Tripless in Seattle and Pembrokeshire
June 17, 2026
by William P. Meyers

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Tripless. It sounds like it means having not taken a desired trip, perhaps to Paris or Rome.

I found the word by chance in Emma Darwin, A Century of Family Letters. Emma Darwin was Charles Darwin's wife and a remarkable, if seldom remembered, woman.

The word is used on page 9, and then a footnote explains that tripless "is a Pembrokeshire word, and means unsteady, rickety."

Which raises several questions, especially for Americans like me. Where the hell is Pembrokeshire? Follow the Wikipedia link, but in short it is a county in southwest Wales. How did the word migrate to western England, where it was used, in this case? Is there any relation to Pembroke College, a women's school in Providence, Rhode Island, which became part of Brown University in 1971? Where in 1973 I lived through the winter in an inadequately heated dorm room, due to the Arab Oil Embargo? Which was presumably named after the Pembroke College of Oxford, England, named after the 3rd Earl of Pembroke, which circles back to Pembroke in Welsh Pembrokeshire. [Sorry about the double Which]

Lest you do not want to find a copy of the book, the word was inspired by an incident at a dance where Octavia Allen's [an aunt of Emma Darwin] dance partner "had like to have paid dear for the pleasure of dancing with her, for when we came to tea, she undertook to make it, and the urn being what we call very tripless, she pulled it over and scalded the poor man's leg."

So, unsteady, rickety. To be applied only to objects like stools, ladders, and piles of household junk, or could it also be applied to people? A drunk, a sinner, one of poor judgment, an ill person, an old person? A business, a group of people, a government, an economy? A President, like Biden or Trump?

Here in Seattle a lot of things look unsteady to a lot of people. The teapot is standing, to be sure, and most people are happily dancing, but there are indications the party may end soon, at least for most people. The most obvious rickety things are the junkies, many of whom seem to live nearly permanently in the fentanyl stoop, head hanging down towards the knees. These and other drug addicts (don't assume they are homeless) congregate it certain areas of the city, upsetting nearby businesses and residents. Many of them steal and a few do things like damaging property for the fun of it, committing arson, or assaulting the occasional passerby. This small hoard of the workless and tripless has been around for a couple of decades now, so it may mean little about the future stability of the city itself.

Because of Amazon and other tech companies, wages tend to be high in Seattle, but the cost of living is too. For decades now people have moved here for high paying jobs, and despite many apartment buildings going up, there always seems to be a shortage of housing. Rents are high and tend to rise rapidly. Lately there have been signs of unsteadiness, however. Jobs are being replaced by AI. Fear is in the air. Other jobs are being created by AI projects at firms in the area, but they require a different expertise than the jobs that are being eliminated. I don't think many people are leaving the area yet, they made good money before termination and so many can afford to stay for a while, hoping for a new job. But which trend will be stronger? With enough layoffs we could go back to something like the 1970s or 1980s, when housing was (relatively) cheap.

Nationally and internationally we see some of the same trends. A tripless economy. People worried about jobs and prices. Some are, and should be, worried about a more general collapse, a bad recession or even a Depression. In the later scenario the prices of almost everything will drop, so that the rich will get scalded along with the poor. In fact the rich might be the first to go. In the Great Depression the stock market fell apart in late 1929, it took longer for the massive layoffs to undue the more working class members of society.

If things fall apart, will our democracy become a dictatorship? Back in the 1930s many (mostly wealthy) people considered FDR to be acting like a dictator, though he had huge Democrat Party majorities to back him up. The Supreme Court, left over from the Republican Roaring Twenties, killed a number of New Deal measures. With Trump, or some successor, it might be different.

Speaking of a wobbly urn, we have the environment. What fun, for those who like a bit of chaos. The warmest set of years ever, and an El Nino developing. Could amount to nothing, could scald millions or billions of people, could topple governments and economies, could be the end of the America Empire. Could be the end of the world as we (and other species) know it.

Emma Darwin was a Wedgwood, a descendent of the genius potter Josiah Wedgwood. Josiah started as an ordinary workman and yet became one of the great industrialists of England in the late 1700s. Owning a Wedgwood pot (or plate) became a matter of prestige during the early years of the United States of America. Today we may still eat off of ceramic plates, or drink hot beverage from ceramic mugs, but except for a relative few collectors, the glamour is gone from pottery. Josiah's most important legacies are doubtless his grandson Charles Robert Darwin with his revolutionary Theory of Evolution Through Natural Selection.

I fear the pot is about to be overturned, so we are about to go through an evolutionary bottleneck. In which the human population will decline rapidly and the number of other plant and animal species will also decline dramatically.

Call me tripless. The trip I desired to take, starting decades ago, was an end to the insane destruction of the planet by the petroleum industry and other greed heads. I can't complain about my own situation too much, looking out my window at a green fir tree. Yet, despite Trump's efforts to throw a veil over the data, I can also see what is happening. Those who are already suffering, here and in places like India, Chad, Sudan, and Palestine, you have my sympathy. I had hoped for a humane way to bring the earth back into balance. But Fate decided to dance with another.