10 Years After

My return to college

7.25.2005

Everybody Enjoys a Holy War


strunk & white 1:1

7.12.2005

The Teachers Are Afraid Of The Pupils

Hackers, Spelling, and Grammar?

6.21.2005

One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer


I first encountered Kingsley Amis a few years back when I picked up his "The King's English: a guide to modern English." It was witty and fabulous. Then, last year sometime, I picked up his "On Drink" from The Book Thing in Baltimore. Fantastic.

I thought three things from "On Drink" worth blogging:
Publisher's Note

Linguists tell us that the the differences between American English and English English are small and mostly concentrated around the everyday things of life. Drink being, indubitably, onbe fo the most everyday things of life and Kingsley Amis being unredeemably, gloriously English, the reader of On Drink will perhaps find here and there an occasional unfamiliar usage or reference. We have pondered this problem, polled our numbers, and have decided against tampering with Mr. Amis's Anglicisms, for, we think, the very good reason that he always says things better than we could say them, even when he says them in a different way.
To be sure, the problem is not always severe. When the author speaks, as Englishmen will, of pubs, motor cars, cupboards and hogsheads, we more or less understand. As for pence and pounds, it's no good converting them to dollars anyhow; they change too often these days. Worthington and Double Diamond (two beers, we think) are a bit more difficult, and while The Wine Development Board might speak for itself, we were baffled by G.L.C.(a government term?) and V.A.T. (not the Scotch whisky, we believe). Furthermore, if you are as puzzled as we are by the identity of among others, Donald Watt, George Gale, T. G. Rosenthall and, notably, Reginald Bosanquet, inventor of his own "Golden Elixir" - may it prolong his own life and that of all who imbibe it - then we can only recommend the resources of your local library, or, more suitable to the subject, the resources of your local bar.
We could go on, to literary references for instance, but we've been interrupted. What's you say, barman?"Time please"? Ah well, bottoms up.
Inexplicable I found myself with a curiosity for absinthe when I first encountered reading about it. I think it was an article in Wired magazine. Several years after that I re-encountered it reading something by Peter Mayle. A friend of mine said she ordered a bottle of actual absinthe online. I must look into this. Here's Amis' comment on the drink and a bit of etymology, to boot.
[In a list of store bought drinks to keep on hand]
6. A pseudo-absinthe such as Pernod or Ricard. True absinthe (the name is from a Greek word meaning 'undrinkable') has been illegal in most places for a long time. It is, or was, flavoured with the herb wormwood, which, as the French authorities noticed after years of using absinthe in their army to combat fever, 'acts powerfully on the nerve-centers, and causes delirium and hallucinations, followed in some cases by idiocy'(Encyclopedia Britannica). The perfectly wholesome successors to absinthe are flavoured with ANSI, or aniseed. The result always reminds me, not unpleasantly, of those paregoric cough-sweets children ate before the war, and I see that paregoric does contain aniseed, but throws in opium, camphor and benzoic acid as well, so I am probably just being nostalgic. Anyway, when recipes call for absinthe, as they can still do if their compilers and revisers have been too ignorant or lazy to make the change, use Pernod or Ricard instead.
Incidentally, what happened about vermouth, which is also flavoured with wormwood? - 'vermouth' being a French or German attempt to say 'wormwood'. Could the idiocy, or bloody foolishness, which comes to afflict the multi-martini-man be the result of wormwood in the vermouth? No. Is is the alcohol, you see. (And I suspect it was the alcohol in the absinthe, too, that caused the trouble all along, when the stuff was taken to excess.)
(page 54-5)
I'm not sure about the etymology of absinthe. AHD relates [Middle English, wormwood, from Old French, from Latin absinthium, from Greek apsinthion.]It is more clear on vermouth, [French vermout, from German Wermut, from Middle High German wermuot, wormwood, from Old High German wermuota.] Looking up wormwood the AHD gives [Middle English wormwode, alteration (influenced by worm, worm, and wode, wood, perhaps from the use of its leaves as a vermifuge), of wermod from Old English wermõd, from Germanic *wermõdaz.](please note: instead of a tilde over the 'o' it should just be a solid bar). Easton's 1897 Bible Dictionary ties back to the Greek meaning of the word:
Heb. la'anah, the Artemisia absinthium of botanists. It is noted for its intense
bitterness (Deut. 29:18; Prov. 5:4; Jer. 9:15; Amos 5:7). It is a type of
bitterness, affliction, remorse, punitive suffering. In Amos 6:12 this Hebrew
word is rendered "hemlock" (R.V., "wormwood"). In the symbolical language of
the Apocalypse (Rev. 8:10, 11) a star is represented as falling on the waters
of the earth, causing the third part of the water to turn wormwood. The name by
which the Greeks designated it, absinthion, means "undrinkable." The absinthe of
France is distilled from a species of this plant. The "southernwood" or "old
man," cultivated in cottage gardens on account of its fragrance, is another
species of it.




