India pale ale (IPA) is a hoppy beer style within the broader category of pale ale.  The term "pale ale" originally denoted an ale brewed from pale malt.  Among the first brewers known to export beer to India was George Hodgson's Bow Brewery, on the Middlesex-Essex border.  Bow Brewery beers became popular among East India Company traders in the late 18th century because of the brewery's location near the East India Docks.  Demand for the export style of pale ale, which had become known as India pale ale, developed in England around 1840 and it later became a popular product there.  The pale ales of the early 18th century were lightly hopped and quite different from today's pale ales.  By the mid-18th century, pale ale was mostly brewed with coke-fired malt, which produced less smoking and roasting of barley in the malting process, and hence produced a paler beer.  Contemporary American IPAs are typically brewed with distinctively American hops, such as Cascade, Centennial, Citra, Columbus, Chinook, Simcoe, Amarillo, Tomahawk, Warrior, Neomexicanus, and Nugget.  Read more and see graphics at  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/India_pale_ale

Atomic chess is a chess variant.  Standard rules of chess apply, but all captures result in an "explosion" through which all surrounding white and black pieces other than pawns are removed from play.  Some variations additionally remove rules concerning check such that the king may be able to move into or remain in check.  In 1995 the German Internet Chess Server (GICS) introduced the game, based on rules one of its users collected from friends who played offline.  It was soon after incorporated into the Middle East Wild Internet Server (MEWIS) and other smaller servers before being implemented at Chess Live and Internet Chess Club in 2000, Free Internet Chess Server in 2003 and Lichess in 2015.   Read more and see graphics at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_chess

In the 3rd Century BCE, in the Hellenic Egyptian city of Alexandria, a librarian named Aristophanes had had enough.   He was chief of staff at the city’s famous library, home to hundreds of thousands of scrolls, which were all frustratingly time-consuming to read.  For as long as anyone could remember, the Greeks had written their texts so that their letters ran together with no spaces or punctuation and without any distinction between lowercase and capitals.  It was up to the reader to pick their way through this unforgiving mass of letters to discover where each word or sentence ended and the next began.  Aristophanes’ breakthrough was to suggest that readers could annotate their documents, relieving the unbroken stream of text with dots of ink aligned with the middle (·), bottom (.) or top (·) of each line.  His ‘subordinate’, ‘intermediate’ and ‘full’ points corresponded to the pauses of increasing length that a practised reader would habitually insert between formal units of speech called the comma, colon and periodos.  This was not quite punctuation as we know it--Aristophanes saw his marks as representing simple pauses rather than grammatical boundaries--but the seed had been planted.   When the Romans overtook the Greeks as the preeminent empire-builders of the ancient world, they abandoned Aristophanes’ system of dots without a second thought.  Cicero, for example, one of Rome’s most famous public speakers, told his rapt audiences that the end of a sentence “ought to be determined not by the speaker’s pausing for breath, or by a stroke interposed by a copyist, but by the constraint of the rhythm”.  As it spread across Europe, Christianity embraced writing and rejuvenated punctuation.  In the 6th Century, Christian writers began to punctuate their own works long before readers got their hands on them in order to protect their original meaning.  Later, in the 7th Century, Isidore of Seville described an updated version of Aristophanes’ system in which he rearranged the dots in order of height to indicate short (.), medium (·) and long (·) pauses respectively.  Moreover, Isidore explicitly connected punctuation with meaning for the first time:  the re-christened subdistinctio, or low point (.), no longer marked a simple pause but was rather the signpost of a grammatical comma, while the high point, or distinctio finalis (·), stood for the end of a sentence.  Spaces between words appeared soon after this, an invention of Irish and Scottish monks tired of prying apart unfamiliar Latin words.  And towards the end of the 8th Century, in the nascent country of Germany, the famed king Charlemagne ordered a monk named Alcuin to devise a unified alphabet of letters that could be read by all his far-flung subjects, thus creating what we now know as lowercase letters.  Writing had come of age, and punctuation was an indispensable part of it.  With Aristophanes’ little dots now commonplace, writers began to expand on them.  Some borrowed from musical notation, inspired by Gregorian chants to create new marks like the punctus versus (a medieval ringer for the semicolon used to terminate a sentence) and the punctus elevatus (an upside-down ‘;’ that evolved into the modern colon) that suggested changes in tone as well as grammatical meaning.  Another new mark, an ancestor of the question mark called the punctus interrogativus, was used to punctuate questions and to convey a rising inflection at the same time.  (The related exclamation mark came later, during the 15th Century.)  The three dots that had spawned punctuation in the first place inevitably suffered as a result.  As other, more specific symbols were created, the distinction between low, medium and high points grew indistinct until all that was left was a simple point that could be placed anywhere on the line to indicate a pause of indeterminate length--a muddied mixture of the comma, colon and full stop.  The humble dot was put under pressure on another front, too, when a 12th Century Italian writer named Boncompagno da Signa proposed an entirely new system of punctuation comprising only two marks:  a slash (/) represented a pause while a dash (—) terminated sentences.  The fate of da Signa’s dash is murky--it may or may not be the ancestor of the parenthetical dash, like those that surround these words--but the slash, or virgula suspensiva, was an unequivocal success.  It was compact and visually distinctive, and it soon began to edge out the last holdouts of Aristophanes’s system as a general-purpose comma or pause.  Keith Huston  Read more and see graphics at http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20150902-the-mysterious-origins-of-punctuation  Thank you, fellow librarian!  You have prompted me to take words from an Appalachian Christmas carol (I wonder as I wander) and change them to I wonder as I ponder.

