Word of the Week – Barbarian

Word of the Week – Barbarian

When we call someone a barbarian, it has some definite tones of insult going on. But was it always that way? I remember reading in school about how really, the word was just from Barber, a foreign land to the Greeks and Romans.

And that’s true…but.

But even in the days of Ancient Greece, there was still a note of insult in barbarian–it not only meant “foreign,” it meant “foreign, incomprehensible, ignorant.” Even the Greeks considered those who didn’t speak their language or understand their ways to be inferior. Less so in truly ancient days, but after the Greco-Persian war–Persians being the ultimate barbarians to them–there was DEFINITELY negative connotations

Interestingly, Romans were considered barbarians to the Greeks as well…but then when Rome conquered Greece, adopted the word, and began to apply it to other areas. It’s traveled down through the centuries from there, arriving in English in the 1400s. It was used throughout the Middle Ages for pagans, foreigners, and especially those from the Barbary Coast. By 1610 it was used for any “rude, wild person,” but was still considered a step closer to civilized than savage.

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Professional

Professional

I’ve held a few jobs in my life. I spent my college years as an “office slave,” as I called it, so I can attest that not all jobs are lifestyles or passions or careers.

Some are one of those things, or two. Some are all of them. And I always knew that, with dreams of being a creative and making a living at it, that’s what it would take. Building a career as a novelist would require passion, and it would be my life. I’m not just a mom or a homeschool teacher who writes on the side. I am a novelist.

The thing with pursuing any work with the kind of determination that leads to it becoming a career is that you drive so hard, so long, that you run the risk of burnout. Worse, you run the risk of losing the passion and seeing only the work. That’s often when creatives step away–sometimes entirely, sometimes just for a season of rest. Or they dial it back. Or they make some other change.

For the past several years, my writing and design income has supported out family–and I’ll be honest, it was extremely satisfying to be able to do that. To say to my husband, “You’ve worked a lot of years in a job you mostly hated so that I would have the freedom to write–pursue your dreams now.”

What I didn’t realize at the time was that my flagging energy wasn’t just from overwhelm, it was from a pituitary tumor literally sapping me of strength and clarity. I worked with it for years, and I worked hard. I was, as my husband put it, in “professional athlete mode.” I trained my creative muscles, I worked them out, I exercised them. I showed up on game day, and I got the job done. It was work I loved, but it was still work. Sometimes it left me dry. Sometimes it left me exhausted. Never ready to give up–never!–always so grateful I got to do this work. But it came with a cost.

Creativity always comes with a cost, which is strange. It drains and it fills. It gives life and it takes life. I like to think of it like a garden. It gives immeasurable peace and satisfaction, it produces a harvest that will fill you and delight you, and tending it can soothe your soul…but you can’t ever stop that tending, or it’s all over. Sometimes the garden doesn’t get enough water and it dries up. Sometimes it gets too much. Sometimes you leave for a week and come back and it’s overrun.

The creative life can be the same way. We need it, we love it, it fills us up…but sometimes it also takes all our spare time and doesn’t seem to give anything back, or our expected successes are snatched away…like when the deer get the fruit and veggies the night before you were going to harvest (yep, we’ve had that happen!).

I’ve written about bits and pieces of this in my  “Let Me Tell You a Story” segment in my newsletter, so you’ve possibly read my thoughts on this before. But they bear repeating, or expounding on if you haven’t seen those.

Creativity is like a garden–it will give, but it also needs to be fed. If you’re feeling dry and burned out, burnt up in the scorching sun of life, then it isn’t necessarily time to pack it in and retire to your air conditioning and just say, “I can’t. I don’t care anymore.” It’s time to refill the well. Let the water overflow. Get back to the first love.

For me, that meant not just focusing on what I had to do–but rather, taking time to just create, when it meant nothing. When there were no deadlines or strings attached. When it’s just fun. I hadn’t done that in…years.

After I shared about it in my newsletter, I heard from people who’d had the same experience with their music, with their art, with teaching. Things they’d begun because they were passionate about them…but over the years, the passion wore away and left them just with the job. There was no joy in it anymore.

So the musician took some time to sing some old favorites just for herself, not for the choir. The artist turned to some sketches just for fun. The teacher put aside lesson plans with demands and remembered her own favorite days in school, what led her to that job, and pondered how to bring that to the kids today.

Rekindling a first love isn’t usually all that difficult…but it does have to be purposeful. It has to be tended with care. Nurtured. Appreciated.

