Highfalutin'

So ... this morning ... in the coffee shop ... I'm reading along in a book and come across the word highfalutin'.

Now, I know what it means, as does Dictionary.com: pompous; bombastic; haughty; pretentious. But instead of reading on, I began to wonder: Where does that term come from? And what's "falutin'"? (Blogspot's spell-checker just wondered, too--as, oddly it just now did when I typed "Blogspot's.")

Well, Dictionary.com suggests this for the origin: 1830-40; high + falutin (perhaps orig. flutin, variant of fluting, present participle of flute)

I found that ... less than satisfactory, so I checked some other sources I have (am I starting to sound high falutin'?), and I found a few things.

My Dictionary of American Slang (2nd ed., Thomas Y. Crowell, 1975) says this: pompous; high class; ideal and sets the date ca. 1850. No speculation about the source.

My Morris Dictionary of Word and Phrase Origins (Harper & Row, 1977) offers a bit more: originally an American slang word, first recorded in print about 1850. It was part of our frontier language and was used to disparage high-flown, bombastic orators. As a matter of fact, some language students think highfalutin is simply another form of "high-flown" or "high-floating"--to refer to the puffed-up phrases used by old-time Fourth of July orators.

But my ultimate source for such things is The Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang, a publishing project which seems to have ended after the 1st two volumes (2: H-O). Not sure why. This reference book also says it probably came from high-flown--but traces it a bit earlier, to 1839. It then lists all sorts of quotations from writers who used it, including a New Yorker writer in 1990.

Okay, let's check the Oxford English Dictionary while we're at it. That venerable publication also places the expression in 1839 (1839   Spirit of Times 18 May 123/3   Them high-faluting chaps) and also finds some interesting users--including James Russell Lowell (1870). The OED also suggests it comes from the sources the other reference books had identified.

Well, I read the expression this morning in the 3rd volume of Mark Twain's Autobiography, which I am slowly reading. And, I now realize, this morning--like a dope--I neglected to write down the page number or the sentence. Oh well. Sometime in 1907 he dictated it for these volumes (3) that he had expressly forbidden to be published until 100 years after his death. (He died in 1910). And it's easy to see why. He fires all of his considerable weapons of bitterness. How about this one i read today?

I am quite sure now that often, very often, in matters concerning religion and politics a man's reasoning powers are not above a monkey's (3: 133).

Frankenstein Sundae, 241

More about trying to recover details about Mary's story, details I'd lost in the years after I quit working full-time on her story ...

Shelley and Mary, privately printed in 1882, contains in its four volumes a number of letters and other documents relative to the story of Bysshe and Mary Shelley. Needless to say (an expression, by the way, which, needless to say, is almost always needless to say), the book is not easy to come by.[1] I see in my notes that I acquired volumes three and four in late 1999 through inter-library loan at Hiram College, a service I was able to use because my wife, Joyce, was a full-time faculty member at the time.

But to read volumes one and two, I drove over to the Lilly (Special Collections) Library at Indiana University in October 1999—a journey of about 350 miles. My journal for those days—October 5–7—reveals that I seem as much interested in food as in the Shelleys. I talk about a visit to a steakhouse (ate a steak (duh) and a bunch of biscuits), a stop at a CVS for some pop (diet, of course) and a Snickers (not diet, of course). Back in my motel room (a Comfort Inn) I used a phone cord to connect my computer to the telephone so I could get online and use AOL to write a note to Joyce—remember the buzzing sound of static while you connected to AOL or other online service back in the phone-modem days?

Here’s some of what I wrote in my journal:

Once I fell asleep, I didn’t really wake up till morning (I’d forgotten till last night that I was in Central Time), and then had the pleasure of knowing that my shower—with squeaking pipes—was annoying the people around me who had annoyed me last night. At the desk, I got some directions to IU and without any trouble found the Union (with its lone public parking lot—nearly full already). I went upstairs & found a little coffee shop, where I bought a coffee (duh) and a scone [more food news!] and waited till about 8:45 (reading my Kirkus book) for the library opening time (9). The Lilly Library is in fact very close to the Memorial Union, so I had a few minutes to wait in the lobby, then went through the usual routines for using rare-book libraries. I was the only patron for a while, and so they quickly brought me the two volumes of Shelley and Mary, and I was thankful I had this laptop: The books were, well, books, not microfilm, so I had to type the notes I took. Not a lot of stuff, but some was golden—especially the letters from Godwin to Mary (unpublished most other places). After about two-and-a-half hours of typing, I was ready to leave for New Harmony, so off I went.

