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Monthly Archives: September 2023

Not Quite a Dead Language

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Wherever You Go in Hawaii, You Are Reminded of the Native Language

The State of Hawaii has two official languages: English and Hawaiian (ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi). There is also a third unofficial language, namely Pidgin English, but that is a subject for another day.

Although the ratio of purebred Hawaiians to persons of White or Asian ancestry has been in decline ever since the 19th century, the language has been adopted by many residents of the islands, irrespective of their ancestry, as a means of differentiating them from the invading mainlanders.

In our hotel room was a large sign that read E komo mai. Fortunately, it means “Welcome,” and not “Yankee Go Home!” It is astonishing how many place names are in Hawaiian, wholly or in part. (“Hawaii Kai ” includes the first syllable of the last name of mogul Henry J. Kaiser.) It can be confusing, since so many of them begin with the latter K, such as Kalihi, Kalmuki, Kaka’ako, and Kahala.

There are a number of words from the Hawaiian language that are now part of everyday English:

  • Aloha: Means Hello (and Good-Bye)
  • Haole: Foreigner or outsider
  • Hula
  • Kahuna: priest, wizard, or sachem—found in many beach movies of the 1960s
  • Lanai: A veranda or patio
  • Ukulele
  • Taboo, comes from the Hawaiian kapu. Hawaiian does not have the letters t or b
  • Wahine: girl

Two words visitors will frequently encounter, particularly on menus and signs, are keiki (children) and kama’aina (persons born or raised in Hawaii, sometimes expanded to persons residing in Hawaii).

It takes a while to get used to, but but I regard it as part of the adventure of visiting such a culturally diverse state as Hawaii.

Back from O’ahu

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The Lyon Arboretum in Honolulu’s Manoa Valley

Martine and I returned from Hawaii late on Tuesday, somewhat the worse for wear. We both had a low-level cold during the entire week of our vacation. In my case, it ratcheted up into a full-blown cold when I woke up yesterday morning.

Still, it didn’t prevent u8s from enjoying ourselves in Hawaii. We went everywhere by bus (except to Lyon Arboretum) since we both still had our HOLO cards for TheBus [sic]. Unlike most tourists, who spend of $1,000 or more for a rental car and hotel parking, our total transport expenses were $40.00 for a one month senior citizen pass for TheBus.

Honolulu is an endlessly fascinating city—which most tourists don’t realize, mainly because their main focus is on Waikiki. Some 83% of all hotel rooms in the Honolulu area are on the two-mile-long peninsula of Waikiki, on the Diamond Head side of the city. Most tourists who don’t have rental cars take expensive and overcrowded shuttles to a handful of tourist sites. Martine and I were on the more comfortable and air-conditioned public buses which most tourists didn’t know how to take.

More’s the pity, because there’s a lot to see downtown, in Chinatown, and on the western (Ewa) side of the city. And I don’t just mean Pearl Harbor.

It’s a pity that most Honolulu tourists end up ghetto-ized in Waikiki, and maybe just taking an exploratory jaunt to the Ala Moana Shopping Center. I guess most vacationers would rather not overthink their pleasures. Me, I overthink everything. For me, the preparation just extends the fun beyond the time I am in the islands.

On To O’ahu

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Tomorrow Martine and I are headed off to Honolulu for a week in the sun. The last few days, both of us have had a low-level flu. I am getting better, but Martine has a real problem with insomnia. Some years ago, she got too used to taking prescription sleeping pills and is dismayed to find that they don’t work as well as they used to. The best thing would have been not to get hooked on them in the first place, but that boat has sailed.

We’ll be staying at the same hotel we stayed at last year. It may not be on he beach, but we would prefer not to hang out at the beach. We prefer the hotels on Kuhio Avenue, one or two blocks makau (inland) from the beachfront properties on Kalakaua Avenue.

Tonight I don’t expect to get much sleep. And because of the time zone difference, tomorrow will be a 27-hour day. I expect both of us will get a good night’s sleep tomorrow.

Look for this blog to resume on Wednesday or Thursday of next week. Until then, aloha!

