Parvum Opus 258 ~ Special Effects

PARVUM OPUS

Number 258
December 27, 2007

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SHAKESPEARE FOR CHRISTMAS

For a mini-refresher course on Shakespeare (under two hours), check out Hugh Hewitt’s Christmas Day program with U.S. Naval Academy Professor David Allen White, who teaches Shakespeare at the Academy. Professor White said the Elizabethan audience loved language the way we love special effects in the movies. He also believes Shakespeare contributed to the King James translation of the Bible, and cryptically signed Psalm 46, which contains the words “shake” and “spear” and various applications of the number 46, which was somehow significant; I didn’t follow it. At some point, I heard either Hewitt or White say that Shakespeare’s time saw the “ripping apart of two great Teutonic plates” (the medieval & modern worlds); should have been “tectonic”, possibly I misheard. Good program, though. Always good to get some Shakespeare back into the forefront of consciousness.

POSTED

About that U.S. civics test:

Mike Sykes wrote:

I'm pleased to report that I too did better than the Harvard seniors, though until I saw those results I was just a bit disappointed with my 75%. After all, my score is what you would expect for knowing only half the answers and, for the remainder, simply ruling out the three least likely and tossing a coin between the other two.

It would be invidious for a Brit to draw conclusions.

Oh, go ahead and be invidious, Mike. I would in your place.

Bill R. wrote, “Take that, Herb” because he answered 58 out of 60 correctly — 96.67 %.

Anne DaBee wrote:

Had to take the test, of course, and was somewhat surprised to score 72 percent, higher than most college students. Going on to read the rankings of students at many U.S. colleges, I was shocked to find that students at such institutions as Berkeley, Princeton, Duke, Yale, etc. scored poorly, with seniors scoring LOWER than freshmen, and the schools with the highest-paid presidents and biggest endowments scoring worst of all. Time to stop and think about where our educational dollars should go? And about what our preparatory schools, whether public or private, should be teaching? If a student GETS to college stoopid.... I've heard grumblings about entering college freshmen being required to take basic English courses because they're so poorly prepared. No wonder the SATs are now loaded with essay questions ~ perhaps they weed out those who can't write and think coherently. ...

I'm sadly reminded of an elementary school principal I once knew, who (I think) had been promoted to prince solely to get him out of the classroom. He didn't know whether the American Revolution or the Civil War came first, and didn't think it mattered whether the students knew, either. ... Perhaps the promotion premise was that he could do less damage to fewer students in the front office than on the battle line in the classroom ~ sad, but possibly true. Of course, there's always the question of why he was permitted to stay around at all. And the answer to that is that there are so many protective mechanisms in place that it's easier to put the misfits someplace else than to get rid of them ... so he was a prince for 10 more years until they retired him with a hefty pension after 30 years of damaging youthful minds. Now if he'd damaged their BODIES, he'd have been out of there in a year or two...

When I was a student at one of the 7 Sisters prestigious women's colleges, it was sort of a joke, albeit a sad one, that if we didn't marry before or shortly after graduation, many of us would go to secretarial school so we could get a job and meet eligible guys, preferably lawyers or investment bankers. Then we would become (effortlessly) mothers of beautiful children and impress our husbands' bosses with our beauty, hostessing skills, fine mind, and fitness to be the wife of a rising star in the company firmament. And yes, that was in the dark ages.... Once again, we have met the enemy and he is us...

I’m not sure whether the SAT essay questions are used to weed anybody out. These days, maybe the students get points for “creativity” or for their social/political values or perhaps just for trying. I do remember hearing about girls going for their “Mrs.” degree, but at least those well educated mothers were able to teach their own children.

(OK, my score was 76% plus change. I’m not very knowledgeable about history but I’m a good test taker.)