So … that was October 1999. By this week—July 2016—I had completely forgotten that I had notes and photocopies from Shelley and Mary and was wondering how on earth I was going to find the text of that 1827 letter from Fanny Wright to Mary Shelley, the letter that initiated their brief relationship, that letter that appears in Shelley and Mary.

And then I thought … Hmmm … maybe in my files?

I looked. Found a file labeled Shelley and Mary (1882), found in it my notes and photocopies, including a copy of that letter I’d so much wanted to consult, the one from Fanny Wright.

If I could dance, I would have, right in my study, surrounded by books by authors, who, if they could have seen me, would have averted their eyes, wondering how they possibly could have wound up on the shelf of a guy who moves like that!

---

[1] The volumes are indeed very rare. On July 15, 2016, I found no copies for sale on either ABE or Bookfinder, two very comprehensive sites for antiquarian book collectors.

Coxey's Crusade

I first heard of "Coxey's Army" when I was researching and writing about the life of Jack London. In 1894, when he was in his late teens, living in the Bay Area, he joined a ragtag outfit called "Kelly's Army," inspired by Coxey's (more about this in a bit), and headed east toward Washington, DC, to protest the miserable employment situation in the year after the Panic of 1893. At that time, the federal government was not interested in jobs programs (another half-century would pass before the Great Depression and FDR's alphabet soup of federal programs to help so many groups of people).

Anyway, in April 1894, the 18-year-old London headed out (he was a bit late, had to catch up with the group). But by May 25, he'd had enough--horribly sore feet, etc.--he abandoned the group near Hannibal, MO (they'd been on boats, heading down the Mississippi) and headed off on some other adventures that would take him to Chicago and to Niagara Falls, where he would be arrested for vagrancy and spend 30 days in the Erie County Penitentiary. (Later, he got a book out of it!)

Anyway, via a friend of a friend (and the author himself), I acquired not long ago a copy of this new book, Coxey's Crusade for Jobs: Unemployment in the Gilded Age (Northern Illinois Univ. Press) by Jerry Prout, who's teaching political science at Marquette. It's a brief book--fewer than 120 pages of text--but Prout clearly spent a lot of time doing his homework.

He tells the story of Jacob Sechler Coxey, a wealthy man living in Massillon, Ohio, who thought the government could/should help out in the unemployment crisis that followed the Panic. Coxey's consuming idea he called the Good Roads Plan: The government would employ workers to build and improve the nation's fairly dreary system of public roads. (Prout spends some time explaining this program in more detail--including the complications of its proposed financing.)

Coxey hooked up with another man committed to the program--Carl Browne--whom Prout labels "flamboyant" (19), a fitting term (as one of the book's photographs reveals). Anyway, the men spend countless hours planning and hyping their march to Washington, a journey of about 350 miles (says Google Maps).

Both men were very competent in PR, and soon the story began spreading all over the country. Men began arriving in Massillon to join up. By the time Coxey's Army left Massillon, there were a handful of other "armies" heading east, as well; newspapers had embedded reporters; crowds gathered all along to cheer the marchers. As Prout ably shows, the public support was astonishing.

The more traditional press, however, heaped editorial scorn on the endeavor and on the marchers, start to finish, despite their peaceful, even exemplary behavior all along the route. And when they finally arrived in DC after a thirty-five day march, they did not find Open Arms at the capital. There was a brief bit of violence (nothing deadly), and officials denied Coxey the opportunity to speak on the Capitol steps. Instead, they arrested him, hauled him off to the hoosegow.

And so it ended with a whimper rather than a bang. Some editorial gloating ensued.

But Prout shows in his Epilogue that the march had been an important--and very public--first step in our recognition that some of us need help from the rest of us. "Progress came slowly," he notes (113). But it has come. Though, obviously, opposition--strong opposition--to government interventions of this sort remains.

Although there are contemporary parallels throughout the narrative, Prout rarely mentions them (he doesn't really need to), but his concluding sentence begins with this: "The cause seems just as relevant today ..." (117). Indeed.

