"You don't need a weatherman..."

     Half the fun of travelling is what you do to pad the spaces around the reason for your visit.
     For instance, last month we drove to central New York to spend Thanksgiving with our younger son's in-laws.     

     It's a two-day drive — we stretched it to three, spending nights in Cleveland and Buffalo.
     We arrived in Cooperstown Tuesday evening. Wednesday morning was a no-brainer: the Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum, which is well worth visiting — so much so that I have a big write-up about the place scheduled to run in the paper this Sunday.
     We spent the morning and the early afternoon there. But what of the late afternoon? My wife, who has a marvelous facility for sniffing out such places, suggested the Fenimore Art Museum, located in the former mansion of author James Fenimore Cooper. Who did not live in Cooperstown coincidentally — turns out his father, William, a Quaker leader, founded the village in 1768.

      The museum has an unusual Georgia O'Keeffe — "Brown and Tan Leaves," a 1928 autumnal still life — and an adequate John Singer Sargent. But what really sets it apart is its collection of American folk art. I particularly enjoyed the weather vane collection. Beautiful, rural, they made me wonder what exactly weather vanes  are good for besides being pretty. Yes, to tell which way the wind is blowing. But how is that useful to a farmer? In predicting the weather, mostly — for instance, in a certain location, an easterly wind might mean an increased chance of rain, while westerly was more an indication of fair weather ahead.

    To understand just how important the wind was to weather prediction, all we have to do is turn to etymology. The word "weather" is easily a thousand years old, from the Old English weder, meaning "air and sky." Or, going back further, to the Indo-Germanic weh, meaning "blow." To get a sense of how words formed. Say it out loud and create a little breeze yourself — "weather"and "wind" have the same root.

    Moving on, Noah Webster's 1828 dictionary traces "vane" to the Dutch vaan, flag or banner, while its homophone "vain" is from the Latin, vanus meaning empty or insubstantial. To round out the homophone hat trick, "vein" is from the Latin venio, or pass through a conduit; a reminder that even though words sound the same they can trace their origins to different places.

     Not that the definitions don't blend at times. One of Webster's definitions of "vain" is "inconstant," and a weather vane is certainly that, leading to a slur for unreliable people, such as in the 1623 folio of "Love's Labor Lost."    

    "What plume of feathers is hee that indited this Letter?" the Queen asks. "What veine? What wethercocke?"

    Of course "inconstant" is so judgy. I prefer to think of it as "flexible."