Thinking of the movies I’ve seen, it seems that the people that worked on plantations usually lived there — farms are generally kind of a one family sort of operation and usually farm workers, other than the family, don’t live there.

Another view I took away from the movies was that a farm was family run and they hired help as they needed it and paid that help a fair wage. Plantations were often run with slave labor. Obviously the Civil War ended that practice.

So anyhow, I don’t know the difference — today, it’s probably more terminology or one’s perception of the term being used… kind of like a porch and a veranda. They’re both pretty much the same, but if you’ve got a porch, you sit on it and drink a beer or iced tea — if you’ve got a veranda, you sip mint juleps….
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A few weeks ago, while doing some work at our church, we had a “nuts and bolts” discussion (for those of you that don’t know, a nuts & bolts discussion is a very detailed discussion that gets down to the most essential components of something) about a kind of strange topic. A guy asked the difference between a bolt and a screw.

Well, a couple of people thought they knew the answer and we heard a number of detailed explanations. A couple of people thought that the shape of the head and the fact that you needed a screwdriver, made it a screw, but then someone pointed out that machine screws are intended to be used with a nut and could be considered a bolt. A proposal was made that the shafts of bolts are not tapered like screws, but again, not all screw shafts are tapered…

One of the smarter ones of the group decided that a screw is an externally threaded fastener that is tightened by applying torque to the head, causing it to be threaded into the material it will hold. A bolt is an externally threaded fastener that is used in conjunction with a nut. But of course, this didn’t satisfy anyone — it just sounded smarter than the other explanations.

The words bolt and screw seem to be ambiguous — they are probably better used to describe how the threaded device is used.

So the discussion never really ended, everyone just went home. I really don’t know the difference between a bolt and screw — I’ve never been bolted….
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The first Memorial Day weekend after we moved to Shepherdstown a few years ago, we drove by the local cemetery and there were Confederate Flags displayed on many of the graves. (Antietam National Cemetery is only a couple of miles away, but because it is a “national” cemetery, confederates weren’t allowed to be buried there, so a significant number are buried here in Shepherdstown.) Claire was appalled that they should be displaying Confederate Flags…

It made perfect sense to me because that was the flag they fought and died under. Anyhow, I got to thinking…

Memorial Day is a United States federal holiday and is celebrated every year on the last Monday of May. It is set aside as a day to remember the men and women who died while serving in the United States Armed Forces. Memorial Day was originally known as Decoration Day and it originated after the Civil War to commemorate the Union and Confederate soldiers who died in the Civil War. By the 20th century, Memorial Day had been extended to honor all Americans who have died while in the military service.

So let’s see, the day that we now now call Memorial Day was originally created to honor both the Union and Confederate soldiers that died in the Civil War. Today, “Confederate Memorial Day” is still celebrated in a number of southern states.

For some reason, the Confederate Flag has come to refer to racist policies or other undesirable traits, but the fact is that that flag was bravely carried in many battles and those fighting for for and under it were fighting for what they believed in. One argument is that the Confederate graves should display the American Flag, because they were Americans.

In my opinion, there is nothing dishonorable, disrespectful, or racist in placing Confederate Flags on the graves of Confederate soldiers — it’s the flag under which they fought and died. There are probably many reasons that those who fought for the Confederacy did so. I’m sure many chose sides only because of where they were born, but some made the choice for reasons of patriotism, or love of family and even love of the nation. Both Union and Confederate soldiers died in the Civil War, but in the end they all died for the same belief — the freedom to be governed by a form of government of one’s choosing.

It’s unfortunate that the Confederate Flag has become to many a racist symbol —it never was any more than the Civil War was a racist war. Those that died in that war lost their lives for their beliefs; they were all true Americans — those that fought for the Confederacy shouldn’t be dis-honored because of the flag they waved….
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This past weekend, Deerfield Village, where we live, had a community-wide yard sale — everyone put things in their yards and driveways and (lots of) people toured the community looking for bargains.

The sign in front of the village distinctly said, “Yard Sale” but I’m sure that not one “yard” was sold. I don’t know if this is misleading advertising or not, but it seems to be a trend. A couple of years ago, we visited the Slave Market in Charleston — guess what — not one slave was for sale. Shepherdstown has a Farmer’s Market — and — you can’t buy farmers there…. I’m not saying there should be an investigation, but this seems more important than a lot of things under investigation by Congress.