Published by an academic press and written by a professor, Coxey's Crusade is nonetheless easily accessible for interested and/or serious readers. Yes, there are some passages explaining some fairly complicated economics, but nothing too daunting (even for me!). But Prout is careful to keep us in the march of his prose and not lose us in the dust of diction.

There's a lot to learn here--not just about the march and the marchers, but the planners, the politicians (especially those ever-clueless ones in the US capital), the journalists, the public attitudes of 1894, the philanthropists of the era (Carnegie, etc.). Actually, it makes a reader yearn for an even more thorough treatment--a big, fat popular history. Maybe this kernal will cause something to emerge from the soil where Prout has planted it?

Oh--included is a fine gallery of relevant photographs.

So ... thoroughly researched, carefully written, wisely trimmed, sharply focused. Learned a lot.

Frankenstein Sundae, 240

a pause to refresh the screen

So today—July 13, 2016—I pause to think about what I’m doing. That’s generally a good thing to do every few years. And it was a few years ago that I thought it would be fun to write a memoir about my adventures chasing the story of Mary Shelley (1797–1851) all over the place. I’d begun my passion for her in mid-1990s when, my Jack London passion cooling, I’d begun using the Frankenstein story with my eighth grade students. No, we did not read the book (a bit much for a thirteen-year-old—not all of course, but most, I would say). But we looked at the cultural phenomenon of the creature—the movies, TV shows (The Munsters!), postage stamps, books, mugs, Halloween masks, ad infinitum. And then I had the kids writing their own story about the creature, whom they discover right in our Harmon Middle School building. They were fun to read, those stories.

Anyway, it wasn’t long before I was truly obsessed, especially after I retired in January 1997 and could devote virtually every waking hour to her and her circle and her story. And before it all ended—has it ended? surely not—I had read everything she’d written, all the books by each of her dazzling parents, her husband, many of her family’s friends, and on and on. I’d traveled to Europe to see what I could see of what remains of her world (more than I’d thought, less than I’d hoped). And then I settled in and wrote a YA biography about her, The Mother of the Monster: The Life and Times of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, which I published on Kindle Direct in 2012. I’d tried a couple of traditional publishers, but by then, in a struggle with metastatic prostate cancer, I decided I didn’t have time to fool around, to dicker with publishers and agents and the like, so I just published the damn thing myself.

By then—2012—I’d actually been away from her story for a while. I’d returned to part-time teaching for a bit (2001–2011) at nearby Western Reserve Academy (I walked to work; walked home for lunch), and I’d “moved on” once again (just as I had with Jack London), and I was reading and writing and traveling to get Poe’s story in my mind (which I also wrote and published on Kindle Direct).

And one (unforeseen) consequence? Mary’s story slipped away. Well, the details did. And when I began writing and serializing this memoir, I realized after a while that I’d forgotten so much of it, and I found myself actually telling more of her story than the story of my own pursuit. Can’t be helped: I need that detail back. And the only way to get it back is to go back through all that I did—and, sadly, to re-do a lot of it.

And so we come to yesterday—and the occasion for this rest stop of my freeway. I’d reached the part of the story—1827—when Mary got somewhat involved with Fanny Trollope and Fanny Wright. The latter, as we’ll see, tried to get Mary to go with her to America—we’ll see why in the ensuing posts.

So, yesterday, I went back to Mary’s published letters to see when she and Fanny Wright had first connected—and how. And I found Mary’s first letter to Wright—with a footnote to Wright’s earlier letter. I tried to find the latter letter (!) online (no luck—though I probably didn’t exhaust all my options there), but I noticed that in her footnote to Mary’s letter, editor Betty Bennett said this: Frances Wright had written to Mary Shelley in her letter of 22 August 1827 from Paris (see S & M, IV, 1092–95).[1]

Those of you with foul minds will look at S & M  and think of things your mother would be ashamed to hear you’re (still!) thinking about, but for me it triggered a couple of memories that had lain hidden in my fading brain for more than a decade.

TO BE CONTINUED ...

---

[1] Vol. 2, 5n.

Tuesday Triple

NOT my SAT score; NOT my address
on Pennsylvania Ave., NOT my number of Facebook friends,
NOT my bank balance, NOT ... all sorts of stuff ...

Tuesday Triple, says the title of this post. No, this is not a post about a memorable triple I ripped back in the day when I was playing baseball (though there were plenty, I assure you!). No, I've got three things to talk a bit about, so here we go.

