Politically, California remains blue: My state voted for Joe Biden over Donald Trump, 63.5 to 34.3 percent, and has a Democratic governor, two Democratic US Senators and a majority-Democratic Congressional representation.
But in our non-electoral lives, it was a very purple year.
Continue reading "Word of the year, California edition: Purple" »
| |
|
I’ve been thinking about outrage since listening to an episode of NPR’s “Hidden Brain,” “How Outrage Is Hijacking Our Culture, and Our Minds,” which originally aired on October 9. The episode centers on the research of Yale psychologist Molly Crockett, who has written that “moral outrage is all the rage online,” and that “digital media may exacerbate the expression of moral outrage by inflating its triggering stimuli, reducing some of its costs and amplifying many of its personal benefits.”
This week, a lot of outrage is directed at a phenomenon with an unrelated but similar-looking name: outage. I’m not the only one.
| |
|
By the time you read this, California may finally be getting some long-overdue rain – and some desperately needed clearing of the wildfire smoke that has been suffocating us for almost two weeks.
It’s been bad, but not as bad as in Butte County, where the Camp Fire is still not fully contained. Bay Area air-quality map via PurpleAir, November 19, 2018
For my latest Visual Thesaurus column I looked at how we talk about wildfires. (It’s a subject I’ve explored now and then here on the blog.) Full access is restricted to subscribers; (No longer paywalled!) Here’s an excerpt.
The November fires were caused in part by a drought so severe that it merits its own name: negative rain. “Every year we have a certain amount of rain that we expect as a result of historical patterns,” Andy Wood, a climate scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, told The Daily Beast. “Negative precipitation [comes] when you have a departure from that.” When there isn’t enough rain, the air gets “thirsty” because it can’t pull enough moisture from the ground. A new tool developed by NOAA, the Evaporative Demand Drought Index, or EDDI, measures this “thirst.” It’s being used by farmers and ranchers in the West, and has also come up in analyses of the California fires.
Blog bonus: The Camp Fire has virtually leveled Paradise, a once-lovely city of nearly 27,000 in Butte County, northeast of Sacramento. It’s a pretty memorable name, not least for its irony. But Donald Trump got the name wrong – not once but twice.
'Pleasure, what a name': Donald Trump confuses wildfire-hit California town Paradise pic.twitter.com/Lt5cGZaUdy
— The Independent (@Independent) November 19, 2018
What's interesting to me is not that Trump sometimes misspeaks but how he reacts when he realizes. Rather than apologize, he'll always say "or (the correct word)," as if it's a subjective choice between the correct word and the equally valid word he used. https://t.co/4QFhIEGbJZ
— Daniel Dale (@ddale8) November 19, 2018
UPDATE: The Baffler has a good story about the political and economic context for the fires, with a focus on the role played by the regional utility company Pacific Gas & Electric: “Despite the overwhelming evidence that PG&E has been responsible for some of California’s most grievous man-made disasters, time and time again, their executives have avoided substantive punishment in lieu of multimillion-dollar payouts to victims who have brought class-action lawsuits.”
| |
|
As if the wildfire devastation throughout California – and the thick, choking, persistent smaze here in the Bay Area – weren’t bad enough, the other day I learned about a new-to-me terror: firenadoes.
Firenado, aka fire whirl, fire devil, and fire twister. Source: Wikipedia
| |
|
On January 5, at its annual meeting in Salt Lake City, the American Name Society will select its names of the year for 2017. Names of the year are those “that best illustrate, through their creation and/or use during the past 12 months, important trends in the culture of the United States and Canada.” I won’t be attending this year, but I’ve made my own list and checked it at least twice. Feel like playing? I invite you to submit your own nominations in the four official categories.
| |
|
Here in the San Francisco Bay Area, we’re having our usual cool and foggy summer. But in the hotter inland and upland parts of the state, wildfire season is entering its third month. A couple of weeks ago, I drove home from Los Angeles on I-5, near where the poetically named Sand Fire was consuming more than 41,000 acres in the Santa Clarita Valley. The name suggested a hellish haboob, but in fact the fire was named for nearby Sand Canyon.
Most wildfires are named that way: after local landmarks. “The commander on the scene often uses a nearby geographical feature to describe the fire, but he's not bound by any official rules,” Daniel Engber wrote in a 2005 Slate article about fire-naming. “He first suggests a name to the interagency fire dispatcher, who passes it along in fire reports, dispatches, and so on.”
How, then, to explain the Cold Fire, which is currently raging in Napa and Yolo counties?
Cold Fire near Lake Berryessa, August 3, 2016. Photo via The (Santa Rosa) Press-Democrat.
| |
|
Pyrocumulus: A cumulus-type cloud triggered by a heat source on the surface. From Greek pyro- (combining form, "fire") and Latin cumulus ("heap" or "pile"). Pyrocumulus clouds may be caused by wildfires, volcanos, or nuclear explosions; the nuclear "mushroom cloud" is a type of pyrocumulus. (Source: Skybrary.)
The recent wildfires in Southern California have caused some spectacular pyrocumulus clouds. Here's a photo of one such cloud created by the Station Fire* on Mt. Wilson:
From a Flickr set by EricF2000. Used under Creative Commons license.
Watch a time-lapse video of pyrocumulus clouds caused by one of last week's wildfires in the Los Angeles area (via The Cloud Appreciation Society).
More posts about fire names here. For current California fire information, see the incident page of the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (CAL FIRE) website.
