Parvum Opus 302 ~ Taxonomy of Grammar

Floy-Floy Revisited

New PO reader Mick Pearce wrote:

I came across a brief discussion in Parvum Opus regarding the origin of the term "floy-floy".

"The only other place I've read floy-floy was in a sketch by S. J. Perelman", you wrote.

Just FYI, "floy-floy" turns up in the film Ace in the Hole (Billy Wilder, 1951). From a Time Out review: "...reporter Chuck Tatum (Douglas), resentfully stagnating in a New Mexico backwater after being repeatedly fired from jobs in the big time, ...sees a chance to manufacture a scoop when a man is trapped by a rockfall. The sheriff, calculating the publicity value to his forthcoming election campaign, agrees to spin out the rescue operation; Tatum builds his story into a nationwide sensation; and as thrill seekers, media hounds, and profiteers turn the site into a gaudy carnival, the victim quietly dies."

Tatum, at one point trying to calm, and boost the confidence of, the trapped man, tells him he's got floy-floy, which appears to mean, imprecisely, flair or courage or character. I doubt, though, that the term ever had a truly exact meaning.

Paul Whiteman recorded a track called "Flying Down to Floy Floy" (maybe Florida?).

I agree that floy-floy probably never had a precise meaning. (Speaking of Perelman, I was pleased to run across a phrase I haven’t seen since I read it in something by Perelman, which I can’t locate: “instinct with”. Theodore Dalrymple wrote: “For Hall, life is instinct with meaning.” Searching for that phrase + Perelman, I did find a partial quote but I don’t remember it and think maybe he used it elsewhere. Now “instinct” is almost always used as a noun.)

Also from Mick:

"F.F.F. is a tune, originally written and performed by Slim & Slam (Slim Gaillard and Slam Stewart) that got very popular in the 40's. A floogie is a lady of easy virtue -- the floy is V.D. Not an elegant lyric, but succinct at any rate." [my emphasis; VD being, of course, an outdated term for STD].

Mick also wondered if The Supremes knew that when they recorded “Floy Joy”. I think not. But he got me to wondering why VD (venereal disease) gave way to STD (sexually transmitted disease). “Venereal” was formed from “Venus” and I guess the reference to the classical goddess of love was at once too erudite and too sentimental, whereas STD sounds loosely and vaguely more scientific.

Long-Lived

At last, someone who knows how to pronounce “long-lived”! Armand Schultz, reading The Last Patriot on CD, pronounced “lived” with a long “i” (like “I’ve come to wive it wealthily in Padua” ~ Kiss Me Kate).

How to read a book, second installment: I listened to this book on CD in the car over a week or so and missed a lot of details which didn’t seem to matter much if you didn’t care much about the plot, which I didn’t; it didn’t seem to hurt to ignore large patches of the book. But it’s an OK thriller, lots of action amongst CIA and spy types, a (fictional) historical mystery regarding Thomas Jefferson, Miguel de Cervantes, and Barbary pirates. The best part was a most ingenious (fictional) invention by Jefferson of a mechanical scribe that concealed an encrypted message. That and the long-i “lived”.

Narrative

An article in the National Post (Canada) described a particular usage of the word “narrative”, which I’ve encountered but never pinned down before. Barbara Kay wrote:

On November 4, the Globe's Margaret Wente hailed Obama's all-but-certain victory: 'The bitter narrative of oppression and grievance is over. The narrative of possibility ~ of Martin Luther King ~ can begin again.'

...In this vein, her repeated use of the word ‘narrative' is instructive. 'Narrative' is politically correct code nowadays for a personal history by a member of a minority identity group that is consciously constructed as a political vehicle. Its salient feature is that every feeling and every incident in the story is filtered through an ideological lens, edited to exert a political and ideological influence over the reader or listener. 'Narratives' means stories that are calculated to appeal to a target demographic's sense of guilt and ideals, but may have little to do with reality.

Thus people replace the “dominant narrative” with their own. This “narrative” is one of the synonyms of “my truth”, as opposed to “the truth”. If you believe the winners always invent all history, and the losers can rewrite history to their taste, you can completely disregard historical accuracy.

