Educational

It's New Year's Eve, and what are we doing when we're not posting on the Internet? We're sitting around watching movies. And why not? Year-end parties hold no allure for either of us (don't drink, don't smoke, aren't hugely social people), and it's nice to have some time off to relax together (since I've been working nearly non-stop during the Christmas season).

One of the movies we watched was Pedro Almodóvar's La Mala Educación, which we probably should have seen ages ago but when you live in a damp little cow-pat of a town like Moncton, opportunities pass you by. Better late than never: the movie's tremendous.

In one scene a choirboy is singing a song, and here, proving that you can find anything on the Internet, are the lyrics:

Gardener, gardener,
night and day among our flowers,
setting fire to their colors
with the flame of our love.
And you place in every calyx
the smile of your yearning,
with your eyes turned up to heaven
where all your hopes reside.
And your flowers, gardener,
with their corollas burning brightly
join together in gratitude
and embalm you with their scent.
Continue with your labor,
cultivating all the flowers
entrusted to your love
by the Lord.

I guess I didn't need to quote the whole thing, but I thought it was pretty.

Anyway. When the boy sang the word "calyx", which in Spanish is "cáliz", a little bell went off in my head, accompanied by a thought: I tucked the thought away in my head for after the movie, and that thought was, "'Cáliz' sounds a lot like 'calice', which is the French word for 'chalice', isn't it?"

It is!

A calyx is a cuplike botanical or anatomical structure; the calyx of a flower is the structure formed by the sepals, which are the abbreviated leaflike parts that sit at the bottom of the petals. A chalice, of course, is a cup. And both words come from Latin "calix" or "calyx", which means, as you will have guessed, "cup". Isn't that great?

Have a happy new year and don't make any resolutions you can't keep.