A Definition of Weeds

So what exactly is a weed? Is it a plant that has weed in its name: goutweed, dockweed, chickweed? Not entirely. There are plenty of weeds that have seemingly innocuous names. Multiflora rose sounds pretty — many flowers. And it’s a rose isn’t it? Roses aren’t weeds. Well, they are when they take over everything in the landscape. Multiflora is considered an invasive.

Most plants have had some use at some point in history. And many so-called weeds have beneficial effects. Some repel insects and can be placed to protect other plants subject to those insects. Some are edible. Dandelions can be used in salads or made into tea. And some are poisonous — deadly nightshade, hemlock (beneficial only to those with suicidal or murderous intent).

Some common plants, such as English ivy, are considered weeds or even invasives, although ivy is carefully cultivated in the suburbs of Philadelphia. I keep it in check but I haven’t torn it out. It’s very useful: evergreen, covers bare spots, no fuss, it just does what it does without any attention from me. And I hope that it distracts my neighbors from the mess that is the rest of my landscape. (My neighbors’ yards, unlike mine, are all elegantly pruned, trimmed, and regularly nourished, but that’s another story.)

The standard tongue in cheek definitions of weeds are:

• A plant the use of which has yet to be discovered.
• A plant obsessed with sex (they do seem to grow much more vigorously than many plants purchased at some expense from the plant store).

But my favorite definition of a weed is a plant that’s growing where you don’t want it. In that case, it could be poison ivy or a broad-leafed grass in the middle of the lawn. Or it could be an antique tea rose.

On Gallimaufries

So what is a gallimaufry?

According to the Oxford English Dictionary (the one you need a magnifying glass to read), a gallimaufry is “a dish made of hashing up odds and ends of food; a hodgepodge, a ragout.” The word comes from old French, galimafrée and it appears frequently in the 17th century, diminishing into the 19th. Shakespeare used it in The Merry Wives of Windsor, itself, surely a gallimaufry of characters.

I’ve checked the cookbook collection for a recipe. I was sure that it would appear in the kind of book that starts what they call a “receipt” with something like “Dress a boar,” or in The Chef’s Companion, a culinary dictionary by Elizabeth Riely. No luck. Not even in an 1892 cook book. So we’re on our own, having to substitute one of the numerous recipes for hash.

In dictionaries, the word is called rare, obscure, archaic, presumably used only by desperate thesaurus searchers and pedants.

But wait! Check the blogosphere. There are quite a few gallimaufries out there. For instance, one of the more entertaining and wide-ranging is at incompetech.com. There’s also “Gallimaufry of Whits”, mostly about science. (A whit is the smallest thing imaginable.) David Ewalt has one at Forbes.com and a woman in Shimla in India is describing the town and showing off her photographs at olio-gallimaufry.blogspot.com.

All random thoughts, intellectual hashes. So maybe there is a niche after all for my kind of blog.

Don’t Talk About Writing

I’m told by an authority on such matters that it’s not appropriate to talk in the blogosphere about writing, or about the difficulties of writing. Is it a matter of etiquette? Like not talking in public about your latest operation, or complaining loudly about an affliction that everyone shares? Don’t whine. Just suck it up and get on with it.

I don’t understand why this should be a rule. I thought the internet was wide open. Freedom! No constraints. We can rant however we like. If we find like-minded surfers, so much the better. If not, oh, well.

Writing about writing is a time-honored form. Many writers have done it. If done well, it can be entertaining. It certainly sparks a flash of recognition, even commiseration and advice from other writers, as my blog on writer’s block did.

I was going to follow it up with a piece on cutting, about how difficult it is to pull out all those precious little children that you’ve taken such trouble to plant on the page.

But now… I’m not so sure.