A new narrative: Already I’ve heard Obama referred to as a Hitler, because perhaps he’s not been a supporter of Israel but favors Palestine and other countries that are enemies of Israel, and not incidentally, the U.S. I didn’t like Bush being compared to Hitler and I don’t like it with Obama. And to be fair, I think his mere presence in the two-year campaign has already averted global warming, just as he promised. When’s the last time you heard about it in the news? What’s the weather like in your neighborhood?

Taliband

Cincinnati police have rounded up a big gang that calls itself the Taliband. How cute is that?! Their specialty was robbing old people and generally terrorizing their neighborhood, plus an occasional homicide. But that name shows creativity as well as multicultural awareness. Should be good for probation for whoever came up with it, who just might parlay the whole affair into a safer career. I see a musical, a movie, maybe a TV series.

The Taxonomy of English

From Bryan Garner’s Usage Tip of the Day

"A zoologist who divided animals into invertebrates, mammals, and beasts of burden would not get very far before running into trouble. Yet the traditional grammar is guilty of the same error when it defines three parts of speech on the basis of meaning (noun, verb, and interjection), four more on the basis of function (adjective, adverb, pronoun, conjunction), and one partly on function and partly on form (preposition). The result is that in such an expression as 'a dog's life' there can be endless futile argument about whether 'dog's' is a noun or an adjective." W. Nelson Francis, "Revolution in Grammar" (1954), in Readings in Applied English Linguistics 69, 77 (Harold Byron Allen ed., 2d ed. 1964).

When I have to explain grammar to my students, not being a professional grammarian sometimes I get into trouble when I can’t quite define parts of speech. So I’m glad to know it’s not just me.

The Sykes Varieties

Mike Sykes commented variously:

RE “The Telegraph compiles lists of irritating phrases, which are transatlantically irritating too”:

This piece is based on a book that won't be published stateside until next month. It was reviewed by Michael Quinion recently here. Notice how the comments bring out the pedants, especially those who think dictionaries are definitive rather than descriptive. Of course we all have words and usages that annoy us. I've try to adapt to those that seem useful, rather than feebly witty, but sometimes I fail. More frequently as time goes on. So don't get me started!

But I want to get you started, that’s the whole point. Mike then corrected a typo he made, but since I tend to ignore mine these days, we’ll ignore his too. Regarding hell in the hallway, he added:

It's fifty years now since a colleague remarked to me: "When one door shuts, another closes." And there's a quote that "every cloud has a silver lining; only sometimes it's a little hard to get it to the mint."

Dead Parrots Are Timeless

Are you one of those people who buy Readers Digest so you can be the first to repeat its jokes at work? Try telling some of the oldest jokes in the western world, some of which are the same as the new jokes. Philogelos: The Laugh Addict - The World's Oldest Joke Book is a 1983 book, and you can now also purchase a shorter e-version with CD and online text with Jim Bowen.

Coming Next Week

New Olympic event: synchronized bed turning.

TELL ME A STORY!

Read The Wish Book, a novella by Rhonda Keith, free online.

New interview with bluesman Sonny Robertson.

______________________________________________

Trivium pursuit ~ rhetoric, grammar, and logic, or reading, writing, and reckoning: Parvum Opus discusses language, education, journalism, culture, and more. Parvum Opus by Rhonda Keith is a publication of KeithOps / Opus Publishing Services. Editorial input provided by Fred Stephens. Rhonda Keith is a long-time writer, editor, and English teacher. Back issues from December 2002 may be found at http://www.geocities.com/keithops/. 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 e-mail, and I'll take you off the mailing list. Copyright Rhonda Keith 2008. 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 301 ~ Hell in the Hallway

The Amish Cook at the Bookstore

I went to a book signing for a book I didn’t buy, The Amish Cook at Home: Simple Pleasures of Food, Family, and Faith, edited by Kevin Williams. I’ve been reading Lovina Eicher’s weekly column for a year. She writes simple accounts of her family life by hand and mails it to Kevin Williams via snail mail, whence it goes into syndication. Her husband and two of her children were at the bookstore, with Williams, who spoke to the crowd, but Lovina Eicher just signed books while her family looked on. Besides their clothes, the Eichers’ appearance was different from those of the people who came to buy the book. Their faces showed the simplicity and, yes, I’ll say it, the purity of their lives. But since the Amish do not like to have their photos taken, you won’t see a picture online.

