A.Word.A.Day with Anu Garg  In the late 19th century, men were often kidnapped to work on ships.  Since China was often the destination for these ships, Shanghai became a verb, meaning to recruit forcibly.  (The name Shanghai literally means upon-the-sea).  Shanghai may be the best-known example of a place name turning into a verb, but there are many such words in the English language.

birminghamize  (BUHR-ming-ham-aiz)  verb tr.  To render artificial.  After Birmingham, UK, where counterfeit coins were produced in the 17th century.

barbados  (bar-BAY-doz, -dos, duhs)  verb. tr.  To forcibly ship someone to another place to work.  After Barbados, an island country in the Caribbean, formerly a British colony.  Between 1640 and 1660 thousands of Irish people were sent by the British as indentured servants to work in Barbados and elsewhere in the Caribbean.  The name of the island is from Portuguese/Spanish barbados (bearded ones).

solecize  (SOL-uh-syz)  verb intr.  To make an error in language, etiquette, etc.  After Soloi, an ancient Athenian colony in Cilicia, whose dialect the Athenians considered as substandard.  The noun form is solecism

debunk  (di-BUNGK)  verb tr.  To expose the falseness of a claim, myth, belief, etc.  After Buncombe, a county in North Carolina.  In 1820, Felix Walker, a representative from that area, made a pointless speech in the US Congress.  While his colleagues in Congress urged him to stop and move to vote on an issue, Walker claimed that he had to make a speech “for Buncombe”.  Eventually, “Buncombe” became a synonym for meaningless speech, became shortened to “bunkum”, and then to “bunk”.  And if there’s bunk, it’s one’s duty to debunk.

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From:  Alan W. Ritch  Subject: Birminghamize and Coventrate  Having grown up on a farm between the cities of Birmingham and Coventry (Brum and Cov in local slang), I was less familiar with Birminghamize than with Coventrate.  The latter verb was coined soon after November 1940, when I was two weeks old.  The medieval center of Coventry was obliterated by German bombs, and other blitzed cities in the English provinces were said to be Coventrated, after the site of the first and worst destruction.  The verb the British coined in horror, the Third Reich adapted in pride:  koventreiren.

From:  Kathy Geer Root  Subject:  to be norwalked   Right here in small-town Ohio, we’re “famous” for being where the dreaded “cruise-ship” and “Chipotle” virus was first identified.  Yep, that is Norwalk, Ohio--home of what was first-known and named “Norwalk virus” until just a few years ago, when the name was Latinized to “norovirus” to reflect that it’s not just a single virus but rather a family.  “Norwalk virus” was initially identified in the late 1960s by Earl R. McLoney, MD, a family physician (and personal friend) who also served as county health commissioner at the time.

From:  Anderson Blenman  Subject:  Barbados  I have lived in Barbados all my life and had no idea that it was a verb.  As far as the comment on the origin of the name, it is generally believed here that the “bearded ones” refer to the bearded fig tree.  When the Portuguese first landed in the early 17th century, there was an abundance of the trees, giving rise to the name.
From:  Georgia Morehouse  Subject:  solecize  What an amusing memory this word conjured!  My husband and I were on a road trip through the Appalachians when we needed to refuel, so we pulled into a small filling station.  That’s when we noticed the sign on one of the pumps that said:  OUT OF ODOR.

From:  Robert Rietz  Subject:  debunk  As a faithful reader and a Buncombe County resident, I was proud of the witty signs hoisted during the March for Science held in Asheville this spring.  My favorite was “You know it’s serious when the nerds start protesting”.  The primary theme of the march was to debunk(!) the claims of the climate change deniers.

National Invasive Species Information Center (NISIC):  Gateway to invasive species information; covering Federal, State, local, and international sources   Invasive species are plants, animals, or pathogens that are non-native (or alien) to the ecosystem under consideration and whose introduction causes or is likely to cause harm.  Browse by subject or geography at https://www.invasivespeciesinfo.gov/index.shtml

The predicate of a sentence is the part that modifies the subject in some way.  Because the subject is the person, place, or thing that a sentence is about, the predicate must contain a verb explaining what the subject does.  Look at some of the shorter sentences in the English language:  “She danced.”  The subject of the sentence is “she,” the person about whom the speaker is speaking, but what is being conveyed or expressed about this person?  She performed an action, of course; she moved her body; she danced.  The word that modifies the subject “she” is the past-tense verb “danced.”  “It talked!”  It might be a baby saying a word for the first time, a parrot squawking “hello,” or even an inanimate object somehow bestowed with the power of speech.  What you know about “it” is that, according to the speaker, it spoke.  “Talked” modifies the subject “it.”  These sentences are very simple examples of what predicates are, since the predicate is expressed entirely by one word.  Predicates may also be whole phrases.  http://grammar.yourdictionary.com/sentences/what/what-is-a-predicate.html  See origin of predicate and uses as noun and verb at https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/predicate

