Joan: Look out the window. Come over to the window.

In his latest post, "Spelling Bee, Abseil, and Waiting for a Star to Fall," William Wright revisits his son's math homework in which he had to solve an anagram for "a spelling bee." He notes that the Scripps National Spelling Bee final coincided with Joan of Arc's feast day this year, and he also finds the Elvish word for "bow" (the weapon) hidden in the homework assignment. I left a comment pointing out that the French for "bow" is arc.

A few hours after reading that post, I taught a student who is working on improving his pronunciation. We use a book where each unit focuses on a particular sound and includes dialogues that use that sound a lot. Today's lesson was brought to you by the letter O -- or, rather, the phoneme /o/, the "long o" sound. You know what name includes that sound? Here's the dialogue from the book:

Joan woke up a few minutes ago, but Joe is still sleeping.

Joan: Joe! Joe! JOE! Hello!?

Joe: (groans) Oh, no. What's the problem?

Joan: Look out the window.

Joe: No. My eyes are closed, and I'm going back to sleep.

Joan: Don't go to sleep now, Joe. Come look at the snow.

Joe: Snow? It's only October. I know there's no snow. Leave me alone.

Joan: Come over to the window.

Joe: Stop joking, Joan. There's no snow.

Joan: OK, I'll show you. I'm going to put on my coat and go out and make a snowball and throw it at you! Then you'll open your eyes!

(If the first line of that dialogue made you think of the Garden of Eden, you might be a Mormon.)

The way Joan keeps trying to get Joe to go to the window made me think of a scene from the Beatles movie Help!, so I looked it up:

I haven't watched that movie since I was a kid, and I had forgotten that the scene also includes a bow. The Leo McKern character is trying to hypnotize Ringo (Japanese for "apple"; his real name, Richard Starkey, is also interesting) into approaching the window so that they can shoot him with an arrow that has a balloon full of red paint attached to it.

Joan's line "I'm going to put on my coat" also caught my eye, since the immediate context is William's blog, which is called Coat of Skins -- referring to the physical body. "I'm going to put on my coat" could mean something like "I'm going to assume physical form."

The baddies in Help! want to hit Ringo with red paint. Joan threatens to hit Joe with a snowball. Snow and red dye are connected in a famous passage in Isaiah: "Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow."

Later, I thought I should go through all my 50-some posts tagged "Joan of Arc," but I got sidetracked by this one: "The Stadium Arcadium covers." There's lots of Eden symbolism there -- the bitten apple, the four rivers -- but what really caught my eye was this:

Here, Joan's coat of arms is juxtaposed with the words snow and arc ("bow"), and with two red swords (though Joan's own is white). Red weapons sync with the red-paint arrow in Help! and also with my comments in "Humpty Dumpty sat on the counter" about stained swords becoming bright as a symbol of repentance and redemption.