Ask naut what your vocabulary can do for you

I've just returned from a trip to Washington D.C. where I was visiting my brother. Among the places we visited this time was the U.S. Botanic Garden near the Capitol grounds. A placard within the garden reads: "Orchids are beautiful but not particularly delicate. Leathery leaves save water in windy, sunny treetop habitats; devious pollination schemes lure sex-starved insects who pollinate but remain unfulfilled." Rowr! Pretty racy writing for a functionary of the federal government.

Speaking of literature, I've moved on to reading another book this summer, In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex by Nathaniel Philbrick. From this account of the nineteenth century sinking of a whaleship by a sperm whale (the inspiration for Moby Dick, natch), I'm picking up a lot of archaic terms that I will probably never have occasion to use. Terms like scupper -- which is an opening at the edge of a ship's deck that allows water to overflow -- and cathead -- which is a wooden peg to which an anchor is secured.

I've been trying to think of a good reason to apportion part of my brain for the memorization of these terms. Like, maybe they would make good metaphors for some larger ideas? At one point in high school, a random rifling through the dictionary led me to the word remontoire -- a mechanism within a clock that provides the impulse to the pendulum. In effect, it's the timekeeper behind the timekeeper, which acts as a nice illustration of the Latin saying: "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?" ("Who watches the watchers themselves?"). There was a time when I wasn't familiar with this phrase -- when I was interviewing for the Computational Biology program at UPenn in the spring of 2001, to be exact. One of my interviewers was delighted to see that I had majored in Latin (in addition to something science-y), reminisced about his own experience taking Latin, and brought this phrase up... in Latin, of course. When I told him I didn't know what it meant, the smile passed from his face. The rest of the interview was just formality. How often I've wanted to turn back the hands of time (which a remontoire won't let you do) and say, "Why, of course I know what that means! Isn't just like a remontoire?"

Now I'm trying to think if scupper and cathead would make good metaphors for anything? Yeah, this is definitely worthy of my time, definitely going to help me graduate. But, hey, you never know when you're going to be at a cocktail party with pirates.