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I doodled up two ideas for "sticky" - these are really rough; hopefully, I'll be able to refine them a bit this week . :)

For some reason all I could think about was stepping on gum when I saw the word "sticky". I had fun whipping this out. Not a lot of detailed story-telling here, but I think we can all relate.

This is 'Day at the fair'. My boys with the grandparents! Usually by the end of this day...everyone is very sticky! I did something a little different with this painting. After puting in the watercolor washes, I went over it with pen and ink to define edges. It is something different for me and I wanted to see what the end result would look like. I think it gives a bit of a caricature look to it.
Debbie

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When I think of mildew I think of camping gear that came home after a rainy canoe trip, was dragged into the basement so I could warm up in the bath, and then forgotten about for a month or so.

As I’m sure is the case with most people, I have no particular fondness for mildew.  I place it in a mental compartment very close to where I keep my images of mold.  If I am diligent in my household sanitation mildew and I can keep a respectful distance between us.

That’s why the other day when I was researching the word honey I was astonished to find that the Latin word for “honey” had given rise to the English word mildew.

Evidently when mildew first was used in English it meant “honeydew,” the sticky droppings left behind by aphids.

It seems that to a farmer a sick plant was a sick plant and if it was sick because aphids were sucking it dry and leaving it covered with a sticky coating, it was just as bad as if it was sick because of a fungal growth that was leaving it with a sticky coating; so why not call both coatings the same thing.

Less appetizing though, don’t you think.

The honeydew meaning appears first in Old English documents—so well over 1000 years ago—while the fungal meaning creeps in a little over 600 years ago.

One of the reasons we know that mildew relates to honey is because of a fellow named Robert Bruce Cotton.

He lived around the same time as William Shakespeare, so that’s 400 years ago.

He was particularly interested in antiquities and he was fortunate enough to be pretty rich.

We really should thank him because he came along at a very opportune time.  King Henry VIII had found it necessary to kick the Catholic Church out of England so that he could get on with some new marriages.  In doing so he had disbanded the monasteries.

But the monasteries were the main places of refuge if you were an old manuscript trying to hide from the ravages of time.  In kicking out Catholicism Henry unwittingly made homeless whole libraries of precious manuscripts.  Sir Robert Cotton went around collecting up these homeless waifs and giving them a roof over their heads in his own personal library.

The other day I talked about the Lindesfarne Gospels during the episode on the word amen; these fantastic documents were among those rescued by Cotton.

Similarly the first document to contain the word mildew was housed in the Cotton Library.

While most of the citations I report to you from the Oxford English Dictionary come from some book or other with a name, in the case of the word mildew the name of the old manuscript that gives us a first citation is a little curious.

It is called the Cleopatra Glossary A.III.

There is nothing in the document that relates to Cleopatra the old queen of Egypt.

Instead it was an idiosyncrasy of Sir Robert that earned the title.

Sir Robert Cotton arranged his library with busts of famous people from history along the top shelves, with each of the shelves below marked by letter and number.  So it just so happened that this particular word, in this particular document lay for some years beneath the marble likeness of Cleopatra.

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On the heals of Jan Greenberg’s post contrasting fabricated memoirs with the tireless research she’s putting into her book on artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude, comes the news, in yesterday’s New York Times, that Esquire plans to run a fictitious first-person diary titled, “The Last Days of Heath Ledger” in its April issue. The “diary,” written in fact by Lisa Taddeo, follows the late actor from London to New York, imagining his thoughts and actions during the days leading to his death from an accidental overdose of prescription medicine on January 22. In today’s world of information overload, it’s not so surprising that somebody came up with yet another way to exploit the tragic death of a talented actor. What is surprising is that in the Times article, several publishing professionals, including one who teaches magazine writing at NYU, endorse and even applaud the move.

I was trained to believe the line between truth and fiction should not be blurred. I’m not saying people shouldn’t write historical novels or produce movies and TV shows that are “inspired” by real events. The public usually knows what it’s getting into with those creations. But including a fictionalized piece in an environment where people expect truth and accuracy undermines a publication’s credibility. Years ago, when I was a contributor to Scholastic Search, a fantastic American history magazine for middle school students, the editor proposed a series of “interviews” between notables from different eras. Ben Franklin might sit down with Theodore Roosevelt, for example, or Rosa Parks might speak with Pocahontas. It’s an intriguing idea, and a good writer who did a lot of research might pull it off. But it made me uneasy to think of a fictional piece running in a kids’ non-fiction magazine.

Similarly, it drives me nuts when I see bookstores shelving installments from the Dear America series and its descendants and imitators in the non-fiction section. If store personnel can’t distinguish those fictionalized diaries from the real thing, how can kids? I vastly prefer the original American Girl books, where the historical fiction is followed by an engaging essay exploring the true events that inspired the novel. Those books give you the best of both worlds: compelling fiction and historical context under one cover.

In recent years, the trend in kids’ nonfiction has been toward more attribution and accountability. When my editors first told me they would require footnotes for quotations and statistics, I balked, flashing back to those long ago days of writing college papers. But now I embrace the chance to hold the veracity of my work up to public scrutiny by including footnotes and inviting readers to e-mail me with questions about sources. And when those sources conflict with no clear consensus, as in the spelling of Annie Oakley’s real last name (Moses or Mozee), I do my best to report the disagreement and explain why I chose the option I did. In kids’ nonfiction, honesty is the best policy and accuracy always matters.