Talk Wordy to Me

One of my Twitter pals, Erin Zulkoski (@e_zulko) had a series of tweets last night that touched on something that happened to me recently that has been bothering me:

I saw a older man eating by himself in the hospital cafeteria today and I couldn't help but stare at him. Why was he there? And alone?—
Erin Zulkoski (@e_zulko) November 16, 2011

My heart broke for him. I wanted to go over and sit with him, or just offer him a kind smile.—
Erin Zulkoski (@e_zulko) November 16, 2011

But I didn't do either. I just watched him a few more seconds. That's our problem: we watch and do nothing.—
Erin Zulkoski (@e_zulko) November 16, 2011

She’s right about that. I was stopped in a McDonald’s on my way home from work on Saturday, to pick up a McFlurry for Lauren. It was late, about 11:30, and there weren’t many people in the restaurant, working or eating. I was loitering at the counter, waiting for the burger I had ordered for myself, and there were two high school age kids also waiting. When the woman minding the counter went over to check those green on black 1980s monitors they have to keep track of the orders, one of the kid’s hands darted over the counter and came back with a drink cup, not quite magician quick, but close. Then he strolled over to the drink machine and filled up a soda, and began sipping it furtively behind the glass divider.

I stood there, watching this. I wanted to go Dirty Harry on the guy. I wanted to kick him in the nuts. I wanted to smack the drink out of his hand.

I wanted to at least say something.

I didn’t. I rationalized. Well, they’re both bigger than me. And they’re obviously assholes. I don’t want to get beaten up over a $1 Coke. Yeah.

It all happened so fast, his friend didn’t even notice right away. When he saw his friend sipping the stolen Coke, he said something I couldn’t hear, but I knew he was asking where the drink came from his friend said he’d grabbed it from behind the counter. So the friend goes over, and he obviously hasn’t done this before (he’s definitely the sidekick in this clown show) and looks around clumsily, then leeeaaaans over the counter looking for the drink cups. He was making his friend look like fucking Houdini.

Great, I think. This moron is going to get caught, and I won’t have to do anything.

Of course he doesn’t. He finally tracks down the cups and fumbles one out just before the cashier turns back around, smiling, with their food bags.

I agonized some more, and rationalized some more, and then my burger came, and I left.

Maybe speaking up wasn’t worth the potential trouble. But I couldn’t help thinking, on what seemed like a long drive the rest of the way home, that if I couldn’t stand up to petty shit like that, because it is easier, more comfortable, less risky, then what the fuck would I do when the stakes, and the risks, were higher?

It didn’t matter that it was something small. I was a coward.

I never want to feel that way again.

One of my very best friends, Nina Hoffman, wrote a really moving piece for her newspaper, Philadelphia Weekly, about her husband’s survival of and struggles with being sexually abused as a child, and about how terrible it is that the main story in the Penn State idiocy hasn’t been about sexual abuse. “I’m heartbroken,” she says.

Lauren and I made ice cream sundaes at home a few weeks ago, and we wondered about the origins of the word. It turns out it’s one of those ones that does not have a definitive etymology. From the OED:

The name is generally explained as an alteration of Sunday , either because the dish originally included leftover ice-cream sold cheaply on Monday, or because it was at first sold only on Sunday, having, according to some accounts, been devised to circumvent Sunday legislation. The alteration of the spelling is sometimes said to be out of deference to religious people’s feelings about the word Sunday. For several accounts see H. L. Mencken, The American Language Suppl. I. (1945), pp. 376–7.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t find a copy online of Mencken’s explanations. The theory about Sunday legislation seems to come from a place that banned ice cream sodas, prompting someone to offer the treat without the banned soda.

Early yesterday morning, Boston police arrested 141 people taking part in the Occupy Boston movement after they refused to leave a park downtown. As there has been in other cities where arrests have occurred, the protesters were outraged that they would be arrested while engaging in civil disobedience.

On the one hand I can see how people who are new to mass protests and civil disobedience would be surprised the first time arrests occur. But on the other hand, it shows a lack of understanding of the history of such movements.

