Lots of Odds; Fewer Ends

Those of us who write for the internationally targeted Voice of America have learned to keep a few things in mind:

Not all homes in America look like this. In fact, not very many do

One is that our reality is not the reality of many places to which we communicate. We need to be sensitive when writing about American fashion or food fads, for instance. We recognize there is severe poverty and hunger in many parts of the world, and that some among our audience will know of such privations first hand. It doesn’t mean that we hide America’s good fortune. But it should not surprise us if those who hear or read our words construe a story about mouth-watering steaks, or luxury cars in a celebrity’s garage, as flaunting our society’s excesses.

This is Seattle’s skyline. That’s Mount Ranier off in the distance

Nor can we take for granted that our audience is familiar with American places. If I write about Seattle, Washington, American readers – or most of them, I fervently hope – know at a minimum that it’s “out there somewhere” in the Pacific Northwest. I wouldn’t really even need the “Washington.”

But readers in Nepal may not know Seattle or Washington state, and it’s the height of national chauvinism to expect them to. Where in Syria is Aleppo? Just a hair under 100 percent of Americans wouldn’t have a clue or know there is an Aleppo. So why should we expect a Syrian to pinpoint Seattle?

Here’s a real example: In my last posting, I mentioned the great transcontinental railroad that metaphorically and physically united the country in the mid-19th Century. From the east, that line began in Omaha, Nebraska – railroads having already reached Omaha at the Missouri River. But someone overseas, reading that the new track was “transcontinental,” might logically assume that Omaha and Nebraska lie somewhere on the East Coast.

The third lesson, on which I want to spend some time, has to do with the English language. We in VOA’s Central Features Branch write all our original stories in English, as you'd surely expect, and they are translated into 40-some foreign languages for broadcast to different parts of the world, and broadcast worldwide in English by VOA’s English Service. Our readers, listeners, and viewers understand English to varying degrees. Many tell us that they love to read it and hear it, even though it’s a challenge to keep up. They concur that American English, in particular, has become the dominant international language of youth, science, music, movies, and the Internet.

This looks like a book that could come in handy – for supposedly fluent English speakers as well as those learning the language

But save for Avi Arditti and Rosanne Skirble’s “Wordmaster” series, to which I link in the archived Wild Words column to the right, most of us don’t spend a lot of time writing about the English language’s nuances. Most English idiosyncrasies don’t appear in Swahili or Uzbek or Amharic, nor do peculiarities of those languages apply to English.

However, one English-language matter has, as my mother would have said, “my liver in a quiver.” If the menace that I’m about to describe spreads to other languages, the world may be doomed!

Lessons in this Saint Augustine, Texas, County school back in 1943 must have been so hard that it took two girls to figure them out!

Part of the no-big-deal, ever-more-casual nature of American popular culture is a growing disregard for rules of language (not to mention dress and decorum) that used to be drilled into us in school and at home. These days the attitude is, “Rules, schmules. Rules are for fuddy-duddies. Like, chill, you know what I mean?”

No, I don’t know what you mean. Careless and incorrect usage such as, “Things are, like, going well between you and I” make me want to bite my tongue and gnash my teeth, and tear at what’s left of my hair.

Now here’s a series of street signs that got the apostrophe right! Of course, they are in Gibralter, not the United State’s. (That one was just for fun.)

Most annoying of all to this fuddy-duddy are the deliberate attempts to eliminate the humble apostrophe, on the pretext that this tiny but noble symbol of the possessive form is a waste of time and a bother. John Kelley reports in the Washington Post that two local governments in England have given up putting apostrophes in street names and signs. I can assure him that the apostrophe is long gone from thousands of U.S. places as well. St. Ann’s Court is “St. Anns Court.” Prince George’s County – next door to us in Washington, D.C. – is “Prince Georges” on a lot of maps and signs. Everywhere you look, you see “Freds Cleaners,” “Sals Barber Shop,” and “Riccardis Liquors.”

Here’s an example of a shop sign whose designer who put in an apostrophe, all right, but where none was needed

Every other American welcome mat reads “The Smiths” or “The Landphair’s.” OK, not the latter one. Americans have become so confused, intimidated, and annoyed by the little apostrophe that we just stick it where it sort of feels right: “The dress was her’s.” Or, as I’ve said, we consider it a nuisance and skip it entirely.

John Kelley’s own, renowned newspaper has all but scrapped the apostrophe on its sports pages. Post reporters write about “Capitals owner Ted Leonsis,” the “Redskins touchdown drive,” and the “Wizards foul trouble.” Thankfully, the news section isn’t discussing “New Mexicos senior senator.”

Yet.

Oh no, where does it go?

These assaults on the possessive form are not mere peccadilloes. They would be outrageous affronts in many other languages. Greek or Persian speakers who tried to turn “the cat’s ball” into “the cats ball,” for instance, would be thought daft – illiterate for sure. They couldn’t do it, because their possessive forms require whole new word endings. It is the ball of the cat, and it takes more than a zippy little apostrophe to make it so. Disregarding the special endings and rearranging of words that make a Greek or Persian word possessive would be akin to writing “the cat ball” in English. It would be nonsense, gibberish.

Are this young texter and others like her responsible for the slow death of the apostrophe?

