What Are They?

Imagine you’re carving up a pie. You slice through it from one side to the other. Now you have two equal halves. It’s a good start, but a half-pie is too much of a serving for most people. So you make a perpendicular slice. Now you have four quarters. Better, but those are still pretty big pieces.

What’s the next step? You make two diagonal slices and Voilà! You have eight equal pieces.

Now imagine that the pie is a year. The first logical slice to cut it in half is from winter solstice to summer solstice. The perpendicular slice then is from autumnal equinox to vernal equinox. The four pieces of the pie are the seasons.

But maybe those three-month-long seasons are too long for some purposes? Say, for example, you’re Vivaldi and you feel inspired to turn a calendar year into an eight-part violin piece. What’s the next step?

The next step is to cut each of the seasons in half, which means finding the midpoints between the solstices and the equinoxes. Those four midpoints are the Cross Quarter Days.

Cross Quarter Days are holidays in some parts of the world, particularly Ireland and Scotland.

Here are the traditional dates and names of the four Cross Quarter Days:

• February 2 Imbolc/Groundhog Day/Candlemas

• May 1 Beltane/May Day

• August 1 Lughnasadh/Lammas Day

• October 31 Samhain/Halloween

Depending on your culture, some of these might loom large and others might sneak by without any notice. In subsequent posts, we’ll see if I can find something interesting to say about each of them.

I personally am satisfied having the year split into eight half-seasons. I don’t, for example, feel any need to have Cross Eighth Days that would give us 16 quarter seasons.

However, it was pointed out to me recently that the Japanese divide the year into 72 microseasons. I’m guessing they probably don’t have big parties for them, since a new one starts every five days.

A week or two ago, Linda said to me, “Tonight’s the best night for seeing the Perseids.”

“Great!” I said. “But remind me please. Who are the Perseids?”

She explained that they’re a meteor shower that appears every mid-August, but only after midnight. I’m not sure why it has to be so late. I guess they don’t want it to be too early for the west coast audience.

So we stayed up way past our bedtimes and, as midnight neared, strapped folding beach chairs to our backs and hiked into the woods, finding our way with flashlights.

The night was eerily quiet - except for approximately one billion insects, who were chirping their imitation of a 747 revving up for takeoff.

Why were we hiking into the woods? Because this was the regional water authority property. It’s deserted at night and has a pedestrian bridge across a reservoir with enough open space around it to give a good view of the sky. The picture up top shows the bridge in daylight.

By the way, the reservoir property is closed to visitors after sunset. I’m telling this story with the understanding that you will defend us in court if necessary, and that therefore this posting is subject to Attorney-Client Privilege.

We stopped in the middle of the bridge, set up our chairs, sat down, and turned off our flashlights. As if they’d been designed with meteor showers in mind, the beach chairs reclined pretty far and had little almost-pillows for our heads.

The night sky is a beautiful thing. I, for one, don’t look at it as often as I ought to. It’s the ocean above us every night.

First you see the bright stars. Then you see some fainter stars. Then you get distracted by an airplane. (Movement! Flashing light!)

Shortly after we took our positions, some wispy clouds drifted into our field of view. It was like viewing the stars through lace curtains.

The clouds passed and time passed, but no meteors appeared. In place of the wispy clouds, a question started to hover over us: How long are we willing to wait?

Then - Boom! A bright line flew across the sky and then disappeared. Unmistakeable. It was as long as my thumb held at arm’s length. “Wow!” we said.

We tried waiting to see another one, but the sky was in no hurry to provide an encore. Meanwhile, it was very late and we’d already seen one very nice meteor. We packed up our chairs, clicked on our flashlights, and headed home.

We’d spent about an hour sitting and watching. The payoff was a straight, white line that lasted about a second. A meteor shower? Not really. I can imagine someone giving it a zero or one star Yelp review.

But personally, I thought it was a wonderful evening. Five stars.

(Next: Cross Quarter Days)

MacGougan’s Metric Numbers

The names we give to numbers in English are not quite consistent and logical. I’m guessing this is probably true of most languages. French is probably worse than English on this score. The French word for “eighty” translates as “four-twenty” - which seems to me more like a math problem than a number name.

So earlier today, when I probably should have been thinking about how to cure cancer or achieve world peace, I decided to work out what a really logical number-naming system would look like.

You might compare our current numbering system to a jet taking off. It’s a bit bumpy down low but smooths out once you get up to a decent cruising altitude. That is, by the time you get up to the sixties, everything is very regular and consistent.

So here’s my concept, which I call MacGougan’s Metric Numbers. We take the logical and consistent pattern that serves us so well with larger numbers and extrapolate it back down to the smaller numbers.

