Monthly Archives: February 2010
Our embassy, ourselves
Warren Ellis, a comic book writer who has quickly become one of my favorite people on the Internet, offers an evaluation of the proposed design for the new U.S. Embassy in London. “Release the Mongolian Terror Trout!”
Words of Others | Hold on to Your Spine
This week’s Words of Others, like last week’s, comes from Warren Ellis’ Shivering Sands, a collection of essays by the British comic book writer.
In “Nothing Happened,” written in 2003, Ellis uses Marilyn Manson as a jumping-off point, specifically an interview in which Manson “explains his evocation of Cabaret in his recent work as a reaction to recent times, Thirties vaudeville as a haven from politics.”
Ellis interprets Manson’s message as a reaction to the start of a new century that is pretty much like the end of the last, and Ellis doesn’t like that idea: “Is it a creative reaction, to answer ‘nothing’s happened’ with ‘nothing’s going to happen and you can’t do shit about it’?”
And then Ellis closes with absolute brilliance (warning, contains language):
The lesson of the 1930s is that, in a time of encroaching conservatism and creeping repression, the correct response is not to flush your fucking spine down the toilet.
Words of Others | Why We Write
I’m reading Shivering Sands, a collection of short essays and other writing by British comic book writer Warren Ellis. A lot of it is thoughts on writing and the creative process, both his and others’. In “Comics and Ideas,” he talks about how comics educate and transmit ideas. It concludes with this line:
The best fiction, like the best reportage, is about the writer telling the reader where they think they are today, and what they think it looks like.
The Gospel of Hyperbole
Jan Freeman, who writes The Word column for the Boston Globe, had a good one yesterday about two words that fell down with all the snow last week on the East Coast: snowmageddon and snowpocalypse. I love them both. Ms. Freeman explores their origins and delves into the root words, explaining why snowpocalypse might better reflect the mood under all that snow:
If you have any purist leanings, there are reasons to go with snowpocalypse. It’s based on apocalypse, the Greek word for “unveiling, revelation” and the alternative name for the Book of Revelation, that vision of the world’s end. Well into the 19th century, apocalypse could still be used as an everyday synonym for “disclosure,” but by the end of the century it had acquired a darker meaning: a catastrophe or disaster of the scale foretold in Revelation, one that does (in the Oxford English Dictionary’s words) “drastic, irreversible damage to human society or the environment, esp. on a global scale; a cataclysm.”
Armageddon, on the other hand, is just one battle, a single event in the long unrolling of the end times; its name is a site in Israel, says the OED, “the place of the last decisive battle at the Day of Judgement; hence [it is] used allusively for any ‘final’ conflict on a great scale.”
But she also thinks snowmaegeddon will win out. Read the full story to find out why.
As I write this late Sunday night, snow is falling on Louisville, making its way slowly east. It may be there by now. Search your souls, sinful, liberal East Coast types. The end is nigh. Or at least the beginning. Of more shoveling.
Words of Others | Lost Things
From the story “Feeders and Eaters” in Neil Gaiman’s Fragile Things:
I was beginning to wonder whether he had a right arm. Maybe the sleeve was empty. Not that it was any of my business. Nobody gets through life without losing a few things on the way.
Thoughts interrupted
In Monday’s Words of Others, I quoted from chapter of the book “An Artist in Treason” in which our villain, James Wilkinson, has moved to the frontier in Kentucky. One of Wilkinson’s talents was in giving good first impressions to everyone he met (only to borrow, betray, and disappoint later). A description of one such impression gave me a word to explore:
In staccato style, a fellow settler, Humphrey Marshall, noted the impact of Wilkinson’s physical presence, energy, and wit: “A person not quite tall enough to be perfectly elegant, compensated by symmetry and appearance of health and strength; a countenance open, mild, capacious and beaming with intelligence; a gait firm, manly and facile; manners bland, accommodating and popular; and address easy polite and gracious, invited approach, gave access, assured attention, cordiality and ease. By these fair terms, he conciliated; by these he captivated.”
Whoa. I thought I was reading a history book, not a romance novel.
Steamy or not, that description was indeed staccato. The definitions from Webster’s New World:
- 1. In musical direction: With distinct breaks between successive tones: usually indicated by a dot (staccato mark) placed over or under each note to be so produced.
- 2. Made up of abrupt, distinct elements or sounds, as in a staccato outburst of gunfire.
The American Heritage Dictionary had the best etymology I could find. It led back twice to related words and etymologies:
- Staccato: From the Italian past participle of staccare, meaning to detach, short for distaccare, from the obsolete French destacher, from the Old French destachier. See detach.
- Detach: From the French détacher, from the Old French destachier : des-, de- + attachier, meaning to attach. See attach.
