Truncheons and stanchions

A search through my clippings, and on my computer, reveals that I don't have any reference whatsoever to the word stanchion, likeable enough as it is as a word.   Which means I won't have any reference to the phrase plastic stanchions either.  In fact, the word is so little visible in my vocabulary that I had to look it up on Google to remind myself what it meant.  It sounds a bit like truncheon but isn't related, as far as I'm aware.  Which led me to look and see what truncheon comes up with when you go off to Wikipedia.  They suggest the obvious: a policeman's baton, but there are three other references there as well.  A truncheon can be a stem cutting off a plant which is then used as a means of plant propagation used by gardeners.  Well, I guess gardeners would know that use of it, though I don't (I'm too amateur a gardener, obviously).  Truncheon is also the staff of a spear, but this is so obsolete a usage that only someone like Tolkien would know it well enough to use it in the Lord of the Rings trilogy.

HMS Truncheon

The word was also used as the name of a Royal Navy submarine that was commissioned in the last few months of the Second World War.   It served with the Navy until 1968 when it was bought by the Israelis and renamed the INS Dolphin.  She was eventually scrapped nine years later, so I hope the Israelis got their money's worth. Well, there you go!  Your bit of trivia for the day.   (We went to a quiz night at a local pub recently; it's surprising what you know, what you're pretty sure you know and have to argue for, and what you have absolutely no idea about whatsoever - sport, mostly, for me, although even there I managed to suggest some possibilities.)

Truncheon, as you might expect, is a word with some French history.  It first appeared in our language, as far as we know, around the 14th century, when it went under the Middle English umbrella as tronchoun.  Its parentage was the Anglo-French word, trunchun, and that in turn goes way back to the Vulgar Latin word truncion/truncio, which comes from the 'proper' Latin word, truncus, which means a trunk.  I suppose there's a connection between a trunk (the trunk of an elephant?) and the baton we know today, but it seems a bit of a distance.

Stanchion (to go back to where we started in this post) initially has a similar history: Middle English stanchon, Anglo-French stanchun or stançun.  These words, however, were alterations of an Old French word, estançon, which is apparently a diminutive of estance, meaning a stay or a prop.  At least stanchion starts where it ends, you might say.  [Thanks, Merrian-Webster, by the way.]  Estance is a fancier ancestor to have than truncio, I think, even if it's not quite a old.

It just occurs to me that in our usual English spelling fashion we have managed to make one of these words end in 'ion' and the other in 'eon'.  Ain't English fun?

Perhaps because stanchion has retained its original meaning rather more, it tends mostly to relate to things that stand upright and hold something else. Those little things you see in restaurants where they hold the number of your order are a form of stanchion, I suspect, though I don't know if they're actually called that.  Stanchions appear in restaurants more as a form of crowd control: they'll often have a rope dangling between them to stop unworthy patrons from joining worthy ones.  [See the fancy model to the right.]  I notice them mostly in banks where they force people to form queues, and where children delight in dropping the connecting 'rope' (of whatever form) off one stanchion, find they've just received a disapproving look from a parent, and then have to figure out how to put it back again.  

Stop drinking bottled water

Today is Blog Action Day 2010 - at least in this part of the world, since we're well ahead of much of the world - and the focus is on WATER.

One of the things that has amazed me over the last twenty years is the way in which bottled water has become the In Thing for so many Westerners. Someone managed to convince 'us' that tap water wasn't clean enough, or healthy enough, or safe enough, and then produced bottled water - which, if truth be told, is, in many cases, no different to the water that comes out of your tap.

It's a fad!

I wonder how singers used to manage in the days before bottled water. You never saw them running around with a bottle of water as though this was essential to their survival.

It's a fad!

I wonder how athletes used to manage in the past without their constant bottles of water. But they did! They're buying into a fad!

The idea that we need to hydrate ourselves constantly isn't a medical fact, it's a medical fiction. Of course we need some water during the course of the day, but a good deal of that already comes in the form of coffees, teas, fruit and even vegetables. We're not exactly starved of water in our diet.

This theory that we need to drink several litres of water alone each day is just another part of the machinery of making sure we buy more bottled water. I had a prostate operation a couple of years ago, and the insistence on my drinking water constantly was huge. It was as if my whole system would suddenly seize up without all this water (in fact, when I wearing a catheter for two or three months, all that wonderful water was just passing straight through and into the catheter bag - I might just as well have poured all that water straight down the toilet).

This huge over-intake of water is just another part of our Western assumption that we should have more access to the world's goods than people in Third World countries. (And let's not even get started on the waste of plastic involved in all this bottled water - that's a nightmare on its own, far worse than the use of plastic bags.)

