About this blog: My weblog is primarily my personal scrapbook for clipping articles and keeping track of story ideas. It is also meant to reflect three asssumptions and observations about the media:
1) The most important and interesting news is usually just below the media's radar. There is no such thing as a "news cycle" in the real world--only the constant daily drama of people's lives and the fascinating dynamics of culture. more 2) Rather than ghettoizing news into sections, the media should promote and satisfy broad curiosity about the world, seeking to connect not with consumers in categories, but with readers in general.
3) The media must find the balance between personal voice and public responsibility. Newspapers are typically dry and lifeless, blogs are typically pointless personal or political bloviating. There is a place for personal analysis written with voice, so long as it is wise, balanced, and humbly provocative. more
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- My weekly column on language runs Thursdays in the Tempo section of the Chicago Tribune. - My weblog at BooksandCulture.com is updated Mondays (archive).
My latest Tribune language column: A roundup of the words of the year. temp link/perm.preview
More on "chav" here, on "Google-aire" here, and on the New OAD's additions here. More from Grant Barrett on the life cycle of slang.
Inflections Christmas leftovers: "Twas the Night Before Christmas" in jargon:
Whereas, on or about the night prior to Christmas, there did occur at a certain improved piece of real property (hereinafter "the House") a general lack of stirring by all creatures therein, including, but not limited to a mouse. A variety of foot apparel, e.g., stocking, socks, etc., had been affixed by and around the chimney in said House in the hope and/or belief that St. Nick a/k/a/ St. Nicholas a/k/a/ Santa Claus (hereinafter "Claus") would arrive at sometime thereafter. continued...
My wife hadn't heard the word "smart" as a verb until my dad said it this weekend. Turns out the injury connotation preceded the intelligence connotation!
smart late O.E. smeart "sharp, severe, stinging," related to smeortan (see smart (v.)). Meaning "quick, active, clever" is attested from c.1303, probably from the notion of "cutting" wit, words, etc.; meaning "trim in attire" first attested 1718, "ascending from the kitchen to the drawing-room c.1880." [Weekley] In ref. to devices, "behaving as though guided by intelligence" (e.g. smart bomb) first attested 1972. Smarts "good sense, intelligence," is first recorded 1968. Smart aleck is from 1865, perhaps in allusion to Aleck Hoag, notorious pimp, thief, and confidence man in New York City in early 1840s. Smart cookie is from 1948; smarty-pants first attested 1941. link
and for what it's worth:
spunk 1536, "a spark," Scottish, from Gaelic spong "tinder, pith, sponge," from L. spongia (see sponge ). The sense of "courage, pluck, mettle" is first attested 1773. A similar sense evolution took place in cognate Ir. sponnc "sponge, tinder, spark, courage, spunk." Vulgar slang sense of "seminal fluid" is recorded from c.1888. Spunky "courageous, spirited" is recorded from 1786. link
Geoff Nunberg on gingerly as an adjective (here and here).
"SportsCenter" on Tuesday morning referred to the blue field of Boise State as the smurf turf, and referred to the new jersey of Vince Carter, who was recently traded to the New Jersey Nets.
When I heard this Sunday morning, I thought it was some of the lamest political rhetoric I'd heard since the end of the Kerry campaign.
MR. RUSSERT: Senator Daschle, 26 years in Washington--what's the most important lesson you learned?
SEN. DASCHLE: I think the most important lesson you learn is that this really is the greatest country in the world, and democracy works. Democracy has all of its flaws but it beats the noise of violence. I think there's just so much we can be proud of, especially this time of the year. We have a lot of challenges out there, Tim, but the most important lesson is that I think this legacy, this democracy, this incredible republic's going to go on for centuries to come.
(And what was Dr. Phil doing on the "Meet the Press"??)
My review of Bill Walsh's The Elephants of Style will run in the next Verbatim. I discuss the split infinitive; turns out there's a whole Wikipedia entry on that. And I inevitably discuss The Elements of Style; here's Geoff Pullum's rant about that treatise:
Regular readers will be able to name my least favorite book in the world: it is Strunk & White's The Elements of Style, a horrid little compendium of unmotivated prejudices (don't use ongoing), arbitrary stipulations (don't begin a sentence with however), and fatuous advice ("Be clear"), ridiculously out of date in its positions on appropriate choices among grammatical variants, deeply suspect in its style advice and grotesquely wrong in most of the grammatical advice it gives. (Don't make me go on; if you want an hour-long lecture on the demerits of this beastly little book, that can be arranged.)
Etymology Today from M-W: maladroit\mal-uh-DROYT\ : lacking skill, cleverness, or resourcefulness in handling situations : inept
To understand the origin of "maladroit," you need to put together some French (or at least Middle French and Old French) building blocks. The first is the word "mal," meaning "bad," and the second is the phrase "a droit," meaning "properly." You can parse the phrase even further into the components "a," meaning "to" or "at," and "droit," meaning "right, direct, straight." Middle French speakers put those pieces together as "maladroit" to describe the clumsy among them, and English speakers borrowed the word intact back in the 17th century. Its opposite, of course, is "adroit," which we adopted from the French in the same century.
"Be at war with your vices, at peace with your neighbors, and let every new year find you a better [person]." Benjamin Franklin posted by Nathan at 7:43 PM
54 Percent of the nearly $500 million in retail computer sales in May 2003 that was spent on laptops, the first time laptops overtook desktop in sales, according to the market research firm The NPD Group. AP
702 permanent U.S. military bases in 130 countries, staffed by 253,000 soldiers and civilians. LA Times (2003)
80 percent of all toys in America that were made in China in 2003. NY Times
82.9 percent of Broadway audiences in 2002-03 schedule who were white, an increase for the fourth straight year. NY Times
7.9 billion dollars allotted to states in 2003 from the tobacco ind settlement, half of which is being used to fill gaps in their budgets other than health care and anti-smoking campaigns, as intended. Wall Street Journal
26.7 million women age 15-44 who have never given birth, a 10 percent increase since 1990. AP posted by Nathan at 7:30 PM
Thanks to Eric Zorn for the plug. Right back atcha. posted by Nathan at 7:29 PM
Sole Remaining Lung Filled With Rich, Satisfying Flavor x posted by Nathan at 7:26 PM
Thursday, December 23, 2004
This week in my B&C blog: Rising to the defense of Babar the Elephant. Plus: Brazil being overrun by "motoboys"; the definition of "intuitive ethics"; Western natalists and their many babies; one former fashion model's crusade against shallow ideals of beauty, and more ... LINK/ARCHIVE posted by Nathan at 1:28 PM
My latest Tribune language column: The Top 10 Books on Language of 2004. temp link/perm.preview
Inflections Here's an example of how trying to avoid splitting an auxiliary from its verb ("will be tainted") sounds really weird. (And what's up with "apparently" in an objective news story?)
"Barry Bonds' legendary career apparently forever will be tainted."
Other questions that come up when you read the papers:
In- is Latin; un- is Old English--I think, after looking it up in AHD.
Just about done with your last-minute Christmas cattle raid? From AHD's WHM:
spree A spending spree seems a far cry from a cattle raid, yet etymologists have suggested that the word spree comes from the Scots word spreath, "cattle raid." The word spree is first recorded in a poem in Scots dialect in 1804 in the sense of "a lively outing." This sense is closely connected with a sense recorded soon afterward (in 1811), "a drinking bout," while the familiar sense "an overindulgence in an activity," as in a spending spree, is recorded in 1849. Scots and Irish dialects also have a sense "a fight," which may help connect the word and the sense "lively outing" with the Scots word spreath, meaning variously, "booty," "cattle taken as spoils," "a herd of cattle taken in a raid," and "cattle raid." The Scots word comes from Irish and Scottish Gaelic sprιidh, "cattle," which in turn ultimately comes from Latin praeda, "booty." This last link reveals both the importance of the Latin language to Gaelic and a connection between cattle and plunder in earlier Irish and Scottish societies.
Geoff Pullum puts this sentence under a magnifying glass at LL:
"We are world champions at lawmaking," Christine Ockrent, who has anchored the evening news on two channels, run the weekly L'Express, and, as she says, "seen everything," told me a few days after the law was signed.
Sez he:
That's a preposed direct quote ("We are world champions at lawmaking") followed by the rest of a clause headed by the verb tell (Christine Ockrent told me ___). The clause has an additional adjunct at the end a~few days after the law was signed): a preposition phrase headed by after, containing a pre-head measure adjunct noun phrase (a~few days) ...
I kid you not: a video and study kit called "Sex as God's Gift" in a Christian catalog offers "Reproducible student worksheets."
I saw an ad for a product and an "accessory." I thought that was what Bill Walsh in Elephants of Style calls a "false singular"--he cites "school supply." But the dictionaries have this as a true singular, in part because of the word's definition as accomplice to a crime.
Invented adverbs in my inbox recently:
"I'll peruse them more in depthly when I get back."
"Thanks muchly."
One of these writers apologized to me for the unorthodox construction. No need--I'm a descriptivist! If you're communicating the meaning you intend, who cares if it conforms to your stuffy English teacher's liking?
"Justice oughta be fair." George W. Bush at recent economic summit.
Sabaism [SAY-bay-iz-um] the worship and adoration of the stars. From a Hebrew word meaning 'host'.
From Richard Wilbur's "Some Words Inside of Words" earlier this year in the Atlantic:
At heart, ambassadors are always sad. Why? Because world affairs are always bad, So that they're always having to express "Regret," and "grave concern," and "deep distress."
The barnacle is found in salty seas, Clinging to rocks in crusty colonies; And salt, which chemists call NaCl, Is found inside the barnacle as well. ...
If a carp is in your carport, go find out Whether the living room is full of trout And eels and salamanders, and if there's A snapping turtle paddling up the stairs. If that's what's going on, your house (beyond A doubt) is at the bottom of a pond.
Some snakes are nice to handle, but an asp Is not the kind to take within your grasp. That is what Cleopatra did, I fear, And, as you know, she is no longer here.
Previous column and inflections posted by Nathan at 1:11 PM
Etymology Today from M-W: precatory\PREK-uh-tor-ee\ : expressing a wish
Example sentence:
We here convey our wishes In this precatory phrase: May peace and joy be with you In all the coming days!
[So do I! - NB]
Nowadays, you're most likely to see "precatory" used in legal contexts to distinguish statements that merely express a wish from those that create a legal obligation. For example, if you add a provision to your will asking someone to take care of your pet if you die, that provision is merely precatory. Outside of jurisprudence, you might see references to such things as "precatory dress codes" or "precatory stockholder proposals" all of which are non-binding. "Precatory" traces to Latin "precari" ("to pray"), and it has always referred to something in the nature of an entreaty or supplication. For example, a precatory hymn is one that beseeches "from sin and sorrow set us free" versus a laudatory hymn (that is, one giving praise). Previous E.T. posted by Nathan at 1:10 PM
The Sage Gateshead, a £70m performing arts centre on the banks of the Tyne, opened [recently]. Its three music venues are shrouded by a vast and billowing steel-and-glass roof that resembles either a bank of low-lying cumulus clouds hugging the river, or the gun-blisters of a second world war RAF bomber. Guardian
Snapshots show a weighted Ping-Pong ball sinking into dry quicksand. The 4.7-ounce ball disappears in about one-tenth of a second and then expels a narrow jet of sand. ... Traditional deathtrap quicksand is a slurry of sand, water and clay. ... Now Dr. Lohse, a professor of applied physics, and his colleagues at the University of Twente in the Netherlands show that it is possible to vanish into a pile of completely dry sand as well. NY Times
This week in my B&C blog: Part five in a series on the brain and consciousness: deja vu, neurotheology, the neuroscience of architecture, the problem with lie detectors, and more ... LINK/ARCHIVE
: not dissoluble; especially : incapable of being annulled, undone, or broken : permanent
Example sentence: The contract should have been indissoluble, but the lawyers discovered an obscure clause that made it not so.
Did you know? "Indissoluble" is a legacy of Latin. The Latin adjective "dissolubilis" gave us "dissoluble" (both meaning "capable of being dissolved"), which first appeared in print in 1534, followed rapidly by the addition of "in-" to make its antonym in 1542. "Dissolubilis" derives from "dissolvere" ("to loosen" or "to dissolve"), which in turn comes from "dis-" ("apart") and "solvere" ("to loosen"). Not surprisingly, "dissolvere" is also the source of "dissolve" and "dissolvable," among other words. Is there an "indissolvable"? Yes and no. It exists, but it is archaic and exceedingly rare. The word most likely to be used for things that cannot be dissolved in a liquid is "insoluble." "Indissoluble" generally refers to abstract entities, such as promises or treaties, that cannot be dissolved.
My latest Tribune language column: On the coming obsolescence of the word "merry" and the greeting "Merry Christmas." temp link/perm.preview
I was going to start the story with this clip from Seinfeld (spotted 10/28 at 6:30 CT):
J: Who would go anywhere with Newman? G: Well, he's merry. J: He is merry.
Here's a story about a bizarre campaign to save "Merry Christmas."
I wanted going to note that the word has had a lot of spellings, especially between Chaucer and Shakespeare: myrie, murie, mery, and merrie. But that's true of most English words that old. Here's an excerpt from the OED.
Inflections "Hanukkah (also spelled Hanukka, Chanukah, Chanukkah), is from Hebrew and means 'consecration, dedication.'" more
funky When asked which words in the English language are the most difficult to define precisely, a lexicographer would surely mention funky. Linguist Geneva Smitherman has tried to capture the meaning of this word in Talkin and Testifyin: The Language of Black America, where she explains that funky means "[related to] the blue notes or blue mood created in jazz, blues, and soul music generally, down-to-earth soulfully expressed sounds; by extension [related to] the real nitty-gritty or fundamental essence of life, soul to the max." The first recorded use of funky is in 1784 in a reference to musty, old, moldy cheese. Funky then developed the sense "smelling strong or bad" and could be used to describe body odor. The application of funky to jazz was explained in 1959 by one F. Newton in Jazz Scene: "Critics are on the search for something a little more like the old, original, passion-laden blues: the trade-name which has been suggested for it is 'funky' (literally: 'smelly,' i.e. symbolizing the return from the upper atmosphere to the physical, down-to earth reality)."
Previous column and inflections posted by Nathan at 2:35 PM
Etymology Today from M-W: verbose\ver-BOHSS\ 1 : containing more words than necessary : wordy; also : impaired by wordiness 2 : given to wordiness
There's no shortage of words to describe wordiness in English. "Diffuse," "long-winded," "prolix," "redundant," "windy," "repetitive," "loose," "rambling," "digressive," and "circumlocutory" are some that come to mind. Want to express the opposite idea? Try "succinct," "concise," "brief," "short," "summary," "terse," "precise," "compact," "lean," "tight," or "compendious." "Verbose," which falls solidly into the first camp of words, comes from Latin "verbosus," from "verbum," meaning "word." Other descendants of "verbum" include "verb," "adverb," "proverb," "verbal," "verbatim," and "verbicide" (that's the deliberate distortion of the sense of a word).
"Good evening. I'm Andy Rooney -- and don't you forget it. Tonight, news about the end of the world, but first, several commercials for some of the disgusting things that are probably wrong with you. You may want the children to leave the room." posted by Nathan at 2:24 PM
Lawyers Separate Mary-Kate & Ashley Olsen In 17-Hour Procedure x
Sports-Related Murder Provides Perfect Local-News Segue x PHOENIX-The arrest of former Arizona State running back Darius Cantrell in connection with a homicide provided the perfect segue from local news to the sports report on KPHO CBS 5's News At Ten Monday. "Cantrell, who is charged with stabbing his ex-girlfriend 38 times, is being held without bail," anchor Diana Sullivan said. "Speaking of sports, can the Cardinals' coach bail the team out of a third-place finish in the NFC West? Our own Gary Cruz will have the verdict after the break."
Risk Champ Flunks Geography Test x ALBANY, NY-Alfred Wu, the 13-year-old winner of the 2004 East Coast Risk Championship, flunked his 8th-grade world-geography test, social-studies teacher Jane Laurent reported Monday. "His test paper was filled with names like Kamchatka and Yakutsk, and the Ukraine spread over half of Europe," Laurent said. "And, by his account, the U.S. is made up of only three states: Eastern United States, Western United States, and Alaska." Last week, Wu received an "F" on a paper he wrote about Napoleonic military Stratego.
Op-ed: Desperate Times Call For Desperate Housewives x posted by Nathan at 2:12 PM
Wednesday, December 08, 2004
This week in my B&C blog: Part two on panhandling. Plus: Why Christians don't care about the Fourth Commandment; the moral messages of public school textbooks; when plagiarism isn't so bad; and more ... LINK/ARCHIVE
Here's the picture for my Places item this week on Mormons in Hawaii. posted by Nathan at 3:22 PM
My latest Tribune language columns: On the state of sentence diagramming. temp link/perm.preview
On the real origins of Chicago's nickname "the Windy City." temp link/perm.preview
I've posted additional links and information on the history of "Windy City" here.
I wanted to do a whole piece on "Word Myths" and so-called folk etymologies (or "mythetymologies," as they are called in the second item below), but "Windy City" called for special attention. Here are two relevant clips; the first from an etymology site, the second from Language Log:
- die is cast This has nothing to do with gambling or dice; instead, it refers to a mold (die) which has been cast (made). Once the mold is made, everything which comes from it, will have the shape of the mold. 'The die is cast' thus states that a pattern has been laid down, and thus subsequent events will conform to the pattern.
- One of the great lessons for me as a participant in ADS-L over the years has been the discovery of just how little even the experts know about the history of idiomatic and formulaic expressions, and how tremendously difficult these investigations are. We can speculate, and produce suggestive citations, but just an enormous amount of history is hazy, and some of it is probably unknowable. Even worse, things that "lots of people know" are just false; go back and look at the die is cast above. Mythetymologies abound. link
Inflections I'd heard the song several times before (67 times alone on NBC's coverage of the Olympics), but it didn't hit me until I was watching Josh Groban's LA concert on PBS Sunday: He sings, "You raise me up to more than I can be." Isn't that impossible? (I know that "more than I had previously been" is not as lyrical, but still ... )
"She said she would go [fly to St. Louis] later in the day," my wife reported. "What day?" I asked. She meant, "she said later in the day that she would go next week."
From my church newsletter: "The room opened up the day I was talking to the social worker about moving her because of her verbally abusive roommate. So we were able to advocate for her priority." I've been hearing this a lot lately. The verb "advocate" is transitive (M-W: "to plead in favor of"), but the problem is that the noun can be used this way: "I was an advocate for her priority." (For that matter, I'm not sure about "for her priority" as opposed to "to make her a priority." But I am glad the room switch worked out!)
LL onthesaurusizing quote attributions. "We caught them on the wrong day," Reese understated. (Reminds me of the classic line: "Shut up," he explained.
taboo Among the many discoveries of Captain James Cook was a linguistic one, the term taboo. In a journal entry from 1777, Cook says this word "has a very comprehensive meaning; but, in general, signifies that a thing is forbidden . . . When any thing is forbidden to be eat [sic], or made use of, they say, that it is taboo." Cook was in the Friendly Islands (now Tonga) at the time, so even though similar words occur in other Polynesian languages, the form taboo from Tongan tabu is the one we have borrowed. The Tongans used tabu as an adjective. Cook, besides borrowing the word into English, also made it into a noun referring to the prohibition itself and a verb meaning "to make someone or something taboo." From its origins in Polynesia the word taboo has traveled as widely as Cook himself and is now used throughout the English-speaking world.
frank The word frank, "straightforward, open," which originally meant "free, not a serf," goes back to the Late Latin word of Germanic origin, Francus, "Frank." The Franks were a West Germanic people that conquered Gaul in the fifth and sixth centuries A.D., and their name is still used today to designate the new lands they occupied, France. As the dominant group in the newly conquered territory, only the Franks possessed full freedom; eventually, their tribal name described their fortunate social and political status. The idea of political freedom originally conveyed by the English word frank was later extended to include freedom of expression as well. And while most of us pay postage on every letter we send, members of Congress and other high-ranking government officials have franking privileges - that is, their postage is free. The word franchise is related to frank; it comes from the same Latin word through Old French franc. Originally, franchise meant "the social status of a freeman" or "the sovereignty of a political entity (such as a city or the Church)," along with all the rights and privileges that went with this status. The various nature of these rights explains the multiple senses in which the word franchise is commonly used today. The current political sense of the word, "the right to vote in public elections," emerged in the eighteenth century. Another specialized use of the term, "the right to engage in certain commercial activities," is frequent today, as many fast food restaurants and retail stores operate on a franchise granted by the parent corporation.
P.J. O'Rourke's boilerplate post-election editorial in the Atlantic. It's hilarious, but deceptive in appearing easy to write. You have to think through what the cliches would be and then strike the right words (I'm assuming).
The people have spoken, choosing to [blank] the course of American [blank]. We see from the [blank] size of the electoral margin that the people have spoken [blank]ively. It is up to you, [blank] [blank], to navigate these [blank] but [blank] waters with [blank]fullness. Remember, the voters, though often [blank]istic and sometimes [blank]ious, are ever un-[blank] in their [blank]ism. A President's [blank] term in office is the measure of his mettle. Only then does a chief executive have the [blank] to [blank] without undue partisan [blank]. Therefore this is the time to re-[blank] our commitment in Iraq, re-[blank] our international alliances, and re-[blank] the threat of [blank], [blank], [blank], [blank], [blank], and [blank]. ...
[To the victor]It will be your job to balance [blank] and [blank], giving full weight to [blank], while never losing sight of [blank]. There is no other way to provide America with the [blank] it so [blank]ly requires. Although we [blank]ed your candidacy, we believe that, even as your [blank]s, we have the duty to [blank] you when necessary. This is the American [blank]. Likewise it is the American [blank] to seek a leader who will [blank] when the storm of [blank] requires a [blank] hand on the [blank]. As you so [blank]ly said in your victory speech, "America is [blank]." We could not agree more.
Previous column and inflections posted by Nathan at 3:01 PM
Etymology Today from M-W: uncouth\un-KOOTH\ 1 : strange or clumsy in shape or appearance : outlandish 2 : lacking in polish and grace : rugged 3 : awkward and uncultivated in appearance, manner, or behavior : rude
"Uncouth" comes from the Old English "unc?th," which joins the prefix "un-" with "c?th," meaning "familiar, known." How did a word that meant "unfamiliar" come to mean "outlandish," "rugged," or "rude"? Some examples from literature illustrate that the transition happened quite naturally. In Captain Singleton, Daniel Defoe refers to "a strange noise more uncouth than any they had ever heard." In William Shakespeare's As You Like It, Orlando tells Adam, "If this uncouth forest yield anything savage, I will either be food for it or bring it for food to thee." In Washington Irving's The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, Ichabod Crane fears "to look over his shoulder, lest he should behold some uncouth being tramping close behind him!" So, that which is unfamiliar is often perceived as strange, wild, or unpleasant. Meanings such as "outlandish," "rugged," or "rude" naturally follow.
My latest Tribune language column has been postponed to accommodate an illustration; it's actually a longer feature on the controversial history of the name "Windy City." It should run either Friday or next Tuesday; stay tuned.
[The blog was looking a little blah, so I put up this pic as a way to say Happy December! more pics/animation]
Meanwhile, here's a brief I submitted, that didn't run, on haymaker:
Several reports of last week's Pacers-Pistons brawl made the participating pugilists sound like farmers, describing the punches exchanged by players and fans as "haymakers." Over half the results for "haymaker" on a Lexis-Nexis search of the past week refer either to the melee in Detroit or the South Carolina-Clemson football brawl the next day.
What's hay got to do with it? The Online Etymology Dictionary says "haymaker" was probably coined for the punch's "imitation of the wide swinging stroke of a scythe" (which was used to cut hay). According to the Dictionary of American Slang, published in 1967, it originated in boxing. The earliest available citation comes from the National Police Gazette in 1906, posted at www.phrases.org: "One of those ... fellows is going to get the 'haymaker' over on your jaw."
While you don't want to find yourself on the business end of a farm implement, you have less to fear from the analogous punch. Gilbert Odd's 1983 "Encyclopedia of Boxing" defines "haymaker" as "a swinging punch, ususally a right (left for a southpaw), which is inaccurately directed: a wild delivery that comes a long way and is usually used in desperation. It should be easy to avoid."
[Sources note that the Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang has "haymaker" in the sense of "a hard swinging blow" dated back to 1902.]
From the OED:
1. A man or woman employed in making hay; esp. one engaged in lifting, tossing, and spreading the hay after it is mown.
14.. Voc. in Wr.-Wόlcker 582/36 Fenissa, a heymakere. 1528 MS. Acc. St. John's Hosp., Canterb., For mete & drynk for the hay makers. 1590 GREENE Never too late (1600) 103 A womans smile is as good to a Louer, as a sunshine day to a haymaker. 1770 WESLEY Jrnl. 28 July, A shower brought all the haymakers home. 1853 LYTTON My Novel I. iii, For the refreshment of the thirsty haymakers.
n. a discounted item of limited quantity intended to bring customers into a store; a sale of such items; a loss-leader. Also attrib. Categories: Advertising. Business. English.
Also see ESPN The Magazine on the roots of "boxing ring."
[T]he Starbucksian marketeer who came up with the name was probably thinking of the Italian for "twenty". Or "winds", take your pick. Of course, the Italians would use the metric system, and 20 fluid ounces in metric is approximately 591.476 cc, but I don't think that cinque nove uno virgola quattro sette sei is going to make it as a product name. I guess you could round up and call it seicento.
Ever notice how better can be ambiguous? I asked my wife how she was feeling, and she said, "I'm better." "All better?" I asked? No, but better, she had to explain. It made me realize better is idiomatic here; it really should be "best." After all, you wouldn't say "all stronger."
Update: It gets even crazier. An ad says, "With Nexium, you don't just feel better, you are better. And better is better."
My sister gave me this notepad for my birthday a couple months ago, just took a picture of it with my new phonecam:
I also asked my sister, a college student in Ontario, about this excerpt of native Canadian by Geoff Pullum:
"Cripes! Grade thirteen! Here's a loonie -- buy yourself a Coffee Crisp, eh?"
The approved translation is as follows.
"Man, the SAT's! Here's eighty-four cents buy yourself a Snickers, OK?"
Lisa says: "That was entertaining. I would like to point out that I have never ever heard the expression "Cripes" in Ontario (or anywhere else). Also, grade thirteen and OAC's are not equivalent to SAT's. SAT's are tests, OAC's are classes. They are more like AP courses."
This adjective and noun phrase in the opening of this Slate's review isn't sitting right with me: "National Treasure, another Nic Cage-starring movie from blow-'em-up producer Jerry Bruckheimer..."
