Middle Eastern Black Tea & Sage

Tea is a common drink in area of the Middle East and North Africa. This black tea and sage is pretty common in parts of the western Middle East, including part of Jordan, Israel, the West Bank and Gaza. I like tea and I like sage, so this is a drink made for me.

 

Ingredients (per serving):

1 teaspoon black tea (or 1 teabag)

3 or 4 sage leaves (or 1 heaping teaspoon crumbled dried sage leaves, NOT rubbed sage)

1 cup boiling water

honey(or sugar)

Bring the water to a boil in a pan. Remove the pan from the heat and immediately add the tea and the sage leaves. Cover the pan and allow the tea to sit for about 3 1/2 to 5 minutes, depending upon how strong you like your tea. Add honey (or sugar) to sweeten the tea to your preference. (Note: some people add the sweetener, typically sugar, right in the pan to dissolve as the water heats up.)

 

Milder tea (reddish in color) ...

Darker and stronger tea...

 

WORD HISTORY:

Algebra-When I was in school, "algebra" was like a dirty word; in fact, I'd have rather said, "heck," "darned" or "dang it," than utter the word "algebra." The word "algebra" was borrowed into English in the mid 1500s from the Latin word of the same spelling. Latin had borrowed the word in the 1100s with the Latin translation from Arabic of transliterated, "al-mukhtasar fi hisab al-jabr wa al-muqabala" (The Compendium of Calculation by Restoration and Balancing," which has other translations^). Transliterated "al-jabr," a noun, is from the verb "jabara," meaning, "to set, to restore," from Semitic "jbr/gbr," meaning,  "to become strong, to strengthen;" thus also, "to gain, to triumph."

  

^ By the way, the book also helped immensely in the adoption of Arabic numbers into Europe, an adoption that gradually replaced the use of Roman numerals as the main way to write and display numbers.

What's In A Name: Clara, Claire, Jordan

Clara/Claire: This name means "bright;" thus, "clear," and it comes from the Latin name "Clarus," itself from the Latin word "clarus," with the same meaning. It also passed from Latin to French as, "Claire." It seems to have taken hold in English as some families named their children after Saint Clare of Assisi beginning in the mid 1200s.

Jordan: This name is from the river in ancient Palestine where Jesus was baptized. The river's importance to Christianity brought its use as a name. The word comes from transliterated Hebrew "yarden," meaning, "to flow down(ward)."

 I consulted the following for this article: "A World of Baby Names," by Teresa Norman, published by Perigee/Penguin Group, New York, 2003.

WORD HISTORY:
Bull (2) ^-This is the noun most commonly meaning, "an official papal document." It is not related to the word of the same spelling, but meaning "a type of male animal." The word's distant history is unclear, although some seem to feel that Latin borrowed it from Gaulish, a Celtic language of western Europe that was largely absorbed by Latin in what is today much of France and southern Belgium. That may well be, but at this point, I'm not really convinced. It goes back to Latin "bulla," which meant, "knob, bubble," which then produced the meaning, "a rounded metal device used to seal documents." The meaning then transferred to the documents themselves; thus, "a sealed document issued by a figure of authority." More and more such documents were issued by the pope, bringing a strong connection between "bulla" and the papacy. The word was borrowed by English as "bulle" in the late 1200s, with likely added reinforcement for its spelling from Old French, a Latin-based language, which had "bulle" as its form of the word.^^             

^ This is the link to the article with the history of the word "bull," the animal: https://pontificating-randy.blogspot.com/2012/02/world-in-protest-revolution-or-civil_07.html

^^ Just a guess really, but likely the word was present in religious circles in England from Latin itself, but the upper classes in England were descendants of the Norman French and they still used their form of French extensively in writing in that time period. Many, many Latin and French words were similar or even the same in spelling.