IMPETUS

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Sorting through the last year's paperwork for supporting tax evidence, I ran across last year's Valentine's cards, a ten-year-old check register that had escaped the search and destroy mission I did a couple of years ago and a letter responding to my Christmas letter about Lloyd's circumstances. I did find all the W-2 and 1099 forms and the 1098 forms, although I will have to call the company that holds our second mortgage again. They won't send out a 1098 unless I insist. I have a handful of thank you's from charity and the personal property statements. I'm all set to get started with my taxes, right?

Wrong. Along about October, TurboTax sent out my 2008 disc(s), which I laid aside unopened until needed. Now the TTax package lies somewhere in the flotsom that lines the floor of my computer room. Now I have to sort through the detritus: sort, shred, file and re-pile—at least until I find the discs.

Logically, the room is finite. There cannot be infinite material inside. Yet, I don't seem to be able to clear more than enough space to walk into to room for more than two days at a time. If I had more space elsewhere in the house, I would move everything out (putting it all in logical, logistical piles) install file cabinets and bookshelfs, and then herd everything back in in logical order. Oh to have Mr. Spock as my organizer.
The word of the day for February 21, 2009 is "impetus" — Pronunciation: \'im-pə-təs\
Function: noun
Etymology: Latin, assault, impetus, from impetere to attack, from in- + petere to go to, seek — more at feather
Date: 1641
1 a (1): a driving force : impulse. (2): incentive , stimulus. b: stimulation or encouragement resulting in increased activity. 2: the property possessed by a moving body in virtue of its mass and its motion —used of bodies moving suddenly or violently to indicate the origin and intensity of the motion.

Our quotation is from Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (1825–1911), U.S. suffragist and rights advocate. From her 1893 speech at the Columbian Exposition in Chicago: “Woman’s Political Future,” as quoted in Black Women in Nineteenth-Century American Life, part 3, by Bert James Loewenberg and Ruth Bogin (1976):

So close is the bond between man and woman that you can not raise one without lifting the other. The world can not move ahead without woman’s sharing in the movement, and to help give a right impetus to that movement is woman’s highest privilege.

;^)

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