John Kelley notes that text messaging is a villain in this piece, as it is in so many other recent assaults on our language. Who, thumbing away on tiny buttons, can be bothered to put an apostrophe in “John Browns body”? As they would write it, “Its not needed.”

Besides, many palm-held texting devices and cell phones don’t even have the apostrophe character. Here at the office, a texter after my own heart told me that she cannot bring herself to debase a good possessive by leaving out the apostrophe. She substitutes a comma.

Bravo, but little does she realize that the language laggards may already have lined up the comma as the next “unnecessary” punctuation mark.

If I gave in to all this linguistic sloppiness, you would be reading quite a different post. Something like:

Ive been following Freddy Featherbooms travel’s in Ecuadors and Perus’ jungle’s. I know the Featherboom’s well. They live right down the street from Carol and I, near Joes Bakery. Weve been to there house many time’s.

***

Out, Out

When we send this contraption something, we're “printing it out,” like sending out our laundry

Two more language bursts:

Why, when we send a computer document to a printer, do we say that we’re “printing it out.” Aren’t we just printing it? If computers could print, would we be printing it in?

And speaking of punctuation, have you seen this brain-teaser? Lynne Truss included it in her #1 best-selling book (in Britain), Eats, Shoots & Leaves. Take the words below and, by using just two punctuation marks, change the meaning completely:

WOMAN WITHOUT HER MAN IS NOTHING.

(Answer at the end of today’s posting.)

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Where the Boys Are

With a chuckle in a recent meeting, my Voice of America colleague, the aforementioned Rosanne Skirble, noted that she gets a good deal of mail from overseas listeners, many of whom began tuning in to us on the radio long before VOA had much of a television or Internet footprint. But they had not seen the Voice of America name in written form very often.

So Rosanne reports receiving a good deal of mail addressed to:

“The Boys of America.”

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News Woman

I don’t know if this was my cup or Dorothy’s. More likely, the latter

The Boys of America story makes me think about Dorothy Jones, who was the office manager of a large Washington, D.C., radio news operation that I directed years ago, around Marconi’s time. She was one of those refined, stern women of some years who, we all knew, ran the place even though she lacked the title to do so.

One day a job seeker sent an inquiry directly to her rather than to me. This pleased her, and she was even prouder to read the address and salutation:

Ms. Dorothy Jones
WMAL News
4400 Jenifer Street NW
Washington, D.C. 20015

Dear Ms. News:

I did not grant the careless applicant an interview, but as you can imagine, Dorothy was “Ms. News” to one and all for the remainder of her distinguished career.

If only this had happened at VOA. She would have been Ms. News at the Boys of America.

***

Death, Be Timely

If you live in New Orleans, you might want to book a spot here before you die

• The Times-Picayune, the daily paper in my old stomping grounds of New Orleans, recently published this note:

To post your death notice, please call The /Times/-/Picayune/ at 504-826-3551 or toll-free at 1-800-925-0000 or email funerals@/timespicayune/.com.

As another VOA colleague, Faith Lapidus, pointed out, “Wouldn’t it be a bit late by then?” Or putting it another way, if someone managed to post his own death notice, there’d be no need for an obituary. It would be front-page news.

Good dogs like this are getting less exercise these days in the Detroit area

• Speaking of death and timing, here’s an interesting follow-up to something I mentioned in an earlier post, that the two “daily” newspapers in the struggling automobile capital of Detroit, Michigan, are in such dire straits that, to save printing and delivery costs, they are now delivered in print form only three days a week, on Thursdays, Fridays, and Sundays.

Daily newspapers have been America’s traditional medium of notification when one of our neighbors dies. Families and funeral homes carefully prepare death notices and tributes. And if the person is at all famous, the paper often writes a news story as well.

But right now in Detroit, as Jeffrey Zaslow points out in the Wall Street Journal, “you won't want to die on the wrong day. People may never get word that you're gone.” If Detroiters have the nerve to die on a Sunday or Monday or Tuesday, and their funerals are set for Wednesday or Thursday, a whole lot of folks who might otherwise have made a point of attending simply won’t know about it because the next newspaper won’t arrive until Thursday morning.

That’s John Adams, middle, and Thomas Jefferson, standing, to whom Benjamin Franklin is reading a copy of the Declaration of Independence in this 1921 illustration by Jean Leon Ferris

It’s enough to make the dying hold on for a day or two, as U.S. presidents John Adams and Thomas Jefferson are said to have done. They passed away on the same day – July 4, 1826 – not so much because they wanted to travel to heaven together, but because, it is said, that date would mark the 50th anniversary of the signing of the nation’s Declaration of Independence, which Jefferson had written.

July 4, 1826 was a Tuesday. Good thing neither Adams nor Jefferson lived in Detroit.

• And one last death note: Have you heard comedian Steven Wright’s line?: “I intend to live forever. So far, so good.”

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Laissez Les Bon Temps Roulez, Vicariously

On February 24th, a reader named Lindsay left a thoughtful comment about New Orleans on one of my archived postings. The 24th was “Fat Tuesday,” a rough translation from the French of “Mardi Gras” – the last Tuesday of Carnival revelry before the solemn Christian Lenten season in New Orleans; Mobile, Alabama; and smaller cities in French-speaking Acadian country of Louisiana and Texas.