MACLEAN ON THEM

I’ve gotten over the vague sense of inferiority I used to have in relation to Canada. Canada, we always heard, was so clean. Clean, and no crime. And everyone so polite. But Canada does have crime, and now they’re too polite: they’re reaching Euro levels of political correctness. Journalist Mark Steyn and Canadian weekly magazine MacLean’s are being prosecuted by Islamists via the Canadian Human Rights Commission for writing and publishing things about Islam that they don’t like; true things, i.e. not libel, but unflattering. Steyn said that the Canadian HRC is a court from which no defendant ever returns absolved. Apparently it has the force of a legal court, though the human “rights” involved seem to be just about people’s feelings and opinions.

Plaintiff Dr. Mohamed Elmasry asserts that as a reader of MacLean’s he is entitled to its “services” without discrimination on the basis of religion. Logically this means that the “services” of every publication must please every reader at all times. No criticism allowed. Instead of rebutting Steyn’s theses, Elmasry sues. This is exactly what the First Amendment is about; maybe Canada’s constitution doesn’t have a free speech amendment. Elmasry’s complaint summarizes the MacLean’s article, which I haven’t read.

You might subscribe to MacLean’s as a gesture of support for the free press in the West.

Meanwhile, an imam representative of the grand Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei in Iran asked

why aren’t all the women who don’t wear the hijab dead, as well as their husbands and fathers, since the Islamic revolution of 28 years ago? He also preached against short-legged dogs, and now has extended the fatwah to all dogs, and their owners. This worries me because of the many Muslim cab drivers in the U.S. who refuse to carry passengers with dogs, even service dogs.

A modest proposal: Why don’t the Iranian women carry guns beneath their burqas? I mean, if you can carry a bomb, you can easily carry a nice little pearl-handled revolver. I’m seeing a new foreign aid program here. I’d call it the Beecher program, after the old Beecher Bible and Rifle Church in Wamego, Kansas. Send a gun and a Bible. Sort of like the little CARE packages we used to donate to in grade school; we’d bring in toothbrushes and soap and things to class, to be sent to war-ravaged Europe.

By the way, today’s murder of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto of Pakistan is a serious loss for them and us.

THE WHOLE NINE YARDS

Jim Simmons sent this about the WWII origin of the phrase “the whole nine yards”:

The belts of .50-caliber ammunition for the heavy machine guns of the American bombers were 27 feet long (whence the expression [they shot] "the whole nine yards").

(I would have guessed it came from football, but that shows you how much I know about football.)

HAPPY NEW YEAR

This is the last PO of the year already. Chatting with Parvum Opus readers has been a pleasure. Thanks! And have a very Happy New Year.

Parvum Opus 257 ~ Bon Bon Mots

PARVUM OPUS
Number 257
December 20, 2007

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WE ELFED OURSELVES

Here is a silly Christmas greeting to all of you from me, Fred, and the cat (if you want to see what we look like): http://www.elfyourself.com/?id=1607249875. (For those of you who got the beta version, this is somewhat improved; Fred’s face isn’t so red.)

Merry Christmas to all, and merry non-Christmas too.

KITTEN GLOVES

Frankee sent a “nice image”:

One of the people in my class was complaining about how the postal service never seems to be willing to do the hard things necessary to deal with poor performers. In his words, "we always deal with them with kitten gloves".

Yes, I prefer the period outside the quote.

I want kitten gloves for Christmas!

OPUS TOO

Jim Simmons sent me the 12/16/07 Opus cartoon strip (which I was already planning to use; coincidence? ... perhaps....). Opus the penguin is making up words that he calls little bon bon mots:

giving up all hope for a flat stomach = abdicate

rescue vehicle for carrying squashed folks to the hospital = flatulance

HO HO HO NO MO

An Australian Santa provider has asked its Santas not to say “Ho Ho Ho!” because it might frighten the children or insult hos, I mean women. Santas can frighten children no matter what they say or how they laugh, but as for the insult potential ~ this is a case of bad words driving out good. If we stopped using every word that has been used to insult someone, we’d be reduced to a vocabulary of about ten words, all articles and conjunctions probably.

