Tag: language

Reading Around on December 23rd through December 29th

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A few interesting links collected December 23rd through December 29th:

  • Fun phrases in Latin – Ridiculum sum, ergo sum

  • Glenn Greenwald – Karl Rove: Champion of “traditional” divorce – [he ] engineered multiple referenda to incorporate a ban on same-sex marriage into various states’ constitutions in 2004 in order to ensure that so-called “”Christian conservatives” and “value voters” who believe in “traditional marriage laws” would turn out and help re-elect George W. Bush. Yet, like so many of his like-minded pious comrades, Rove seems far better at preaching the virtues of “traditional marriage” to others and exploiting them for political gain than he does adhering to those principles in his own life:Karl Rove granted divorce in Texas

  • Animated stereoviews of old Japan ::: Pink Tentacle – In the late 19th and early 20th century, enigmatic photographer T. Enami (1859-1929) captured a number of 3D stereoviews depicting life in Meiji-period Japan.

    A stereoview consists of a pair of nearly identical images that appear three-dimensional when viewed through a stereoscope, because each eye sees a slightly different image.

Barrelhouse Words Defines the Blues

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“Barrelhouse Words: A Blues Dialect Dictionary” (Stephen Calt)

Ooh, I’m getting a copy of this dictionary. Sounds fun…

Enter Stephen Calt, a blues historian and amateur linguist whose new book, “Barrelhouse Words: A Blues Dialect Dictionary,” published by the University of Illinois Press, is an impeccably scholarly, irresistibly readable guide to the language heard on the recordings of the great blues singers who were active in the first half of the 20th century. If there was ever a time when you found yourself wondering what it means to get a “stone pony” or “make a panther squall,” Mr. Calt is your man. As far back as the late ’60s, he was interviewing aging blues singers and sifting through arcane printed sources in the hopes of untangling the verbal mysteries of the music he loved.

…

All this and much, much more is made manifest in the pages of “Barrelhouse Words,” perhaps the only dictionary on my bulging bookshelf that can be read for pure pleasure from cover to cover.

Part of the pleasure arises from Mr. Calt’s donnish sense of humor. He must have been smiling quietly to himself when he defined “crying shame” as “an exceedingly lamentable occurrence.” No less enjoyable, though, are the examples of contemporary usage that accompany his definitions, all of them drawn from classic blues records. A few are genuinely poetic, while others are drop-dead funny. Look up “business, pork-grindin’,” for instance, and you’ll be confronted with this stanza from Kokomo Arnold’s 1935 recording of “Sissy Man Blues”: Lord, I woke up this mornin’ with my pork-grindin’ business in my hand / Now if you can’t send me no woman, please send me a sissy man. This is a family newspaper, so if you can’t figure the rest out for yourself, turn to page 42 of “Barrelhouse Words.” I haven’t laughed so hard while reading a reference book since the last time I consulted H.L. Mencken’s “New Dictionary of Quotations.”

[Click to continue reading Barrelhouse Words Defines the Blues | Sightings by Terry Teachout – WSJ.com]
[non-WSJ subscribers use this link for full version of article]

postscript: I hope there is an entry on Little Red Bike, as discussed here

I had not heard Kokomo Arnold’s version of this song, only these two, with similar lyric. Connie McLean sings: with my business in my hand, and Josh White sings what sounds like “pork grinding business“, but the words are a bit hard to make out:

  1. Connie McLean’s Rhythm Boys– Sissy Man Bues


    The Copulatin’ Blues Compact Disc

  2. Joshua White– Sissy Man


    Roots N’ Blues: The Retrospective

I’ll have to look for the song. Looks like an album of 24 Kokomo Arnold songs is available at Amazon for $8.99.

Reading Around on December 1st through December 3rd

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A few interesting links collected December 1st through December 3rd:

Whoopsie! Safire is on permanent hiatus

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Share photos on twitter with Twitpic

[click to embiggen photo]

Today’s New York Times Magazine has an awkward typo: William Safire, who died September 27th, is listed as being on hiatus. Yikes. Last week’s NYT Magazine said Safire “is on hiatus for a few weeks.” Ok, last weeks magazine was excusable, it was only a couple of days after Mr. Safire’s death. But to alter the byline means someone edited it since last week. Awkward…

They have now appended a correction to the online version of the article

A note with the “On Language” column on Page 14 this weekend refers to the absence of the regular columnist, William Safire. Mr. Safire died last Sunday, after some copies had gone to press.

