So my encyclopedia of word origins has informed me the word sausage comes from the Latin salus, meaning salted or preserved. (Hmm, perhaps that is incorrect. Webster’s online has the Latin word as salsus.) It’s says it was invented by the Chinese (I can’t verify that), and it gives the recipe used to make The Great Scunthorpe Sausage, which was the longest sausage ever made for a long time. It reports the 1998 world record came from Canada for a “continuous sausage” 28.77 miles in length.

The current Guinness World Record, which may not be for exactly the same thing, is measured by weight. The 2008 Guinness report states: “The record for the largest sausage weighed 18.98 tonnes (41,859 lb) and was made by J.J. Tranfield on behalf of Asda Stores Plc, at Sheffield, South Yorkshire, UK on 27-29 October 2000.”

Oh, look. Here’s an entry on “Scandinavian words in English.”

Just a couple links from me tonight.

I just got my membership card today from the Friends of the Viking Ship, the society devoted to saving and preserving The Viking, the replica of the Gokstad ship that was sailed from Norway to America for the Columbia Exposition in in Chicago, in 1893. Nowadays replica Viking ships are fairly commonplace, but this was the very first, and no one was entirely sure it could even be done.

A few of you are Viking aficionados, so I thought I’d just mention that they’re always looking for support. It’s far from the most important cause in this sad old world, but it would be a mournful thing to be told the old ship has crumbled with no one to care.

Speaking of this sad old world, the always thoughtful Theodore Dalrymple has a profound article up at City Journal. It’s called Modernity’s Uninvited Guest. The subject is theodicy (the question of how a good God could create a world full of evil), and he relates it to the utopian fantasies of the Left, by way of Dr. Samuel Johnson’s 18th Century critique of a book of theology.

The superficiality of this argument requires, from a modern standpoint, little commentary. But even Doctor Johnson—a man with a delicate sense of personal imperfection who once stood several hours bareheaded in the rain in the Uttoxeter marketplace, in penance for having been disrespectful a half-century earlier to his father, who had run a bookstall there—did not criticize it strongly. Both he and Jenyns were a world away from our modern concerns about evil. Accustomed to our comforts and our delicate sensibilities, we would find their world unbelievably harsh; yet their notion of evil strikes us as naive and almost innocent. Despite the violence of Johnson’s review of Jenyns, the two men agreed more than they differed. They lived on the cusp of the Enlightenment but were both, at least in their treatment of evil, pre-Enlightenment in outlook. The burning question for them was not “Why do men behave evilly?” but “Why is there evil at all?”

That’s it for tonight. Tomorrow—scandal and passion among Norwegian pioneers!

It occurred to me during my walk tonight that we’re well into haying season, and I don’t think I’ve ever told you about haying.

My brothers and I didn’t do a lot of heavy farm work growing up, but the one labor-intensive time of year was haying season (straw baling too, but the tolerances were greater with straw. Also it was much lighter to lift).

Up until sometime in my childhood, my dad used to make hay more or less the old-fashioned way, cutting it and drying it in the field, and stacking it loose, either in the barn or in a shed, or (when space ran out) on the ground under a tarpaulin. We had an undersized barn, and so usually ended up stacking some hay outside. This is not a good thing. Wet and vermin get in. You always use the outside hay first, because it goes bad first.

Here’s my dad and my grandpa, some time before I was born, working on a hay wagon.

Continue reading Hey, hay! →