Topically

Hello all. I'm home, and the trip was wonderful. Jean and I ate and drank our way through the bay area, bought more yarn than anyone has any business owning, and I totally kind of almost knitted a hat.
For the dwindling numbers of us who remotely care about the thing, Academy Awards are happening tonight. I've actually seen like, three of the nominated films this year, so I might actually give a watch. If only to see the "I didn't realize that guy was dead" slide show.
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences was founded in 1927. Author Bill Bryson suggests that the wordy nature of the name is due to the fact that Hollywood has always shied away from the term movie, which he says took on a negative connotation in the early days of film because the moral elite considered movies trashy. 
We're not sure exactly where the term Oscar came from. The statue was designed by Cedric Gibbons, MGM art director, and first awarded in 1929. Bryson thinks that the statue was named by the librarian for the academy, Margaret Herrick, who thought the statue looked like her uncle Oscar. From this, we must conclude that Uncle Oscar liked to stand naked on top of a film can, covering up his good china with a sword. Wikipedia says the statue could also have been so named after King Oscar II of Sweden. Granted, I've not seen him naked or holding a sword, but I can't quite see the resemblance. 
If you watch really old movies, you'll notice they've often got no credits - nobody thought to start giving actors names until the second decade of last century. It was then that people realized that audiences had favorite actors and could be lured in by them.  

Hello, ya'll. The Word Nerd is vacationing in sunny (actually not so sunny) California and will return to her pontificating Sunday or so.

Jump!

One of my favorite things about the Internet is the power it has to give handy common language. For example, jumping the shark. Most every TV show hits a point where it all just starts to fall apart. The point at which the thing goes from being a good show to being totally past its prime. The term was made famous by John Hein, founder of the now defunct jumptheshark.com, in reference to an episode of Happy Days, in which the Fonz, clad in his signature leather jacket, leaps, on water skis, over a shark in a daring display of manliness.
Often the shark-jumping moment is some last ditch effort to salvage a sinking ship - like  little cousin Oliver on The Brady Bunch, brought in because apparently Cindy wasn't cute enough. Or Scrappy Doo. 
Or sometimes it's that an actor left a show on bad terms, and they have to do something to explain their absence (or not, in the case of the older brother in the first season of Happy Days). Like half the cast of Three's Company.
A few shows have run with this. The X-Files had an episode in their final season called Jump the Shark, although I think we can all agree that The X-Files jumped long before that episode aired. The Simpsons featured an episode in which Homer actually recreates the Happy Days shark jumping scene, and one of the final episodes of Pushing Daisies features an underwater circus act involving a performer jumping over a shark.
Ted McGinley, the suave sailor pictured below (check out that awesome Ken doll hair), has been called The Patron Saint of Shark Jumping because of how often he appears in shows that are in the process of jumping. Like Happy Days. It seems Happy Days did a lot of jumping. According to Wikipedia, McGinley made a reference to this on Married...with Children, in which he once refers to Al as Fonzie. 

Other ways a show can jump, according to the aforementioned defunct jumptheshark.com, include the following (whether the examples given are jump-worthy is up to you to decideO:

• Same Character Different Actor: The famous Darren switcheroo on Bewitched, and Second Becky on Rosanne. Second Becky, played by Sarah Chalke of Scrubs after the original Becky left the show. Oddly, the original Becky, Lecy Goranson, came back to the show after a while, and instead of getting rid of Second Becky, they alternated the two actresses. Who look absolutely nothing alike.
• They Did It: Two characters whose sexual tension drives the plot along finally hook up. Like Pam and Jim on The Office. Tony and Angela on Who's the Boss. Then again, there's The X-Files, in which the unresolved sexual tension goes so long unresolved you stop caring whether it ever happens.
• New Baby: Rachel gives birth on Friends, for instance. Or Fran on The Nanny. Did she give birth, or did I dream that? It was on really late at night, back before the days of cable, and I used to fall asleep to it. That or stupid Matlock.
• The Wedding: Lisa and what'shisface the evil dude on News Radio. Rhoda and Joe on Rhoda.
• Radical change: Rosanne wins the lottery. Sacred Heart Hospital on Scrubs inexplicably transforms into a med school. Laverne and Shirley move to LA, bringing the entire supporting cast with them. TVTropes.com refers to situations like this as a reboot, which I love.
•  It Was All a Dream: Absurd on Dallas. Brilliant on Newhart. 

How about you? What's your favorite shark-jumping moment.

Villainy!

So I'm reading Altered English by Jeffery Kacirk, on loan from the my awesome friends the Wedges. This book deals with words that have made a huge leap in meaning over time. They give, as an example, the word villain. It comes from the Latin word they teach you on the first day of high school Latin: villa, meaning farmhouse. A villain was someone who worked on said villa, so villain used to mean a serf or a peasant. People of such low class were considered undesirable by the upper class - the people with the power to shape the language. As is the nature of the oppressor, the upper class justified their oppression of the lower by casting them as lazy, untrustworthy, likely to turn on you at any moment. 
That's kind of interesting in light of the fact that most recent villains in pop culture today are filthy rich. No surprise that they're increasingly more-so in light of our economy and the fact that it was the filthy rich bankers and tycoons who brought about the crash. It may be coincidence that the first Wall Street movie came out right around the time of the great stock market crash of 1987, but it's certainly no coincidence that the second movie began development in 2007 just as it became apparent that the world economy was on the verge of catastrophe.
I once heard a story on NPR about how much you can learn about what Americans have feared and hated most throughout history by the villains of Professional Wrestling. As this article in The Weekly Standard points out, most of the baddies at the birth of pro-wrestling just after WWII were German and Japanese.
As American attention turned away from the past and toward the cold war, the bad guys were Russians. Nikolai Volkoff, whose shtick involved singing the Russian national anthem before each match, terrorized the good guys of the WWF in the 1970s and 80s, but reinvented himself as a good guy after the fall of communism. 
In the 80s, when American anxiety over Iran was high, Volkoff teamed with The Iron Sheik, who, during the Gulf War would be reborn as the Iraqi Colonel Mustafa.  
The WWF tried to make a villain of the pro-apartheid Colonel DeBeers in the 1980s, but apparently Americans didn't hate apartheid (which, by the way, I spelled right on the first try) quite enough, as DeBeers never really caught on. 
Nowadays, ethnic origin-based villainy has become taboo. Instead, there are guys like Chris Harvard in the first decade of the century, reviled for his ivy league snobbery. 
Today the villains, as you'd expect, wear expensive suits.

