I’m happy to introduce our latest guest blogger: Elisabeth Calvert Smith. Elisabeth is an attorney for the Massachusetts Department of Labor. (The astute reader may realize that T & S seems to be returning to its law roots, with attorneys now constituting the past two guests, three of the past four, and four of the past six). She graduated from Utah State University with a bachelor’s degree in Economics and a master’s degree in Political Science, and earned her law degree from Boston University. She currently teaches legal research and writing part-time to first year law students at Boston University. She also loves (most weeks) her job of teaching the five- and six-year-olds in Primary.
Elisabeth is married with cats, and loves chocolate donuts, movies, books, The New Yorker, running along the Charles River. Plus her husband and family (they rank behind the donuts, though). And finally, I would be remiss not to point out that Elisabeth is the author of the best spiritual securities law analogy I’ve ever seen.
Welcome aboard, Elisabeth!
Welcome Elisabeth!
I’m looking forward to Elisabeth’s post, even if she is another lawyer. For one thing, she spells her first name the way we spelled it for my youngest daughter, in other words the right way.
Elisabeth,
Ha! I knew they would get you eventually. I look forward to seeing what you have to say!
Thanks for the intro, Kaimi, and the welcome! I’ve very much enjoyed reading T&S, and am excited about making my debut as a blogger here (apologizing in advance for any rookie mistakes).
Jim F. – my parents tell me that they named me Elisabeth instead of “Elizabeth”, after John the Baptist’s mother in the Bible, and also because they didn’t like the nickname “Liz” (which I of course adopted in my rebellious teenage years).
The downside to an unusual spelling is a lifetime of having to pipe up that my name is Elisabeth, “with an “s”!!, and then having people get hopelessly confused about where to put the “s”, so that I have to spell out my entire name for them at least three or four times (not to mention never finding cute personalized souveniers with my name spelled correctly on them). :)
Elisabeth,
Those reasons (#4) are precisely why the Institute for Naming Children Humanely (I.N.C.H.) has a website. See http://inch.stormpages.com/index.html
I wondered whether the s/z variant had to do with an original Hebrew letter tsadey, pronounced *ts*, which sometimes comes into English as an s and other times as a z. But no, Elisabet is the Greek form of Elisheba’ (the name of Aaron’s wife), and in Hebrew the letter is a shin, pronounced *sh*. So the s is better from that perspective. Apparently the name means “my God is an oath”; IE, “to whom God is the oath” or, more loosely, “worshipper of God, devoted to God.” The el means “God,” the i is a first person singular ponominal suffix (“my”), and I saw one claim that the sheba is related to the sacred number seven (by which one might swear, thus the idea of an oath or something set apart as sacred).
Thanks, Kevin, for that helpful exegesis of my name. Unfortunately, my childhood friends didn’t appreciate the sacred origins of the name, and found considerable pleasure in making up their own creative nicknames such as “Lizard Breath” or, my personal favorite, “Elisa-barf”.
Ah, yes, I recognize Lizard Breath from the comic strip For Better of for Worse, which is what the older brother endearingly (?) calls his younger sister Elis/zabeth
Elisabeth, welcome aboard. Remember that the S stands for Super — girl or woman. Every body knows what the S means. So don’t let them give you crap about your lizard breath.
Elisabeth,
Did you work on Gov Romney’s campaign?
Thanks, Blake. You are a tough act to follow, by the way. I enjoyed your posts.
Hi, Crystal –
I did. Did you?
I did. I was a BU student at the time, and my meager duties included stamping envelopes and collecting signatures for the Lt. Governor.
That sounds like a lot of what I was doing as well! That, and organizing those darned phone banks. Campaign work is not as glamorous as it may appear. Thanks for your help – it was a huge production to get all those signatures collected and certified in such a short time period.
Oh, my pleasure. I had a lot of fun and it helped me get over my crushing shyness with strangers.
It’s good to see (Err… read) you again! :o)
Hmm, BYU’s law school has just started a search for a new tenure track faculty position.
also, quoting from Suzette Haden Elgin’s newsletter:
6. Clicking on the religion link at http://mixingmemory.blogspot.com will
take you to three articles that I recommend: “The Schematicity of Religious
Thought”; “A Comprehensive Theory of Religious Cognition”; and “Democracy:
Reason ‘Left Behind’ .” The first too are a bit technical, but not
impossibly so; they’re well worth reading.
7. From _Religion BookLine_ for 4/13/05, a brief review by Jana Riess of
the $150.00 Collector’s Edition of _The Moriah Haggadah_ — with
illuminations by Avner Moriah, calligraphy by Izzy Pludwinski., and
commentary by Shlomo Fox, published by the Jewish Publications Society:
“Collectors won’t be the only ones who will want to shell out the steep
asking price for this gorgeous illuminated haggadah, which is well worth
the cost. Moriah, a Jerusalem-born painter… draws his color scheme from
the oranges, golds and blues of the Middle East… Pludwinski’s beautiful
Hebrew calligraphy calls forth the Exodus story in bold relief. (The
English-language JPS translation is also provided.)”
Welcome.