Here at home, some people are calling for Santas to be thin from now on, as examples for children. One guy calls it “updating Santa’s brand”. Santa is a brand?

SYNTAX REVIEW

Regarding "generously tipped the entire staff after his 50th birthday party at the restaurant", which I thought should be “tipped the entire staff generously”: Mike Sykes wrote, “It suggests to me that he was generous to tip everybody, rather than only those who served his party.” That’s a good possibility, probably more likely than my interpretation. You’d have to read it with the emphasis on “entire”.

RANDOM EDITS

||| Church sign: “Download your worries. Get online with God.” Shouldn’t that be “Upload your worries”? Sounds like God is sending the worries ~ of course, that’s why we pray, “Lead us not into temptation.”

||| Cooking program: “We certainly do like to imbibe in sugar.” First, “imbibe” means drink and is not followed by “in”, although you can drink in something, like a beautiful sunset. Second, we don’t imbibe sugar. Sugary drinks, yes, but I think the cook meant something like indulge in sugar, consume sugar, scarf down sugar.

||| On Oprah: “If it doesn’t hurt other people, quantification has to be added.” This was a show about polygamy (or “plural marriage”). I don’t understand that sentence.

||| From somewhere: “In ten years India’s going to transcend China in terms of population.” It’s surpass, not transcend. Transcend means to rise above qualitatively, perhaps into another plane of existence altogether, while surpass just means to pass quantitatively. And why is it so hard to construct a sentence without “in terms of”? “In ten years India’s population will be bigger than China’s.” Might India transcend China in terms of, say, spiritual enlightenment?

||| Library counter sign by piles of books and tapes: “Please feel free to Check-Out one.” First, “check-out” with a hyphen is a noun; the verb does not take the hyphen. Second, why capitalize it? Third, I’d say “check one out” (but, “check out a book”). Fourth, shouldn’t a librarian know these things? Fifth, don’t I need a drink?

NOVELS IN THREE LINES

Dave DaBee hipped me to Novels in Three Lines, a book of three-line novels written by Felix Feneon. They read more like police report summaries, intriguing but lacking character development and denouement. Here’s an original by me, inspired by Feneon:

The cat sharpened its claws on the corner of the expensive new leather couch. After that, it was forced to eat its meals on the porch, despite the cold weather.

Dave also sent this item from The Onion:

According to a groundbreaking new study by the Department of Labor, working ~ the physical act of engaging in a productive job-related activity ~ may greatly increase the amount of work accomplished during the workday, especially when compared with the more common practices of wasting time and not working.

This reminds me of a typical word puzzle that translates a common saying into ponderous language: “A manually-restrained denizen of the avian world is more valuable than two specimens in the foliage.” But I like The Onion’s style of humor better, stating the obvious in journalese or academese.

HOW COLD IS IT?

My mom used to say someone or something was frozen into a cocked hat. Why a cocked hat? I couldn’t Google up the phrase, although I learned that “knocked into a cocked hat” means to get beaten soundly.

BLOOD GLOW

When did the makeup that makes your cheeks red change from rouge to blush (both of which can be nouns or verbs)? Rouge is French for red; blush is English and comes from a root that’s more about shining or blazing (as Romeo said, “O, she doth teach the torches to burn bright!”). My theory is that the word rouge became too closely associated with the artificiality of makeup, while blush was something that girls used to do naturally and implies innocence. But I think women use the color to look healthier, brighter, more vivid, not necessarily more innocent. A better name might be glow, or for the Anglophile, plain old red. It’s all about blood in the face; no one blushes any other color, although we do have bronze makeup for the summer look.

DO YOU HAVE A LICENSE FOR THAT OPINION?