That may make sense--I'm not sure--but I think it's too awkward to be worth it. But I like "blow-'em-up producer." It's as good as the first phrase is bad.
yard sale n. in skiing or other snow-based sports, a fall or spill; a wipeout. [Perhaps from the appearance of "sporting goods spread out all over the yard."] Categories: English. Slang. Sports. x
leitkultur n. mainstream or guiding culture. [German leit 'leading (adj.); leader' + kultur 'culture'] Categories: Germany. German. x
I was moved to look up the etymologies of berserk (or beserk, as I thought it was spelled) and hubbub (or hubub, as I thought it was spelled)
berserk Etymology: Old Norse berserkr, from bjorn bear + serkr shirt 1 : an ancient Scandinavian warrior frenzied in battle and held to be invulnerable 2 : one whose actions are recklessly defiant
hubbub Etymology: perhaps of Irish origin; akin to Scottish Gaelic ub ub, interj. of contempt
Etymologies can be deceiving. For example, when I read that feign came from the Latin "fingere," the verb for "shape" (since "feign" means to "fashion an impression or shape an image," as M-W says; figure, effigy, fiction, and figment are cognates), I assumed that this is where finger comes from, too, since we use fingers to give things shape. But it's just a coincidence. From OnEtDc:
finger: O.E. fingor, from P.Gmc. *fingraz (cf. O.S. fingar, O.N. fingr, Du. vinger, Ger. Finger, Goth. figgrs), with no cognates outside Gmc.; perhaps connected with PIE *pengke, the root meaning "five."
From M-W: feign \FAYN\ verb 1 : to give a false appearance of : induce as a false impression 2 : to assert as if true : pretend
"Feign" is all about faking it, but that hasn't always been so. In one of its earliest senses, "feign" meant "to fashion, form, or shape." That meaning is true to the term's Latin ancestor: the verb "fingere," which also means "to shape." The current senses of "feign" still retain the essence of the Latin source, since to feign something, such as surprise or an illness, requires one to fashion an impression or shape an image. Several other English words that trace to the same ancestor refer to things that are shaped with either the hands, as in "figure" and "effigy," or the imagination, as in "fiction" and "figment."
I also wondered if ever was a cognate of aver and very. Nope. At least not at the level of Latin; maybe P.I.E. OnEtDc again:
ever O.E. ζfre, no cognates in any other Gmc. language; perhaps a contraction of a in feore, lit. "ever in life" (the expression a to fore is common in O.E. writings). aver
aver c.1380, from O.Fr. averer "verify," from V.L. *adverare "make true, prove to be true," from L. ad- "to" + verus "true"
very c.1275, verray "true, real, genuine," later "actual, sheer" (c.1390), from Anglo-Fr. verrai, O.Fr. verai "true," from V.L. *veracus, from L. verax (gen. veracis) "truthful," from verus "true," from PIE *weros- (cf. O.E. wζr "a compact," Ger. wahr "true"). Meaning "greatly, extremely" is first recorded 1448. Used as a pure intensive since M.E.
From Michael Wittmer's new book on heaven and worldview (hey, that was my idea!)
Metaphysics ... entered our vocabulary by a fluke of history. The great philosopher Aristotle once gave a series of lectures on the nature of reality. Since these lectures on reality appeared on the shelf after his lectures on physics, one of his students began calling this branch of philosophy "metaphysics," meta being the Greek word for "after." Thus the term "metaphysics" simply means the study of reality.
Previous column and inflections posted by Nathan at 3:32 PM
Etymology Today from M-W: arduous\AHR-juh-wus\ 1 a : hard to accomplish or achieve : difficult *b: marked by great labor or effort : strenuous 2 : hard to climb : steep
"To forgive is the most arduous pitch human nature can arrive at." When Richard Steele published that line in The Guardian in 1709, he was using "arduous" in what was apparently a fairly new way for English writers in his day: to imply that something was steep or lofty as well as difficult. Steele's use is one of the earliest documented in English for that meaning, but he didn't commit it to paper until almost 200 years after the first uses of the word in its "hard to accomplish" sense. Although the "difficult" sense is older, the "steep" sense is very true to the word's origins; "arduous" derives from the Latin "arduus," which means "high" or "steep."
My latest Tribune language column: On the word "co-family" as a replacement for "stepfamily." temp link/perm.preview
I thought about starting the article with this Paul Reiser joke, but it didn't work out:
Comedian Paul Reiser once joked that there's a greeting card for every possible situation: "From the Three of Us to the Three of You," "From Some of Us to All of You," "From Both of Us to Nobody in Your Area."
[From Reiser's "Couplehood," p. 254:] I once went up to the guy at the register and said, "You know, a friend of mine just got a job on the same day as his anniversary, and his dog just had puppies, but sadly his grandfather passed away that afternoon. Is there a card that might cover the whole thing?"
He said, "Sure. From the whole family, or just yourself?"
More from Wayne Glowka on euphemisms:
"Undertaker" sounded better than "gravedigger"; perhaps "funeral director" sounds better than "undertaker." "Grief specialist" sounds specious and certainly more expensive. Whatever the case, there is still a body to embalm and dispose of in some fashion in the midst of grieving relatives and friends. When a co-mother tells her co-daughter to quit talking back, the sound of this conversation will not be improved with the new terms.
Re: gypsy: Dictionary.com lists the American Heritage Dictionary's entry for "gypsy" as its primary definition, identifying gypsies as descendants of migrants from northern India who "have preserved elements of their traditional culture, including an itinerant existence and the Romany language." AHD's fourth entry for "gypsy" is "one inclined to a nomadic, unconventional way of life. A person who moves from place to place as required for employment."
Inflections ASD-L says the season's greetings of an ad for Virgin Mobil talks about Chrismahanukwanzakah
An advisory at woodtv.com for Wednesday's storm predicted that "snow will continue to overspread southern lower Michigan this afternoon."
Ad for some truck: "Roomier. Brawnier. Versatilier."
One of Letterman's Top Ten Signs You're Watching A Bad Disaster Movie was ""Explosions" are just crew members shouting, "Pcchewwwww!"" Here's where I wish I knew the IPA, but that spelling doesn't sound much like the usual explosion noises I've made and hear people make. There's a K and an F in there, and some kind of an SH. I was going to try to spell it, but I can't.
Is this the origin of queen meaning queer? Apparently nasty rumors surrounded King James (of the King James Bible). From Wikipedia: "When James inherited the English Throne in 1603, it was openly joked in London that Rex fuit Elizabeth: nunc est regina Jacobus (Elizabeth was King: now James is Queen)."
QUINTER, KSSophia Reed, 7, dominated Monday's Family Game Night, thanks in part to her inscrutable Uno face, family members reported. "She'd just sit as quiet as a church mouse, then hit me with a 'draw four wild card,'" said Leo Reed, Sophia's grandfather and Uno opponent.
The Online Etymology Dictionary's plea for sponsors for certain pages is clever: "Sponsor 'peace'. Give your boyfriend 'lust.' Show your appreciation for 'candy.'"
If the English subjunctive was dying, the Toronto Sun may have just yanked at its plug, says RC.
Speaking of which, I want to diagram the name of the song from Moulin Rouge that my wife and I danced to at our wedding: "Come What May." I can't figure out if "may" is a subjunctive; is it an auxiliary in a subjunctive construction? I hate my grammatical ignorance.
""everynow and then" gets about eight thousand hits" at Google, says ASD-L.
In their extended commentary the editors contend, and the collection demonstrates, that notoriously fissiparous evangelical enthusiasms are, in recent decades, converging in a creedal affirmation of the Great Tradition grounded in Scripture as authoritatively interpreted by the early fathers and councils of the Church.
M-W: fissiparous Etymology: Latin fissus, past participle of findere + English -parous : tending to break up into parts : DIVISIVE
"Oh well, right?" my wife said/asked me this morning. I thought that was interesting: using the interjection "oh well" to make the statement "it is not important," then asking me to confirm the statement. Or was she quoting it--"'Oh well,' right?"--as in, "'No pain, no gain,' right?" more
QT Grammar R Us Seminar on the English Language (cont'd):
David Pinion, a Los Angeles reader, regarding QT's inclusion of "viz.," i.e., "videlicet," i.e., "it is permitted to see," on a list of commonly confused Latin abbreviations, viz. "i.e.," "e.g." and "viz.," writes: "Wouldn't 'viz.' be more appropriately placed in the list of commonly confused Latin abbreviations that pertain to lists, i.e., 'i.e.' 'e.g.', 'viz.' and 'et al.'?" We do seem to have a growing list, viz. "i.e.," "e.g." "viz.," "et al.," etc.
QT Grammar R Us Seminar on the English Language (cont'd): J.T., a Milwaukee reader, regarding QT's referring to a common confusion between two Latin abbreviations, i.e., "e.g.," i.e., "exempli gratia," i.e., "for example," and "i.e.," i.e., "id est," i.e., "that is," messages: "You forgot 'viz.' " You are referring to "viz.," i.e., "videlicet," i.e., "it is permitted to see," which is not an abbreviation to be followed by an example, e.g., "e.g.," or by a restatement in different words, e.g., "i.e.," but by a complete list of whatever is being written about, e.g., three commonly confused Latin abbreviations, viz. "i.e.," "e.g." and "viz." A cohort is a group, not a person, by the way.
DTWW says says there's such a political slang term as if-by-whiskey speech: "southern US regionalism: a speech coming down emphatically on both sides on an issue."
From the days when any good southern politician had a speech of this sort at the ready, concerning his views on spiritus ferminti. Several such passages are of record, of which this is the best. Supposedly from a Mississippi legislator in 1958.
'You have asked me how I feel about whiskey; well, Brother, here's how I stand.
If by whiskey you mean the devil's brew, the poison scourge, the bloody monster that defiles innocence, dethrones reason, destroys the home, creates misery and poverty, yea, literally takes the bread from the mouths of little children; if you mean that evil drink that topples Christian men and women from the pinnacles of righteous and gracious living into the bottomless pits of degradation, shame, despair, helplessness, and hopelessness, then, my friend, I am opposed to it with every fiber of my being.
However, if by whiskey you mean the oil of conversation, the philosophic wine, the elixir of life, the ale that is consumed when good fellows get together, that puts a song in their hearts and the warm glow of contentment in their eyes; if you mean Christmas cheer, the stimulating sip that puts a little spring in the step of an elderly gentleman on a frosty morning; if you mean that drink that enables man to magnify his joy, and to forget life's great tragedies and heartbreaks and sorrow; if you mean that drink the sale of which pours into our treasuries untold millions of dollars each year, that provides tender care for our little crippled children, our blind, our deaf, our dumb, our pitifully aged and infirm, to build the finest highways, hospitals, universities, and community colleges in this nation, then my friend, I am absolutely, unequivocally in favor of it.
This is my position, and as always, I refuse to be compromised on matters of principle.'
Previous column and inflections posted by Nathan at 1:27 PM
Etymology Today from M-W: purlieu\PERL-yoo\ 1 : an outlying or adjacent district 2 plural : environs, neighborhood 3 : a frequently visited place : haunt 4 plural : confines, bounds
In medieval England if you were fortunate enough to acquire a new piece of land, you might hold a ceremony called a "perambulation," in which you would walk around and record the boundaries of your property in the presence of witnesses. If your land bordered a royal forest, there might be some confusion about where your land started and the royal forest ended. Luckily, the law said that if you performed a perambulation, you could gain at least some degree of ownership over disputed forest tracts, although your use of them would be restricted by forest laws and royals would probably still have the right to hunt on them. Such regained forest property was called a "purlewe" (or as it was later spelled, "purlieu"), which derives from the Anglo-French word for "perambulation."
News Headline: "13-year-old boy charged with abducting exotic dancer." They grow up so fast, don't they?
From the QT Archive of Knowledge: *Thirty-two percent of the voters who supported John Kerry have visited Belgium at least once. *Twenty-six women are older than the world's oldest man.
Supermarket Headline of the Month: "SUPERMARKET LOBSTERS ESCAPE TANK."
S.S., a Chicago reader, writes: "Because the past four years and the election have shown beyond any doubt that President Bush's supporters don't care what he does, but only what he is and says, he now has a rare opportunity to please all the people, if he does what his opponents want." You know, it just might work.
From a column I clipped by Michael Kelly, on why saying something well doesn't make it true:
All happy families resemble one another, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way? No, that is exactly wrong. Happy families are wildly, even eccentrically, diverse. But in every unhappy family, as any social worker can tell you, you will likely find the same dreary woes: dead love, physical or psychological brutality, alcoholism, infidelity, poverty.
Newsweek's Jonathan Alter onTerrell Owens, Desperate Housewives, and hypocrisy:
First, the good news. If this had happened 20 years ago (and it could have; TV was full of sexual innuendo then, too), all the talk would have been about the interracial coupling of Sheridan and Owens. This time, the hottest of hot buttons in American history-the source of countless lynchings-caused barely a public peep.
The menu for the first Thanksgiving dinner included fish, venison, corn, squash, berries, and corn bread. There's no record that turkey was on the table.
Benjamin Franklin, advocating the turkey as the national bird:
"The Turkey is in comparison a much ore respectable Bird, and withal a true original Native of America.... He is besides, though a little vain & silly, a Bird of Courage, and would not hesitate to attack a Grenadier of the British Guards who should presume to invade his Farm Yard with a red Coat on."
More: In this morning's Sun-Times, QT spoils your Thanksgiving dinner:
Relish trays contain aflatoxins, benzaldehyde, quercetin glycosides and hydrogen peroxide. Roast turkey contains heterocyclic amines. Bread stuffing contains benzo(a)pyrene, furfural and sihydrazines. Cranberry sauce contains furan derivatives. Apple pie contains acetaldehyde. Antacids contain aluminum. Happy Thanksgiving!
QT also notes that as travelers clog airports today, security personnel are reportedly getting less modest when it comes to "patting down" passengers. "And remember," QT says, "even as you are being patted down, that, even at that moment, the Transportation Security Administration is allowing uninspected cargo onto your airplane."
The bird Meleagris gallopavo, commonly known as the turkey and familiar as the centerpiece of the Thanksgiving feast, is a native of the New World. It acquired the name of an Old World country as a result of two different mistakes. The name turkey, or turkey cock, was originally applied to an African bird now known as the guinea fowl (Numida meleagris), which at one time was believed to have originated in Turkey. When European settlers first saw the American turkey, they identified it with the guinea fowl and gave it the name turkey. There are many other examples of this sort of transference of old names to newly encountered species by speakers moving into a new area. In North America, for instance, the large thrush called a robin (Turdus migratorius) is an entirely different bird from the robin of the Old World (Erithacus rubecula), but they both have a breast of a reddish-orange color.
This week in my B&C blog: On the decline of expository preaching, as politics and psychology dominate the pulpit. Also: Why Manhattan is good for the environment, the true story behind premium gas and fortune cookies, and more ... LINK/ARCHIVE
I wanted to use the phrase "fiery folial finery," but I thought that would just be a pile of glop. More on autumn leaves here and here. Another brilliant picture here. posted by Nathan at 9:12 PM
I got the 8 in 10 stat here, but Christianity Today has a much better breakdown of the "values voters" numbers here. (Also see Slate on why James Dobson must choose either church or state.)
At the risk of making it look like I'm tooting my own horn (my wife will tell you I do enough of that after we eat at Chipotle), I wanted to pass along some of the e-mail responses I got as a way of exhorting fellow left-leaning Christians to keep the faith. I was stunned that of the over 40 e-mails I received, all but a half-dozen were positive (My favorite negative one was this: "I guess at our local paper in metro Detroit, we ran out of liberals to write columns so we are starting to recruit them from neighboring communities.")
Here are a few fellow bleeding hearts:
- I would like to tell you how heartening it is to know that there are Christians out there who think the same way as my family. After the elections, I did not want to go back to our church and be associated with people who limited their Christianity to 2 issues. It seems the whole country is full of them. I know God is sovereign and in control but I am struggling with the fact that an incompetent person is once again at the helm. ... Let's not stop praying for our country.
- Thank you for putting so simply ... what I have been feeling these many long months about the "Christian values" issue. Somehow it's all gotten twisted around. ... I am passing your article along to others who share my feelings. Regards, Another "2 in 10er"
- I myself am a Christian - attend church every Sunday and Wednesday and actively involved in other church activities- that voted for Kerry. I even felt like the black sheep among my fellow Christians, and questioned myself and prayed on this issue. To me the two big issues that swayed Christians are small issues and are being approached in the wrong way. ... I want to thank you for making me feel that as a Christian, that I did not neccesarly vote wrong when I voted for Kerry.
Some of the negative responses I received said there was a contradiction between my points that values always affect voting but that church and state should be kept separate. I should have clarified that. The difference is this: the institutions of the church and the government should be kept apart (so James Dobson should not seek to be a power-broker in the Republican Party, as he is, and President Bush shouldn't be a figurehead for certain religious groups, as he seems to be). The church must speak truth to power without becoming part of that power. But individual citizens couldn't separate their values (whatever they are) from their voting if they tried.
I was a little reluctant to publish this op-ed, since some consider it bad form for a journalist to disclose her voting preference (others appreciate it; but since a sizeable majority of those in mainstream media vote Democratic, there isn't much suspense to begin with). If I were a news reporter instead of a features writer, I might not have done it.
My reluctance came from the likelihood that some readers will now dismiss everything I write about anything, since they have successfuly identified me as a member of a vast left-wing conspiracy, an evil empire whose corruption of my cerebral capabilities is so complete that I am unable to put together a single sentence without submitting to it and extending its nefarious influence.
Meanwhile, those who agree with me may presume that I bat for their team and have abandoned any effort to locate wisdom among people with different views. They, too, are wrong.
If you think that either of the above is true, I despair of persuading you that my articles about language and other topics should be read in their own context and on their own merits, rather than as undercover dissemination of an agenda that will either degrade or transfigure America. So I leave it up to you. posted by Nathan at 9:11 PM
My latest Tribune language column: On the fascinating history of the alphabet. temp link/perm.preview
This was cut:
As a result, C has multiple personalities, changing sounds in the words critic, dance, ocean, chain, and indict). The letters M, B, and D are the easiest to say, so they're the first sounds out of the mouths of babies ("ma," "ba," and "da"). The sounds "er" and "sh" take them longer to learn.
Last week we set you the puzzle of trying to work out the abbreviations in the following passage.
"The CoLP COG and the MPS wish to work together to create a DCPCU. The EIDU, in partnership with BDB has been assisting AC SCD with securing s93 or s25 PA funding from APACS and HO once approval has been given from HMC&E regarding the VAT issues."
The answer is as follows.
"The City of London Police Chief Officer Group and the Metropolitan Police Service Management Board wish to work together to create a Dedicated Cheque & Plastic Card Unit. The Events and Income Development Unit, in partnership with Bircham Dyson Bell has been assisting Assistant Commissioner Serious Crime Directorate with securing Section 93 or Section 25 Police Act funding from the Association of Payment and Clearing Services and the Home Office once approval has been given from Her Majesty's Custom & Excise regarding the Value Added Tax issues."
Inflections The Daily Show's Ed Helms described the Democracts as "feckless--devoid of feck." M-W: Scots, from feck effect, majority, from Middle English (Sc) fek, alteration of Middle English effect
Another Comedy Central show, which is animated, is called "Drawn Together."
A reader asked me about the word triennial. I had to look it up:
M-W: 1 : occurring or being done every three years (the triennial convention) 2 : consisting of or lasting for three years (a triennial contract)
AHD: ADJECTIVE: 1. Occurring every third year. 2. Lasting three years. NOUN: 1. A third anniversary. 2. A ceremony or celebration occurring every three years.
So I advised that treat it like biannual/biennial:
biannual - twice a year biennial - once every two years
triannual - three times a year triennial - once every three years
A CTA infomercial on Windy City TV (trust me, it was better than anything else in prime time last Wednesday after West Wing) referred to bus drivers as bus operators. Who in the world--outside of CTA headquarters--actually calls them "bus operators"?
From wordcrafter:
Vixen is one of extraordinarily few words beginning with v which comes from Old English, rather than a foreign tongue, typically French or Latin. (The only others are vane and vat.) Also, though the names for this animal (a fox if male but a vixen if female) seem related, but why do they begin with different constants? Which led to the other, and why? The root of these oddities is the region dialects of southern England, where folk tend to pronounce an initial "unvoiced fricative" as a "voiced fricative". Putting that in ordinary terms, an s is pronounced z, and an f is pronounced v, at the start of a word. For example, the locals in Somerset will pronounce that name 'Zomerzet'. The word fat became vat, and the Germanic word fahne = flag became vane. In Old English, the feminine of fox was fyxe or fyxen, which the southern dialect converted to vixen. These three words are the only such bits of such dialect that have worked their ways into standard English.
Two interesting words posted recently at DTWW (I especially love the second one):
king v. among graffiti artists, to (pervasively) paint ones name or symbol (throughout an area); to own an area through tagging or bombing. link [Is this like checkers? "King me!"]
unass v. to dismount or disembark (a vehicle); to get off of (something); to unseat (someone); to leave (somewhere). link
Nicholas Kristof quoted the following in a recent column:
"When a Texas governor, Miriam "Ma" Ferguson, barred the teaching of foreign languages about 80 years ago, saying, 'If English was good enough for Jesus Christ, it's good enough for us.'"
ASD-L says there's no evidence for this quote, though there is for a related quote from a different person. more (at bottom of page)
Previous column and inflections posted by Nathan at 7:33 PM
10 so-called bright ideas from the London Guardian:
1. The Environmental IQ: profiling the impact of products 2. Hibernation Day: an international duvet day for the world 3. Fame Lottery: people get their 15 minutes, money goes to charity 4. A city/country house swap network to house everyone efficiently 5. Lottery entry slips to have a tick box for 10% to charity 6. A proportion of defence spending to tackle the causes of terrorism 7. Heavy parking fines (but only for persistent transgressors) 8. Charging the candidates for political apathy 9. A focused eco-tax on using animals in product marketing 10. Using cartoons to assess middle management problems more ...
I hope lightning from heaven strikes whoever actually wrote about God's comeback in a headline about election and religion:
Religion plays new election role God's comeback changes interplay between hopefuls posted by Nathan at 7:20 PM
Three years. I started this blog on November 14, 2001, as an intern at the Chicago Journal. So many links, so much ... junk, really, though I've tried to keep things substantive here. Of course, I've since started a blog at booksandculture.com, and so it's rather unseemly to ask people to read two blogs now. For that reason--and for the principle of it--I'm determined to do less blogging and more reading in the next 3 years.
It won't be easy. Addictions die gradually. posted by Nathan at 7:16 PM
The post to end all posts Here lie links I don't want to lose but don't want to clog my bookmarks folder, either. They go to show that for all the compulsive instaneity of blogs, sometimes the most worthwhile links are to longer and older pieces of writing.
Now that this blog has veered in a linguistic direction (and now that I've outed myself as a Kerry voter--although I remain committed to looking for sense on both sides), it's time to retire this blog's slogan ...
Random Curiosity. Ideological Ambivalence. Purposeful Diversion.
About this blog: My weblog is primarily my personal scrapbook for clipping articles and keeping track of story ideas. It is also meant to reflect three asssumptions and observations about the media: 1) The most important and interesting news is usually just below the media's radar. There is no such thing as a "news cycle" in the real world--only the constant daily drama of people's lives and the fascinating dynamics of culture. more 2) Rather than ghettoizing news into sections, the media should promote and satisfy broad curiosity about the world, seeking to connect not with consumers in categories, but with readers in general. 3) The media must find the balance between personal voice and public responsibility. Newspapers are typically dry and lifeless, blogs are typically pointless personal or political bloviating. There is a place for personal analysis written with voice, so long as it is wise, balanced, and humbly provocative. more
Domineering Wife Specifically Said 'Chunk-Style' Pineapple
Local Life-Insurance Salesman A Catalog Of Horrific Sudden-Death Scenarios x
Opinion: What Happens At Yucca Mountain Stays At Yucca Mountain x posted by Nathan at 6:56 PM
Wednesday, November 10, 2004
This week in my B&C blog: A roundup of recent articles on philosophy and reason in America today, including the Sopranos-and-Philosophy craze. LINK/ARCHIVE posted by Nathan at 2:49 PM
My latest Tribune language column: On a new kind of sentence fragment in TV newscasting: so-called "ing-lish." Plus: Overheard on Election Night; Tom Brokaw's pronunciation.
For the viewer already dizzy from all the news crawls, instant online polls and ever-shrinking sound bites, it's getting harder to tell the difference between what has happened, what is happening, and what will or may happen in the future. These days, everything seems to be happening at once.
However, if you really dig grammar (God bless you!), you know that this line, and my line about "putting everything in the present," are regrettably misleading. Absolute phrases and gerunds have NO tense--they are non-finite, since they do not specify tense, agent, and number. There's a good, clear breakdown of this at I.G.O.E. My English professor's more thorough explanation is here. He adds a few common absolute phrases: "all things considered, all other things being equal, God willing..."
This essay at News Lab and this PBS segment suggest the phenomenon has something to do with "dropping the verb," but in fact only the auxiliary verb ("is," "have been," etc.) is dropped; the verb remains in something resembling absolute form.
More on newsspeak here and on Election Night here. Transcript of CNN's 7 p.m. hour of Election Night here. The Seattle Times on how the media can get it right next time. And more Ratherisms.
I was really interested by David Gergen's "locust of lawyers." Here's more: locusts
United Press International October 15, 2004 Friday HEADLINE: Analysis: Will lawyers decide the vote? BYLINE: By MICHAEL KIRKLAND Like a biblical plague of locusts, lawyers are gathering by the thousands at the call of the Democratic and Republican parties to handle voting-related court challenges both before and after the Nov. 2 presidential election.
Election Integrity At Stake By George F. Will Sunday, October 24, 2004; Today's worry concerns a cloud of locust-like lawyers asserting novel theories that purport to demonstrate that sensible rules, such as requiring voters to have identification, are illegal, even unconstitutional. This locust litigation will erupt around any close election -- any not won beyond "the margin of litigation." link
CNN: GERGEN: What the attorneys will be looking for is the same thing the monitors will be looking for. And both sides will have them out in force. As George Will called them, the locust of lawyers.
Inflections:
Slogan of the Nader campaign, qtd in the Chi.Tribune: Bush and Kerry make me want to Ralph.
"'Wal-Mart Republicans' is probably more accurate [than "Religious Right"], given that Bush's majority was built up in the same kinds of small communities where the world's largest retailer thrives." x
"I have to admit that I am a little confused by all this talk of 'man date' by Republican leaders in the days since the election. I thought they were opposed to same-sex fooling around." x (more on mandate)
This was from a rerun of either Seinfeld or Sex in the City, I forget which:
To boyfriend: "Here's the thing." Bf: "Oh no, not the thing! I hate the thing."
