“What happens to the plumbers when the last lead pipe is removed?” I asked my wife the other day while we were out.
She’s as guilty as I am of blurting out non-sequiturs that are actually preludes to tap into our inner dialogues.
“What do you think?” She answered.
I told her about the massive and costly effort to remove lead piping from old municipal water systems and to remove lead paint from homes.
She stared longingly at the bridge supports, which came up quickly.
I don’t think she knew at this point that I was more likely to be doing a grammar puzzle than worrying about the livelihoods of the people who run our toilets and showers.
“I mean, if they can’t work with lead anymore, we’ll have to name them something else,” I said.
Our last names are often closely linked to our work. In the old days you might go to a man named Fleischmann to buy your meat.
Why? Because “Fleisch” is German for “meat”.
My father’s family ran a butcher shop in Milwaukee. It’s a wonder my name isn’t Fleischmann.
Knowing that a “tree” is a tree, I romanticized as a kid that Baumann means “lumberjack” in German. nope A lumberjack is called a hozlfaller (excuse the missing umlaut).
But everyone seems to agree that “Baumann” was the name for someone who lived near a tree.
Well, that’s not particularly ambitious.
Smiths were allowed to shape iron with hammers and hot fire.
Fletchers made arrows.
Coopers made barrels.
I guess living near a tree gives you the freedom to explore the possibilities of your working life.
But plumbers are people who work with lead. And while there are still millions of miles of lead pipe supplying homes with water, plumbers have been banned from using lead pipe or lead solder for nearly 40 years.
The Romans coined the name for those who used the heavy metal to make hookahs. “Plumbum” is Latin and means “lead”. Some of these old sanitary facilities are still there today.
One of these artisans was called “Plumbari”. That was eventually anglicized to “plumber.”
Those who work with stained glass still work with lead, so perhaps “plumber” would be a better name for them.
If you think about it, Baumann might be the name of someone who uses a lot of trees to make newspapers and books that sell poorly.
Wordle famous
I am assuming that many of you reading this column are everyday participants in the Wordle phenomenon. But do yourself a favour: celebrate your result. Don’t dig deeper to compare your guesses with WordleBot’s because you’ll feel stupid even if you solved it in three “guesses”.
Sports editor Kathleen Danes sent me an agenda for our weekly meeting in which she listed “Women’s Wordle Cup.” to the topics.
It seems that the predictive text (autocorrect) has replaced “World” with “Wordle”.
The bots have clearly taken over the world.
Write carefully!
• Jim Baumann is Vice President/Editor-in-Chief of the Daily Herald. You can purchase Jim’s book Grammar Moses: A Humorous Guide to Grammar and Usage at
grammarmosesthebook.com. Write to him at jbaumann@dailyherald.com
and put “Grammar Moses” in the subject line. You can also friend or follow Jim at facebook.com/baumannjim.
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