gist

GIST is an odd little word that I have heard used my entire life and never known the origin. People say "What was the gist of it?" meaning what was the essence or essential part of a matter In law, it has a more specific meaning, the real point of an action, as in "damages are the gist of the lawsuit."

The word appeared in the early 18th century and comes from Old French, gesir  "to lie" and earlier from Latin jacere.  The legal connection seems important as there was (is?) an old legal phrase cest action gist  that was used in France and England meaning "this action lies." That phrase denoted that there were sufficient grounds to proceed. "Lie" here means more like the way we use it today when we say "The difficulty lies in getting sufficient funds."

I came to all of this when I was writing about memory. There is a kind of false memory that is sometimes called "gist memory." Gist traces are fuzzy representations of a past event when we have the general idea but not the specifics of the event clear. Verbatim traces are detailed representations of a past event. It seems that although people are capable of processing both verbatim and gist information, they oddly prefer to reason with gist traces rather than verbatim.

The older I get, the more I seem to be relying on gist memories  if I remember something at all!

plaque

A nice plaque for Mickey at the Hall of Fame

I saw this Tweet by comedian Jim Gaffigan,

and it got me wondering
in the way that usually generates ideas for posts on this blog.

 PLAQUE - that gunk on teeth and also those things we win and never know what to do with - (and not to be confused with the disease "plague" - an unfortunate misspelling I often saw with my students) is an odd word for its two very diverse meanings.

Dental plaque is a biofilm of bacteria that grows on surfaces within the mouth. It is sticky and colorless at first, but later it forms tartar and is an even grosser brown or pale yellow. It gets all over teeth and when it gets along or below the gumline, you have bigger problems.

A commemorative plaque is certainly nicer than that stuff on your teeth. You can stick it to a wall, although if you get a lot of them, you can stick them in a drawer.

What's the connection? Even Wikipedia didn't try to answer that for either plaque. But some etymological digging told me that the word in those uses comes from mid-19th century from French, where it arrived via the Dutch noun plak meaning "tablet" which in turn came from the Dutch verb plakken meaning "to stick."

I guess the dental gunk refers to the verb and the way it sticks to your teeth, while the award is a tablet (though you do stick it on a wall or in a drawer).

I tried, but failed, to find a plaque that commemorates plaque, but it probably wouldn't cost much to have one made. You might want to give it to your dental hygienist next time you get a good cleaning.

The dental variety

Meme

A meme (AKA Internet meme) is an idea, behavior, or style that spreads from person to person within a culture. Nowadays, these tend to spread via the Internet and particularly through social networks such as Facebook or Twitter.

Memes are seen as cultural analogues to genes because they self-replicate, mutate, and respond to outside forces.

The word meme is a shortening (modeled on gene) of mimeme from Ancient Greek meaning "imitated thing." It was coined by British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene well before the Internet. Dawkins gives examples of memes from catchphrases, fashion, and technology.

Proponents theorize that memes are a viral phenomenon that may evolve by natural selection in a manner analogous to that of biological evolution. Memes do this through the processes of variation, mutation, competition, and inheritance.

Memes that propagate less prolifically become extinct. Others survive, spread, and sometimes evolve or mutate.

Memes existed before we had that word to attach to them. I wrote here earlier about the phrase "Kilroy was here" which was a popular, viral meme that appeared during and after World War II.

Looking at memes popular in the online culture in 2106, we find a lot of lightweight items.

As Andy Warhol predicted about the more and more frequent "15 minutes of fame" we would see in culture, someone such as Ken Bone became a meme very briefly during the second Clinton/Trump Presidential Debate.  Bone, an undecided voter tapped by Gallup, asked the candidates an earnest, straightforward question about energy policy and quickly became a meme more due to his old-fashioned look and a red sweater that sold out within a matter of hours and became a popular Halloween costume.

“Me at the beginning of 2016 vs me at the end of 2016” was popular photo meme in 2016. But, unfortunately, what Dawkins meant as a serious kind of cultural evolution seems to indicate that our evolution is a mimetic devolution into triviality and pop fluff.

Yule

A Yuletide bonfire of Yule logs - via Flickr CC

Yule or Yuletide ("Yule time") is a festival observed by the historical Germanic peoples, later undergoing Christianised reformulation resulting in the now better-known Christmastide. Scholars have connected the celebration to the Wild Hunt, the god Odin and the pagan Anglo-Saxon Mōdraniht.

Yule is the modern English representation of the Old English words ġéol or ġéohol  which was the 12-day festival of "Yule" which was later called "Christmastide." The words ġéola or ġéoli  referred to the month of "Yule." To further complicate things, ǽrra ġéola referred to the period before the Yule festival (December) and æftera ġéola referred to the period after Yule (January).

The noun Yuletide is first appears around 1475 in the explicitly pre-Christian context primarily in Old Norse. The the long-bearded Norse god Odin also had the names jólfaðr (Old Norse for "Yule father") and jólnir ("the Yule one").

Today Yule is also used to a lesser extent in English-speaking as a synonym for Christmas. Present day Christmas customs such as the Yule log, Yule goat, Yule boar, Yule singing, and others stem from pagan Yule.

• More about the Yule celebrations
• Yule: Rituals, Recipes & Lore for the Winter Solstice
• Yule: A Celebration of Light and Warmth 

Mott the Hoople

                     

Mott the Hoople were an English rock band with strong R&B roots, popular in the glam rock era of the early to mid-1970s. They are best known for the song "All the Young Dudes", written for them by David Bowie.

Gut Stevens of Island Records decided to sign the band, Silence, an early incarnation of Mott (minus lead singer Ian Hunter). While in prison on a drug offense, Stevens had read the novel Mott the Hoople about an eccentric who works in a circus freak show and decided to use it as a band name. Silence reluctantly agreed to the odd name change following their early 1969 audition for Stevens.

Mott the Hoople is a 1966 novel by Willard Manus. According to Wikipedia, the plot involves Norman Mott a misfit, lazy rebel without a cause who dislikes work. Mott believes life is a "bad comic opera." In order to avoid real work, he engages in various scams and gambles.

According to a review of the novel, "Hooples, to clear this up right at the beginning, 'make the whole game possible, Christmas Clubs especially, politics, advertising agencies, pay toilets, even popes and mystery novels.' Obviously, they're squares and Mott, Norman Mott, is certainly not..."

On the Ian Hunter/ Mott website, the book is "very much a book of the '60s, and so in some regards has dated somewhat. In the context of this website, it is an interesting read, since it was this book that inspired the name to Guy Stevens. In a wider context, I'm not so sure, and if I hadn't been a fan of the band I probably wouldn't have bothered. But if you grew up in 60's America it might be enough to bring back a few memories..."