RV and preparation

In my November 28 post "Sometimes a banana is just a banana -- right?" I recount a dream I had in which there was a song beginning "R-V!" and I note that "in the dream I understood RV to stand for preparation worker, even though that doesn't make any sense." I had the dream in the early 1990s, but I just posted about it three weeks ago because the sync-stream had made it relevant.

This morning, one of my private English students brought this magazine article:

RV alone would have been something of a sync, but notice that five words on the page have been bolded for special emphasis -- as "key vocabulary" the reader should be sure to know -- and that one of these is preparation. There's no logical connection between RV and preparation, so this is a pretty strong sync.

(By the way, the grammar pedant in me has to take exception to the last sentence in the first column: "It was called the Gypsy Van, and many people considered it to be the first RV." Surely it was only later, in retrospect, that the Gypsy Van was thus considered -- I doubt anyone in 1915 was politically correct enough to call it a Roma Van -- so it should be "many people consider it to have been the first RV.")

Note added (3:50 p.m.):

The facing page, which I didn't photograph, has an additional example sentence for each of the bolded words. The one for preparation is "Morris put a lot of preparation into the job interview." The name caught my eye because a couple of days ago I found myself thinking of the spider who patrols my balcony -- a large male cane spider (Heteropoda venatoria), the one I mentioned "dancing" to a Johnny Cash cover in "Spider's oil and walking the line" (December 12) -- as "Morris." I don't know where that name came from, and I never made a conscious choice to give it to him; I just caught myself thinking "I wonder if Morris will come out tonight" and realized that he had a name.

I understand that cane spiders are an arachnophobe's nightmare, being both enormous and given to sudden bursts of lightning-fast movement, but anything that kills cockroaches is all right in my book, and Morris is more than welcome on my balcony. Among his conspecifics, Morris stands out for his eyes -- not usually a cane spider's best feature -- which, though tiny, are bright green and remarkably reflective. They always seem to be glinting even when there's no obvious light source, and that's usually how I spot him at night.

I first mentioned my "RV" dream in a post dealing primarily with bananas and my childhood "Banana Man" persona. One of the common names for Morris's species is banana huntsman spider, and apparently there is an urban legend that spiders of this species will hide inside bananas. According to Wikipedia:

The banana spider myth claims that the Huntsman spider lays its eggs in banana flower blossoms, resulting in spiders inside the tip of bananas, waiting to terrorize an unsuspecting consumer. This is supposed to explain why monkeys allegedly peel bananas from the "wrong" end.

My post also included a reference to the way monkeys allegedly peel bananas:

I insisted on eating them "the monkey way" -- meaning with the skin peeled back but not removed, as I had seen monkeys eating them in cartoons.

I've just remembered now that during my Banana Man period, my father told me that I ought to write a story about a boy named Harvey who had a secret alter ego as the superhero Banana Man. Why Harvey I don't know, but I remember that he specifically suggested that name. Harvey of course sounds very similar to RV.