My wife spotted a flyer nailed to a phone pole that said "Found: Lost Cat." "It's not really lost anymore, is it?" she observed. On the other hand, the alternative is posting a flyer that says: "Found: Cat That Had Been Lost At The Time We Found It But As Of Its Finding Is No Longer Lost"
Someone found this blog by doing a search for the architect of the "ifill tower." (I had posted a quote from the debate moderated by Gwen Ifill, and said something somewhere about a tower, so voila.) I wonder if that surname was originally someone's attempt to name their family after the famous landmark? I doubt it; the name is probably older than the tower.
"If "The Incredibles" did not exist, it would be necessary to invent them," wrote the Tribune. This is approaching cliche territory, suggests a quick search for "If x did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him/her/them."
Googling my name (everyone's entitled now and then), I found this post from a Lon Bierma, my relation to whom (if any) I don't know.
From: Lon Bierma Subject: Words with Opposite Meanings Sigmund Freud speculated that language may have first developed with one word representing both one thing and its opposite. He cited several examples but let's use the word 'day'. Day can be used to represent both day and night or only daylight. Picture two people without a language trying to communicate the meaning of day and night as they watched the sun rise or set. It is easy to see how one word would suffice. Freud also pointed out that when we hear a concrete word our minds immediately jump to its opposite. Try it on friends. When you say black the first word to come to their minds will be white. Same with up/down, hot/cold, etc.
Previous column and inflections posted by Nathan at 2:46 PM
Etymology Today from M-W: nexus \NEK-sus\ 1 : connection, link; also : a causal link 2 : a connected group or series 3 : center, focus
"Nexus" is all about connections. The word comes from "nectere," a Latin verb meaning "to bind." A number of other English words are related to "nectere." The most obvious is "connect," but "annex" (meaning "to attach as an addition," or more specifically "to incorporate into a political domain") is related as well. When "nexus" came into English in the 17th century, it meant "connection." Eventually, it took on the additional meaning "connected series" (as in "a nexus of relationships"). In the past few decades it has taken a third meaning: "center" (as in "the trade nexus of the region"), perhaps from the notion that a point in the center of an arrangement serves to join together the objects that surround it.
George Bush is already proclaiming a mandate, for chrissakes. If the narrow margin of victory in this election had swung the other way, does anyone doubt for a moment that an army of Republican surrogates would have immediately fanned out to the shouting-head shows to argue, until they were collectively blue in the face, that the election of John Kerry was nothing more than a statistical fluke that certainly carried with it no greater meaning?
"I'll reach out to everyone who shares our goals." - George W. Bush, 11/4/04
'Tis the season--yes, already--for Christmas decorations. I did this brief for Chicago Tribune Magazine last year:
Q: ARE RETAILERS STILL PUTTING UP CHRISTMAS DISPLAYS EVER EARLIER?
A: We used to consider stores jumping the gun if they did it before Thanksgiving. Now they seem to start closer to Halloween. But there's little uniformity. Marshall Field's reports its holiday decorations went up chain-wide on the first weekend in November, a la the past 50 years. Bloomingdale's followed two weeks later, same as last year (but its New York flagship decorated a week later than in '02). Many Mag Mile mainstays waited until the Festival of Lights parade on the Saturday before Thanksgiving. And Nordstrom's brags that it waits untill the day after Thanksgiving.
Nationally, most stores started their holiday decorating on Nov. 1, according to the International Council of Shopping Centers. "That's been pretty consistent for the past five years," said a spokesman. But Russell Salzman, president of the Greater North Michigan Avenue Assn., says the long-term trend has stores inching into October. "I'm sensing stores are looking to extend the holiday shopping season," he says. "Over the past 10 years, decorations have been going up earlier and coming down later." Longer or not, this holiday season is expected to bring a 5 percent jump in spending over last year, according to the National Retail Federation. That would lighten our wallets by more than $217 billion. 12/14/03
My column on Christmas Web sites posted by Nathan at 2:30 PM
"If you come to a fork in the road, take it. -Yogi Berra posted by Nathan at 2:24 PM
My aunt is finding her new church surprisingly entertaining. She recently told of a sermon that left the youth minister in stitches--literally.
Young and exuberant, he bounded across the stage of the sanctuary one Sunday with a gleam in his eye, preaching the power of faith.
"I have so much faith," he exclaimed, "that I know I would be OK if I were to leap into the congregation right now, because my brothers and sisters would catch me."
To prove his point, he leapt.
His brothers and sisters didn't catch him.
Instead, panicked by the body hurtling toward them, they parted like the Red Sea.
The young preacher emerged with cuts and a broken collarbone, and, surely, a touch of wounded pride.
But his faith was unshaken--as he told it later, God might be teaching him not to take himself too seriously.
The wretches who roam around aimlessly in gangs and kill people by throwing stones from a highway bridge or setting fire to a child--whoever these people are--turn out this way not because they have been corrupted by computer "new-speak" (they don't even have access to a computer) but rather because they are excluded from the universe of literature, and from those places where, through education and discussion, they might be reached by a glimmer from the world of values that stems from and sends us back again to books. -Umberto Eco, On Literature
Napoleon was, in writing, at least, quite the Romeo, according to the new book The Linguist and The Emperor:
I have awakened full of you. The memory of last night has given my senses no rest... Sweet and incomparable Josephine, what an effect you have on my heart! I sent you thousands of kisses---but don't kiss me. Your kisses sear my blood. p26
David Flemming, Country Club Plaza in Kansas City. link posted by Nathan at 1:52 PM
G.K. Chesterton on journalism:
We announce on flaring posters that a man has fallen off a scaffolding. We do not announce on flaring posters that a man has not fallen off a scaffolding. Yet this latter fact is fundamentally more exciting, as indicating that that moving tower of terror and mystery, a man, is still abroad upon the earth. That the man has not fallen off a scaffolding is really more sensational; and it is also some thousand times more common. But journalism cannot reasonably be expected thus to insist upon the permanent miracles. Busy editors cannot be expected to put on their posters, Mr. Wilkinson still safe or Mr. Jones, of Worthing, not dead yet. link
Self-Help Book Believes It Can Be A Bestseller Someday x
wdyt: "Our nation may be bitterly divided, but at least our government can agree on being ultra-conservative."
"Now that the Republicans run Congress, the White House, and soon the Supreme Court, they'll just have to invent some new branches of government to dominate, as well."
"The fact that 48 percent of Americans voted for a boring placeholder like John Kerry is actually a really good sign for the Left." posted by Nathan at 1:43 PM
Thursday, November 04, 2004
I'm still not sure the election was won on abortion and same-sex marriage. When you think about it, in nearly every election since FDR's Fireside Chats--which helped begin the personality era of presidential politics--the friendlier candidate has won (Eisenhower over Stevenson twice, Kennedy over Nixon, Carter over Ford, Reagan over Carter and Mondale, Bush Sr. over Dukakis, Clinton over Bush Sr. and Dole, Bush Jr. over Gore and Kerry). Nixon's wins might be an exception, but even he learned a hard lesson in likability in 1960. (In the case of Truman and Johnson, neither they nor their opponents--Dewey and Goldwater--were friendly, so it wasn't the friendliness factor, but the macho factor.)
My Tribune language column today: On the new book "Doctor Dolittle's Delusion," on why animal communication doesn't qualify as language. temp link/perm.preview
Here's author Steven Anderson's page at Yale. Here's the full text of The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle, and here's much more on the series. Here's the NYT on Anderson's book. Here's a clip from my story this summer on Rico the dog.
Inflections As if voting weren't confusing enough, a sign yesterday said "Voting Enterance." (Is that syllable added in common pronunciation? I'm not sure.)
"These restrooms are for accessible use only," a sign said in a hotel lobby. So I looked for an inaccessible one.
Manny Ramirez on why the curse of the Bambino didn't stop the Red Sox: "You make your own destination."
One of Jay Leno's Headlines, from an ad: "Going away? Don't Want To Leave Your Dog In a Canal?" (Sure don't. Wet dogs reek.) He also had an ad for "Frosted Shredded What."
The NYT: "Music critics have a word for ... this knee-jerk backlash against producer-powered idols who didn't spend years touring dive bars. Not a very elegant word, but a useful one. The word is rockism, and among the small but extraordinarily pesky group of people who obsess over this stuff, rockism is a word meant to start fights.
I want to look into the transitivity of the verb "quit" in British English versus its American intransitivity: "[Hostage] calls upon Britian to quit Iraq." (There's that line from The Raven: "Leave my loneliness unbroken! Quit the bust above my door!")
The Trib on people with the last name of Frankenstein.
Previous column and inflections posted by Nathan at 2:48 PM
I've said it before and I'll say it again: What more does a president have to do to lose re-election? How do you look at President Bush and say, "Job well done. Please do more of it"? I guess the difference was the macho factor: "I have more testosterone in the fight against terrorists, and I don't like the thought of gay guys doing it."
But the harsher question goes to Kerry, the second-straight underachieving Democratic nominee. How do you lose to this guy, after these last two years? How many more vulnerabilities can a challenger ask for in an incumbent? Kerry should be prepared for even more Democratic hatred than Gore got--at least Gore won the popular vote.
Take a look at the last four Democratic losers: Kerry, Gore, Dukakis, Mondale. All aloof elitists, all vastly ineffective communicators. As was said last night, the Democrats are mostly a bi-coastal party, and desperately need to become a national party again.* You don't become a national party--you don't wade into that sea of red states--with Hillary Clinton. You might do it with John Edwards, but he doesn't make up the gap in the macho factor, especially not against Rudy Guiliani. You could do it with Barack Obama, but he won't be ready until '12 or '16, and will probably start out as a VP nominee.
There is just one consolation in all this: Now Bush will have to clean up his own mess. It wouldn't have been fully fair to ask Kerry to hoist us out of the hole--in Iraq and in the economy--that Bush dug. Bush will have to sleep in the bed he made. And he'll have to face, on a daily and public basis, his failure.
One last thought: will the Democrats pipe down now about the Electoral College? It nearly won them the White House this time despite a two or three percent deficit in the popular vote.
David Brooks registered his apt misgivings about both Bush and Kerry yesterday. William Saletan has a reality check for Democrats this morning. Nicholas Kristof in today's NYT on why the working poor vote for trickle-down Republicans. (Update: what went wrong, what won't work next time, and more on the "God gap" here, here, here and here. And Slate on how to move to Canada.)
* - States that Clinton won in 1992 and/or 1996 that neither Gore nor Kerry carried (with the exception of Gore's sort-of and squeaker wins in FL and NM): Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Missouri, Tennessee, Montana, Ohio, Nevada, New Mexico, and West Virginia. (response/more results)
Look at how little these percentages budged after four years. Kinda makes you wonder, what's the point of all those ads, sound bites, conventions, debates, and most of all, all those polls?
So, ladies and gentlemen, here he is, your commander-in-chief, Mr. Mission Accomplished:
(Well, at least it isn't this guy!)
Tom Shales this morning in the WP: "We finally figured out who [Kerry] looks like: Jay Leno's grandfather."
Update: (I lost the source of this, sorry):
There were about 115 million votes cast. There are 217.8 million eligible voters. That means that about 52 percent of eligible voters cast ballots. That means that the president was re-elected by 27 percent of eligible American voters. And that Kerry received the active support -- that is, taking the trouble to vote -- of 25 percent of eligible American voters.
"Bad politicians are elected by good people who don't vote." (George Jean Nathan)
concession speech delivered by Dick Tuck, a candidate for California assemblyman in 1964: "The people have spoken -- the bastards." posted by Nathan at 2:23 PM
Etymology Today from M-W: tergiversation\ter-jiv-er-SAY-shun\ 1 : evasion of straightforward action or clear-cut statement : equivocation 2 : desertion of a cause, position, party, or faith
The tergiversation of Ken's speech left his listeners confused about where he really stood on the issue.
The Latin verb "tergiversari" means "to show reluctance," and it comes from the combination of "tergum," meaning "back," and "versare," meaning "to turn." "Tergiversari" gave English the noun "tergiversation" and the verb "tergiversate" ("to engage in tergiversation"). "Tergiversation" is the slightly older term, having been around since at least 1570; the first known use of "tergiversate" dates from 1590. There's also the much rarer adjective "tergiversant" ("tending to evade"), as well as the noun "tergiversator" ("one that tergiversates").
Note: My "On Language" column in the Tribune is moving to Wednesdays as of today. Here is today's column, on political slang: temp link/perm.preview
Inflections
When I saw the headline 'Kerry woos labor at Warren rally,' I thought that we usually use the word "woo" in cases of successful seduction, which did not necessarily occur in Warren (but three-letter verbs are a boon to headline-writers). The definition doesn't require success, but is that more common? (If I have time, maybe I'll fiddle around on Google and try to find out.)
Isn't it interesting how the article "a" can denote a hypothetical and/or future happening? "We do not know if a President Kerry would cross partisan lines to build a broad consensus on critical matters of foreign policy, health care, and judicial appointments." If he wins the election, just drop the "a."
The Trib said that Norman Mailer did a creditable job of playing himself in a guest appearance on Gilmore Girls. I wondered, what's the difference between "creditable" and "credible"? Apparently not much: credible: "offering reasonable grounds for being believed"; creditable: "worthy of belief ... sufficiently good to bring esteem or praise." Did the Trib mean Mailer's self-impersonation was believable or praiseworthy, or both?
E-mail I received: "Going forward, we'll work on getting the entire [newsletter] online." Easier that way than to go backward.
`Would you mind if I called you Judy?' a Tribune reader asked a waitress. 'She said, `No, not at all.' Later, Judy returned to the table and handed me a piece of paper with her phone number on it. When I'd asked if I could call her Judy, she thought I was asking for her phone number.' more
Always left out: A producer on the extras for the movie Miracle says that they looked for skaters "all over North America and Canada."
ESPN's graphic for the highlights of a hat trick in Dutch soccer read Hoeden Truc (and translated it as "hat trick")
"Here!" I yelled across our apartment in response to my wife's inquiry about my whereabouts. "Where's 'here'?" she asked. I had intended the volume and origin of my voice to convey how far away I was, but should have reported my location. "Here" is demonstrative; can it demonstrate distance, as I intended?
I looked upkitsch after seeing this NYT article and picture: "originates from the German term etwas verkitschen (which has a similar meaning to "knock off" in English." (more earlier)
Bulletin board ad in our basement for a used fur coat: "Like New Condition"
It's not healthy to get too worried about newspaper endorsements (at least they provide thought-out arguments, which are rare this time of year), but here's the full roundup from Editor & Publisher. Here in Chicago, the Tribuneendorsed the Republican presidential candidate for the 287th time (prompting this rebuttal from ex-die-hard Republican Steve Chapman), but did give the nod to Democratic Senate candidate Barack Obama. Here's the WP for Kerry (also: Slate and Nykr). The Cleveland P-D, which endorsed Bush in 2000, wants to back Kerry this time, but its tax-cut-loving publisher is standing in its way. Why not go the route of the Republican-friendly Detroit News, and decline an endorsement? (Update: It did.)
Meanwhile, nearly as important as the presidential race is the balance of the Senate, Daily Kos has a roundup. Just in case, ABC's The Note has a list of excuses ready for whichever presidential candidate loses.
Egad! An article about issues less than a week before the election! USA Today on stem cells.
Despite these links, I really am getting sick of politics--promise. I need some political humor to lighten the load. Sojourners saw a bumper sticker that said: "Bush/Cheney '04: Because you don't change horsemen mid-apocalypse."
Vote for the man who promises least. He'll be the least disappointing. -- Bernard Baruch (1870-1965)
I never vote for anyone. I always vote against. -- W.C. Fields (1879-1946)
It doesn't matter who you vote for, the Government always gets in. -- graffito in London, 1970s
Q: Where does one find dual air bags? A: At a political debate. -- Johnny Hart
One last thing, on Bush's metaphysical ruminations, via Slate:
A "senior adviser to Bush," Suskind reports, says to him that "guys like me were 'in what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. 'That's not the way the world really works anymore,' he continued. 'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.' ...
The problem with this now-famous anecdote is that it has nothing to do with certainty based on religious faith or with the tension "between fact and faith" that Suskind claims to find in the Bush White House. The aide isn't talking about ignoring reality and living in some spiritual dream world, he's talking about changing reality through worldly action (e.g. war). His point is less Christian than Marxist, a vulgar Bush corrolary to Marx's famous Theses on Feuerbach , the last of which is carved into his tombstone: "The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it." The press and much of Washington studies the existing world in various ways, the "senior advisor" seems to be saying. "Meanwhile we're changing the world in ways that make your studies obsolete."
OK, maybe one more thing, on political journalism: I wrote here in my college paper about the overabundance of sports metaphors in political coverage. This headline is a classic case: "Kerry Returns Bush Volley On Health Care" As I said earlier, Geoff Nunberg noted that the most apt sports metaphor for the debates is figure skating: "a quadrennial competition that nobody has any idea how to score unless one of the competitors actually falls down."
Finally, even worse than a biased media is a banal media. When reporters bend over backwards to be artificially neutral (Daily Kos says coverage of the veep debate was "Both Sides Mislead: Cheney Erroneously Claims Not To Have Repeatedly Linked Iraq to 9/11, While Edwards Overestimates US Spending on Iraq Reconstruction by Less Than 1%") they get stiff. Is anyone informed or illumined by this lead of David Broder's story on the final debate?
Reprising policy battles that Republicans and Democrats have contested for decades, President Bush and challenger John F. Kerry sharpened their differences on social and domestic issues last night, with each candidate comfortably articulating the positions his most loyal supporters wanted to hear.
As I've written--and let me again disclose I'm fervent about my Christian faith--faith isn't faith without a healthy dose of doubt, without the tension between a sense of credulity and incredulity. Certainty is a form of denial of the complexity of the world. So it's fatuous of the media to necessarily equate spiritual belief with single-mindedness, but it's also fatuous of Bush to treat his morning devotions as a pep talk rather than as spiritual reflection, as he reportedly does.
Another update:
"[A] political candidate who jumps to conclusions without knowing the facts is not a person you want as your commander in chief." President Bush, Oct. 27
Couldn't have said it better myself. I have just one question about this election, and this is the absolutely last thing I'm going to get off my chest. Whatever your beef with Kerry (and I have many), what more does a president have to do in his first term to lose re-election? On what basis will you ever vote against an incumbent in the future if you vote for this one? What more will that incumbent have to do, and will the country be able to survive it?
The new electronic voting machines are complicated. But don't worry: Octogenarians will be on hand to troubleshoot any technological problems that might arise.
Don't wear dress shoes. They leave black scuff marks on gymnasium floors.
If you are black and a resident of Florida, work out two or three alternate routes to your polling place to avoid police checkpoints.
If you live in Florida, for Christ's sake, look at the ballot very, very carefully this time.
Keep in mind that the name of every person who votes against George Bush is going to be read aloud on television the next time we're attacked by terrorists.
- Other headlines:
Republicans Urge Minorities To Get Out And Vote On Nov. 3 x
Study: 100 Percent Of Americans Lead Secret Lives x
Assistant Uses Cake To Smuggle Cake-Decorating Set To Martha Stewart x
Op-ed: Converting to the Metric System Starts With the Individual x
Street poll on bringing back the draft: x "If I get drafted, I hope they put me on one of the swift boats. From what I gather, those guys are never in any danger."
Well, okay. As long as it's only a small draft and then they promise to stop."
That's it. I'm voting for the candidate who would flip-flop on sending my son to die, rather than the one who'd do it without hesitation."
- What do do about the flu vaccine shortage x posted by Nathan at 11:38 AM
Time Out NY onmedia people's media diet. posted by Nathan at 11:33 AM
Clinton Stockwell of Chicago Semester on Christian urban engagement:
A few years ago, when thinking about the focus of another urban program, we came up with the following: that there was a great need to create a new generation of leaders for a world that has become increasingly more urban, more global and more culturally diverse. Biblically, as many of you know, perhaps the most significant verse in scripture for me comes from the book of Jeremiah in the Old Testament. There, Jeremiah exhorted the exiles, who found themselves in pagan Babylon, not to flee or revolt, but to seek the peace of the city, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its peace, one would find their peace as well. In a world rife with conflict, tension and danger, we desperately need such leadership. We need those who can navigate cities, can make connections globally and will stand in the gap between cultures, and between differences of race, class, nationality, gender, ethnicity and religion.
Apparently the technical term is racing thoughts, but here's a clip from CTILibrary.com: "Finally, if you're cursed with a runaway mind, remember, as Oswald Chambers said, "God . . . loves me, and I will never think of anything that he will forget, so why should I worry?"
This will get your thoughts racing, from NYT's review of Harold Bloom's latest:
Yet the title of Bloom's antiphilosophical book, ''Where Shall Wisdom Be Found?,'' is, of course, an ancient philosophical question. He never stoops to say in a reductive way what wisdom finally is, but he does give us some of its characteristics. He speaks of the ''wisdom of annihilation'' in Ecclesiastes, of the ''structure of gathering self-awareness'' in Job and ''King Lear,'' of how, from Homer, we learn the hard truth that ''the gods are selfish, nasty spectators, all too happy to see us suffering in their theater of cruelty.'' Yet human suffering can be made bearable: ''Wisdom literature teaches us to accept natural limits.''
Oct. 27, 2004: Game four of the World Series in St. Louis Oct. 27, 2004: President Bush campaigns in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Michigan Oct. 27, 2004: Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) campaigns in Iowa and Minnesota Oct. 27, 2004: Sen. John Edwards (D-NC) campaigns in Florida Oct. 27, 2004: Vice President Cheney campaigns in Florida, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin Oct. 28, 2004: Game five of the World Series in St. Louis if necessary Oct. 28, 2004: National John Kerry Meetup Day Oct. 28, 2004: Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) campaigns in Ohio and Wisconsin Oct. 29, 2004: Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (R-CA) campaigns for President Bush in Columbus, OH Oct. 29, 2004: Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) campaigns in Florida Oct. 30, 2004: Game six of the World Series in Boston if necessary Oct. 31, 2004: Game seven of the World Series in Boston if necessary Oct. 31, 2004: Daylight savings time ends Oct. 31, 2004: Halloween Nov. 2, 2004: Election Day Nov. 2, 2004: Scheduled start of the NBA's 2004-2005 season Nov. 5, 2004: President George W. Bush and Laura Bush's 27th wedding anniversary Nov. 5, 2004: National unemployment numbers for October released Nov. 5-8, 2004: International Association of Political Consultants' 37th world conference in Vancouver, British Columbia Nov. 7, 2004: 35th Annual New York City Marathon Nov. 11, 2004: Veterans' Day Nov. 17, 2004: Fmr. Gov. Howard Dean (D-VT)'s birthday Nov. 18, 2004: Official opening of the William J. Clinton Presidential Center, Little Rock, AR Nov. 19, 2004: State unemployment numbers for October released Nov. 25, 2004: Thanksgiving Day Nov. 30-Dec. 4, 2004: National Lague of Cities' Congress of Cities and Exposition in Indianapolis, IN Dec. 1, 2004: World AIDS Awareness Day Dec. 3, 2004: National unemployment numbers for November released Dec. 4, 2004: Louisiana congressional runoff Dec. 7, 2004: Hanukkah begins Dec. 7, 2004: Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day Dec. 11, 2004: Sen. John Kerry (D-MA)'s birthday Dec. 13, 2004: Presidential electors meet in state capitals across the country Dec. 15, 2004: Bill of Rights Day Dec. 21, 2004: First day of winter Dec. 21, 2004: State unemployment numbers for November released Dec. 25, 2004: Christmas Day Dec. 26, 2004: Kwanzaa begins Jan. 6-8, 2005: Southern Political Science Association conference, New Orleans Jan. 7, 2005: National unemployment numbers for December released Jan. 16, 2005: 62nd Annual Golden Globe Awards Jan. 20, 2005: 55th Inauguration of the President of the United States Jan. 21-23, 2005: American Association of Political Consultants' 14th annual conference in Washington, DC Jan. 25, 2005: State unemployment numbers for December released Feb. 13, 2005: 47th Annual Grammy Awards Feb. 26-27, 2005: National Education Summit on High Schools cosponsored by Achieve, Inc. and the National Governors Association in Washington, DC Feb. 27, 2005: 77th Annual Academy Awards May 19, 2005: Star Wars: Episode III: Revenge of the Sith opens in theaters posted by Nathan at 11:06 AM
Etymology Today from M-W: slake \SLAYK\ 1 : satisfy, quench 2 : to cause (as lime) to heat and crumble by treatment with water : hydrate
"Slake" is no slacker when it comes to obsolete and archaic meanings. Shakespearean scholars may know that in the Bard's day "slake" meant "to subside or abate" ("No flood by raining slaketh...." - The Rape of Lucrece) or "to lessen the force of " ("It could not slake mine ire, nor ease my heart." - Henry VI, Part 3). The most erudite word enthusiasts may also be aware of earlier meanings of "slake," such as "to slacken one's efforts" or "to cause to be relaxed or loose." These early meanings recall the word's Old English ancestor "sleac," which not only meant "slack" but is also the source of that modern term.
My latest Tribune language column: On the phrase "in harm's way," which has doubled in use over the last month. temp link/perm.preview/reprint
More from Safire on "in harm's way":
The phrase is rooted in its opposite: out of harm's way, coined by the English divine Thomas Fuller before 1661: "Some great persons . . . have been made sheriffs, to keep them out of harm's way." Apparently the sheriff's job was a political plum, not then dangerous. ... Thomas Manton, chaplain to Oliver Cromwell, delivered a [17th century] sermon arguing that man's "duty is to run in harm's way" because "there are none so much harmed, maligned and opposed in the world, as those that follow that which is good ... The hoary phrase has more power than the bureaucratic "in the face of impending hostilities."
More on the debates: tranx's and search/more. "Cheney's top three phases were Saddam Hussein (11), fact of the matter (10) and United States (10), while Edwards' were John Kerry (36), American people (28) and tax cuts (16)." More on Bush's pauses (I'm not buying the idea that this is evidence of Bush being wired). Also: Kerry and Bush acc. speech texts.
More on the candidates' language: LL on Kerry and contractions; Bush and tautologies. Kerry said "ladies and gentlmen" 13 times to Bush's 0 in the second debate, which could have come off as patronizing. Bush said "steadfast" four times to Kerry's once (in a "yes, but" rebuttal) and "firm resolve" or "firm and resolve" three times to Kerry's 0. As I wanted to say in the story, you can be steadfast and have resolve and still be guilty of what H.L. Mencken called a "foolish consistency." Also: USA Today noted that Bush said in his acc. speech. "Some folks look at me and see a certain swagger, which in Texas is called walking," and "Now and then I come across as a little too blunt."
Some interesting observations on the candidates' speaking styles--although, as I quoted Mark Liberman in my story and as Arnold Zwicky wrote me by e-mail, let's not go overboard and let these superficial analyses override matters of policy.