- Attach: From the Middle English attachen, from the Old French attachier, an alteration of estachier, from estache, meaning stake, of Germanic origin.
Putting a damper on a ‘pun’
Ah, Super Bowl week. Wall-to-wall media coverage that results in both reporters and athletes looking a little ridiculous. (Evidence: We had a picture in today’s paper of a player bench-pressing a reporter.)
In yesterday’s paper, we had a story about rain forcing “media day activities” inside. It included this:
It led Saints running back Reggie Bush to provide the day’s first pun.
“Well, it put a damper on things,” he said.
This could have been an actual pun. But a lot of people seem to think damper actually means “to get wet”; I almost never see it used in anything but a story about rain ruining something. Since it doesn’t mean that, I don’t think it even really works as a pun, because it wouldn’t be understood as one.
Damper actually means to depress or deaden, with its roots going back to choking or smothering fumes.
Here are damper’s definitions, from Webster’s New World. The first is the relevant one here, with the second being related:
- 1. Anything that deadens or depresses.
- 2. A movable plate or valve in the flue of a stove or furnace, for controlling the draft.
- 3. A device to check vibration in the strings of a stringed keyboard instrument.
- 4. A device for lessening the oscillation of a magnetic needle, a moving coil, etc.
I needed the OED to get deeper into the etymology, so a friend checked it out for me. Damper comes from the verb damp. The relevant defintions:
- 1a. Transitive. To affect with ‘damp’, to stifle, choke, extinguish; to dull, deaden (fire, sound, etc.). Also figurative.
- 1b. To damp down (a fire or furnace): to cover or fill it with small coal, ashes, or coke, so as to check combustion and prevent its going out, when not required for some time. Also figurative.
1a refers to damp as a noun, and in the etymology for damp as a verb, the OED points back to a meaning of damp as a noun that is obsolete except when used in a coal-mining context:
- 1a. An exhalation, a vapour or gas, of a noxious kind. Obsolete.
- 1b. Specifically in coal mines: (a) = CHOKE-DAMP; also called black damp, and suffocating damp. (b) = FIRE-DAMP, formerly fulminating damp.
The OED gives this etymology for damp: “Corresponds with the Middle Low German and the modern Dutch and Danish damp, meaning vapour, steam, smoke; the modern Icelandic dampr, meaning steam; the Middle High German dampf, tampf and modern German dampf, meaning vapour, steam; compares also to the Swedish damb, meaning dust.”
Bowdlerized over
I’m still reading Neil Gaiman’s short-story collection Fragile Things, and found a word that was new to me in the story “The Problem of Susan”:
The Grimms’ stories were collected for adults and, when the Grimms realized the books were being read in the nursery, were bowdlerized to make them more appropriate.
The American Heritage Dictionary defines bowdlerize as ” To remove material that is considered offensive or objectionable from (a book, for example).” A friend checked the OED for me, and it had a more colorful definition: “To expurgate (a book or writing), by omitting or modifying words or passages considered indelicate or offensive; to castrate.”
The OED also had the best etymology: “From the name of Dr. T. Bowdler, who in 1818 published an edition of Shakespeare, ‘in which those words and expressions are omitted which cannot with propriety be read aloud in a family’.”
Wow, this reminds me of the story that was circulating last week about the California school district that is taking dictionaries out of classrooms because they have a definition of oral sex. I guess they are just bowdlerizing the entire book.
Words of Others | The Hands of Industry
My wife gave me a book for Christmas that is turning out to be really interesting: An Artist in Treason: The Extraordinary Double Life of General James Wilkinson — Commander in Chief of the U.S. Army and Agent 13 in the Spanish Secret Service. (I though the long subtitle explains the book pretty well.)
Wilkinson started out in the army during the American Revolution, when he was in his late teens and early twenties. He ended up betraying too many of his mentors and left before the war was over. He then moved his young family to Kentucky, where so many of us intrepid Easterners have gone to find our fortunes. (Wilkinson was from Maryland; his wife from the great city of Philadelphia.)
Others saw Kentucky as a promising land as well, including “The Dutch-born, South Carolina-based explorer John William de Brahm.” He is quoted in the book, describing Kentucky in 1756:
“The vallies are of the richest soil, equal to manure itself, impossible in appearance ever to wear out. This country seems longing for the hands of industry to receive its hidden treasures, which nature has been collecting and toiling since the beginning ready to deliver them up.”
Well, the hands of industry certainly did receive those hidden treasures. I always think it is interesting how much the world has changed, that what once seemed like the limitless bounty of Providence has given way to resources so depleted that strip mining, mountaintop removal mining, deforestation, and worn-out soil are the result. This is true everywhere, not just in Kentucky, but Kentucky is where I live for now, so this struck a chord.
