Ruination & Despair

In an unrelenting drive westward, Archelaus has reached La Crosse, Wisconsin. The Pearl Street Bookstore has raised the white flag of surrender and will be selling Archelaus cards by the middle of next week.

La Crosse is located on Wisconsin’s border with Minnesota. A prominent member of Minnesota’s congressional delegation is reported to have urged her state’s governor to call out the National Guard. “These pernicious cards are being openly sold all over Wisconsin,” she is quoted as declaring. “We must stop them from entering Minnesota before they have a chance to corrupt our children and other real Americans!”

Having written about fabric names, bird names, and animal names, I think it is time to move on to plant names. I will leave the large subgroup of flower names to a later post, likewise the fruits and vegetables. (Continue reading . . .)

Having discussed bird names in my last post, I feel I now have little choice but to account for names taken from the rest of the animal kingdom, as well. After all, if we can’t name our children after rodents, insects, or snakes, what claim do we have to be living in a free society? (Continue reading . . .)

The recent media obsession with the story of “balloon boy” Falcon Heene seems as good an excuse as any to have a look at the use of bird names for people. Although more common overall than fabric names, most examples from this group are quite rare. (Continue reading . . .)

Today we sent a flunky to deliver cards to The Waygoose, an upscale gallery for American handcrafts (“from the silly to the sublime”), with locations in Bethesda and Rockville.

According to Dr. Hurlbutt, who can be relied upon to know these things, waygoose is an archaic word signifying an annual feast held by master printers for their employees around the time of St. Bartholomew’s Day (August 24), when the long summer days began to shorten and it became necessary to use candles in the workplace. The etymology of the word is obscure, but the plural form, waygooses, suggests that there is no relationship to goose/geese.

Today we shipped an exceptionally large order of our fine cards to Jammed Lovely, a handsome gift store in the historic town of Elora, in Ontario, Canada (about thirty-five miles west of Toronto, as the crow flies, or about sixty miles northwest of Buffalo, New York). Located in a century-old stone building overlooking the scenic Grand River, the store appears to be a highly suitable venue for our peculiar cards, and we’re very pleased it will be carrying them.

After lulling the enemy into a false sense of security by doing absolutely nothing for awhile, Archelaus is once again on the move, seizing more territory near Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. Specifically, a sizable shipment of holiday cards is now on its way to the women’s clothing and gift store Vaguely Reminiscent at 728 Ninth Street.

Given that it would never occur to most of us to name our children after fabrics, the number of documented fabric names is remarkable. Though never common, these names occurred most often in the decades around the turn of the twentieth century, between roughly 1880 and 1920. The impulse behind them was presumably similar to the one behind the fashion for flower and gemstone names at that time. (Continue reading . . .)