Crazy Names for Bottles of Wine

Adapted from Michael Quinion, World Wide Words

You may have heard those odd names for big bottles of wine such as Magnum, Jeroboam, Rehoboam, and Methuselah.

What do they mean and where do they come from? How long does wine have to age for it to be called a Methuselah?

I'm glad to be able to report that the age of the wine has no connection with these curious names, otherwise a methuselah would have age for 969 years.

Those crazy names refer to the sizes of the bottle, but it's now illegal to put any of them except one on a bottle and they've become curiosities that mainly come up in pub quizzes.

The only term of the set that's still allowed is "magnum", which refers to a bottle containing two standard bottles or 1.5 litres. It's also the oldest of all the terms, having appeared in English in one of the prose works of the Scots poet Robert Burns, back in 1788.

It's an abbreviation of Latin "magnum bonum", a large good thing. It was in Scotland that it acquired the sense of a size of wine bottle and became abbreviated to "magnum". It has also been given to a variety of potato, various varieties of cooking plums, a gun, and even a large-barrelled steel pen.

The remainder of the set, as usually quoted in reference books, are jeroboam (4 bottles/3 litres), rehoboam (6/4.5), methuselah (8/6), salmanazar (12/9), balthazar (16/12), nebuchadnezzar (20/15), melchior (24/18), solomon (28/21), sovereign (33.3/25), and primat (36/27).

Some lists even include a melchizedek, holding 40 standard bottles or 30 litres.

For more, go to Moore Partners Scribbles

The Art of Being Clear

The Art of Being Clear

We planned to construct a dumbwaiter in the new house we are building. The idea of getting coffee, tea, and snacks up to our second floor office with-out spilling all over ourselves on the stairs was appealing.

But it took a lot of room and interfered with the ductwork, and the only good place for it was the wrong place...so sanity returned and we ditched the whole idea.

In the meantime, we were laughing with the stone mason about how he could be a dumbwaiter specialist. The conversation quickly deteriorated to "dumb waiterspecialist" and the whole burlesque act reminded me of the importance of syntax.

Since syntax (the arrangement of words in a sentence) is one of the major ways we decipher meaning in English, proper syntax should govern the placement of modifiers so the right words are grouped in a sentence the way we intend.

The basic idea is simple: adjectives and adverbs go as close to the words they are supposed to modify as possible. This way we will connect those modifiers with the right words.

Of course, there is a little more to it than that, and below we go into the mechanics in more detail. As you will see, there are ways even a simple idea can go comically wrong.

For more, go to Moore Partners Scribbles

People Learning Together

I've been called on lately to lead several workshops and I'm always struck by how much fun it is when people learn together.

And it is always a collaborative effort among all the participants in a workshop.

I usually ask my audience, "What are your hopes for the day?" Typically their first thought is (since they have to spend the whole day with me) that I'm not a real dud. I feel the same way. As I start my opening re-marks, I'm very aware that I will have to spend the day with this group and I hope they aren't a bunch of duds.

They never are.

Happily, nearly everyone, if given half a chance, wants to learn something useful in a positive atmosphere. That's the joy of giving workshops.

We must admit that we have somewhat neglected the workshop segment of our services over the last year, so we would like to concentrate on creating and giving useful and enjoyable workshops.

To that end, I sat down, took the best from my teaching experience at Queen's, Loyalist, Laurentian, St. Lawrence, and U of T, and created eight workshops listed here and also on the Workshops section of our website.

If you or your organization are interested in these topics-or would like a workshop created specifically for you...go to Moore Partners Workshops

Being Concrete

Concrete begins as careless, slovenly, and entirely feckless. It is promiscuous and easygoing, willing to flow this way and that, open to being shaped, doing what anyone wants if that person is strong enough to hold it. Once it is committed, though, concrete becomes fanatically adamant.

You may know people like that.

Concrete writing is not heavy, stubborn, and dull. It is sensible, relating to our senses of touch, sight, smell, taste, and hearing. It binds us to the everyday world, to the practical, the familiar.

Writers should always try to pour concrete, to produce concrete writing unless, of course, they are trying to hide or obscure their meaning. In fact, a recent study by Daniel Oppenheimer showed that lack of specificity and concreteness is a sign of an intention to deceive.

Concrete writing sticks to your audience like the real thing to a shovel - and that's the whole point of good communication.

For more on Being Concrete, go to Moore Partners Scribbles

Notes from the Underground

We are building an earth-sheltered house, hoping to be more sustainable, on the wooded banks of the fastest-flowing part of the Salmon River north of Kingston, Ontario, where we will live nearly maintenance-free, listening to the roar of the rapids.

Our earth-sheltered house will have a Trombe wall on the south side for light and passive solar heating. This part of the house will contain an open-concept living/dining area snuggled around a woodstove, plus a kitchen and pantry with a three-season room on the river side. Our office overlooking the rapids and a sitting and napping area will be on the second floor.

The rest of the house, including study, bedrooms, guest room, workshop, laundry, systems room, and garage will be sheltered under native groundcovers and two to three feet of soil. Since the earth is 18 degrees C at most times, our heating and air conditioning will be free. In fact, we may have to heat slightly year-around with in-floor heating provided by solar hot water.

For more go to Notes from the Underground