We work hard to be professionals in our fields, to turn our love into our careers. But we also have to remember what brought us here. We have to cling to that seed. We have to take time for the joy of it, not just the job of it.

I’m so blessed to be a professional writer. But one of the most amazing lessons I’ve learned in the past year is that sometimes I need to set aside the professional…and just be a writer.

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Word of the Week – Banana

Word of the Week – Banana

Banana.

There’s something about those duplicated syllables and vowels that just makes it a fun word to say, am I right? But also a little strange. Where did this word even come from??

I was expecting some interesting etymology to match the fruit’s interesting history, but it’s a bit mysterious. What we know is that the fruit was introduced to Africa in pre-history, and that West African dialects called the fruit–you guessed it–banana. We know that Spanish and/or Portuguese explorers kept the name for the word when they began transporting the fruit to Europe in the 1510s, and that English speakers were using the same name for it in the 1590s. Why did those original people call it that? Big ol’ shrug.

But there are some interesting pieces on the various phrases using banana that are fun.

First, its casing. Banana-skin came first, in 1851, and was followed with banana-peel in 1874. Here’s the funny thing–you know all those TV or cartoon episodes with people slipping on banana peels? Real thing! People really did leave the peels on the streets, and as they rotted they got slippery and resulted in falls. It was a huge nuisance in cities…and even an insurance scam in the 1890s that targeted streetcar lines! Who knew?

The wonderful invention of a banana split brightened humanity’s existence by 1901 (I’m not biased, LOL). Banana oil was used for the chemical “essence of banana” (kinda like extract) by 1873 but by 1910 was also used to mean “nonsense.” In the 1950s, banana began to be used as a word for a comedian, which is probably what led to bananas as a term for “crazy” in the 1960s.

But let’s hop back to that extract or artificial flavoring for a few “did you know?”s. Did you know that banana flavoring was one of the very first artificial flavors? And while we today think of that flavor as “fake banana,” it’s in fact true banana–the flavor was made to imitate bananas of the time. Since then, banana trees have been modified and all been cloned from a single source–that’s why every banana tastes the same (and why when disease hits the trees it’s potentially catastrophic!). So our bananas today are actually just a derivative of original bananas, and that “fake” flavor is really “historically accurate banana.” 😉

And what about banana republics? This was a term used to refer to the Central American countries whose economies were entirely dependent on banana cultivation, which was a very big deal in the early 1900s. Rich American and British entrepreneurs set up plantations that ended up more or less controlling whole countries by being the only revenue source around. Sketchy. And it’s also why bananas are one of the core fruits today.

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Drought

Drought

When I was about eight, we went through a few dry years. One summer especially, it was declared an official drought…and I hated it. I live in the mountains of West Virginia, and those mountains are used to being green. Being rural, we had a well. Drought for us meant being very careful with and anxious over our water tables, being watchful of any sparks or fires, and praying God would send rain.

I was too young to know or care much about the bigger concerns. What I knew was that the lush green grass I loved running through barefoot was dry, brown, and pokey. Running barefoot through it held no appeal. What I knew was that our neighbors liked to burn trash, and fire was already terrifying to me after a rather large one consumed the hillside next to our house on my sixth birthday. What I knew was that this was NOT how my world was supposed to be.

I remember praying every night–every night–with all the earnestness of an eight-year-old that God would make the grass green again. I didn’t actually pray for rain. I prayed for green. Because that was what I saw. That was what I hated–the brown grass. And I knew God could make it green again…even without rain, right? Every night I would pray, and every morning, I would run out to the dining room window and look out, eager to see my miracle.

Every morning, I looked out that window and saw the same brown, scratchy, crunchy, hated grass.

Here’s the thing. I didn’t give up praying. I didn’t get angry. I just huffed a breath and thought, “Maybe tomorrow morning. I’ll just keep praying.”

Those memories have stuck with me for more than thirty years. Why? I think, looking back on it now, it’s not really because the drought itself scarred me for life or anything. It wasn’t because I realize, looking back, that I should have been praying for rain instead of green. I think that time has stuck with me, because Little Roseanna knew something Grown-Up Roseanna needs to remember.

We need to keep praying. Day in and day out. Disappointed or fulfilled. No matter how dry our souls feel. No matter how barren things look. Every day we’re left with a “no” or a “not yet,” we need to say, “Maybe tomorrow then. I’ll keep praying.”

As I ponder those days, I also remember something else.