Kerry's involuted syntax is less a sign of prevarication than an excess of prudence. He steps into a thought like someone wading into a rocky stream, always probing with his toe for stones. And when he does finally set his foot down, it's cushioned in abstractions -- "We're not maximizing the potential for the outcome we went in there to achieve." When he's finished, it's not always easy to tell if he has actually touched bottom.
For a start, there is nothing indecisive-sounding about this sentence of Kerry's, with its series of illustrative examples and its succession of parenthetical phrases ... Yet there can be plenty of indecisiveness in a stream of fairly simple clauses if they are all over the map in terms of subject matter.
"I don't believe it's going to happen.... I've shown the American people I know how to lead.... I understand everybody in this country doesn't agree with the decisions I've made.... People out there listening know what I believe.... This nation of ours has got a solemn duty to defeat this ideology of hate.... We have a duty to protect our children and grandchildren.... Ten million citizens [in Afghanistan] have registered to vote."
My reading of the whole answer is that we're looking at a man in a panic who has no idea what to say to the question. He has been taught a whole slew of tough-sounding clauses to reiterate, but can think of nothing to do but hurl them around at random. He demonstrates ... real intellectual weakness and indecisiveness when faced with a challenging question. ... Neither of the current stereotypes about styles of speech seems to be true: Kerry does not engage in long-winded unstructured rambling; Bush sometimes does.
During his career George Bush's speaking style has changed significantly ... [In a 1994 gubernatorial debate with Ann Richards,] Bush was eloquent. He spoke quickly and easily. He rattled off complicated sentences and brought them to the right grammatical conclusions. He mishandled a word or two ("million" when he clearly meant "billion"; "stole" when he meant "sold"), but fewer than most people would in an hour's debate. More striking, he did not pause before forcing out big words, as he so often does now, or invent mangled new ones. " more
Ever since the graphic of a swing (that you swing on) next to this NYT op-ed about polling, I've had this image of a voters swinging back and forth on swingsets whenever I hear the term swing voters.
In his new book on animals and language, Yale's Stephen Anderson cites an eleven-letter, vowel-less word in Georgian that is monosyllabic: gvprts'kvnis ("he is bleeding us, financially"). (p.123; see #5 here.
Reading a New Yorker piece from this summer on Reagan by Edmund Morris: "Gorbachev once remarked on Reagans balance to me in an interview. But he used the Russian word ravnovesie in its wider sense, of psychological equilibrium. The Presidents poised body and smooth yet inexorable motion telegraphed a larger force that came of a lifetime of no self-doubt."
From Dave Barry's Mister Language Person: Melba Glock sent in a story from the Lincoln (Neb.) Journal Star headlined ``Volunteers needed to help torture survivors.''
A memo from our apartment building informed us that "the tuckpointers will be setting up their equipment" this week. Had no idea what that was; M-W: "tuck-point/ transitive verb/ : to finish (the mortar joints between bricks or stones) with a narrow ridge of putty or fine lime mortar"
The memo also alerted us to a new coffee shop that was a "flavorsome" alternative to Starbucks. I didn't think that was a word, but M-W has it and it gets some 6,600 hits on Google
Speaking of hits, Red Sox slugger David Ortiz has been hailed by fan signs as papi, which the announcers identified as a term of respect in Central America. Haven't found anything on it yet (I'm assuming it's a variant of papa, which M-W says derives from "French babytalk"; unlike "pappi," a part of a fruit, which comes from the Greek "pappos.")
On the last "Scrubs," J.D. asks for a miladocookie and is told it's a milano. He's relieved and says: "I always thought that was a little bigoted for a cookie."
At the store, I wondered, is Lunchables what linguists call a substantivized adjective--an adj. that functions as a noun, as in "through thick and thin"?
A friend once told me about an idiom that nearly ended a relationship. He was northern European, not a native speaker of English, sojourning at a university in the midwest. She was American, reading a map in the passenger's seat of the car he was driving. "OK," she said, "at the next intersection, you want to turn right." He was furious. Internally, of course. "How does she presume to know what I want?" There were other issues here, but her idiom crystallized his sense of psychic intrusion, and he brooded about it for days.
I came across the adjective a prioristic last week; I forget where. I thought it was suspect. M-W has "apri·or·i·ty" (which would make the adjective "aprioritistic"); Google has 493 hits for "a prioristic" and over 2,000 for "aprioristic."
From IMDB.com: "The change [of title] is clear in the movie, as in the song before the credits, the singers interlock between calling the movie "Sharkslayer" and "Shark Tale".
"Interlock between"? M-W: interlock: "1. to lock together: UNITE 2. to connect so that the motion or operation of any part is constrained by another." How about "alternate between"?
Movies as sponsors are getting strange--yesterday's World Series telecast included something like the "Polar Express Play of the Game"--but an NYT printer-friendly page was confusing, running its announcement and movie title side-by-side:
so that it naturally reads: "Printer-Friendly format I [Heart] Huckabees/Sponsored by In Select Theaters Now."
Finally, from a Kodak ad: "The best part about photography are the pictures."
It are?
Previous column and inflections posted by Nathan Bierma at 11:26 AM
Jacques Derrida 'Dies' posted by Nathan Bierma at 11:22 AM
Slate's breakdown of major polls gave Kerry a 276-262 Electoral College edge on 10/19 (above), Bush a 271-267 edge on 10/24
This is (duh) all a crapshoot, not least because in many cases more people hang up on pollsters than talk to them (as I've covered before; more this week from the NYT and NYkr), because of the ambiguity of who is a "likely" voter, because of last-minute voting decisions or changes of mind, and because the election will probably go into the courts for a few weeks again. The AP outlined a few scenarios that will make the election anything but cut-and-dried:
For example, if just New Hampshire and Nevada (or West Virginia) shifted from favoring Bush to the Democrats this time, there could be a 269-269 tie, leaving it to the House to pick the next president and the Senate to pick the new vice president come January. That would leave open the jarring possibility of a Bush-Edwards or Kerry-Cheney pairing, depending on the political leanings of the new House and Senate.
More likely is the chance that results from one or more states could be up in the air for a while because of a recount, challenges to provisional or absentee ballots or lawsuits related to other voting problems. Both parties have lawyers primed to pounce at any target of opportunity this time. And the opportunity for challenges has grown under a new federal law requiring all states to allow people to cast provisional votes if their names don't appear on registration rolls. ...
Michael White, the federal official responsible for coordinating certain aspects of the Electoral College, says he'll be keeping an especially close eye on Colorado, where voters are considering a referendum to divide the state's electoral votes proportionally among the candidates rather than using the existing winner-takes-all formula. A lawsuit is virtually guaranteed if the referendum is approved, meaning the state's nine electoral votes could be a lingering question long after Election Day.
"There is in most literary biography a single detail that speaks volumes about its subject," writes Paul Theroux in The New York Times Book Review. "Thoreau almost never left home, Henry Miller was henpecked, Borges lived in fear of his mother, James Joyce was afraid of thunderstorms, Freud was angst-ridden on railway platforms, Wittgenstein was addicted to cowboy movies, Wallace Stevens to candy. Jack Kerouac had copies of National Review by his bed when he died."
Perched five stories above Columbus Circle in the Time Warner Center, Rafael Viρoly's new design for Jazz at Lincoln Center has a cool ethereality that lifts it above the mediocrity of its setting. It's a reminder that some experiences become more intimate when they are shared in full public view. NY Times posted by Nathan Bierma at 10:57 AM
Etymology Today from M-W: chicanery\shih-KAY-nuh-ree\ 1 : deception by artful subterfuge or sophistry : trickery 2 : a piece of sharp practice (as at law) : trick
"We have hardly any words that do so fully expresse the French clinquant, naivetι ... chicaneries." So lamented English writer John Evelyn in a letter to Sir Peter Wyche in 1665. Evelyn and Wyche were members of a group called the Royal Society, which had formed a committee emulating the French Academy for the purpose of "improving the English language." We can surmise that, in Evelyn's estimation, the addition of "chicanery" to English from French was an improvement. What he apparently didn't realize was that English speakers had adopted the word from the French "chicanerie" before he wished for it; the term appears in English manuscripts dating from 1609. Similarly, "clinquant" ("glittering with gold or tinsel") dates from 1591. "Naοvetι," on the other hand, waited until 1673 to appear.
My latest Tribune language column: On Nicaraguan Sign Language, the youngest known language in the world. temp link/perm.preview/reprint
Here's Ann Senghas on NSL; here's a summary from TFD and here's a piece from the Economist. Here's the UC Maroon on Marie Coppola's research (and here's a UC page). Here's the NYT Mag story in 1999, with an interesting letter in response from a prof a Gallaudet.
I asked Marie whether NSL is now taught in Nicaraguan schools
The students are not formally instructed in NSL. The teachers in the classroom vary widely in their ability to sign NSL (it is not part of their special education training), and are definitely not as proficient as the students. Some teachers attend classes in NSL at the Deaf association in Managua.
There are two keys to winning a stock-car racing championship: win your races and watch your tongue. Dale Earnheardt Jr.s win at an October 3 NASCAR race in Talladega put him in first place in points in the season standings, but he fell to second two days later when NASCAR fined him 25 points for using an expletive in a post-race NBC interview.
Here's the exchange:
In Victory Lane on Sunday at Talladega, Ala., an NBC interviewer asked Earnhardt how much his fifth victory at that track meant.
"It don't mean [expletive] right now," Earnhardt replied. "Daddy's won here 10 times."
"While NASCAR is being the world's decency police, why not take another 10 points from Earnhardt Jr. as well for his grammatical error?" asked Scott Fowler in the Charlotte Observer. More from SI.com. Also: Frederica Mathewes-Green on the ethics of joyous vs. angry swearing; Pittsburgh P-G on Tony Campolo saying the S-word in a sermon.
Inflections -Tribune headline: "Rising health costs resonate for voters." Shouldn't that be "resonate with" (since the relevant definition of "resonate" is "to relate harmoniously"?
-I thought it was interesting to see a long mark over the U in the logo of PUR, since long marks are virtually unused in English. But the mark is necessary here unless you want to say "purr" and sell cat food.
-The referee in the Vikings-Saints game last night explained that a receiver "got three feet in bounds" (meaning three steps, of course) before crossing the sideline. Said ESPN's Paul McGuire: "I wanna see the guy with three feet."
But I know Whom I have believθd, And am persuaded that He is able To keep that which Ive committed Unto Him against that day.
In the hundred or so times I've sung this hymn, I wondered how you can "commit" something "against" a day. I had to look at the lyrics online today to realize it's the "keeping" that's "against that day." I think.
I'm the son of a seminary professor and I should know this, but I'm confused: is it that God is keeping/protecting the commitment against the threat of judgment day? Or is "against" somehow an old-fashioned preposition for until? Looking at side-by-side English translations of 2 Timothy 1:12, which the hymn is quoting, suggests the latter:
KJV (from Wycliffe's EB) For the which cause I also suffer these things: nevertheless I am not ashamed; for I know whom I have believed, and am persuaded that he is able to keep that which I have committed unto him against that day.
NIV That is why I am suffering as I am. Yet I am not ashamed, because I know whom I have believed, and am convinced that he is able to guard what I have entrusted to him for that day.
WEY That indeed is the reason why I suffer as I do. But I am not ashamed, for I know in whom my trust reposes, and I am confident that He has it in His power to keep what I have entrusted to Him safe until that day.
YLT for which cause also these things I suffer, but I am not ashamed, for I have known in whom I have believed, and have been persuaded that he is able that which I have committed to him to guard -- to that day.
Update: My Dad weighs in:
I checked a commentary, and the reference in 2 Timothy 1:12 to "that which I have committed unto him" could also be translated as "that which he [God] has entrusted to me" (the word is simply "deposit"). In either case, it's probably Paul's work or doctrine that had been entrusted to him or that Paul had entrusted to God. And "entrusted . . . for that day" might reflect Paul's confidence that as a steward of that which has been given him (or of what he has given to God), he will not be found wanting on the great day of reckoning.
I wonder how the phrase This isn't rocket science, with its conventionalized meaning "This isn't all that advanced or hard to understand", originally came from? I've got a few clichι dictionaries, but they don't cover it. Why is rocket science a byword for arcane advanced scientific mumbo jumbo? Rocket technology is thousands of years old. Sulfur, saltpeter, and charcoal powder in a tube, light and retire. A little bit of trigonometry will tell you where it will land; a little calculus and some data on thrust and combustion rates and you can work out the acceleration and the trajectory and everything. It's a good application of basic Newtonian physics and math, but it's surely not the most difficult stuff science ever got into.
-The Plain English Campaign was alerted to this sign in a Canterbury supermarket: "If you wish to change your baby, please see the lady at the salad bar." (It's never too late for genetic engineering!)
As it happens, that phrase first became common in the American political lexicon in the 1970's, when the televised debate was permanently revived after a 16-year lull, and the networks first began broadcasting post-debate commentary and spin. "Looking presidential" in debates is like "artistic merit" in figure skating -- an imponderable that nobody feels obliged to pin down.
Earlier he notes, "the most apt sporting comparison is probably to Olympic figure skating - a quadrennial competition that nobody has any idea how to score unless one of the competitors actually falls down."
-LL on when back in August can mean August 2005 (interesting note on the Latin "post"), and a followup post here that notes, "Canada is not above the US--go outside, look up, and see for yourself."
-Here's a sentence (from Martin Marty on 9/27) I'd like to diagram. Makes perfect sense, but the inversion seems pointless. "Not ready to whisper or be silent is Father Andrew Greeley."
-I was interested to learn at LL that you can do a Google search for there are x linguists (with certain tags included) and turn up instances with the number inserted (a similar search would be for "x statistics are made up on spot," discussed here).
Previous column and inflections posted by Nathan Bierma at 4:12 PM
And the O's person-on-the-street poll: Last week, U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan set up a commission to determine whether genocide has taken place in the Darfur region of Sudan. What do you think?
"So this might have been a genocide after all, and not a civil war in which only one side was fighting."
"I think the U.N. is going to find that the blame lies with all the Sudanese rap music that glamorizes genocide."
"I think the entire world will breathe a sigh of relief if the U.N. finds that it is not genocide. Well, everyone except for the half-million people who were murdered there." posted by Nathan Bierma at 4:08 PM
How's this for a some-of-my-best-friends-are-black kind of patronization of religious people (that sets up a recitation of the media's Bush-as-puppet-of-fundamentalists conspiracy theory) from Timothy Noah in Slate:
Now, don't get me wrong. Religious faith can be a very fine thing. Some of my best friends believe in God, and some of their best qualities derive, at least in part, from their faith.
("'Some Of My Best Friends Are Black' How many times have I heard someone say this when they become anxious about a position they are taking, except it comes out as "you know, some of my best friends are black, but ... (followed by some essentialized view of what the speaker perceives as "blacks")" x.
Lecture at Amherst: "But Some of My Best Friends Are Black: Racism and the Culture of Denial.) posted by Nathan Bierma at 3:45 PM
So what was Bush's bulge, anyway? Elvis put it there. No, I think it's just how the suit bunched. But suit expert tells the NYDN that this isn't the answer. "I'm telling you that is not a tailor's mistake. Unless somebody doctored the photos, he's got something under there." But if Bush was wired, how did he manage to sound so, er, unassisted?
Kerry in 100 words: 82,000 Arizonians lost their health insurance under President Bush's watch. This president has turned his back on the wellness of America. President Bush has taken -- he's the only president in history to do this. 6 million jobs lost. This president has taken a $5. Once again, the president is misleading America. The president just said that government-run health care results in poor quality. The jobs the president is creating pay $9,000 less than the jobs that we're losing. 6 million jobs. The president has denied 9. Let me pay a compliment to the president, if I may.
Bush in 100 words: My opponent talks about fiscal sanity. You voted to increase taxes 98 times. Most health-care costs are covered by third parties. If you have a child, you got tax relief. If you're married, you got tax relief. If you pay any tax at all, you got tax relief. We passed tax relief. We'll increase federal spending. We've increased funds. The people I talked to their spirits were high. My opponent, the senator, talks about foreign policy. I think people understand what she's saying.
CQ's Craig Crawford on flip-floppingat nytimes.com:
No one was more of a flip-flopper than Lincoln on the slavery question. To slavery supporters, he often spoke of the inequality of the races, implying but never explicitly saying that blacks were genetically inferior. To abolitionists, he criticized slavery but did not clearly oppose it. He successfully maintained this balancing act until emancipation became a tool to demoralize the Confederacy and win the Civil War.
William Safire on flip-flop:
In one corner of the linguistic arena, we have a heavy-hitting onomatopoeic reduplication: flip-flap, cited in the 16th century as ''they goe flip-flap in the winde,'' meaning to swing back and forth, and soon taken up by performers to describe a type of somersault, becoming flip-flop about a hundred years ago. In the opposite corner, wearing tricolor trunks, is nuance, rooted in the Latin for ''cloud'' and the French for ''shade,'' meaning ''a subtle variation in tone'' or ''delicate shading of meaning.'' According to Candy Crowley of CNN, George W. Bush once told her, ''In Texas, we don't do nuance.'' ...
To flip-flop is ''unabashedly to switch sides,'' but when done by a politician you support, it is called ''changing one's mind to comport with the nuances of new circumstances.'' A neutral term is ''to undergo a reversal of views.'' When engaged in by a politician you oppose, the verb tergiversate, pronounced with a soft g, is a choice favored by pedants, meaning ''to switch sides like an apostate.''
As I said here and here, this ex-Naderite will be voting for Kerry. But I'm not unconvinced of this claim by writer Robert Ferrigno:
I'll be voting for Bush ... Kerry will dance the Albright two-step with Kim Jong-il, consult with Sandy Berger's socks, and kowtow to the U.N. apparatchiks who have done such a fine job of protecting the Cambodians, Rwandans, and the Sudanese. No thanks. No contest.
Update from The Onion: Nader Polling At 8 Percent Among Past Supporters x posted by Nathan Bierma at 3:15 PM
Who could possibly still be undecided in the presidential election? A New Yorker cartoon identifies three undecided voting blocs:
Pro-war gay oilmen for separation of church and state
Robin Williams on Leno: "Compassionate conservatism--that's like a gun rack on a Volvo."
Billy Crystal on Letterman, on the hazards of taking his 18-month-old granddaughter to a restaurant in LA: "In LA, when you're out with a woman 54 years younger than you, people think you're dating." posted by Nathan Bierma at 3:12 PM
In honor of the Astros' first playoff series win, from SI last year:
Baseball in Houston is a cup of tea at Starbucks, an order of salmon at The Palm or a car ride through Venice. It has an odd ring to it. Forty-one years after the major leagues came to Houston and pandered to Texans by naming the expansion team after a firearm--the Colt .45s--the fourth-largest city in America is a backwater outpost on the baseball map. ...
The Astros, of course, have been easy to overlook, even when dressed in those famously loud-striped 1980s uniforms inspired by laundry detergent boxes. No city has waited more seasons for its first World Series than Houston. Worse still, the Astros [hadn't] won a playoff series of any kind [until they beat the Braves in the '04 LDS], losing [their first] seven while dropping 22 of 30 postseason games. x
Drawing on what I have learned from Steven Garber, I would suggest that the Bible functions in our cultural engagement in at least six ways: by drawing us toward a heart commitment to Jesus, by providing the Big Story that frames our reasoned convictions, by modeling in Jesus and the heroes of the faith what our character might be, by calling together through a shared heart commitment the communities of faith within which our convictions and character are forged, by indicating the transhistorical meta-context that frames all of our particular historical contexts, and by proclaiming the calling to the love of God that anchors all of our particular vocations. x
Debbie Blue, in her beautiful book of sermons, Sensual Orthodoxy: "Maybe we're just meeting a figment of our own or some Sunday School teacher's imagination if Jesus doesn't strike us as a little odd." posted by Nathan Bierma at 2:57 PM
Etymology Today from M-W: whilom\WYE-lum\ : former
"On the eastern side settlement and agriculture have all but obliterated the whilom tallgrass prairie...." (William Least Heat-Moon, The Atlantic, September 1991)
"Whilom" shares an ancestor with the word "while." Both trace back to the Old English word "hw?l," meaning "time" or "while." In Old English "hw?lum" was an adverb meaning "at times." This use passed into Middle English (with a variety of spellings, one of which was "whilom"), and in the 12th century the word acquired the meaning "formerly." The adverb's usage dwindled toward the end of the 19th century, and it has since been labeled "archaic." The adjective first appeared on the scene in the 15th century, with the now-obsolete meaning "deceased, late," and by the end of the 16th century it was being used with the meaning "former." It's a relatively uncommon word, but it does see occasional use.
This week in my B&C blog:The ethical dilemma of whether (and what) to give to panhandlers. Plus: King Oyo of Uganda, age 12 (pictured); tourists watchng Mt. St. Helens steam; the American ivory trade; the controversy over who painted the White House's East Room portrait of George Washington; Japan's baseball strike; cleaning the crud out of your computer keyboard; Starbucks prices go from rip-off to ridiculous; and more ... LINK/ARCHIVE
The history of the word cappuccino exemplifies how words can develop new senses because of resemblances that the original coiners of the terms might not have dreamed possible. The Capuchin order of friars, established after 1525, played an important role in bringing Catholicism back to Reformation Europe. Its Italian name came from the long pointed cowl, or cappuccino, derived from cappuccio, hood, that was worn as part of the order's habit. The French version of cappuccino was capuchin (now capucin), from which came English Capuchin. The name of this pious order was later used as the name (first recorded in English in 1785) for a type of monkey with a tuft of black cowl-like hair. In Italian cappuccino went on to develop another sense, espresso coffee mixed or topped with steamed milk or cream, so called because the color of the coffee resembled the color of the habit of a Capuchin friar. The first use of cappuccino in English is recorded in 1948.
Here's more on Mocha, Yemen. Here's an e-mail from etymology expert Anatoly Liberman on whether "cream" was a blend of "cramum" and "cresme," as dictionaries speculate.
As for "burrito," The Washington Post speculated in 1998 that the name comes from a Spanish saying (presumably intoned by burrito-eating ranchers and miners): "If I had a horse, I would go make my fortune, but I only have a little donkey." More Spanish food words and loan words. Here are some more French food words. Here's a page on the Turks and the history of coffee, and here's a page on the history of sushi (couldn't find the translation of the word). Finally, a list of instances of the presumed Hebrew root of "cider" ("shekar" for "strong drink," via the Greek sikera) in the Bible (including Ezekiel 44:21: "Neither shall any priest drink wine when they enter into the inner court.")
Inflections: I wondered why Dick Cheney found it necessary to use pandemic to clarify epidemic in the VP debate:
Well, this is a great tragedy, Gwen, when you think about the enormous cost here in the United States and around the world of the AIDS epidemic [em dash] pandemic, really. Millions of lives lost, millions more infected and facing a very bleak future.
M-W defines "epidemic" as "an outbreak or product of sudden rapid spread, growth, or development," and "pandemic" as "a pandemic outbreak of a disease," and the adjective as "occurring over a wide geographic area and affecting an exceptionally high proportion of the population." (Both words can be n or adj.) So an epidemic can be concentrated, while a pandemic can be national in scope. Cheney doesn't bring much care or concern to his use of words, so this subtle distinction was surprising.
Most Democrats, including Kerry, duck and cover when Republicans bring up values. Not Edwards. He knows the language and loves to turn it against the GOP. The word "moral" was used twice in this debate. The word "value" was used three times. All five references came from Edwards. He denounced the "moral" crime of piling debt on our grandchildren. He called the African AIDS epidemic and the Sudan genocide "huge moral issues." When Ifill asked him about gay marriage, he changed the subject to taxes. "We don't just value wealth, which they do," said Edwards. "We value work in this country. And it is a fundamental value difference between them and us."
- Among the "malapropisms, solecisms, gaffes, spoonerisms ... truisms," and other Bushisms highlighted in this Slate piece are "Hispanos," "resignate," and "transformationed". Says Slate's Jacob Weisberg: "the symptoms point to a specific malady--some kind of linguistic deficit akin to dyslexia--that does not indicate a lack of mental capacity per se." Says his wife Laura: "He doesn't like to overthink." Also see LL on Weisbergisms
- "To laughter, Mr. Bush said that Mr. Kerry would impose "Hillary care'' on America ... unlike what Mrs. Clinton proposed in 1993, it would not create any big new federal bureaucracy and would retain the current employer-based system, and Mr. Kerry said he was averse to any kind of national health care plan." NY Times
- "It is a truism of American politics that the more optimistic candidate wins, and Kerry has good reason to fear joining the line of Democrats-Jimmy Carter, Michael Dukakis, Al Gore-whose careers were cut short by insufficient ebullience. New Yorker
- Jon Stewart called Cheney's comment in the debate that "If I had it to recommend all over again, I would recommend exactly the right same course of action" a case of 20-20 blindsight. (Later in that show, he asked Bob Schieffer why, after Abu Ghraib, etc., only Rathergate "gets a -gate."
- From Newsweek: Though the 2007 French presidential election remains a long way off, early political jockeying is already taking place-in bookstores. Mixed in with nearly 700 new autumn releases are more than a half-dozen books by France's most popular or powerful politicians, known as presidentiables. (What is the French word, I wonder?)
- Andy Rooney said he'd like to see debates between the presidential candidates' wives and the vice presidential candidates' wives. The graphic for the latter read "Vice Presidential First Ladies Debate." Shouldn't that be Second Ladies, just as the veep's plane is Air Force 2?
Federal regulation of the $2 trillion consumer credit industry may hinge on how the Supreme Court chooses to interpret a single word. ... Donald B. Ayer, representing Alexandria-based Koons Buick Pontiac GMC Inc., told the court that it is "utterly clear" from the context and history of the law that Congress intended to set a $1,000 cap on how much consumers could win by suing for alleged violations of TILA by car dealers -- and that it used the term "subparagraph" to lump such cases together with others subject to the cap.
-The Chronicle of Higher Ed onsovereignty as the S-word of world politics.
Meanwhile, the market for functional foods, a broad category that includes everything from calcium-fortified orange juice to cholesterol-lowering Benecol spread to drinkable supplements like Ensure, has been increasing by up to 14 percent annually. Though Mars might like us to think otherwise, chocolate could never pass as a functional food, because of its high levels of fat and its high number of calories.
-2Blowhards ongentrification in Brooklyn and what it calls the word's pejorative origins in 1960s London.
-In his column this week, Martin Marty quotes Emory University's Robert M. Franklin talking about African-Americans' non-marital birth rate. Hadn't heard that one, but as long as it isn't ambiguous (birth rate of babies who aren't married?), it's a good substitute for "out-of-wedlock" (wedlock means marriage, but it's used almost exclusively now in the context of unmarried partners--regrettably, I think).
Lamping is a form of pest control involving the shooting of foxes and ground game at night with the aid of powerful lights. Hunters' lamps can illuminate areas up to 300 metres away, and are sometimes fixed to a vehicle. The reflection of the lamp light in the eyes of the quarry startles them and helps direct the lampers' aim.