In other words, let’s work backwards. Take a look at the pattern in the following set of numbers.

• Ninety

• Eighty

• Seventy

• Sixty

What would be the logical way to extrapolate down from there? I think the answer is pretty clear:

• Fivety

• Fourty

• Threety

• Twoty

• Onety

Note that, for consistency with all the other groups of ten, the oneties will need a major overhaul as follows:

Ten → Onety

Eleven → Onety-one

Twelve → Onety-two

The teens → Onety-three through onety-nine

Note also that the MMN system would continue on up through thousands, millions, and so on. Take, for example: 333,222,111. That would be three hundred threety-three million, two hundred twoty-two thousand, one hundred onety-one.

Due to its logical consistency, the MMN system would be easier for children to learn and easier for everyone to translate numbers from words to numerals and vice versa.

Now, I’ll admit that there could be a few minor drawbacks to this admirable system. For example, the term “onety” is longer than “ten” and could easily be mistaken for “twenty.” Also, there are one and a half billion English speakers in the world who will need to be retrained.

Oh well. Look on the bright side. At least there aren’t onety billion.

(Next: A Clear Night For Showers)

Bizz-Buzz

When I was a kid, there was a counting game that I would play with my siblings that we called Bizz-Buzz. I was an elementary school student at the time, and it required all of my available concentration just to not lose every time.

I went on to attain a reasonable but not overwhelming facility with numbers. That is, I was never an actuary, but I could talk to actuaries. To this day, I’m not sure if Bizz-Buzz helped me to achieve that level of comfort with numbers or prevented me from going further.

The game involves counting up from one to as high as you can go. If two people are playing, you take turns. If three or more people are playing, you go around the circle. When it’s your turn, you say the next number.

Here’s the catch:

• If the number is three or a multiple of three, instead of saying the number you say Bizz.

• If the number is five or a multiple of five, instead of saying the number you say Buzz.

• And if the number is a multiple of both three and five, instead of saying the number you say Bizz-Buzz.

So, the first twenty turns should be as follows:

One
Two
Bizz
Four
Buzz
Bizz
Seven
Eight
Bizz
Buzz
Eleven
Bizz
Thirteen
Fourteen
Bizz-Buzz
Sixteen
Seventeen
Bizz
Nineteen
Buzz

When, inevitably, you say the wrong number or Bizz when you should have Buzzed, you lose the round and the game restarts from one.

You can, I hope, see how this game could either strengthen someone’s feel for patterns in numbers or crush their confidence that they understand even something so simple as counting.

I recommend you try this game with a congenial partner - someone who won’t get flustered if they find it very hard and who won’t be unkind if you find it very hard. As simple as it might sound, it’s a pretty good workout for the old gray cells.

I have two local granddaughters - one who’ll be going into second grade in the fall and one who’ll be going into kindergarten. With them, I play a more straightforward counting game. No Bizzes or Buzzes. We just take turns counting up higher and higher.

When I play with the younger one, it works best for her to start us off at one. That way, I’m on the spot for all those decade transitions (like twenty-nine to thirty or thirty-nine to forty).

It would be years away, but at some point I’ll need to decide whether or not to teach them Bizz-Buzz. My guess is that, if I do, they’ll clean my clock at it.

(Note to self: put “clean my clock” on the list for yet another series on confusing expressions.)

King Frog

Way back, before I was a Substack maven or an insurance guru, I spent a few years as a school teacher. I’m not sure how much my students learned from me, but one thing I learned from them was King Frog.

It’s a circle game. The number one position is King Frog and the other positions proceed clockwise from there. After each round, the loser of the round goes to the end of the circle, the position to the right of the King Frog, and everybody who was behind that person moves around to be one step closer to King Frog.

Each round starts with a little chant: “Dum-dum-ta-dum-dum-dum. Ribbit! Ribbit!”

At that point, everybody in the circle starts snapping their fingers in time, alternating from one hand to the other. This sets the pace for the game.

The King Frog says, “One frog!”

Then the chant goes around the circle, keeping time to the finger snapping:

• Two eyes!

• Four legs!

• Ker-plunk!

• In the puddle!

At this point, without missing a beat, it’s the King Frog’s turn:

• Two frogs!

And again the chant goes around the circle:

• Four eyes!

• Eight legs!

• Ker-plunk!

• Ker-plunk!

• In the puddle!

• In the puddle!

And then, yes, the King Frog says:

• Three frogs!

And so on until somebody has trouble calculating how many eyes or legs or loses track of how many ker-plunks or in-the-puddles or (in the case of King Frog) neglects to come in at the proper time with the next-higher number of frogs.