David Hazinski, an associate professor of journalism, thinks there should be some sort of certification for “citizen journalists”. In other words, if you want to post a story or your opinion on your blog, someone official ~ such as him, presumably ~ should train you and give you the OK. Even if you’re not getting paid. He compares the “citizen journalist” to a “citizen surgeon” or a “citizen lawyer”. Bad analogies, and I won’t even bother to explain why, except to say that it doesn’t require all that much skill to get a job as a journalist (and none to make bad analogies) ~ and certainly very little to get a journalism degree these days. And no amount of training will make an ethical journalist.

TEST YOURSELF

Herb H. is pressing all his nieces and nephews (and me) to take this test ~ at AmericanCivicLiteracy.org you can test your knowledge of U.S. history. I did better than the Harvard students’ mean score, but not as well as Herb’s 90%. Must study.

WE LIKE IKE NOW

The New York Post’s headline on the death of Ike Turner: “Ike ‘Beats’ Tina to Death”. I saw Ike and Tina perform together years ago at the Ohio State Fair. They never did it nice and easy. Rest in peace, please.

EZRA SINGS, RUNS

Reader Ezra Sykes is running the Boston Marathon and raising money for the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, offering as an incentive for donation a CD of original songs for children, Juvenile by Design, by himself and David Brodie. Go to http://www.firstgiving.com/ezrasykes to make a contribution. If you'd rather donate by mail, make your check out to "MSPCC" and send it to his home address, 44 Nonantum Street, Brighton, MA 02135.

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Link here to look for books on Amazon.com!

Or click on underlined book links.

NEW SHOP: Scot Tartans. NEW STUFF AT Parvum Opus CafePress shop:

"Flash in the Pants"

"If you're so smart why aren't you me?"

"If you build it they won't come"

Rage Boy/Bat Boy: Can you spot the difference?

Akron U. Alma Mater: The Lost Verse

PWE (Protestant Work Ethic) tote bag

"I am here" T-shirt

"Someone went to Heaven and all I got was this lousy T-shirt"

"I eat dead things" doggy shirt and BBQ apron

Plus new kids’ things, mouse pad, teddy bear, stein, and more!

ELSEWHERE

Parvum Opus now appears http://cafelit.blogspot.com/. It is also carried by the Hur Herald, a web newspaper from Calhoun County, West Virginia. See Editor Bob Weaver's interview with me (February 10, 2007 entry), and the PO every week in Columns.

WHEN SONNY GETS BLUE! Check out the video clips of Sonny Robertson and the Howard Street Blues Band at http://www.sonnyrobertson.com/ and http://www.youtube.com/rondaria, with his new original song, "A Different Shade of Blue".

SEARCH IT OUT ON AMAZON : "It is the glory of God to conceal a thing: but the honour of kings is to search out a matter." Proverbs 25:2; "Get wisdom! Even if it costs you everything, get understanding!" Proverbs 4:7:

The poet Muriel Rukeyser said the universe is not composed of atoms, but stories. The physicist Werner Heisenberg said the universe is not made of matter, but music.

NEED SOMEONE TO ORGANIZE A MEETING OR CONFERENCE? CALL KEITHOPS.

Go to Babelfish to translate this page into Chinese, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, or Spanish!

Parvum Opus is a publication of KeithOps / Opus Publishing Services. Back issues may be found at http://www.keithops.us/. Feel free to e-mail me with comments or queries. The PO mailing list is private, never given or sold to anyone else. If you don't want to receive Parvum Opus, please reply with "unsubscribe," "quit," "enough," or something like that in the subject line, and I'll take you off the mailing list. Copyright Rhonda Keith 2007. Parvum Opus or part of it may be reproduced only with permission, but you may forward the entire newsletter as long as the copyright remains.