Reading Around on October 4th

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Some additional reading October 4th from 10:05 to 12:48:

Werner Herzog Interviewed by Rocco Castoro

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“Conquest of the Useless: Reflections from the Making of Fitzcarraldo” (Werner Herzog)


“Herzog on Herzog” (Werner Herzog)

As always, Werner Herzog has interesting things to say. And this makes me laugh, since whenever I watch a Herzog film1 I turn on the Director’s Commentary. Sometimes, if the film is a little slow, the commentary is much more enjoyable, and his accent is fun to emulate.

RC: In Grizzly Man, like most of your documentary films, you provide the narration.

I grew into this somehow. In the old days I had the feeling that, yes, I should do it, because I wouldn’t know of anyone who would be as credible as my own voice.

RC: It does seem like the best person to narrate a documentary would be its maker.
It’s a question of credibility, and I don’t care how bad my German accent is. I make myself understood anyway.

[Click to continue reading WERNER HERZOG – Vice Magazine]

Indeed you do, Mr. Herzog, indeed you do.

Also, he is allegedly starting his own film school.

I will be starting my film school very soon, and I will make a point about a sense of literature for young people who want to step into filmmaking. One of the prerequisites will be that those who apply have to read this, this, and this.

RC: It’s amazing that you’re starting a film school. Can you give me a sampling of what will be on your syllabus?
 For example, Virgil’s Georgics. They don’t have to read it in Latin, but there are some good translations around.

Oh, and of course, Bad Lieutenant: New Orleans Port of Call

There’s been quite a bit of controversy around that film and no one’s even seen it yet. Abel Ferrara, the director of the original Bad Lieutenant, was outraged that you were doing what he considered to be a remake. But you steadfastly deny that it’s a remake and claim to have never even seen the original.
I don’t need to see the film that was made sometime in the 90s. Mine has a completely different story and a completely different setup. Basically what happened is that one of the people who had produced the first Bad Lieutenant held rights to the title, and they were hoping to establish some sort of a franchise. I don’t mind, I can live with the title, but I always felt it had to be something else. I tried to call it Port of Call New Orleans, but I couldn’t prevail. So now it’s Bad Lieutenant and then it has the subtitle of Port of Call New Orleans.

Footnotes:
  1. I’ve seen about a third of his films, but will eventually see most [↩]

Alpha Male a Mistaken Trope

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“Wolves: Behavior, Ecology, and Conservation” (University Of Chicago Press)

Apparently, the study of wolf behavior has advanced since the theory of an Alpha Male was first put forth by L. David Mech:

The concept of the alpha wolf is well ingrained in the popular wolf literature at least partly because of my book “The Wolf: Ecology and Behavior of an Endangered Species,” written in 1968, published in 1970, republished in paperback in 1981, and currently still in print, despite my numerous pleas to the publisher to stop publishing it. Although most of the book’s info is still accurate, much is outdated. We have learned more about wolves in the last 40 years then in all of previous history.

One of the outdated pieces of information is the concept of the alpha wolf. “Alpha” implies competing with others and becoming top dog by winning a contest or battle. However, most wolves who lead packs achieved their position simply by mating and producing pups, which then became their pack. In other words they are merely breeders, or parents, and that’s all we call them today, the “breeding male,” “breeding female,” or “male parent,” “female parent,” or the “adult male” or “adult female.” In the rare packs that include more than one breeding animal, the “dominant breeder” can be called that, and any breeding daughter can be called a “subordinate breeder.”

[Click to continue reading No more ‘alpha male’! : A Blog Around The Clock]

I’d be surprised if the term alpha male stopped being used in non-wolf literature – too much time has passed, and the phrase has its own meaning now. Hegemonic masculinity, political pyscho-babble, you name it.