This is the sort of fun I missed at Mardi Gras this year. Sigh

On the radio on that Tuesday, I heard Rex, the costumed King of Mardi Gras, make the ceremonial request of New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin that serious endeavors be suspended for the day in favor of masquing, parading, fancy balls, general merriment, and a drink or two or ten. (They don’t call the club that sponsors one of the big New Orleans Carnival parades “the Krewe of Bacchus” for nothing.)

Nagin assented with a flourish. I’m sure President Obama would also suspend serious work for our financially beleaguered nation for a time if he could.

Here was Lindsay’s comment:

This is the photo of the Hibernia Tower to which Lindsay refers. It was taken from Bourbon Street in the heart of the French Quarter. Sigh, again

“I happened across this blog because I was looking for a picture of the Hibernia Tower [a venerable bank landmark in New Orleans] bathed in Mardi Gras color,” Lindsay wrote, “and your blog contains a great photograph of it [by Carol]. It's 3:45 Mardi Gras morning and I'm many miles from the Avenue where my heart longs to be - your photo let me go home for a little bit.”

I don’t know where you are, Lindsay, but I, too, pine for a whiff of sultry Louisiana air on a late winter’s morning. As I write this, I’m wearing a strand of cheap, gaudy, plastic Mardi Gras beads of the sort that Bacchus and other krewes toss by the thousands to the multitudes on Napoleon and St. Charles avenues and on Canal Street. The beads look truly dorky on me, but what can I say?

Legendary 19th- and 20th-Century photographer Frances Benjamin Johnston, who has been Carol’s beau ideal, took this moody shot in the French Quarter in the late 1930s

I'd make a Mardi Gras brandy milk punch for old times’ sake, but all we have in the office fridge is low-fat milk and no brandy.

Mardi Gras wouldn’t work in Washington anyway. There’d be 10,000 cops on the street on overtime, masks would be prohibited as a security risk, lobbyists would see to it that every parade float carried advertising, Republicans would boycott it if King Rex were a Democrat, and vice versa. Besides, the congressional commission studying the advantages and drawbacks of the event would not finish in time for the good times to roll.

***

Who Am I?

Here’s the National Museum of the American Indian in one of Carol’s photos taken before the “Indian/Not Indian” sign appeared

The Voice of America’s offices sit directly across Independence Avenue from the four-year-old Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian. Hanging above its entrance is a flag that intrigued me. It turns out that another of my VOA colleagues, Susan Logue Koster, wrote about the three words on that flag, but I thought I’d share a bit about them here as well.

The flag reads: “Indian/Not Indian.” I assumed, incorrectly, that this had something to do with the terms “American Indian” and “Native American,” which to the country at large mean pretty much the same thing. But inside the community whose culture the museum displays, these terms have quite different connotations. My reading of the matter is that the former, “American Indian,” has greater currency these days, “Native American” being seen as an overly inclusive bureaucratic term invented by the Bureau of

This is the kind of “noble savage” image of American Indians that Fritz Scholder detested

Indian Affairs in the 1960s. Lakota activist Russell Means has written that he “abhors” the Native American designation. “We were enslaved as American Indians, we were colonized as American Indians, and we will gain our freedom as American Indians,” he wrote.

Here’s the genesis of the “Indian/Not Indian” message:

It is the title of two retrospective exhibits – one here and one at the museum’s gallery in New York – of the work of expressionist artist Fritz Scholder, who died in 2005. As Susan wrote, Scholder (rhymes with “shoulder”) “was the most influential figure in the history of American Indian art.”

“Indian/Not Indian” was the way Scholder – who was one quarter each French, German, English, and American Indian – described himself. At first he vowed to never paint Indian figures or scenes, since he objected to the idealized, stereotyped ways in which they are often depicted. But when he moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico, and experienced the reality of Indian life, he changed his mind. His vivid, brutally frank paintings of such images as a drunken Indian staggering down a street ignited controversies that simmer to this day.

Similar quandaries over one’s identity abound elsewhere in this multiracial country. One son of a white American mother and a black Kenyan father, President Barack Obama – who has lived in such culturally diverse places as Indonesia, Hawaii, and Chicago, Illinois – has described his own identity confusion at various points in his life. As he found out when others sought to label him during rough patches of his run for president, a flag marked “Black/Not Black” could easily have hung from his own front porch. Once he settled into identifying himself as a black man, others even began to ask if he were “black enough.”

Obama’s multiracial, multicultural life reminds us that we are a nation of many races and cultures, but Americans all. And as Russell Means would no doubt point out, American Indians were here first.

***

And the First of These is What, Again?

Finally, on what is turning into my “Mention Your Fellow Workers Day,” Faith Lapidus, of whom I spoke earlier, just told me a delightful story that I want to share.

When she identifies herself on the phone or leaves a message, she often begins, “This is Faith Lapidus at the Voice of America. Faith, like ‘faith, hope, and charity.’”

Paul, later Saint Paul, was a Jew in Jerusalem who converted to Christianity and then worked to convert many others throughout the Middle East

That makes perfect sense to those of us “of a certain age.” It traces to the Christian bible’s New Testament. Jesus’s disciple Paul is said to have preached, “Now abideth faith, hope, charity. These three, but the greatest of these is charity.”