Anyway, if you don't believe what I'm saying, check out this excellent video by Annie Leonard. She's very convincing - and it's good to have what I already knew confirmed by her.

Photo by Udit Kulshrestha

Checking up on the stats

I’ve mentioned the articles I’ve got on Triond before in these posts, so I probably don’t have to explain again that it’s one of these sites that you write for and leave your articles on in perpetuity – or at least for as long as the Internet lasts. And the incentive to do so is that they pay you. A modest sum, to be sure, but there are no strings attached – like having to have $50 or $100 on your account before they’ll fork anything out.
Anyway, I’ve now had articles on there since 7th November, 2006, and the current list numbers some 74 pieces.
I was curious to see which ones had been viewed most often, and since Triond helpfully provides such information, I can tell you that a piece called A Future Without Plastic has had just under 600 reads, which may not sound much, but is still more views than any of the posts on this blog have ever had.
Second in line is another ‘green’ piece: The End of Petroleum. This one is considerably behind the first in having only 517 views. Then we have another big drop (partly because the piece appeared five months later) to 349 views on Where Are the Willy Wonka Children? I always find it hard to believe that this one has had anywhere near that number of views; it seems a fairly innocuous topic to me. Plainly celebrity is more important than I thought.
Even more absurd, in a way, is the fourth: How to Wake Up, which is a jokey piece on getting out of bed in the morning. Why this should have been a hit I don’t know. It's also just about the youngest of my pieces on Triond.
The problem, as you can see, is that if I was trying to gauge what to write about so that people would be encouraged to come back again and again, I’d be struggling on the basis of these first four. And number five doesn’t help balance things up: Ten Places in Britain You Might Not Want to Move To.
Okay, I understand that people seem to like lists, but this is actually the first of the top five to have focus on a list. So that doesn’t help much either.
We’re now down into the views in the 200s, with New Zealand Factoids. Not the name I gave the piece, incidentally. I don’t know why they changed it from New Zealand Facts, as it's the only time they've ever done it!
This is followed by Possums and Prostates. Good grief. Here’s a medical piece that got almost no views for weeks on end and then suddenly took off. Perhaps some prostate sufferers discovered it.
Animals, Collectively, is another one of those tidbit types of writing, in which I talk about the collective names for certain animals. Again, hardly rip-roaring stuff, but that hasn't stopped it being popular.
With 150 views we get to World’s Steepest Street Not Always the Easiest to Live On. This was popular when it first arrived – perhaps because of the ‘World’s Steepest’ element – which is maybe why it’s up there with the first ten.
And the 10th place goes to Classical Music Isn’t Always Classical, which was an attempt to explain that we often call music Classical when it isn’t in the least bit ‘classical,’ just serious – or ‘fine,’ as they now say on our Concert Program.
So there you go. What' s interesting about the top-viewed list is that it doesn't entirely connect to the top earners. Eight of the top viewers are on the top earners page, but not necessarily in the same order. Two articles, The Need for Electricity, and A Green Roof Over My Head (both environmental items, so maybe there's something to be said for that area after all) managed to sneak into the top earners, with the electricity item coming third.

Water, water everywhere, and far too much to drink?

Everywhere I go I see people with water bottles. Now you might think that was sensible when these people were doing some physical activity, but many of them aren't - they're just carrying a water bottle because that's the thing you do. I find it quite a concern for two reasons:

one, the amount of plastic required to produce water bottles is phenomenal. Okay they may be recyclable, but I still think it's plastic overkill.


two, how did people in the past survive without all the water that our contemporaries are drinking? They got a drink when it was necessary, and still managed to live quite well, thank you.


Today's people almost give the impression they'll die if they don't have enough water. Hmm, maybe in the Sahara, or the middle of Australia, but in your average street? I see people taking their water bottles to the swimming pool, for goodness' sake. Are they really going to expire there? Okay the water in the pool isn't drinkable, but something strikes me as paradoxical about the situation. Maybe it's just another one of my old person biases...


It seems to me that the advertisers have convinced a certain percentage of the population that water is absolutely essential at all times - how many litres a day do they say? Something absurd, it seems to me. If I've lived this long without drinking water constantly, then I must be some kind of super-human. Well, that's encouraging!

Ouch - plastic surgery!

I’ve just found a quote from an old Reader’s Digest – dating from 1976. It’s both ‘quaint’ (because of the speed with which things have changed) and accurate.

‘In this new, totally electronic age, the enforcement of financial obligations will present few difficulties, since failure to pay up could be disastrous. The culprit might even have to undergo what EFT men call ‘plastic surgery’ – the cutting off of his bank cards. Economically speaking this would make him a non-person."

Well, we haven’t quite got to this 1984 scenario as yet, but the options are certainly open to bankers and other financial