I know much more about Etruscans than I did, but no one knows everything about them. Their civilization precedes Rome and was conquered by Rome. Genetically, they are Italian, but linguistically, they have markers that share word parts with some ancient European languages spoken in Anatolia, now Turkey.
Many familiar languages, including all Germanic and all Romance ones, derive from a mother language called PIE, Proto Indo European. Plus all languages in India, plus all Slavic languages, plus Celtic languages, plus more.
But Etruscan is proto ancient European, pre PIE, coming before Latin. Few of the proto European tongues are in any sense left today. Words here and there... but not many. They have documents from 2000 to 2800 years ago with Etruscan writing, which is written using an old Greek script, so they can pronounce all 4000 known words of the language, but they only have an idea what 400 of them mean. And there's some confusion about some, like ten might be this word, or maybe that word is twelve, and this other word is ten.
I care about all this because I flippin' love love love etymology. My desert island book is the 20 volume Oxford English Dictionary, which would both sustain me for years, and is probably the reason my damned boat sank, amiright?
So I read the full Wikipedia article on the language, and the theories, and then I studied the list of 200 ish words on Wikipedia that exist in our language that are Etruscan. These include military, belt, arena, and some other very common ones. One that stopped me and made me think a lot is "scurrilous."
Scurrilous means besmirch. Or "besmirchful," if there were such a word, but there isn't. Or insulting.
It comes from Etruscan, "scural," or something like that. That means, "of the community," and more specifically a bastard. Children without a father who claimed them and took responsibility for rearing them. Kids of deadbeat dads of Etrusca. (Now Tuscany, in part. Say both words and you'll hear the relationship.).
And I started thinking about how much having that word, said that way, and apparently without rancor, told us a lot about the culture. They had some system for taking care of such children. Maybe a family member took them, maybe the priest class took them, maybe there was a food bank, maybe informal adoption? We don't and can't know, but there's a strong hint in the word itself that "this is a community problem. It takes a village."
Compare to ancient Rome, the conquerors of the Etruscans, who left unwanted children at crossroads to be eaten by scavengers or just die of exposure. And that doesn't bother me in cases of ice age people, or tundra hunter-gatherers on the move in hard times, who might have to do so in order to save the life of the mother and her extant children. Tough times. That's more survival, making difficult choices, and doing what you can.
Rome was not tough times. Rome was insanely rich, through conquest. They had gold vomit bowls and paid 350,000 warriors good wages. Surely, someone could have been taxed for there to be an orphanage.
Which of course made me think of America and how it doesn't tax the rich much. I checked the current stats. Half a million children under 12 are homeless at some point during every year. Probably every night, 80,000 kids that young have to sleep in a car, and mom or dad has to have money for gas, to keep out of the notice of cops by moving the car, and get the kids to school the next morning. If you're homeless, your car, in America, is the very last thing you want to give up. No?
But apparently this reality is not such a big deal to us. Whatever, we say, or "there are too many tough things to think about." But what I think about is cabinet members who own 12 yachts, including one large enough to park a normal sized yacht inside. And then I think of kids sleeping in cars, and I realize, okay, next time I'm at a gas station and see a harried woman and notice kids, blankets, toys in the back seat, I'll offer to pay for a full tank of gas.
Then I get pissed off. Like working class income me gets to take care of the poor? And it's not just me. That falls on volunteers, people who donate at church every week, people who give a dollar to GoFundMe, since 2017, the largest health care "insurer" in America. I mean, why is that burden on people like me? Not to pick on Jeff Bezos or Bill Gates, who are actually better than most billionaires who have no name recognition, with large foundations and lots of donations, but I've seen them ask, "What am I to do with all this money?"
Crazy idea: Maybe pay taxes? Maybe tell Congress you want to pay your fair 45%, that capital gains and bonuses should be taxed like actual earned income, that you do not want 200 special rich people deductions. I dunno, who am I, but that seems like a place to start, maybe?
I also thought about how the word scurrilous is negative, and in a sense, the insult falls on the baby who didn't ask to be born to a deadbeat dad, and how interesting that is, that word meaning can change like that. ("Girl" used to mean a child of either sex. "Slut" used to mean "tomboy, with a slightly dirty face." Definition drift is just fascinating to me.) Scurrilous at one point meant of dubious standing.
If we should be scurrilous, in the modern sense of insulting, about anyone, it's surely the deadbeat dad. Or how about the pornographically rich tax dodger?
And though we could end WIC and food stamps and housing assistance, and become Romans rather than Etruscans about the topic, I rather wish we wouldn't.
Which may surprise readers who know I don't particularly like children. But if I'm a Roman female, and I'm walking along the crossroads, and there's a baby still kicking, I look around, hope someone else is here, but when I see there is not, I pick up the damned kid and do my best.
So, that's it. I'm just musing. In my head, without talking to anyone about such thoughts typically, this is what I do daily, as much as I do writing, walking, and reading novels. Now you listened once. Thanks.
In other random thoughts, on my 40th or so cheese you'll never eat in the US (all of them are amazing!) I thought, isn't it weird that we squeeze the udders of bovines, or ovines, mix it with lamb guts, let it kind of rot, squeeze it out and put it in a cave, and later put it on pizza?
The correct answer is, yeah, that's plenty weird. Like visiting aliens would say WTF?!?
Had a red onion and gorgonzola pizza slice this week. Gorgonzola dolce, which you probably also can't get in the States, with really not a hint of the blue cheese mustiness. No red sauce. Really really good. It's all really really good.
You know what's in my favorite flavor of gelato? 1) heavy cream. 2) superfine sugar.
Nothing else. Zero additives in most foods. Very few food additives are legal here. Zero sugar in bread, unless you're looking for a sweet roll or donut, in which case, yes, sugar.
But like with foccacia, where they pour on a bunch of real, sweet, delicious olive oil, all from one local farm? You definitely don't need sugar. You need gums. Teeth are optional, I imagine, and you'd want the ability to say "yum."
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