Mastering the Mistress

I worked quite intensively yesterday, proofreading and editing a travel guidebook. With the usual pauses to reconsider proper and common nouns – African wild cat or African Wild Cat?  Blue wildebeest or Blue Wildebeest?

This conundrum continued to occupy brain space deep into the early hours of the morning as I sleeplessly tossed and turned. It’s in these moments that my brain transforms into a golden snitch zooming around in a particularly frenetic game of Quidditch.  If the reference escapes you, read anything in the Harry Potter series.

Why are titles proper rather than common nouns?  Why do we persist with three female titles – Miss, Mrs and Ms? What is the preoccupation with marital status or conversely, screening the status with the ubiquitous Miz? Why don’t we use a blanket ‘Mistress’ as the feminine version of ‘Mister’?  Why are young boys titled ‘Master’ yet grown men ‘Mister’?

By now the snitch was in full manic mode and so far out into left field it had exited the room. Thoughts and arguments tumbled and skyrocketed at top speed, kicking slumber into touch. Another note to self to really, really stop having that after dinner coffee; caffeine does gymnastics in my sleep cortex.

Is it fear of a lack of options? The horror of being categorised either married, unmarried or one of the above? Does anyone really care?

Mrs is an abbrieviation of Mistress and I’m happy to be a Mistress in all connotations of the word. Even the less salubrious meaning is rather daring and elicits a frisson of excitement. Let’s lose the overpidgeonholing thing and match Mister with Mistress, Ms for short (no feminist statement here, simply the first and last letters of the word, a la Mr).

Simplify the world for our daughters, with a single title that denotes their gender rather than their marital status and removes the rather meaningless but nonetheless anguished over decision women make at some point to either go with traditional ‘subjugation’ policy and take on a new title and name or to follow the feminist ‘correct’ path.

If a girl is ‘Ms’ from birth to death, the decision about taking her husband’s name becomes one of convenience and choice as she’ll be Ms whether married or not. Ms Smith can elect to become Ms Blenkinsop or remain as she was without the confusion of then putting ‘Married’ under her title Miss.

Let’s face it, ‘Ms’ hasn’t taken off as a mainstream choice, possibly because the issue is overcomplicated and implicitly suggests rebellion or rampant feminist. And can you be a ‘Ms’ with your spouse’s name, or is Ms currently reserved for maiden names, whether the bearer is married or not? 

This is something worth marching about, an issue to be clarified and decided once and for all. At the very least, there will be an ink and space saving on official forms with the removal of two title options!

Rounding Up Errant Thoughts

I was gently nudged by a dear friend and loyal reader regarding the erratic train of thought in my last post.  Truth be told, I'd intended chatting about how our plans were turning out to be more liquid than plan, and as flexible as a meandering stream.

Breaking off midway through my musings for a cuppa, the state of the kitchen brought my temperature to boiling point faster than the kettle rattled steam from it's spout.  Hence the diverse sidetrack, sorry about that.  One of the downsides of not planning my blogs; off the cuff scribing means that I'm not totally in control of where it is headed.

OK, so you've got the gist - our departure date for East Africa has stretched further and further out and even a firm resignation and resolution hasn't actually made it reality.  To add more complication to the mix of installing lightbulbs in hospitals, Kenya's August election result was declared null and void by the High Court and a re-run ordered.

Frankly, I'm delighted by this African first, an election result declared free and fair by outside observers successfully contested in court.  Not that I'm leaning one way or the other regarding the parties but this display of democracy at work is very pleasing.  Except, with the new election date set for 17th October and many expats heading out of the country again until things settle down, Him Outdoors sensibly began to wonder if a further postponement of our trip should be considered. 

A call last week to an expat friend in Nairobi scored a point for my opinion, that this was the time to be bold and be there, people who would usually be too busy to see us will have time on their hands.  1 - 0 for the optimist.

A lengthy Skype chat to our Kenyan business partner on Monday evening levelled the score though.  In fact, it earned double points and weighted the seesaw towards the Realist.  George strongly advised that we delay, saying it would be a waste of our time - Kenyan business owners are simply frozen until after the election. He himself was preparing to take his family out of Kenya for a while and this, coming from a Black Kenyan entrepreneur, carried huge weight with us.

Sadly reporting back to our Jozi pals that the drinks send off on Saturday was to be postponed elicited an interesting and heartwarming perspective - 'yay, now we have you for longer' was the general gist.  Wow, guys, we didn't see that coming and absolutely love our Monty Python-esque pals - 'Always look on the bright side of life' is now ringing in our ears and HO belts out a whistle or two every now and then.  Mostly when my bottom lip quivers and pouts.  