Bits and Pieces

[~] Librivox,org presents free audio books online, read by volunteers. I started to listen to the Memoir of Jane Austen by James Austen-Leigh (Jane’s nephew). The readers (different ones on each of the first two tracks so far) are clearly not professionals, and they make me appreciate the skill of the ordinary professional actor, but still, it’s a good service.

[~] It seems somewhat magical to hear a voice from a century ago, when audio recording and film were new. You can listen to brief clips of G. K. Chesterton on YouTube.

[~] The Telegraph compiles lists of irritating phrases, which are transatlantically irritating too.

Welsh Signs

Mike Sykes wrote on the badly translated Welsh traffic signs:

... only a minority of the Welsh actually speak the language, and secondly it reminds me of the number of times I've reflected while driving in Wales that these bilingual are a potentially dangerous distraction to drivers, since I find that I for one have to scan the whole of the text and discard what I don't understand, before considering whether the bit I do understand is actually relevant to me. It's not as if there is any significant proportion of the population don't understand English.

Hell in the Hallway

Making the e-mail circuit: “Whenever God closes one door He always opens another, even though sometimes it's hell in the hallway.”

Foy Graw

Here’s a slightly edited blog entry from my drummer son Foy, for his former Boston band, the Maintainers.

Do you know what makes a good band, aside from emulating the Maintainers as much as possible? It's how much beer gets thrown at you. I'm on week three of my music information collection expedition to Kansas (funded by a grant from the Maintainers Club) and here's what I've learned: if a band that's just starting out doesn't get verbally abused enough, they become spoiled and do things like noodle with their tuning for five minutes between their three minute songs (no song should be more than two minutes according to The Maintainers' Elements of Style). More than two tunings per 45 minute set is unacceptable and shouldn't last longer than the actual song-playing. Otherwise, the following steps should be taken by the audience members: 1) Buy two beers*. 2) Open both. 3) When band is tuning during the set a) take note if it is the third or more tuning and b) make sure to not confuse tuning with an abstract spacey guitar jam a la Pink Floyd. 4) If it is the third or more tuning, project one beer at the culprit aiming for the guitar itself or, even better, the pedal board and 5) follow with loud heckle (example: "Less noodling and more sauce!" or "That guitar sounds great ~ give it to a guitarplayer!"). *You'll still have a beer as a cover if previous actions are not received well. The band will only improve; it's called tough love and, yes, they will thank you for it later when they learn to put together a streamlined and rollicking set.

-- From Kansas, I'm Foy Graw.

Like Home

I overheard one of my students from Dominican Republic say to another student, “After I graduate I want to go someplace else, a big city, someplace with more Hispanic people. There’s so many white people here.”

I asked her if she’d be offended if I said I’d like to move someplace with more Scottish people or more northern European people, and she said no. Then we talked about the weather.

My visit to Stonehaven, Scotland, where some of my ancestors lived long ago, is still powerfully in my consciousness. A Jewish friend asked me if I felt like I was home, and I said that I did in a way, to my surprise. The faces looked familiar. She said when she lived in Israel for a while, years ago, she had the same feeling, and when visitors asked her for directions, she was so pleased. Foreign (i.e. non-European) visitors asked me and my son for directions in Stonehaven. We looked like we belonged. (Of course, I also used to feel good when tourists asked me for directions in Boston.) It is the unfamiliar (to me) feeling of home. An old Scottish toast is, “Here’s to us! Who’s like us? Dam*ned few, and they’re all dead.” I am, of course, all American, but I can’t help feeling that there’s a similarity of temperament or some undefined sensibility among people of the same blood and country.

I like to look at the webcam in the harbor of Stonehaven, where we stayed, near Dunnottar Castle. Last week it was offline some of the time. I hope Stonehaven isn’t like Brigadoon, the magic Scottish village that appeared only once every hundred years.

The Guid Buik

In Stonehaven I ordered The New Testament in Scots from Bridgefield Books, a new bookstore run by Carol Anderson. It turns out Carol was at the Marine Hotel pub the night we were lucky enough to find the monthly Celtic music jam. She’s a musician, and also has been a sailor on tall ships. It was she who recommended W. L. Lorimer’s translation of the New Testament, and it’s fascinating. I can understand a lot of it, although that’s partly because some of the text is familiar. Some examples:

[~] “Ax, an it s’ be gien ye; seek, an ye s’ finnd; chap, an the door s’ be apent tae ye.”

