[See original at toothpastefordinner.com]
From whiskey river:
Report From A Far Place
Making these word things to
step on across the world, I
could call them snowshoes.They creak, sag, bend, but
hold, over the great deep cold,
and they turn up at the toes.In war or city or camp
they could save your life;
you can muse them by the fire.Be careful, though: they
burn, or don’t burn, in their own
strange way, when you say them.
(William Stafford)
[Another in a series of occasional posts about popular American songs with long histories. And if you are seeking information on the Justin Timberlake song by the same name, believe me, you are 100% in the wrong place.]
On paper, it doesn’t appear to be a “big” song. Nearly always, the arrangement features a single vocalist and one or two background instruments. The lyrics aren’t even all that special, in one respect: very simple words (with one exception), in a more or less conventional order. At that, the title itself appears six times over the course of the three stanzas, and a slight variation of it thrice more.
But given the right singer, oh, how loudly this song speaks…
(Who’s “the right singer”? Hard to say. Wikipedia lists a sample of about 150 of them. Amazon’s MP3 download store includes over 600 hits — many duplicates, of course, but still… And if you go rummaging around on iTunes and elsewhere on the Web, you can quickly fill your hard drive with unique versions.)
Here’s the story:
RAMH has seen a boost in its site traffic over the last week — not in the number of visits to the blog, but in the number of pages read per visitor. Just as one example, over a 25-minute period last night 60 pages were “read,” all by one visitor: pretty amazing for a blog which, until last Wednesday(ish), averaged fewer than two pages per visit.
Without getting into a lot of detail, in short, I’m getting lots of attempts to post comment spam. One attempted spam comment — let’s call it a spomment — per post. Each (with a few exceptions) lasting no more than a minute. The posts themselves aren’t being visited — the “reader” is jumping right to the comment form. All of these bulk spomments are trying (apparently) to sell name-brand shoes: walking shoes, boots, and so on.
And all of these bulk spomments originate from pretty much the same location: Beijing.
I corresponded briefly about this with the doyen of RAMH‘s overseas contingent, Froog, who lives and works in that city and is as far as I know my only connection there. (On his own blog, roughly concurrently with the onset of spam at my end, he’d written of a sudden burst in Internet service disruptions at his end. That post of his was only the most recent in a loooooong and probably ongoing series about his problems getting — and staying — online.)
Most likely, we think, his service disruptions have nothing to do with my bulk spomments. Someone over there may have found RAMH via Froogville, or vice-versa, but is probably just testing, successfully, workarounds for the little reCaptcha word-verification scheme which I use here.
At any rate, the spomments’ contents take an interesting form. If you look at a given batch, you’ll notice that the messages are identical — though different from one batch to the next. Each spomment is a literary-sounding (but clumsily Englished) passage littered with a handful of hyperlinks, and if you jump right over the hyperlinks while reading it, the passage makes a sort of sense. Sorta. Kinda. Like.
Last night’s barrage was especially amusing, especially when you consider they’re — ostensibly — trying to sell you walking shoes (emphases added, shoe brand and of course hyperlinks removed):
We should so live and labor in our cheap [brand name] shoes time that [brand name] shoes sale what came to us as seed may go to the next [brand name] walking shoes generation as blossom,and what came to us as blossom may go to them as fruit. This is what clearance we mean by progress. It is better to die on your feet than to live on your knees.
The Missus and I saw District 9 on Saturday. I’m tempted to review it in full, but fear I’d reveal too much of its plot. So I’ll just say that District 9 is one of the, I don’t know… two or three best movies I’ve seen for the last 10 or 15 years — in any genre. It raises important questions about what it means to be human, and it leaves them dangling in the air, just daring the audience to answer them. And it does so in the context of a science-fiction, summer-blockbuster, mock-documentary-cum-action film which should be a natural draw for audiences across the board.
Which may sound like a recommendation. You need to see it if you haven’t already, right? But, uh, well… No.