But, back to yard sales — they seem to be events for selling (usually) used items by individuals. So far as I know, sellers are not required to obtain a business license or collect sales tax, although I do remember reading that several states and the IRS are considering legislation to make income from yard sales reportable.

Yard sales are often called garage sales, attic sales, basement sales, rummage sales, lawn sales, moving sales or sometimes estate sales, but they all pretty much serve the same purpose — an attempt for people to unload unwanted items from their household.

The origin of the modern day yard sale isn’t really known, but it seems to be an American custom, habit or tradition, although I’ve heard that these sales are gaining favor in Canada and Australia.

The yard sale may have evolved from the rummage sale — in fact, I don’t remember yard sales when I was a kid, but I do remember rummage sales. “Romage” entered the English language as a nautical term originally relating to how cargo was packed into the hold of a ship and evolved to mean bustle and commotion. Years later, the term would also refer to an exhaustive search. As the word continued to evolve, it came to refer to a great amount of miscellaneous cargo stashed away in the hold of the ship.

The first actual “rummage sales” were held at the docks. Cargo that was unclaimed or damaged would be hauled out of the hold and put up for sale. Soon this practice was being called a rummage sale and it also referred to the sale of damaged or unwanted goods from warehouses or storehouses as well.

As time passed, the rummage sales would be held at communal locations such as a park or a church, usually for a charitable cause or to raise money for the church. People would donate items to be sold. Although not quite as common, these events still take place today.

It’s just speculation on my part, but I’d guess that the yard sale evolved from this practice and probably picked up steam after World War II when people had more money and spent it on all the new products that were being produced after the war. With all the new “stuff,” the yard sale became a great way to pare down the clutter and make a little extra money.

So no matter what you call it — the name of things does not really matter, what matters is what something really is — these “sales” will be around and popular for a long time. Another person’s trash, might very well become your treasure….
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A few days ago, the subject of this blog was compliments and how sometimes compliments didn’t come across as they were intended — even if the person doing the complementing was sincere. Given so many words in our language that have multiple meanings, I’m not surprised. In fact, I’m surprised that we can communicate as well as we can.

Sometimes we can say something to one person and get one reaction and say the exact same thing to another person and get a completely different reaction. Well, I got to wondering why that is. After a bit of extensive research, I discovered that words (and phrases) actually have two distinct meanings. The denotative meaning refers to what the word refers to or what it means. But words also have something called the connotative meaning associated with them that has to do with what the word suggests to a person based on his or her experiences and associations with that word. For instance, if you love dogs, the word dog means an animal with four legs, licks you in the face, etc. But let’s say you were bitten by a dog when you were a kid – the mention of a dog may very well conjure up bad thoughts or even fear.

Not only does the same word mean different things and evoke different emotions in people, the same word often has multiple meanings. The word cold can mean a low temperature, or being sick with the sniffles — it can also mean to be “aloof” or lacking emotion. And just think of all the ways we use the word: we talk about a cold room or cold beer, using cold logic, a cold person or maybe a cold audience. A dog may be tracking a cold scent, a body may be cold in the grave, someone may have cold fury, a basketball team may have a cold shooting night, someone might be cold sober or turned down cold. Or — may get cold feet, be given a cold shoulder, be killed in cold blood, or just be out in the cold. Anyhow, you get the idea — simple words have multiple meanings and can be used in numerous ways.

Then of course there’s the gender thing — unfortunately, men and women can say exactly the same thing and believe me, it has a completely different meaning… take vulnerable for instance. being vulnerable to a woman is to fully emotionally open up one’s self to another. To a man, being vulnerable is playing football without a helmet. A woman’s definition of communication is the open sharing of thoughts and feelings with their partner. A man has communicated if he leaves a note before taking off to play golf with the guys. Entertainment for women may be a good movie, concert, book, or a play. Men think entertainment is anything that can be done while drinking beer.

There’s an old comic routine titled, “What the Captain means…” that has one of the comedians (“the Captain”) making a rather blunt or rude statement and the other putting a diplomatic spin on it. That sort of thing happens in real life, too. You learn that what is being said (and often the way it’s said) doesn’t really mean what it sounds like. For instance, if your wife says, “thanks.” It probably means thanks — and the correct response is “you’re welcome. But if she says, “thanks a lot,” that is dramatically different than “thanks.” The proper response here is not, “you’re welcome.”

Well, since there is no time like the present, I thought it was time to present my views on these word quirks — it’s my present to you….
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