Reading Around on August 14th

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Some additional reading August 14th from 12:05 to 12:45:

William Blake:

0312-0057_elohim_creating_adam.jpg

  • Think You Can Rip Someone’s Image From the Internet and Use it For Free? Think Again, You Just May End Up Sued and Lose | Thomas Hawk Digital Connection – “It was interesting to hear yesterday from photographer Christopher Boffoli who has done a lot of freelance work lately for the West Seattle Blog. Boffoli wrote me and told me about a situation where a Seattle based Realtor, Laura Miller with Catalyst Commercial Partners, used an unauthorized photo of his for a real estate listing (photo above) of hers and ended up having to pay him a $1,000 small claims court judgment over it.

    I’ll let Boffoli tell part of the story”

  • Change of Subject: Getting aboard a health plan — it’s time to throw a lifeline to 60 million Americans – “they’re fine with the idea of providing coverage to everyone. But only if it costs them nothing and leaves them with all the advantages, priorities and prerogatives they currently enjoy. In other words, the old “I’d haul you up, but you might swamp my rowboat” argument.

    Others tell me they view access to quality health care as something they’ve earned — either by working hard or being related to someone who works hard. And if others want it, let them earn it too — the old, “Go build your own rowboat, you slacker!” argument.

    Still others say that those without coverage can always fall back on the patchwork of public hospitals, charity and Medicaid — the old “You don’t need a rowboat. Driftwood will do” argument.

    Obviously, though, too many swimmers are drowning:”

  • Krugman- Republican Death Trip – NYTimes.com
  • – “President Obama is now facing the same kind of opposition that President Bill Clinton had to deal with: an enraged right that denies the legitimacy of his presidency, that eagerly seizes on every wild rumor manufactured by the right-wing media complex.”
  • Court extends Tribune Co. control of Chapter 11 case — chicagotribune.com – “A bankruptcy judge said Tribune Co. can keep control of its Chapter 11 case for three-and-a-half more months as it looks to sell off some assets, including the Chicago Cubs, in its bid to exit bankruptcy protection.

    Judge Kevin J. Carey of the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Wilmington, Del., on Monday gave the publisher of the Chicago Tribune an extension to Nov. 30 to file its reorganization plan to emerge from bankruptcy and to repay creditors. He also set a March 15, 2010, deadline for the media giant to win creditor support for a plan.”

  • delicious blog » Sharing Made Easier: Email and Tweet Your Bookmarks – “If you use Twitter and want to send bookmarks to your Twitter feed, associate a Twitter account (only a single Twitter account can be associated at one time) by logging into Twitter under the Twitter panel. You have the option to send all your saved bookmarks to Twitter by selecting the “Tweet all bookmarks unless private” checkbox when you add the Twitter account. If you’ve selected this option, your Twitter account will appear by default in the Send field.”
  • Juan_Gris
  • Juan Gris

Wonder of Whifling

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“The Wonder of Whiffling: (and Other Extraordinary Words in the English Language)” (Adam Jacot de Boinod)

The author of Toujours Tingo


Toujours Tingo

Adam Jacot de Boinod, has written a new book:

“The Wonder of Whiffling” is a hugely enjoyable, surprising and rewarding tour around the language of the British Isles (with plenty of fine coinages from our English-speaking cousins across the pond, Down Under and elsewhere). Discover all sorts of words you’ve always wished existed but never knew, such as fornale, to spend one’s money before it has been earned; cagg, a solemn vow or resolution not to get drunk for a certain time; and petrichor, the pleasant smell that accompanies the first rain after a dry spell. Delving passionately into the English language, Adam Jacot de Boinod also discovers why it is you wouldn’t want to have dinner with a vice admiral of the narrow seas, why Jacobites toasted the little gentleman in black velvet, and why a Nottingham Goodnight is better than one from anywhere else.

