DAH is me, David Anthony Hance. 
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First up this week: Zig … 
A friend experiencing exotic-vocabulary burnout suggested I occasionally use simpler words. Here we've the difficult last letter of the alphabet with three simple words. The first turn a zigzag line makes is called a zig. Merriam-Webster suggests 1840 as the first "known-use" year for zig. It also offers this as one definition: "a movement or direction at an angle to a zag." I find that amusing. There's a Zig Zag Road in Liverpool, England (birthplace of The Beatles). On a map that road doesn't zig or zag at all. Nothing like the famous tourist-swamped zigzag stretch of Lombard Street in San Francisco.

Second up this week, Zag …
The second turn a zigzag line makes is called the zag. How about "a movement or direction at an angle to a zig?" But, of course. And zag's first known use was in 1793. How did a zag work if not following a zig? Definitions ALWAYS suggest that both zig and zag were born as part of zigzag. Did it really take 47 years, originally, for that word to end? Similar-meaning words in Dutch and German are in writings from earlier in the 18th century. Did something curious happen around 1700? Something curious that required words and a combination word to express "crooked meandering?"

Third up this week, Zipper …
You’ve encountered the zipper. It reminds me of zigging and zagging, so here we are. The zipper is so convenient until it goes wrong. Then it turns annoying and could trap you in or out of your trousers. The zip-fastener developed from Chicagoan Whitcomb L. Judson’s 1892 invention. It became the “zipper” after it was so-named by the B. F. Goodrich Company when used as the fastener in a new model of rubber boot (1923). We’ve zipped ever since. Velcro’s taken a run at the “secure-me-in-here” crown, but I’ll stick with the zip-fastener. There’s even a book: Zipper: An Exploration in Novelty, by Robert Friedel. I haven’t read it, although I’m tantalized. 

An older mystery novel I zipped through …
The Flanders Panel
by Arturo Perez-Reverte, translated by Margaret Jull Costa

There must have been some reference to this book. Stumbled upon, I don’t know where. I found I’d purchased it for my Kindle e-reader years ago. It then lost itself in the dark of that digital collection without my reading it. I’m now preferring real-book reading. So I bought a well-worn decommissioned hard cover library edition. I read it straight through and fast. I enjoyed it, but can see how others might lose patience. It’s about an art restorer who smokes like a chimney. And a 500-year-old mystery she discovers in a painting, a chess problem, and murder. The chess seems to take over in the second half of the book, and I didn’t mind that at all. Pretty easy to follow. But all those chess problem images and move-lists … I can see how some would find them daunting. Not me. 

And a bit more … 

"Grammar" by Tony Hoagland

Maxine, back from a weekend with her boyfriend,
smiles like a big cat and says
that she's a conjugated verb.
She's been doing the direct object
with a second person pronoun named Phil,
and when she walks into the room,
everybody turns:

some kind of light is coming from her head.
Even the geraniums look curious,
and the bees, if they were here, would buzz
suspiciously around her hair, looking
for the door in her corona.
We're all attracted to the perfume
of fermenting joy,

we've all tried to start a fire,
and one day maybe it will blaze up on its own.
In the meantime, she is the one today among us
most able to bear the idea of her own beauty,
and when we see it, what we do is natural:
we take our burned hands
out of our pockets,
and clap.


And that's all for this week.
From Mary Oliver's "Sometimes"