[~] “Gie us our breid for this incomin day; forgie us the wrangs we hae wrocht, as we hae forgien the wrangs we hae dree’d; an sey-us-na sairlie, but sauf us frae the Ill Ane.”

[~] Jesus in the Temple with the money changers: “He whummelt the tables o the niffers o siller an the cheyrs of the dou-cowpers.”

[~] In Appendix II, Matthew 4.1-11 (when Jesus fasted for 40 days and nights and was tempted by the Devil, or “the Deil” or “the Temper”), all the text, and the words of Jesus, are in Scots, but the Devil speaks in English.

[~] “Luve keeps nae nickstick o the wrangs it drees.” (I Corinthians 13, the verses are not numbered.)

If you’d like to order the book from Carol, let me know and I’ll hook you up. Bridgefield Books doesn’t have a web site now.

Thanx

Thanx to those of you who said PO 300 was a good issue. I know it was just because it was politics- and pain-free. I just have one political/ecnomic question: Will the real estate bail-outs be retroactive? Because I’d like to get a loan for a house I can’t afford, and then have the gov’t, i.e. you, pick up the mortgage after I default.

New interview with bluesman Sonny Robertson.

______________________________________________

Trivium pursuit ~ rhetoric, grammar, and logic, or reading, writing, and reckoning: Parvum Opus discusses language, education, journalism, culture, and more. Parvum Opus by Rhonda Keith is a publication of KeithOps / Opus Publishing Services. Editorial input provided by Fred Stephens. Rhonda Keith is a long-time writer, editor, and English teacher. Back issues from December 2002 may be found at http://www.geocities.com/keithops/. 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 e-mail, and I'll take you off the mailing list. Copyright Rhonda Keith 2008. 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 300 ~ Transgressive Reading

Some Things Lost in Translation, Maybe

|=| I gave a writing assignment to retell a ghost story or scary story from the student’s own culture or language (for Halloween week). My Moroccan student’s story was about a Christian college student in Egypt who challenged God to show himself and prove his existence. The Christian student (not the Moroccan, who is a Muslim) was duly killed when he got water in his ears, which is “scientifically known” to be how donkeys can be killed. I asked a couple of questions about this narrative, and he told me that the word he translated as “Christian” (from Berber? Arabic?) means Christians, Jews, and/or Muslims. Hmm.

|=| I tried to translate a couple of verses by Goethe using Babelfish (German to English), but not all the words translated, and the meanings weren’t clear. When I copied the German text directly into the Google search box, I found images of book pages with the poems, and in one case English translations followed. So I recommend this method for translating literature, though not, of course, for e-mail from your friends, unless their letters have been published already.

|=| Dave DaBee sent these links to bad translations in Welsh on signs in the UK.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/wales/7702913.stm

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/wales/south_east/4794753.stm

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/wales/north_west/4605768.stm

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/wales/5321588.stm

Dave added: “I'm inclined to agree with local citizen Dylan, quoted in the first article: when proofreading, consider using someone who knows the language at issue.”

Transgressive Knitting

Craft magazine has an article about a woman who mixes electronic bits, like digital watches, with fiber, and calls it transgressive. What she means is novel or unusual. She’s pretending her mixed materials are more important and intellectually interesting than they are, maybe even daring, maybe sinful.

Proverbs 17:9: He that covereth a transgression seeketh love; but he that repeateth a matter separateth very friends.

I’m sure that crafters seek love, but the trendy lady with the electronic bits is no more transgressive or in need of love than anyone who ever made ornaments from beverage can poptop rings. I hope she won’t repeat the word “transgressive”.

How to Read a Book

My MA in English lit almost killed my taste for fiction, except for mysteries and Jane Austen. However, I decided to try a novel by Kingsley Amis, who wrote one of my favorite funny novels, Lucky Jim, written in the 1950s, which I quote from time to time. The Russian Girl is a 1992 novel. It’s not as light, bright, and sparkling as Lucky Jim (to quote Jane Austen’s remark* on her book Pride and Prejudice), not as funny; it reads like the work of a man who’s had four more decades of living and working with neurotic, destructive personalities (as well as being one). Yet his protagonist in The Russian Girl, Richard Vaisey, like Jim escapes from a bad relationship (in this case, marriage to a good-looking, sexy, wealthy, but psychopathic woman rather than a frustrating affair with an unattractive, neurotic virgin) and the prospects of a stultifying academic job, and finds love with a nice woman, and a better job. Also like Lucky Jim, the Russian book contains a masterly description of drunkenness and a whopper of a hangover. But other matters required some brow-knitting.

