IVY BALDWIN, FLIGHT PIONEER  Ivy Baldwin (born William Ivy 1866-1953) was an American balloonist, aeronaut and high-wire performer  He is credited with being the first aviator to be shot down during wartime in the U.S. during the Spanish–American War.  In 1877 he performed in Thayer Dollar Circus as a tightrope walker.  He later joined with Thomas and Sam Baldwin—billed as "The Baldwin Brothers"—performing high wire acts as well as balloon ascensions and parachuting.  The Baldwin Brothers performed using handmade balloons filled with hot air which would ascend to 2500 feet as Ivy Baldwin performed acrobatics and would parachute to the ground.  He became a solo performer in 1893 and joined the U.S. Army Signal Corps the following year as a Sergeant in the position of piloting and maintaining their demonstration balloon.  In 1898 he was the pilot of the hot air balloon that gave U.S. troops location information of Spanish snipers before the Battle of San Juan Hill.  The balloon was shot down on June 30, 1898, and landed in the Aguadores River.  Baldwin was later honorably discharged and he took fragments of the balloon with him which he would sell when he performed, dubbing himself "the air hero of the late War".  He celebrated his eighty-second birthday by tightrope walking 125 feet above a canyon formed by the South Boulder Creek in Colorado, a crossing he'd made 80 times in 40 years.  He was the first inductee to the Colorado Aviation Hall of Fame in 1969.  He was selected to be in the Nevada Aerospace Hall of Fame for being "the first person to successfully fly an airplane in the State of Nevada" which he accomplished on June 23, 1910.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivy_Baldwin

IVY BALDWIN, CHOREOGRAPHER  Ivy Baldwin is a NY-based choreographer, performer, teacher, and founder of Ivy Baldwin Dance.  Baldwin is a 2014 Guggenheim Fellow, 2014 BAM Fisher Artist-in-Residence, and 2013 Movement Research Artist-in-Residence.  Since 1999, Baldwin has received commissions from the Brooklyn Academy of Music, New York Live Arts, The Chocolate Factory, Dance Theater Workshop, The Wooden Floor, Barnard College, Dixon Place, and Dance New Amsterdam.  Her work has also been presented by Lincoln Center Out of Doors, New Museum, Danspace Project, Movement Research at Judson Church, Symphony Space, and La MaMa E.T.C and has toured nationally and internationally including: Tanz im August (Germany), Dans Contemporan Festival (Romania), American Dance Institute, Philadelphia Fringe Festival, and Appel Farm Arts and Music Center.  Baldwin regularly teaches, choreographs, and sets work within the university system and is a graduate of the North Carolina School of the Arts and NYU Tisch School of the Arts MFA program.  http://www.meredithboggia.com/ivy-baldwin/

A funambulist is a tight-rope walker or rope dancer.  The word comes from the Latin funambulus with the same meaning (yes, the Romans had tight-rope walkers, too:  it was a popular public spectacle).  It’s a compound of funis, “rope” (the source also of our funicular, a cable railway) and ambulare, “to walk”.  The Latin word evolved into the standard term for the concept in the Romance languages, for example in the Italian funambolo and French funambule.  The word can also be used in a figurative sense to mean somebody who is mentally agile.  http://www.worldwidewords.org/weirdwords/ww-fun1.htm

“Choir” came to English through the Old French form “cuer,” which in Middle English became “quere.”  This slowly became “quire” by about the 15th century.  The word retained most of the meanings of the Latin “chorus,” which entered English itself in the 16th century, but “quire” was used primarily in religious contexts while “chorus” tended to more secular use.  “Quire” was also used to mean the specific part of the church or cathedral reserved for the singers, which was often separated from the rest of the church by a latticework screen of some sort.  The “quire” spelling stayed in place until the end of the 17th century, when the spelling “choir” (which the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) deliciously terms “fictitious”) was adopted.  The rationale was to “Latinize” the word by analogy to “chorus,” but because the pronunciation “quire” was so deeply rooted in popular usage, the result was a word (“choir”) that bore absolutely no resemblance to the way it is said.  http://www.word-detective.com/2014/11/quire/

