Milt Reynolds: Thinking Out Loud

Photo by Mishaal Zahed on Unsplash - unsplash.com/photos How did "toast" come to mean two apparently disparate things: lightly burnt bread, and a cup raised to the health and honor of a person? Short version: The Roman habit was to put a bit of blanckened bread in their cup of wine to remove bad flavors from poorly made wines. The Latin word for "browning with heat" was tostare , and the result was tostus . "Toasting" became honorable, and became a way to express honor for another. The longer version: At some point, wine clarified and improved by a bit of toast became figurative language for a "beautiful or popular woman whose health is proposed and drunk to". - https://www.etymonline.com/word/toast Raising a cup of wine in honor of a woman, and expressing respect and resolve for good things, all seem to make toasting a worthy ritual. But inevitably, over-drinking and over-politicizing becomes boistrous at best, ribald or even rebe

A “moment” used to be an actual measure of time and corresponded to roughly 90 seconds. It was used during the Medieval era and was derived from the solar hour (the hour on the sundial’s face was divided into 40 “moments”). - https://www.howtogeek.com/ This pleases me. I don't know why. I'll probably need to spend some more time in counseling and silence and solitude. But, it pleases me to know the actual approximate duration of "a moment". When I was in elementary school I became obsessed with specifying the precise duration of time required when I said something like, "I'll be back in a sec", or "Just a minute." It didn't feel right to be so casual and offhand about time. Instead of "I'll be back in a sec", I would say, with a bit of time spent calculating, "I'll be back in 45 seconds." I know. It's pitiful. But, I'm also an introvert. It kind of makes sense.