“Today, a chatelaine is usually reserved for wearing with Renaissance Faire garb. If going to the faire as a high-born lady rather than a woman of the lower serving classes, a chatelaine is a good mark of one’s class.”

If the key fits wear it…

(2) It is good to see that you are publishing in a science-blogs space and that your astrophysicist spouse may in future be contributing. The more you can do to defend scientific values the better. Those values have taken a beating this past month, with significant spin published about “climategate”, as you point out in your new blog. – When I refer to science here, I do not mean to refer to its current perversions at the hands of corporations and the military but rather to its pure roots, as we may half-glimpse those roots in _Astrophysical Journal_ or in Spivak’s calculus books, or again in such historical figures as Faraday and Einstein. I am referring here to a regulative ideal, approximated in messy and imperfect ways by the various human institutions which strive, with their varying degrees of success, to analyze problems scientifically. A key component in the regulative ideal is respect for truth, as something outside us and above us and beyond us, (a) to which the theories in the textbooks approximate in inexact and forever-provisional ways, and (b) which is capable of indicating to its human investigators, provided they are creatively diligent in their lab work, that one theory is a better approximation than another.

Soupir!

Thank you for your correction.

Blushing and departing.

Don’t matter none to me what you call it. I’ll read it anyway.

I don’t know how you would feel about it, Sharon, and the origin of the word Chatelaine is, you guessed it, French! What’s up with that, you ask? It’s just what it is, and you would honor that word source if you were to add an accent — un accent grave — yes, a grave accent as it relates to a required deeper first syllable pronunciation of Châtelaine, and figuratively as well, I suppose, in regards to the serious matters at hand.

No biggie, however, as we say in the biggie business!!

I hope it’s been an especially good week for you.

Shalom,

Madame Bovary

Or do I have that backwards?

Anyway, for what it’s worth, I rather like it. Literary and historic reference to what we are all trying to do — keep our houses. Clean, well stocked, people and livestock fed, etc. Makes sense to me. I always was a little odd, though….