Monsieur Jacot de Boinod1 also added, in comments to this post, the following

Delving passionately into the English language, I also discover why it is you wouldn’t want to have dinner with a vice admiral of the narrow seas, why Jacobites toasted the little gentleman in black velvet, and why a Nottingham Goodnight is better than one from anywhere else. See more on http://www.thewonderofwhiffling.com

Listening to the Conversation's Ebb and Flow

Tangentially, and surprisingly, I’m at the beginning of a cagg of my own. Vowed to forswear booze for at least a month2 – my target to resume consumption is Labor Day. Why? Mostly vanity, my pants were getting a little snug, and I was polishing a couple of bottles of wine a day. Cause and effect, most likely. Anyway, possibly more on that subject

Footnotes:
  1. I assume I’m spelling that correctly, my French language skills have atrophied to point of parody [↩]
  2. along with gluten – bread, pasta, etc. – and a few other items [↩]

The Humor of Obama

Seth Anderson1 Comment

President Obama’s cynical, quirky style of humor is one of his most endearing characteristics. I can relate to that kind of joking: it is the kind of language I might use myself.

Speaking to U.S.

Matt Bai writes about the original Skip Gates press conference question where Obama remarked

But perhaps the more jarring if overlooked moment in Obama’s answer came just before that, when he endeavored to cast himself in the place of his friend Henry Louis Gates Jr., whose trouble began when he needed to break into his own home. “I mean, if I was trying to jigger into — well, I guess this is my house now, so it probably wouldn’t happen,” the president said. Then he flashed a mischievous grin and added, “Here I’d get shot.” [view YouTube clip]

It’s hard to imagine an edgier joke than this — the nation’s president, its first black president at that, teasing about being gunned down in the White House foyer. Had Obama not gone on to malign a cop, it almost certainly would have dominated the next day’s punditry. And yet the moment was in keeping with what we have learned about Obama in the months since his inauguration. The president, it turns out, is quite funny — and sometimes a little reckless. Obama had to make his first apology just days after being elected president, for joking about Nancy Reagan’s séances. He ran into trouble with advocates for the handicapped in March, when he suggested to Jay Leno that his bowling on the campaign trail belonged in the Special Olympics. And before the Super Bowl, he angered fans of the singer Jessica Simpson by appearing to make light of her supposedly ballooning weight. (Fortunately for Obama, fewer than a dozen of those fans are old enough to vote.) You have to have a pretty determined sense of aggrievement — or just a dim view of the president generally — to take genuine offense at such throwaway one-liners. And yet they tend to obscure, if only for a day, Obama’s more serious objectives, undermining the comedian in chief’s reputation as an innately disciplined politician.

…

More recently, Obama sounded mystified by plans for a new presidential helicopter. “The helicopter I have now seems perfectly adequate to me,” he remarked dryly. “Of course, I’ve never had a helicopter before, you know? Maybe I’ve been deprived and I didn’t know it.” Other presidents mastered the telling of the canned political joke. Obama’s shtick is that he finds such stagecraft, the falsity and pomposity of modern politics, to be as laughable as we do.

Such a perspective is entirely new in the White House, born perhaps of the same deconstructionist ethos that gave us “The Simpsons” and The Onion — self-aware acts of ridicule that would have seemed wholly out of place in the age of “All in the Family.”

[Click to continue reading The Way We Live Now – Funny How? – NYTimes.com]

Refreshing, and a welcome contrast to the smug frat boy humor of the previous resident of The White House.

Nigh-Gah Nigh-Gah Nigh-Gah All In Your Face

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Or something like that, whatever Chuck D was saying.

那个1

look for a moment at China through the eyes of young [American] athletes on their first visit, and China can feel, once again, like a new frontier.

Take, for example, Mandarin’s most unfortunate homonym. The English word “that,” when used as an adjective to indicate something as in “that glove,” is translated as neige and pronounced “nay-ga.” It also is used routinely as a space-filler akin to “umm” in English. But as American visitors frequently attest, neige can sound uncomfortably close to the n-word.

“We spent the whole first week thinking, ‘What?'” said one U.S. boxer.

