Ardent spirits

Some days I feel like the Dan Rather of copy editing, relegated to a backwater channel still performing, but for minimum wage.  The only difference is Rachel Maddow doesn't ask me about divisive issues like one or two spaces between sentences, or a slash or not at the end of a web address, or whether or not to use "on" before of a day of the week.  Believe it or not those are emotional issues that raise anger among certain segments of the editing population.  For what it's worth, you can't stand ON a day.

Other days it's more like River, receptors wide open but despite intelligence, no idea what to do with what she knew, until one day she becomes Serenity.  That's a "Firefly" reference in case you don't know.

Then I heard a term tonight that just screams to be used.  It showed up on a Ken Burns PBS special about the Lewis and Clarke expedition.  At Christmas on the Oregon coast after two years on the trail, Meriwether Lewis lamented they had no ardent spirits with which to celebrate the occasion.  The early American lexicon had such wonderful terms, terms that are lost now unless somebody like Ken Burns dredges them out of expedition journals.

In another incarnation. research found this one in a description of an early Alaska gold miner who had gone crazy.  The editor of a newspaper in Iditarod wrote that whatever tipped him over was, "the last blow to unseat his reason."

Ardent spirits seem quite tempting in the current climate on the Knik River bank as well, only unlike for Lewis and the Corps of Discovery, there are some available here.