“These days,” my friend Dick wrote in Intermemezzo,* “I binge-watch opera.”
I saw Dick sing in “Mefistsofele,” produced by Pacific Northwest Opera; I attended “Samson,” an oratorio performed by Opera Popolare. I enjoyed both. But binge-watching opera? Not me. My brand of COVID-19 entertainment is dictionary-diving—a diversionary tactic, wresting me from the persistence of pandemic news. Today’s targets: binge and coronavirus.
Before binge signaled excessive drinking, it meant “a servile bow or obeisance” and “to soak a wooden vessel.” Binge-watching has been around since the late 1990s when boxed DVD sets arrived, followed in 2013 by streamed shows like Netflix’s “House of Cards.”
Ri Pierce-Grove, a lecturer at the Sorbonne and a Ph.D. candidate at Columbia, claims that planned binge-watching can be a “healthy and calming escape.” Sounds like perfect justification for daily opera consumption as well as my preferred escape into the varied meanings of coronavirus, a word that permeates our everyday existence, messaging danger and death.
We all know what a virus is, right? —a tiny pathogen living within a host animal. Beady-eyed little bats emerging from caves infecting humans who fly across continents come to mind. Virus comes from Latin accompanied by a string of references to “poisonous secretion, venom, virulent” and “human semen.” That, plus “Pus, or other discharge produced by an ulcer or wound” precipitated my settling on this definition: “Any agent causing an infectious disease.”
The early meanings of corona are charming: flower garlands called chaplets, headbands known as fillets, crowns signaling sovereignty, and luminous halos.
Ancient churches mounted circular chandeliers—corona lucis, “crowns of light.” Early monks displayed coronas—tonsures, a shaved part of their heads. Noah Webster called the upper surface of molars or grinders a corona, though my dentist friend Ray said he’s never met a grinder named corona. Zoologists examine rotifers, microscopic critters with up to five eyes, who have coronas, hair-like structures around their mouths. Botanists calls anything growing on the head of a seed a corona.
I feel a smiling familiarity with garlands, chandeliers, cornices, shaved clerics, and five-eyed beings. I nod at dandelions and thistles, aware that their headdresses are called coronas. I take refuge in the word that catalyzed this submission, Intermezzo, and the Oxford English Dictionary’s second definition of that word: “an interval, an episode.”
I’m thankful for distraction by dictionary in this interval time of danger and death.
* Dick Little’s submission to Peoples’ Perspectives