I like this game. It’s silly and there’s a beat to it, but it also requires concentration. While there’s a competitive element to it, the joy of the game is the teamwork satisfaction of keeping a round going as long as possible. And it becomes a pretty impressive spectacle when a group is able to make it to fifteen or twenty frogs before someone slips up.

I thought about that game from time to time during my business career. For many of us working on complicated projects within large organizations, the concentration we put into playing our parts wasn’t primarily about striving to be King Frog. It was about being part of a team that could achieve remarkable things together.

The up-top illustrations for this Playing with Numbers series - however slickly professional they might look - were actually created by me without the use of Artificial Intelligence. Or, frankly, intelligence of any kind.

For no particular reason, the closing illustrations are pictures from one of my favorite places, the West Hartford Reservoir. I take a walk in or near this property just about every day.

The Concert

Tanglewood is a large estate in Lenox, Massachusetts that was donated in the 1930s to become the summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. It takes its name from “Tanglewood Tales,” which Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote while staying in a cottage on the estate.

The main performance space at Tanglewood is the “Shed,” a fan-shaped, largely open structure that can seat about 5,000 people. Many thousands more listeners are able to sit on the lawn around the Shed. Lawn-loving Tanglewood regulars are able to wheel in impressive arrangements of folding chairs and picnic spreads.

Here I am getting comfortable on the lawn outside the Shed two years ago.

There’s a second, less well known performing space on the premises, Seiji Ozawa Hall. It’s a more polished and more intimate structure, seating about 1,200 people and open at its back end to enable perhaps a thousand more to listen in from the lawn. Because of its more limited seating, Ozawa Hall tends to host chamber groups rather than big-name touring acts or full orchestras.

I enjoy both spaces but am particularly fond of Ozawa Hall. It’s won many awards and one expert on such things has deemed it to be the 13th best concert hall in the world.

As we were arriving for the concert at Ozawa Hall, the sky was threatening and the ushers were urging patrons to stay under cover due to the risk of lightning. The start of the concert was, in fact, delayed by a short but intense downpour. (The hall is mostly enclosed, but the storm was noisy and the lawn patrons couldn’t get into position until the rain was over.)

As a side note, until the sun went down, the opening in the back of the hall looked to me like the proscenium for a stunningly-staged performance of one of Shakespeare’s pastoral comedies. (I think that could actually work pretty well if they could figure out a way to reverse the ground floor seats.)

The performers were a pianist (Seong-Jin Cho, from South Korea) and a violinist (Augustin Hadelich, born in Italy to German parents), both young to my eyes and remarkably talented to my ears. They played works by Brahms, Janáček, Beach, and Prokofiev. For a charming encore, they sat down at the piano together for a duet by Ravel.

Young Mr. Hadelich, the violinist, was badly injured by a fire in his teens and had a lot to overcome in order to become a world-class musician. I’m glad, though, that I didn’t know this backstory when I heard the concert. I think pity can detract from our ability to recognize greatness. Our expectations might become lowered if we know it’s a miracle that he can play the violin at all.

Linda tells me she doesn’t feel this way. Then again, she’s a musician, so she has a much better ear than I do and her judgments are less likely to be influenced by outside factors.

As it was, I found the evening inspiring for the international nature of the talented duo. This was similar to the inspiration I also felt in July watching World Cup matches on television.

Classical music and soccer are both worldwide interests that aren’t limited by language or national boundaries. Musicians and athletes from all over the world are able to develop tremendous skill and have those skills appreciated pretty much everywhere.

(Next: Playing with Numbers)

The Hike

Every summer, Linda and I like to make a sojourn or two up to the Berkshires. Usually, we’re looking to hike in the mountains and listen to music at Tanglewood. It’s a way to enjoy, in close succession, opposite ends of civilization.

First we explore nature, as far as we can get away from civilization. Then we embrace some of the highlights of civilization with a nice meal and a concert of classical music.

This year our hike was the Alander Mountain Trail. It’s as far west as you can go in Massachusetts without crossing over into New York State.

When you get to the top, Alander Mountain has a great view of a mostly wooded and hilly swath of Massachusetts, New York, and Connecticut. There used to be a fire tower at the summit and you can still see the simple fire warden’s cabin just before the summit. The tower was technically in Massachusetts, but the primary view is to the west and the wardens were employed by New York.

A portion of the trail follows a road that was used to bring supplies to the fire warden. That’s nice because it enables some side-by-side hiking, which makes for easier chatting than single-file hiking. (“This is so peaceful and serene.” “What?” “Peaceful and Serene!” “What?” “PEACEFUL AND SERENE!”)