Increasingly, Faith says, those on the other end of the phone react with a “huh?” as if she had spoken nonsense words, like, “Hi, I’m Faith Lapidus, as in Ogsfaith Prylob Znork.” More and more people have never heard “faith,” “hope,” and “charity” strung together. (Nor have they heard of Saint Paul.)

So Faith is testing other approaches. She tried “Faith, as in Faith Hill.” That draws blanks, too, from people who are not into country music.

She now reports somewhat greater success with this approach: “Faith, as in ‘You gotta have . . .’” – picking up lyrics from a 2006 George Michael song. (He being way cooler than the Apostle Paul.)

The next thing you know, Faith will be doing it like Michael does: “Hi, this is Faith Lapidus, 'cause I gotta have faith-a-faith-a-faith.”

That should take care of her first-name recognition. But no one that I know of – not George Michael, not Beyonce, not Coldplay, not even Frank Sinatra for us geezers – has put out a song with “Lapidus” in it.

***

Brain-Teaser Answer

WOMAN. WITHOUT HER, MAN IS NOTHING.

TODAY'S WILD WORDS

(These are a few of the words from this posting that you may not know. Each time, I'll tell you a little about them and also place them into a cumulative archive of "Ted's Wild Words" in the right-hand column of the home page. Just click on it there, and if there's another word in today's blog that you'd like me to explain, just ask!)

Consternation. Frustration and confusion. It’s easy to be consternated by an overly wordy and tangled explanation of something.

Dork. This is not something you want to be called. A dork is a loser, an incompetent and even stupid person. Believe it or not, the word dates to the early 20th Century.

Fuddy-Duddy. A fuddy-duddy – usually referred to as an old fuddy-duddy, is an old-fashioned, stuffy, stuck-in-the-past dullard. Nobody can quite lock onto the term’s origin, but we know that a “dud” is a dull disappointment. A fuddy-duddy’s a bit like an old fogey, and neither is a compliment.

Peccadillo. A small sin or indiscretion, not worth getting too worked up about.

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Wonders

My last posting on Abraham Lincoln is the jumping-off point for today’s missive. Last time, I pointed out that Abe’s is one of four gigantic sculptures of the heads of former U.S. presidents that were blasted out of a granite hillside on Mount Rushmore in the Black Hills of South Dakota. Someone here in the office remarked that this mega-sized tribute surely was one of our nation’s greatest engineering feats. That got me to thinking about the many wondrous places I’ve seen and to ponder what might be the Seven Wonders of America.

The Great Pyramid is just one of three amazing pyramids at Giza. And it’s the only one of the seven Ancient Wonders still intact

Seven, borrowing the model of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. Do you know them?: Egypt’s Great Pyramid at Giza; the 22-meter-high Hanging Gardens of Babylon*; the Statue of Zeus at Olympia in Greece; a colossal human figure ― indeed called the Colossus* ― that stood astride the entrance to the harbor at Rhodes, also in Greece; a temple to the Greek goddess Artemis in Ephesus (bet you didn’t get that one); the Tomb of Maussollos at Halicarnassus in present-day Turkey (no way you knew that one), from which we get the word “mausoleum” to describe ostentatious burial sites; and a great lighthouse at Alexandria, Egypt*. Earthquakes brought down the three that are marked with asterisks.

The World Trade Center towers symbolized American capitalism, both to those who loved the country and those who loathed it

For my own list of American Wonders, I am going to exclude two excellent candidates simply because they, too, no longer stand: • New York’s World Trade Center, whose seven buildings and plaza filled the footprint of 164 previous structures. The complex was so massive that the entire volume of New York’s famous Empire State Building would have fit in just the Trade Center’s subterranean levels. As we remember, with enduring sadness, the center’s two tallest towers collapsed after terrorists flew pirated airliners into their upper floors. • The second is the great transcontinental rail line that linked two furiously competing railroads – one working westward from Omaha in the heartland on the Missouri River, and the other pushing eastward from Sacramento, California. This long, cross-country dual track, celebrated in Utah’s high country in 1869 at a ceremony in which spikes of pure gold and silver were driven at the point where the Union Pacific and Central Pacific came together, united not just the two railroads but also, metaphorically, the far-flung American nation.

The original Central Pacific and Union Pacific engines and tenders have been preserved at the Golden Spike National Historic Site, near Brigham City, Utah

I could also easily nominate other transportation achievements such as the vast interstate highway system; the glamorous riverboats that plied the Mississippi and Ohio rivers; incredible mountain tunnels such as the Flathead Tunnel that bored through

Not all U.S. engineering achievements resulted in ponderous buildings or grand memorials. Great roller coasters like this one are hard to design and build but fun to ride

the Montana Rockies; and breathtaking pieces of roadway like the double-decker, cantilevered Hanging Lake Viaduct through Glenwood Canyon in Colorado. Even fun structures like roller coasters, domed sports stadiums such as Houston’s Astrodome, and giant strip-mining shovels like the one they call “Big Brutus” in Kansas might qualify.

Impressive all, but not grand enough.