The Russian girl in question is a poet in London, who wants various well-connected people to promote her reputation as a writer in order to garner international favor which might help spring her brother from a Russian prison, where she says he’s been held too long after finishing his sentence for some crime. So it looks like this novel might possibly be about something other than the character flaws and tangled relationships of urban intellectuals, but of course as it’s a “literary” novel, things aren’t that clear-cut. There’s some vague back-and-forthing about whether the brother is in fact unjustly imprisoned, how much danger he’s in, and so on, but the more interesting scenes are about the refusal of two of the people asked to sign the petition, and their reasons, as well as the reasons some people help (for example, Czechs who are angry at the Russian government).

One character who refuses to sign the petition in aid of the girl’s brother does so because he thinks literature is too important to jeopardize one’s professional reputation and integrity over by proclaiming bad writing to be good, even for a (possibly) good cause. Vaisey, a specialist in Russian literature, realizes the girl he loves writes horrible poetry. Amis creates a hideous sample poem (in English translation, of course). Vaisey the scholar notes that the original Russian displays no ear for language, let alone any sensibility indicating a mind of any imagination, feeling, insight, intelligence, etc., and since he’s falling in love with the girl, he actually is reduced to tears by this knowledge. So he lies to her about her poetry.

At the end of the book, when Vaisey and the girl are happily beginning a life together, she writes a love poem of which Amis/Vaisey does not give the reader a verbal critique, but which moves Vaisey to tears again. I liked it and I’ll give you the first few lines here:

man of all men in Shakespeare’s island,

eyes that shine through the rain in my heart,

where I came as a stranger,

finding a hand grasping as firmly as time,

knowledge that burns like fire

and makes my heart round and red again.

So the conclusion is that true love can inspire decent or at least tolerable literature. Thus the novel has an old-fashioned moral. I wasn’t sure why I was reading the book or why Amis wrote it, but this must be it.

*Austen: The work is rather too light, and bright, and sparkling; it wants [i.e. needs] shade; it wants to be stretched out here and there with a long chapter of sense, if it could be had; if not, of solemn specious nonsense, about something unconnected with the story: an essay on writing, a critique on Walter Scott, or the history of Buonaparté, or anything that would form a contrast and bring the reader with increased delight to the playfulness and general epigrammatism of the general style.

Book Chat

|=| Studs Terkel died at 96. He was privileged to be able to quiz all kinds of people on their lives and thoughts. I heard him speak in Boston maybe ten years ago. He noted that newspaper business pages do not have a section on labor (unions and working people). I wonder what he thought about the push to do away with the secret ballot on unions. Very police statish. The next step is to do away with the pretense of voting at all. He also told a story about standing at a bus stop in Chicago with a couple of yuppie types who didn’t know that unions gave them the 40-hour work week. We tend not to know much about history, let alone unions. Those who forget history are inclined to repeat it, it’s said, but they’re also inclined to lose what they’ve got.

|=| I’m sorry to see that another good, popular novelist, Michael Crichton, just died. He gave us Jurassic Park as well as State of Fear, which I wrote about.

|=| Fun fact: Bill Ayers dedicated his 1974 book, Prairie Fire: The Politics of Revolutionary Anti-Imperialism, to political dissidents, including Sirhan Sirhan, the man who shot Robert Kennedy.

The Wish Book

Need some light reading? I’m publishing one of my short novels/long stories online, making it available for free download as a Word document. The Wish Book is about a young woman who discovers she can order anything she wants from century-old Sears catalogues, at century-old prices. Danger and love ensue. It’s a lot of fun. Read it or download it from my web site.

New interview with bluesman Sonny Robertson.

______________________________________________

Trivium pursuit ~ rhetoric, grammar, and logic, or reading, writing, and reckoning: Parvum Opus discusses language, education, journalism, culture, and more. Parvum Opus by Rhonda Keith is a publication of KeithOps / Opus Publishing Services. Editorial input provided by Fred Stephens. Rhonda Keith is a long-time writer, editor, and English teacher. Back issues from December 2002 may be found at http://www.geocities.com/keithops/. 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 e-mail, and I'll take you off the mailing list. Copyright Rhonda Keith 2008. 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.