in Anne Fadiman's Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Readerhi, D she uses Dante's concept of the sempiternal rose as follows:

"It would take an epic...to do justice to the tools purveyed by the Sempiternal Rose of mail order, the 1902 Sears, Roebuck catalogue"

i'm not sure i understand her meaning here; Paradiso's offering of the Mystic Rose as the clustering of souls around the Deity, with those closest being the brightest and nearest in the quality of love, doesn't seem to translate well for me.

does anyone use this metaphor, and if so could you please share another example of its usage?

Yes, I use this phrase all the time!

But seriously, isn't she just condensing the meaning of 'still blooming (after all these years)'? hi, paul simon

yeah, I doubt that she is offering up the SR catalog as being Mystic, simply eternal.

hmm, it only just now occurred to me to look sempiternal up, to see if it can stand on its own as an adjective, and the etymology (from Latin sempiternus : semper, always + aeternus, eternal) suggests that the word is self-redundant.

i doesn't make sense that it can be superlative to 'eternal', since there can be nothing beyond eternity. in what context would one use 'sempiternal' as opposed to simply 'eternal', except as a symptom of euphuism?

It is very hard for us to understand the magical meaning the early Sears Roebuck catalog to the disadvantaged rural population of 1902. For the first time they could dream of acquiring luxuries they had never seen before.

magical meaning the early Sears Roebuck to the disadvantaged rural population of 1902.

Not to mention an eternal supply of toilet paper.

For the first time they could dream of acquiring luxuries they had never seen before.

Yes! like this gem, which Fadiman quotes:

"LADIES, YOU CAN BE BEAUTIFUL. No matter who you are, what your disfigurements may be, you can make yourself handsome as any lady in the land by the use of our FRENCH ARSENIC WAFERS"

no wonder they died young back then.

It is very hard for us to understand the magical meaning the early Sears Roebuck catalog

Even these days anyone posted overseas by military knows one of the best things to have is a Sears catalogue! Heaven be praised for the Military Postal Services.

That's why we call it the "Wish Book."

...and arsenic's bad enough... but French arsenic? Yuck I'll have the Old Lace to go, please.

well, arsenic-- in very small quantities tend to make the skin whiter (well actually-- it destroys red blood cells-- and make you anemic-) but its not the only the only poison used in makeup-- even today "red" lipstick uses coal tar dyes-- (take a lump of coal-- heat it with out any oxygen-- it will melt, and smoke)-- take the tar like reside and mix it with alcohol and fat-- and sell it for $10 for less than an ounce--Voila! Lipstick. (Coal tars are know to be carcinogenic.– But the thought is you don't "eat" lipstick.)

Do you ever read the ingredients list for makeup? iron (usually an oxide) for blush-- or eyeshadow-- copper too, (and copper is a poison too, just not as strong a poison as arsenic) titanium, too. Cleopatra uses eyeshadow made from kohl– a soft lead compound– and Queen Elizabeth (I) used a lead oxide to powder her face white.

Don't think "natural" cosmetics are better-- some dyes are made from soaking dead insects in alcohol to dissolve there their "shells"--ecto- skeletons- for dyes.. (Yummy!)

>But the thought is you don't "eat" lipstick.

I read somewhere not too long ago that the average US'n woman inadvertently ingests something like 8 pounds of lipstick over the course of a lifetime. So much for not eating lipstick...

How about bat poop (called guano) for mascara. Now you know why I hate make-up!

Since the only sizable deposits of bat guano are in large caves inhabited by vampire bats as well as insect eating bats, the droppings may be heavily contaminated with rabies virus, of which vampire bats are often carriers. Not merely a yucky ingredient for cosmetics, a potentially lethal one!

Oh the things we women do for beauty!--

I did't know about the guano connection-- does it have to be bat guano(Satin)? I didn't think there was much of a market left for guano-- NY South Street Museum has an old 3 masted sailing ship that was a guano carrier-- and it hasn't carried any cargo for 30 years or so, and had has been cleaned and painted.. and it still stinks! -- I would not have wanted to be a crew member when there was a fresh cargo aboard!

And Dr bill is the rabies vaccine found in excetia? I know it is found in saliva, and tear ducts (there was a case about ten year ago of a out doors/free lance lumberjack who was killed in a car accident-- he had signed a donor card-- and his cornias were transplanted.. the recipient later died of rabies.. Its thought the lumberjack had contracted rabies (which lead to his car accident) unknowingly..

and most makeup compounds are sterilized as they are made... I hope the ones that use bat guano are!