So here are my Seven Wonders of America – that is, those created by humans, not by God:

• Mount Rushmore. Let’s start here, in tribute to Lincoln and the three other presidents – George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Theodore Roosevelt – whose images loom high on that mountainside:

The faces on Mount Rushmore look like they were crafted with a chisel, not created with dynamite and heavy pneumatic drills

In the early 1920s, Doane Robinson, South Dakota’s state historian, dreamed of a panoply of western heroes whose faces might be inscribed in spires called “The Needles” in the rugged Black Hills. He sounded out Lorado Taft, known for classic fountains such as the Columbus Fountain outside Washington, D.C.’s, Union Station. Taft declined. So Robinson turned to Gutzon Borglum, whose work on stone figures of Confederate heroes on Stone Mountain, Georgia, had been stalled by a personality conflict with his patrons.

Borglum agreed to search out a Black Hills site that could showcase a monumental work, not about western legends like the showman Buffalo Bill Cody, as Robinson had hoped, but about what Borglum called “America’s founders and builders.”

These are some of the photos and artifacts in the Borglum Museum at the Mount Rushmore site

Beginning in 1927, Borglum and his crews shaped the granite faces of Lincoln, Washington, Jefferson, and Roosevelt using the sculptor’s ingenious “pointing” technique, in which carefully placed dynamite charges “carved” – though “blasted” would be a better word – 90 percent of the work. Workers hanging in boatswain’s chairs finished the job up close, using pneumatic drills. “Pointing” involved a scale calculation, using a giant protractor and a plumb bob, of one inch on models in Borglum’s studio to one foot on the mountain. The 18-meter-high faces, 152 meters above a new national park’s visitor center, were completed and dedicated one at a time, beginning with Washington in 1930 and ending with Roosevelt in 1939. Public contributions paid the remarkably small cost of about $1 million.

Borglum found the granite face of Mount Rushmore perfect for his task. It was sufficiently firm and stable – geologists estimate that it will erode just a few centimeters every 10,000 years – and offered a southeastern exposure, meaning it would enjoy sunlight most of the day. And that’s how millions of visitors, making a trip far from most U.S. urban areas, find it, year after year.

• San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge. (The Brooklyn Bridge in New York would have been another good prospect, but since the Golden Gate is thought to be the most-photographed structure in the world, it must be something extraordinary. And it is.)

This photo by Carol gives you an idea of both the beauty of the Golden Gate Bridge and the power of the current in the strait below

The distinctive “international orange”-colored bridge that opened in 1937 across the Golden Gate strait – named by explorer John C. Frémont because it reminded him of Istanbul’s Golden Horn Harbor – has become the enduring symbol of the “City by the Bay.” To understand its engineering, picture an incredibly sturdy hammock, suspended between two massive support towers. One-meter-thick cables – each a bundle of more than 27,000 wires – drape over the bridge’s towers, then stretch back to bedrock in San Francisco and the opposite Marin County, California, shore. Each cable began with a single wire across which a spinning shuttle wheel rode back and forth, twisting together thousands more wires. If that’s not astounding engineering, I don’t know what is!

The finished cables hold up the “hammock” – the bridge’s rigid road surface and railings – suspended below. During four years of construction, 11 men lost their lives in the swirling winds and treacherous currents. Nineteen others who fell were saved by a safety net and inducted into the informal “Halfway to Hell Club.”

More notoriously, the Golden Gate Bridge has been the site of an estimated 1,000 suicides. The heaviest load it has ever carried was the weight of an estimated 300,000 people who marked its 50th anniversary by walking across on May 24, 1987. About 2 billion vehicles are estimated to have traversed it since it opened. Contrary to urban legend, the bridge is not constantly being painted from one side to the other and then starting over again. Painting is just an occasional touch-up job. Until New York’s Verrazano-Narrows Bridge opened in 1964, the Golden Gate Bridge, at 2.74 kilometers, was the world’s longest span.

The Golden Gate Bridge has proven remarkably sturdy. But still, it’s getting some added bracing in the event of another catastrophic San Francisco earthquake

The deadly 7.1-magnitude Loma Prieta earthquake of 1989 severely damaged the San Francisco-Oakland Bay bridge around the bend on the San Francisco peninsula, but the Golden Gate Bridge came through nearly unscathed. Still, authorities thought it prudent to undertake a three-part seismic retrofit, which began in 2002. The retrofit – too complex to summarize here, not that I could do it very well – included an added support tower and is now in its third and final stage.

This one of Carol’s photos gives you a good idea of the enormity, not just of the finished Hoover Dam, but also of the task that lay ahead of those who built it

• Hoover Dam on the Arizona-Nevada border. The rambunctious Colorado River had long been eyed as an ideal source of water for the arid Southwest and of energy for much of the West. But it took Bureau of Reclamation engineers and 5,000 men, housed at an instant “company town” called Boulder City at the height of the Great Depression in the 1930s, to tame the angry river. They accomplished this by creating the 6,600,000-ton, 60-story-high Hoover Dam across the Black Canyon of the Colorado on the Nevada-Arizona border, 30 miles south of the gambling mecca of Las Vegas, Nevada.

First, the river’s water was diverted into tunnels bored through canyon walls. Then workers poured 122,000 cubic meters of concrete each month for two years into forms constructed across the canyon. Vertical columns were locked together by a series of blocks, similar to giant “Lego blocks.” But these were not plastic like those in children’s play sets. They were made of carefully cooled concrete. Grout was then forced into crevices to complete the structure.

