Greenman

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

A 1964 article in Nature with the euphonious title, “Nature of argillaceous odour,” gave the world the not-as euphonious-sounding word, “petrichor.” In it, two researchers attempted to scientifically describe what it is we smell when we smell the world after a rain shower and to give it a name.

The two authors coined the word, “petrichor,” which I have been mispronouncing in my head since I first encountered it last year, when an article on the Huffington Post started making its social media rounds. It has a long “I,” so say it like this: “petra,” then “eye-core,” which is not how I hear it in my head, with a short “i.”
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Today in History: April 9

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

I know it’s very bad form to quote one’s own reviews, but there is something the New York Times said about me [in 1958], that I have always treasured: “Mr. Lehrer’s muse [is] not fettered by such inhibiting factors as taste.”—Tom Lehrer

Tom Lehrer is 88 today. From the late 1940s until the early 1960s, he was an in-demand nightclub performer whose droll and sometimes dark songs (“Pollution,” “We’ll All Go Together When We Go”) were sung cheerfully by an bespectacled man at a piano. He retired from performing live in the early 1960s, then wrote and sang satirical songs for television (“That Was the Week That Was”), then retired from performance altogether to become a math professor at UC Santa Cruz.

In 1971, PBS debuted a children’s television show called “The Electric Company,” and there a new generation (mine) learned about the alphabet and some of its many entanglements from droll cartoons illustrating concepts like the “silent E” accompanied by clever songs sung by a cheerful voice and piano. I did not know who Tom Lehrer was when I was 4, but I did know this song by heart (below the fold):
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Ladybug, Ladybug

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

Fairy tales and superstitions come down to us from the past like hearsay. “They say Mother Goose used to sing this to her grandchildren: ‘Ladybug, Ladybug, fly away home …'”

Who the heck is this Mother Goose? And why are her stories and rhymes so apocalyptic? “Your house is on fire and your children … .” Sheesh.
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