Three national non-profit groups, the LaundryCares Foundation, the Clinton Foundation’s Too Small to Fail initiative, and Libraries Without Borders have launched a new Laundry Literacy Coalition.  This new alliance was formed as a collaborative effort to make early literacy resources available to underserved communities through local laundromats in communities nationwide.  Since 2015, the LaundryCares Foundation, Too Small to Fail, and Libraries without Borders have been focused on the role of laundromats in promoting children’s early literacy development.  Initiatives have included:  Free Laundry & Literacy Day events at local laundromats throughout the United States hosted by the LaundryCares Foundation and Too Small to Fail; “Wash Time Is Talk Time,” an assortment of early literacy tools and resources distributed to over 5,000 laundromats through a partnership between the LaundryCares Foundation and Too Small to Fail, and; “Wash and Learn,” an initiative to extend library services to laundromats through a collaboration between LaundryCares Foundation and Libraries Without Borders.  https://laundrycares.org/laundry-literacy-coalition/  See also http://laundromatlibraryleague.org/ and https://www.michiganradio.org/post/laundry-libraries-and-literacy-why-one-group-putting-books-laundromats and https://www.usnews.com/news/healthiest-communities/articles/2018-12-25/library-laundromat-program-puts-spin-on-child-literacy  Thank you, Muse reader!

fuddy-duddy  Most dictionaries say they don’t know where this term for an old-fashioned, narrow-minded and pompous person comes from.  It first appears in mainstream texts at the beginning of the twentieth century, with very little clue as to where it comes from.  Internal repetition has certainly helped its popularity, as it has with dilly-dally, helter-skelter, tittle-tattle, willy-nilly, and dozens of others.  There is one hint to where it originated:  a glossary of the Cumberland dialect published in 1899 contains an entry for duddy fuddiel, a ragged fellow.  Fuddiel seems to be a dialect form of fellow, while duddy is a Scots term meaning “ragged”.  What seems to have happened is that duddy fuddiel became inverted and changed into fuddy-duddy.  How this happened, or why the sense shifted from somebody ragged to somebody old-fashioned, is quite unclear.  There might be a clue or two in the sounds:  fuddy sounds like an amalgamation of fussy and faddy (recorded from early in the nineteenth century) and duddy is close in sound to daddy.  http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-fud1.htm

Stanley Plumly (1939-2019) Remembered at University of Maryland by Harriet Staff   Distinguished University Professor Stanley Plumly died April 11, 2019.  Plumly was born in Barnesville, Ohio and educated at Wilmington College and Ohio University, where he earned his PhD in English Literature.  He authored ten volumes of poetry, including Old Heart (2007), winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Paterson Poetry Prize, and finalist for the National Book Award.  His other volumes include In the Outer Dark (1970), winner of the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Award; Out-of-the-Body Travel (1978), nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award; Now That My Father Lies Down Beside Me:  New and Selected Poems 1970-2000 (2000); and most recently Orphan Hours (2012) and Against Sunset (2017).  He also authored four celebrated works of non-fiction, including Elegy Landscapes, Posthumous Keats, and An Immortal Evening, winner of the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism.  Plumly was a long-time contributor to Poetry magazine, and to the Kenyon Review, which has posted this page https://www.kenyonreview.org/kr-online-issue/in-memoriam-3/ in memory of the poet.  https://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2019/04/stanley-plumly-1939-2019-remembered-at-university-of-maryland  Stanley Plumly’s honors and awards included fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Ingram-Merrill Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts.  He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.  He taught at the University of Iowa and at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and was professor of English at the University of Maryland.  He served as Maryland’s poet laureate for several years. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/stanley-plumly

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2081  April 16, 2019