Dichroic Reflections

Dichroic’s being linguistic again

I told Coach DI about my thousand-meter time yesterday. His exact response was "Your like one of those little guys in the Mighty Dog Ads! Pound for pound you kick @#%$!!" I thought that was funny....it’s not often that someone gives you a compliment that translates so literally as "Mean little bitch!"

Today, we finally got to row the lightweight women’s quad that we’ll be racing Saturday, and it was great. Speaking of small women who kick ass....We hadn’t done it before because one of the women rows with a different group, but she came out this morning just for us. Now I’m looking forward to Saturday. Toward the end of practice, I ended up having to row with three other (heavier) women, which was amusing in a different way. One of them caught a crab with her starboard oar every single time we tried a racing start. We did ok with steady-state rowing, though.

I should explain that term "catch a crab", because it confused me for years in Through the Looking Glass. Remember when Alice is with the sheep, who’s knitting, and suddenly the shop they’re in dissolves, and Alice is trying to row a boat? The sheep keeps saying "Feather! Feather! You’ll catch a crab." Alice takes that as literally as I always did, and says she’d rather like to catch a "dear little crab". For years, I had no idea what Lewis Carroll was gassing on about -- I think I thought "Feather!" was some odd British expletive. (Well, it’s no stranger than "Blimey!") Turns out they’re rowing terms -- "feathering" is rotating your oar so it’s parallel to the water and glides on top of it. "Catching a crab" is when your oar basically gets stuck under the water (like if you feathered it entirely underwater) so that you can’t pull it out at the end of a stroke.

I’m sure you all feel better now for knowing that. Or at least better than the guy in my meeting earlier whose name we deduced the meaning of. It was a Danish name and someone who speaks Danish told him the literal meaning. That part was fine, but I probably didn’t have to add the relationship of the parts of his name to old English words, and how the word "gaard" (farm) relates to our word "yard" (through palatalziation of the initial consonant, or course). I wish I’d been able to finish that Linguistics degree. I will someday, but meanwhile I have a horrible feeling of cogitus interruptus that tends to manifest in little lectures like these.