It’s invisible from overhead, but one place that the mountain overlooks is the point where Connecticut, Massachusetts, and New York converge. We didn’t get there on this trip, but we’ve visited it before.

I think of it as an almost magical place. The one place where all three of these great states touch one another is in a small clearing in the middle of a dense forest. The exact point is indicated by a simple stone marker.

Another Round of Potential New Expressions

Back in April I ended my first series on confusing expressions with “Time For Some New Ones,” in which I proposed several (I thought) plausible new expressions as follows:

- The Camel’s Diaper
- Two Boats in a Bathtub
- The Queen Bee Can’t Eat Jelly
- The Rhino’s Nose Ring
- There’s No Smoke Upwind

Here’s a link if missed and are interested:

https://markmacgougan.substack.com/p/macgougan-at-large-142

Astonishingly, none of these catchy expressions has yet broken through into mainstream usage. So we’ll try again - this time aiming for shorter and more topical candidates for new expressions.

Going HAL

Refers to any electronic device that’s ignoring your input and can therefore be assumed to have malicious intent. (The reference is to HAL 9000, the creepy computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey.)

“Sorry I wasn’t able to get back to you, but my phone was going HAL.”

Frankenphone

A term for any mobile phone that habitually goes HAL.

“Sorry I wasn’t able to get back to you, but I have a real Frankenphone.”

IKEA-Boxed

Refers to a complicated set of information that has been systematically broken down into lots of relatively simple components.

“I need background materials for a historical study. Has anybody ever IKEA-boxed the theology of Thomas Aquinas?”

Binge-Noshing

The art of extracting a substantial meal out of an event serving light hors d’oeuvres.

“We were going straight to the show afterwards, so we binge-noshed our way through Bill’s retirement reception.”

Reader’s Digest Movies

Said disparagingly about trailers that deliver the entire arc of the story, removing any need to actually see the movie. (Note to those who aren’t as old as I am: Reader’s Digest was a magazine but also a publisher of condensed versions of books.)

“I was glad to see The Odyssey in a theater, but I would have been happy to skip the four Reader’s Digest Movies they showed beforehand.”

Clever Hans

A skeptical way to refer to Artificial Intelligence. If you aren’t familiar with Clever Hans, here’s the Wikipedia summary:

“Clever Hans was a horse that appeared to perform arithmetic and other intellectual tasks during exhibitions in Germany in the early 20th century. In 1907, psychologist Oskar Pfungst demonstrated that the horse was not actually performing these mental tasks, but was watching the reactions of his trainer.”

“I can’t believe how much faith our management puts in that Clever Hans of an AI system. Yesterday it told me that, since Christmas makes me happy, I should consider celebrating it several times a year.”

(Next: A Day in the Berkshires)

Cats

Why in the world do we refer to something cool and neat as “the cat’s pajamas”?

Actually, I’m dating myself with this one. Let me rephrase the question. Why in the world did anyone ever refer to something cool and neat as “the cat’s pajamas”?

This is a Jazz Age expression. That is, it’s something that people started saying in the 1920s, the Roaring Twenties, that high-energy interlude between the Great War and the Great Depression that seems to have been a lot more fun than the 2020s. (Our current decade is just a little more than half over, but my tentative name for it is The Cringe Decade.)

Pajamas, in the 1920s, were a fashionable new option for women’s sleepwear. A “cat” was any cool person - a usage that survives today mostly, and perhaps not surprisingly, in the jazz world. So “the cat’s pajamas” is a funny-sounding way to refer to a cool person’s exciting, new thing.

A similarly nonsensical and animal-related expression from the time is “the bee’s knees.” It means exactly the same thing and it’s not unusual for something to be both the bee’s knees and the cat’s pajamas.

Speaking of cats, why is it that particular animal that has “got your tongue” when you don’t know what to say?

As with many odd expressions, there are lots of theories. Here are a few of the least likely:

• British Naval Whipping: punishment by the “cat o’ nine tails” presumably left disobedient sailors speechless.

• Witchy Felines: superstitious folk in the Middle Ages attributed magic powers to cats.

• Gruesome Ancient Egyptians: apocryphal stories of the pharaohs having enemies’ tongues removed and fed to their revered cats.

These all make good stories, but the expression didn’t appear until the late 1800s, well after any of these proposed inspirations for it. The more likely answer is that it was simply an easily understood way to tease a child and possibly alludes to the fact that cats are sometimes known to steal food.

And finally, and perhaps most obscurely, there is “sitting in the catbird seat.” This is an admittedly old fashioned expression for being in a favorable situation - similar to “sitting pretty.”

A catbird is, in fact, a bird and not a cat or a cat-bird hybrid. The gray catbird is typically found perched on the highest branch of a tree.