The confusion is hardly unique to the team. Robert Davis, a fluent Mandarin speaker who heads China programs for the Chicago Public Schools, has escorted more than 150 Chicago principals and administers to China in the past eight years, many of whom are African-American, he said. He discovered long ago that he should feature a discussion of the word neige in his pretrip orientation.
[From U.S. Olympic team learns to roll with the punches on trip to China — chicagotribune.com]

Usage here, dictionary definition here

Footnotes:
  1. a repost from my old blog [↩]

The Rant Moves to YouTube

Seth Anderson0 comment

You’ve probably seen or at least heard mention of most of these rants

Modern YouTube ranters include Christian Bale, William Shatner, Alec Baldwin and Lily Tomlin, the arrogant actors; Jim Mora and Dennis Green, the furious football coaches; Axl Rose, the intense rocker; Pat Condell, the smug atheist; Rick Santelli, the fed-up CNBC reporter; and Kanye West, the imperious musician. In a less-masculine key are end-of-rope rants by Chris Crocker, the Britney Spears superfan, and Tricia Walsh-Smith, the vengeful and off-kilter ex-wife.

Fictional YouTube rants — scenes from movies and TV that have found a second life online — include Jeremy Piven’s dressing-down of his therapist in “Entourage” (“I thought . . . you could give her [his wife] a pill that could either fix it or make her a mute!”) and Al Pacino’s savage tirade in “Glengarry Glen Ross” (“Where did you learn your trade . . . , you idiot? Who ever told you. That you. Could work. With men?”).

Watch all these rants — there should be a greatest-hits album — and intriguing patterns emerge. First, the Chicago connection. Axl Rose’s heated 1992 soliloquy about his cruel family took place at a theater outside the city. Lee Elia, the onetime manager of the Chicago Cubs, ranted memorably about disloyal fans at Wrigley Field. This year, Rick Santelli raged against the president’s housing plan from the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. “Glengarry Glen Ross” is set in Chicago — the hometown of its author, David Mamet, the nation’s leading playwright of rants.

Second, rants happen in prose, and often ugly, spluttery prose. Not poetry. Verse tirades (including Shaquille O’Neal’s rap roast of Kobe Bryant and Nas’s “I embrace y’all with Napalm” ripping of Jay-Z) are far too elegant to be rants, which are simultaneously more dangerous and more pathetic. The rhyme that dominates rants is not a rhyme at all but a repetition: a word matched exactly with itself, as in Bale’s harangue on the set of “Terminator Salvation,” in which he spit out a single obscenity some three dozen times. (As a general rule, inflection substitutes for reason.)

[Click to continue reading The Medium – The Rant Moves to YouTube – NYTimes.com]

This is placeholder text:I want to find as many of these rants on YouTube as I can. For amusement purposes only, of course, no wagering allowed.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3HURJNd0J4U

Ricky Roma all but destroys Williamson after the latter screws up Roma’s big sale. One of the two great scenes from Glengarry Glen Ross, and one of Pacino’s best monologues.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tLXVuy0h29c

Christian Bale Goes nuts on the set of “Terminator Salvation”

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3HURJNd0J4U

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GpVuxgSxFFE

Jessica Savitch goes on a tirade. Don’t know if she’s totally in the wrong though, after all the anchor is the one that ends up looking silly, even if its everyone behind the scenes that screwed up

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uGDC2J_E0rY

Live performance in Rosemont (Chicago), Illinois, 1992.04.09. Axl talks about the things he said in his Rolling Stone interview about his upbringing.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uv23pqH9iG0

Elia’s outburst occurred on April 29, 1983, after the Cubs suffered a one-run home loss to the Los Angeles Dodgers.
The rant took place during a postgame session with reporters in his office. Elia was pissed off at the continual booing by the Wrigley crowd (both during and after the game) and frustrated that no one could see beyond the Cubs’ 5-14 record for any of the progress he felt the team was making.
The fact that Elia’s rant has been preserved for posterity is something of a miracle. In the early 80s, “baseball reporters didn’t work with tape recorders. But radio guys certainly did. So it was that Elia’s outburst came to be a part of the public domain.”
Les Grobstein, aka “ubiquitous” Les, was lurking on the edges of Elia’s office, with tape rolling. For Grobstein, graduate of Chicago’s Von Steuben High School, “it was his Zapruder moment.” Elia commented that he dearly wished Grobstein “had gotten a flat tire on his way to Wrigley that afternoon.”