This has resulted in some comments that seem really out of touch with the reality of confronting both the government and corporations. This one, from today’s Globe, really highlighted that:

“I think it’s disgusting that Menino said civil disobedience won’t be tolerated,’’ said Andrew Farkas, 29, of Cambridge, who held up a sign that read “Civil disobedience made this country.’’ People here are just going to resort to more drastic actions. And it’s possible that things could turn violent.’’

(Menino is Tom Menino, Boston’s mayor.)

To threaten violence over arrests during a civil disobedience action is really stupid. Civil disobedience means breaking the law. When you engage in civil disobedience, you expect to be arrested. That’s actually the point.

Martin Luther King Jr. spent countless days in prison for engaging in civil disobedience, and he never once threatened violence. The arrests draw attention to your cause, and force a confrontation with those in power. King talks about this in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail, which he wrote after being arrested for civil disobedience:

You may well ask: “Why direct action? Why sit ins, marches and so forth? Isn’t negotiation a better path?” You are quite right in calling for negotiation. Indeed, this is the very purpose of direct action. Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored. My citing the creation of tension as part of the work of the nonviolent resister may sound rather shocking. But I must confess that I am not afraid of the word “tension.” I have earnestly opposed violent tension, but there is a type of constructive, nonviolent tension which is necessary for growth. Just as Socrates felt that it was necessary to create a tension in the mind so that individuals could rise from the bondage of myths and half truths to the unfettered realm of creative analysis and objective appraisal, so must we see the need for nonviolent gadflies to create the kind of tension in society that will help men rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to the majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood. The purpose of our direct action program is to create a situation so crisis packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation. I therefore concur with you in your call for negotiation. Too long has our beloved Southland been bogged down in a tragic effort to live in monologue rather than dialogue.

If you believe in your cause, and you’re going to engage in civil disobedience, then you have to be prepared to be arrested for it. It’s a tool. And it works. Today’s Globe had two frontpage stories about Occupy Boston and the arrests. That’s the most coverage it has received since it began.

If you’re not prepared to be arrested, then you shouldn’t engage in civil disobedience. Those in power are not going to allow you to break the law just because you’re right. It took years and years for King and the rest of the civil rights movement to force change, and even now, going on 50 years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act, that work is not finished. If the Occupy Wall Street movement really hopes to accomplish anything, it has to know that these arrests are not the last and are not the biggest, but only a beginning.

As anyone has heard me complain about it knows, I’ve been having problems with my wrists for about two years. It’s the result of working eight hours a day on a computer five nights a week  for the past five years. I stretch and I use ice, and I also load up on painkillers, but the pain has never really gone away.

I’m currently in physical therapy, and it seems to be helping. I’m also using a funky new keyboard that @RoseFox loaned me to try out at work. That also seems to be putting less stress on my wrists.

But one problem I’m still having is that what I want to use a computer at home it’s painful to even think about sitting down and using my wrists even more. So I’m trying out the built-in speech recognition software that comes with Windows 7. I’m writing this post using it right now. It seems fairly accurate and it’s supposed to learn as I continue using it and correcting its mistakes.

The funniest mistake that it made while I was writing this was in the first sentence. It wrote  ”I’ve been having problems with by breasts for about two years.”

I’d like to blame my lack of blogging lately on my wrists, but mostly it’s just been laziness. Now if I could just find some software to fix that.

Yesterday, one of our Metro columnists, Yvonne Abraham, wrote about the predictable reactions of the members of Massachusetts’ congressional delegation to the debt ceiling deal:

But [John] Kerry, who is widely seen as a prospect for next Secretary of State, was very careful to avoid criticizing President Obama, who had some of his Massachusetts colleagues spitting chips for ceding way too much, too soon.

Case in point: professional chip-spitter Mike Capuano.

“At some point in his presidency, he is going to have to find some backbone,’’ said the Somerville Democrat, who has never come within a thousand miles of careful.

Yvonne is Australian, and someone wondered if spitting chips was some Australian idiom. I couldn’t find anything in my usual sources, the OED and the American Heritage Dictionary, so I turned to Twitter, where I follow at least one known Australian (@obsidiantears83). She and another Australian (@staticsan)confirmed that spitting chips is something they say down there, used to describe an angry outburst when someone is very upset. But when I asked what kind of chips they’d be spitting — wood chips or chips as in fish and chips — they thought about it and realized that it was one of those things they’d never thought about.