The expression was regional to the South at first, but became national through its use by Red Barber in his baseball broadcasts (a batter with three balls and no strikes was in the catbird seat) and James Thurber (whose short story, “The Catbird Seat,” was widely anthologized).

So, American idioms teach us that cats can represent coolness, muteness, and dominance. Which, I might point out, is a surprisingly accurate summary.

The Skids Are Alright

“What are skids?” you might ask.

You’re probably familiar with skid as a verb. It’s what your tires might do if you brake suddenly. Skids as a noun is less familiar to most of us because it relates specifically to large-scale logging in times past. Were you a logger back in days of yore? No, and neither was I.

I’ve been told, however, that the basic idea was to create a kind of conveyor belt to move logs from where they were felled out to a staging area, generally down by a waterfront, where they could be milled or loaded onto a boat. And what raw material did they have available for the creation of such a conveyor belt? They had logs.

Skids were giant pathways of parallel logs, generally heading downhill, on which newly-felled logs could be slid or dragged with a minimum of effort. To reduce friction, the logs were often coated with grease.

My normal rule is to only illustrate this column using my own pictures, but in this case I thought it would be good to provide something historically accurate. I borrowed the photo below from the “Gold Trails & Ghost Towns” Facebook site, where it was credited as coming from the Vancouver Archives.

If you have that picture in your head, then the expressions aren’t so confusing.

On the Skids - Failing, going inexorably downhill.

Hit the Skids - A sudden transition from success to failure.

Grease the Skids - Taking precautions ahead of time to make sure that an intended action or process will proceed smoothly as intended.

Skid Row - A seedy, disreputable section of town. The original Skid Row was a road in Seattle on a site that had once been the tail end of a logging skid.

The tough men who laid down those skids and turned wooded hills into mountains of lumber belonged to a time when the forests seemed like oceans - endless and inexhaustible. One challenge for us today is to be mindful that the earth’s resources are finite without losing the energy and hope for the future that drove those loggers to work so hard to build a new world.

Waxing Eloquent

When someone has much less skill than another person, we might say that they “can’t hold a candle to” them. Where does that come from?

I used to think this had to do with using a candle to examine something for quality or development, as has traditionally been done with eggs.

Now that I’m posing unconvincingly as an expert in these matters, I realize that the expression refers to pre-industrial workshops. Traditionally, the job for the most junior and least skilled apprentice was to hold a candle to light whatever the master or a skilled apprentice was working on.

What got me on the wrong track, I think, is the word “to.” It makes it sound like the candle is being used to illuminate the other person. The expression makes more sense if you substitute the word “for.” The point is that the inferior person isn’t worthy to be a candle holder for the superior person.

Another candle-related expression is “to burn the candle at both ends.” What confuses me about this one is simply logistics. It wouldn’t be possible with any conventional candle holder. You’d need some sort of elevated ring that you could slide the candle through sideways.

The expression dates from the early sixteen hundreds and was originally used to warn against overspending one’s financial resources. Some time in the seventeen hundreds it started to be used to warn against overcommitting one’s time.

You can see how it could serve either purpose. A candle is a finite resource - as is our income and our time. If you overuse any of them, you’ll lose them sooner.

The modern use of the expression to warn against exhausting yourself by trying to do too much seems more germane than ever today. As you may have noticed, we live in a 24x7x365 world.

In such a world, it might not be enough to warn someone against burning their candle from two sides. We might need to start with “Don’t put your candle in the microwave or air fryer where it will be depleted simultaneously from every possible direction.”

The Whole What?

There are several interesting but also baffling expressions for totality. Let’s start with “the whole nine yards.” In what world is nine yards the sum total of completeness?

It turns out that the history of the expression is a rabbit hole much deeper than any single-digit number of yards. The late NYT columnist William Safire wrote nine columns about it.

I’m thinking that it would be poor form on my part to attempt to out-column William Safire on this topic. I’ll just summarize briefly and say many of the theories that have been put forward over the years (sailing ship rigging, cement mixer volume, football first downs, machine gun ammunition) have been discredited. One theory (standard fabric lengths) has some potential validity, but most observers say that it’s probably just an arbitrary number and unit.

For what it’s worth, there was for a time a parallel expression, “the whole six yards.”

Which brings us to a laundry list of terms vying with “nine yards” to complete the phrase “The whole ____.”

Shebang: Civil War era term for a rough hut.

Ball of Wax: Might be a play on the term “bailiwick.”

Enchilada: May refer to the variety of fillings available.

Kit and Caboodle: Kit is a soldier’s supplies. Boodle is a collection of things.