-Saw this slogan on the Crain's building here in Chicago yesterday. I'd like to make it a sentence (by adding "Crain's is...") and diagram it. Where the Who's Who Read What's What.
The idea that you can distinguish a clockwise from a counter-clockwise circular loop by saying that one goes to the west and the other doesn't is more than just wrong, it's a screamingly obvious geometrical impossibility.
-The Trib's Rick Morrissey on "one of the most amazing quotes in the annals of sports":
"I resent the inference that I'm not prepared," [Dominican Republic native Sammy Sosa] told the Sun-Times. If Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld were quoted as saying, "Sup, Dawg?" it wouldn't be weirder than Sosa being quoted as saying, "I resent the inference " Either Sosa needs better advisers and stenographers or else he needs to forget baseball and start teaching honors English, he's suddenly that good with the language.
Eat breakfast backwards, to, v. - To vomit Dead heat in a zeppelin race, phr. - Large breasts Passhole, n. - The person who drives slowly for miles but speeds up the minute you try to pass
CANTON, OH-QT2D-7, an 11-year-old electric assembly-operations robot, was laid off Monday when the Lawn-Boy plant that has employed him relocated its manufacturing headquarters to New Delhi, India. "Query: What am I going to do now?" QT2D-7 said, panning its infrared eye across the empty parking lot outside the factory where it had worked every day for more than a decade. "Observation: I've never known anything but assembling lawnmowers. Query: Just like that, they throw me out?" x
Ad Exec Doesn't Care What Proverb Actually Means CHICAGO-Leo Burnett Agency creative executive Patrick Bergman authorized the use of a common proverb in a Subway ad campaign in spite of the fact that the phrase's true meaning undermines the intent of the ad, the 41-year-old reported Monday. "The ad slogan 'Who says there's no such thing as a free lunch?' was perfect for Subway's free-sandwich giveaway," Bergman said. "Who cares if, technically, the customer had to buy 12 sandwiches to get one free? People know the phrase, and they respond to it." Bergman last misused a proverb two weeks ago, when he put "haste makes waste" in an ad encouraging people to hurry to a 12-hour Macy's white sale. x
-I mentioned the phrase sold them a lemon [i.e. a junky car] to my wife, and she said, "I like lemons!" Do lemons generally have more negative connotations than positive? Obviously, they're sour, but they don't suffer approval ratings as low as, say, green vegetables.
- From wordcraft.infopop.cc:
A very uncommon word today, but what a glorious quotation for it! smaragdine- of or pertaining to emerald; resembling emerald; of an emerald green
As I trod the trackless way Through sunless gorges of Cathay, I became a little child, By nameless rivers, swirling through Chasms, a fantastic blue, Month by month, on barren hills, In burning heat, in bitter chills, Tropic forest, Tartar snow, Smaragdine archipelago, See me --- led by some wise hand That I did not understand. Called on Him with mild devotion, As the dewdrop woos the ocean. - Aleister Crowley, Aha!
- From KPVI TV: "Scholars, academics if you will[??], tell us that there are many ways to communicate through language: English, the language of business; Russian, the language of debaters; French being the language of lovers; and Spanish, the language of God."
Older Brother Accused Of Cushion-Fort Prisoner Abuse x
Bush Arrives At Debate Wearing Flight Suit
Many Animals Harmed in Catering of Film x posted by Nathan Bierma at 1:29 PM
"I'm up in the Senate most Tuesdays when they're in session. The first time I ever met you was when you walked on the stage tonight," Cheney told Edwards during the debate.
On Feb. 1, 2001 ... On April 8, 2001 ... On Jan. 8, 2003 ... AP via ABC News
The New Times of Broward-Palm Beach 10/7/04 on the first presidential debate: "Dubya's eye-batting, scowling, stammering, smirking, embattled, half-paranoid, and all-around weird performance."
If, as president, you met with President Jacques Chirac of France, would you permit yourself to speak French? Would the American people?
Why should we make you commander in chief of the United States armed forces after you have said that those forces regularly committed war crimes in Vietnam, and after you voted against new missile systems, the B-2 bomber and the American-led effort to drive Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait in 1991?
History suggests our best presidents acknowledge error, learn from mistakes, grow in the job. Lincoln readily conceded a number of errors. "I'd like to believe I'm smarter today than I was yesterday," he explained. Yet when you were first asked about mistakes you had made since the inauguration, you could not think of any. Your vice president followed suit this week, insisting he would recommend today exactly the same course in Iraq. Without acknowledging error, how can you expect to be smarter today than you were yesterday? ... [Actually, this was close to the last question for Bush in the 2nd pres. debate]
Are you prepared to say to the world's Muslims that the United States is not a Christian nation but a religiously neutral nation whose Constitution prohibits the establishment of any religion? posted by Nathan Bierma at 1:24 PM
And a good observation in Slate about a recent fad in popular portrayals of suburban angst:
But there's at least one problem: The placid suburban lifestyle of shows like Desperate Housewives-a world in which whole communities of stay-at-home wives expect to be subsidized in grand style by the labor of their uncomplaining husbands, who in turn expect to come home to spotless mansions-doesn't exist anymore, at least not in the pure form depicted on this show. Why are we so, well, desperate to satirize a rapidly disappearing slice of American life? Is the recent wave of suburban snarkiness just suburban nostalgia in disguise?
Caitlin Flanagan has written that we don't have housewives anymore, we have full-time moms. The difference (she didn't put it exactly this way) is that housewives spent their days in their kitchens; FT Moms spend theirs in their minivans. posted by Nathan Bierma at 1:16 PM
Yes, there are some not-so-good-things about neocalvinism. We neocalvinists are not often tempted to world-flight, but we are tempted to the triumphalistic notion that the sanctification of the world rests finally in our human hands, we are not often tempted to anti-intellectualism, but instead often succumb to intellectualism, we are not often tempted to an illiterate biblicism, but instead sometimes succumb to a sophisticated and subtle reduction of trust in the authority of the Bible, we seldom go too far toward quietism, but often forget to pray. At least, some of us do.
Man 2: Rabbi, should I buy a Chrysler? Rabbi K: Eh, couldn't you rephrase that as a, as an ethical question? Man 2: Um... Is it right to buy a Chrysler? Rabbi K: Oh, yes! [chuckles] For great is the car with power steering and dynaflow suspension!
Speaking of The Simpsons, here's a case of a cartoon character being used to argue municipal policy:
New Times Broward-Palm Beach 10/7/04 In the Name of Mr. Burns Exxxxxcellent!
Hamilton Forman is Fort Lauderdale's equivalent to Mr. Burns on The Simpsons: a multimillionaire with so much power and wealth that he sometimes seems to believe he owns his fair city. Forman bought Broward County land early and often, from downtown Fort Lauderdale to the western cities; he is the patriarch of the county's premier land-owning aristocracy. ... At the September 20 meeting of Fort Lauderdale's Planning and Right of Way Committee, Forman demanded approval to turn part of the median outside the church into a parking lot. He even offered to pay to do it. Forman had for years been using the green space as an illegal parking lot. Despite no-parking signs and two wooden barriers intended to keep cars out, ol' Mr. Burns found a way. He even admits it. Forman simply destroyed the attractive barriers to make way for his fellow churchgoers, he told the committee. ... It's right there on tape: Mr. Burns admitting to willfully and maliciously destroying municipal property.
Etymology Today from M-W: saga \SAH-guh\ 1 : a prose narrative recorded in Iceland in the 12th and 13th centuries of historic or legendary figures and events of the heroic age of Norway and Iceland 2 : a modern heroic narrative resembling the Icelandic saga 3 : a long detailed account
The original sagas were prose narratives that were roughly analogous to modern historical novels. They were penned in Iceland in the 12th and 13th centuries and blended fact and fiction to tell the tales of famous rulers, legendary heroes, or even plain folks. And they were aptly named; "saga" traces back to an Old Norse root that means "what is said or told." When English speakers borrowed the term back in the early 1700s, they used it to describe those first Icelandic stories. Later, "saga" was broadened to cover anything that resembled such a story, and eventually it was further generalized to cover any long, complicated scenario.
This week in my B&C blog: September news and book review roundup, plus a places item on a Wal-Mart opening near this sacred Aztec pyramid. LINK/ARCHIVE
My latest Tribune language column: On the history of the phrase "through thick and thin," the new slogan of the floundering Chicago Bulls. temp link/perm.preview
I e-mailed Steve Schanwald to ask whether this would be a "thick" or "thin" year. His response, in classic marketing-ese: "As for whether this season will be thick or thin, only time will tell. That's's why they play the games. All I know for sure is that fans who come to our games will have fun."
Here's the text, background, and translation of Chaucer's Reeve's Tale. Here's another early example of "thick and thin" cited by OED, from Edmund Spenser's "The Faerie Queene" in 1590: "His tyreling jade [a weary horse, from which we get our word "jaded"] he fiercely forth did push, Through thicke and thin, both over banke and bush" (background)
Here's the home page of Anatoly Liberman, etymologist extraordinaire. Here's an imaginary conversation written entirely in cliches involving the word "thick." Here's a sermon entitled "Through Thick and Thin."
Inflections: - Wikipedia calls pages such as this one (on the Indian language of Tamil) disambiguation pages, "i.e., a navigational aid which lists other pages that might otherwise share the same title."
- LL on LH on the new (old, actually) name of the capital of Kyrgyzstan:
Its name ... used to be Pishpek, and then became Frunze in Soviet times ("Purunze" to the locals, at least in pronunciation). Since the Soviet name was a reference to the Bolshevik political and military leader Mikhail Frunze, the post-Soviet Kyrgyzstan decided to return to the old name. Unfortunately, no one knew its etymology. I'm not completely clear why this was viewed as a problem -- perhaps local linguistic nationalism prefers etymologically transparent place names? Anyhow, it was decided to use the Kyrgyz word nearest in sound, which is bishkek, meaning "whisk to stir kumiss with". ... This story (if true) means that the name of the capital of Kyrgyzstan is a very special type of eggcorn, namely a false analysis, with a slight change in sound, created on purpose to provide an interpretation for a name that otherwise lacks one.
- Heard Letterman refer last week to the luxury personal blimp advertised in the new Neiman Marcus' Christmas catalog as a dirigible. Hadn't heard that word before; M-W defines the noun as an "airship" and the adjective as "capable of being steered," from the Latin "dirigere." Most articles I found about the catalog (including CNN and NPR) refer to the blimp as a "zeppelin," and so does the catalog itself. Here's a page from the Chicago Public Library on a "dirigible crash" in the 1920s.
- Conan, via anglais.blogspot.com: "Since Bill Clinton's operation, the number of patients complaining of similar chest pains has increased dramatically. Doctors are calling the trend the Bill Clinton Syndrome. ... Before the operation the Bill Clinton Syndrome was characterized as a burning sensation in the groin."
- LL finds that "in Thursday's debate, John Kerry's sentences were 17.7% longer than George Bush's," and that Kerry used more words (7,168 to 6,165) in fewer sentences (468 to 476). LL also challenges Kathleen Hall Jamieson on her contentions that Bush's sentences are S-V-O-period and that "words found on the SAT verbal exam should not appear in candidate's speeches." Finally: Debate fact-checking from the Wash.Post.
- The Onion: 'Ravaged' named Florida's official state adjective x
- My friend Nick coins a word at his Web site: "Corklearance: a periodic cleansing of one's bulletin board contents, often yielding year-old pamphlets."
- The Observer (via Lit. Saloon) says Carlos Fuentes' new manifesto-memoir is dubiously translated:
The strangest moment may have more to do with the translator than the author. Writing about his wonderful father ('a man of good humour, tenderness, punctuality: a good example'), he records that on the day he died, Fuentes Sr 'did two things: he tried on a new suit and he sexually harassed my mother'. Fuentes's attitudes towards women are dodgy enough, but can he really be praising Dad for cornering Mum in the kitchen? Perhaps the Spanish means something more like 'made gallant romantic advances to'.
- The trouble with headlines: This article in the Trib was about how the Baltimore Orioles were compensated for having the Montreal Expos move next door to them in D.C. The headline leaves in unclear whether they were compensated or charged: "Report: Orioles paid well for Expos' move"
- Can we drop the "-less in Seattle" headline already? This morning on ESPN, the anchor's tease said the Mariners were "manager-less in Seattle." That's miles away from clever.
- Speaking of ESPN, I thought it was incorrect for ESPN to call an analysis segment "Fact or Fiction," since the segment often includes predictions (about whether the Dodgers will beat the Cardinals, etc.), and predictions are neither demonstrably true nor false. But M-W says fiction can mean "a useful illusion or pretense." (I guess it's up to you to decide how useful ESPN's predictions are.)
Documents Reveal Gaps In Bush's Service As President x
Organizers Fear Terrorist Attacks On Upcoming Al-Qaeda Convention x
There Are So Many Experiences I Want To Write About Having Had x
Santiago Calatrava: The Architects Studio highlights the work of one of the most celebrated and original architects of the present day. From the Olympic Sports Complex in Athens to the PATH terminal at New Yorks Ground Zero, Calatrava is responsible for many of todays signature building sites. The exhibition presents these projects within the context of his entire career, with special attention to the Lyon TGV Station, the Milwaukee Art Museum, Tenerife concert Hall, and two of his extraordinary bridges, along with his continuing work in Valencia, Spain and Malmφ, Sweden. Henry Art Gallery posted by Nathan Bierma at 1:53 PM
The Leaning Tower of Pisa has been given some 300 years more of life, Italian experts announced. Reporting on the present conditions of the monument at the 32nd World Geological Conference in Florence, Italy, Turin University's Michele Jamiolkowski, president of the committee for the protection of the tower, said that the famous tilt has been finally halted. Straightened by half a degree, the monument has stabilized for the first time in more than eight centuries. "Apart from seasonal, cyclic movements, the tower has been basically motionless since September 2003. We believe geotechnical stabilization has been achieved," Jamiolkowski told the conference. Cyclic displacements include the tower heating up at sunrise and slightly leaning to the west before returning to the original position. Discovery News posted by Nathan Bierma at 1:50 PM
Sick of reading political blather? Read some poems (here, here and here). posted by Nathan Bierma at 1:47 PM
My friend Cathy wrote this pre-Olympics piece in the Oneonta (N.Y.) Daily Star on Michael Phelps, her fellow graduate of the Baltimore area Towson High School. posted by Nathan Bierma at 1:35 PM
A 15th Century Italian Renaissance prayer book valued at £10m has finally been completed after a stolen page was reunited with the rest of the volume. The intricately illustrated Sforza Hours was commissioned around 1490 but at least three pages were stolen from the illuminator before its completion. The missing pages were discovered 65 years ago and until this year one remained in private hands. ... The book measures just 130mm x 95mm but is considered one of the library's greatest treasures. It contains an illustrated calendar marking religious days alongside illustrations for each month. The final page - October - is illustrated with a hunting scene, a typical activity for the time of year. BBC posted by Nathan Bierma at 1:32 PM
Etymology Today from M-W: fustigate \FUSS-tuh-gayt\
1 : to beat with or as if with a short heavy club 2 : to criticize severely
Though it won't leave a bump on your head, severe criticism can be a blow to your self-esteem. It's no wonder that "fustigate," when it first appeared in the 17th century, originally meant "to cudgel or beat with a short heavy stick," a sense that reflects the word's derivation from the Latin noun "fustis," which means "club" or "staff." The "criticize" sense is more common these days, but the violent use of "fustigate" was a hit with earlier writers like George Huddesford, who in 1801 told of an angry Jove who "cudgell'd all the constellations, ... / Swore he'd eject the man i' the moon ... / And fustigate him round his orbit."
This week in my B&C blog: Marilynne Robinson's interview by the New Yorker, covering writing, praying, Calvinism, and Congregationalism. Plus: theft of electric cable plagues Mozambique, designing streetlights in New York City, Freud versus C.S. Lewis, secular life ceremonies, the history of suicide (deadly Yangtze River Bridge pictured), the mummification of Egyptian cats, and more ... LINK/ARCHIVE
My latest Tribune language column: On the revitalization of Native American languages in California. temp link/perm.preview
Here's the Economist's Kenneth Hale obituary with the Louvre quote. It says Hale could converse in about 50 languages. More on his Green Book. If you're interested in language death, take a deep breath and start clicking: Languages in Danger on Listmania; bibliography on Indigenous Language Stabilization from www.indigenous-language.org; a post about UNESCO's forthcoming "Language Preservation and Documentation Handbook: South Asia version"; intro to a paper or book called Revitalizing Indigenous Languages; resources on endangered languages from www.englishpen.org.
More specific sites: www.kumeyaay.com, about the So. Calif. language I mention in my column; also, the revitalization of the Oneida (NY), Omaha (Neb), and Comanche (Okla) languages. More from the BBC from NPR, with links to audio samples from Africa and Asia.
Here's a review, excerpt, and overview of Mark Abley's Spoken Here. And here's a review of David Crystal's Language Death.
More from LL:
In August 2002, Wayt Gibbs wrote a piece in Scientific American called Saving Dying Languages. It included a full-page geographical plot to show the degree of correlation between locations of endangered languages and regions of greatest biological diversity. I wish someone could do a similar plot but with a linguistic uniformity score for each region of the world superimposed over a conflict index. David Crystal considers this issue in his great book Language Death and mentions other cases of conflict in regions of linguistic uniformity. In a footnote, he quotes a section from the The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy about the mythical Babel fish, a universal language translator which, "by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation." x/x
And here's a drawing of the indri, mentioned in the briefs at the end of my column.
Inflections: - The words of a protester (the mother of a soldier killed in Iraq) who disrupted a Laura Bush speech earlier this month:
I wanted to rip the president's head off. ... I think if I had him in front of me I would shoot him in the groined area. x
- This blogger and this columnist suspect Iraqi prime minister Allawi's speech to Congress last week was written by the White House. I wonder if his use of the phrase better off is a tip-off--not just because it is so frequently uttered by Bush, but also because it is idiomatic (or, at any rate, the individual parts do not suggest to speakers who struggle with English, such as Allawi, their meaning when paired). The world, he said, is better off without Saddam Hussein.
- MSNBC aired the results of a CBS poll on how many Americans "Think Iraq was the right thing to do"--"Iraq" being synonymous with "invading Iraq," and you can't help thinking that whenever Bush looked at a map circa 2002, he couldn't conceive of the name of the country without wanting to invade it.
- Saw an ad for a movie--Wimbledon, I think--that included this endorsement: "'Thumbs up!' Ebert and Roeper." I scratched my head: you usually see E&R's unanimous recommendation written as "Two Thumbs Up!" But in this case, apparently one of the critics had given it thumbs up and the other thumbs down--an ambiguous endorsement, dishonestly presented here. If the movie was indeed Wimbledon, this is exactly what happened: Ebert gave it thumbs up, Roeper thumbs down.
- Upon hearing the familiar voice of Terry Gross when he interviewed her, the Trib's Michael Wilmington says he was voicestruck. (Here's my piece on Gross from my college paper.)
-"When I was little I was big." WILLIAM PERRY, 1981 Clemson's 6'3", 305-pound guard, talking about his childhood.
- When de Vicenzo signs [an] incorrect card, 66 becomes his official posting, and he misses the green jacket by one phantom stroke. Afterward de Vicenzo's spirit and English are both broken. ... "What a stupid I am."
- Rick Reilly, on one SI collector: "He's got every single issue--protected in plastic slipcovers and stacked, in order, neatly on bookshelves in his living room. "There were four or five over the 50 years that didn't come for one reason or another," he said, "but I always managed to go to my dentist and take them from him." Where else would you go to fill a cavity?"
- My wife referred to our young nephew yesterday as double as old as when we last saw him. I assumed this was one of her unique contrivances, but "double as much" gets 819 hits at Google (compared with 544,000 for "twice as much").
we also experience a twist in the apparent wind in the order of 5 degrees or so (close hauled - downwind the twist can be double as much)
He spent double as much for sugar in 1904 as he did in 1890.
Elderly women lose nearly double as much calcium as elderly men because of hormonal changes due to menopause
Then there were just more than double as much cdma 3G customers than GSM/UMTS 3G customers in the end of 2003.
Murphy advertise in the news paper in the East and offered the workers 5 $ in day that was double as much as the normal salary on that time
The merchant repenting, offered to give him double as much if he would make it again, but neither his promises nor Cosimo's entreaties could make him consent.
- A link I saved: Terry Eagleton on fundamentalism:
Fundamentalism doesn't just mean people with fundamental beliefs, since that covers everyone. ... "Fundamental" doesn't necessarily mean "worth dying for". You may be passionately convinced that the quality of life in San Francisco is superior to that in Strabane, but reluctant to go to the gallows for it. ... Fundamentalism means sticking strictly to the script, which in turn means being deeply fearful of the improvised, ambiguous or indeterminate.
From Tim Dowley's Introduction to the History of Christianity: "The term 'fundamentalism' came to denote an unduly defensive and obscurantist attitude which was anti-scholarly, anti-intellectual and anti-cultural."
- The Trib's Rick Morrissey a week and a half ago: "Babe Ruth was beloved. Bonds is a lot of things, but 'beloved' isn't one of them. If 'beliked' were a word, Bonds wouldn't even be that." The Chicago Reader notes that Reilly first used this word, but exonerates Morrisey of plagiarism.
- via wordcraft.infopop.cc: From Thomas Hobbes, A Brief Of The Art Of Rhetorick, Bk. III ch. II, Of the Choice of Words and Epithets:
THE Vertues of a Word are two; the first, that it be perspicuous; the second, that it be decent; that is, neither above, nor below the thing signified; or, neither too humble, nor too fine. Perspicuous are all Words that be Proper. An Orator, if he use Proper Words, and Received, and good Metaphors, shall both make his Oration beautiful, and not seem to intend it; and shall speak perspicuously.
Had cause to cite Naisbitt and Aburdene's Megatrends in a B&C piece in the works.
Published in 1982, the book outlined these ten megatrends in the world:
Industrial Society to Information Society Forced Technology to High Tech/High Touch National Economy to World Economy Short Term to Long Term Centralization to Decentralization Institutional Help to Self-Help Representative Democracy to Participatory Democracy Hierarchies to Networking North to South Either/Or to Multiple Option
The 2000 edition has this list:
The Blooming Global Economy of the 1990's A Renaissance of the Arts The Emergence of Free-Market Socialism Global Lifestyles and Cultural Nationalism The Privatization of the Welfare State The Rise of the Pacific Rim The Decade of Women in Leadership The Age of Biology The Religious Revival of the New Millennium The Triumph of the Individual
Just came across this page that says The Cat in the Hat was an allegory for American involvement in Vietnam. (You always have to be careful about these kinds of theories; but this one seems plausible.)
Trapped Miner Wishes He Could See The Coverage x Female Athletes Making Great Strides In Attractiveness x Kerry Vows To Raise Wife's Taxes
And one "person-on-the-street" comment on the failure to renew the assault weapons ban: "When we enacted this ban in 1994, it was an important step to protect our children. Now that our children are grown up and off at college, it's not such a pressing issue." posted by Nathan Bierma at 1:36 PM
Watched Office Space over the weekend, and found this bit of trivia at IMDB.com:
The red Swingline stapler that Milton was so afraid of having taken away was never actually manufactured by the Swingline company; it was instead painted red by a crew member in the props department. However, following the movie's success on video as a cult film, the demand for red Swingline staplers (apparently as a symbol of quiet rebellion among cubicle-bound employees) was so great that the company began to sell the red Swingline stapler on its website.
The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography is a work which makes superlatives superfluous. Running 11 feet along the shelf and weighing in at a healthy defensive end's 280 pounds, the D.N.B.'s 60 volumes contain 60,000 pages and some 60 million words. More than 10,000 contributors have written a total of 54,922 essays on the worthies (as well as the worthless) who make up the fabric of British history. It has been more than 12 years in the making. NY Times posted by Nathan Bierma at 1:30 PM
Etymology Today from M-W: morganatic \mor-guh-NAT-ik\
: of, relating to, or being a marriage between a member of a royal or noble family and a person of inferior rank, in which the rank of the inferior partner remains unchanged and the children of the marriage do not succeed to the titles, fiefs, or entailed property of the partner of higher rank
The deprivations imposed on the lower-ranking spouse by a morganatic marriage may seem like a royal pain in the neck, and yet the word "morganatic" comes from a word for a marriage benefit. New Latin "morganatica," a term based on Middle High German's "morgen" ("morning"), means "morning gift." It refers to a gift that a new husband traditionally gave to his bride on the morning after the consummation of their marriage. So why was the New Latin phrase "matrimonium ad morganaticam," which means literally "marriage with morning gift," the term for a morganatic marriage? Because it was just that the wife got the morning gift, but that's all she was entitled to of her husband's possessions.
This week in my B&C blog: The theology of hurricane avoidance. Plus: South Africa's boom in wildlife preserves; supermarkets learning to cater to Latino shoppers; the dark side of getting a good deal; Johann Wilhelm Wilms, the forgotten contemporary of Beethoven; the legacy of the poet Ovid; Gandhi's sleeping arrangements, and more ... LINK/ARCHIVE posted by Nathan Bierma at 3:42 PM
My latest Tribune language column: Is it "world English," "international English," or "global English"? temp link/perm.preview
Inflections -From Philip Gourevitch's recent New Yorker piece on Bush's oratory:
Bushs gift ... is a function of his lack of polish: the clipped nature of his phraseology, the touch of twang, the hard consonants, the nasal vowels, the dropped conjunctions and slurred or swallowed suffixes. ... He is grossly underestimated as an orator by those who presume that good grammar, rigorous logic, and a solid command of the facts are the essential ingredients of political persuasion, and that the absence of these skills indicates a lack of intelligence. Although Bush is no intellectual, and proud of it, he is quick and clever, and, for all his notorious malapropisms, abuses of syntax, and manglings or reinventions of vocabulary, his intelligence is--if not especially literate--acutely verbal. His words, in transcription, might seem mindless, incoherent, or unintentionally hilarious ... but it is pretty plain what he means.
-I was thinking the other day how ironic it is that the word "candidate" contains the word candid. Meanwhile, thisplay just showed in Bloomington:
In a presidential year when many commentators have deplored the dearth of eloquence in public discourse, one of the most eloquent of presidential candidates, Adlai E. Stevenson (1900-1965), will be the subject of a one-man play opening this summer. The play, "Adlai, Alone," focuses on the language, life and politics of Stevenson, the unsuccessful 1952 and 1956 Democratic opponent of Dwight D. Eisenhower. It is scheduled to open on Sept. 10 at the McLean County Museum of History in Stevenson's hometown, Bloomington, Ill.
-It's not a crime, but this review of The Gutenberg Elegies ends with this sentence: "Above all, what we are doing needs thinking about."