You could see Lake Mead behind Hoover Dam from a distance in the previous photo. This is a closer look

The reservoir created behind Hoover Dam captured enough water to cover the eastern state of Pennsylvania to a depth of three centimeters. For 14 years, the dam’s 17 generators held the record as the world’s largest hydroelectric power plant. More massive than the largest of Egypt’s pyramids, Hoover Dam subdued the Colorado, created a sublime, watery recreation playground called Lake Mead, and sent water flowing generously into California’s rich agricultural fields in the Imperial Valley. And you can thank or blame Hoover Dam for powering the millions of dancing lights in Las Vegas.

Hoover Dam was named for Herbert Hoover, an engineer and the incumbent president at the time of the dam’s authorization in 1928. But the next administration’s Interior secretary, Harold Ickes, loathed Hoover, and for years official signs and documents referred to “Boulder Dam.” Congress reaffirmed the “Hoover” designation in 1947.

The image or outline of the Capitol Dome is used to make thousands of postcards, souvenirs and other symbols of Washington and the American democracy

• The U.S. Capitol Dome. (Another worthy candidate in the nation’s capital would be the Washington Monument, but it is but a giant version of many other great obelisks, albeit one whose construction required mighty impressive scaffolding and incorporated 893 interior steps. I’ve descended, but never climbed, them. What do you think I am, crazy?)

Washington’s planner, Pierre L’Enfant, picked the highest hill in town for his “Congress House,” and he envisioned a grand dome atop the home of the national legislature. Architect of the Capitol Charles Bulfinch designed one, but it was squat, wooden, and sheathed in copper. Once it weathered, it looked like the base of a green toilet plunger. That dome was constructed beginning in 1820. When Bulfinch’s successor, Thomas Walter, began his design of the Senate and House of Representatives wings, he realized that they would overwhelm the scale of the modest center dome. At about that time, fire destroyed most of Congress’s library, then housed in the Capitol, and the need for a “fireproof” as well as loftier dome was confirmed.

Walter took on the challenge and wowed the nation with his design: a majestic dome with inner and outer cast-iron shells, 36 columns, pilasters, and lots of windows, crowned by a heroic statue. Begun in 1855, the job took eight years. You’ll recall from my Lincoln meanderings that the dome was unfinished during Lincoln’s first inaugural in 1861. Work continued right through the Civil War as, in the president’s words, “a sign we intend the Union to go on.” The unfinished rotunda served as Union Army barracks for a time.

When construction was complete, almost 4 million kilos of iron plates had been lifted by steam derricks, bolted together, and painted to produce the awe-inspiring, 87-meter-high – and indeed quite fireproof – dome, rotunda, and porticos that anchor the east end of Washington’s National Mall.

The bronze Statue of Freedom atop the U.S. Capitol was cast in five sections. It sat on the grounds for from 1861 to 1863, waiting to be hoisted and installed while the dome itself was finished

The statue atop the dome is often mistaken for the princess Pocahontas or another American Indian figure. (She does show up in a painting inside the rotunda below.) Instead, it is Thomas Crawford’s statue of “Freedom,” wearing a helmet encrusted with stars and surmounted by an eagle’s head and feathers.

• The Gateway Arch. One does not often think of the gleaming arch that anchors the National Expansion Memorial complex on the riverfront in St. Louis, Missouri, as tall. Yet the Gateway Arch, which opened in 1967, is the nation’s tallest monument! At 192 meters, it’s 23 meters taller than the Washington Monument. Designed by futurist architect Eero Saarinen, the arch in cross-section is a series of equilateral triangles – you remember what those are from geometry class, right? – laid upon each other. Its sections measure 16 meters to a side at ground level, tapering to 5 meters at the top. “Creeper cranes” climbing the arch lifted the double-walled steel sections into place for welding. No scaffolding was employed.

Can you visualize a ride up the soaring Gateway Arch? People do it by the hundreds almost every day

The polished-steel sections bend inward until the two “legs” of the arch meet. The hollow core tapers to a snug 5 meters across at the apex. I say “snug,” because an entire moving tram made up of eight aluminum capsules that look like cement-mixer barrels rumbles up and down the arch in there. These capsules, loaded with tourists, rotate 155 degrees within a frame on their journey. The weight of the five passengers in each car somehow keeps the pods – and them – upright.

Riding up or down the Mississippi River, you know when you’ve reached St. Louis as you come upon this magnificent “Gateway to the West”

Observation windows at the top provide a spectacular view of metropolitan St. Louis and a glimpse of the distant flat land that pioneer settlers first traversed as they headed west.

Yes, as you likely were wondering, the Gateway Arch is struck by lightning hundreds of times a year, but lightning rods detour the current down to bedrock. At least that’s what they assured us as we swayed up the arch inside those capsules.

This photo by Carol shows you the Sears Tower, off to the left, in the context of other Chicago skyscrapers

• Sears Tower. The promoters of this Chicago skyscraper love to play nip and tuck with the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, for the title of the world’s tallest building. Arguments come down to the highest occupied floor, the height of TV antennas, and the measurement at rooftop level. But the Sears Tower is the clear winner as the world’s largest private office complex. More than 16,000 people work in 41 hectares of floor space in the building, which rises 402 meters into the air.