1. For Father's Day, our son had found somewhere online an Oklahoma license plate from 1944 (the year I was born); he bought it; got it; forgot it. (He is, in many ways, most definitely my son!) But on Sunday night we were down at their place in Green, and his wife, Melissa, reminded him about it. And now he knew right where it was. And now it's in our house. And it's looking the worse for wear (as I am).

I don't remember a lot about Oklahoma license plates, but I think I remember this: That the first number refers to the county. Garfield County, where we lived, was (if I recall correctly) a 5. As I look at an alphabetical list of the 82 counties, I see that Garfield is #24. So maybe it was based on population?

I just this moment checked a website that confirms my memory! Five was the Garfield Co. code between 1952-61. I turned eight in 1952, so that was about the time I started paying attention. (Link to list of Oklahoma codes.) In 1944, however, the code was 9. In 1944, 58 was the designation for Woods County, a little west of Enid; Alva, the Woods County seat, we had been to and through a number of times. So, I am declaring right now: I saw this very car in Alva when I was too young to remember.


2. Not long ago, one of my word-a-day calendars featured the word pridian, a word I didn't know (but I know it now!). It's pronounced--as you see--PRIH-dee-uhn.

That word bounced and banged around in my head a bit, and it made me remember some books I used to urge on my middle-schoolers back in the mid-1970s: Lloyd Alexander's YA fantasy novels, collectively called The Chronicles of Prydain. They all featured Ged, a boy training to be a wizard (hmmmmm ...), in the kingdom of Prydain. In my thin-thin-thin file on the books (what happened to all the other stuff?!) I found a "pronouncing guide" to the books, and Prydain is prih-DANE. 

But it got me wondering ... was Lloyd Alexander being cutsie? Using for the name of his fictional kingdom a version of the word that means yesterday or in a previous time? I just checked the OED, hoping to see prydain as a variant spelling. Nope. But I'm gonna go with it, anyway.

Alexander, by the way, died in mid-May 2007. So he lived to see Harry-Potter-Mania. (Wonder what he thought of it? Maybe some guy wrote a novel about a white whale and a crazy captain named Carl and called it Carl the Crazy Captain and the White Whale, and then Melville came along?) My "Alexander" folder does have his obituary that I cut from the New York Times on May 19, 2007.

Years ago--back in my frenzy about the books--Alexander spoke at a convention of the National Council of Teachers of English. I want to say it was in Philadelphia, but I'm not sure (like a dope I didn't save the program, apparently). Anyway, I stood in the back and took picture after picture with a telephoto lens (no flash: I was sensitive!). But he noticed me and gave me a weird look a couple of times while he was speaking. But I'm used to that, weird looks. I had some great pictures I hung on my classroom wall for a couple of years. Where are they now? Ask my son, I guess. Cuz I do not know.

3. Finally--I let a milepost slip by. My 1600th post on DawnReader was on Sunday. And, as is my wont, I checked my (not all that impressive) numbers: Over the life of the blog, I've had 275,703 hits. That's 172 hits/post. A nice comfy number. But nothing to write home about (so I won't). I began on January 6, 2012 (link that that 1st post). I called it "I Am Born"--a Dickens allusion: It's the title of Chapter One of David Copperfield. And I've been fairly regular, missing days now and then for reasons ranging from health to depression to laziness to dotage.

But--as I've said before--I'm writing these, really, for myself. To get things down. To give my son and grandsons something to check out, later on, when I've checked out ...

Frankenstein Sundae, 239

Back to Mary in 1827, when she meets Frances Wright, the great social reformer.

On August 22, 1827, Mary received a significant letter. For the nonce, she was living in Arundel, about sixty miles slightly southwest of London, near the Channel, and only about seventy-five miles east of Bournemouth, where her remains now lie.

She liked it there in Arundel, a market town, where she had moved on September 3. Her friend and fellow widow (from that 1822 boating accident that took Bysshe Shelley’s life), Jane Williams, had since remarried to an old school friend of Bysshe’s, Thomas Jefferson Hogg, who, once upon a time, had made moves on Mary herself. Anyway, in a September letter to Jane, Mary told of her affection for Arundel, praising the beauty and … scenery of the town, especially its park, its streams and woodland glades … sources of never ending pleasure. She also mentions that they have not seen the Castle, the traditional home of the Duke of Norfolk.[1] I saw it from a train on April 15, 1999, on my way to see Bysshe’s boyhood home. In my journal that day I commented about the glorious castle of that name [Arundel], seat of the Duke of Norfolk, whom PBS and his father both employed to help in their estrangement after PBS’s expulsion from Oxford & his elopement with Harriet. 