-Digging through the ADS-L archives, I found this attempt to antedate the apple-a-day adage:
_An apple a day keeps the doctor away._ Eating fruit regularly keeps one healthy. First found as a Welsh folk proverb (1866): "Eat an apple on going to bed, And you'll keep the doctor from earning his bread." First attested in the United States in 1913. The proverb is found in varying forms. --Gregory Titelman, RANDOM HOUSE DICTIONARY OF POPULAR PROVERBS AND SAYINGS (1996). 8/3/2000
-My grandma asked me about the origins of the word piggyback, and I didn't know. So she found it online (she's a very wired grandma).
In the old days and I guess even now it was common practice for individuals who had to carry a heavy object to invariably place it on their back. This method of carrying things around was called "pick a pack". And `pick a pack' when said quickly became `pickapack'. Parents often carried their children "pickapack" too. But children because they loved animals so much changed "pickapack" to "piggyback".
-wordcraft.infopop.cc has the origins of dumbbell, which has nothing to do with intelligence.
-This July, the Onion ran an "op-ed" by the Hulk. I haven't seen the movie, but it got me curious about his trademark syntax--familiar from early portrayals of Tarzan and Native Americans--featuring few verbs and articles and little subject-verb agreement. I wonder why these syntactic features came to be associated with "primitive" speakers. I suppose speakers learning English as a 2nd language might use such constructions, but only because their native language lacks articles and uses different endings for plurals. And children's syntax is quite different from this. So why is this syntax considered brutish?
X2 come out last year. Spider-Man 2 come out last month. Both great sequels to great movies about Hulk friends. Hulk love great action movies about friends! People buy tickets. Make money for theaters, make money for movie company. Movie company make more movies with money. Already, they working on X-Men 3. Hulk movie come out last year. It success. It big popcorn movie with heart. So why no one want make Hulk 2? It make Hulk mad!
-words for deceased relatives in the Bardi language, from Anggarrgoon, via LL:
loomiyoon baawa (child who has lost a parent, = orphan; cf loomi baawa, neglected child) gambaj(oo) (mother who has lost a child, now used as a swear word by Bardi men who don't know its original meaning) algooyarr (father who's lost a child) jilarr (man who has lost a brother, sister or cousin) miiraj (woman who's lost a brother or sister) galgarr (widow or widower)
I'm canceling my subscription I'm over your issues posted by Nathan Bierma at 3:18 PM
My friend Nathan reports on the legend of a Loch Ness-like monster in Great Slave Lake near Yellowknife. posted by Nathan Bierma at 3:17 PM
It's been pointed out that the second-most common word in President Bush's convention address was "will"--not a good sign for an incumbent. Still, as David Brooks pointed out (here), what nobody noticed was that Bush's speech had a lot about social programs. I thought this was interesting, because it made Bush sound like a Democrat, and Kerry's speech was so Republican.
Bush proposes to build community health centers, expand AmeriCorps, increase the funds for Pell Grants, create job retraining accounts, offer tax credits for hybrid cars, help lower-income families get health savings accounts, dedicate $40 billion to wetlands preservation, and on and on and on. This is an activist posture. As Karen Hughes said on PBS on Thursday evening, "This is not the grinchy old 'Let's abolish the Department of Education or shut down the government' conservatism of the past."
Etymology Today from M-W: probity \PROH-buh-tee\ : adherence to the highest principles and ideals : uprightness
"Probity" and its synonyms "honesty," "honor," and "integrity" all mean uprightness of character or action, with some slight differences in emphasis. "Honesty" implies a refusal to lie, steal, or deceive in any way. "Honor" suggests an active or anxious regard for the standards of one's profession, calling, or position. "Integrity" implies trustworthiness and incorruptibility to a degree that one is incapable of being false to a trust, responsibility, or pledge. "Probity," which descends from Latin "probus," meaning "honest," implies tried and proven honesty or integrity.
This week in my B&C blog: The absence of work, and workplaces, from contemporary literature. Plus: Denmark's harsh restrictions on marrying foreigners, tree removal in the Amazon River (pictured), the truth about the diamond trade, Francis Scott Key's political views, and more ... LINK/ARCHIVE
My latest Tribune language column: On "belly talk"--the attempts of expectant parents to communicate with their unborn babies. temp link/perm.preview
Here's the BBC on the Psychological Science study I mentioned, and here's a page about ultrasound. Here's a recent Wash.Post report that babies understand concepts.
Here's the report I mentioned about the supposed typos of Indian transcriptionists; LL links to the skeptical post. Here's a 1996 instance of "baloney amputation."
Update: The Times of London via PEC: "[Among] the Times' series of letters about dictation confusion... A solicitor dictated a warning that a client was under a misapprehension. The client received a letter stating she was 'under a Miss Happy Hension.'" posted by Nathan Bierma at 2:28 PM
An article in the current American Journalism Review on the lack of diversity among Supreme Court reporters spotlights my brother-in-law, Stephen Henderson, believed to be the first minority reporter to cover the Court for the mainstream media. posted by Nathan Bierma at 2:21 PM
Etymology Today from M-W: travail \truh-VAIL\ 1 a : work especially of a painful or laborious nature : toil b : a physical or mental exertion or piece of work : task, effort c : agony, torment 2 : labor, parturition
Etymologists are pretty certain that "travail" comes from "trepalium," the Late Latin name of an instrument of torture. We don't know exactly what a "trepalium" looked like, but the word's history gives us an idea. "Trepalium" is derived from the Latin "tripalis," which means "having three stakes" (from "tri-," meaning "three," and "palus," meaning "stake"). From "trepalium" sprang the Anglo-French verb "travailler," which originally meant "to torment" but eventually acquired the milder senses "to labor" and "to journey." The shift in meaning from "torment" to "journey" gives us an idea of what people once thought about travel: it was torture. The Anglo-French noun "travail" was borrowed into English in the 13th century, followed about a century later by "travel," another descendant of "travailler."
This week in my B&C blog: The computer al Qaeda left behind in Kabul. Also, the probability of miraculous premonitions, pedestrians on their #$*&! cell phones, humor in the arts (including "Tiger Mending," above), the sixteenth minute of fame, and more ... LINK/ARCHIVE posted by Nathan Bierma at 2:36 PM
My latest Tribune language column: On a new essay collection called "The Genius of Language: Fifteen Writers Reflect On Their Mother Tongues." temp link/perm.preview/book excerpt
More on the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis here and in Diane Ackerman's chapter on metaphors in her new book "Alchemy of Mind," where she quotes Whorf:
We are inclined to think of languages simply as a technique of expression, and not to realize that language first of all is a classification and arrangement of the stream of sensory experience which results in a certain world order.
Inflections: -I thought it was ironic that the Los Angeles Lakers issued a statement after the dismissal of the Kobe Bryant case saying:
This has been a very difficult situation over the past fourteen months for everyone involved. Kobe has handled himself with dignity and professionalism throughout this very trying ordeal.
First, "trying" is a pun, and second, this was nothing compared to the original medieval ordeals, in which torture or forced hand-to-hand combat was used to supposedly demonstrate guilt. Most people, in their glib pronouncements that "that was quite an ordeal" are oblivious to this gruesome history.
- From Newsweek's recent cover story on biblical archaelogy:
Scholars like John Dominic Crossan, a professor emeritus of religious studies at DePaul University and former co-chair of the Jesus Seminar, can read volumes into a simple signpost in the Biblical town of Ephesus. "There's a gate to the market that Paul would have walked under," Crossan relates. "On top, it says Caesar is the son of God. When Paul applies that name to Jesus, it's not just a nice title. It's the title of Caesar. That is known as high treason."
(Also see CT's analysis of the Newsweek piece; story on Sudan's biblical history; earlier pieces here, here and here on the importance of biblical archaeology. x)
-I recoiled at the banality of President Bush's phrase the horror of terror, as did linguist Geoff Pullum:
The horror of terror. Surely no one but Bush could have slopped together such a ridiculous-sounding phrase - two virtually synonymous and phonetically similar abstract nouns fighting each other like two possums in a sack, I thought as I heard it.
But, Pullum finds, the phrase turns up nearly 200 non-Bush hits, so Bush shares the culpability for this banality.
- NYT on how Hurricane Frances was named. Also, news anchors kept talking about how Floridians were battening down the hatches. M-W defines "batten" as "to fasten with or as if with battens"--that helps--and says the word "probably [comes] from Old Norse batna to improve; akin to Old English betera better." The first definition is "to grow fat, to feed gluttonously." "Hatch," meanwhile, means "door," as in "espape hatch."
I'm pretty sure I heard one anchor say "batted down the hatches." Google suggests this is a rare mistake, which surprised me, given the archaic verb. The phrase gets only 9 hits, compared with over 20,000 for "batten down the hatches."
-I changed the word compunctions to qualms in my B&C blog this week, following the rule that you should change Latinate words to Old English ones whenever possible. Then I checked to confirm that "qualm" is Old English. American Heritage said its origin is unknown, but EtymOnline.com, which gets much of its info from the OED, says:
qualm - O.E. cwealm (W.Saxon) "death, disaster, plague," utcualm (Anglian) "utter destruction," related to cwellan "to kill," cwelan "to die" (see quell). Sense softened to "feeling of faintness" 1530; meaning "uneasiness, doubt" is from 1553; that of "scruple of conscience" is 1649. A direct connection between the O.E. and modern senses is wanting, but it is nonetheless plausible, via the notion of "fit of sickness." The other suggested etymology, less satisfying, is from Du. kwalm "steam, vapor, mist," which also may be ult. from the same Gmc. root as quell.
-The histories of the Italian words peccadillo and punctillo.
-Among the linguistic tidbits I enjoyed while re-reading James Wood's review last year of "God's Secretaries."
There is a one-word answer to the question of what the translators got right. It is music. And here music is meaning. Take the well-known words from Matthew 11:28: Come unto me all ye that labour, and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Tyndale had Come unto me all ye that laboure and are laden and I will ease you. The Jacobeans retained Tyndales rhythm; but it was they who added that simple, brief word-to our modern ears a marvellous half-adjective and half-adverb-heavy laden. Their desire, made explicit in the preface, was to use as many English words as possible, commodiously, for the greater glory of God. Often, they strove for the widest possible meaning, the most ambiguous resonances; the musical equivalent might be the organ stop known as a mixture, in which tones of related pitch are played simultaneously by a single key. A famous example occurs in I Kings 19:12: And after the earthquake, a fire; but the Lord was not in the fire: and after the fire, a still small voice. Coverdales earlier rendition had a still soft hissing, and the so-called Matthews Bible, of 1537 (which closely followed Tyndale), had a small still voice. The later translators, by changing small still voice to still small voice, retained the literal meaning of Matthews Bible while playing on the double sense of still, adding the extra suggestion that the voice has always been small and will continue to be (is still small). ...
The Princeton New Testament scholar Bruce M. Metzger complains in his book The Bible in Translation (not found in Nicolsons bibliography) that the word katargeo, which occurs twenty-seven times in the New Testament, is subjected to an anarchy of different English approximations, eighteen in all, including abolish, cease, cumber, deliver, destroy, do away . . . fail, loose, bring (come) to naught, put away (down), vanish away, make void. ...
And, of course, there were errors, many of them. In I Kings 13:27, the wrong pronoun prompts unwitting comedy: And he spake to his sons, saying, Saddle me the ass. And they saddled him. Modern translations have changed him to it, but my copy of the King James Bible, at least, still proudly bears him.
-Thumbing through Paul Tournier's book The Meaning of Persons, I liked this line, a qualifier to his condemnation of superficial and self-serving small talk:
It would simply not be human to wish to divest the dialogue of everything superfluous; it would become dry and pedantic, devoid of all graciousness and poetry.
(Later, Tournier says: "The real meaning of travel, like that of a conversation by the fireside, is the discovery of oneself through contact with other people, and its condition is self-commitment in that dialogue." How that contrasts with the orientation toward private leisure and consumption in the travel industry!)
Speaking of the New Yorker, here's David Denby on "We Don't Live Here Anymore":
He frames this discordant material with formal elegance and a soothing, even redemptive beauty--the right aesthetic strategy, I think, since other peoples unhappiness, however fascinating, can be merely tawdry when offered without the relief of lyricism.
This continues an important theme from Denby's reviews of "House of Sand and Fog" and "In the Cut": the aesthetics of monotonous misery. posted by Nathan Bierma at 1:36 PM
Recent cartoons in the New Yorker (8/30):
- Girl to playmates: "I have to be getting back--I'm the glue that holds my parents' marriage together."
- Squirrel calling to squirrel on top of park bench: "Try to remain calm. I'm going to talk you down."
- General to victim standing before firing squad: "You will notice that we are represented by troops from many nations."
Plus, I meant to post these from last summer but never did:
- Man to dancers: "Damn it, Persky! I ask you for a fiercely choreographed rite of destruction and rebirth, and you give me a febrile study of dehumanized angst!" (6/30) (Was this lifted from this review?)
- Two doctors in waiting room, one standing passively w/arms folded, other hunched forward, eyes wide, arms out. "What'll it be, Mrs. Waltham--stolid workmanship or nervy brilliance?" (5/26)
- Parents congratulating graduate: When I think of the as yet undreamed-of loopholes that are going to be available to you guys! (6/2)
- Pickup truck driver to passenger: "That's a good question, Clint. I don't know if my gun rack is an authentic regionalism or just a macho affectation." (3/31)
- Dinner guest introducing companion to company: "Jim is a good old-fashioned modernist." (3/31)
- Burglars examining enormous SUV: "No radio, but there is an orchestra pit." (3/31)
More in my B&C blog posted by Nathan Bierma at 1:29 PM
I do think this upcoming election is the most important in my lifetime, which isn't saying much, since I was born during the Carter Administration. But so much is at stake for our country's ability to repair our relationship with our allies and undertake more sensible economic and environmental policies that I'm deeply worried about Bush's current lead. Still, the most important election label has been thrown around with abandon in American history, as the Times showed on Sunday. Among the most dubious usages:
1924 Coolidge vs. Davis "I look upon the coming election as the most important in the history of this country since the Civil War." Joseph Levenson, Republican leader, The New York Times, July 20
1976 Ford vs. Carter "I think this election is one of the most vital in the history of America." President Ford, debating Jimmy Carter, Oct. 22
1984 Reagan vs. Mondale "This is the most important election in this nation in 50 years." Ronald Reagan, Nov. 5
Meanwhile, Christian historian Mark Noll writes that he will be sitting this election out, as usual. He explains:
Seven issues seem to me to be paramount at the national level: race, life, taxes, trade, medicine, religious freedom, and the international rule of law. My disillusionment with the major parties and their candidates comes from the fact that I do not see them willing to consider the political coherence of this combination of convictions, much less willing to reason about why their own positions should be accepted, or willing to break away from narrow partisanship in order to try to act for the public good. ...
These are political convictions to which I have come as a result of my Christian faith. Of course, I could be mistaken--either in what traditional Christianity should mean politically for an American citizen in the early twenty-first century or in how best to argue for these positions with reasoning not demanding a pre-commitment to traditional Christianity. But as long as I hold these positions, I am a citizen without a political home.
I blogged here last year about this editorial from the New York Times on the population bomb that wasn't. The Times ran another piece about under-population a week or two ago. (More from Philip Yancey in May.) posted by Nathan Bierma at 1:17 PM
A former professor of mine kept this journal during her semester in Hungary last year. posted by Nathan Bierma at 1:15 PM
Etymology Today from M-W: nabob \NAY-bahb\ 1 : a provincial governor of the Mogul empire in India 2 : a person of great wealth or prominence
In India's Mogul Empire, founded by the Moslem prince B?bur in the 16th century, provincial governors carried the title of "naw?b" in the Urdu language. In 1612, Captain Robert Coverte (apparently unaware of earlier travel accounts) published a report of his "discovery" of "the Great Mogoll, a prince not till now knowne to our English nation." The Captain informed the English-speaking world that "An earle is called a Nawbob," thereby introducing the English version of the word to the written page. "Nabob," as it thereafter came to be spelled, gained its extended sense of "a prominent person" in the late 18th century, when it was applied sarcastically to British officials of the East India Company who returned home after amassing great wealth trading in Asia.
My latest Tribune language column: On the use of the term "Indian country" to refer to Iraq. temp link/perm.preview
More on Lewis and Clark here and here; their journals are here and here. (Earlier I linked to a Slate piece that questioned the value and celebration of their expedition.)
Update: WP on Algonquin loan words, The Melbourne Age on Yulparija, and Slate on "Native American": "The term 'Native American' describes not one culture but a multitude of cultures that share the superficial connection of having evolved in the Western Hemisphere before the arrival of Christopher Columbus.
The NY Times' letters from soldiers in Iraq are here. More on American Indians in military history here and here. And for what it's worth, here's a brief essay on Cooper's caricatured frontiersman Natty Bumppo.
Inflections: -The International Herald-Tribune ran a piece on interpreter-related problems at the Olympics:
The French, of course, turned up without a translator and were fined. They borrowed a UEFA official who bewildered listening journalists by translating the word 'dechets' correctly but unintelligibly. So Jacques Santini, the coach, reportedly said that his team's bad passing was 'leftovers.' He meant that it was a waste.
ChinaDaily.com has a piece on an archer who was disqualified for disobeying an official's order she did not understand--but the piece merely chastises her for not knowing English.
-The NYT's guest On Language column this week is on all (or most) of the words that have been called The A-word, The B-word, etc. They include:
B Budget. Biodiversity. C Cancer. Cellulite. Class. D Detente. Dinosaur. Deficit. E Elite. In her July 1 column in The Times, Barbara Ehrenreich commented on conservatives' promoting the idea of ''a sinister, pseudocompassionate liberal elite. . . . Note how richly the E-word embellishes the screeds of Ann Coulter, Bill O'Reilly and their co-ideologues.'' Also: Euphemism. Electronic.
-Here's another alphabet offering, from Christopher Hitchens' review of books about John Kerry: "The name Kerry is thus another tired synonym for ABB, or ''Anybody but Bush.''
-Earlier this month, Jan Freeman, the Boston Globe's language columnist, had an interesting piece on the history--and inflation of five-dollar word (and ten-dollar word, and so on).
-I didn't get anywhere with my search for the origins of give away the farm--all I found was a page about corporate trade secrets titled "To give away the farm or not to give away the farm?" When did such a numerous bunch of over-charitable farmers make the mistake of giving away their farms for free that they had a phrase coined for them? Who knows, but the phrase has special meaning at this Web page:
Environmentalists are urging Santa Barbara County to refrain from rezoning any more prime agricultural land for housing. There must he a way to spread the new homes throughout the community and spare the best farmland, they say. "We don't want to give away the farm, literally," said Dave Fortson, executive director of the Santa Barbara County Action Network.
-The CS Monitor had a rather ho-hum piece on the ethics and offensiveness of speaking your mind.
-Recent articles on the philosophy of disgust have proceeded in oblivion to the analysis in the Boston Globe by my B&C editor, John Wilson. That includes this otherwise worthwhile LL post on whether speech and accents can be disgusting.
-Seen in From Flutes of Fire: Essays on California Indian Languages, by Leanne Hinton:
While the cardinal directions are used with great frequency in this passage, it also contains many words that talk about direction with regard to features of the landscape instead--"up the hill," "down the hill," and "over the flat," for example. For many languages of California, direction words are not based on the sun, but rather on geographical features, and the direction of flow of the watercourses.
-A couple of fascinating paragraphs from John McWhorter's The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language:
Ask someone who speaks a language other than English natively how to say I sank into the mud up to my ankles, and figure out what the words actually mean. ... Am intrat in noroi pana la glezne (I have entered in mud up to ankles [Romanian]); Ich bin bis zu meinen Knocheln im Schlamm versunken (I am until the ankles in mud sunk [German]); Ja provalilsja v grjaz' po scikolotku (I sank-self in mud at ankle [Russian]); Doro no nake ni askikubi made tsukatte shimatta (mud of within at ankle until soaked put-away [Japanese]); Bikwaakoganaaning ingii-apiichi-gagwaanagwajiishkiwese (knob-bone-at I-extending to-'mudmoved' [Ojibwe, or 'Chippewa']) and so on.
And:
Sometimes a word's meaning simply drifts aimlessly, with each step following plausibly from the last, but the difference between the earliest reconstructable meaning and the most recent one having become so vast as to completely obscure any historical relationship. In Old English, the word that became silly meant "blessed." ... Blessedness implies innocence. That kind of implication led people to gradually incorporate innocence into their conception of the word, and through time innocence ended up becoming the main connotation rather than the "definition 2" one ... Thus, by the Middle Ages, silly meant "innocent": about 1400, we find sentences such as Cely art thous, hooli virgyne marie. If one is innocent, one is deserving of compassion, and this was the next meaning of the word (a 1470 statement: Sely Scotland, that of helpe has gret neide), but because the deserving of compassion has a way of implying weakness, before long the meaning of silly was "weak" (1633: Thou onley art The mightie God, but I a sillie worm). From here it was a short steep to "simple" or "ignorant," and finally silly came to mean "foolish"--having begun meaning "sanctified by God"!
I was intrigued by this phrase in C.S. Lewis' The Four Loves (in which he questions the notion that sexual desire is necessarily a spiritual distraction).
The gnat-like cloud of petty anxieties and decisions about the conduct of the next hour have interfered with my praryers more often than any passion or appetite whatever.
Etymology Today from M-W: roseate \ROH-zee-ut\ 1 : resembling a rose especially in color 2 : overly optimistic : viewed favorably
"Everything's coming up roses." "He views the world through rose-tinted glasses." "She has a rosy outlook on life." In English, we tend to associate roses and rose color with optimism, and "roseate" is no exception. "Roseate" comes from the Latin adjective "roseus," and ultimately from the noun "rosa," meaning "rose." Figurative use of "roseate" began in the 19th century, and the literal sense of the term has been in the language since the 16th century. Literal uses of "roseate" are often found in descriptions of sunrises and sunsets. "Through yon peaks of cloud-like snow / The roseate sunlight quivers," wrote Shelley in Prometheus Unbound. And in an early short story, Edith Wharton wrote, "The sunset was perfect and a roseate light, transfiguring the distant spire, lingered late in the west."
My latest Tribune language column: My hunt for the origins of the word solecism. temp link/perm.preview
Here's a guide to ancient Greek literature that mentions Anakreon, and here's an amateur page about modern-day Soloi.
What was trimmed from the piece was a graf about how the singling out of Soloi seemed unlikely because Greek was morphing into so many different dialects around the empire. This source on the history of the Greek language contains a muddled sentence that seems to make a similar point.
Because of the importance of Athens in both politics and literature, its speech was destined to play an especially prominent part; but the custom of treating 5th and 4th century Attic as the standard form of Greek, and divergencies from it in other dialects as abnormalities, while it may be convenient pedagogically, is indefensible linguistically.
Here's a shorter page on Greek dialects throughout history.
Finally, here's Strabo's fateful entry about "barbarize" and "solecize":
The term "barbarize," also, has the same origin; for we are wont to use this too in reference to those who speak Greek badly, not to those who talk Carian. So, therefore, we must interpret the terms "speak barbarously" and "barbarously-speaking" as applying to those who speak Greek badly. And it was from the term "Carise" that the term "barbarize" was used in a different sense in works on the art of speaking Greek; and so was the term "soloecise," whether derived from Soli or made up in some other way.
Also, here's an artists' rendering of the Greek playwright Aeschylus about to get bombed by a turtle shell, which came up in my 8/12 column. Here are the perm.prev's for my 8/12 and 8/5 columns.
Update: More words supposedly derived from Greek slurs: laconic, abderian, sybarite, boeotian
Inflections: -More (here and here) from LL on d'oh and other grunts (earlier)
- Listening to the sanity-threatening Olympic gymnastics announcers last night, I was wondering if dismount is an appropriate term for the conclusion of a floor routine. Here's LL on how one linguist named the marathon.
- Here's the Rocky Mountain News on eggcorns, with a follow-up post by LL.
- I had the phrase just one damn thing after another in my head, so I googled it. What came up repeatedly was an anonymous quote which some sources (such as this one) attributed to PBS's Nova: "Time is just one damn thing after another."
- From Joseph Epstein's entertaining, sporadically apt, sometimes snobbish Weekly Standard story "Is Reading Really at Risk?":
Eubanks reports that "at the heart of the NEA survey is the belief that our democratic system depends on leaders who can think critically, analyze texts, and write clearly." If this were true, the United States would have been done for around the time of Andrew Jackson.
Epstein also uses the term whinging--"But what if the books that Oprah's club endorsed were mostly works of victimology--whinging, hopeless books about dysfunctional families that chiefly reinforced readers in their own self-pity and self-righteous anger?"--I didn't know it, but it turns out to be the OE root of "whining."
- From The Week: "The Japanese rival Americans in their devotion to work; indeed, they have had to add a word to their language for death from overwork, karoshi. Still, they manage to get away for an average of 18 days a year-almost twice as much as Americans."
Cleaning out a lot of old files: - I never did write anything about the U of Colorado flap over the c-word, but, really, how could I have discussed that in a family newspaper? x
- LL is skeptical about what the BBC calls the most untranslatable word in the world: ilungax
Just as North American sports commentators compete with unique terms, Indian announcers seek to outdo each other with distinctive expressions, reports The Wall Street Journal. One, a retired cricket player named Navjot Singh Sidhu, has become famous for his "Sidhuisms," as when he refers to a losing team as "tumbling over like a row of bicycles without their stands." Indian cricket announcers, describing a well-hit ball, might say "the batsman has a royal stroke," "his bat is roaring like a lion," or, the ever-popular, "runs are flowing from his bat like water flowing from the Ganges River."
- From IMDB.com: "Many German viewers were annoyed when they realized that in the German dubbed version the dubbing voice of Brad Pitt was changed from his usual one (Tobias Meister) to the voice of Nicolas Cage (Martin Kessler). This was done on personal request from director Wolfgang Petersen."
- And more "Troy" news from the Plain English Campaign in May:
Promoters of a major Hollywood production have encountered linguistic problems in Japan. Japanese uses a "phonetic" language where words are made from a set of sounds rather than letters. When foreign words are used in Japanese, they are altered to the closest equivalent that can be produced from this set of sounds. This means the film title "Troy" appears on posters above star Brad Pitt as "Toroi". Unfortunately, when read out loud, the word sound the same as the native Japanese word for slow and dim-witted.