Guess which of these buildings is the tallest in America? This photo gives you a good look at the separate “tubes” that, together, form Sears Tower’s distinctive profile

Filling two city blocks, the $150-million tower, completed in 1974, is a series of “bundled” square tubes of welded steel, each 23 meters square, and clad in black anodized aluminum and bronze-tinted glass. Nine such tubes rise to the fiftieth floor; so in effect, nine separate skyscrapers combine to form one building. In what’s called “stepback geometry,” other tubes then terminate at higher floors, creating a staggered silhouette against the Chicago sky. The strong, separate tubes help protect the building from gale-force blows in the “Windy City.” Still, the building can sway as much as 25 centimeters, this way or that, at the top. (Nothing like doing a football-stadium-like “wave,” just sitting at your desk on an upper floor!) Engineers stopped counting the length of telephone cable inside the building at 80,000 kilometers. And there’s enough concrete flooring to build a nine-kilometer-long, eight-lane highway. The tower is said to weigh 222,500 tons, though, for the life of me, I can’t figure out how they lifted it onto a scale to find out.

In a touch of modern economic irony, the Sears, Roebuck and Company department store chain, which built the tower, has since relocated to a suburban location.

• Finally, the U.S. Space Shuttle, which I figure is earthbound long enough to qualify.

Mock-ups of a space shuttle orbiter are used to train crews at NASA’s Johnson Space Center, near Houston

Every transportation system has its milk runs. America’s space shuttles, history’s first reusable spacecraft, carried satellites, the Hubble telescope, and secret military payloads into space; sent work crews to build the international space station; and gave scientific experiments – not to mention astronauts – a round-trip ride. Putting together this earth-to-orbit ferry involved unimaginable rocketry, guidance, and thermal technology and the dedication and courage of shuttle crews.

Announcing the program in 1972, President Richard Nixon said it would turn the space frontier into “familiar territory.” And it has, by “routinizing” – another Nixon word – space travel. Shuttle prototypes, delta-winged for earth re-entry and landing, were tested on piggyback flights atop a Boeing-747 jet. On April 12, 1971 – 20 years to the day after Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin blasted off on the world’s first spaceflight – a new era in space began with the launch of the Columbia orbiter on a two-day mission. It and four subsequent orbiters, named for historic sailing ships, were each a high-tech mélange of 200,000 synchronized components.

Muting the accomplishment of more than 100 successes, the Challenger explosion in 1986 and the break-up of Columbia in 2003, with the loss of 14 space voyagers between them, cast palls over the shuttle program. Never again would shuttle flights be “routinized,” but the catastrophes did not douse the nation’s determination to continue pushing the boundaries of space exploration.

Those are my “Magnficent Seven” U.S. engineering wonders, each of which makes a fascinating travel destination. Well, you’ll have to settle for either a mock-up of the space shuttle at NASA’s Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center outside Houston, Texas, or the long-retired space shuttle “Enterprise” -- an engineless member of the fleet that was used for airborne landing practice but never saw orbital duty. It’s on permanent display at the Smithsonian Institution’s Udvar-Hazy Air and Space museum near Dulles Airport in Virginia. And you won’t get much of a tour of Sears Tower, since you’ll probably need an appointment to get past security. But looking up at the monster building, outside, is free!

I’ll ask you again: Can you believe that Lincoln’s face, and the others, were blasted out of a giant, granite rock face?

My favorite among the seven takes me right back to Lincoln at Mount Rushmore, for no matter what I read, I cannot fathom how Borglum’s minions, hanging from ropes and shoving, then lighting, sticks of dynamite into crevices of a nondescript mountain, turned granite into completely believable likenesses of Abe, George, Tom, and Teddy. It took something besides T-squares and slide rules to do it in those days long before computers. It took vision, and it took guts.

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Abe, Abe, He’s (Still) Our Man

The words of my last posting about Abraham Lincoln had hardly cooled on the keyboard when the cable channel C-SPAN, which broadcasts congressional sessions and hearings as well as speeches by authors and historians, published the results of a poll of 65 eminent U.S. historians, who were asked to rank all the U.S. presidents for overall effectiveness.

Once again our man Honest Abe finished first. I say once again because he has topped the list of presidents in nearly every prestigious survey, beginning with a 1948 poll conducted by Harvard’s Arthur M. Schlesinger Sr. Lincoln always scores high for his leadership through a terrible civil war and for his eloquent writing. The lowest he’s finished, so far as I know, is third, in a 1982 Sienna College poll in which Franklin Roosevelt and Thomas Jefferson edged him out.

That same year, a survey of self-identified liberal and conservative historians remarkably found that Lincoln scored first among both! So the man clearly deserves all the attention he’s getting this bicentennial month of his birth.

