My B&C blog is idle this week. You can catch up on recent Places items on San Juan de Teotihuacan's pyramids, Danish restrictions on marrying foreigners, South Africa's wildlife reserves, paintings found in a Philadelphia school (2nd item), Redesigning NYC's streelights (2nd item), the Mormon temple in Nauvoo, Illinois (2nd item)
posted by Nathan at 1:52 PM 0 comments

 
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.

Geoff Nunberg on Kerry in July:

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.

Geoff Pullum on Bush and clarity:

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.

James Fallows in the Atlantic this summer:

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

Inflections
• "On the Media" on October surprise. (This year's OS? albeit unplanned)

• 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 Reagan’s “balance” to me in an interview. But he used the Russian word ravnovesie in its wider sense, of psychological equilibrium. The President’s 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 milado cookie 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"?

• From LL:

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.

• And LL on the NYT's "after boring of the task."

• 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 at 11:26 AM 0 comments

 
Onion headlines:

U.S. Finishes A 'Strong Second' In Iraq War x

Millions of American Lips Called To Service In Fight Against Poverty x

Tibetan teen getting into Western philosophy x

Jacques Derrida 'Dies'
posted by Nathan at 11:22 AM 0 comments

 



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 [Update: Slate too]), 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.

posted by Nathan at 11:09 AM 0 comments

 
Baseball History is Made



Boston Globe
posted by Nathan at 11:03 AM 0 comments

 
via G&M's Soc.St.'s:

"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 Viñoly'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 at 10:57 AM 0 comments

 
• 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, naiveté ... 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. "Naïveté," on the other hand, waited until 1673 to appear.

• Previous E.T.
posted by Nathan at 10:46 AM 0 comments

 
This week in my B&C blog:
Five articles on reading, writing, and critical inquiry.
LINK/ARCHIVE
posted by Nathan at 5:24 PM 0 comments

 
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.

More on babies' vocabularies here and here.

This brief was cut from my column:

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"?

-LL and NW on the history of hip.

-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.

-Geoff Nunberg on sort of at LL and the NYT.

-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."

-I was puzzling over the line in the hymn I Know Whom I Have Believed (don't you love hymns' grammar?):

But I know Whom I have believèd,
And am persuaded that He is able
To keep that which I’ve 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.

Here's the Greek (also see the interlinear text):

[12] di' hên aitian kai tauta paschô, all' ouk epaischunomai, oida gar hôi pepisteuka, kai pepeismai hoti dunatos estin tên parathêkên mou phulaxai eis ekeinên tên hêmeran

Here's the Latin:

[12] ob quam causam etiam haec patior sed non confundor scio enim cui credidi et certus sum quia potens est depositum meum servare in illum diem

-Geoff Pullum at LL:

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 cliché 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!)

-Nunberg on the phrase look presidential

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 at 4:12 PM 0 comments

 
Onion headlines:

Glee Club Depressed, Angry

Pringles level at six inches and falling x

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 at 4:08 PM 0 comments

 
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 at 3:45 PM 0 comments

 
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?

Tom Shales on the 3rd prez debate.

Tranx's here; search tool here.

Sound bytes: Debate summaries via auto-summarizer:

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.

posted by Nathan at 3:36 PM 0 comments

 
CQ's Craig Crawford on flip-flopping at 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.''

posted by Nathan at 3:27 PM 0 comments

 


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 at 3:15 PM 0 comments

 
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

Black Christian Howard Stern fans from Texas

Trust-funded organic-farming Enron stock-holding gun enthusiasts


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 at 3:12 PM 0 comments

 
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

posted by Nathan at 3:07 PM 0 comments

 
GS on cultural engagement ...

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

... and how to get a good education 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 at 2:57 PM 0 comments

 
• 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.

