Things I Learned Recently

I didn't mean to take off much of last week, but I got involved with two days of snow removal, finally decorating the tree, a bit more Christmas knitting, and a lot of reading. I've got ideas for posts for at least today and tomorrow, so I better write them before I forget. 

Today is about some things I learned recently. Nothing earth-shattering, and maybe they are things you already know, but when I first heard them I was surprised and intrigued.

• Decarcerated is a word. Of course, this makes complete sense, but when I heard it on Friday I thought it had to be a mistake. If I hadn't been listening to NPR, I would have been sure it was an error, but I looked it up anyway. I couldn't find an entry in Merriam-Webster or Dictionary.com, but Oxford Reference defines it as "the process of removing people from institutions such as prisons or mental hospitals—the opposite of incarceration. Another linked concept is transcarceration, in which people are moved sideways from one kind of institution to another."

• I've always heard and spoken the idiom as "the devil is in the details" but while listening to NPR on Saturday, I heard an interviewee say "the angel is in the details". John was talking at the time and didn't take kindly to my shushing, so I can't tell you who said this. I've tried to find a clip online but wasn't successful. Wikipedia tells me that the idiom was derived from "God is in the detail", and has been attributed to German architect, Mies van der Rohe. This seems closer to angel than devil. Nancy Pelosi said, "The devil and the angels are in the details." when discussing the Covid-19 stimulus package, so I may have to consider angels rather than devils. 

• I don't remember exactly how we started the conversation, but John told me that he just learned that roads, streets, avenues, boulevards, drives, and lanes were not just arbitrary names but actually meant something. This was news to me also, so of course, we had to look them up. 

Road: Can be anything that connects two points. The most basic of the naming conventions. 

Street: A public way that has buildings on both sides of it. They run perpendicular to avenues.

Avenue: Also a public way that has buildings or trees on either side of it. They run perpendicular to streets.

Boulevard: A very wide city street that has trees and vegetation on both sides of it. There’s also usually a median in the middle of boulevards.

Drive: A long, winding road that has its route shaped by its environment, like a nearby lake or mountain.

Lane: A narrow road often found in a rural area. Basically, the opposite of a boulevard.

Most of the local examples we could think of seemed to hold true to these naming conventions, except for one. We live on an Avenue, and it is parallel to Main Street. Main Street may be an outlier because our avenue is also perpendicular to a street. I grew up on Oak Lane, and it was a one lane dirt road in a rural area.

So am I the only one who didn't know about decarcerate, "the angel is in the details, and street naming conventions? What have you learned recently? Please educate me!