On the Shelf – 8/13

Be a Volunteer ?

I spent most of this past weekend handing out water at the finish line for the Downieville Classic mountain bike races — a bit of volunteering that I’ve done for the past 20 or so years.  And, as so often happens in my brain, it got me to thinking about a specific word — in this case, “volunteer”.  Which, of course, prompted me to further research.  Here’s what I’ve found.

The word “volunteer” (which can be either a noun or a verb) is rooted in the word “voluntary” (which is an adjective).  That word comes from the Latin voluntarius, meaning “willing”, “of one’s own choice”. (The Latin noun voluntas means “will” or “desire”.)  The Latin word worked its way through Old French (volonte), and eventually into English in 1330, where it appears in a poem called “Of Arthur and of Merlin” as “volunte” — indicating “will” in this instance.

One of the first recorded uses of the word “voluntary” in English, used as a noun, appeared around 1380, when Chaucer used it in his Boece, a translation of Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy.  The noun “volunteer”, however, doesn’t appear until the Early Modern era, when it was recorded in Walter Raleigh’s The Life and Death of Mahomet, sometime before Raleigh’s death in 1618.  This seems to have established the word with a military connotation, meaning someone who willingly entered into military service.

Within a few decades the word was being used in non-military contexts, e.g., when in 1648 Thomas Gage wrote of Spanish religious missions being sent to the “New World”, and including volunteers, in addition to priests and others.  In 1643, the verb “to volunteer” appeared in a description of the First Battle of Newbury in the English Civil War.

And, bringing the discussion a bit closer to our time, during the 1847 Mexican-American War a call for 2,800 volunteers from Tennessee for military service yielded some 30,000 recruits from that state, resulting in the state’s nickname of “The Volunteer State”, recorded as early as 1853.

Which brings us now up to our own time in our own place.  It is my belief that, in many ways, volunteers — those who willingly step forward to offer their time and/or efforts and/or skills — are the lifeblood of rural communities. Without the financial resources of larger, more urban, communities, rural communities exist and thrive because their people put themselves forward for the good of the whole.  As I shared in discussion this weekend with a volunteer who came from outside of Downieville, it is a matter of determining (1) what the community needs, (2) what you have to offer, and (3) what you enjoy doing.  It is where those three things overlap that a volunteer opportunity awaits for you.

What’s New on the Shelves of the Downieville Library

Several new-to-the-library items have recently found their way to us.  Here’s what’s new:

Fiction books

• The Fire Agent, by David Baerwald

• This Bird Has Flown, by Susanna Hoffs

• Theo of Golden, by Allen Levi

• By Any Other Name, by Jodi Picoult

• How the Penguins Saved Veronica, by Hazel Prior

• Marble and Mud, by K.E. Thompson (Book 1 of the Stewart’s Camp Saga)

• Gelding Rock, by K.E. Thompson (Book 2 of the Stewart’s Camp Saga)

Non-fiction books

• Women Heroes of the American Revolution, by Susan Casey (juvenile)

• A Kids’ Guide to the American Revolution, by Kathleen Krull (juvenile)

• Bamboo Secrets: One Woman’s Quest Through the Shadows of Japan, by Patricia Dove Miller

Audio-books

• 4th of July, by James Patterson & Maxine Paetro

• Burn, by James Patterson & Michael Ledwidge

• The Black Book, by James Patterson & David Ellis

• The Lady in Blue, by Javier Sierra