In today's world of instant gratification and push button convenience, it is so easy to lose sight of what life really is about - a straggly, potholed track strewn with fallen trees and the odd puddle.  The only way through is to keep moving forward, slowly navigating all the obstacles and to press ahead. Smooth paths and life on a plate are the exception, not the rule. Hollywood and popular fiction have dulled our realistic expectations and should be seen for what they really are - feel good fantasy.

Life itself is a muddle that keeps us on our toes and constantly stretches and challenges our ability to think on our feet and adapt, and thank heavens for that. Disappointment aside, the kinetic energy of change is exciting.

Urrgh, Men and Commune Housework

Life unfolds at it's own pace, which at times is far too leisurely for me.  I'm the 'make a decision and dash off at 100 miles an hour to get it done' sort of person and yes, that crazy woman in the supermarket, parking her trolley at the end of the aisle 3 then zooming across to aisle 27 to pick up the next item on her list is me.

Him Outdoors refers to my grocery excursions as gym time, he swears I walk at least 4x more than needed.  I think of my shopping trail as a sort of honey bee waggle dance. Just not in a figure 8 or, truth be told, in any sort of coherent manner at all. Perhaps the sort of post-fermented marula fruit waggle dance that a bee would perform if a bee's mind was as absent as mine.  Nonetheless, our pantry is always stocked so does the gathering mileage really matter?

We've been wanting to head back to Kenya for months now but things keep cropping up. HO's contract has been (admittedly thankfully) extended time after time as new projects are thrown at him but eventually, in a spousal headlock, he agreed to draw a line under 31st August and bid Altsa 'adieu'. Which he did. 

Perhaps not as effectively as envisaged, though, as now we are both living in the communal company house in Durban while our fur babies and home are under the care of a dear friend and I have clothes and belongings scattered in 6 places, including the boot of my car parked at Oliver Tambo.  Who knew that Madam Chief Nest-er could live a gypsy lifestyle at all, let alone for 10 months?I've had a crash course of lessons in patience, acceptance and relinquishment of control, not to mention having to let go of a perfectionist's standards of, well, pretty much everything. It's been a tussle, I must admit.

While we wait for the contractors to provide HO with accurate and believable figures of the stock required to finish the installations so that the sites can be delivered and signed off, we are sharing a rather cute Victorian house with two work colleagues of HO. A sparsely furnished, absolutely no frills, under renovation Victorian house, and did I mention that the cottage at the bottom of the garden houses a tenant, as well? 

The housemates are lovely guys and lots of fun but my word, they haven't a clue about making a space the teeniest bit homely and as to how easily the XY chromosome bearers slipped into leaving cooking, tidying and washing up to the woman....grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr. They also rate as probably the untidiest people I've ever had the misfortune to share a roof with, including the one I married who has reverted to some kind of bachelor oblivion about cleaning and standards of hygiene.

It took me a few days to down tools and resolutely REFUSE to continue tidying the kitchen because I can't bear the odious mess, but neither am I prepared to be 'house girl'. However, the shambles irks me intensely while they are completely oblivious to the mess. I'm taking so many deep breaths, oxygen overload is my middle name. 

I've had a bit of experience sharing digs with a few men this year. In April I homed with No 2 son and his 3 mates for a few days over graduation.  What a pleasure! No 2 had dictated a huge clean up prior to my arrival, apparently, but over the 3 days I was there the guys cooked and cleaned up after themselves. The bathrooms were always spotless and as for the company, it was a hoot.  4 bright post grad scientists who couldn't do enough or be more polite or considerate of their house guest and numerous debates and discussions about the world at large made for a memorable and very enjoyable stay with them.  

I guess the tidy mentality can be laid neatly at the feet of the mother, in which case I need to have a few words with my darling mother-in-law. Or perhaps it's a generation thing - my sprogs were expected to clean up after themselves and ensure the house was tidy, there was none of that 'girls clean, boys reside on a pedestal' thinking in my house and looking at No 2's digs mates it seems he has found kindred spirits of his age.

As for the old geezers I currently share with, zounds. And because the subbies keep finding random rooms and corridors previously not accounted for on site, we are going to be here far longer than anticipated.  Zen and the art of domestic disorder, I'm breathing.  Deeply. 

Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia

Prize of the day goes to readers who can identify this phobia without resorting to a search engine.

Hippo - Horse (Greek)
Potamos - River (Greek)
Monstro - Monstrous being, or something huge and terrifying (Latin)
Sesquippedalio - Adaptation from Latin meaning 'over a foot and a half high'.

