This week in my B&C blog: July news and book review roundup. LINK/ARCHIVE

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 at 6:01 PM 0 comments

 
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 at 4:58 PM 0 comments

 
My latest Tribune language column:
On the blogging linguists at Language Log, which just turned one year old.
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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 at 4:37 PM 0 comments

 
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 at 4:33 PM 0 comments

 
Seen at this quote page:

``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.''

posted by Nathan at 4:31 PM 0 comments

 
• 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.)

• Previous E.T.

posted by Nathan at 4:29 PM 0 comments

 
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 at 1:25 PM 0 comments

 
My latest Christianity Today online article:
On indifferent apologies, or "kinda culpas."
http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2004/128/31.0.html

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.

posted by Nathan at 1:18 PM 0 comments

 
My latest Tribune language column:
On The Hippie Dictionary.
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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 one’s 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 world’s 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 Glück, 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 felicità-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 don’t 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:

clematis-wise media-wise
composition-wise money-wise
heartwise penny-wise
PR-wise pennywise
streetwise people-wise
tax-wise percentage-wise
weatherwise pricewise
anotherwise recreation-wise
bloomwise retail-wise
coastwise street-wise
cost-wise streetwise
inflation-wise vitamin-wise

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.

- The history of d'oh.

- 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

• Last week's column and inflections
posted by Nathan at 1:17 PM 0 comments

 

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 at 12:14 PM 0 comments

 
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 at 12:10 PM 0 comments

 

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 at 11:58 AM 0 comments

 
- 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 

posted by Nathan at 11:56 AM 0 comments

 
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."

You are?

posted by Nathan at 11:53 AM 0 comments

 
Presented by a U.S. Army linguist (via LL) :

Why did the Iraqi Chicken cross the road?

CPA:

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.

(continued)

posted by Nathan at 11:36 AM 0 comments

 
It's the 25th anniversary of the Walkman.

posted by Nathan at 11:34 AM 0 comments

 
Things people have been kind enough to say about this blog:

"... a thought-provoking blog worth viewing."
-Chicago magazine online

"... thoughtful treatment of difficult subjects."
-blogger Cat Connor, frykitty.com, blogathon.org.

"He has many thoughtful ideas that aren't the same as mine so that makes him very much worth reading."

-blogger MF

And about my monthly news roundup at my B&C blog:
"... one cool weblog ... good quick way to get a pulse of some of the events happening in our world."
blogger JR Woodward.

posted by Nathan at 11:32 AM 0 comments

 
• 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").

• Previous E.T.

posted by Nathan at 11:29 AM 0 comments