Glamping means “glamorous” camping.  Flexcation mean longer stays or midweek visits.  Staycation means a vacation spent at or close to home. 

The story of the Resolute Desk goes back to 1855 when a whaler named George Henry found the abandoned ship the H.M.S. Resolute off Baffin Island in the Arctic.  The ship was returned to England and served the British Navy for many more years.  After England finally decommissioned the ship, its oak timbers were used to create a desk weighing more than 1,000 pounds.  Given by Queen Victoria to President Rutherford B. Hayes in 1880, this desk has been used on the Second Floor of the White House, the Ground Floor, and, most notably, the Oval Office.  https://www.whitehousehistory.org/questions/what-is-the-resolute-desk-and-where-did-it-come-from

President Franklin D. Roosevelt requested that the rear kneehole of the Resolute Desk be fitted with a panel carved with the presidential coat of arms but he did not live to see it installed in 1945.  Following the Truman renovation of the White House (1948–1952), the desk was placed in the broadcast room on the ground floor where it was used by President Dwight D. Eisenhower during radio and television broadcasts.  It was first used in The Oval Office in 1961 at the request of President John F. Kennedy after his wife, Jackie, found the historic desk covered in a green cloth.  President Lyndon B. Johnson selected another desk for his office and the Resolute Desk was loaned to the Kennedy Library for a traveling exhibition from 1964–1965 and then was taken to the Smithsonian Institution for exhibit during 1966 and 1967.  In January, 1977, President Jimmy Carter requested that the historic desk be returned to the White House for use, once again, in the Oval Office.  In 1981, President Ronald Reagan also chose to use this desk in the Oval Office.  President George Bush used it in the same office for five months in 1989 before having it moved to his Residence Office.  On January 20th, 1993, the Resolute Desk was returned to the Oval Office for use by President Clinton.  See picture of the desk at http://www.thepresidentsdesk.com/history/ 

THE MUSER FORGOT to put butter in her pancake batter once, but no one seemed to notice.  Which leads to a few thoughts:  In your recipes, try cutting salt by half, sugar by half, and fat by half.  Then try leaving out those ingredients altogether. 

The British comedian Frankie Howerd used to say in mock astonishment:  “I’m flabbergasted—never has my flabber been so gasted!”  That’s about as good an explanation for the origin of this strange word for being surprised or astonished as you’re likely to get.  It turns up first in print in 1772, in an article on new words in the Annual Register.  The writer couples two fashionable terms:  “Now we are flabbergasted and bored from morning to night”.  (Bored—being wearied by something tedious—had appeared only a few years earlier.)  Presumably some unsung genius had put together flabber and aghast to make one word.  The source of the first part is obscure.  It might be linked to flabby, suggesting that somebody is so astonished that they shake like a jelly.  It can’t be connected with flapper, in the sense of a person who fusses or panics, as some have suggested, as that sense only emerged at the end of the nineteenth century.  But flabbergasted could have been an existing dialect word, as one early nineteenth-century writer claimed to have found it in Suffolk dialect and another—in the form flabrigast—in Perthshire.  Further than this, nobody can go with any certainty.  https://www.worldwidewords.org/weirdwords/ww-fla1.htm 

The roots of Montezuma Orchard Restoration Project began when co-founders Jude and Addie Schuenemeyer got into the nursery profession in 2001.  They originally ran a nursery that had been in business for over 50 years and had a lot of older clientele, who often asked about apple varieties they remembered enjoying as children.  In asking around, the Schuenemeyers learned the area’s rich history, discovered other rare varieties, and realized just how many old trees still grew here--quite often with the descendants of settlers who planted these old orchards still living on the original farms or at least in the area.  After the couple purchased a peach orchard in McElmo Canyon, Jude attended an orchard restoration workshop in Capital Reef with some of our Nation’s most renowned fruit enthusiasts, and taught himself to graft from books.  Thus began their efforts to find and graft from heritage trees returning one to the trees owners when possible, bringing a piece of living history back to the place where the parent tree stood for more than 100 years.  https://montezumaorchard.org/montezuma-orchard-restoration-project-morp/about/ 