Parvum Opus 256 ~ Tunavision

PARVUM OPUS

Number 256

December 13, 2007

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CUPCAKE CONTROL

I just came home from the office Christmas party, and after consuming wine and cookies with my raw vegetables, I think it’s appropriate to apprise you of the annual Nanny Awards. The Center for Consumer Freedom invites you to vote for the worst food cop of 2007. My choice is based on the worst metaphor:

MeMe Roth, “Real Cops Need to Arrest Food Cop” Award ~ This self-appointed obesity activist crammed a whole lot of crazy into the past year. She called out the Keebler Elves, Girl Scouts, and even Santa Claus as obesity culprits. Roth had to be physically restrained from vandalizing a YMCA snack table. And when asked on The Daily Show if “eating a cupcake is the same as putting a gun in your mouth,” she agreed.

Metaphor test: Someone needs to offer Meme Roth a cupcake with in hand and a gun in the other and see which one she wants to put in her mouth.

A friend once told me that a cousin of hers who’d gone in for nutrition in a big way went to visit an aunt in the hospital with cancer. The newly converted health foodist saw that her aunt’s hospital meal had Jello or some kind of sweet desert and said, “Don’t you know that sugar will kill you!”

LOAD ANOTHER iTUNE IN

Kathy Taylor of Hur Herald liked the iPod/nickelodeon bit, and wrote a song about the newfangled technology. “Remember I am a professional redneck,” she said:

Load another iTune in

in that iPod with an awesome skin

'tis much better

than the way

of the old MP3

of a yesterday.

I told her with a little work and some more verses, she could be on her way to fame and fortune via Nashville.

DON’T DENIGRATE ME, BRO

Dennis Miller still drives me crazy with his frequent misuse of words, for instance:

If it takes 30 years to denigrate an intelligence agency, it will take a long time to build it up again.

Denigrate means belittle, which could be expressed as “run down” which could also mean to deteriorate, but that doesn’t make deteriorate equivalent to denigrate. I wonder if Miller has the same problem of one of my students who said he took a speed-reading course, primarily for reading technical and business material, and learned to skim a page by reading only about 1/3 of the words, just the longer ones. Now when I have him read aloud, he omits or misreads the small connector words, prepositions and articles and so on. Dennis Miller likes to read history, and I’m wondering if he learned speed-reading at some point, since reading history or technical material isn’t like reading poetry or fiction or even philosophy; you don’t need to linger or ponder. Miller certainly didn’t read with a dictionary on the table. And yet he said his comedy shtick relies in part on his big vocabulary. A schoolteacher even called the radio program once to tell him she admired his vocabulary. I can excuse him, because he’s a comedian, but not her. I think he should hire me to poke him every time he misuses a word.

WORD ORDER

And now for another lesson on word order, which means so much in English: Dilbert creator Scott Adams owns a restaurant called Stacey’s in California, where he “generously tipped the entire staff after his 50th birthday party at the restaurant.” It should be “tipped the staff generously.” As written, it sounds as if it was generously of him to tip anything at all. The revised version sounds like his tip was generous. Furthermore, it sounds like he’s had 50 birthday parties at the restaurant. This is why we have the rule for hyphenating adjectival modifiers: “50th-birthday party”.

R-E-S-P-E-C-T, FIND OUT WHAT IT MEANS TO ME

Remember Gillian Gibbons, the schoolteacher who barely escaped with her life for letting her young students name a teddy bear Mohammed? It seems that moderate Muslims, and Whoopi Goldberg, say they agree with her release but that people have to learn the customs of a country and respect them. But if you travel to Sudan, for instance, how would you find out about that particular custom? Do travel agencies have info about teddy bears, the naming of, or the name Mohammed, which is what every other Sudanese is called? I suspect things can crop up that you could never anticipate.

WHERE NEW PHRASES COME FROM

From Overheard in New York:

Long Island girl: Tiffany, we need new expressions!

Tiffany: What?

Long Island girl: Like, new phrases to say in response to stuff.

Tiffany: Oh. Okay, we'll make some up.

Then you don’t have to get bogged down in thinking in response to stuff.