-From the Apr. 12 '04 Christian Century: "The way things stand in many seminaries, learning Hebrew and Greek is the standard for everyone, while learning Spanish is a specialty reserved for the few. ... I think we have it backwards. If learning a language other than English is not presented as the norm, it will never be embraced later on by busy pastors." Heidi Neumark, pastor of Trinity Lutheran Church
Sarah Harmer waited until near the end of her show at the TriBeCa Rock Club on Friday night to make her embarrassing confession. Just as she was about to sing "Took It All," from her enthralling new album, "All of Our Names" (Zoλ/ Rounder), she paused to announce that there was a slight problem with the chorus. "It wasn't until I was spell-checking the lyrics to the record that I found out `abundancy' isn't really a word," she said. But she sang the song the way she wrote it, intoning, "It didn't blow up in our face/This life's abundancy/Came clear to me," and the line conjured up two images at once.
-From the Trib on grade inflation ("NU finding A par for journalism courses," Robert Becker, April 6 x): "Education officials decry the "Lake Wobegon" effect, where suddenly all students are now above average, and the grade of C has been consigned to the academic dustbin."
The Trib has a great piece today from its foreign correspondents on Olympic television coverage around the world. x posted by Nathan Bierma at 4:41 PM
The new nature center at my alma mater, Calvin College, sounds pretty cool:
The Bunker Interpretive Center is a largely self-sustaining entity, independent of the city's sewer system and taking more than 60 percent of its operating power from a photovoltaic array on its roof. Much of the center - including paneling, insulation and interior trim - is built of recycled materials. On days the weather permits, the windows open automatically to heat and cool the building. Gray water (from sinks) is recycled through a biomass, a large window box filled with plants that filter the water and return it to preserve ponds. Waste is processed through chemical composting toilets. The soil from those toilets, processed by worms, will eventually enrich the center's landscaping - all indigenous plants grown in the preserve.
Etymology Today from M-W: poignant \POY-nyunt\ 1 : pungently pervasive 2 a (1) painfully affecting the feelings : piercing *(2) deeply affecting : touching b : designed to make an impression : cutting 3 a : pleasurably stimulating b : being to the point : apt
"Poignant" comes to us from Anglo-French, and before that from Latin specifically, the Latin verb "pungere," meaning "to prick or sting." Several other common English words derive from "pungere," including "pungent," which can refer to, among other things, a "sharp" odor. The influence of "pungere" can also be seen in "puncture," as well as "punctual," which originally meant simply "of or relating to a point." Even "compunction" and "expunge" come from this pointedly relevant Latin word.
Publishing news trimmed from my book roundup: More on online used book sales. The CSM on online short stories, and Alan Wolfe on pamphleteers as the ancestors of bloggers and pundits.
I'll blissfully be a non-blogger for the rest of this week and all of the next. My Aug 5th column will be on the book Hearing Gestures (and mention Hand to Mouth: excerpt and critique). My Aug. 12th column will be on bird-watching, now known as birding. posted by Nathan Bierma at 6:01 PM
Friday, July 30, 2004
This week in my B&C blog: Part four in a series on consciousness and perception. Plus, the closing of Berlin's historic Tempelhof Airport (pictured). LINK/ARCHIVE posted by Nathan Bierma at 4:58 PM
My latest Tribune language column: On the blogging linguists at Language Log, which just turned one year old. temp link/perm.preview/reprint
Here's more from LL on measuring Google hits, or Ghits, as I mentioned at the end of the column.
My column last week (temp link/perm.preview) was on the 25th anniversary of the Plain English Campaign. Here'sPEC founder Chrissie Maher's op-ed in the Guardian; more from the Gdn here and here. Here's more from the BBC on Britain's recent civil court reforms.
From the PEC's weekly e-mail, 7/2:
Thanks to everybody who has sent examples of foreign equivalents for the term 'gobbledygook'. (By the way, one reader pointed out that the Dutch word 'onzin' is actually a literal translation of 'nonsense'.)
Josi Luis Iparraguirre D'Elia suggested 'galimatmas' or 'jerigonza' in Spanish. Another reader told us that 'beliberda' was the Russian term. Jarka Dvorakova gave us 'kecy' and 'blaf' (both plurals) from Czech.
And another Czech speaker, Daniel Deyl gave an interesting alternative.
"The Czech equivalent is 'ptydepe', pronounced 'pteedehpeh'. The word doesn't sound Czech at all; in fact, it doesn't sound like anything, and neither should it. It was devised by Vaclav Havel, the Czech playwright-turned-president, specifically for the purpose of being utterly incomprehensible. He used it in his play 'The Memorandum' (1965) to denote an artificial language designed to prevent rather than facilitate verbal communication; it is used by omnipotent authorities and their officials. The word, its meaning slightly broadened to denote any excessive officialese, outlived the play and has become part of regular Czech vocabulary. After almost four decades, Havel's compatriots still find it useful. Unlike the communist system which produced it, gobbledygook is still alive and kicking."
From a recent Hagar the Horrible' cartoon: "As your lawyer, allow me to clear up this matter for you... in most cases, the defendant supersedes the pro bono factors unless and until the plaintiff decides to coagulate the judicial pontification of all parties involved..."
Finally, here's more on plain English in air traffic control, and here's more on the meaning of "al Qaeda."
Inflections: - Sports Illustrated, July 12 In English we have a word for disillusionment but not, oddly, for its opposite: that moment when you meet a person whom you've admired from afar, and he turns out to be kinder, more decent, more heroic than you'd ever imagined.
- "Dumb is just not knowing. Ditsy is having the courage to ask." Jessica Simpson, qtd in the Syracuse Post-Standard, via The Week
- "Under certain circumstances profanity provides a relief denied even to prayer." Mark Twain, qtd in the WSJ, via The Week
- The NYT on interpreters and business travel. posted by Nathan Bierma at 4:37 PM
Conventions are such charades now, I was thinking the media should avoid them altogether. But Jay Rosen, quoted in the Wash.Post, points out that there is a need for good journalism about cultural rituals. As I wrote earlier this month in my review of The Creation of the Media, the media's function is to facilitate ritual. And it is odd that the media keeps cutting back on convention coverage citing the ceremonies' lack of news, yet they were all over the Ronald Reagan funeral, which also lacked news--Reagan wasn't going to get any deader.
Jay Rosen is here to chronicle the convention for his Web column, PressThink, along with about 30 other online entrepreneurs who will be placed on the convention's "Blogger Boulevard" and offer an idiosyncratic take on the proceedings.
Conventions can be interesting, says Rosen, "but it would require a very different lens of journalism to show that. Rituals do have meaning, just not in the category of new information. Journalists tend to think of rituals as inherently meaningless, but they're not."
The dominant theme of the coverage, Rosen wrote online, is "irony about politics, irony about newslessness, and irony on TV about TV. That is where we are marooned today. But the irony ('one big infomercial, folks') no longer instructs or inspires anyone, professional ironizers included. It's a big dead zone in the narrative of presidential politics." x
More here and at left under "About this blog." Relevant word from WordSpy: banalysis. posted by Nathan Bierma at 4:33 PM
``I will always remember the day Rene Decartes died. We had just finished a wonderful meal and were sitting around plotting our next move over coffee. The waitress came up and asked, `More Coffee?' Decartes replied, `I think not.' And just disappeared right before my eyes.''
Etymology Today from M-W: kvell \KVELL\ : to be extraordinarily proud : rejoice
The history of "kvell" is far from a megillah, so don't kvetch. Etymology-meisters have determined that the word is derived from Yiddish "kveln," meaning "to be delighted," which, in turn, comes from the Middle High German word "quellen," meaning "to well, gush, or swell." The Merriam-Webster mavens whose shtick is dating words have not pinpointed an exact date for the appearance of "kvell" in the English language. They have found an entry for the word in a 1952 handbook of Jewish words and expressions, but actual usage evidence before that date remains unseen. (The words "megillah," "kvetch," "meister," "maven," and "shtick" are also of Yiddish origin.)
This week in my B&C blog: The history and theology of happiness. Also: cleaning up the Tigris River, advertisers and the vanishing mass market, when groupthink isn't so bad, jokes and quotes in spam, the obesity of medieval monks, and more ... LINK/ARCHIVE posted by Nathan Bierma at 1:25 PM
I had thought about working in the theme of hypocrisy, and would have quoted this line from Neal Plantinga in The Banner: "At some point the hypocrite becomes blind to his falseness. He becomes that most impenetrable of creatures, the sincere hypocrite."
Meanwhile, the Trib's Clarence Page wrote about the indifferent remorse of both Bush and Kerry. And this headline caught my eye: "Clinton: Monica Affair Was 'Moral' Mistake." Finally, Martha Stewart's recent statement went in different directions:
"I'll be back," she promised afterward, speaking in a strong voice on the courthouse steps. "I'm not afraid. Not afraid whatsoever. I'm very sorry it had to come to this. ... Today is a shameful day. It's shameful for me, for my family and for my company," she said. But outside the courthouse, Stewart was far more forceful and confident, complaining that a "small personal matter" was blown out of proportion and promising that she would not go quietly.
As a blond-haired Dutchman who can't dance, I was glad to see that "groovy" comes from the Dutch word "groeve," meaning pit. More on the legacy of Dutch in English here from LL.
Inflections: - The journal Daedalus has some fascinating etymology on words for happiness:
It is helpful to look for a moment at the principal word in ancient Greek for happiness, eudaimonia, one of a constellation of closely related terms that includes eutychia (lucky), olbios (blessed; favored), and makarios (blessed; happy; blissful). In some ways encompassing the meaning of all of these terms, eudaimon (happy) literally signifies good spirit or good god, from eu=good and daimon=demon/spirit. In colloquial terms, to be eudaimon was to be lucky, for in a world fraught with constant upheaval, uncertainty, and privation, to have a good spirit working on ones behalf was the ultimate mark of good fortune. Even more it was a mark of divine favor, for the gods, it was believed, worked through the daimones, emissaries and conductors of their will. And this, in the pre-Socratic world, was the key to happiness. To fall from divine favor-or to fall under the influence of an evil spirit-was to be dysdaimon or kakodaimon-unhappy (dys/kako=bad), or more colorfully, in the shit, a not altogether inappropriate play on the Greek kakka (shit/ turds). 2 In a world governed by supernatural forces, human happiness was a plaything of the gods, a spiritual force beyond our control. When viewed through mortal eyes, the worlds happenings-and so our happiness-could only appear random, a function of chance. ...
In every Indo-European language, the modern words for happiness, as they took shape in the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance, are all cognate with luck. And so we get happiness from the early Middle English (and Old Norse) happ-chance, fortune, what happens in the world-and the Mittelhochdeutsch Glόck, still the modern German word for happiness and luck. There is the Old French heur (luck; chance), root of bonheur (happiness), and heureux (happy); and the Portuguese felicidade, the Spanish felicidad, and the Italian felicitΰ-all derived ultimately from the Latin felix for luck (sometimes fate). Happiness, in a word, is what happens to us. If we no longer say that we are kakodaimon when things dont go our way, we still sometimes acknowledge, rather more prosaically, that shit happens.
- I wanted to do a column on wise as a suffix, but it didn't go anywhere. But Geoff Pullum was good enough to do a search for "-wise" in the Wall Street Journal between 1987 and 89.
My guru-level Unix skills enabled me to compile this list with a single one-line command. (I deleted words that are obviously not grist to your mill, like "wise" and "unwise", and also "all-wise", "clockwise", "crosswise", "lengthwise", "likewise", and "otherwise".) There were 24 left, including variants with and without hyphen:
Of course, some may be false hits; for example, "vitamin-wise" just might mean "wise to the value of vitamins in a healthy diet".
Here's the American Heritage Book of English Usage on wise as a suffix, and here are some recent instances from Lexis.
One other thing: I read once that writers should practice re-writing famous lines to see the kind of elbow grease it takes to polish good sentences. It gave the example of how the beautiful "There are times that try men's souls" could have emerged from the banal "Soulwise, these are trying times."
- Ever since Jon Stewart said in his commencement speech (at William & Mary) that "'terror' isn't even a noun," I wanted to do a column on President Bush's phrase war on terror. How can you wage war on an emotion? But as usual, Geoff Nunberg closes the case: "Terrorism may itself be a vague term, as critics have argued. But terror is still more amorphous and elastic, and alters the understanding not just of the enemy but of the war against it," he wrote earlier this month in the NYT. He suggests that sloppiness of words leads to sloppiness of policy. "Even if Mr. Hussein can't actually be linked to the attacks of Sept. 11, 'terror' seems to connect them etymologically."
- One thing I didn't hear in the freedom fries nonsense last year but did read recently in John McWhorter's The Power of Babel: fry is a French word (see the top right of this page). So should it have been "freedom frees"?
- LL on the syntactically sketchy phrase share divergent views.
- From the Trib: "In a matter of hours, the Illinois Republican Party's search for a replacement for U.S. Senate candidate Jack Ryan went from Ditka to bubkes."
- One company-wide e-mail update I receive always contains this verbless sentence: "As always, any problems or questions, let me know." (Somewhat relatedly, see the WP on management-speak).
- The Trib did a story on people named Kerry Edwards.
- Safire's column this week is on a word I hadn't heard: gobsmacked
The fearless, reassuring face of our leader as he threatens Saddam with war and rallies a nation to his bewildering cause, on 3/17/03. posted by Nathan Bierma at 12:14 PM
Airing Network, as Bravo did yesterday, is always an ironic act for a TV executive. But it was a Chayefsky-ian moment when, just after Faye Dunaway tells her underlings that they need "angry television" to get high ratings (a zeal that let to the network airing the rantings of Howard Beale), the scene cut to a promo for "The Ten Things I Hate About You." Tune in! posted by Nathan Bierma at 12:10 PM
Civilian astronomers are using the Air Force's Aeos telescope, above, and an experimental new camera to try to record images of planets around other stars. NY Times posted by Nathan Bierma at 11:58 AM
- This sounds like an excuse, but it's a good point. The Trib's Don Wycliff:
I sometimes wonder at the reluctance of journalists to own up to what seem to me simple mistakes. But a letter like this helps me understand. In today's poisonous political atmosphere, nothing is ever just a mistake. It's a slander, a calumny, an assault on the truth itself and--by the way--no doubt part of some evil conspiracy. Who would admit to that? x
From the Chi. Tribune 7/16: "'You are officially a neighborhood when you get a Starbucks,' said [5th Ward Ald. Leslie] Hairston, who fought to bring one to South Shore even as residents of affluent neighborhoods bemoaned the spread of the chain coffeehouses."
The fact that the chicken crossed the road shows that decision making authority has switched to the chicken. From now on the chicken is responsible for its own decisions.
Halliburton:
We were asked to help the chicken cross the road. Given the inherent risk of road crossing, and the rarity of chickens, this operation will only cost $326,004.
US Army Military Police:
We were directed to prepare the chicken to cross the road. As part of these preparations, individual soldiers ran over the chicken repeatedly, and plucked the chicken. We deeply regret the occurrence of any chicken rights violations.
Al Jazeera:
The chicken was forced to cross the road multiple times at gunpoint by a large group of occupation soldiers, according to witnesses. The chicken was then fired upon intentionally, in yet another example of the abuse of innocent Iraqi chickens.
Etymology Today from M-W: mansuetude \MAN-swih-tood\ : the quality or state of being gentle : meekness, tameness
"Mansuetude" was first used in English in the 14th century, and it derives from the Latin verb "mansuescere," which means "to tame." "Mansuescere" itself comes from the noun "manus" (meaning "hand") and the verb "suescere" ("to accustom" or "to become accustomed"). Unlike "manus," which has many English descendants (including "manner," "emancipate," and "manicure"), "suescere" has only a few English progeny. One of them is "desuetude" (meaning "disuse"), which comes to us by way of Latin "desuescere" ("to become unaccustomed"). Another is "custom," which derives via Anglo-French from Latin "consuescere" ("to accustom").
This week in my B&C blog: Why book lovers said the sky is falling on reading after an NEA report last week, and why they were wrong. Also: resistance to historic preservation in Laos (pictured at left), Iowa City as a literary haven, Microsoft patents the human body as a data processor (seriously, sadly), Mesopotamia's status as earliest civilization questioned, the latest surge of solar storms, video screens may be coming to gravestones, dinosaurs' fleas, and more ... LINK/ARCHIVE posted by Nathan Bierma at 3:24 PM
My latest Tribune language column: How call centers in India train workers to use Western accents. temp link/perm.preview
Here's the Discovery Channel's companion page to the documentary I mentioned. Here's an LL post about the clip from the accent class. Here's 60 Minutes' piece on outsourcing call center work to India, and here's 24/7 Customer's still sunnier take on how great outsourcing is for Indian workers.
More on Italian idioms from the article I mentioned in the briefs at the end:
As the Italians say, "la perfezione non θ di questo mondo" - perfection is not of this world. There's that Italian majesty again. Take the Italian version of our cryptic "looks count." Choosing personification and lending more majesty to the expression, the Italians say "vero θ che l'occhio vuole la sua parte," translated literally, "it is true that the eye wants its share."
Inflections: - I've had this slogan stuck in my head, don't know whose: more than you thought for less than you'd think. Someone should make that into a sentence and diagram it.
- The NYT's Jodi Wilgoren used to be a vivid writer, but covering campaigns has ruined her writing. In May she wrote that a Kerry speech was "kicking off an 11-day focus on national security." (Careful, don't kick the focus!)
- David Brooks is much better. I think this term of his is an original coinage: "the whole range of ampersand magazines (Town & Country, Food & Wine) that display perfect parties, perfect homes, perfect vacations and perfect lives." (Does Books&Culture count? It's improved my life!)
- Here's the NYT's review of a recent documentary on whether African Americans should use the N-word.
- More on values as a political platform plank with which to whack opponents (as I wrote about earlier). UPDATE: From Geoff Nunberg's piece in the NYT:
"Values" is a word that's made for political mischief, as it slithers from one meaning to another. Sometimes it simply refers to cultural preferences or mores, and sometimes it suggests religious principles or morals, the sorts of things that some people have more of than others do. Or often it blends mores and morals together. That point was nicely made in a line from the recent movie "Win a Date with Tad Hamilton." Nathan Lane's playing a Hollywood agent who's trying to persuade his dissolute movie star client to dump the small-town West Virginia girl he's smitten with. "Your values are different." Lane tells the actor. "For instance, she has them." ... It says something about what we've come to that a word that ought to be a bland political bromide has turned into a battle cry for both sides.
Last night's 60 Minutes interview with John Kerry and John Edwards didn't include a single question about what they actually want to do as president and vice-president. Which makes sense, since there aren't really any pressing foreign and domestic problems out there right now ... posted by Nathan Bierma at 2:53 PM
Etymology Today from M-W: primordial \pry-MOR-dee-uhl 1 a : first created or developed : primeval b : existing in or persisting from the beginning (as of a solar system or universe) c : earliest formed in the growth of an individual or organ : primitive 2 : fundamental, primary
The history of "primordial" began when the Latin words "primus" (meaning "first") and "ordiri" (meaning "to begin") came together to form "primordium," the Latin word for "origin." When it entered English in the 14th century, "primordial" was used in the general sense "primeval or primitive." Early on, there were hints that "primordial" would lend itself well to discussions of the earth's origins. Take, for instance, this passage from a 1398 translation of an encyclopedia called On the Properties of Things: "The virtu of God made primordial mater, in the whiche as it were in massy thinge the foure elementis were ... nought distinguishd." Nowadays, this primordial matter is often referred to in evolutionary theory as "primordial soup," a mixture of organic molecules from which life on earth originated.
I wrote this review before the Reagan funeral, which illustrated my conclusion. As the Chicago Tribune wrote, the week of national mourning was "both a reminder of television's power to unite the nation in ceremony and a test of how strongly the nation still clings to its civic rituals."
I cut these grafs from the review for space reasons:
Although he doesn't say it, this question [of media ownership] is especially pertinent now, with the fervent efforts of Michael Powell's FCC to increase the market share of media companies under the dubious justification that, what with the Internet and all, it's harder for corporations (even Clear Channel, with its 1,200 radio stations) to make a buck. (A bipartisan outcry against Powell, from everyone from the ACLU to the NRA--and the bizarre assumption that this year's Super Bowl halftime show, produced and aired by Viacom-owned entities, was primarily the result of media consolidation--has slowed his efforts somewhat). ...
Think of it this way: by the transmission view, it is very important for both left-wing and right-wing groups to "get their message out" about say, gay marriage. But in the ritual or narrative view of journalism, the presence of such ideological diversity is unremarkable--the way that readers and viewers will tend to hear and react to such groups is to figure that they both sound alarmist extremist overreacting to something. ...
In short, though it is billed as a history of "public discussion, public knowledge, and public opinion," Starr's book is actually about control, not culture: who controlled what and when, but not how the media actually shaped society.
My latest Tribune language column: On whether Rico the dog, who responds to dozens of different commands, actually understands language. temp link/perm.preview
More on Rico from the AP, USAT, NPR, NYT, Wired, and the Wash.Post. Here's the summary from Science. Discussion and followup at Language Log here. As I wrote, there was a lot of hype about Rico. I was struck by this statement, which I think was from the Post article: "If Rico had a human vocal tract, one would presume that he should be able to say the names of the items as well, or at least try to do so," says Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, who studies animal communication and intelligence at Georgia State University. "It also raises the issue of whether Rico and/or other dogs or other mammals might already be trying to say words but have great difficulty being understood."
Here's NPR on the use of dogs in interrogation, and here's Ananova on reading the barks of watchdogs. Here's more on Kanzi the bonobo. Here's more on Clever Hans. Here's more on B.F. Skinner. And, what the hey, here's LL on duck dialects.
Inflections: - BG's Jan Freeman looks into the adverbial phase real live:
How to punctuate "real live," Ideas colleague Joshua Glenn asked, in a phrase like "`a real, live license plate'?" But maybe that was a bad example, he added: "It seems wrong to apply `real, live' to an inanimate object." It does, once you think about it. But you're better off not thinking about it: "Real live" (I like it, usually, without the comma) has been around since 1887, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. It's jocular, the OED says, except when used of inanimate things ("A real live glass milk-jug"). In that case it's slang -- or at least it was a century ago. Real live is still jokey, but it seems to have no problem, these days, hooking up with mere objects and concepts: "Real live violins" and "real live statistics" are now a real live part of our language. x
- William Safire goes back and forth with Antonin Scalia on whether recuse is transitive:
BILL CLINTON, FORMER PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: If there had been no Kenneth Starr, if we had different kind of people I would have said here are the facts, I'm sorry. Deal with it however you please.
STEWART: If there had been no Ken Starr [Clinton] would have confessed. You know, I'll say this for Bill Clinton, his integrity is at his highest when the situation is at its most hypothetical.
STEWART: I'm not a pacifist in any stretch of the imagination. As a matter of fact, I like bombing countries.
KING: You do?
STEWART: Well, just purely for the knowledge of geography. It's just fascinating to learn about these countries. ... I didn't know Kabul was the capital of Afghanistan until we started bombing it. ... If we would haven't gone to war there, I certainly wouldn't have known that.
A computer-generated image of what the London skyline would look like in 2010 if planned high-rises come to fruition. NY Times posted by Nathan Bierma at 12:58 PM
Etymology Today from M-W: redolent \RED-uh-lunt 1 : exuding fragrance : aromatic 2a : full of a specified fragrance : scented b : evocative, suggestive
"Redolent" traces back to the Latin verb "ol?re" ("to smell") and is a relative of "olfactory" ("of, relating to, or connected with the sense of smell"). In its earliest English uses in the 15th century, "redolent" simply meant "having an aroma." Today, it usually applies to a place or thing impregnated with odors, as in "the kitchen was redolent of garlic and tomatoes." It can also be used of something that reminds us of something else or evokes a certain emotional response, as in "a city redolent of antiquity."
This week in my B&C blog: The mangled means and ends of liberal arts education. Plus: Cape Town, South Africa, goes Hollywood; what happens to the digital data of the deceased? the truth about Pinocchio, and more ... LINK/ARCHIVE posted by Nathan Bierma at 5:10 PM
Update: More from TNR posted by Nathan Bierma at 5:09 PM
My latest Tribune language column: On the mysterious origins, and sudden emergence, of the phrase "back in the day." temp link/perm.preview
Here's my mini-corpus, a collection of recent examples, for "back in the day." Here's the history of the Citroen, the car mentioned on CNN.
I looked up heyday in the OED; the oldest definition is "an exclamation denoting frolicsomeness, gaiety, surprise, wonder, etc." It derives it from the ME heyda or hoighdagh; OED's first citation is 1526. Here's an example of heyday's root as an interjection:
1622: Hey-da! what Hans Flutterkin is this? what Dutchman doe's build or frame castles in the aire? -Jonson, Masque Augures
Inflections: - One e-mailer wondered about one linguist's use of "an historical" in an e-mail statement in my column this week. I checked with Fowler's Modern English Usage, 3rd ed., 1996:
Opinion is divided over the form to use before h-words in which the first syllable is unstressed: the thoroughly modern thing to do is to use "a" (never "an") together with an aspirated h (a habitual, a heroic, a historical, a Homerica, a hypothesis), but not to demur if others use "an" with minimal or nil aspiration given to the following h (an historic, an horrific, etc.) ... At the present time, especially in written English, there is abundant evidence for the use of "an" before habitual, historian, historic(al), horrific, and horrendous, but the choice of form remains open.
- Another e-mailer inquired about the journalistic term lede. My eagle-eyed editor, Lilah Lohr, fields it.
In a move that could have major implications in the doping scandal related to the Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative (BALCO), the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency has begun to argue that the stringent burden of proof standard known as "beyond a reasonable doubt" should no longer apply to track and field drug cases because of recent changes in anti-doping rules, according to a June 1 memorandum The Washington Post has seen. USADA Director of Legal Affairs Travis T. Tygart wrote to the agency's Anti-Doping Review Board that the lesser standard of "comfortable satisfaction of the . . . hearing body" should be adopted in the arbitration of all track and field cases initiated after March 1 of this year regardless of when the alleged violations took place.
"During the silly time when Clinton was pilloried for wanting to debate the meaning of "is," I often wondered why no one pointed out that he was educated by Jesuits, for whom the meaning of "is" is a matter not lightly resolved."
- I think WordSpy is on vacation this week, so you'll have to wait for his writeup on smoothista(LL) and cheesemail:
Cheesemail: "Whenever someone of the non-management staff does something beneficial for the organization, they are thanked/congratulated by the middle management team," writes Marion Germaine, who thinks she might have created this neologism. "This is cc'ed to all of the staff and upper management. We on the staff must reread the same congratulatory message over and over as each middle-manager demands that you take notice that they have noticed the non-management staff. And they're also letting upper management know that they have noticed . . ." G&M
- ties that bind started in a hymn, and is now a political cliche, says GetReligion.
- Did you know Thomas Jefferson wrote it's as a possessive? (LL again)
- Just watched the Simpsons play Scrabble on the Season 1 DVD:
Pull back to reveal that the rest of the family are playing the classic word game. Bart waits impatiently for Marge to make her move, and she does: She places an `H' on the board to spell `HE'. Now it's Homer's turn. He grumbles, ``How can anyone make a word out of these lousy letters!'' Homer's rack contains the letters O-X-I-D-I-Z-E. He decides to play the `D' to spell `DO'. Lisa places an `I' above the `D'...