Dear of troy: I have read that bat urine can have rabies virus in it, and since it is in the saliva, I would expect it to be in feces. I have read about spelunkers (cave enthusiasts) getting rabies presumably from contact with bat droppings. I can't see any justification for making cosmetics from loathesome materials. New England was free of rabies fifty years ago, and so was Canada. But occasional bats were found to be rabid, and it spread to animals that lived in same caves, presumably. The biggest threat now is from racoons, who can be carriers without any symptoms. I also read of a corneal transplant patient dying of rabies. The donor was said to have been a forest ranger, who died of rabies which was not diagnosed until after the corneal transplant patient died.
I saw a bunch of URL's about bat guano and rabies virus, but none were suitable for including here.

If you don't mind a non-word digression, I can tell you some things about guano. In the late 60's, I acted as a ship's husband (vessel and charterer's agent) for ships importing guano from Chile. It was sold by a huge company called Chilean Nitrate Corp. Back then there were literally mountains of guano deposited by birds on the shore and islands in Chile. It was dug up with bulldozers and cranes with huge clamshell buckets and loaded in bulk in ships and brought here, when the process was reversed. It was a dry whitish-grey powder with very little odor. We also took care of ships importing fish meal, also from Chile. Fish meal was made from the small fish which the birds ate to produce guano, and was a brown coarse powder also with very little odor when dry, imported in 100-lb. bags. But if fish meal was allowed to get wet, not only did it smell to high heaven, it would also catch fire by spontaneous combustion, like a manure pile. No one wanted to get within 2 blocks of our dock when fishmeal was being worked in rainy weather. One of my coworkers took a bag home to put on his roses and by the next day had at least 50 cats digging up his garden. Both of these industries were done in by El Niño, which caused a shift in the ocean currents so that the vast schools of anchovies, which were used for fish meal and eaten by the birds, moved away from the coast of Chile and have never returned.

Not to argue with a doctor about this (and at the risk of incurring the "Wrath of AnnaS"® for getting off word-topic) but I would question the ability of the rabies virus to survive any appreciable length of time out side the host.

hmm, it only just now occurred to me to look sempiternal up, to see if it can stand on its own as an adjective, and the etymology (from Latin sempiternus : semper, always + aeternus, eternal) suggests that the word is self-redundant

I don't think that's quite right, though I can't be sure what did happen in Latin. The long vowel of aeternus would (I think) contract to a long I in sempIternus (cf. -cIde from caedo 'kill'), but it's short. So it's presumably the same suffix as in ae-ternus (< aevi-ternus) and hes-ternus 'of yesterday' (related to the English). I suppose the R of semper was lost by dissimilation in sempiternus, but it's not a regular form so I'm not sure what happened.

Before I researched this I assumed diurnus and nocturnus contained the same suffix, and the lack of T in the first was confusing me: but it seems that they're unconnected.

The Latin dictionary (on-line Lewis & Short) glosses sempiternus as existing day-by-day throughout all of time, whereas aeternus transcends time, or exists age-by-age.

The Latin dictionary (on-line Lewis & Short) glosses sempiternus as existing day-by-day throughout all of time, whereas aeternus transcends time, or exists age-by-age.


Hmm. Both words are used in the Mass. It might be instructive to see in what context they are used. I know we have requiem aeternum in the Requiem Mass. I can't think of any specific instances of sempiternus but I'm sure it won't take too much research.

In reading something the other day about Elizabeth I, I came across the following on the use of various odd and hazardous compounds to enhance womanly beauty:

"[Elizabeth] whitened her skin by applying powder made of ground alabaster. She also used lotions consisting of beeswax, ass's milk, and even the ground jawbones of hogs. It is likely that she took even more drastic whitening measures, which included application of a substance compounded of white lead and vinegar and another mixture consisting of borax and sulfur. To redden her lips in pleasing contrast to the artificial pallor of her complexion, she may have used a popular concoction of red ocher and red crystalline mercuric sulfide, as well as cochineal, a red dye made from the ground-up bodies of the scaly red cochineal insect....Renaissance women routinely bleached freckles and other "blemishes" with a mixture of birch tree sap, ground brimstone (sulfur), oil of turpentine, and sublimate of mercury. In time such preparations left the skin almost in a state of mummification."

None for me, thanks.

(I thought I'd given up commenting on the vagaries of Ænigma, but for ocher the mad beast proposed Oconomowoc! 'Zlids!)

Re women's efforts at beautification

Why do you think the French have the saying, "Il faut suffrir pour être belle"?

"Il faut suffrir pour être belle"?

Aroun' these here parts we say "you have to suffer to be beautiful."
After reading all this it's SPF 15 for me and that's it ... devil take the hindmost!

Why do you think the French have the saying…

Because they wouldn't know real beauty if it bit them on the tush?