None of these is a particularly clear or compelling term to illustrate the concept of completeness. Let me just say that we don’t call them idioms because they were made up by geniuses.

And, by the way, don’t confuse any of them with “all that and a bag of chips,” which connotes cool excellence rather than completeness.

That may not be much of a column, but for today it’s the whole Gretzky.

Over Skis and Under Par

In my former life as a titan of the insurance industry, my colleagues and I had an expression for someone who announced something before it was ready. We’d say that they had gotten “out over their skis.”

That’s an expression I found very handy but also confusing. I’m not a skier, but my general understanding is that you want to be over your skis. You’re in trouble if you’re ahead of, behind, or under your skis. Once you strap them onto your feet, pretty much the only place you ever want to be relative to your skis is over them. Given that, shouldn’t the expression be “out ahead of their skis”?

Google tells me that the expression started in the financial industry. That may be telling. I’d be willing to concede its accuracy if it had originated in the competitive skiing community.

Meanwhile, I also struggle with under and over par. I’m not a golfer any more than I’m a skier, but my general understanding is that the goal of the game is to be under par. The further over par you are, the worse you’re doing. The further under par you are, the better you’re doing.

So why do we say that a job poorly done is “under par” or “not up to par”? Clearly these expressions refer to golf terminology, but also clearly they ignore the nature of golf scoring.

I believe the nub of the problem here is that golf has a very unusual scoring convention. The low score wins. It’s pretty much taken for granted when you’re playing a sport - any sport - that you want to score points. At the end of the match - unless you’re playing golf - whoever has the most points is going to win.

So people take the idea of a goal that’s being targeted - in this case “par” - and superimpose on it the standard notion that a desirable outcome would be to exceed that target and an undesirable outcome would be to end up short of that target.

And as illogical as the expression may be, I don’t recommend trying to reverse it.

Let’s say a friend asks for your opinion on something they’ve done. You could tell them that it’s way, way below par - and you might mean it as a golf-rules-compatible high compliment. However, chances are that your friend is going to feel insulted.

Over My Head

Why is something that I can’t understand “over my head”? It sounds like I might be able to grasp the elusive concept if only I were taller.

This, by the way, is not to be confused with “in over my head,” which expresses being overwhelmed and is based on a metaphor of water depth.

Nor is it to be confused with someone “going over my head,” which expresses having one’s authority overruled and is based on visualizing an organizational chart.

Nor is it to be confused with “it went right over their head,” which is used when someone doesn’t get a joke or misses the significance of something. The image here is that something has passed that person by without leaving a trace. It’s not saying that they tried and failed to comprehend a difficult concept, but rather that the person was simply oblivious to the intended meaning of something.

In the it’s-too-hard-to-understand version of “over my head,” there are two related metaphors at work. One is size-related. Difficult or complicated concepts are imagined as being physically large. They may, for example, be hard to grasp, or difficult to get your arms around.

The other is height-related. The more abstract a concept is, the higher it’s considered to be, while a less abstract concept is considered more down-to-earth.

So the concept that’s over my head might either be too big for my small mind or too elevated for my lowly intellect.

One final over-head expression is “head over heels in love.” This is a lovely, evocative expression that doesn’t quite make sense. There’s nothing noteworthy about having your head over your heels.

It turns out that the history here is similar to “having your cake and eating it, too” that I wrote about in the first round of Confusing Expressions. The original expression made sense but then later became reversed.

The expression started way back in the 1300s as “heels over head in love” but became reversed sometime in the 1700s.

So I’m thinking it’s about time that we switched it back again. I invite all MacGougan at Large readers - as a small effort to make our language more logical - to please, if you haven’t already, fall heels over head in love with someone this week.

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CousinFest

Back in July of 2003, I participated in a family gathering at Cannon Beach, Oregon, a charming town alongside a huge ocean beach most notable for the very dramatic Haystack Rock.

We called it “CousinFest.” Here’s a group shot from that gathering.

CousinFest came at a tender moment in our family life. We’d recently lost my mother and grandmother. We didn’t know it at the time, but we were soon to lose a few more of our gathered family members as well.

Mom and Grandma had been key elements of the glue that held the different branches of the family together. I found myself not only missing them, but also wondering if the loss of them might lead to a loss of connection with other family members. I hoped that wouldn’t be the case.

Shortly afterwards, I wrote the following song lyrics.

COUSINFEST

Some family types took a notion
For a big bivouac by a rock in the ocean.
Well, sad to say I’m no Phi Beta Gamma-
Are you still my cousin since we lost our Grandma?

  	Well, I think so.
  	The answer is I think so.
  	I really kind of think so.
  	And let’s just leave it at that.

