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Polygamy is a major part of Mormon history, dating back to the 1800s when Mormon leaders first encouraged it.  While it is now a taboo subject, it had an undeniable impact on Mormon life, as illustrated in this infographic.

Download a jpg or pdf of the infographic.

Paula Kelly Harline has been teaching college writing for over 20 years for the University of Idaho, Brigham Young University, and Utah Valley University. She has also worked as a freelance writer and artist. She currently lives with her husband, Craig, in Provo, Utah. She is the author of The Polygamous Wives Writing Club:  From the Diaries of Mormon Pioneer Women.

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The post Mormon pioneer polygamous wives [infographic] appeared first on OUPblog.

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While getting ready for my surgery, I started accumulating books over the past few months, some from used book stores and some from Borders. (Alas, I won't be doing the latter anymore.)  Some were adult books, and some were children's books. I started on the adult stack first, and was I ever surprised: Apparently my week in Paris a couple of summers ago burned its imprint into my unconscious; five of the books take place either partially or entirely in Paris. They are too many to review, so consider this post a thumbnail sharing of each.

I'll start with my least favorite first, Gourmet Rhapsody, by Muriel Barbery. I'm sorry to put it that way, too, because my purchase was motivated by how charmed I had been by Barbery's first book, The Elegance of the Hedgehog. In Hedgehog, a young girl has given herself a date on which she'll commit suicide unless she can find enough reasons not to. I know that sounds like a morbid story, but the book captures small, luminous moments of beauty that make life truly worth living. So I was expecting to be deeply moved again in Gourmet. Nope: A food critic lies on his deathbed, hoping to capture a favorite flavor that he can't quite identify in memory. Acquaintances and family each have a turn at sharing what they recall about this thoroughly unlikeable man. That's it, folks. some exquisite writing, because this author cannot turn out a bad line, but for me, the plot was . . . missing in action (pun intended).

But, next I read Cara Black's  Murder in the Bastille.  Black is one of my favorite mystery writers.  Her series stars Aimée Leduc, a private eye for white collar techie matters who keeps getting dragged into murder cases instead.  To read any one in the series is to get a free trip to Paris.  Black knows that city inside and out and places each new mystery in a different neighborhood.  Because Aimée grew up in Paris, naturally she has little snippets of memory about buildings she passes or bridges or streets she traverses, and so in a completely non-intrusive way, the reader picks up scraps of French history and art history while Aimée chases or runs from the bad guys.  Black's website is equally interesting: Press here and go take a peek.

Then I read The Girl at the Lion d'Or by Sebastian Faulks.  This is a  carefully sculpted story of a young girl cast adrift following World War I.  It takes place in a small village outside of Paris where Anne has taken employment as a waitress in the Hotel Lion D'Or of the title.  Her story unfolds by degrees: Her father was falsely accused of cowardice at  Verdun and shot.  Because of accusations, Anne and her mother were hounded out of their village and went to Paris.  With no one to turn to after her mother dies, Anne hopes to find a new life at the Lion D'Or.  Sh

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By Anatoly Liberman

Where there is golf, there are clubs; hence this post.  But club is an intriguing word regardless of the association.  It surfaced only in Middle English.  Since the noun believed to be its etymon, namely klubba, has been attested in Old Icelandic, dictionaries say that club came to English with the Vikings or their descendants.  Perhaps it did.  In Icelandic, klubba coexists with its synonym klumba, and the opinion prevails that bb developed from mb, which later became mp.  (The near synonymous lump is not related.  Its cognates are Engl. limp and German Lump(en) “rag”; however, the history of the limp-lump group is even harder to trace than that of club and its evasive kin.)  Although Engl. clump surfaced only in the 17^th century, it has a respectable Old English antecedent and may, but need not be, of Scandinavian descent.  To wed clump to club, it is asserted that club emerged with the original sense “something pressed tightly together; clump.”  This sense will also haunt us next week.  At the moment, we can’t help wondering about the main thing:  Is a cudgel “a substance beaten into a mass, something pressed together”?  A cudgel is rather destined to beat its victim into such a mass.  Those who attempt to save the situation say that a club got its name from thickening toward the end; allegedly, it was visualized as having a knob (a lump).