___
* The Station Fire was named for the communications towers on Mt. Wilson that transmit feeds to every television station in the L.A. basin.
| |
|
At 8 this morning the sky was cinder-gray and the sun was dull orange. I parked my car in the driveway for a couple of hours and returned to find it covered in a thin veil of ash. Even though we're 60 miles northwest of the fire that's currently wiping out thousands of acres of Santa Clara County wilderness, we're definitely within its range.
This week's fire started on Labor Day, just as the Day Fire did last year. They're calling the current "major incident" the Lick Fire, a name that manages to be both prosaic and poetic.
The Lick name is well known in these parts. James Lick (1796-1876) was a carpenter, real estate speculator, philanthropist, and patron of the sciences who had the good sense to fetch up in San Francisco in January 1848 with 600 pounds of chocolate he'd brought from Peru. A few days after he arrived, gold was discovered at Sutter's Mill. Today there are several schools named after Lick, as well as a section of freeway, the James Lick Mansion in Santa Clara, and the Lick Observatory on Mt. Hamilton, which is operated by the University of California. Lick is buried under the observatory, and it's that institution--ten miles from the start of the fire--that gives the fire its name.
"Lick" is apt in other senses, too. Lick "to pass the tongue over" is a very old word in English, with many cognates in world languages. It's often used metaphorically in expressions about water ("The waves licked at the shore") and, of course, fire ("The flames licked at the cottage walls"). Lick also has slang meanings: to whip, to beat, to defeat. All of which makes Lick an eerie and effective word with which to name a major wildfire.
As of today, the fire had burned nearly 19,000 acres and was 25 percent contained.
Other recent California wildfires with interesting names: the Moonlight Fire, the Lazy Fire, and the Quien Fire. Quién is Spanish for "who," but I haven't been able to find out why it's the name of this Monterey County fire (100 percent contained, by the way).
Read my posts about the naming of the Day Fire and the Angora Fire.
| |
|
Wildfire season has begun ominously early here in California. We're used to fires in September and October, after four or five rainless months, but last winter's near-drought created what the newsfolk like to call "tinderbox conditions." The Angora Fire, which started on June 24, is already the Lake Tahoe area's biggest wildfire in half a century: 3,100 acres consumed, 178 homes and 75 other structures destroyed. Firefighters don't expect to contain the fire until next Tuesday.
As always in California, politics and ecology play starring roles in the current disaster. (An alternate headline for the story could be "Nature bats last.") But my focus is language, so I want to talk about the name of the fire.
Unlike last year's Day Fire, which got its unusual name from the day it started (Labor Day), the Angora Fire was named in more typical fashion: after its geographic origin. The fire area comprises Angora Peak (elev. 8,658 feet), Angora Lake, and Angora Ridge Road. But there's no town named Angora in the vicinity, and "Angora" doesn't show up in the standard California place-name references, including Erwin Gudde's California Place Names: The Origin and Etymology of Current Geographical Names. So the place name's origin is a bit of a mystery, at least to me.
The word "Angora" has an interesting history. It's an old spelling of "Ankara," the capital of modern Turkey; the word comes from Greek ankylos, meaning "anchor" or "bend." Angora the place lent its name to Angora goats, known for their soft fur (which is spun into angora yarn); Angora cats and rabbits were named after the goats. There's an Angora in Oregon that was named in 1898 for the Angora goats a homesteader was raising nearby. It's possible that the various California places called Angora were named for a similar reason. But I'm guessing: if you know otherwise, please leave a comment and enlighten us all.
However it came to be attached to Lake Tahoe, Angora is a lovely, historic word that will have tragic associations for many years.
Photo of Angora Peak and Indian Rock Fallen Leaf Lodge, 1932, from Pomona Public Library.
| |
|
It's been a very bad year for wildfires all over the American West. For nearly a month now, even up here in the Bay Area, we've been getting regular updates on the Day Fire, which has burned more than 160,000 acres of Southern California's Los Padres National Forest since Labor Day. It's one of the largest wildfires in California history, and it has cost more than a million dollars a day to fight. As of October 1, it was 87 percent contained.
I grew up in Southern California, where wildfires were an annual phenomenon like the grunion run, only more dangerous. But all the fires I'd known were named for the places they burned: Malibu, Bel Air, Cedar (after Cedar Creek in San Diego County), and so on. I'd been wondering how the Day Fire got its unusual name. Did officials think it would be controlled in one day?
An email from a friend and neighbor who's visiting relatives in Southern California--and who'd asked the same questions--gave me an unlikely-seeming lead: "Because it started on Labor Day." Then why isn't it called the Labor Day fire?
I found my answer in an unexpected place: The American Spectator. Correspondent Reid Collins did some serious digging and came up with this explanation: two fires started on Labor Day; one was dubbed "Labor" (that fire was quickly controlled) and the other one "Day."
Who came up with these unusual yet pallid attempts at nomenclature? Collins ferreted out that answer, too: the dispatch office of the Angeles National Forest. "This is a fairly new procedure," Collins informs us. "Up until a couple of years ago, the honor of bequeathing the name fell to the 'incident commander' at the fire scene."
So now you know. And if you want to know even more, here are some places to start. Doc Searls, who lives near the fire area in Santa Barbara (and who is much better known as a co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto), has been posting firsthand reports on the Day Fire in his blog, and he's posted many terrific aerial and terrestrial photos of the fire on Flickr. (That's one of his shots at the top of this post.) For more on California wildfires and the catastrophic social planning--or utter lack of it--that has caused them, read Mike Davis's compelling Ecology of Fear. And for the complete song lyrics (from Lerner & Loewe's Paint Your Wagon) from which I excerpted the title of the post, go here.
| |
|
