#JusJoJan: Abscission, Eh?

Today’s word is given to us by Lakshmi Bhat, who chose the word abscission, and Linda actually let her. Anyway, be sure and drop by both their blogs and say "howdy!"

Naturally, I had to look up abscission in the dictionary, which told me that it comes from the Latin scindere, meaning "to cut." The ab- prefix means "from," so it means "to cut from." Plants have an abscission zone, in which the enzymes are produced and stored that tell the plant to shed its leaves. The dictionary makes sure that we all understand the difference between abscission and incision, which is cutting into a thing, specifically a body. Sounds rather macabre, doesn’t it?

Mary, my wife of 44 years as of today, knits and crochets, and thus has a number of pairs of scissors sitting around to cut yarn as well as older pairs to cut things like boxes. I had exactly one pair, a small pair designed specifically to trim mustaches and beards, which I would use once or twice a month to trim my mustache, whenever I started eating it with my food. They came in a set with a wee comb with which I could comb it. One day, I went to trim my mustache because she complained, and the scissors were gone. I asked her "where are my mustache scissors?" and she said "I dunno; where did you last see them?" I said, "in the bathroom, in the case where I always put them."

Anyway, one day she’s going through a knitting project that she hadn’t worked on in some time, and lo and behold, there were my mustache scissors. She had "borrowed" them, no doubt intending to return them, and they ended up in the bag with her project…