Mary occasionally received letters from people who’d admired her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, and her father, William Godwin. And this August 22 letter was one of those. It was from social reformer Frances Wright (1795–1852), a woman whose lifespan was almost identical to Mary’s (1797–1851). We’ll get into Fanny’s reform passions in a moment, but let’s add a little more here first.

Fanny’s hand-delivered letter came via Robert Dale Owen, son of the founder of the New Harmony utopian colony in Indiana, the founder who’d been a friend of Mary’s father. So there are many fibers in this particular web of friendship and association. The younger Owen had met Fanny Wright earlier, knew Mary, and it was no doubt through him that she learned about Mary Shelley. Fanny believed the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft must surely be an ally in causes of social reform.  And she had an amazing one in progress (more later!).

Fanny begins the letter by effusively praising Mary’s (liberal/radical) parents. Then she turns to Mary herself, observing that, surely, you share at once the sentiments and talents of those from whom you drew your being.[2]

 

Frances Wright

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[1] Letters, vol. 2, 2.

[2] Shelley and Mary, 4 vols. (privately printed, 1882), 4: 1092.

Sunday Sundries, 110

1. AOTW--No one really stood out this week (other than the usual Traffic Doofuses), so I will take the crown myself this week, with apologies to all.

2. Okay, so I'm streaming all 100 episodes of The Rockford Files again. So what if I've done it so many times I've lost count! I love that show that ran from 1974-1980.

3. Earlier this week Joyce and I went to see the new Tarzan movie. I grew up watching Johnny Weissmuller swinging through the sound stage--uh, jungle--and I liked Cheetah (who is NOT in the new film! Oh no!), I merely tolerated Jane (I was too young) and envied Boy.

Later, Lex Barker came along (he made only five Tarzan movies), but I was never too crazy about him. I missed Johnny W.

The last Tarzan film I saw (I think) was Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes (1984), with the lean Christopher Lambert in the title role--and with appearances by stage heavyweights Ralph Richardson and Ian Holm. Jane was Andie MacDowell! It was directed by Hugh Hudson, whose previous film, Chariots of Fire, had won the Oscar for Best Picture in 1982 (he'd been nominated for--but had not won--in the Best Director category). I don't remember much about it--except not liking it very much.

This new Tarzan film--The Legend of Tarzan--adds Samuel L. Jackson to the mix (as an American academic), and the film retains all the awkwardness of the earlier ones. One white guy accomplishing what a country full of black guys can't. Yes, the filmmakers tried hard to make Jane more "liberated," to make many of the Congolese more competent and independent, but it still came down to the Same Old Thing. In this case--it was breaking up a massive attempt to enslave most of the country's people to work in the diamond mines to benefit Bad White Guys. Jane gets captured by the main BWG (of course--played in his now very familiar sleazy way by Christoph Waltz). I was affected now and then by some of the stuff with the animals--all CGI, of course. But still ... Something about a man nuzzling with a lion, you know? And the deep, expressive eyes of an elephant?

BTW: For you Aurora, Ohio, readers--Johnny Weissmuller (pre-Tarzan), who had been a swimming champion (multiple golds in the 1924 Summer Olympics), appeared at Geauga Lake Park, where, at 22, he set a new record in the 220-yd freestyle. It was July 11, 1926. Ninety years ago, almost exactly.

4. I finished one book this week, the 2016 novel, The Whale: A Love Story, by Mark Beauregard (his debut), the story of the relationship (and, yes, "relationship") between Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne (15 years his senior) in 1850-51 when both were living out in the Berkshires (Pittsfield and Lenox, Mass., respectively). Hawthorne had just published The Scarlet Letter and was at work on The House of Seven Gables; Melville was trying to rescue his once-thriving career by writing a story about a white whale.

