View allAll Photos Tagged UnionSquare
I never associated New York with Fifth Avenue, Wall Street, Broadway or Times Square. My New York is a city of little squares, parks and three-story buildings, and I'm sure I'm not unique in that view. For me, however, it's also the city of the old. I find it hard to explain, but New York seems like a good place to grow old. For sure, it's lonely as hell - even if you are young - but at least you've got so much going on around you to reflect on. I always notice those eccentric-looking people in their 80-s walking down the street late at night or sitting on a bench in a park alone.
It was almost midnight, and I was returning to my hotel, cold and wet after five hours of endless snow blizzard, when I noticed this old lady. She was sitting on a bench by Union Square, with an umbrella in her hand. Just sitting, watching the snow.
The history of the word asparagus is a good illustration of one of the peculiarities of English etymology—one found in few other languages. After the rebirth of classical learning during the Renaissance, Greek and Latin achieved a lofty status among the educated. As a result, etymologists and spelling reformers of the 16th and 17th centuries tried to give English a classical look by Latinizing or Hellenizing the spelling of words that had Latin or Greek ancestry (and even some that didn't). For example, Medieval Latin had a word sparagus, from Classical Latin asparagus, that was borrowed into Middle English and rendered as sparage or, more commonly, sperage. Botanists were familiar with the proper Latin version asparagus, and their use of that term together with the efforts of the etymologists caused the Latin form to become more widespread, eventually supplanting sperage. Thus, it is difficult to say whether the Modern English word asparagus is a direct continuation of Middle English sperage or a borrowing directly from Latin, a difficulty one encounters with hundreds of other words whose spellings and even pronunciations were Latinized during this time. •The Latin form asparagus lives on in another guise as well; in the 1600s it was shortened in popular speech to ’sparagus, which became sparagrass, sparrowgrass by folk etymology
Source. The American Heritage Dictionary
Here is my block for this week, I decided to use fussy cuts. See how I made mine on my blog:
americanhomestead.blogspot.com
Ellen
The normally vigilant subway maintenance staff have left this alone, either out of inattention or appreciation. Naturally, it's almost certainly the former; I hope for the latter.
Places to check out in Union Square: Forbidden Planet, Guitar Center and The Strand. Many more, but these are the spots I frequent!