Why not? Because of the ick factor: surgical close-ups; exploding bodies; individual and societal violence (and threat of same)… Some people might even be put off just by the, well, icky appearance of the aliens, who look like viscous love children of THE alien from the Aliens films and H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu.
Somewhere, in the so-far unseen pages of your work in progress — or the pages of WIPs gone by — somewhere lurks a phrase so graceless, a metaphor so aluminum-foil-on-dental-fillings, a sentence so raggedy-ass, a title so forgettable or a character’s name so laughable, something that made you realize you may be a writer but you’re also a doofus. Come on. You know it’s there. Maybe you’ve got to rummage through old rough drafts, crusty short stories and anguished poems from high-school or college days. Or maybe you found it in a paragraph you wrote just the other day but didn’t find until revising this morning (and, when you came to, immediately hacked out with scissors or carving knife).
‘Fess up — in the comments here, or on Twitter with the #wordsfail hashtag.
Groans encouraged — groans of empathy, damn it. Because if you’ve written nothing like this, it’s only because you’ve forgotten the key word: yet.
To kick things off, here’s one from me. This excerpt comes from close to 30 years ago, a faux-Irish-brogue poem called “Sodden, Betrodden, and Noddin’.”
I was leanin’, it seems, besides on me dreams,
Rather close to the fellow next to me.
Full six foot he sat (when not wearin’ his hat),
And his face it was tired and gloomy.
Note especially the way you need to read the second line to force the rhyme with the fourth: next TO me. Alas, at that point in the stanza you don’t even know line 4 is coming up. So you’ve gotta get to the last line, realize your mistake, and back up.
A famous translation exercise (well, famous among wordish-nerdish types) takes the phrase “one man’s meat is another man’s poison,” translates it into Russian, and then back again into English. I can’t find the result online anywhere (maybe the exercise isn’t as famous as I’d thought), at least without buying access to a document apparently by someone speaking at a language/English conference. But it was predictably bizarre, as literal translations tend to be.
A Web site called Translation Party (which I just found courtesy of an acquaintance’s “shared items”) automates this. The translation process begins with an English phrase; you click on the “find equilibrium” button, and off it goes — translating the phrase to Japanese, then back into English, then feeding the translated English back into the translate-into-Japanese engine, and so on. “Equilibrium” is said to be reached when the engine repeats the same translation twice.
Here’s what I got from the famous tagline (well, famous among movieish-nerdish types) tagline for Jaws II: “just when you thought it was safe to go in the water”:
Please also enter the water safely.
If you try it yourself and come upon a translated phrase so good that you just have to look at it, like, once a month*, note the link at the bottom which stamps your result onto a T-shirt or mug.
The Internet world is so full of strange and/or wonderful things…
By the way, feeding the “one man’s meat…” line into Translator Party doesn’t work. It just goes back and forth, repeatedly switching the two phrases on either side of the “is.” Eventually it gives up and says equilibrium will never be reached. (I know how it feels.)
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* Depending on the frequency of your laundry cycle.
[Cole Porter at the piano, sometime in the 1930s. For me, it’s easy to see in him,
from this photo, the song “Begin the Beguine” — but not the beguine itself.]
[This is another in an occasional series on popular songs with appeal across the generations. This post will be broken into two parts; Part 2 appears in a few days here.]
So let’s start with the obvious question for a word geek, that word: beguine.
As far as I can tell, every Google result for the word “beguine” (pronounced something like b’GEEN) refers to the song — with these exceptions:
And what does beguine refer to, in the context of the song? Wikipedia:
The beguine is a dance, similar to a slow rumba, that was very modestly popular in the 1930s, coming from the islands of Guadeloupe and Martinique, where the Martinique beguine is a slow close dance with a roll of hips.
(Indeed, a whole style or genre of music exists, known as biguine — not at all unrelated to the beguine dance.)