When we turn to German, we find Kolben “butt of a rifle; piston; retort.”  Where English, or rather Scandinavian, has k-l-vowel-b, German has k-vowel-l-b.  Are club (from klumb?) and Kolben related?  Among the cognates of Kolben (which goes back to the older form kolbo), we find Old Icelandic kylfa “cudgel” and kolfr “bolt; metal bar; blunt spear; the tongue of a bell” (a later form is kólfr, but ó is simply o lengthened before lf).  German etymologists hedge and say that Kolben may be related to the club group and Keule, another word for “thick stick.”  Now, Keule appears to be related to German Kugel “bullet” and Engl. cudgel.  The sense “bullet” reinforced the conclusion that cudgels are things with knobs, bullet-like lumps, at their end.  The semantic bridge is shaky.  It rests on too many comparisons and hardly accounts for how klu-b is related to kol-b.  However, if these words are old, the situation can be rescued.  Compare the English verbs kn-ow (with kn pronounced as in acknowledge) and ken “to know.”  A root is often represented by a form with a vowel and a form without it.   A similar alternation can be seen in the reconstructed root gel- “to roll together; stick” and its variant gl-, as in Latin globus “globe”, literally “a round thing.”  It won’t do to say that in Kolben the vowel and l were simply “transposed,” for other languages also have words with the same order of sounds: compare Icelandic kolfr and kylfa, mentioned above.  Additionally, in German itself, alongside Kolben, with its reference to things thickening or widening toward the end, we find Kloben “log,” and the two may be related.

Dictionaries list numerous Germanic cognates of globe, including cleave “split” and the already familiar clump.  With regard to cleave I’ll quote a sta

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Spilled a drink on this one in the early goings. Being the stalwart illustrator that I am however, I rescued it.

"Stalwart" in this case of course means "too lazy to start over."

Which is weird.

A little under two months until the books release!

Steven

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I still have an awful lot to do on this one. It's a little promotional piece I'm working on for the book. Not that it has anything at all in common with "The Breakfast Club," nor do I really even like the movie. The pose is recognizable enough though.

Steven

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One of the things I love most about maintaining a blog is the people I meet. It’s a huge thrill when a conversation gets going in the comments. Even when everyone doesn’t agree, it’s still super cool because I get the privilege of hearing new ideas and perspectives. I read every comment and when I think I might actually contribute something of value to the conversation, I’ll jump back in.

I love questions in the comments that keep things rollin’. That’s amazing. Even if you don’t comment and just enjoy lurking about, that’s fine too. Happy to have ya.

You’re all awesome (yes, you reading this right now). I appreciate how valuable your time is and with all the blogs to read out there, I’m happy that you include mine in your list. You simply rock.

As thanks to you fun people who keep coming back, I’ve decided that I’m going to offer up a free illustration every month. Yep, that’s right - a free, original, unique, probably strange, Sparky Firepants illustration to have and to hold from this day forward as long you both shall…  

Well, you know. You can have it.

Use it for whatever you feel like. Print it on a t-shirt, put it in a frame, use it as your desktop wallpaper, your twitter background, in your blog, on your web site, the list of possibilities is endless. Tape it to your teacher’s back. Tape it to your student’s back. Tape it to the side of an airplane and see if it’s still there when you arrive. Bring it to the International Space Station. Please, have some fun with it (and if you’re going to the ISS, can I come?).

The only thing you can’t do is sell the image or sell stuff with the image on it. My lawyer says that’s a no-no and I listen to her because she wears very sensible shoes.

So what do I do?

It’s easy. It’s free, no hidden costs, taxes, shipping, handling, or foam peanuts in your living room.

I’ve created a fantastically weird and fun Sparky Firepants Members Club. To join, all you have to do is sign up here. Every month (starting with this one, hooray!) you’ll get an e-mail from me with a password that allows you to access your free illustration. You’ll also get fun little tidbits and special things that those regular people you see in line at Starbucks aren’t getting.

That’s because you’re awesome.

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Donald Ritchie, author of Reporting from Washington: The History of the Washington Press Corps, Our Constitution, and The Congress of the United States: A Student Companion, has been Associate Historian of the United States Senate for more than three decades. Earlier this week he sent me this blog along with the following introduction: Even though I study news rather than make it, last week I was invited to give a “newsmaker” luncheon talk at the National Press Club. The occasion was the club’s centennial, the video of that talk is online here. I thought the condensed version below would make a good blog.