A bit of Googling turned up two answers, one likely true though incomplete, and one that seems apocryphal but is much more amusing.

The first comes from the Australian National Dictionary, which appears to be something produced with the Oxford University Press, and which explains language quirks of Australia. It gives this, under the entry for chips:

In the phrase to spit chips:

a. To feel extreme thirst.

1901  Bulletin Reciter 108 While you’re spitting chips like thunder … And the streams of sweat near blind you. 1940  Bulletin (Sydney) 27 Mar. 17/1 But, though he’s spittin’ chips hisself, he nacherally shrank From anythin’ to spoil that lovely thirst. 1946 A. marshall  Tell us about Turkey, Jo. 142 I was spitting chips. God, I was dry!

b. To manifest extreme anger.

1947 J. morrison  Sailors belong Ships 189 Old Mick Doyle’s with them. He’s spitting chips because they’re not using sea water. 1954 P. gladwin  Long Beat Home 17 It’s enough to make you spit chips when you think of Sydney—movies and vaudeville comedies and a decent musician once in two years. 1968 S. gore  Holy Smoke 14 When he comes rushing up—spittin’ chips, he’s so mad—young Dave only lets fly with one shot outa his ging, and the big bloke’s stonkered.

Unfortunately, there is no etymology, and an article on the Australian Broadcasting Company website says how it went from thirst to anger is unclear.

But the explanation I liked best, even though, as a coworker pointed out, it is the very definition of an apocryphal story, was this, from a site called Aussie Slangs:

Spit Chips: Aussie slang meaning to be very angry. Said to have originated from when a Prime Minister was watching a soccer match on TV but the Australian team lost against England. He was eating chips, like all Aussies do in front of the TV, and vomited because he was so angry. The next day, newspapers reported of the PM “spitting chips” and applauded him for his patriotism. “Spitting chips” has since entered the Aussie Slang Dictionary.

Patriotic vomiting? This is my new favorite way of showing you love your country.

We recently had a story that made a reference to spalled concrete. I’d never heard of this, so I asked around the desk, and while some people were familiar with the term — in this sense it meant crumbling —  it certainly seemed too obscure for the newspaper. So I changed it to crumbling.

Spall is an older word, according to the OED, with the first sense appearing around 1440 as a noun and meaning  ”a chip or splinter, especially of stone or ore.” Of its etymology, the OED says, “  Of doubtful origin: perhaps related to German spellen, meaning to split, but compare to the noun spale.” A spale is “a splinter or chip, a thin piece or strip, of wood,” and its etymology is “There is resemblance in form to Old Norse spal-, spǫlr, meaning a bar, rod, short piece, the Middle High German (and German dialect) spale, meaning rung of a ladder, and the German dialect spale, spal, meaning wooden spit, wedge; but real connection with these is doubtful.”

Spall’s noun sense eventually got verbed, with the OED showing a usage in 1758 defined as:  ”Mining. To break (ore) into smaller pieces,” and later, a sense first cited in 1858: “To split or chip; also, to detach as small fragments or particles.” The adjective form, meaning  ”Dressed or broken with the hammer. More widely, broken off or chipped by spalling,” is first cited in 1793.

None of these OED entries  mention crumbling as a sense, though the American Heritage Dictionary does in its definition of spall as an intransitive verb: “To chip or crumble.”

I was told a week or so ago that my blog had gone gray in Google Readers, a sign that I am inactive.

Gee, I don’t FEEL inactive.

But of course, I have been on Talk Wordy to Me. My last post, on April 29, was the day before Lauren and I started looking at houses. We found one 10 days later. We made an offer, and it was accepted so fast that when the real estate agent called us I thought we’d left something behind at his office.

And then things got crazy, and Talk Wordy got left behind. We closed at the beginning of July, and moved in the middle, and we are now finally climbing out of the mountain of boxes and approaching normalcy. So I’m back, with a bit of a redesign on the blog and new helpings of word nerdery ready to go.

As always, thanks for reading.