Maybe we was off a rocker;
A score of folk and a dog who plays soccer.
Well, I can’t quite tell if it’s a laugh or a drama-
Are we brothers and sisters since we lost our Momma?

  	Well, I think so.
  	The answer is I think so.
  	I really kind of think so.
  	And let’s just leave it at that.

It’s more than my small head can solve,
If I touch the rock will I evolve?

Independence Day sounds like a riot;
Not allowed on the beach, but it’s not very quiet.
Well, the sound can explain what speech just garbles-
Are we still one country if we’ve lost our marbles?

  	Well, I think so.
  	The answer is I think so.
  	I really kind of think so.
  	And let’s just leave it at that.

At room twenty-three, Meg and Scott’ll
Let you in if you bring a bottle.
Well, it’s hard to say who’s a host or moocher-
Will you be my family when we’re lost in the future?

  	Well, I think so.
  	The answer is I think so.
  	I really kind of think so.
  	And let’s just leave it at that.

In the intervening years, there have been various - mostly smaller scale - CousinFests. I was reminded of the original recently when we received photos from CousinFest 2026, which took place at Long Beach, Washington - not that far and not that different from Cannon Beach, Oregon.

Here’s the money shot. These are basically the kids from the 2003 picture, along with their mates and children.

• Was I right to be concerned?

Sure. Extended families drift apart all the time.

• Are we still a family now that we’re lost in the future?

Absolutely! Happily, I’m now in a position to venture a stronger position on this than “I really sort of think so.”

(Next: Another Round of Confusing Expressions)

Beach Song

My general practice with this column has been to end each series with lyrics to an original song related to the topic. I’ve gotten away from it a bit (it’s a Guideline and not a Rule), but found myself being inspired by the very simple experience of a day at the beach.

TAKE OFF YOUR SHOES

We come from the mountains and valleys and more
Like migrating birds we’re all drawn to the shore
We face the great vastness with little to spare
A bag and a blanket and maybe a chair
We drop our importance and don’t hear it fall
To sit by the sea is to know you are small.

Enjoy the vast views
And the comforting sound
The sky and sea blues
And the surf’s steady pound
So take off your shoes
This sand’s holy ground.

A day at the shore is a lifetime elapsed
Whatever we’ve built has already collapsed
The thirst for our roots has been mostly assuaged
Our hair has been bleached and our skin has been aged
But there is a peace as the day comes to close
Hiding like sand in the clefts of our toes.

Enjoy the vast views
And the comforting sound
The sky and sea blues
And the surf’s steady pound
So take off your shoes
This sand’s holy ground.

(Next: The Ties That Bind - A MacGougan at Large One-Off)

The Neighborhood

On our second day, we took a walk around the inn’s neighborhood. I enjoy walking around neighborhoods that are pretty and different from my own.

Is this real estate voyeurism? Let me say in my own weak defense that I don’t think so. I’m not ogling lustfully. I don’t covet the houses or long to own them. It’s an aesthetic experience, like strolling through an art gallery.

There’s a certain look to nice New England shoreline houses: classic lines, weathered shingles, usually white trim.

We saw some interesting weather vanes.

One unusual feature we saw on a couple of big yards was a waist-high metal fence with a turnstile. Really? Does one need a ticket to enter?

Here’s another interesting touch: a rooftop viewing platform.

In some cases, what was growing in the yard overshadowed the house itself.

The Inn and the Beach

The original Weekapaug Inn opened in 1899 on a piece of sandy land with the wonderful name of Quonochontaug Barrier Beach. (A barrier beach is a spit of land facing the ocean with a bay, salt ponds, or marshes behind it.) The inn building on the beach was destroyed by a hurricane in 1938. They decided to rebuild on a saltwater pond a short walk away from the beach. The current building opened in 1939. It’s a very nice place.

The inn offers various activities on the pond, including kayaking and rides on a motor launch. However, the real attraction for many of us is a short walk away - Quonochontaug. It’s an uncrowded ocean beach about two miles long.

There’s some controversy about how uncrowded it is. Entrance to the beach is restricted by the Weekapaug Fire District. This isn’t just a matter of signage. A gatekeeper meets you at the entrance to confirm your eligibility to proceed forward. You’re eligible if you’re a tax-paying local or a registered guest at the inn.

Now, you might wonder what a fire district has to do with ocean beach access. Beaches face many hazards, but fire has got to be pretty low on that list.

In Rhode Island, fire districts are used to provide miscellaneous governmental services. I believe the original idea was that this would enable regional fire departments, but it also provided a mechanism for local communities to exercise control over access to their beaches.

