Indian Summer, gossamer and Goose Summer

Image by Peter Rufi  Public Domain, Link

Recently, I saw this warm period of summerish weather in late October that I'm experiencing referred to as a "Goose Summer." It's a term I never heard before. "Indian Summer" is the more common expression in my experience. So, I went looking online.

The trail leads back to the word "gossamer" which means extremely light, delicate, or sometimes tenuous. You might refer to clouds as being gossamer if they are thin and light. The wings of angels or dragonflies might be seen as gossamer. 

The Goose Summer goes back to Middle English. A period of mild weather in late autumn or early winter was sometimes called a gossomer, which literally means "goose summer." My first thought was that it was because this was when geese were flying to warmer climates, but perhaps that's more of an American occurrence. The explanation I found was that October and November were the months when people felt that geese were at their best for eating. 

The word gossomer was also used in Middle English for filmy cobwebs floating through the air in calm, clear weather. The thought is that they resembled the down of a goose. 

The term "Indian Summer" is an American expression to describe a spell of warm, hazy autumn weather that feels more like summer than fall. The origin isn't known. One thought is that that kind of weather allowed Native American Indians to continue hunting before winter. 

A more specific definition is that it is a warm, tranquil spell of weather after a frost or period of abnormally cold weather - a kind of reprieve from early winter. The term originated in the United States and came into use in about 1778.

If "Indian Summer" seems inappropriate or politically incorrect, an earlier term in America for such weather was "second summer" and I found online other possibilities including badger summer and quince summer. 

A Ballcock Is Not an Obscenity

As I wrote in a short poem, this mechanism that is often found as part of toilet sounds obscene. It's not. At least it wasn't meant to be when it was invented by a priest.

A ballcock (also known as a balltap or float valve) is a mechanism or machine for filling water tanks, such as those found in flush toilets, while avoiding overflow. 

The modern ballcock was invented by José Antonio de Alzate y Ramírez, a Mexican priest and scientist, who described the device in 1790 in the Gaceta de Literatura Méxicana. The ballcock device was patented in 1797 for use in steam engines by Edmund Cartwright.

It consists of a valve (11) connected to a hollow sealed float (1) by means of a lever (3) mounted near the top of the tank. The float is often ball-shaped, hence the name ballcock. The valve is connected to the incoming water supply, and is opened and closed by the lever which has the float mounted on the end. When the water level rises, the float rises with it; once it rises to a pre-set level, the mechanism forces the lever to close the valve and shut off the water flow.

Cock valves (also known as plug valves, stop cocks, or quarter-turn valves) are devices that allow the user to restrict or permit flow through a pipe from an external point. Their use can be dated all the way into antiquity, and they are one of the simplest means of controlling fluid flow.

The word cock has many meanings beyond being a slang term for a penis. Going back to the 1500s, we find the term used as a noun and verb referring to a part of a gun and the action of putting into position the hammer by pulling back to the catch before firing.

A later usage is the term "to go off half-cocked" which figuratively means to speak or act too hastily. That usage alludes to the literal situation when firearms fire unexpectedly when supposedly secure. A weapon that is half-cocked has the cock lifted to the first catch, at which position the trigger does not act.

In 1770, "half-cocked" was noted as a synonym for "drunk." 

British pub sign - Public Domain

The male of the domestic fowl is called a cock (and more politely and euphemistically as a "rooster') and they have been associated since ancient times with male vigor. Cock is short for cockerel and a cockerel might be introduced to a group of hens (roost) to encourage egg laying. It is then called a rooster. Rooster is more common in American English and cockerel (cock) is British English. The connection to a human male penis is unclear. Ironically, the fowl known as the cock has no penis.

The  (the Latin word is penis). There are examples of efforts to avoid the older usages of "cock." As with "rooster," haystack replaced haycock, and weathervane replaced weather-cock. Author Louisa May Alcott's father was born Alcox, but changed his name.

The word is still used in other expletives such as cock-teaser and cock-sucker which appeared in print as far back as 1891. 

A cocker spaniel was a dog breed trained to start woodcocks in the hunt. 

"Cock of the walk" is a phrase used to describe an overbearing fellow, probably alluding to the "proud" walk of the rooster.  

"Cock-and-bull" is used to label a fictitious story or exaggerated lie. It was first recorded in the 1620s and might be an allusion to the talking animals of Aesop's fables. French has parallel expression coq-à-l'âne.

A "cock-lobster is a male lobster and goes back to 1757.

Ice Nine and Ice Nine Kills

 
  

I came across a reference to a band called Ice Nine Kills (abbreviated to INK, and formerly known as Ice Nine) that is an American heavy metal band from Boston known for its horror-inspired lyrics. Formed in 2000 by high school friends Spencer Charnas and Jeremy Schwartz, they started as ska-punk but later became a form of heavy metal.

I don't know much about their music but I do know where they got their name. Their band name is derived from the fictional substance ice-nine from the science fiction novel Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut.

Cat's Cradle is a satirical novel that I had taught to high school students and that I really enjoy. It was Vonnegut's fourth novel, published in 1963. It is a satire of science, technology, religion, and the nuclear arms race. It is black humor and if funny and scary.

In the novel, the co-creator of the atomic bomb and Nobel laureate physicist who creates for the military ice-nine. It is an alternative structure of water that is solid at room temperature and acts as a seed crystal upon contact with ordinary liquid water, causing that liquid water to instantly transform into more ice-nine. If put into a swimming pool, all the water instantly transforms. If you touched it to your tongue, you become ice-nine.

Things don't end well for the Earth with ice-nine. Read (or listen to) the book.

Besides ice-nine being a fictional solid form of water from Vonnegut, I found via Wikipedia that it shows up in other places besides the novel and the band. 

The most interesting of those is Ice IX which is an actual form of solid water. On the technical side, it turns out there is also ice II, and ice III. In fact, ordinary water ice is known as ice Ih in the Bridgman nomenclature and there are different types of ice, from ice II to ice XVIII that have been created in the laboratory at different temperatures and pressures. Who knew? I hope none of them work like Vonnegut's version!

Ice-nine can also refer to:

• Ice Nine (game), a first-person shooter video game for Game Boy Advance
• Kerach 9 (Hebrew: Ice 9 ( קרח 9 )), an Israeli rock band
• ICE-9 (album), an instrumental album by Susumu Hirasawa
• "Ice 9", a song by Joe Satriani from Surfing with the Alien
• Лёд-9 (Liod-9) or Ice-9, an album by Smyslovye Gallyutsinatsii
• Ice Nine Publishing Company, Inc., licensor of musical compositions by the Grateful Dead
• "Ice-Nine," a Grammy-nominated musical composition by Steve Wiest, recorded by the One O'Clock Lab Band on Lab 2009
• Ice-9 is a fictional computer virus in the Person of Interest (TV series)