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6pp6WC1Ocz4

The title explains it all. Michael Richards becomes combative and explodes in a vile, racist diatribe at Laugh Factory in LA.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iAeLFjNCb3A

Bill Shatner asks the question – ‘What is it with George Takei and his issues with me?’ The question is based on George Takei’s recent marriage and the multitude of press stories about his decision not to invite William Shatner to his wedding

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8J0-ZatDHug – Alec Baldwin yelling at his daughter

Minatory

Seth Anderson0 comment

A word I was not familiar with, before today

MEANING:
adjective: Threatening or menacing.

ETYMOLOGY:
From Latin minari (to threaten), from minae (threats). Ultimately from the Indo-European root men- (project) that is also the source of menace, mountain, eminent, promenade, demean, amenable, and mouth.

[Click to continue reading A.Word.A.Day –minatory]

Do not Bring Yer Guns to Town
[Don’t Bring Yer Guns to Town – Trident Cannery, Ketchikan, Alaska]

One could say the Cambridge police officer involved in the Professor Gates false arrest incident claimed that Gates was acting in a minatory fashion towards the officer, even though facts later proved the officer’s description as erroneous and laughably misleading.

Epeolatry

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“THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE” (O. W. HOLMES)

words at the Seattle Public Library
[words at the Seattle Public Library]

I’ve been meaning to work this word into conversation for a while now, ever since I encountered it on the Word-of-the-Day email list. It seems like a fun, obscure thing to accuse someone of1

Similar to idolatry and iconodulism, epeolatry literally means the worship of words. It derives from epos, which unlike logos more specifically means word in Greek, and was apparently coined in 1860 by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.[1]. You may be hard-pressed to find an admitted epolatrist because the term connotes a sort of blind devotion, sanctimony, or hypocrisy; or more specifically, an advanced form of reification. Figuratively speaking, the word can be playfully applied to philologists, linguists, or lexicographers.
The term is of significant satirical value and may be used in the denigration of popular religions or belief systems. For example, one could call Christianity an epeolatric religion because the majority of its teachings hinge on the words of the Hebrew Bible. However, you are unlikely to encounter the word in any form because it remains obscure.

[From Epeolatry – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia]

This particular Oliver Wendell Holmes book2 is available at Project Gutenberg as well as Google Books


Suggested entry at the new word-centric site, Wordnik.

Footnotes:
  1. being an epeolatrist presumedly [↩]
  2. that I’ve never heard of before today [↩]

Reading Around on July 7th through July 8th

swanksalot0 comment

A few interesting links collected July 7th through July 8th:

  • Fox report suggests Pentagon policy nixing religious flyover is a sign Obama is anti-Christian | Crooks and Liars – The military was regularly providing flyovers at countless evangelical Christian events all over the country, not only violating the regulations prohibiting military participation in religious events, but spending millions of dollars of taxpayer money in the process.

    MRFF began exposing these events, which included flyovers on the five holidays when flyovers at civilian events are permitted, and even a few at National Day of Prayer events, and began to see some decline in their frequency, but we weren’t sure if the number of flyovers at these events was really decreasing, or if the military and organizers of these events were just being more careful not to make the nature of the events so obvious.

    Well, needless to say, the following letter denying, for the first time in 42 years, the request for a flyover at one Christian rally…was the best 4th of July present MRFF could have asked for.

  • Branding blunder gives Russia-Nigeria energy linkup a bad name – Russia’s attempt to create a joint gas venture with Nigeria is set to become one of the classic branding disasters of all time ‑ after the new company was named Nigaz.

    …the name has “rather different connotations” for English-speakers.

    It recalled other international branding mishaps including the Ford Pinto ‑ which in Brazil means small penis ‑ and the Pepsi slogan “come alive with the Pepsi generation”. In Taiwan this rousing motto translated as “Pepsi will bring your ancestors back from the dead”.

  • Living the “art” Life – … there is more, so much more to art…