Category: Yeah Yeah Yeah

A little dig

Sly closing remark by Bill Poser at the end of a Language Log post about garbled entomology in a Customs and Border Protection press release (with my spelling correction):

The odd wording appears to have originated with Customs, in this press release. (Customs is now part of the “Department of Homeland Security” but I avoid using this name. Whenever I see it, I hear “Reichssicherheitshauptamt“.)

From the Director

A Warning:

There will be no gunfire in this production.
There will be no smoking of cigarettes during this production.
No strobe light will be used.
There will be no intermission.
There will be no strong language.

If you are looking for any of the above when attending the theatre, we are sorry to disappoint you. However, we do encourage you to remain.

What there WILL be before you on the stage is a celebration. It is a celebration of the very essence of what makes live theatre such an exciting and engaging art form. There will be two actors acting.

They will use no props. They will not change costumes. The set will not spin around them. They will use their considerable talents to create for you eight characters—both seen and unseen—as they relay one of the greatest ghost stories ever told.

Have I seduced you? Well. God be with you.

—Kathy Feininger, director’s notes to Round House Theatre’s production of The Turn of the Screw, January 1999

And yet… I must also note that this production was excellently, if minimally, designed, by a team of established talents in the D.C. theater community: Elizabeth Jenkins McFadden (scenic), Rosemary Pardee (costume), Ayun Fedorcha (lighting), and Tom McCarthy (sound).

But that’s just me

Arnold Zwickly produces two rants after my own heart. First:

Why are people so incompetent at finding e-addresses and web addresses? The hypothesis I’ve developed is that the InterWeb—the conglomeration of the Internet and the World Wide Web—makes people lazy and stupid. Here’s this amazing resource, which allows people to track down all sorts of arcane information within (at most) minutes, yet the users have come to expect that sites will be designed to offer them a single-click route to whatever they want. That’s just lazy. And they seem to have lost the ability to search things out for themselves. The InterWeb has made them stupid.

But, in a subsequent parenthesis, he backs off a bit. Give ’em hell, Arnold! Contrariwise, but making the same point: earlier this week I watched a training video (basically a spoken narration over screenshots of a developer writing code) that involved a side trip to a popular download site. We watched the coder-narrator type the name of the download site into a search box and then click through the search results. Oy vey! Bookmarks and URLs are your friends, people!

Next, Zwickly talks more moderately about the bleed-through of technical language into general use, and the repurposing of common words like normal and mass for technical purposes. He uses a favorite bête noire of mine as an example:

The fact is that ordinary language is pressed into service in a number of ways to provide technical vocabulary, which then has a very specialized meaning in certain contexts, and at the same time technical vocabulary “leaks out” into ordinary language. People get the general drift of the technical vocabulary, but (usually not knowing either the etymology OR the context of its technical use) do their best to interpret what they hear.

And they get a lot of it wrong, from the point of view of people in the technical fields. Epicenter obviously refers to a location (of an earthquake)—to, in some sense, the central point where the earthquake took place. Besides center, there’s an extra element epi-, which clearly must contribute something. So the epi- adds extra stuff, probably something emphatic: the epicenter is, people reason, the EXACT center. (Technically, it’s the location on the earth’s surface OVER the place where the earthquake event happened, underground.) Now, getting all enraged about the common-language use of epicenter for the central point of an event—it seems to be standard now—is just as silly as getting all enraged about the common-language use of vegetables to refer to tomatoes, zucchini, peppers, eggplants, etc., all of which are technically fruits in one scheme of biological terminology.

I take his point, that it’s a question of degree. I don’t get bent about the proper use of fruit the way my agronomist ex probably does, but I haven’t given up on epicenter yet. When epi- changes its meaning from “upon” to “exactly,” something is lost: the ability to make sense of a related word like epidermis (“the layer above the dermis”) or epidemic (“a scourge upon the people”).

Tom Stoppard’s Henry says in Scene 5 of The Real Thing:

[Words are] innocent, neutral, precise, standing for this, describing that, meaning the other, so that if you look after them you can build bridges across incomprehension and chaos. But when they get their corners knocked off, they’re no good any more…. [Words] deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you can nudge the world a little or make a poem which children will speak for you when you’re dead.

It’s not working

Okay, it’s against my better judgement, but I’ll bite—I don’t normally respond to goads from creationists, because what results is not dialogue but mutual sniping, but I am rising to the bait from Robert Bowie Johnson Jr., who proposes the expression “Slime-Snake-Monkey-People” to refer to adherents of “Darwinism, a closed-minded, anti-Creator mindset which compels them to ignore or deny any evidence which tends to validate the Book of Genesis.” Supposedly, as the press release suggests, skeptics will be shamed by such a risible epithet. Oh, yes, and “since Slime-Snake-Monkey-People insist they evolved over millions of years through a countless series of random mutations, Christians should also refer to them as ‘mutants.'”

Online, at least, Johnson doesn’t seem to be getting much traction with his intended audience. Most of the current search results point to blogs unsympathetic to his cause. It might have something to do with his unconventional thesis that Greek art recapitulates the stories in Genesis.

Some links: 17

Via kottke.org, Wikigroaning is the dubious pastime of comparing the length and quality of a Wikipedia article on a general-interest topic (say, Knight) to a similarly-titled one on some wisp of useless fanfluff (Jedi Knight). For instance, while the article on Trail of Tears runs to 7 screens, the one for Tears for Fears runs to 13.

Extra points, I suppose, if you’ve never even heard of the pop-culture half of your article pair.

We have met the enemy

Wyatt Mason takes his time getting to the point, but it’s a good one, well made:

“Does it concern you,” the [reporter] asked, stuttering, “that the Beirut airport has been bombed, and do you see a risk of triggering a wider war? And on Iran, they’ve so far refused to respond. Is it now past the deadline, or do they still have more time to respond?”

“I thought,” [George] Bush replied, “you were going to ask about the pig.”

Try to ignore, if you can, the image of the carcass of a pig, Bush poised, knife in hand, ready to carve. Consider instead that when asked on an international stage about real carnage—about spreading violence in the Middle East, about a constellation of worries suggesting a world at the brink of war—the president’s reply did not take the questioner’s inquiry seriously but, rather, sarcastically. His rhetoric sounded less like that of a steward of state—one addressing serious matters with sobriety—than that of a smartass. And this was not Juvenal’s sarcasm, or Twain’s, or even [Stephen] Colbert’s: it was not elegantly tuned to a point nor artfully part of a formal design. It was, instead, almost perfectly inappropriate and, of course, not unindicative of the president’s normal rhetorical mode. For it is not, I think, as is so often said, that the president is as much inarticulate as he is too clearly articulate, in a way: his tone, consistently condescending, betrays his sense of being, like a satirist, above those he calls down to. And that tone—carelessly sarcastic, thoughtlessly ironic, indiscriminately sardonic—that is the very one you now find everywhere. Bush is us; Bush is me: his is the same sarcasm I employ when I tell my father, once again, that of course I didn’t read today’s op-ed.