• Previous E.T.
posted by Nathan at 2:55 PM 0 comments

 
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


posted by Nathan at 3:18 PM 0 comments

 
My latest Tribune language column: On the juicy roots of food words, and why English is a sampler platter of other languages.
temp link/perm.preview

Here's AHD on "cappuccino" and the Capuchins:

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.

debate tranx's: Pres 9/30, VP 10/5, Pres 10/8

- more on values from William Saletan in Slate:

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."

Update: Stewart on 60 Minutes: "I can't believe that the National Guard memo scandal is the only scandal in four years that has gotten elevated to the status of having a gate attached to it," says Stewart. "Rather-gate. For God's sake, we launched a war based on forged documents. That doesn't get a gate. How do you not get a gate outta that?"

- 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?

-From the Washington Post:

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 on sovereignty as the S-word of world politics.

-From the NY Times Mag:

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 on gentrification 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).

- What is lamping? From the Guardian:

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.

-Geoff Pullum at LL

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.

-From a book of Australian profanity:

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

-The Complete Review on English PEN's seminar on translating fiction, featuring its 2004 Translation Prizes. Related articles: Arabic lit not being read in the West, and German lit gets a bad rap.
,

-Language-related Onion stories:

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."

-Lines from a recent spam message:

ambushgirtharduousbasinjoysutureyatesderbytam bellboy gimbal audition coppery commonweal multiplicity practitioner cortex crupper headline vertigo triatomic verbal janus easel upholstery feeney mirth lady cormorant peppy hedonism italy decompile eurasia dilapidate zeal domino

(See 3rd item here from my B&C blog)

-LL observes the death of Derrida. (LL on Mencken on the fatuities of journalism; LL on journalists and math.

• Previous column and inflections
posted by Nathan at 1:32 PM 0 comments

 
Onion headlines this week:

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 at 1:29 PM 0 comments

 



"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."

Questions you won't hear in the debates:

For Kerry:

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?

For Bush:

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 at 1:24 PM 0 comments

 
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 at 1:16 PM 0 comments

 
Interesting and important observations by a fellow neo-Calvinist, Gideon Strauss:

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.

posted by Nathan at 1:10 PM 0 comments

 
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!

-Like Father, Like Clown, The Simpsons

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.

posted by Nathan at 1:04 PM 0 comments

 
You can have some fun with this make-your-own-highway-advisory page:

/


(More on Dante's Inferno here, here and here.)
posted by Nathan at 1:00 PM 0 comments

 
PHC episodes I intend to listen to again: 12/21/02, 04/19/03, 10/25/03
posted by Nathan at 11:53 AM 0 comments

 
• 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.

• Previous E.T.
posted by Nathan at 11:45 AM 0 comments

 
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






posted by Nathan at 3:29 PM 0 comments

 


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.)

• Previous column and inflections
posted by Nathan at 3:09 PM 0 comments

 
Recent Onion headlines:

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 Architect’s 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 York’s Ground Zero, Calatrava is responsible for many of today’s 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 Malmö, Sweden. Henry Art Gallery
posted by Nathan at 1:53 PM 0 comments

 
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 at 1:50 PM 0 comments

 
Sick of reading political blather? Read some poems (here, here and here).
posted by Nathan at 1:47 PM 0 comments

 
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 at 1:35 PM 0 comments

 


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 at 1:32 PM 0 comments

 
• 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."

• Previous E.T.
posted by Nathan at 1:30 PM 0 comments

 
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

Back issues of B&C I want to re-read:
Jan/Feb 2000,
May/June 2000
July/Aug 1998




posted by Nathan at 4:34 PM 0 comments

 
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.)

From Sports Illustrated, 9/27:

-"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.

• Previous column and inflections
posted by Nathan at 1:52 PM 0 comments

 
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

More here and here.
posted by Nathan at 1:47 PM 0 comments

 
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.)



posted by Nathan at 1:44 PM 0 comments

 
Recent Onion headlines:

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 at 1:36 PM 0 comments

 
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.

posted by Nathan at 1:34 PM 0 comments

 

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 at 1:30 PM 0 comments

 
• 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.

• Previous E.T.
posted by Nathan at 1:29 PM 0 comments