Maputo is the capital of Mozambique.  It used to be known as Lourenço Marques.  Maputo is known as the City of Acacias (because many of its streets are bordered by acacias) or the Pearl of the Indian Ocean; it is located 77 km from the South African border.  The city was built on the northern bank of the Esturio do Esprito Santo, an estuary which leads to the Maputo Bay on the West.  Prior to the arrival of the Europeans in the area in the 1500s, the area was known as an exchange place between Arabs and Africans, and was known as Catembe, on the southern bank of the estuary.  In 1502, the Portuguese Antonio de Campos was the first European to get to Maputo Bay, but it was the navigator Lourenço Marques who explored it truly for the first time in 1544.  Initially, the bay was known as Delagoa bay, as it was the first maritime transit from Goa.  It was a village whose main economy was based on the ivory trade.  It is only in 1876, that the city became known as Lourenço Marques, after the navigator.  A commission was sent by the Portuguese government in 1876 to drain the marshy land near the settlement, to plant the blue gum tree, and to build a hospital and a church.  A city since 1887, it superseded the Island of Mozambique as the capital of Mozambique in 1898.  Today, Maputo is a melting pot of several cultures dominated by the Bantu and Portuguese, but also influenced by Arab, Indian and Chinese cultures.  It is also well-known for its beautiful colonial architecture.  Read more and see graphics at https://afrolegends.com/2013/02/18/why-the-name-maputo/

Zero-Tasking Day occurs on the day when Daylight Saving (not Savings) Time ends.  Zero-tasking is a term coined by Nancy Christie, an author and motivational speaker.  (I guess we can call her a “de-motivational” speaker.)  Christie encourages us to resist the urge to fill that hour with activity.  She wants us to kick back and relax, to be, not to do.  Christie’s holiday is an important reminder of the need to rest and recharge.  It also sounds like the perfect excuse for a nap.  http://www.worldwideweirdholidays.com/zero-tasking-day/ 

i.e. and e.g.:  What are they?  Why do we use them?  What do they mean?  And why don’t we just get rid of them?  A small issue in a larger project recently got me thinking about this topic.  To put it bluntly, an author who had otherwise produced a manuscript that was clear and easy to read, using plain and lively language with a minimum of clichés, jargon, and academic English, had chosen to liberally sprinkle one or two chapters with uses of i.e. and e.g.  I didn’t think much of it at the time, but later it nagged at me.  Why had the author done this, I wondered?  Because (I knew) it seemed appropriate.  To a great many writers, i.e.and e.g. are just two more tools in the box, ready to be used when needed.  The more common concern is using them correctly (e.g. = for example; i.e. = that is) and not confusing them.  It’s a very common error.  But many of those same writers, who strive for clarity, have become so familiar with these terms that they don’t recognize they are not only cliché-like in their overuse, but that their use is actually a kind of pretentious faux academic English.   It seems to me that using e.g. and i.e. falls into this category.  By themselves, maybe they’re not so bad.  But they can quickly become symptoms in a broader diagnosis of a greater out-of-touch state (dare we say cluelessness?) about contemporary style and best practice.  Which is why when I spent a little time thinking on and researching this issue, I rapidly came to the obvious conclusion: e.g. and i.e. should not be used.  Kick them out of your writing, and don’t let them back in, no matter how hard they bang on the door.  Christpher Daly  Read about the infamous butterfly effect at https://thebettereditor.wordpress.com/2017/07/31/i-e-and-e-g-youre-not-writing-in-latin-so-why-are-you-using-them/

Live broadcast of solar eclipse  From the comfort of your own couch or cubicle, you can have a front-row seat the total eclipse on August 21, 2017 thanks to a team from the University of Maine and a balloon floating three times higher than a commercial airliner flies.  The UMaine High Altitude Ballooning group will travel to Clemson University in South Carolina, where it will be one of many teams documenting the eclipse as part of the NASA-sponsored Great American Eclipse project.  Millions of Americans are expected to tilt their heads upward to catch a glimpse of a total eclipse of the sun, which will be blocked out as the moon passes in front of it.  The best views of the eclipse will be in a 70-mile-wide band stretching from Oregon to South Carolina.  The UMaine group, partnering with Montana State University, will launch a pair of high-altitude balloons about 110,000 feet above Clemson to capture a unique angle on the event, which will be broadcast live on the internet at nasa.gov/eclipselive.  “The live-stream video will show the curvature of the planet, the blackness of space, and the whole of the moon’s shadow crossing the earth during the eclipse,” Angela DesJardins, director of the Montana Space Grant Consortium, said in a statement.  “By live streaming it on the internet, we are providing people across the world an opportunity to experience the eclipse in a unique way.”  More than 50 other teams from across the country plan on doing the same, creating a network of high-altitude cameras to catch the action as the eclipse draws its path across the country.  Because they’ll be on the East Coast, UMaine’s balloons will be among the last to go airborne.  Nick McCrea  https://bangordailynews.com/2017/08/16/news/bangor/umaine-team-to-launch-high-altitude-balloons-for-live-broadcast-of-solar-eclipse/

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 1756  August 18, 2017  On this date in 1920, the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution was ratified, guaranteeing women's suffrage.  On this date in 1938, the Thousand Islands Bridge, connecting New York, United States with Ontario, Canada over the Saint Lawrence River, was dedicated by U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt.  On this date in 1958, Vladimir Nabokov's controversial novel Lolita was published in the United States.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/August_18