“A Toad Can Die of Light”

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I can never tire of Emily Dickinson’s poems. Short though they may be, they resonate far beyond their few lines. I love the last two lines about “the gnat’s supremacy.”

A toad can die of light!
Death is the common right
Of toads and men,--
Of earl and midge
The privilege.
Why swagger then?
The gnat's supremacy
Is large as thine.

Crônicas: The Terror

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I am continuing my reading of Clarice Lispector’s Cronicas: Too Much of Life. The following piece was published on October 5, 1968. It is an amazing description of the birth of a newborn.

THE TERROR

There was too much light for his eyes. There was a sudden push; they were maneuvering him, but he didn’t know that: there was only the terror of those faces bent over his. He didn’t know anything. And he couldn’t move freely. The voices sounded to him like thunder, only one voice sang to him: he basked in it. Immediately afterward, he was put down again, and then came the terror, and he was screaming from behind the bars and saw colors, which, only later, he understood were blue. The blue bothered him, and he cried. And then there was the terror of colic. They opened his mouth and put horrible things in it, which he swallowed. When the voice that sang put horrible things in his mouth, he could bear it more easily. But he was immediately placed behind the bars again. Gigantic shadows surrounded him. And then he would scream. The one glimmer of light in all this was that he had just been born. He was five days old.

When he was older, he heard someone say, although without understanding what they meant: “He’s easy enough now, but when he was first born he kept crying and screaming. Now, fortunately, he’s much easier to manage.” No, it wasn’t easy, it never would be. Birth was the death of a single being splitting into two solitary beings It seemed easy now because he had learned to cope with the secret terror he had felt, a terror that would last until he died. A terror of being on the Earth, like a nostalgia for the sky.

Heat » Evaporation » Clouds » Rain » Flooding

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Scene of Flooding in Delhi, India

This isn’t altogether scientific, but I think I might possibly see how global warming translates into disastrous weather such as tornadoes, hurricanes, typhoons, and other types of storms associated with heavy rains and flooding.

It all begins with hot weather. According to National Geographic Magazine, the hotter it gets, the more evaporation takes place;

The National Weather Service in the United States measures the rate of evaporation at different locations every year. Scientists there found that the rate of evaporation can be below 76 centimeters (30 inches) per year at the low end, to 305 centimeters (120 inches) per year on the high end.

The variability is based on temperature. The evaporated vapors form clouds until the air in a place just can’t take any more. The article continues:

Once water evaporates, it also helps form clouds. The clouds then release the moisture as rain or snow. The liquid water falls to Earth, waiting to be evaporated. The cycle starts all over again.

Many factors affect how evaporation happens. If the air is already clogged, or saturated, with other substances, there wont be enough room in the air for liquid to evaporate quickly. When the humidity is 100 percent, the air is saturated with water. No more water can evaporate.

Then—you guessed it!—it comes down as rain. Sometimes, lots of rain. Such as Los Angeles received when a hurricane hit Southern California a couple weeks ago with record rainfall. Those record rainfalls have been happening all over the globe: Burning Man at Black Rock City in Nevada; Derma in Libya, at the edge of the Sahara Desert; and Delhi, India.

So I think that the whole cycle of drought and flood will become ever more extreme, sometimes in the most unlikely places.

Phobias for Fun and Profit

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Trypophobia: Fear of Clusters of Holes

I am currently reading Kate Summerscale’s The Book of Phobias & Manias: A History of Obsession. In it are discussed an incredible array of things that frighten people. Summerscale takes it all very seriously, examining in each case when the phobia was first discovered and by whom and possible cures, when available.

Presented here are some of the stranger and less commonly known phobias, here more for their humorous side.

Koumpounophobia. Fear of buttons. Apparently Steve Jobs had this, which is why he always wore turtlenecks.

Pogonophobia. Fear of beards.

Telephonophobia. A fear of making or taking telephone calls. I sort of have this.

Triskaidekaphobia. Fear of the number thirteen.

Nomophobia. Fear of not having your cellphone on your person.