Why Scotch Whisky and not whiskey you might ask. A small matter of lycography he takes up later: "for the factually minded: only Scotch may legally be spelt without the 'e'. (footnote page 39).

6.19.2005

Do Not Go Quietly Unto Your Grave


A short time back I picked up "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" by Jean-Dominique Bauby from the shelf of free book at the campus library. It's a wonderful true story about a French editor who inexplicably becomes paralyzed. There is a chapter that tells how he was able to write this book since he was paralyzed:
The Alphabet

I am fond of my alphabet letters. At night, when it is a little too dark and the only sign of life is the small red spot in the center of the television screen, vowels and consonants dance for me to a Charles Trent tune: "Dear Venice, Sweet Venice, I'll always remember you . . . " Hand in hand, the letters cross the room, whirl around the bed, sweep past the window, wriggle across the wall, swoop to the door, and return to begin again.
E S A R I N T U L O M D P C F B
V H G J Q Z Y X K W

The jumbled appearance of my chorus line stems not from chance but from cunning calculation. More than an alphabet, it is a bit parade in which each letter is placed according to the frequency of it use in the French language. That is why E dances proudly out in front, while W labors to hold on to last place. B resents pushed back next to V, and haughty J - which begins so many sentences in French - is amazed to find itself so near the rear of the pack. Rolypoly G is annoyed to have to trade places with H, while T and U, the tender components of tu, rejoice that they have not been separated. All this reshuffling has a purpose: to make it easier for those who wish to communicate to me.

It is a simple enough system. You red off the alphabet (ESA version, not ABC) until, with a blink of my eye, I stop you at the letter to be noted. The maneuver is repeated for the letters that follow, so that fairly soon you have a whole word, and then fragments of more or less intelligible sentences. That, at least, is the theory. In reality, all does not go well for some visitors. because of nervousness, impatience, or obtuseness, performances vary in the handling of the code (which is what we call this method of transcribing my thoughts). Crossword fans and Scrabble players have a head start. Girls manage better than boys. By dint of practice, some of them know the code by heart and no longer even turn to our special notebook - the one containing the order of the letters and in which all my words are set down like the Delphic oracle's.

Indeed, I wonder what conclusions anthropologists of the year 3000 will reach if they ever chance to leaf through these notepbooks, where haphazardly scribbled remarks like "The physical therapist is pregnant," " Mainly on the legs," Arthur Rimbaud," and "The French team played like pigs" are interspersed with unintelligible gibberish, misspelled words, lost letters, mottied syllables.

Nervous visitors come most quickly to grief. They reel off the alphabet tonelessly, at top speed, jotting down letters almost at random; and then, seeing the meaningless result, exclaim, "I'm no idiot!" But in the final analysis, their anxiety gives me a chance to rest, for they take charge of the the whole conversation, providing both questions and answers, and I am spared the task of holding up my end. Reticent people are much more difficult. If I ask them, "How are you?" they answer, "Fine," immediately putting the ball back in my court. With some, the alphabet becomes an artillery barrage, and I need to have two or three questions ready in advance in order not to be swamped. Meticulous people never go wrong: they scrupulously note down each letter and never seek to unravel the mystery of a sentence before it is complete. Nor would they dream of completing a single word for you. Unwilling to chance the smallest error, they will never take it upon themselves to provide the "room" that follows "mush," the "ic" that follows "atom," or the "nable" without which neither "intermi" or "abomi" can exist. Such scrupulousness makes for laborious progress, but at least you avoid the misunderstandings in which impulsive visitors bog down when they neglect to verify their intuitions. Yet I understood the poetry of such mind games one day when, attempting to ask for my glass (lunettes), I was asked what I wanted to do with the moon (lune).

* * *


It reminds me of the Sherlock Holmes' case where he deciphers the underworld code of dancing men in part based on which characters are most repeated.

6.18.2005

Monsoon


Often while I am bored at work I'll look up the etymology of groups of words
at dictionary.com to amuse myself. I was doing weather terms the other day and was surprised by Monsoon. I was thinking it was some a word from maybe an Indic language or somewhere from the Indian Ocean or South Pacific.

[Obsolete Dutch monssoen, from Portuguese monção, from Arabic mawsim, season, from wasama, to mark. See wsm in Semitic Roots.]

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