Monthly Archives: July 2010

The Washington Post had a really interesting article about Salt, the new Angelina Jolie spy movie out today. The article talks about how Jolie is charting a career course that is traditionally only taken by male actors, splitting her time between serious dramas and action flicks, while avoiding genres like romantic comedies.

But what really caught my eye was the interesting word used in the article:

If “Salt” makes anything clear, it’s that the most superhuman stunt Jolie performs in the movie can’t be found in the over-the-top set pieces, or in her deceptively layered performance as the film’s slippery title character — or even in the marmoreal perfection she has reached as a physically flawless screen object.

The OED definition of marmoreal:

• Resembling marble or a marble statue; cold (also smooth, white, etc.) like marble.

Marmoreal comes from the classical Latin marmoreus, which comes from marmor, meaning marble. One of those times that I wish my two years of high school Latin had taken. This seems like  a bit of an obscure word to use in a pop-culture article, but it’s the right one here for what the writer wanted to say. Movie stars do cultivate that statue-like perfection.

In April, I started selling mugs and T-shirts with the Talk Wordy to Me logo to raise money for the American Copy Editors Society Education Fund. I have made $55 from them so far.

Now I am debuting a new design, one that should be of broader interest to copy editors:

My friend Lindsay Hack, a page designer at The Courier-Journal, donated her time to making that. She’s awesome. (Lindsay also designs jewelry. She sells it on Etsy.)

And thanks to Andy Bechtel for refining my original idea.

Both the mugs and T-shirts have color and style customization options on the right side of the product pages in my Zazzle store. (Please use that link or the one in the right column of this site. I get an extra 15% for any sales made through those links, which contain a referral code.) I get 10% on each sale, plus the 15% for the referral, so 25% of your purchase will support ACES. I also get a bonus if sales reach certain targets.

The original Talk Wordy to Me mugs and T-shirts are still available as well.

Thanks in advance to everyone who buys something!

As I wrote yesterday, I’ve started reading Helmet for my Pillow, the World War II memoir of Robert Leckie, who served in the First Marine Division. The book was published in 1957, and Leckie’s writing shows how different the tolerance for foul words was back then. (Obviously, this post will contain some language.) The worst he’ll write so far are words like bastard and raggedy-assed.

This reluctance to use the foul language common among soldiers contrasts sharply with The Pacific, the HBO miniseries that was partly based on Helmet for my Pillow. The episodes of that show were filled with all the salty language that lurks offstage in the book.

Early in the book, Leckie talks about the Marine who took recruits to the train headed for the training center at Parris Island in South Carolina:

The master gunnery sergeant who became out momentary shepherd made the fact plainer to us. Those rich mellow blasphemous oaths that were to become so familiar to me flowed from his lips with the consummate ease of one who had spent a lifetime in vituperation.

(To vituperate is “to rebuke or criticize harshly or abusively; berate. See synonyms at scold,” according to the American Heritage Dictionary.)

Like other times in the book when he talks about foul language, Leckie never shares what was said. It’s kind of like a horror book or movie where the really gory stuff takes place without being described or shown, leaving it to your imagination. When it’s well done, that can be a good thing, and Helmet for my Pillow is very well done. Here’s another passage, from training at Parris Island:

The rifle range also gave me my first full audition of the marine cursing facility. There had been slight samplings of it in the barracks, but never anything like the utter blasphemy and obscenity of the rifle range. There were noncommissioned officers there who could not put two sentences together without bridging them with a curse, an oath, an imprecation. To hear them made our flesh creep, made those with any depth of religious feeling flush with anger and wish to be at the weather-beaten throats of the blasphemers.

We would become inured to it, in time, have it even on our own lips. We would come to recognize it as meaning no offense. But then it shocked us.

How could they develop such facility with mere imprecation? This was no vituperation. It was only cursing, obscenity, blasphemy, profanity — none of which is ever profuse or original — yet it came spouting out in amazing variety.

