Are mineral specimens without labels fewtrils? In the initial attempt at this post, I asserted as much.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the noun fewtrils (always in the plural) means: “Small or trivial things; knick-knacks.” It’s a lovely word and I first learned of it during the 2021 National Spelling Bee. New York Times reporter Alan Yuhas offered it and several others from the 2021 contest as evidence to argue that the National Spelling Bee words “weren’t always this hard.” The recent contest featured words that were hard, obscure, and seldom encountered. The Oxford English Dictionary places fewtrils in Frequency Band 1 which “contains extremely rare words unlikely ever to appear in modern text.”
The origin of the word is uncertain, though the OED suggests it might be an “alteration” of fattrels, a Frequency Band 1 noun used in Scotland meaning “ribbon-ends.” Fattrels comes from the French fatraille defined as “trash” or “things of no value.”
I wrestled with whether it was fair to apply fewtrils to a gift of several dozen minerals I recently received on behalf of a fossil and mineral club. This generous donation, from the widow of a man whose father had collected them, will support the club financially through our auctions or generate good will via giveaways. What has come to me in the past few days are the specimens the donor’s husband held back when he gave away his father’s collection many years ago. I have no idea what prompted him to retain these, whether they held some special meaning for him, whether he felt these were particularly attractive specimens, or whether these were the dregs that he couldn’t give away.
There is one thing that binds nearly all of these items together: a lack of any identifying label and, so, there is no information as to what the minerals were believed to be, where they were found, or when they were collected.
I fear this post will be taken as showing a lack of gratitude for this gift, the undercutting of an act of generosity by a bit of petty criticism. That’s not what I intend. I acknowledge and salute the gift, but lament that I know so very little about these specimens. And, though they still have value, there’s a lesson to be learned for today’s and tomorrow’s collectors, one that is painful given how striking many of the donated minerals are, as the pictures that follow attest.
Only the fifth image from the top shows a specimen that sports a label: "Quartz crystals, Ark."
The absence of an identifying label is a big deal. Ronald Louis Bonewitz in Rock and Gem: The Definitive Guide to Rocks, Minerals, Gems, and Fossils (Smithsonian, 2008) wrote:
In the beginning, all of this [note taking and labelling] may not seem so important, but as a collection grows, so does the likelihood of mixing up specimens and forgetting the localities where they were found. Precise information enhances both the financial value of specimens and their scientific interest. (p. 23)
In his interesting, self-published, slim volume titled The Collecting Bug: A Rock Collector’s Philosophy of Life (2020), amateur rock, mineral, and fossil collector Bob Farrar, devotes a chapter to the labelling of specimens. His position is clear: the chapter is titled “Label, Label, LABEL!” He asserted:
[P]roperly labeled mineral and fossil specimens constitute knowledge, i.e., the knowledge that that particular mineral or fossil occurs at a particular place. . . . A specimen can always be identified later, but missing locality information is often gone forever. A specimen of, say, calcite, with no locality information does not constitute knowledge that calcite occurs at a particular place. That calcite specimen may still be useful for education purposes, such as demonstrating double refraction, or as a decorative piece to sit on a shelf somewhere. But, it does not constitute knowledge. (p. 34)
So, are minerals without labels really fewtrils? I don’t think so. Though Bonewitz posited that such specimens are certainly less valuable financially and scientifically, they are not without some value. Even some that border on being nearly worthless (knick-knacks) may have some beauty which may turn each of them, in Farrar’s words, into “a decorative piece to sit on a shelf somewhere.”
This line of reasoning isn't unique to minerals. I and many others have argued that fossils without labels are just rocks, but perhaps they're actually a bit more than that.
Is there a noun for objects worth less than they could have been?
[Later edit: Disappointments is, I think, entirely too negative, bordering on fewtrils.]
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