Reading: J.M. Coetzee, Disgrace

Moving: walked 2.7 miles

Listening: NPR

Watching: ER

16 November 2000: Step stoep stoop

It was in the past several years that I, to my mind tardily, found out that the English word for a group of fish, "school," is related to the Dutch for shoal in some way. It makes a lot more sense than to think of scholarly fish. So anyway now I'm reading Disgrace and it's got a few words of South African English and some Afrikaans words that South African English has borrowed. Coetzee writes of someone sitting on a stoep. When I read that, I whooped, happy to have figured out something else.

I grew up in a Cape. The house, being a Cape, had no porch. There were two sets of stairs, front and back, leading to their respective doors. When we used the stairs as means of egress, we called them steps. Before my father built the deck (1988), we hung out, if hanging out was to be done, on what we called the "stoop."

"Stoop," like "yea" for "approximately," is a word I don't think I've heard often or ever outside my family. I never actively wondered about its etymology. But clearly it's the English pronunciation of the Dutch for "step" (or the Dutch for "stoop").

Today someone brought in yet more leftover Halloween candy. If someone anticipates so many trick-or-treaters that she buys so much candy that she has whole bags left two weeks later, does that mean she doesn't get as many kids as she anticipates or that she overcompensates? Anyway, Egg asked me if I wanted to go make a cookie run. When she came to my cube, she answered her own question, "Oh, you're eating a banana! You're so healthy, you don't want cookies!" This is because last week, when she decided to go for her first cookie run and asked me to accompany her, I exclaimed "No! I hate cookies!" as I gathered my sunglasses and wallet. I pointed out that today when I came back from the library (a tad late), she was eating a carrot and I was eating a hot dog (see "late"). Who's healthy?

Anyway, I said I wasn't at all healthy, because in addition to my banana I had partaken of the public Kitkats. "Kitkats!" exclaimed Egg, her eyes widening. "They're the best ever. I don't need cookies now!" She told me that she loves Kitkats with beer and asked me about that myth about beer and chocolate cake. Of this I had never heard. She got it from The Outsiders, when "Emilio Estevez's character--"

"Sodapop," I interrupted,* because I read the book a million and four times and have seen the movie maybe twice (which shocks Haitch).

"--has beer and chocolate cake for breakfast."

The book is pretty clear about chocolate cake for breakfast, but I don't remember Ponyboy telling us they had beer with it. Egg suggested I try a Kitkat with my next beer, and I said I was sure it was delicious if you liked beer to begin with, which I am far from doing.

A girl in my high school class told me that when she started drinking beer, she didn't like it either and would pinch her nose so that she couldn't taste it. In that case, I wondered, and still do, what's the point of drinking anything at all besides water? Just to get drunk?

Egg asked, "So you've never liked beer?"

"No," I replied, remembering, "I did like it when I was little."

Her eyebrows went up at that.

"After my father would mow the yard, he'd sit on the back stoop with a can--not a bottle, not a glass--of beer, pour some out for Sagi, give me a sip, take a chug himself."

"So you did like beer once!"

"Or at least my father." How I now analyze this is that I blamed my father for the divorce, blamed him and his alcoholism, decided all alcohol was bad and wrong, and by the time--long after Sagi's and well into Shadow's life--I was at the age to start drinking on my own, I had huge psychosomatic hurdle to overcome. I never have, and overall I'm glad of it. I've got way too much genetic tendency, way too much personal tendency, toward

So anyway this aprés-lawn-mowing ritual reminded me of "stoep." It was a word Egg had heard and understood but never used. This piqued my curiosity, and we went to another person (the donor of the Kitkats; everything connects) who is of Dutch extraction and grew up in one of those remnants of towns in Iowa that still speak Dutch or German or whatever the immigrant-settlers of 100 years ago spoke. The donor had never heard of "stoop" at all. So I went to ask Verm's replacement, who is also from Vermont and whom I shall also call Verm as they are in fact brothers, whether he was familiar with this word, whether it was maybe a New English regionalism. He wouldn't call stairs a stoop even if they had a nice wide landing at the top unless they had a little roof. Hmm.

* Dora tells me that Rob Lowe played Sodapop and Emilio Estevez Two-Bit. It is more in keeping with Two-Bit's character to have beer along with the chocolate cake the Curtis brothers always served for breakfast, so yesterday's effrontery at the idea of Soda having beer with breakfast was soothed. I didn't see the movie until well after it had launched its actors' careers, and so by the time I saw it, Emilio Estevez was Andrew Clark and Rob Lowe Billy from the roof and Johnny Cade wasn't Johnnycake but the Karate Kid and I never liked C. Thomas Howell as Ponyboy. Patrick Swayze is a good Darrell though, and Matt Dillon a good Dallas. Anyway, I always thought Rob Lowe and Emilio Estevez's roles should have been reversed, which is why I immediately named the movie-watcher's "Emilio Estevez's character" as Sodapop.

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Freaking out now. I'm adding books to my booklist and Rumer Godden, whose Croyartie vs. the God Shiva: Acting through the Government of India Nisou gave me for Christmas, an author who Desiree, whose booklist inspired me to update my own, has a whole page dedicated to, wrote Impunity Jane? Impunity Jane that I should have read way back when I first learned of its existence in Look Through My Window? Yet another wasted lifetime of books unread flashes before me.

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Bad wrongness here. The Evil They have changed the "ER" theme music. Pain and trauma. Theme music matters here, even if every time I try to hum the theme music to "Northern Exposure" I end up with a song from Graceland.

And have I said before I hate Robert "Rocket" Romano and I will never liked the actor Paul McCrane? It's like Meryl Streep in "Kramer vs. Kramer." He'll never recover.

OH! PLT pointed out a few seasons ago that that was Kurgan from "Highlander" as the HMO representative who was sleeping with Kerry Weaver. And by golly it was. The chick from "Highlander" is the alcoholic mother of an alcoholic teenager, as I realized in a rerun a few days ago.

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Blake is more of a computer addict than I am. I'm going back and forth between the couch and my desk, watching ER and doing my booklist during commercials, and while the show is on Blake pines away on the corner of the couch closest to my study and whines. When I pick him up to bring him with me to the desk, leaning forward pressing against my fingers with his little keel bone, holding his wings out, steering. Freak.

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Google: "stoep step etymology" = http://www.internetnow.co.uk/dutchusa/nlusword.htm

I love the web.

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