Aibohphobia. Fear of palindromes, such as “Able was I ere I saw Elba” or “Lewd did I live evil I did dwel.”

Hippopotomomonstrosesquipedaliophobia. An aversion to long words. The “sesquipedalio” means a foot and a half long in Latin.

This one is not discussed in the book, but I can string together Greek roots with the best of them. This is the most terrifying phobia of them all:

Enochlogynopogonophobia. Fear of being in a large crowd of bearded women.

“A Certain Apprehension of Darkness”

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This is not what one usually hears when talking about the settlers who crossed the continent in wagon trains to settle California. I am currently reading Joan Didion’s Where I Was From, which presents a much-needed corrective to the prevailing boosterism. This is interesting because Joan Didion’s ancestors came to California in the same wagon train that included the Donner Party. Joan’s ancestors split off and settled in Oregon at first.

To read these crossing accounts and diaries is to be struck by the regularity with which a certain apprehension of darkness enters the quest, a shadow of moral ambiguity that steadily becomes more pervasive until that moment when that traveler realizes that the worst of the Sierra [Nevada Mountains] is behind him. “The summit is crossed!” one such diary reads. “We are in California! Far away in the haze the dim outlines of the Sacramento Valley are discernible! We are on the down grade now and our famished animals may pull us through. We are in the midst of huge pines, so large as to challenge belief. Hutton is dead. Others are worse. I am better.” By this point, in every such journey, there would have been the accidents, the broken bones, the infected and even the amputated hands and feet. Sarah Royce remembered staying awake all night after a man in her party died of cholera, and hearing the wind whip his winding sheet like “some vindictive creature struggling restlessly in bonds.” There would have been the hurried burials, in graves often unmarked and sometimes deliberately obliterated. “Before leaving the Humboldt River there was one death, Miss Mary Campbell,” Nancy Hardin Cornwall’s son recalled. “She was buried right in the road and the whole train of wagons was driven over her grave to conceal it from the Indians. Miss Campbell died of mountain fever, and Mother by waiting on her caught the fever and for a long time she lingered between life and death, but at last recovered. Miss Campbell was an orphan, her mother having died at Green River.”

There would have been, darkest of all, the betrayals, the suggestions that the crossing might not after all be a noble odyssey, might instead be a mean scrambling for survival, a blind flight on the part of Josiah Royce’s “blind and stupid and homeless generation of selfish wanderers.”

Like a Boss?

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I Think It’s Time to Retire This Meme

Speaking as a retired person, I am happy to say I don’t have to kowtow to any megalomaniacal bosses any more. I put in some forty years of work, retiring only in my seventies. And not once during that forty years did I deal with a boss who did not behave like a tinpot dictator.

What I would have like to have seen is a company owner who would consider himself as the first among equals, not ruling with the divine right of kings. Although I consider myself a good writer, everything I wrote was “corrected” in such a way that it was worse than my first draft.

Within a year after I retired, my health improved markedly. My blood pressure, glucose readings, and weight all were better. That’s because I was no longer under stress. Had I continued working, the stress would have killed me before 2020. Treat me like a boss? No, I am not a prisoner in a concentration camp.

The funny thing is that my bosses were also under quite a bit of stress. But why is it that that was the only thing they were willing to share with their workers?

A Royal Palace on American Soil

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Honolulu’s Iolani Palace (Built 1879)

Not far from the Hawaii State Capitol sits the Iolani Palace, home of the monarchs of the Kingdom of Hawai’i from Kamehameha III in 1879 until the overthrow of the monarchy under Queen Lili’uokalani by a group of American merchants in 1893.

As I prepare to go to Hawaii in a week or so, I am conscious once again that the United States ruthlessly stepped on the rights of the Hawaiian people just so that a cabal of American merchants could have their way. On this trip, I plan to read Queen Lili’uokalani’s autobiography. For eight months, the Queen was imprisoned in one of the second floor bedrooms until she was tried by a military tribunal on some trumped-up charge.

It was like the U.S. and the American Indians all over again. Fortunately, there were no massacres by the cavalry in this instance, though the takeover was no less final—and unjust.