I bet you got phobia, well done! (If not, it means morbid fear)

So what is Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia when it's at home?  Fear of a hippopotamus perhaps?  You'd be right to respect them, their reputation as Africa's most dangerous large land animal is well deserved.  Cuddly and pink, in this case, does not mean, well, cuddly and friendly.  At all.

Nah, our word inventors have gone way out there on this one.  Which Mensa candidate designated a phobia about long words with a name 38 letters long?

Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia is a very real phobia, leaving suffers to sweat and tremble in a full blown anxiety attack when confronting a very long word.  

How to pronounce it:
Hippo
Poto
Monstro
Sesqui
Pedalio
Phobia

If in doubt, resort to Mary Poppins and sing it out - 
Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious was a popular song from the musical Mary Poppins and we've all bellowed it out at some time or the other. Um-dittle-ittl-um-dittle-i. Songwriters Richard and Robert Sherman clearly didn't suffer from Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia and it's a good thing neither Dick van Dyck nor Julie Andrews did, as the 4 Oscars swept up by the film enhanced their movie careers no end.

It's downright cruel to give sufferers of this phobia such a mouthful to read and pronounce.  I wonder if they can even bear to take the prescription from the Doctor, let alone hand it over to a Pharmacist and answer his friendly enquiry about how the Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia is today?

To tie your tongue in monstrous knots, listen to the 
Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia song on the link below.  It's really chipper and annoyingly, you'll be leaping from humming this to Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious for the next 24 hours.  Sorry!

https://youtu.be/C-V6FHWYtcg

My Mother is an Xperia and Dad a Samsung

My lovely Nikon D5200 gives me, someone not gifted with an artistic hand, the chance to create a beautiful picture. It's the very devil to get it right, and the rare successes are usually unplanned accidents but I feel like van Gogh as I fiddle with settings and seek the best angle to photograph something that caught my eye.  The disappointment when viewing the end results is often very deep but ups the determination to find out why and to get it right next time. Taking pictures with my mobile phone, on the other hand, is convenient (especially for insurance claims) but feels rather lame.

I'm in the minority, I fear, as a picture paints a 1000 words and this cartoon speaks millenniums to me.

That device in your hand which you refer to as a phone is used for almost anything but speaking on.  Sure, it's a reasonable evolutionary leap from phone to messaging to internet access, email and social media (all forms of communication) but our faithful telephone has now crossed a species boundary and become camera of choice to billions.

Nikon, Leica and Olympus must be feeling the pinch, because I'm not sure they can fall back on a broader range of products to make up the lost turnover like some of the competition can.

For on-tap convenience and availability the mobile phone as a camera has absolutely no equal.  Not only is it pretty much always at hand but with a few swipes the image is instantaneously shared widely.  This, of course, is a double edged sword.  Who hasn't pushed 'send' too hastily and winged an inappropriate email or message they'd rather not have sent?  And now we have the added facility of capturing and sending pictures that really shouldn't have been caught at all, and those photographs, once seen, are indelibly etched on spooked minds. 

Would those naughty photographs of various dangly bits have been taken if the erstwhile photographer had to set up a tripod of sorts and set the timer on his Canon Sureshot?  More importantly, wouldn't the world be better off without those photographic gems?  How do you feel about countless photographs on social media of (usually) young women stretching their pouty lips into hideous duck impressions - and what is it about fitting rooms that has women photographing their reflection and sharing it with their world? Again, if they had to haul out their Nikon D3200, would they bother?

Ready availability and ridiculous ease has created a scenario where we've all become photography addicts, with very little interest in learning more about this fascinating and wonderful field.  Point, shoot, load onto Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, WhatsApp and move on.  Composition?  Light? Capturing the everyday in a creative way?  What's that?  My lunch is on Facebook and that's all that counts.  Photography is easy, anyone can do it.

Ja, well, no fine (love that South African expression).  

So if your child draws your likeness as a Sony Xperia, and your furbaby pauses to pose in his version of cute mode when he sees your phone, you should take a moment yourself and step out from behind your teeny camera.  Put it down for a bit and have some real Face Time creating moments that are captured solely in your mind's eye and that of your companion.  

That's a picture uniquely and forever yours and theirs.

Einstein Says...

Far be it from me to argue with a genius, particularly when his signature equation, E=MC2 doesn't raise a hair on my woolly head as it whizzes way above my 5'8" body.