Lisa: `Id', triple-word score! Homer: No abbreviations. Lisa; Not I.D., Dad, `id'. It's a word! Bart: As in ``This game is stoop-id''.
Lisa reminds Bart that he's supposed to be building his vocabulary for tomorrow's aptitude test. Marge suggests they check the dictionary, and Homer is surprised that they have one. It's currently being used to prop up the couch. Lisa looks up the word and confirms her score. Now it's Bart's turn.
Bart: Here we go. Kwyjibo. [places his tiles] K-W-Y-J-I-B-O. Twenty-two points, plus triple-word-score, plus fifty points for using all my letters. Game's over. I'm outta here. [gets up] Homer: [grabs Bart with his left hand, holding a banana in his right] Wait a minute, you little cheater! You're not going anywhere until you tell me what a kwyjibo is. Bart: Kwyjibo. Uh... a big, dumb, balding North American ape. With no chin. Marge: And a short temper. Homer: I'll show you a big, dumb, balding ape! [leaps for Bart] Bart: [making his escape] Uh oh. Kwyjibo on the loose!
Though one of the poorest countries in the European Union, Portugal invested $780 million in construction of stadiums for the Euro Cup, more than any other host of the event has ever spent. At the Algarve Stadium in the seaside resort of Faro-Loulι, Hellmuth, Obata & Kassabaum topped the stadium with two billowing sails made of a tensile fabric structure held up by 65-foot masts and cables. Their swooping shape is designed to provide shade over the stands and to allow air currents to swirl under the cloth and across the seats. "For years and years, town halls or banks or churches conveyed the status or identity of a city," said Richard Breslin, an architect with HO& K. "Now they are football stadiums." NY Times posted by Nathan Bierma at 4:33 PM
Etymology Today from M-W: peremptory \puh-REMP-tuh-ree\
1 : putting an end to or precluding a right of action, debate, or delay 2 : expressive of urgency or command 3 : marked by arrogant self-assurance : haughty
"Peremptory" is ultimately from Latin "perimere," which means "to take entirely" and comes from "per-" ("thoroughly") and "emere" ("to take"). "Peremptory" implies the removal of one's option to disagree or contest something. It sometimes suggests an abrupt dictatorial manner combined with an unwillingness to tolerate disobedience or dissent (as in "he was given a peremptory dismissal"). A related term is the adjective "preemptive," which comes from Latin "praeemere" - "prae-" ("before") plus "emere." "Preemptive" means "marked by the seizing of the initiative" (as in "a preemptive attack").
This week in my B&C blog: The wobbly reliability of Red and Blue America distinctions, and the difference between "university" and "management" elitists. Plus: German beer in Moscow, the family that put Millican, Oregon, back on the map, China's elderly population boom, pragmatism in foreign policy, "laughter leaders," and more ... LINK/ARCHIVE
Here and here are my college newspaper columns on male feminism and "family values." Here's a Listmania list on "Media Literacy and Motherhood." More on The Mommy Myth here, here and here. Another can-do self-help book that caught my eye (but whose title was too long to include) was Working Mothers 101: How to Organize Your Life, Your Children, and Your Career to Stop Feeling Guilty and Start Enjoying It All. (Sounds easy enough.) And, I'm not sure how this fits in, but there's a book called Eat My Words: Reading Women's Lives Through the Cookbooks They Wrote. The NYT piece on the opt-out revolution is here (with Reason's take on it here and mine here). Whew! When I actually become a parent, I won't have time to read all this crap about parenting! posted by Nathan Bierma at 4:28 PM
My latest Tribune language column: On two new witty works of word watching, Geoff Nunberg's Going Nucular and Barbara Wallraff's Your Own Words. temp link/perm.preview
I was going to start the story by saying that since presidents are immortalized by their words, President Bush may be forever remembered for saying "nucular," especially now that it's in a book title. But my editor wisely called me off it: "I'm not sure you can convince me that in, say, 50 years, anyone will remember Bush said nukular. JFK's Boston blueblood accent was a big deal in the 60s, but he is not immortalized for having said "Cyu-ber" for "Cuba.""
Here's more on "nucular" from LL, the NYT and Richard Lederer. And here's LL on the Latin nuculeus.
Update: LL two-part analysis: nucular--error or deviation?
Inflections: - The etymology of the expression K-Rad
- The fine print on my Quizznos coupon said I must "surrender" the coupon when redeeming it. Oh yeah? To Quizzno's and what army?
- Swimmer Janet Evans, in a Q&A with Sports Illustrated: The roofless Olympic pool is not ideal, she said. "But every swimmer is in the same boat." Are boats covered under performance-enhancers?
- In the same issue, a story said the Stanley Cup Finals "amounted to a debutant ball for 24-year-old Lightning center Brad Richards, the Conn Smythe Trophy winner..." "Debutant," told me, is French for "one making a debut."
- Yesterday's pitching matchup between Barry Zito and Carlos Zambrano was only the third meeting in the history of the game of pitchers whose surnames began with the letter Z, says ESPN. Zito faced Victor Zambrano last year; the previous instance was in 1925. Meanwhile, as Steve Rushin noted last month, Giants rookie David Aardsma has bumped Hank Aaron out of first place in baseball's alltime directory of players sorted by surname.
- In a not-so-fond farewell to Ronald Reagan, Christopher Hitchens recalled, "Reagan said that intercontinental ballistic missiles (not that there are any non-ballistic missiles-a corruption of language that isn't his fault) could be recalled once launched."
- E.J. Dionne in a Sojourners article on the language of the marketplace: He quotes a Democratic advisor: "We used to call for immunizing little children against disease. Now we call it an investment in human capital."
- Remember when participants in a study used to be called subjects? "Now the American Psychological Association wants to retire the term," says the NY Times. "It is, the group says, too impersonal, stripping people of their individuality, their humanity."
- I was studying the terminology of 2 Peter 3:10 for my book when I came across this bit of translation trivia in a 1987 piece in the Westminster Theological Journal: "The recent official Swedish version of the NT translates "will perish" (skall forgas) and adds in a footnote: "This word renders what the author must have meant.")" There's nothing like convenience when grappling with God's Word.
- Updates: I wrote about the book Wordcraft and the morphing of brand names to common nouns without knowing there was a word for it: "Genericide: The process by which a brand name becomes a generic name for an entire product category." from Wordspy.com. More on brand names at Wordlab. Also from WordSpy: Children's books get vulgar: call it poop fiction.
I wrote about Lynne Truss' Eats Shoots & Leaves the week before its release in the U.S. (where it has become a bestseller). This week Louis Menand gets picky about the book in the New Yorker.
Finally, I quoted the National Spelling Bee director as saying there were no major non-English spelling bees that she knew of (here). This one may not be major, but LL says there's a Dutch spelling bee, which intrigued this blond-haired Dutchman.
Congrats to the champs! I was just getting addicted to my driveway hoop in Michigan the last time a scrappy bunch of Pistons defeated a showy ensemble of Lakers for the NBA championship. Here's Mitch Albom and Drew Sharp on the title that took even Hockeytown by surprise. Pity that all ESPN could talk about since the confetti flew last week has been which Lakers are going where in the wake of their collapse. This after mobbing the bandwagon and prounouncing how great it was that a team-oriented group of unknowns trounced the selfish stars and what a reminder it was that basketball is a team game and we shouldn't swoon over stars. Now about those stars... Meanwhile, my dad and I continue to await a Super Bowl victory for the Lions. As the Free Press wrote last week, it's been a while. posted by Nathan Bierma at 4:05 PM
Do young children have an immunity to irony? I was on the Amtrak back from Grand Rapids last week and watched the conductor goofing around with some kids who were four or five years old. The conductor held up the bottom of his tie and pretended it was a microphone as he interviewed them. "That's not a microphone! That's a tie!" one boy noted. My dad was inconsolable when my younger sister and I stopped protesting the veracity of his goofing. I wonder if kids this age have a need for certainty and sincerity as they take in the world around them, and can only develop a sense of irony and metaphor later on (though in the case of talk radio, numbness to irony persists). posted by Nathan Bierma at 4:01 PM
Childe Hassam Country Road (Wayside Inn, Sudbury, Massachusetts), 1882. Childe Hassam (1859-1935), a pioneer of American Impressionism and perhaps its most devoted, prolific, and successful practitioner, was born in Dorchester, Massachusetts. This spring, The Metropolitan Museum of Art will offer Childe Hassam, American Impressionist, an unprecedented exhibition of about 120 of Hassams finest oil paintings, watercolors, and pastels, and some 30 prints. ArtDaily.com posted by Nathan Bierma at 4:00 PM
Also, just one Clinton joke, qtd in today's Trib: "President Clinton talks about his infidelity on `60 Minutes' this Sunday," Jay Leno said. "Sixty minutes, is that enough time? Shouldn't it be `48 Hours'?" posted by Nathan Bierma at 3:54 PM
Does anybody have better bad taste than members of America's upper class? This has been a particularly rich season in opportunities to view the vanishing folkways of the genus High WASP. Sotheby's auctioned the chattels from Greentree, Mr. and Mrs. John Hay Whitney's North Shore estate, earlier this month. In the manner of their class, the Whitneys did not set off their Van Goghs with pin spots and mausoleum solemnity. They treated them instead as decoration, no more or less important than the penny banks, scrimshaw powder horns and Staffordshire dogs that sat atop every surface in sight. Far from being accorded any special status, the Picasso, "Boy With a Pipe (The Young Apprentice)," hung unobtrusively in a knicknack-cluttered living room suggesting a chintz-upholstered dollhouse owned by a truly strange child. NY Times posted by Nathan Bierma at 3:53 PM
The word "shod" is the past tense form of the verb "to shoe"; hence we can speak of shod horses and shod feet. When the word "slipshod" was first used in the late 1500s, it meant "wearing loose shoes or slippers" - such slippers were once called "slip-shoes" - and later it was used to describe shoes that were falling apart. By the early 1800s, "slipshod" was used more generally as a synonym for "shabby" - in 1818, Sir Walter Scott wrote about "the half-bound and slip-shod volumes of the circulating library." The association with shabbiness later shifted to an association with sloppiness, and by the end of the century the word was used to mean "careless" or "slovenly."
This week in my B&C blog: My interview with David Sedaris, whose new collection is Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim. (Another portion of this interview will run later this month in Chicago Tribune Magazine; other interviews here and here.) Also: race in South African suburbs, the art of scientific visuals, the importance of Christian creeds, information environmentalism, the history of writer's block, why the Detroit Zoo is releasing its elephants, and more ... LINK/ARCHIVE
Speaking of information environmentalism, saw this at G&M:
Every increase of knowledge may possibly render depravity more depraved, as well as it may increase the strength of virtue. It is in itself only power; and its value depends on its application. -Sydney Smith
My latest Tribune language column: On the Esperanto Society of Chicago, dedicated to studying and celebrating an obscure international language invented in the 19th century. temp link/perm.preview
One of the most interesting things about Esperanto that I had to cut from the piece is "Passporto Servo" ("passport service"), in which Esperantists can travel to any of 80+ countries where the language is spoken and find free lodging with fellow Esperantists. This has the practical benefit of cutting travel expenses and the idealistic benefit of fostering international goodwill. That and more is covered in this fine magazine-length piece on Esperanto earlier this year in the Ottawa Citizen.
Reagan Week afterthoughts:From Slate: 5 myths about the Reagan presidency, more on the end of the Cold War, and William Saletan on Reagan, government and liberty. Here's what I wrote a couple years ago in my college paper about rethinking Reagan. Incidentally, the NYT's Alessandra Stanley was the only one I saw who jumped on this pun: mourning in America. As for the Reagan funeral as a national ceremony, see the Chi.Trib, NYT, and NPR. Also, a fascinating piece on the writing of obituaries in advance in the Boston Phoenix. posted by Nathan Bierma at 12:42 PM
The latest mutation of the Nigerian e-mail scam now involves Qusay Hussein. The supposed sender identifies herself as the "former mistress to the son (Qusay) of the Iraqi former leader, Saddam Hussein. ...While i was still in contact with Qusay,he made a deposit in my name to a security firm in Spain, which has an affiliate branch in Amsterdam." x posted by Nathan Bierma at 12:33 PM
The Box House is a floating cube perched on concrete piers. Three sides are uninsulated timber, one and a quarter inches thick, and the fourth, the north and sun-facing side, is entirely of glass, with bifold doors on the lower level that open onto a deck overlooking fields, trees and hills. The house is 20 feet high by 20 feet long by 20 feet wide, a scant 400 square feet. But the double-height ceiling, cubic space and transparent north facade make it feel spacious. NY Times posted by Nathan Bierma at 12:26 PM
Etymology Today from M-W: polyonymous \pah-lee-ON-uh-muss\ : having or known by various names
"Polyonymous" comes to us from Greek. The "poly-" part means "many," and the "-onymous" part derives from the Greek word "onoma" or "onyma," meaning "name" so a reasonable translation of "polyonymous" is, in fact, "having many names." There are a number of other descendants of "onoma" or "onyma" in English, including "anonymous" ("having no name"), "pseudonym" ("false name"), "eponym" (someone who lends their name to something, or a word that comes from someone's name), and "patronymic" (a name taken from one's father). Even "name" itself is derived from the same ancient word that gave rise to the Greek "onyma," making it a distant cousin of all these name-related words.
My latest Tribune language column: On the science of spelling, on the occasion of the National Spelling Bee. temp link/perm.preview
More about the research of Dr. Greg Simpson at his home page. Update: more on the science of word recognition.
The winning word at the National Spelling Bee this year was "autochthonous" (meaning indigenous). The best story on the winner and the wobbly-kneed runner-up was in the Scotsman. Previous winners and words here at SpellingBee.com, more on spelling bees here and on spelling in general here. Geoff Nunberg has written a couple of good commentaries (one of which appeared in The Way We Talk Now, the other in Going Nucular), unavailable online, on these odd ceremonies that celebrate the useless skill of spelling unknown words.
Inflections: - I have no idea what this means: "He is 58, fleshy and balding, with a hard blue gaze." NY Times, 6/1/04
- "Tonight a courageous dog is recovering from [a dangerously helpful intervention]" WBBM 2 News, Chicago, last week.
Can a dog be said to have courage? Or is that a moral virtue ascribed only to humans? (And just what is the difference between courage and recklessness, anyway?)
- Yesterday's church bulletin, introducing a young member of our congregation (whose mother is not pregnant):
"He currently has two younger siblings."
- Letter to the Times of London, as reported by the Plain English Campaign
"It says on the pack of coffee I have just bought: 'Produce of Central America, Colombia and Tanzania. Packed in Belgium.' What puzzles me is why this product is called 'Italian Blend'?"
- I wrote about the naming of BlackBerry last month. The NY Times did a piece a week ago Sunday on BlackBerries as dating devices: posted by Nathan Bierma at 8:14 PM
1 a : having an aristocratic quality or flavor : stylish b : elegant or graceful in manner, appearance, or shape 2 : maintaining the appearance of superior social status
In Roman times, the Latin noun "gens" was used to refer to a clan, a group of related people. Its plural "gentes" was used to designate all the people of the world, particularly non-Romans. An adjective form, "gentilis," applied to both senses. Over time, the adjective was borrowed and passed through several languages. It came into Old French as "gentil," a word that then meant "high-born" (in modern French it means "nice"); that term was carried over into Anglo-French, where English speakers found and borrowed it in the 16th century. Nowadays it is used to describe people or things that are of high social status or that simply give the appearance of being so.
This was held over from early April, shortly after I posted a similar argument in my B&C blog. As I noted a couple weeks ago, many have given Huntington a hard time about his new book; Louis Menand and The Onion have been the most cogent and entertaining.
Update: Roger Kimball says yes, unpatriotic immigrants really are a problem, but Francis Fukuyama says no they're not. posted by Nathan Bierma at 4:03 PM
Number of the Day: 10 Percent of drivers stopped for speeding in 2002 who were going 90, up from two percent in 1991. -USA Today
Thought of the Day: marriage and order One of the interesting features of the otherwise exhaustingly predictable debate over gay marriage is how it is being framed, by both sides, as a question of order. Opponents say legalizing homosexual marriage imperils the "institution" of marriage, invoking an abstract infrastructure whose sturdiness cannot really be determined, much less debated, but has the right dramatic effect (even though what's really bugging them is the mental picture of, as Rick Santorum would say, man-on-man action)(see footnote one). Advocates, meanwhile, say gay marriage is a step toward more structured societal partnerships. Adam Haslett, in a fine history of marriage recently in the New Yorker, cites the arguments of gay conservative Jonathan Rauch. In an age in which individual gratification and consumer choice are squashing the concepts of sacrifice, mutual obligation, and civic life--and marriage is, in turn, declining while cohabitation becomes more prevalent--Haslett paraphrases Rauch as saying that "letting gays marry will actually help marriage by relieving the pressure to create alternatives." (David Brooks echoes this argument.) So the case for gay marriage is not just that it's wrong to devise legal blockades to the flourishing of romance (which, as Haslett notes, has been legally defined as a civil right); the bottom line is: gay marriage is good for marriage.
What makes me wonder is just how admirable this principle of marital order is as a formative bone of the civic skeleton. To go from merely describing--marriage stabilizes society, just as that tree branch is currently suspending a navigationally challenged skydiver--to prescribing--marriage should stabilize society, in the way this steel beam should stabilize the new house--seems to me to demean marriage. Whenever order and not love has been pursued as the ultimate end of married partnerships in history, it's been bad. Usually for women. My chief qualification to say this is that I played Tevye in my high school production of Fiddler on the Roof, and I had to ponder (in the middle of hoping my mustache wouldn't fall off) the protests of Tevye's daughters--the first one pleas for an alternative choice of husband, the second rejects Tevye's, er, right to choose, the third marries a Gentile. In each case, a point of order is at stake--1) the father's choice stands, 2) the father has a choice 3) no marrying outside Judaism. Were Tevye to rule against his daughters, he would be saying that the maintenance of these points of order takes precedence over his daughters' individual happiness and fulfillment. His choices are fascinating; he goes with his daughters on 1 and 2, since they really only affect him personally, but disowns his daughter on point number 3, since it concerns not just patriarchy but religious purity. The musical shows how marriage, for so many centuries of human history, has been run by males for the benefit of males--daughters seldom had any say and were usually considered mere property and pauns in social (or in the case of royalty) political chess games.
But damn it, at least marriage was orderly! So argue the traditionalists. Today we are in a chaotic period in which the honorable principle of individual freedom and the less honorable impulse toward instant gratification have combined to create a maritally tumultuous time of fickle commitments, gender role confusion, and stagnated relational growth. Here those high-minded (if vague) appeals to the "institution" of marriage become understandable: the i-word connotes a stately ivy-covered administration building, whose prestige demands that change be met with indignation. So Rauch's approach, which I believe is indeed his conviction and not a manipulative device, has the advantage of appopriating the ivy and the indignation while arguing the other side.
I'm in favor of gay marriage, not primarily for Rauch's reasons but rather because I believe religious conservatives' objections, based as they are in Levitican sexual ethics, are inapplicable to secular legal questions. If the church wants to perform gay marriages, that's another matter (one on which I'm more ambivalent), but if the state wants to do it, Christians don't have any good reason to stand in its way--that "institution" business won't cut it. Since the state has defined marriage as a legal right, only political inconvenience prevents lawmakers from adopting gay marriage. (And since conservatives just love slippery slope arguments, let's say you can only marry other people, so Senator Santorum's man-on-dog arrangements stay confined to his imagination.)
But the general question of marital order--or order as a marital virtue--remains troubling to me on a personal level. I've been married almost two years now, and I've come to see that while the romance never really fades completely from view, the most powerful inertial force in marriage is order. Everyone, in the heat of some moment, wants out at one point or another in your first year or two of marriage, and at those points, nursing anger or bitterness, I found that what usually popped into my head was: but just think how disruptive divorce would be in my life! My place to live, my finances, the number of meal servings to calculate from recipes, my ambiguous ownership of half our DVD collection, all these fixtures in my life would suddenly wobble (isn't it funny how strong emotion can make us think some of our most mundane thoughts?)(see footnote two). (Laura Kipnis cleverly illustrates these fixtures of order, giving them tongue-in-cheek oppressive overtones, in the October '03 Harper's; unfortunately the piece is unavailable online.) Don't get me wrong: not only do I love my wife, but I think we're really romantic and have an exceptionally long time to go before we're one of those boring married couples (yes, all newlyweds feel this way, but part of this feeling is the presumption of exclusiveness). And nearly two years in, I can acknowledge that marital growth happens when you stick with it for no other demonstrable reason, sometimes, than sticktoitiveness. This is why arranged marriages can sometimes be the best ways to "grow" a marriage (as I've read, and also sang about, as Tevye, with Golde). As Rauch says of marriage, "no other institution has the power to turn narcissism into partnership, lust into devotion, strangers into kin. When you remove the illusion of romantic magic as the main fuel of a marriage, people wisely tend to more enduring traits of loving relationships. One article I read said that people in arranged marriages think of building toward a peak 25 years into the marriage. In our culture, the peak is considered to be the honeymoon. As I wrote last year on Valentine's Day 2003 (second item here), this is the scandal of romantic comedies, with their preoccupation on premarital goosebumps. How much better off would we be if our defining stories of love actually dealt with the dramas, tensions, subtleties, and changes we experience in long-term loving relationships rather than just that initial tease?
Footnote one: Here's Malcolm Gladwell, in the New Yorker, on the convenient connotations of "institution": 'Marriage is a sacred institution between a man and a woman,' [said President Bush in response to the Massachusetts Supreme Court]. Theres that word again, and notice how the sentence doesnt quite make sense. It should read: 'a sacred bond between a man and a woman.' But the President had to say 'institution,' because nobody imagines that the courts decision will actually jeopardize the personal bond between any particular man and any particular woman." "Appeals to the institution of marriage, and institutions [in general]," Gladwell said, are "arguments of expediency ... [they] are where we hide when we cant find our principles." link
Footnote two: Jonathan Franzen articulates this feeling in The Corrections (p.205 of the hardcover): "For a moment, after he hung up, Gary let himself imagine being divorced. But three glowing and idealized mental portraits of his children, shadowed by a batlike horde of fears regarding finances, chased the notion from his head."
Footnote three: I think there's a parallel here to having a relationship with God. I don't like that phrase, which is popular with evangelicals, because, for one thing, it is unbiblical, and for another, it make cozy spiritual feelings normative. But as with my marriage, I wish my faith were a little more "cozy" these days and a little less the product of sterile instruments of order: church services, theological deliberations, and so on. I know there's a function to the instruments--you can't sustain deep-rooted faith on fuzzy feelings--but sometimes I resent them.
Footnote four: From Paul Tournier's "The Meaning of Persons": "Marriage thus becomes a great school of the person, through the level of personal commitment it entails and the exacting quality of the dialogue it demands. ... What marriage really means [is] helping one another to reach the full status of being persons, responsible and autonomous beings who do not run away from life."
Republicans ... proposed a Constitutional amendment ''protecting'' current marriage laws, which they said were grounded in ''more than two centuries of American jurisprudence, and millennia of human experience.'' But this is a fiction. As Chauncey and Wolfson demonstrate, the rules of marriage have changed constantly. In biblical days, adulterers could be put to death. In ancient Rome, people got hitched by shacking up and got unhitched by moving out. A century ago, 14 states barred marriages between whites and Asians. The Supreme Court didn't strike down bans on interracial marriage until 1967. Marriage used to mean that women had no legal identity apart from their husbands; now it doesn't. Spousal rape used to be a contradiction in terms; now it's a crime. States used to ban contraception, on the theory that marriage was for procreation; now they can't. At the time, these changes were condemned as perversions. Now we call them traditions.
Followup: In an earlier Thought I wondered about the consistency of wisdom, and the dilemma we face when embracing some teachings of a wise person while rejecting others as foolish. How can such wisdom and folly exist in the same person, and how are we qualified to sort it out? This is the dilemma of Vincent Bacote, writing in Comment of his appreciation of Abraham Kuyper's theology but horror at his racism. Can a racist be wise? (via the blog of Comment editor Gideon Strauss) posted by Nathan Bierma at 3:23 PM
Da Vinci's The Last Supper, appearing here as randomly as it did in a CS Monitor story about sales of religious books. posted by Nathan Bierma at 3:11 PM
1 : of, relating to, or written in a simplified form of the ancient Egyptian hieratic writing 2 : popular, common 3 : of or relating to the form of Modern Greek that is based on everyday speech
You may recognize the root of "demotic" from words like "democracy" and "demography." The source of these words is the Greek word "d?mos," meaning "people." "Demotic" is often used of everyday forms of language (as opposed to literary or highbrow versions). It entered English in the early 1800s and originally designated a form of ancient Egyptian cursive script which by the 5th century BC had come into use everywhere in Egypt for business and literary purposes (in contrast to the more complex, hieratic script retained by the clergy). "Demotic" has a newer specialized sense as well, referring to a form of Modern Greek that is based on everyday speech and that since 1976 has been the official language of Greece.
My latest Tribune language column: On the multilingual chaos of the newly enlarged European Union. temp link/perm.preview
The Plain English Campaign reports this week that the EU has ordered officials to reduce the average length of EU documents from 32 pages to 15 in order to reduce the burden on translators.
Here's the Guardian's superb story on the linguistic ramifications of enlargement, and here's the NY Times'. Here's the EU's boastful press release about that May 4 meeting. Here's the Guardian's guide to EU enlargement, here's the BBC's, and here's the EU's.
I tacked on an item to my column about the French author who wrote a novel without verbs (as a publicity stunt, evidently). Here's the article from the Telegraph; here and here are posts on it from Language Log, which also refers to a verbless student humor essay,and to other works lacking nouns, prepositions, and adjectives. There's also a short story written in 1939 without the letter E--an example, we learn, of a lipogram (an apparent etymological sibling to "liposuction"). posted by Nathan Bierma at 1:48 PM
My scorecards for an Astros-Cubs game I went to at Wrigley last August have been posted at baseballscorecard.com. Some scorers use dots to denote RBI's; for this game I left out RBI's and used dots to denote balls and strikes (and dashes for foul balls)--balls above the bottom line, strikes below. It's pretty geeky, I know, but it do like to see if the hitter was ahead or behind in the count.
The news isn't all bad, saysPhilip Yancey. Some positive developments in the world since 1980:
*The world illiteracy rate has dropped from 53% to 20% *The percentage of people suffering from malnutrition has dropped by more than half, to 20%. *Only 25% used to have access to clean water; now, 75% have it. *Global infant mortality has dropped from one in eight to one in 16. posted by Nathan Bierma at
My latest Tribune language column:
Just came across 
