Amor Towles (b. 1964) is an American novelist.  Towles was born and raised in Boston, Massachusetts.  He graduated from Yale College and received an M.A. in English from Stanford University, where he was a Scowcroft Fellow.  When Towles was 10 years old, he threw a bottle with a message into the Atlantic Ocean.  Several weeks later, he received a letter from Harrison Salisbury, who was then the managing editor of The New York Times.  Towles and Salisbury corresponded for many years afterward.  As of this writing, his works include:  The Rules of Civility (2011), Eve in Hollywood (2013), A Gentleman in Moscow (2016), You Have Arrived at your Destination (online novella) (2019) and The Lincoln Highway (2021)  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amor_Towles  American pronunciation of Amor Towles sounds like ay·mor tow·uhlz 

Indochina, also called (until 1950) French Indochina or French Indochine Française, the three countries of Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia formerly associated with France, first within its empire and later within the French Union.  The term Indochina refers to the intermingling of Indian and Chinese influences in the culture of the region.  https://www.britannica.com/place/Indochina 

The Oxford English Dictionary attributes the earliest usage of cold feet in this sense to the writer and poet Stephen Crane.  In the 1896 edition of "Maggie:  A Girl of the Streets," Crane writes:  `I knew this was the way it would be.  They got cold feet.'  That is they lost courage or enthusiasm.  By the early 1900s, the phrase was being used on college campuses, and a few years later, the term `coldfooter' was applied to those who were afraid to fight in the Great War.  The wartime usage of `cold feet' has led some to claim that the phrase once referred to soldiers whose frostbitten toes prevented them from entering a battle, but it appeared long before the war in context that had nothing to do with the weather.  The phrase comes up twice in a popular German novel by Fritz Reuter, published in 1862, and both times it involved jokes.  In one case, the person losing his nerve, or getting cold feet, is a shoemaker.  So English-speakers may have translated the German idiom word for word.  Linguists call this a calque, or a loan translation.  The English word `superman,' for example, is a direct translation from the German ubermensch.  So the Germans who arrived in America in the latter half of the 19th century may have brought their cold feet with them.  On the other hand, the phrase may have a longer history.  Ben Johnson uses a similar expression in the play "Volpone" from 1605.  He referred to a Lombard proverb `Cold on my feet,' which means to have no money.  At least in a gambling context, having no money could lead a card player to get cold feet and leave the game.  Daniel Engber   https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4630502 

In 1904, Frances Hodgson Burnett interrupted an interviewer.  “Can’t we talk about gardens?” she asked.  “I love them.”  Then she predicted, “I’m going to write a garden book someday.”  It took her twenty years to fulfill her pledge, and she did not live to see it in print.  She had gotten an assignment from The Country Gentleman, a popular magazine, for a series of six gardening essays called “Gardening for Everybody.”  She began as her health was failing.  After her death, Vivian brought the manuscript of the one extended piece she had finished to a publisher.  In a sense, this short book is both gardening memoir and her bequest to the rest of us.  Vivian drew the book’s title from the concluding chapter of The Secret Garden.  It was fitting.  Just as the spirit of Lilias Craven had whispered “in the garden” to her husband to draw him back to their son, Burnett’s final work leaves us with a message to carry forward.  Garden where you are.  Garden with what you have.  Simply garden.  Marta McDowell  https://lithub.com/frances-hodgson-burnett-really-loved-gardens-even-secret-ones/

A.Word.A.Day with Anu Garg

brogue  (brohg)  noun  1.  A sturdy shoe typically with ornamental perforations and a wing tip.  2.  A heavy shoe of untanned leather.  3. A strong accent, especially Irish or Scottish when speaking English. 

From Irish and Scottish Gaelic brog (shoe).  The accent sense of the word apparently arose from this kind of shoes worn by the speakers.  Earliest documented use:  1587.

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From:  Suzanne Sweeney  I live in the village of Chittenango (an Iroquois word meaning “water flowing North”).  It is also the birthday place of L. Frank Baum who was the author of The Wizard of Oz.  Yes, our downtown sidewalks are paved with yellow bricks, and we have until recently been the site of an annual Oz Fest including a parade in which children and adults dressed as the characters from the book/movie.

From:  Linda Forrester  I’ve been a faithful and enthusiastic reader for a number of years now, and I’ve never known you to say anything that was incorrect, but there it was today.  Dorothy wore ruby slippers, not silver ones. 
Response from Anu Garg:   Sometimes two people can differ and both can be right.  Dorothy wore silver shoes in the book and ruby in the film.

From:  Donald Ardell  In 2013, I lost first place in a World Triathlon Championship in London by one second, due to wasting minutes fumbling around trying to get my running shoes on in a muddy transition field.  This led to work on the design of a shoe that can be entered without the need for hands, while at the same time doing what needs to be done after the bike leg of a triathlon.  The patented design also works for disabled folks and anyone with difficulty getting feet into shoes.  You can see how it works here and in this 30-second video of an early prototype.
From:  Mike Zim   The mention of shoe-buying always, always, brings to mind a 1946 The New Yorker cartoon.

From:  Scott Chase  During HS and college (early 60s), I sold brogans for Thom McAn and Florsheim.  Same shoe as a brogue and, in fact, we shoe dogs used the words interchangeably.

I watched on Netflix this weekend a documentary about Bob Ross, Bob Ross:  Happy Accidents, Betrayal & Greed.  Bob Ross was the TV personality who did 30-minute paintings on PBS TV for over 11 years.   His quotation is:  “We don’t make mistakes, just happy little accidents.”  Sandra Speizer 

Baseball has been known as America’s “national pastime” since the 1850s.  While the sport may have been surpassed by football in the TV ratings, there’s still something about wooden bats, leather gloves, and grass-and-dirt diamonds that feels distinctly American.  And distinctly literary.  Baseball appears in postmodern comedies like Robert Coover’s The Universal Baseball Association (1968), horror stories like Stephen King’s Blockade Billy (2010), fabulist novels such as W.P. Kinsella’s Shoeless Joe (1982), YA fantasy like Michael Chabon’s Summerland (20021), and works of literary realism like Chard Harbach’s The Art of Fielding (2011) and Emily Nemens’s The Cactus League (2020).  Pick a literary genre and you can find baseball books.  Lincoln Michel  https://lithub.com/why-is-baseball-the-most-literary-of-sports/ 

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2447  October 29, 2021