'Living with a Dead Language' proves that Latin isn't really dead at all by Danny Heitman   When the recession struck in 2008, Ann Patty’s employer downsized, forcing her to retire at 58 from her job as a high-powered editor for a major publishing house.  She was financially secure, but the transition from Manhattan to a permanent home in rural New York proved challenging.  There was, first and foremost, the question of how she would spend her time.  Patty decided to learn Latin, and Living with a Dead Language is the chronicle of her odyssey to understand the language of the Roman Empire.  Alibi, we’re told, comes from a Latin word for “elsewhere.”  Alias comes from a Latin term for “other.”  “Dilettante” derives from delecto, delectare, meaning “to delight, charm, interest.”  When we speak or read or write, we are, inevitably, connecting with a voice not that different from Plutarch’s, Pliny’s, or Cato’s.  Patty isn’t the first retiree to find anxiety in a country retreat, turning to the Latin masters as sources of insight and instruction.  Michel de Montaigne did much the same thing in the 16th century, essentially creating the personal essay to record his experiences.  https://www.csmonitor.com/Books/Book-Reviews/2016/0622/Living-with-a-Dead-Language-proves-that-Latin-isn-t-really-dead-at-all

The word romance connotes love and wooing, but when it has a capital R, as in Romance languages, it probably refers to a set of languages based on Latin, the language of the ancient Romans.  Latin was the language of the Roman Empire, but the classical Latin that was written by the literati like Cicero was not the language of daily life.  Romans spoke and wrote graffiti in a less polished language than they used in their literature.  Even Cicero wrote plainly for personal correspondence.  The simplified Latin language of the common (Roman) people is called Vulgar Latin because Vulgar is an adjectival form of the Latin for "the crowd."  This makes Vulgar Latin the people's language.  It was this language that the soldiers took with them and that interacted with native languages and the language of later invaders, particularly the Moors and Germanic invasions, to produce the Romance languages throughout the area that had once been the Roman Empire.  By the 6th century, to speak in the Latin-derived language was to fabulare romanice, according to Portuguese:  a Linguistic Introduction, by Milton Mariano Azevedo (from the Spanish and Portuguese Department at the University of California at Berkeley).  Romanice was an adverb suggesting 'in the Roman manner' that was shortened to romance; whence, Romance languages.  N.S. Gill  https://www.thoughtco.com/romance-languages-120610

non-apology:  "I apologize to those who were offended."  detached apology:  “I apologize for having to re-accommodate these customers” failing to mention the larger problem--for instance, the method used for removal of a passenger on a plane.  apology allergy:  Avoid apologizing as much as possible or change the subject.  evolving apology:  Keep re-wording the apology.  See also The Fine Art of Apology:  When, Why, and How to Say ‘I’m Sorry’ by R. Kevin Grigsby at https://www.aamc.org/download/164762/data/grigsby_fine_art_of_apology.pdf and Teaching how to apologize:  EFL textbooks and pragmatic input by Holger Limberg at http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1362168815590695?journalCode=ltra

The reasons we reciprocate yawns is hard-wired into our brains, a primitive reflex that if better understood could help treat disorders such as Tourette syndrome.  Researchers at the University of Nottingham in England say yawning is triggered involuntarily when others yawn because of a human trait called echophenomena.  Ecophenomena drives us to imitate other people's words and actions, researchers explained in a study published August 31, 2017 in Current Biology.  See article at http://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(17)30966-1  Ecophenomena

is also found in neurodevelopment conditions such as Tourettes, autism and epilepsy, for which the researchers are trying to find alternative treatments.  Sean Rossman  https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2017/08/31/why-yawns-contagious/621515001/

The Library of Congress has put the papers of Alexander Hamilton online for the first time in their original format.  The Library holds the world’s largest collection of Hamilton papers—approximately 12,000 items concentrated from 1777 until Hamilton’s death in 1804, including letters, legal papers and drafts of speeches and writings, among other items.  Now, for the first time, these original documents—many in Hamilton’s own hand—will be available for researchers, students or the generally curious anywhere in the world to explore, zoom in and read at loc.gov/collections/alexander-hamilton-papers/.  In addition, the Library recently acquired 55 items, previously privately held—mostly letters from Hamilton’s powerful father-in-law, General Philip Schuyler, to him and his wife—that have also been digitized and made available for the first time.  Most of these have never been published.  https://www.loc.gov/item/prn-17-119/alexander-hamilton-papers-now-online/2017-08-28/

September is the ninth month of the year in the modern day Gregorian calendar and its predecessor, the Julian calendar.  The month kept its original name from the Roman calendar in which septem means “seven” in Latin marking it as the seventh month.  Its birth flowers are the forget-me-not, morning glory and aster.  The birthstone for September is the sapphire which means clear thinking.  https://www.timeanddate.com/calendar/months/september.html

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 1764  September 1, 2017  On this date in 1905,  Alberta and Saskatchewan joined the Canadian confederation.  On this date in 1914, St. Petersburg, Russia, changed its name to Petrograd.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/September_1  Word of the Day  desire line  noun  A path that pedestrians or vehicles take informally rather than taking a sidewalk or set route, for example, a well-worn ribbon of dirt cutting across a patch of grass, or a path in the snow.