CARE packages

What’s a care package? It's a package you send to show you care about someone. We send them to soldiers abroad and to our kids at college.

But when it is a CARE (all caps) package, you're going back to the origin of the term.

CARE packages were sent by the Cooperative for American Remittances to Europe to Americans in Europe as it was still recovering from WWII.

That organization changed its name to Cooperative for Assistance and Relief Everywhere. Their focus is not on packages but on bigger development efforts.

The term “care package” has survived in its broader sense.

Collective Nouns for Birds

You know about a herd of deer and a pack of dogs or coyotes, but what about a herd of cranes?

A list of English terms of venery (an archaic word for hunting) came about in the Late Middle Ages and these included somewhat whimsical collective names for animals.

One source of these terms was the Book of Saint Albans (or Boke of Seynt Albans), a 1486 book, a compilation of matters relating to the interests of the time of a gentleman. It was the last of eight books printed by the St Albans Press in England, and it is also known by the more accurate name, The Book of Hawking, Hunting, and Blasing of Arms. It contains three essays, on hawking, hunting, and heraldry.

Although originally considered whimsical and humorous, many of these terms for have become part of the modern-day lexicon and some common collective terms (such as herd and flock) for some animals.

Many of the collective nouns for birds are the most poetic.

• gulp of cormorants
• covert of coots 
• murder of crows
• cast, cauldron, or kettle of birds of prey, such as hawks and falcons
• chain of bobolinks
• wake of buzzards
• banditry of chickadees
• convocation, congregation of eagles
• charm of finches
• glittering, shimmer, tune, bouquet, hover of hummingbirds
• party, scold of jays
• bevy, exaltation, ascension of larks

a wake of buzzards

Dracula and Vampires

Dracula is an 1897 Gothic horror novel by Irish author Bram Stoker.

Although more people probably know the character from the many movie versions, the character of the vampire Count Dracula in the novel is the fictional origin story.

Stoker did not invent the idea of a vampire, but he certainly set the modern form of it.

His novel tells the story of vampire Count Dracula's move from Transylvania to England in search of new blood and to spread the curse of the undead curse. He is opposed by those who follow Professor Abraham Van Helsing.

The first appearance of the English word vampire (as vampyre) in English was a travelogue titled Travels of Three English Gentlemen published in 1745, but vampires had already appeared in French and German literature.

Austria gained control of northern Serbia and Oltenia in 1718 and officials noted the local practice of exhuming bodies and "killing vampires."

The English term was probably derived via French vampyre) from the German Vampir, in turn from the Serbian vampir.

Stoker’s vampire was based on Vlad the Impaler (Vlad Tepes), a Romanian prince who had a thing for impaling his enemies. His father, Vlad II, was known as Dracul, meaning dragon or devil, because of he was a member of a  group of knights called The Order of the Dragon.

Prince Vlad was born in 1431 into a noble family of Transylvania, a place that was between the two empires of the Ottoman Turks and the Austrian Hapsburgs. Vlad "Dracula" (diminutive of Dracul)
was imprisoned by the Turks and later by the Hungarians.

Theirs is not a happy family story.  Dracula's father was murdered. His older brother, Mircea, was blinded with red-hot iron stakes and buried alive.

As Vlad the Impaler, Dracula's preferred method of torture for prisoners was to impale them and leave them to writhe in agony.

In battle, supposedly one Turkish advance was halted because they couldn't get past the smell from decaying impaled corpses.

Stories of his actions became legend. Though it was never claimed that he was a vampire Did he eat his meals surrounded by hundreds of impaled victims? Did he eat bread dipped in blood?

He was killed in December 1476 fighting the Turks near Bucharest, Romania. He was buried at the Snagov Monastery nearby. The monastery was also used as a prison and torture chamber. When prisoners prayed before an icon of the Blessed Virgin, a trap door opened dropping them onto sharp stakes below.

Nosferatu, from the 1922 German film, directed by F. W. Murnau,
starring Max Schreck as the vampire Count Orlok
(name changed to avoid copyright issues with the Stoker estate)

SNAFU and FUBAR

Two terms that are related by both their use of an obscenity and in their origin stories are the acronyms SNAFU and FUBAR.

The industrialization of the American military in the 1940s during World War II pushed many new acronyms into the English vocabulary.

New technologies with complicated names often leads to the creation of simplified terms like RADAR, SONAR, SCUBA.

The military has been a major source of acronyms and abbreviations and that's true of these two.

SNAFU: Situation Normal, All Fucked Up - a reference to the general chaos and horror of the battlefield.

FUBAR: Fucked Up Beyond All Repair/Recognition - like SNAFU, the acronym FUBAR dates back to World War II and described a thing or situation in which things were beyond hope - although in a wartime military setting that doesn't mean you didn't have to deal with it.

Moby Dick

Before there was Herman Melville's white whale, Moby Dick, in his novel of the same name, there was Mocha Dick.

Mocha Dick male albino sperm whale that lived in the Pacific Ocean in the early 19th century who had quite a reputation. The whale was frequently encountered in the waters near the island of Mocha, off southern Chile.

The American explorer Jeremiah N. Reynolds published his account, "Mocha Dick: Or The White Whale of the Pacific: A Leaf from a Manuscript Journal" in 1839 in The Knickerbocker and it was part of the inspiration for Melville's 1851 novel Moby-Dick.

Believed to have been active from 1810 to 1859, Mocha Dick was infamous for the ferocity of his retaliations against those who attempted to capture him. From the first recorded encounter near the South American island of Mocha till the fatal harpoon blow, Mocha Dick was a legend in his own time. Mocha Dick survived nearly 100 whaler attacks before he was finally killed while coming to the aid of a female whale and her calf.

Mocha Dick: The Legend and Fury