Always there was the word. Always there was that four-letter ugly sound that men in uniform have expanded into the single substance of the linguistic world. It was a handle, a hyphen, a hyperbole; verb, noun, modifier; yes, even conjunction. It described food, fatigue, metaphysics. It stood for everything and meant nothing; an insulting word, it was never used as an insult; crudely descriptive of the sexual act, it was never used to describe it; base, it meant the best; ugly, it modified beauty; it was the name and the nomenclature of the voice of emptiness, but one heard it from chaplains and captains, from Pfc.’s and Ph.D.’s — until, finally, one could only surmise that if a visitor unacquainted with English were to overhear our conversations he would, in the way of the Higher Criticism, demonstrate by measurement and numerical incidence that this little word must assuredly be the thing for which we were fighting.

(To imprecate is “to invoke evil upon; curse,” according to the AHD.)

I’ve read and heard plenty of people describe all the ways fuck can be used, but never so eloquently, and never without actually using the word. Leckie’s analysis reads almost like poetry, as does much of the book.

Amanda Palmer, who’s part of the Dresden Dolls and has a great solo album, Who Killed Amanda Palmer?, also writes a a good blog. She went to a Lady Gaga concert on the Fourth of July and wrote a long blog post about it. It’s a bit rambling, but very interesting. She captures how I mostly feel about Lady Gaga here (contains language):

i’m not really a fan of the music (disco dance music doesn’t do it for me, and some of the lyrics drive me nuts), and i’m not even sure i’m a fan of the performer, but i’m definitely a fan of other aspects…the fact that she writes her own tunes, and her off-song message (her songs kind of have a hard-to-read message, but her stance in interviews etc is generally: be a freak, be yourself, gay is good, self-expression is the shit. to which i say: RAH RAH AH AH AH).

I like some of the Lady Gaga songs if I’m in the right mood, but that’s about how I feel. Way deeper in the post, Palmer writes this, which I liked:

all these voices in your head bicker and argue and obscure the real key to freedom:

your ability to stand still and ask:

who do i want to be

and what do i want to do

RIGHT. NOW.

?

There’s really a lot of interesting stuff in there if you have 10 minutes to have your thoughts provoked.

Earlier this month, the New York Times had an article about the nightclub scene that is emerging in Baghdad despite the safety risks. I came across a word that I see a lot but didn’t know what it means in a paragraph about one nightclub owner, Antoine al-Hage:

One of the Iraqi partners in the club, Jumaa al-Musawi, seemed to appreciate Mr. Hage’s verve. The restaurant, he worried rightfully, was a hazardous adventure, but he said it was worth trying.

I checked verve out in the American Heritage Dictionary:

• 1. Energy and enthusiasm in the expression of ideas, especially in artistic performance or composition.
• 2. Vitality; liveliness.
• 3. Archaic. Aptitude; talent.

Hage certainly has enthusiasm and liveliness:

Antoine al-Hage, capitalism’s equivalent of a soldier of fortune, smiles at it all — the danger, the risk and, of course, the payoff of bringing nightlife to Iraq.

“Where there’s war,” he said, “there’s lots of money.”

The AHD etymology: “French, from Old French, meaning fanciful expression, probably from the Vulgar Latin verva, from Latin verba, plural of verbum, meaning word.”

I’ve been reading Eagle Against the Sun: The American War with Japan, by Ronald H. Spector. The book was recommended to me as an excellent one-volume history of the Pacific campaign in World War II. I’ve read a lot about the war in Europe, but I wanted to expand my scope. Before I started reading memoirs and books about specific battles, I wanted a broad look at the war, and this has been excellent.

It has also provided plenty of fodder for Talk Wordy to Me. Expect to see a few references to the book in the next week or two.

Here’s a passage from early in the book, about a new ambassador sent from Japan to the United States in February 1941:

Admiral Nomura Kishisaburo was a moderate, favorably inclined toward the U.S. Early in March he and Secretary of State Hull began a series of desultory conversations which dragged on into summer. Neither man had anything really new to offer and some historians believe the talks may have done more harm than good by obscuring how far apart in policy the two countries actually were.

I didn’t know desultory, so I looked it up in my American Heritage Dictionary:

• 1. Having no set plan; haphazard or random.
• 2. Moving or jumping from one thing to another; disconnected: a desultory speech.

And the etymology: from the “Latin dēsultōrius, meaning leaping, from dēsultor, meaning a leaper, from dēsultus, the past participle of dēsilīre, meaning to leap down : from dē-, de- + salīre, meaning to jump.”