Cole Porter had two stories for where he encountered the dance before enshrining its name in the song. In one, he saw it performed on an island in the South Pacific; in the other, later version, he saw Martinique immigrants perform it on a Paris dance-hall stage. Charles Schwartz’s Cole Porter: A Biography offers a letter from Porter to a fan as an explanation which joins both of those stories into one:
I was living in Paris at the time and somebody suggested that I go to see the Black Martiniquois, many of whom lived in Paris, do their native dance called The Beguine. This I did quickly and I was very much taken by the rhythm of the dance, the rhythm was practically that of the already popular rumba but much faster. The moment I saw it I thought of BEGIN THE BEGUINE as a good title for a song and put it away in a notebook, adding a memorandum as to its rhythm and tempo.
About ten years later [on an island to the west of New Guinea, in what is now Indonesia, a] native dance was stated [?] for us, the melody of the first four bars of which was to become my song.
In these terms, then, the music of “Begin the Beguine” sprang from a Caribbean rhythm and a South Pacific melody. (Note, though: Porter was a notorious kidder and practical joker, and very aware of his popular image. Various other explanations have been offered — by Porter and others — for the song’s origin. Basically, all we truly know about the song is what anyone has known since it was published.)
…just now encountered, although I myself can’t use it this exact moment. Permission granted to do with as you will. Definition supplied free of charge:
fumor (fyoo’-mor), n. A rotten mood; a silent stewing of one’s psyche in frustrating but unalterable circumstances. E.g., Dealing with the idiots in her bridge club always put Madge in a fumor, but what could she do? They were her friends.
fumorous (fyoo’-mor-us), adj. Tending to induce or having already induced a fumor. E.g., Ack! The line to get a book signed by the famous author formed a fumorous, two-block serpent stretching down the rainy street.
fumor, fumored, fumoring, v.t. To regard a frustrating situation balefully, often wishing the most ill of wills upon the persons or other entities which have put one here. E.g., With his fully pregnant bride enduring contractions in the back seat of his car, Jerry could do little but fumor the officious traffic cop. The sonofabitch was standing in a pile of excrement left by a passing farm animal, but Jerry was damned if he’d share the information.
(Also feel free to localize the spelling as appropriate: fumour, etc.)
Check out this TED video, of lexicographer Erin McKean (note the “View Subtitles” button — an option I wish were available everywhere, for obvious reasons):
Cool, huh?
Especially given that two years later, her new online super-duper improved version of the dictionary concept is actually online now. It’s called WordNik, and it’s very interesting.
I went to the WordNik site, and entered the word touchstone into the blank field. Here are some of the things I found out:
To answer this, we must consider the argument for conceivability as the touchstone which is to separate the “Knowable” from the “Unknowable.” The Arena Volume 4, No. 19, June, 1891
(The caption under the image explains, “Bubble size: how much this word was used in a year. Bubble height: unusualness in that year.”)I don’t know. Maybe it’s just me. But this sort of thing isn’t just fun and cool; it feels like a leap, y’know?
According to numerous sources, J.R.R. Tolkien offered this memory of his first story — not the plot, not (really) the characters, not the setting, but the language:
I first tried to write a story when I was about seven. It was about a dragon. I remember nothing about it except a philological fact. My mother said nothing about the dragon, but pointed out that one could not say “a green great dragon,” but had to say “a great green dragon.” I wondered why, and still do.
I wonder that kind of stuff all the time. Sometimes you can sort of make sense of the “rule”; for instance, in an animal breed or species name which includes a modifier, you can’t reasonably separate the modifier from the noun. A friendly wire-haired terrier works. A wire-haired friendly terrier doesn’t — even though it imparts exactly the same information.
Other times, maybe, something just “sounds right” one way but not another. It was the longest, most difficult journey I ever took: yeah, that’s all right. It was the most difficult, longest journey I ever took: if I wrote that sentence, I’d immediately want to revise it.
Even when the two adjectives are of similar lengths and/or sounds, one alternative chimes and the other thuds. A cold, clear morning: ding! A clear, cold morning: whoomp!
I can’t believe I have much of anything in common with Tolkien — and nothing at all uniquely in common. So: What’s up with this? Any theories?
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P.S. This sort of thing must drive copy editors — and ESL teachers — crazy.
