Author Archives: chrysti

04/15/13

April 22, 2013, Roundup, “Nike’s Echo”

Nike's-Echo

Catch Chrysti At Large!
Monday, April 22, 2013 at 7:00 pm
Roundup Community Library
6th Ave. at 6th St. W, Roundup, Montana

Chrysti the Wordsmith presents “Nike’s Echo,” an evening of story-telling and word-spinning featuring Achilles, Narcissus, Nike, Atlas, and a host of Greek gods, goddesses and monsters who live on in our modern English conversations.

The Friends of Roundup Community Library will host this Humanities Montana Speakers Bureau program with partial funding provided by a legislative grant from Montana’s Cultural Trust and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Both the Friends of Roundup Community Library and PEO Chapter N are hosting this presentation.

For more information, call Dale Alger at 406-323-1802.

 

 

03/11/13

Limerick

Limerick

There was an old man with a beard,
Who said, “it is just as I feared.
Two owls and a hen
Four larks and a wren
Have all built their nests in my beard!”

This verse from the pen of English poet Edward Lear is a limerick, with its five lines rhyming in the classic aabba pattern. Edward Lear was fond of this style of verse and in 1846 published a volume of them called A Book of Nonsense, sparking a rage for the limerick.

But Edward Lear did not call his rhymes limericks in that 1846 publication; in fact, the term was not seen in print until a half-century later in 1898.

It seems that nobody knows where the name of the rhyme originated.  Limerick is, of course, a town and county in Ireland, but that connection with the style of verse in unclear.

The Oxford English Dictionary claims that extemporizing nonsense verses was a popular parlor game in 19th century England.  The chorus between each verse contained the rhythmic line “won’t you come up to Limerick?” thus inspiring the name of the style of rhyme.

The Encyclopedia of Word and Phrase Origins offers another suggestion. As poet Lear’s verses were dubbed learics by his peers, it’s possible that the learic became the limerick, because, according to the Encyclopedia of Word and Phrase Origins  “people believed that the verses were invented in Ireland, the land of poetry.”

02/8/13

Wear Your Heart on Your Sleeve

Wear Your Heart on Your Sleeve

We English speakers sometimes send our hearts, linguistically speaking, on strange traveling assignments. The heart might find itself in our throats or our mouths in fear. Other times it sinks to our feet in forlorn dejection. Occasionally, we linguistically remove the heart from its cavity only to wear it on our sleeves.

This is what we say of someone who is demonstrably moved by  joy, fear and affection. The idiom to wear your heart on your sleeve has been a popular way to describe an emotionally expressive person since Shakespeare’s time.

The Bard made it famous in his 1605 play Othello, where the villain Iago conspires, through feigned devotion, to rob his master Othello of his riches. Iago pretends to be so faithful that he declares that he will wear his heart on his sleeve. There his heart, so vulnerably positioned, would be little more than carrion for the crows to peck at.

Six centuries later, the phrase wear your heart on your sleeve still serves us well. Some reference sources cite as its inspiration a Medieval custom of a young man attaching his lady’s ribbon to his sleeve as a visible emblem of affection. I prefer Iago’s tragic metaphor of a heart so exposed that it may be carelessly devoured.

02/8/13

My Heart’s in my Mouth!

 My Heart’s in my Mouth!

The heart has a fixed location and a specific function.  Its  function: a “force pump” maintaining the circulation of the blood.  Its location: in the chest, beneath the sternum, slightly to the left of the body’s midline.

But in the language of metaphor, the heart is a capricious nomad. Various English idioms make the heart responsible for feelings of fear, infatuation, discouragement and joy.  Those same expressions place the heart in the throat, in the feet and on the sleeve. How can this organ be so migratory? Let’s take a look.

A frightening start can make the heart seem to lurch, as though the violently beating organ has leapt upward.  The sensation inspired the lively expression to have my heart in my mouth.  This idiom, first recorded in 1548, is useful to us still.

Sudden elation can also make the heart accelerate and perform metaphoric acrobatics in the expression my heart leaps for joy.

But the heart goes south in sadder times. This is when we say our hearts sink or fall in discouragement. Our 16th and 17th century predecessors put an ornamental spin on this notion, having their hearts fall into their toes, plummet to the bottom of their boots, or even cling to their heels in dejection and dismay.

02/8/13

Have a Heart

Have a Heart

Consider the faithful heart, dutifully pumping our life’s blood every second of every day. While science places the heart at the core of our physiological survival, poets, writers and philosophers throughout the ages have imagined the organ as the wellspring of a whole range of emotions: fear, longing, pride, sadness, envy, bravery, love and restlessness.

This ancient notion of the heart as the epicenter of feeling is rooted solidly in our language. Consider: we say that a kind person has a heart of gold; that our heartstrings have been tugged; that we’ve just had a heart to heart with someone. We chuck our scientifically-based notions about the function and placement of this organ when we proclaim that our heart is in our mouth, or that so-and-so has her heart in the right place, or wears her heart on her sleeve.

People are warm-hearted, cold-hearted, hard-hearted, and downhearted.   Though you’d be dead if one were not already beating in your breast, people can adjure you to have a heart.

That we embrace these well-worn heart idioms when they so blatantly challenge current scientific models is a testament to our  delight in metaphor and simile.  Each “heart” expression is a poem in miniature, enabling us to declare our emotions from the deepest well of our being.

01/28/13

Feb. 8, 2013, Bozeman, Chrysti Emcees a Bee

Spelling Bee logoChrysti returns as the esteemed emcee and pronouncer for the Bozeman Schools Foundation’s Adult Team Spelling Bee on Friday, February 8th, 2013. You can catch this event from 6:30 to 10:00 pm at Emerson Center’s Crawford Theater in Bozeman.

Teams of adult spellers will “bee” in costume as they strut their spelling skills and join judges and audience members in crazy antics, all in support of excellence in education.

Chrysti will be in the company of celebrity judges DJ Chadwick (Kiss FM), Dr. Feist, Honorable Kathleen Brandis, Ben Trotter (KBZK) and Paula Beswick (Bozeman Public Library Foundation).

The event includes appetizers, a no-host bar, a Wall of Wine, a Live Drive hosted by Missy O’Malley and a Jumbo Crossword 50/50.

The public is encouraged to attend on Friday, February 8!

Friday, Feb. 1 is the deadline for spelling teams to sign up to take part in the fun. Registration forms can be downloaded at via the Bozeman Schools Foundation.