Essay-turday 18

1. The first known mention of this word was in the 2nd century A.D. in a poem called De Medicina Praecepta by Serenus Sammonicus, physician to the Roman emperor Caracalla, who prescribed that the sufferer from the disease wear an amulet containing the word written in the form of an inverted cone. This, he explained, diminishes the hold of the spirit of the disease over the patient.

Other Roman emperors, including Geta and Alexander Severus, were followers of the medical teachings of Serenus Sammonicus and are likely to have used the incantation as well.

Which word?

2. The earliest known use of the term is from a short story by Zach Wright in the January 30, 1937, issue of Lee’s Magazine. A Russian sergeant in the French Foreign Legion asks the narrator,

“Feldheim… did you ever hear of ______    _____?”

When I said I had not, he told me all about it. When he was with the Russian army in Romania, around 1917, and things were cracking up, so that their officers felt that they were not only losing prestige, money, family, and country, but were being also dishonored before their colleagues of the Allied armies, some officer would suddenly pull out his revolver, anywhere, at the table, in a café….

3. •The name X tree was given by a group of Mormon settlers who crossed the Mojave Desert in the mid-19th century. The tree’s unique shape reminded them of a Biblical story in which X reaches his hands up to the sky in prayer. Ranchers and miners who were contemporary with the Mormon immigrants also took advantage of the X tree, using the trunks and branches as fencing and for fuel for ore-processing steam engines. It is also called Izote de desierto. It was first formally described in the botanical literature as Yucca brevifolia in 1871 as part of the Geological Exploration of the Fortieth Parallel. Identify X.

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