THUMBS UP, DOWN, OR SIDEWAYS

Anne DaBee feels akin to Mike Sykes’s friend who “hit the nail on the thumb:”

For many years "hit the nail on the thumb" has been, in THIS family, a term for any project that went awry, carpentry-related or no. If it's REALLY bad, you've hit the nail squarely on the thumb... and that would surely call for frozen peas. Mike and I think alike, it seems.

I just remembered the time my son Foy flipped a skateboard up in the air and it landed squarely on his thumb and broke it.

TUNAVISION

Bill R. wrote about tunavision (I lost the original thread and don’t know why; probably something from Dave DaBee):

Tunavision is a state of intense visual distortion brought on by chemistry. It is an example of cyclic time ~ thinking about tunavision while chemically augmented takes one back to thinking about tunavision while chemically augmented.

We originally thought of this as circular ~ coming back to the same point. In hindsight, I would assert that it is in fact helical ~ the long axis of the helix being time.

It reminded me of Road Tuna, which is what lives on the middle line of roads and gets deluded cats killed when they go for it. Do not go for the Road Tuna.

Dave, by the way, wrote further about “lactard”:

I expect Mr. (not Dr.) Levy thinks lactard might be un-PC because one part is from retard, and indeed the confabulogism connotes being derisably incompetent, like "You lactose retard, you."

LOST BOOKS

Looking for a light read the other night, I dug out a book I’d bought for a dollar just because it had an amusing cover typical of its time, 1958, but the copies of The Trouble with Lazyy Ethel available through Amazon don’t show this particular paperback cover: a humorous cartoon of the American and South Pacific characters faced with a hurricane, with the islanders depicted as stout bare-breasted women, which is what you wouldn’t find on a book cover today. The 1970 hardback book jacket has a non-humorous illustration of a svelte island woman in a sarong. This was one of many post-World War II semi-comic novels published in the ‘50s, but author Ernest K. Gann also wrote a number of better known books (The High and the Mighty, Twilight for the Gods). The cover blurbs had little to do with the actual story of the hurricane named Lazy Ethel: “A racy, comic tale of what happened on a South Sea island during a whimsical, violent hurricane.” The not-very-racy story was a bit whimsical but the hurricane wasn’t. The New York Times called the book “full of power and drive,” but that wasn’t quite right either. Not a bad story, though, written in a straight-forward style. I don’t know if the light novel is still being written these days. Any suggestions?

______________________________________________

Link here to look for books on Amazon.com!

Or click on underlined book links.

NEW SHOP: Scot Tartans. NEW STUFF AT Parvum Opus CafePress shop:

"Flash in the Pants"

"If you're so smart why aren't you me?"

"If you build it they won't come"

Rage Boy/Bat Boy: Can you spot the difference?

Akron U. Alma Mater: The Lost Verse

PWE (Protestant Work Ethic) tote bag

"I am here" T-shirt

"Someone went to Heaven and all I got was this lousy T-shirt"

"I eat dead things" doggy shirt and BBQ apron

Plus new kids’ things, mouse pad, teddy bear, stein, and more!

ELSEWHERE

Parvum Opus now appears http://cafelit.blogspot.com/. It is also carried by the Hur Herald, a web newspaper from Calhoun County, West Virginia. See Editor Bob Weaver's interview with me (February 10, 2007 entry), and the PO every week in Columns.

WHEN SONNY GETS BLUE! Check out the video clips of Sonny Robertson and the Howard Street Blues Band at http://www.sonnyrobertson.com/ and http://www.youtube.com/rondaria, with his new original song, "A Different Shade of Blue".

SEARCH IT OUT ON AMAZON : "It is the glory of God to conceal a thing: but the honour of kings is to search out a matter." Proverbs 25:2; "Get wisdom! Even if it costs you everything, get understanding!" Proverbs 4:7:

The poet Muriel Rukeyser said the universe is not composed of atoms, but stories. The physicist Werner Heisenberg said the universe is not made of matter, but music.

NEED SOMEONE TO ORGANIZE A MEETING OR CONFERENCE? CALL KEITHOPS.

