Some of you may have remembered Naphtali's "Rare Sighting in Southern Minnesota" post.
Well I'm sorry to say that it was no hoax. The Yeti has appeared yet(i) again!
This time the savvy blog reader will recognize this as one of our OWN windows (some noticed the other pictures were of me cleaning my parent's windows [admittedly not a common occurrence])I'm thinking that there is actually an achilles heel to our cleanly Martha Stewart. I've been married to Naphtali for over 7 years and there aren't many opportunities for my unclean threshold to trigger.
She has this uncanny ability to clean weeks (she would say years) before I'd even notice something was dirty. So I have to say there is ONE area of housecleaning that I excel at. Perhaps years of coke bottle glasses with chronic cleaning during sports has left me with my obsession. According to a myth arising later, his mother, Thetis, had dipped the infant Achilles in the river Styx, holding onto him by his heel, and he became invulnerable where the waters touched him -- that is, everywhere but the areas covered by her thumb and forefinger -- implying that only a heel wound could have been his downfall. Another version of Achilles becoming close to immortal involves Thetis' atte
mpt to make him a god. She would rub his whole body with ambrosia and then hold him over a fire every night. She held him by his heel, which is why that part of his body was vulnerable. One day, Achilles' father, Peleus, came in the home and caught Thetis holding Achilles over the fire. Peleus did not know that Thetis was trying to immortalize Achilles. Thetis was scared and fled out of fear. This possibly coincides with the story that Thetis left Achilles at a very young age.
The use of “Achilles’ heel” as an expression used for “area of weakness, vulnerable spot” dates only to 1855 (Merriam-Webster). It derived from the Greek "Achilleios pterna" (Greek: Αχίλλειος πτέρνα) literally meaning Achilles’ heel.
The Achilles' heel as a singular weakness has become a cliché in superhero comics, originating mainly from Superman's weakness against kryptonite [wikipedia]
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3 comments:
this savvy reader did notice the change in locale!! i'm sorry to be so slow this early in the day but are you saying that dirty windows are naphtali's achilles heel?? or is it you?? it's an amusing (and educational) (i know how you like to learn and share knowledge) entry undiminished by my feeble grasp of its subtler points.
well well well.
I wish I could have been so smart as to think of how it applied to both of us. I was primarily referring to Naphtali's ability to keep things clean before I recognized dirt but...
perhaps I'm the one with the 'weakness' in my cleanliness threshold.
Nooooo!!!! I still take comfort that at least it is a high threshold that I've set for myself ;)
i didn't mean to ask not whether cleaning was your achilles heel(!?) but whether you are naphtali's....and i still can't get the phrasing right.
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