Boy was he right!  Below Ritchie talks about the National Press Club and its place in history.

The National Press Club is celebrating its centennial, raising a question about why journalistic competitors feel compelled to band together. Founded in 1908, the club had many short-lived predecessors. The Washington Correspondents’ Club, for instance, held several dinners designed to reduce tensions between reporters and their political sources during the difficult days of Reconstruction. Such nineteenth-century press clubs failed because they let their members run up a tab at the bar (the National Press Club has never extended credit), and because they were either press clubs, founded by reporters for Washington, D.C., papers that excluded national correspondents, or correspondents’ clubs that barred the local press, indicating the animosity between them. The genius of the National Press Club was that it combined reporters for both the local and the national press.

But only men. The club left women and minorities outside the parameters of mainstream journalism. Not until 1955 did it hold a vote of its entire membership to admit Louis Lautier, a reporter for the National Negro Publishers Association. Radio news broadcasters were also treated as second-class citizens at first, being permitted to join the club only as non-voting members. Women reporters founded the Women’s National Press Club, but the separation prevented them from covering the National Press Club’s regular “newsmaker” luncheons.

In 1956, the men offered a compromise by inviting women to attend the luncheons, so long as they sat in the balcony and left as soon as the lunch was over. While the men dined below, the women shared the balcony with television cameras, hot lights, and coils of electrical wiring. Women reporters appealed to the famous guest speakers not to participate unless they could dine below with the men. Among the few to comply was Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, eager to publicize an American injustice. One who failed to offer solidarity was Martin Luther King, Jr., desperate to attract national press attention to the March on Washington. Dr. King spoke to an audience segregated by gender rather than race. Economic pressures on the club, whose membership declined during the 1960s, finally persuaded the men to admit women as members in 1971. Fittingly, the club’s centennial-year president is Sylvia Smith of the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette.

Regardless of race, gender, or media, Washington correspondents have historically been caught in a creative tension between the scoop and the pack–between professional rivalries and forces that pull the competitors together. They spend much time together outside the same closed doors, riding the same campaign trains, planes, and vans, being handed the same press releases, attending the same press conferences, cultivating the same high-placed sources. This pack journalism is counteracted by each reporter’s dream of the scoop, beating everyone else to the big story that makes a difference.

Somewhere between the scoop and the pack, the club has provided a welcome respite for the working press. Formed for reasons of camaraderie, the club has helped to shape the press corps and to define legitimate reporting. Unique among world governments, the U.S. allows reporters themselves to determine who deserves a press pass. Both the press galleries and the press clubs have guarded this prerogative jealously, and have labored diligently to decide whom to admit. Sometimes they have been too narrow in their definition and too slow to diversify. But ultimately the galleries and clubs have expanded to accommodate a more diffuse news business, one that continues to evolve with each startling technological breakthrough. The Internet will not be the last. A central institution in this transformation, the National Press Club has provided a common ground for newsmakers and news reporters. It would be hard to image the Washington press corps operating without it.

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BARBIE, KEN AND THE REST IN PLASTICVILLE
BY ELEANOR TYLBOR

The continuing and sometimes funny, sad but always interesting story about life and love among the plastic people)

The story so far: Barbie, famous fashionista and media doll celebrity and cyber star of the continuing cyber soap opera, BARBIE KEN AND THE REST IN PLASTICVILLE, has now been relegated to a warehouse, somewhere, along with her friends, KEN, G.I. JOE, BLAIN, the BRATZ, due to a product recall. In stark contrast to their former lives of wearing expensive high end clothes and doing the club scene, they are now in the dark in the true sense of the word, stashed away in boxes.

As we pick up the story, they are in the midst of planning a rebellion to draw attention to their plight and get free in time for the Christmas rush.


BARBIE
Okay. Can we get started? Is everyone here?

G.I. JOE
Oh I’m here babe! Big time! All I gotta do is flip the trigger on this here weapon of mass destruction and then… Boom! We’re outta here big time!

BARBIE
Joe, Joe, Joe… Get this through that thick plastic blob sitting between your shoulders…

G.I. JOE
…I love when you talk dirty like that babe…

BARBIE…whatever. Like...has it hit you yet you are lying down flat on your back in a cardboard box, unable to move?