I googled what the equation means (e = a unit of energy, m = units of mass and c2 is the speed of light squared) to save some readers from having to do the same and hopefully I'm not alone in being none the wiser - physics, numbers, equations, formulas fuzzle my head and make my eyes spin.

However, I can totally relate to this Einstein quote, difficult as it is for a Cancerian, genetically engineered by the planets at birth, to leave the cosy rut she wraps snugly around her like a cuddly duvet.

What is life but a road trip with one single, absolute and common destination for everyone, magnificently captured in the infamous Monty Python Dead Parrot sketch?  "E's passed on!  This parrot is no more!  He has ceased to be! ....'is metabolic processes are now 'istory!...This is an ex-parrot!!"

We have to keep moving.  Evolution is simply changing and adapting to an environment in a constant state of flux.  It's not only our surroundings that change; we, as people change.  Parents continually remark how their offspring resemble one side of the family or other, how Johnny inherited dad's rugby skills and Jane has her granny's love of music, Thembi has her father's eyes while Sbu, sadly, is as short as his mother.  We seem to stop the comparisions as they grow to teenagehood, but a penetrating look in a mirror will show you that in middle age you appear to look more like one parent than you ever did before. It's not only wrinkles and skin folds that emerge, our appearance is changing with the years as well.

Likewise our interests progress and develop in different directions with time. Our world contracts and expands according to our interaction with it and I, for one, love the easy accessibility of technology and Google. Reading a book or watching a movie with my phone in one hand, ready to check a fact or new word.  This usually leads to some interesting new nugget of knowledge and no one could fault that.

We grow as we stretch our boundaries, both physical and mental.  In the rapidly narrowing gap between where I am now and my final destination lie new experiences and adventures.  The choice to pick them and leave behind the familiar and comfortable is mine. We can fear falls and dead ends, but simply sitting in one spot marking time is not enough.  Scrapes and bruises will heal, things going wrong will be blog fodder and for heavens sake, when I'm rocking on the porch, strawberry daiquiri in one hand and a walking stick useful for poking passing whippersnappers in the other, I need something to talk about and relive.

One life, end date unknown.  Live it fully and with joy.  Then fall off your perch and pass on.

Shackled in Spanish - For Better or Worse

Much to my regret, a polyglot I'm not.  Schoolgirl French confused the hell out of me - how could common everyday objects have a gender?  Trying to pick up Portuguese to aid communication in Mozambique brought the same problem - the gender of an object changed EVERYTHING in the sentence and flummoxed my uniglot brain.

Fortunately, No 2 Son, who consistently walked the failure line with Afrikaans at school, appears to have a natural linguistic ear and tongue for indigenous African languages and has taught himself some basic isiZulu, SiSwati and isiXhosa.  He happily chats away to appreciative locals in their own tongue and I'm both proud of and envy him for this skill.

Not, it must be said, that English is easy for people to learn.  Which is totally amazing to a native English speaker, absolutely oblivious to the wily traps of our language.  We don't give a thought to the trickeries of homonyms, for instance. 

Huh?  

Yup, those tricky words both spelt and pronounced the same, with completely different meanings.  A selection: 
Address   Back   Bank   Board   Cast   Check   Duck  Exact   Fair   Fine   Fly
Grave   Groom   Hood   Iron    Jam    Line    Plane    Skirt   Wave   Yard 

Getting the picture?  And that's before we tackle Eight and Ate, Nay and Neigh, Fare and Fair, Knife, Five and Fifth...

Spanish, I think, takes the cake for having a homonym which has a rather startling juxtaposition of meanings.

Esposas. Wife.  And Handcuffs.  Female readers keep breathing.  Male - pick yourselves off the floor and stop laughing.  This can be unpacked in a less than flattering view of the husband, as well.

Picture the scene back in Spanish Stone Age.  Reluctant bride dragged by the hair to the altar. (I always think of an altar as a slab upon which sacrifices are made.  It's an interesting choice of name for the spot on which couples are forever bound, swearing to forsake all others, care, obey (?!) and so on).

Once delivered to the altar, poor Cavewoman is handcuffed / bound to the excited groom.  Maybe they had to tie them together before she legged it back to her peaceful berry-gathering.  Smart woman knew what awaited - skinning and cooking the woolly mammoth he brought home, washing his bearskin skivvies...

However it happened, Spanish speakers are stuck with a word whose double meaning is quite derogatory.  Although, get a group of English speaking husbands together and in no time at all they are speaking about their 'ball and chain', 'trouble and strife' and 'handbrake'. Notice how they are awfully brave in a group and out of earshot...

Misogyny has no language barrier, it seems.