Having found out that someone decided July should be Roots and Branches Month, we can’t pass up commenting, that being the name of our blog and all . . .
Roots and Branches Month is meant to celebrate family trees and encourage genealogy. We do enjoy learning about the people we come from. It helps us know more about ourselves and makes history come alive. But we can think of other roots and branches we know and love, too.
Roots Music. We love the soundtrack from O Brother Where Art Thou. Also The Three Pickers, by Earl Scruggs, Doc Watson, and Ricky Skaggs. Also Another County, which is The Chieftains with various country and bluegrass artists. And lately, 16 Greatest Hits of Johnny Cash and June Carter Cash, which probably isn’t old enough to technically qualify as roots music, but it’s related (a branch from the root?) and I’m loving it.
The willow tree at the house where I grew up. I was sad when it blew down in a thunderstorm the summer of 1976. I spent lots of my childhood climbing into its lowest branches. My petite and nimble friend Alice could climb 2/3 of the way to the top, which scared my Dad enough that he forbade me to climb it with friends, fearing one of them would fall and we’d be liable. I loved that tree.
Root vegetables. A baked sweet potato with butter and brown sugar. Fresh red beets, cooked, pickled, and chilled with eggs in the juice. Mmmm…
Etymology and linguistics. What can I say? We’re word nerds. Art’s studied Latin, Spanish, Hebrew, and Greek. I’ve studied Latin and French. Hence without much trying we see the backstories of many words. When a word, or word family, intrigues me, I tend to dissect it. What is its root, what language did it come from, and what does its progenitor word tell me about its meaning? What prefixes or suffixes change it in what ways? F’rinstance, somewhere in my files I have a whole page on the -fuse family: confuse, profuse, infuse, diffuse, suffuse, etc. This kind of research helps me get to the concepts behind the words. It even sparks new ideas. I’m also fascinated in learning how languages have influenced each other and why. I think this all started in my first weeks of high school Latin classes, when I met pater (father) and mater (mother) and my neurons started forming all kinds of happy linguistic synapses. It’s all about making connections.