In Australia, crisp-skinned sausages help grease the wheels of democracy.  On many an election day, humble sausages, also called snags, are barbecued outside polling areas either for free or to raise money for local causes.  Slingers of “democracy sausages” can be sure to get lots of customers, since not voting in Australia gets you fined.  “Sausage sizzles” were already an Australian tradition, even before they achieved civic importance.  At these fundraising events, school and community groups sell sausages doused in tomato or BBQ sauce and housed inside sliced white bread.  Onions are common but usually cost extra.  Many sausage sizzles outside of the election season happen at Bunnings hardware stores, which rent grilling space to fundraisers.  In 2016, sausage sizzling at the polls reached its highest profile yet.  During the year’s federal election, Twitter released a snag-on-bread emoji to accompany its #ausvotes hashtag, while #democracysausage experienced a major uptick.  Election Sausage Sizzles, a site that maps where voters can track down tasty sausages to accompany their ballot, recorded 1,992 sizzles and bake sales at the polls.  And social media seized on Opposition leader Bill Shorten’s gaffe of eating a democracy sausage from the middle instead of the end.  All the hype resulted in democracy sausage beating out “deplorables” and “smashed avo” (avocado toast) to become Australia’s 2016 word of the year, as decreed by the Australian National Dictionary Centre.  Due to mandatory voting, Australia has one of the highest voter turnouts in the world.  And really, a sausage is cheaper than the $20 fine for not voting.  https://www.atlasobscura.com/foods/democracy-sausage-australia 

Chock-a-block is actually a fairly widely known North American term, I’m told.  In Britain, it’s now common to hear the abbreviated forms chocka (or chocker), which are both from World War Two services’ slang, and in Australia the closely related chockers.  Chock here is the same word as in chock-full, jam-packed full or filled to overflowing.  One meaning of chock in the nineteenth century was of two things pressed so tightly against each other that they can’t move.  This led to the nautical term that’s the direct origin of the phrase.  Block refers to the pulley blocks of the tackle used for various hauling jobs on board ship.  These worked in pairs, with the ropes threaded between them.  When the men hauling tackle ropes had hoisted the load as far as it would go, the two pulley blocks touched and could move no further.  They were then said to be chock-a-block, or crammed together.  The origin of chock is complicated and not altogether understood.  It’s clear that there has been some cross-fertilisation between it and chock in the sense of a lump of wood used as a wedge to stop something moving.  That’s closely enough related to our sense to make it seem as though it might be the same word.  But the experts think that chock in chock-a-block actually came from chock-full.  That has been around at least since 1400.  It comes from a different source, the verb chokken, as in the Middle English phrase chokken togeder, crammed together.  This in turn may be from an Old French verb choquier, to collide or thrust.  One of the problems of working out the origin has been that chock-full has appeared in several different spellings—including chuck-full and choke-full—reflecting users’ uncertainty about where it comes from.  https://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-cho3.htm 

SAVE TIME  Steam salmon atop rice as it cooks.  ADD COLOR  Sprinkle cocoa powder, paprika or cinnamon.   MODIFY  If you don’t have a waffle iron, use a baking pan with a lip or an electric indoor grill suitable for cooking pancakes. 

onionskin, an Americanism dating back to 1875–80; onion + skin, is a thin, lightweight, translucent, glazed paper, used especially for making carbon copies.  https://www.dictionary.com/browse/onionskin 

“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”  “Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much.”  ― Irish poet and playwright Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde (16 October 1854 – 30 November 1900), author of The Picture of Dorian Gray.

WORD FOR OCTOBER 16  saveloy noun   (chiefly Australia, Britain, New Zealand) A seasoned and smoked pork sausage, normally purchased ready-cooked.  https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/saveloy#English  October 16 is recognized by the United Nations as World Food Day to highlight the importance of food security and good nutrition, and the need for action against hunger. 

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2272  October 16, 2020