Depending on one’s point of view, this arrangement safeguards the health, beauty, and serenity of precious natural resources or it unfairly turns what should be a public good into a private club. The communities using fire districts in this way tend to be full of big, beautiful, expensive homes. You can understand the desire of homeowners to maintain the atmosphere of such places, but it isn’t a good look for rich neighborhoods to be gating off their ocean beaches.

Rhode Island arguably has more than its share of quirky practices and traditions. Personally, I’m inclined to cut them a lot of slack because Rhode Island is the state that brought the world a practical model for the separation of church and state. I know my church-less friends are grateful for this, but many of us churched folk are grateful as well. A quick glance at the world and its history is enough to tell us that the combination of religious and secular power is as bad for the church as it is for the state.

Did we boycott the beach because it wasn’t open to the public? No. We were complicit with the status quo and enjoyed the beach in all its cordoned-off tranquility. I was grateful for the small mercy that access to the beach didn’t require purchasing a multi-million dollar home, but could be obtained for the somewhat more reasonable cost of a one-night stay at the Weekapaug Inn.

Getting There

Linda and I were apparently married as infants, because we recently celebrated our 49th wedding anniversary. We decided to mark the occasion by spending one night at a posh seaside resort in Rhode Island.

A posh seaside resort because money is no object when you’re talking about the anniversary of the most important day in your life. One night because money might just possibly be an object the other 364 days of the year.

The resort lets you use their extensive facilities before your room is available and after you’ve checked out. Those of us who are cheapskate big-spenders like the idea of amortizing the cost of the hotel stay over two days of facilities use.

Many Connecticut residents prefer Rhode Island beaches to Connecticut beaches because the Connecticut beaches aren’t true ocean beaches. They’re all on Long Island Sound - which is a big body of water that looks like the ocean, but is in fact a bay. Once you get to Rhode Island, though, you can sit on a beach where there’s nothing but water between you and Europe.

The resort is less than a two-hour drive for us - hooray for small New England states! We decided to make a stop just before we got to the state line. There’s a little peninsula there called Barn Island that has a boat launch we like to use for our kayaks. It’s possible to kayak from Barn Island across to the back side of Napatree Point in Watch Hill, Rhode Island. It’s then a very short walk to the front side of Napatree Point, which is a long, beautiful, and uncrowded ocean beach.

Watch Hill, by the way, has many impressive mansions, including one owned by Taylor Swift. It doesn’t make a lot of sense to me that someone with a mansion in Watch Hill would choose to host a summer wedding at Madison Square Garden.

We came to Barn Island, not to kayak, but to explore on foot. The road to the boat launch is surrounded by trees, so we didn’t have any sense of what else was on the peninsula. We heard there were hiking trails and thought we’d take a look.

It turned out to be a revelation. There are hundreds of acres of tidal marshes, with woods on one side and Little Narragansett Bay on the other.

It’s a different sort of landscape than we usually see in New England, and I was glad we’d stopped. There was a downside, however. There were mosquitos and other biting insects. I’d put on some repellent, but it clearly wasn’t up to the task. The bugs made a good lunch of me.

As is often the case in such settings, the bugs didn’t bite Linda at all. And maybe that’s the secret to a long-lasting marriage. Sometimes you need to take one for the team. If you aren’t in a position to shower your wife with diamonds and furs, you can at least attract biting insects away from her.

Miscellaneous Surnames

So far in this series, we’ve covered surnames based on parentage, occupation, geography, and animals. What does that leave?

Colors is a good category. English language surnames include White, Black, Brown, Gray/Grey, Gold, and Green. I don’t know any families named Puce or Magenta, but that may just be my limited view of the world.

Red is a popular color for surnames, including Reid (Scottish), Roth (German), and Russo (Italian).

Huang/Hwang/Hoang are Chinese and Korean surnames meaning yellow. Kim is a Korean surname meaning gold.

Black, White, Silver, and Gold are probably occupation-based, referring to various types of metalsmithing. Green may be a toponym for someone who lived near a town or village green. Red-related names probably relate to a person’s complexion or hair color.

Here are some other categories with examples.

Buildings - Barnes, Castle, Church, Hall, House, Lodge, Mill, Tower, Wall

Trees - Ashe, Birch, Hawthorne, Oakes, Pine.

Objects - Bell, Crown, Diamond, Gates, Glass, Irons, Post, Stone

Most of these are probably toponyms - someone lived near a tower or a pine tree or a gate. Some of them may refer to an occupation.

What’s the story behind your surname? If you haven’t already, please drop a comment and give us the story.

(The Green family may have lived near here. See the picture at top for one possible ancestral home of the Tower family.)

(Next: One Night, Two Days in Rhode Island)