Two National Icons Pass: Aretha Franklin & John McCain

Within the last couple of weeks, the United States has lost two people who have made their respective impacts on this country, and even on the world.

Aretha Franklin has been a part of the lives of many of us since the 1960s. She has long been one of my heroes and she could stir energy and emotion with her great voice and great music. I cannot type this without tears in my eyes. I'd guess about 2005, there was a guy who turned out to be an outright racist (I didn't know it then), who sang and clapped his hands along with me when Aretha's song "Think" came on the radio one time. Aretha Franklin was one of the balms for our long national wound about race.

Senator John McCain was someone with whom I did not agree on a number of issues, but I respected him. Sometimes we get our feathers ruffled, but we get over it, and such was Senator McCain's relationship with more than a few people. The wife of a cousin of mine, a Republican, called McCain "a traitor to America" to me back when he was running for the Republican presidential nomination in 2008. The man spent more than five years in captivity in North Vietnam. When I told a friend of mine, also a Democrat, what she had said, his first words were about McCain's time spent as a prisoner of war, and he was puzzled that anyone would say such a thing about John McCain. No matter how John McCain voted on any piece of legislation later when he served in Congress, no one can say he had not sacrificed for his country, and for my cousin's wife to call McCain a "traitor" speaks volumes about her, but nothing about John McCain. The same applies even more so to Donald Trump, a self centered abomination, who is about 5 or 6 inches taller than John McCain in physical height, but who actually remains minuscule in comparison to McCain in both political matters and as a human being.
  
WORD HISTORY:
Hearse-The origin of "hearse" is unknown, and some of its meaning additions/changes are tough to pin down. It goes back to Oscan^ "hirpus," which meant "wolf." This gave Latin "hirpex," meaning, "a type of plow device with a row or rows of teeth (the connection to "wolf"^^) used to tear and cut through roots," a meaning later seemingly expanded to include, "a large type of rake." This later became "hercia" in Latin and passed into Latin-based Old French as "herce." It "apparently" was taken on by the Anglo-Norman speakers in England from French by the second half of the 1200s. Around that time, it also came to be used for a "portcullis;" that is, "a sliding gate, usually of metal bars or framework that could be lowered to stop the entry of enemies" ("presumably" the lowering bars looked like teeth coming down), but this meaning didn't seem to generally make it into English until the early 1400s. It had also developed the meaning in French of, "a chandelier for a church," apparently from the resemblance of a large chandelier to the plowing device? This meaning then led to "a framework for candles over a dead body," a meaning that later transferred to, "a wagon or carriage used to transport a body," as candles were often used on such transports. Of course, in modern times, the name transferred to "a specialized (usually elongated) motor vehicle for transporting a body."    

^ Oscan is a now dead language of the Italic branch of the Indo European languages. Latin is also a part of the Italic branch. Oscan was spoken in fairly large parts of southern Italy, and also somewhat in central Italy, but Latin gradually absorbed it until it was essentially gone by circa 100 A.D.

^^ Just for the sake of comparison, German uses "Fleischwolf" (literally, flesh/meat wolf) as its word for "meat grinder," with the idea of a wolf's sharp teeth lying behind the word's meaning.