Go to Babelfish to translate this page into Chinese, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, or Spanish!

Parvum Opus is a publication of KeithOps / Opus Publishing Services. Back issues may be found at http://www.keithops.us/. Feel free to e-mail me with comments or queries. The PO mailing list is private, never given or sold to anyone else. If you don't want to receive Parvum Opus, please reply with "unsubscribe," "quit," "enough," or something like that in the subject line, and I'll take you off the mailing list. Copyright Rhonda Keith 2007. Parvum Opus or part of it may be reproduced only with permission, but you may forward the entire newsletter as long as the copyright remains.

Parvum Opus 255 ~ Confabulogistic

PARVUM OPUS

Number 255

December 6, 2007

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PUT ANOTHER CHIP IN THE IPOD

Listening to songs on YouTube the other night, I remembered several songs that referred to the way we listen to recorded music. Technological change makes the songs a bit quaint (not to mention the prices):

I wanna hear it again, I wanna hear it again,

The Old Piano Roll Blues.

Put another nickel in,

In the nickelodeon.

Put another dime in the jukebox.

Put another record on the record machine.

Will anyone write YouTube, iPod, or MP3 player into a song?

BUSY AS DABEE

Dave DaBee has been as busy as one this week and sent all kinds of stuff.

Confabulogistic Bananagram

First, he asked what these words have in common:

Banana

Dresser

Grammar

Potato

Revive

Uneven

Assess

Ooooo, a new one! Is there a name like palindrome for one of these? If not, let's ask El Ricardo!

Did you figure it out? I didn’t. If you move one end letter to the other end (in this list, the first letter), the word spelled backward is the same as the original word. I queried El Ricardo, Verbivore maven Richard Lederer, and of course he knew the name: embedded palindrome. He said the longest one in English is sensuousness ~ move the last letter to the front, and the word spelled backward is the original word. Dave wanted to suggest some less scholarly words, such as decapitated palindrome, one-headed or one-tailed palindrome, or palindro. Finally, combining two of the words on the list, Dave came up with Bananagram, which he calls a confabulogism. Word up.

Prosaic Depiction

Then he sent a link to a blog from Paul Levy with this sentence in it:

[In an Armenian grocery] First, though, she offered us a prosaic depiction of spices, explaining that each particular mix of spices in the world's cooking provides an arrow in the atlas in terms of the food's location and culture.

Of course prosaic is related to the word prose, as opposed to poetic, but prosaic has taken on the denotation of dull (same as prosy), which the Armenian grocery was not. The writer himself questioned his word, and Dave and others suggested substitutes for prosaic on the blog, so I won’t. But I also question depiction. Notice its relation to picture, pictorial, etc. Levy wanted to contrast the verbal description with the actual tasting of herbs that followed.

Lactard

Dr. Levy has another post about his family’s invented word, lactard, for lactose intolerant people. He feels like it’s vaguely politically incorrect, I guess because of the intolerance issue? (Also, there’s a funny link to the Boston French Toast Alert site.)

The Tyranny of Structurelessness

My Sojourner story from last week’s PO prompted this memory from Dave:

While working on the school paper summer production staff, summer of '72, BiIl R and I worked on an outside production job for one of the social experiment feminist groups of the era. The article we remember best was titled "The Tyranny of Structurelessness," about what happens when you try to start a social group that has a mission, without having any structure to the enterprise. Kinda weird, but I must acknowledge the kids of the era for being bold enough to follow their ideals.

Guess what, I found the article, by Jo Freeman aka Joreen. (I too followed my unstructured ideals ~ very unstructured, no social groups or missions involved ~ and got whacked for it from time to time. But there’s no other way.)

The Dickens

Finally, Dave asked where “full of the dickens” comes from, and said he couldn’t get no sadistfaction from Google. Both yourdictionary.com and dict.org give it as an old British variant of the devil, possibly a diminutive of devilkins.