G.I. JOE
Has what hit me? Nothing hit me! At least I didn’t feel nothing… Uh-oh - it's the enemy planning to strike and I gotta act like…fast and protect youze all! All I hav'ta do is pick up my weapon here... Arm - move! It's gonna move now... I...think...I...feel...something cold...in...my...hand...

BARBIE
(sighing)
Like...just forget about your weapon. 'Kay? Focus Joe - focus!

G.I. JOE
I'm...not sure of...what...this is... I don't remember...them...making weapons with long tails. Then again...a soldier has'ta be prepared for everything and I'm the best, y'know

BARBIE
You’re a legend in your own mind. Ken? Are you around, here, somewhere?

KEN
I-I’m scared, Barbie! It’s so…dark here. And...and I'm soooo cold... Why am I so cold, Barbie?

BARBIE
'Cause it's winter and you're wearing your surfing outfit! You don't have to be scared. I'll protect you

G.I. JOE
Hey! That’s a soldier’s job!

BARBIE
Listen G.I. – like…let me lay it on you the way things are. You are stuck in a cardboard box along with the rest of us

G.I. JOE
Hey! A soldier is never stuck! A soldier always has options!

KEN
(sobbing)
Mommy! I want my mommy!

G.I. JOE
Oh shut your trap, sissy boy! Act like a man and not a cry-baby for pete's sake! ‘I-want-my-mommy…’ This man’s army would make a man out’ta you. Ten-shun!

BARBIE
Like…how did this happen? Me, a former fashionista whose biggest problem was what outfit to wear and which club opening to be at? Look at what I’m reduced to? Can we get on with this meeting? Blain? Are you around somewhere?

BLAIN
Here! Trying…to…lift…this…top… Forgetaboutit. When I was in Australia…

G.I. JOE
There he goes again, talkin’ about that there strange soundin’ place ‘Stra-li-a! ‘Stralia this and Stralia that.’ We don’t care about your weird sounding place with a foreign name! Got that? Or maybe you need a little convincin’ with some lead…

BARBIE
Don’t listen to him, Blain. Like…his elevator don’t go to the top floor if you get my drift. Can we start now? Like…Christmas is almost here and like…we gotta be on the shelves in toy stores or we’ll never be here…forever! We hav'ta make our move, now

(sound of sobbing coming from KEN’s box)

G.I. JOE
There he goes again. ‘Wa-wa-wa!’ Be a real doll for once in your life, soldier! Ten-shun!

BARBIE
Know what’s really sad?

G.I. JOE
I’ll tell you what’s sad, babe! I could run out’ta bullets!

BARBIE
Like…I’ve been wearing the same outfit for like…months! I mean, a fashionista like me deserves better! And…and…nobody will wanna buy me because my beautiful blond hair will be flat and…and…

BLAIN
It’s okay. In my eyes, Barbie – you’ll always be the most beautiful sheila around

G.I. JOE
What’s that? Who’s Sheila? Did he make a pass at you, babe? ‘Cause if he did…

BARBIE
Oh Blain! If only…if only…we weren’t stored away in boxes and…and…we could like…reach out and touch each other…

BLAIN
We have to make a big push to get out. What if your friend, Joe, there, could shoot himself out of his box and then he could do the same for us…

BARBIE
Like…I dunno. The last time he fired his weapon, he shot his right foot off

G.I. JOE
Hey! You promised that would be our secret. Did I cry, huh? Did I? No I didn’t because I’m a real soldier! Not like sissy-boy over there… Anyway, I still got one good foot

BLAIN
Listen – we don’t have much choice, here. Um…G.I. – we need your services as a soldier!

BARBIE
Like…I dunno. I’m getting a bad feeling about this


QUESTION DU JOUR: WILL G.I. JOE BE ABLE TO FREE THEM FROM THEIR CARDBOARD PRISONS? MORE TO THE POINT, WILL THEY SURVIVE? STATE TUNED FOR THE NEXT INSTALLMENT OF “BARBIE, KEN AND THE REST IN PLASTICVILLE”

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This week’s monthly gleanings from Anatoly mark a special moment for me and my family. (more…)

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