James Buchanan looked the part of a president. But he didn’t play it very well

It is notable, too, that the president who finished dead last in the esteem of historians polled by C-SPAN was Lincoln’s predecessor, James Buchanan. He was the country’s only bachelor president. Aha! Buchanan is poorly rated because he dawdled and dallied and generally looked the other way as tensions over southern slavery bubbled to the boiling point. Buchanan left the question of allowing slavery in the new western territories to the Supreme Court, and the matter of secession of southern states from the Union to no one at all. A Pennsylvanian with no particular misgivings about the institution of slavery, Buchanan said he opposed southerners’ break from the Union but could find no legal grounds to stop it. Just before he left office, South Carolina militiamen fired upon a ship carrying reinforcements and supplies to Fort Sumter, a federal installation in Charleston harbor. Buchanan did nothing, the ship turned tail, and days later, just as Lincoln was settling into the White House, the South Carolinians shelled the fort itself. Sumter’s surrender marked the opening salvo of a civil war that Buchanan might, in the view of historians, have done a whole lot more to prevent or forestall.

It’s a good thing Buchanan was not around in 2007 when Nicholas von Hoffman assessed his performance in a Nation magazine story. “Aside from being a dull, unimaginative, dray horse of a politician,” von Hoffman wrote, “he was the President whose cowardice in handling the South and slavery ended the remotest possibility that the United States would be spared the horrors of the Civil War.”

And he didn’t even have a wife to tell him he was wonderful.

William Henry Harrison was a war hero. Maybe that’s why he didn’t want to bundle up against a miserable cold rain at his inauguration

President William Henry Harrison finished 39th out of 43 U.S. presidents. That’s hardly fair, since the poor man was in office only a month, having contracted pneumonia and dying following an overly long inaugural address in cold, driving rain. Perhaps “Old Tippecanoe” – a nickname from his Indian War days – would have been our greatest president. Nah. But 39th? What “body of work” could the historians have possibly studied? His vice president, John Tyler, who served almost all of what would have been Harrison’s term, didn’t fare much better. He finished 35th.

If you’re curious, our outgoing president, George W. Bush, finished 36th out of what had then been 43 presidents. Barack Obama had not yet taken office and was not rated. (He has, at least, outlasted Old Tippecanoe by a few hours, though, as of the time of this posting.)

***

It’s Wrenching at the Top

One more Lincoln observation, and then I’ll leave the man alone.

Restored Ford’s Theatre is not as impressive on the outside as it is inside, where the stage, seating, and display areas have been substantially refurbished

Carol and I were lucky enough to score tickets to a newly commissioned play, “The Heavens Are Hung in Black,” written by playwright James Still especially for the Lincoln Bicentennial and performed at the refurbished and just-reopened Ford’s Theatre here in Washington. It was there, you’ll remember, that Lincoln was mortally wounded by assassin John Wilkes Booth in 1865.

It would do you little good for me to review the play – though I’d like to, since David Selby’s portrayal of the sensitive president was an uncanny insight into Lincoln’s many torments. I bring it up because it hammered home the enormous burden carried by the one individual, the one human being, whom we now call the “leader of the Free World.”

Abraham Lincoln had many troubles and sorrows, which he kept hidden from all but his close friends and staff. The burdens on any president are monumental

Men and women strive hard to become that one person at the top of the political pyramid. Do they know what they’re in for? Do they imagine the flip side of the power, the prestige, the adulation, the ability to order any meal, take any trip, call anyone, anywhere? They know about the “hand on the nuclear button” and the challenge of confronting foreign or domestic conflicts, economic turmoil, and human-rights abuses. They surely anticipate the load of leading many departments and vast bureaucracies. But do they have any inkling of the possible depths of anguish such as Lincoln felt, or the fervor of the hatred that whole segments of society may feel toward them? Do they grasp the full import of the old saying, “Success has a million fathers, but failure is an orphan”?

Compare the photographs of presidents on their first days with those taken on their last. (You can’t count Harrison, who looked an old 68 even when he began his one-month term.) I picture George W. Bush happily trimming brush on his Texas ranch and hoisting a drink or two with his Texas friends at a country club about now. And I think of the words of Old No. 43 out of 43, Buchanan, who wrote a note to his successor after Lincoln won the presidential election. “My dear sir,” he said. “If you are as happy on entering the White House as I on leaving, you are a happy man indeed.”

***

One last quick thing. An anonymous reader suggested that I continue my “tour” of New England by writing a post specifically about Boston. I will, but I wanted it, and me, to thaw out first. We’ll amble up to “Beantown” together later in the year.

TODAY'S WILD WORDS

(These are a few of the words from this posting that you may not know. Each time, I'll tell you a little about them and also place them into a cumulative archive of "Ted's Wild Words" in the right-hand column of the home page. Just click on it there, and if there's another word in today's blog that you'd like me to explain, just ask!)

Dawdle. To take one’s sweet old time!

Missive. A letter or quick note. Does anybody write letters any more? This blog is a missive, but it’s not as quick as I’d like it to be.

Obelisk. This is a monument or even a gravestone in the shape of tall, rectangular column topped by a pyramid. Sort of a squarish pencil with the point at the top.

Panoply. A wide, and often impressive, array of something. A panoply of colors, for example. It’s pronounced “PAN-uh-plee.”

Pilaster. I can never get my architectural terms straight, but I’ve learned that a pilaster is a column with a top (or capital) and a base like most columns, but one that protrudes only partially from a wall. It’s not free-standing, in other words, but part of the wall treatment. The word is pronounced “pih-LASS-ter.”

Rambunctious. Exuberant, noisy, a bit out of control, but not in a dangerous way. The word is often applied, affectionately, to an overactive child or puppy or kitten.

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