Words

Sign, Fallbrook Hospital

I have been wracking my brain trying to come with a word that expresses the new technological dread that I (and I imagine we) find ourselves beset with. Until I come up with something better I am going to use a moniker that I coined in the wee hours of the morning, cybermaw.

Cybermaw is what happens when you have been phished, slammed, hacked, spywared, identity stolen, find yourself talking to a recorded announcement (or screaming at a recorded announcement), had your password stolen, lost your password, facebooked, crashed your hard drive, been social networked to death, linked in, have had your pin stolen, bounced back, been unlocked, had all the money pulled out of your account, trojan horsed, darpa'd, credit cards jacked, been data mined, had your emails read by the government, falsely relegated as a spammer, had your picture subjected to facial recognition software, are under government surveillance, forgot about some automatic payments that have been deducted from your account for years after you have stopped using god knows what service, have been falsely branded as an enemy of the state and otherwise scammed by some similar perversion.

I lost the good function of my primary email account over a year ago. Pacbell.net is a very early suffix and doesn't work quite right in the machines anymore. Some of my email gets to me. Some of it bounces back to sender and oblivion. Yahoo points at Apple, Apple points at ATT but the reality is I am caught up in the dance and it is now not trustworthy and I am forced to use Gmail instead of my favored Macmail. Because some level 3 tech isn't capable of rational thought or is too lazy to care, I have lost the utility and function of my primary cyber address.

In any case I have a pervading sense of doom about many things digital in our new age. I feel strangled when I hear about waitresses in restaurants surreptitiously running your card through that special card reader in the other pocket or the gas station operator whose skimming machine is actually in the pump itself. Or the scanning systems that get all your information by just driving by within 15' of your card or person. I feel sick to my stomach with the whole wave. And its only going to get worse.

I have never felt comfortable about banking online and use a lot of precaution putting account numbers on line but hey, who can really be protected? There are news of large data thefts every day. The bank that took over the mortgage on my building let me know that the flash drive that had all of my information was lost or stolen last year and I was going to get a year's free Equifax account for my trouble. Paypal, Ebay, Amazon, all vulnerable, we are all basically sitting ducks.

Am I alone in my cyberparanoia?

***

On an entirely different topic, I have a question. I have been batting this around for a few years and would like some insight from my learned readers. Out of left field, really.

The spanish word for right as in right turn is derecho. The spanish word for right as in personal right or is also derecho. My question is why? Why does a word for a direction and a word for a liberty have the exact same translation in two languages, english and spanish? It can't be a coincidence but it is a definite non sequitur. The two terms have absolutely nothing to do with each other.

Spanish is part of a language sub tree called the romanic or vulgar latin languages. At one time there were many of these indo-european languages. The principal surviving ones are Spanish, French, Portugese, Catalan, Italian and Romanian. Others are Aragonese, Aromanian, Arpitan, Asturian, Corsican, Emiliano-Romagnolo, Friulian, Galician, Ladino, Leonese, Lombard, Mirandese, Neapolitan, Occitan, Piedmontese, Romansh, Sardinian, Sicilian, Venetian and Walloon.

The English language belongs to the Anglo-Frisian sub-group of the West Germanic branch of the Germanic family. Other sister tongues are german and anglic. It originated in England in the fifth century after Britain was settled by Anglo Saxons from Germany and further influenced by the Norse.

I looked into this linguistic aberration a little bit this morning. The english word right comes from the old english word riht meaning "to lead straight; to guide; to rule." Left evolved from Old English lyft, which meant "weak". A question is in order. How did going straight ahead come to mean the same thing as facing starboard?

The latin word for right is dexter, or skillful. Left is sinistro or wrong. The left handed were thought to be tools of the devil. Left is translated as gauche in French, which means lacking in grace.

I still can not see a connection that will account for the non latin origin of the use of the same word with two different meanings in English and Spanish, two languages with such different etymology. Smart people, please comment.

***

Saturday afternoon in Fallbrook means that I get to hear the drum circle pounding for three hours or so. I call it the natives are getting restless. I walked down with my wife after brunch the other day and wanted to see how much I could stand. Not much.

White people in a drum circle, especially when you get a whole bunch of them, is a painful affair, at least to my ears. I am no great musician but have played guitar and cello in my lifetime. Noise is filling every little space in every measure, in music we need to occasionally leave notes out and let the music be free. And to occasionally listen.

Drum circles are like a lumbering barge that can only turn very slowly. I don't care if we are talking about hippie drums or native american drums, they are both musically quite primitive.

I was listening the other day and the plodding beat cried out for some dominant instrument to pull it out of its slumber and just cut across the grain. A violin, a horn, something that can tear through the horrible, thick texture. It never occurred. And the more players, the worse it gets. And there were plenty. There were a congalero or two that knew what they were doing but they were lost in the din, amongst the native flutes and the aging hippie noisemakers. Perhaps I would be more tolerant after an ayahuasca or peyote session but I sort of gave that stuff up in college. Now it's just an exedrin headache every other saturday.