Brit., Slang devil; deuce: used, with the, only in interjectional phrases, as a mild oath or exclamation of annoyance, surprise, or frustration: What the dickens is that about?

Not a moment too soon, Dave is starting a new blog of his own.

IF IT LOOKS LIKE A TENNIS BALL...

Urbandictionary.com lists “dirty tennis ball” as an urban (i.e. black) expression for that very short hairstyle. So I feel vindicated in saying the chartreuse-haired woman was very like a tennis ball. Dea R. wrote:

Do the multi-colored tennis balls around Boston appear in several other hues besides greenish-yellow? One of them (I refer to them as "its") with reddish-orange fuzz gave me such a tongue lashing once that I felt just this side of a domestic violence episode. It was angry because I couldn't recognize it was being "gender none specific." I asked it, "How am I suppose to know the rules unless I look?" Angrily it reiterated that I shouldn't make assumptions, which is normally good advice except, the subject was specific about gender.

If someone camouflages the usual gender clues and then gets mad when you don’t guess right, he or she or it is just setting you up. Sounds like that tennis ball resented having a sex at all. Of course, some people get mad when you can’t tell if their baby is male or female. I can’t tell for sure what sex our current cat is.

AND THEN THERE WERE SOME

The Lakota high school kids are going ahead with the production of And Then There Were None, but not on school grounds. The community has rallied against this ridiculous censorship of something that doesn’t even exist.

Harry H. wrote of another increasingly familiar instance of word fear:

I took an EEO class at the U.S. Foreign Service Institute about 10 years ago and they instructed us during the course of the class, attended by at least one newly appointed Ambassador, that it was o.k. for an overseas U.S. Embassy to have a party at Christmas (local national dignitaries are usually invited to these functions), as long as they didn't call it a "Christmas Party." Seems sort of like having a remembrance for the Martin Luther King official national holiday and not being authorized to mention the name “Martin Luther King," to me. Or President's Day, and not being able to mention the names of George Washington, Abe Lincoln, or Ronald Reagan.

MO-BEAR

You probably heard about Gillian Gibbons, the English woman teaching in Sudan who let the schoolchildren name a teddy bear Mohammed. She was, of course, imprisoned, and faced a whipping, plus thousands of Muslims demonstrated, calling for her death for the blasphemy, though Mohammed was a man, not a god, and oddly enough, Mohammed is a very popular name for men. (Has anyone noticed the word “ham” right in the middle of that illustrious name? Will we have to expunge that word from English?) Gibbons got sprung and she’s back in England, promoting tourism to Sudan. The teddy bear incident seems to be more of a public relations black eye for Sudan than the years of mass murder.

Grace Slick of the Jefferson Airplane threatened to name one of her children god (lower case), but thought perhaps it would be too great a burden, and changed the name to China ~ big, but not infinite. And of course vast numbers of Hispanics are named Jesus, pronounced Hay-soos, not Jee-zus. For some reason, while an English pronunciation would sound shocking, though it wouldn’t provoke imprisonment or death threats.

PO’ FOLKS

Harry H. likes the Po’ Folks restaurant menus, which use spellings that approximate southern or Appalachian pronunciations such as:

yore (your) sweet tooth

the dropped G in –ing words, such as diet-killin’ and cookin’

niller = vanilla

ya = you

ta = to

jest rite = just right (pronunciation plus spelling riffs)

li’l = little

onion rangs = rings

fried green t-maters = tomatoes

Po’ Folks = Poor Folks

I have a Kentucky cookbook, Out of Kentucky Kitchens (first printing in the 1940s), that distinguishes between grub, vittles (victuals), and repasts as an ascending order of quality or at least expense of menus.

COUNTERINUITIVE

Mike Sykes knew I meant “Inuit” not “Intuit”. Mike suggested if you’re going to rest in peas, make them frozen peas if you have a muscle spasm. He also said he knew someone who used to say “hit the nail on the thumb”, which any way you look at it is painful; try frozen peas.

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