I remember my phobia-level fear–terror–of fire. It was a real thing. In this day and age, I can imagine parents taking their kids to a counselor to talk through it. Because every night when I went to bed, I would tie my favorite teddy bear’s scarf around my wrist, so that if fire came and I had to jump out my window, I wouldn’t leave him behind. I would line up a few favorite things beside that same window, so I could grab them on my way out. I gathered all the matches I could find and soaked them in water, thinking they’d be destroyed forever and save me the worry of anyone making even the smallest fire in my house. Christmas Eve candlelight service? I was a wreck. I thought my long hair was sure to catch on fire and I wouldn’t hold my own candle.

Still, my neighbors, parents of my best friend, had a fire barrel. They would burn their trash rather than pay to have it picked up, and this…was…TERRIFYING to me. Especially because in that year of drought, one day the burning barrel blew over.

Fire. Fire was spreading through that dry kindling that used to be grass, and we were outside playing and saw it happen. Cue all the screaming. The rushing this way and that, having no idea what to do. My friend and I searched wildly for her father, certain the whole world was about to go up in flames…when he came sauntering calmly over with the hose and doused it in about three seconds. He’d been watching all along. He was prepared.

Then, in the next week or two, I noticed something strange.

The patch of grass that had burned grew back…green. I was startled. Amazed. In wonder. Surely that one dousing with the hose hadn’t accomplished that green, had it? Was it the single soaking of water or the fact that the dead grass was burned away?

I had no idea. But it taught me something I never would have anticipated.

Sometimes it takes destruction to bring new life. Sometimes my worst fears have to be realized in order to get the thing I long for.

After that, my best friend and I would joke about how we just needed to do controlled burns of all the grass to bring it back to life–a little match here, then a bucket of water to follow. We’d chase each other around the yard, pretending we were lighting and then quenching restorative flames.

Maybe, just maybe, that was when I started to heal from that phobia. Because of a drought that wouldn’t go away no matter how much I prayed.

I was remembering all of this because the last few weeks have been hot and dry here in the West Virginia mountains–not at all unusual for the last weeks of summer. The grass began to brown, and it would crunch under my feet when I walked through the yard. As it always does, that sound, that feel took me right back to that horrible summer of drought. Then we had a day of rain. One day, one good storm…and I walked outside the next day, and that crunchy grass was soft again. Green had overtaken the brown. Life had been restored.

One storm. One good soaking rain. Sometimes that’s all it takes.

I know many people in the country are suffering from severe drought right now of the natural variety–I have a lot of friends in Texas who are desperate for rain. How many more are suffering, all over the country and the world, from spiritual drought? How many get up every morning, hoping to feel life and hope only to be met with the same brown, crackling, prickly world?

I get it. I’ve been there, both spiritually and physically. But be encouraged, friends, by Little Roseanna and her insights. Keep praying–pray for relief, pray for healing for the root cause, pray for it all. But also know that sometimes, those droughts are there to heal us in the most unexpected ways. Sometimes, being stripped bare, down to the nub, parched of everything we thought we needed, we’re finally able to dig out the roots of fear, of bitterness, of shame, of regret, of hate. Sometimes we need those droughts so that the cleansing fire can get rid of the chaff and healing–life-giving, pure, clean, flowing healing–can finally do its work.

Droughts don’t last forever. Neither do floods. Life is always cyclical, with highs and lows, the dry and the soggy, the too-much and the not-enough. Faith doesn’t change any of that…it changes us and how we see it. It teaches us to see not the lack, but the opportunity. It teaches us to trust in our good and faithful Father, who is always watching, even when we don’t see Him there.

I will never like the feel of crunchy grass under my feet. But I will forever be grateful for what God taught me about Himself through my drought.

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Word of the Week – Ambivalence

Word of the Week – Ambivalence

Did you know that ambivalence was coined as psychological term?

It was based on the word equivalence, which is comprised of two Latin roots, equi (equal) and valentia (strength)–which of course means that two things are of equal strength. Well, in 1910, Swiss psychologist Eugen Bleuler wanted a word to mean that two things conflicted with each other in someone’s desires, so based on that well-established word, he took the Latin ambi (both, on both sides) and paired it with valentia.

Of course, this Swiss doctor spoke German, so his term was actually Ambivalenz, but within two years, English speakers had picked it up as ambivalency and were using to indicate “simultaneously conflicting feelings.” It had been shortened to its current form by 1924…and by 1929, the purely psychological term had been taken up by the general populace and applied in both literary and general senses.

I had no idea this word was so new! How about you?

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