Because my mom lives now in Lenox (and, previously, in Pittsfield), and because my two brothers (both of whom live in the Boston area) share an old farmhouse in Becket, Mass. (not far from all of this), for a weekend/holiday retreat, I have been out there many times, and so I greatly enjoyed re-visiting the sites so important in their story--Monument Mountain (which the two writers climbed on the day they met; with them, among others, was Oliver Wendell Holmes--not a bad day's outing!), Arrowhead (the former Melville farm, now a museum), and the red Hawthorne cottage (rebuilt on its original site--near Tanglewood, summer home of the Boston Symphony). Joyce and I have been in the houses, have climbed the mountain.

Also, Beauregard's research was thorough. He knows the places. Knows the biographies. Knows the books. Knows the written correspondence between the two (though virtually all of the Hawthorne-to-Melville letters are gone). He uses the correspondence here liberally--even composes letters when he needs to. And he does a good job of showing how absolutely smitten Melville was with the older writer, whom he greatly admired ...

... and had the hots for in this new novel (and maybe actually). But I felt for much of the time that I was reading a romance novel (and, yes, there is some pelvic grinding but nothing much beyond: Hawthorne won't allow it, though Melville is eager for it). Although Beauregard does make a good, solid effort to reconstruct what must have been some lively intellectual conversation between the two, I just wasn't too convinced--and the real interest, it seemed to me, was in the fire of this attraction--how damaging it could have been to both of them--how helpless Melville was (and how willing)--how fiercely moral Hawthorne was ... but weak, too.

But--again--the diction was ... excessive. For example ...

• p. 105: Beautifully dying, dusky yellow oak leaves spun in the gentle breeze, catching the soft afternoon sunlight. As Jeanie Field's buggy approached Arrowhead, the gaudy rubies of sumac trees beckoned her gaze up toward the blond and crimson crowns of maples and ashes and finally to the tips of the fading yellow oaks, which glowed in the full light far above. The whole landscape fluttered and changed with every breath of air ....
• p. 131, in Melville's mind: Oh, Nathaniel, we humans are but droplets of the essence of God, lost on the fertile earth, all separate but remembering the same vast ocean from which we came. Oh, Nathaniel, I know that you felt the pull of this tide of love in your heart--we are split from the same original impulse, and together we create not just love but creation itself ....
• p. 222: Hawthorne turned his head aside, and a thrill of terror shot through Herman's whole body--he clutched at Hawthorne, who convulsed and gasped, and this shuddering continued wordlessly for a few moments. The room seemed veiled in supernatural shadows.

A bit much, eh?

Still, I'm glad I read it (for the reasons above), but I wouldn't call it a whale of a story. More delphine.*


5. Some final words--some words I like from my various online word-of-the-day providers ...

• FROM THE OXFORD ENGLISH DICTIONARY:HEROOGONY Pronunciation: hih-RAHG-uh-nee
  Forms: α.   18– herogony   Brit. /hᵻˈrɒɡəni/, /hᵻˈrɒɡn̩i/,  U.S. /həˈrɑɡəni/.  β.   18– heroogony.
  Origin:A borrowing from Latin, combined with English elements; modelled on a Greeklexical item. Etymons: hero n., -gony comb. form, Latin heroogonia, Greek ἡρωογονία.
  Etymology:In α. forms <  hero n. + -gony comb. form, after Byzantine Greek ἡρωογονία (see below). Compare post-classical Latin herogonia (1740 or earlier). Compare theogony An account of the genealogy and history of heroes or demigods, esp. the unfinished account forming part of Hesiod's Theogony (8th cent. b.c.). Cf. theogony n. n.heroogony, n.
• FROM DICTIONARY.COM (I love this one!): 
• SELENOTROPISM \si-lee-nuh-TROH-piz-uh m, sel-uh-noh-\
  noun
  1. Biology. growth in response to moonlight.
  Quotes
  Selenotropism of Plants. *--Ch. Musset, struck by the heliotropic movements of plants, has made some experiments on the influence of the moon. ... The bud seemed to follow the moon, and when the plants were placed at a window with a western aspect a fresh movement was seen, and this continued until the moon disappeared behind the hills.
  -- Edited by Frank Crisp, Journal of the Royal Microscopical Society, Ser. II--Vol. III, 1883
  Origin of selenotropism
  Selenotropism can be traced to the Greek selēnē meaning “moon” and trópos meaning "turn." It entered English in the 1880s.

*dolphin-like