The Good Ship Lollipop

For Jeremy and my first anniversary, we went with some friends to The Melting Pot, a fondue restaurant, in case you couldn't guess. Now, The Melting Pot is pretty darn expensive, and we wanted to save up our appetites. So you know that show Unwrapped on the Food Network, where they show you how they make all kinds of wonderful delicious foods? There was a marathon, and that was the only thing on TV that day.


In addition to ensuring that I'd eat so much at Melting Pot that we got significantly worse mileage on our ride home, it taught me some interesting facts, supplemented here by Bill Bryson's Made in America. 


It's not Reecies Pieces, it's Reece. As in a dude's name. Harry Reese, in fact. He was a farmer, then worked for Milton Hershey, and liked Hershey's chocolate so much, that he started his own candy company, mixing Hershey chocolate with other ingredients. Like nom nom peanut butter cups. Reece's company was purchased by Hershey some years after Reese's death and is now a Hershey subsidiary. Reece's Pieces weren't created until long after the founder's death.


Contrary to what you may have heard, Reece's Pieces were not invented for use in the film ET. The candies were actually invented in the late 1970s and had been on shelves for a couple of years when ET came out. It is true, however, that sales of the treat skyrocketed once the movie came out, making it one of the most successful instances of product placement in history. It is also true that the tie-in was originally offered to M&Ms, but Mars candy turned it down.


I believe I read in Stephen King's memoir On Writing that when King was struck and nearly killed by a van in 1999, the driver was on his way to buy "some of those Marses bars," prompting King to quip that he'd been run over by a character from one of his novels. The book is all the way over there on the other side of the room, and I'm not getting up to go verify. This is the Internet. Accuracy is an anachronism.


Also, Hershey candy was appropriately named for Milton Hershey, mentioned earlier. The original Hershey bar cost a nickel, and stayed that way until 1970. It just kept shrinking to keep pace with inflation.


Before Baby Ruth became a Nestle product, the Curliss Candy Company created it; originally it was called Kandy Kake. Curliss changed the name around 1920, right when Babe Ruth was getting crazy famous. The company insisted, however, that the candy bar was named for Grover Cleveland's daughter, Baby Ruth. Who had been dead for sixteen years at the time. Because that's not creepy, naming candy after a dead baby or anything. They probably came up with the Baby Ruth story so they wouldn't have to pay Ruth royalties. But seriously? "No, no, Mr. Ruth, it's not named after you, it's named after a dead baby. See? It all makes perfect sense."

Piki-pi!

I don't remember ever consciously thinking about it, but I was only reading comic books a minute before I knew that Cyclops' optic blasts go ZARKT, Wolverine's claws go SKNITT when they come out, or my personal favorite, Nightcrawler goes BAMF when he teleports.

Man, if I went bamf when I teleported, I'd teleport all day. Of course, teleportation in his case smells like brimstone, so my house would kinda smell.

So not the point.

The point is you don't think much about onomatopoeia until you think about it. But it's not just bam and pow and comic books. I love susurus, the muttering or whispering sound made by a crowd of people.

And this from Shakespeare's Henry V makes my brain do a little happy dance:

The Dauphin of France has sent King Henry V a gag gift - a box of tennis balls, meant to ridicule him by pointing out that he's young. Henry responds thusly:

And tell the pleasant prince this mock of his

Hath turn'd his balls to gun-stones; and his soul

Shall stand sore charged for the wasteful vengeance

That shall fly with them: for many a thousand widows

Shall this his mock mock out of their dear husbands;

Mock mothers from their sons, mock castles down;

And some are yet ungotten and unborn

That shall have cause to curse the Dauphin's scorn.

See how he uses mock over and over to imitate the sound of a tennis ball? Delicious.

But as it turns out, the Japanese have us beat in this, as with so many other things. In Japan, bells go jan jan. Heavy rain goes za za, medium rain goes potsu potsu, and drizzle goes shito shito. Dude, read that noise out loud. It's a dance party in your mouth.

Now what's cool about Japanese, I just learned from the essay From Za-za to san-san: The Climate of Japanese Onomatopoeia by David Galef, is that the onomatopoeia isn't constrained to just sound effects. When something rolls, it goes goro-goro, from the sound that a barrel makes when it rolls. A smile goes niko-niko, and if you can say niko-niko without smiling, then you're a better man than I. Stars, it seems, go pika-pika.

Which leads me to my favorite word fact of the day. The name Pikachu is a portmanteau of pika-pika, the word for sparkle, and chu, the sound a mouse makes.

Really? Now I'm expected to go to sleep without looking up the etymologies of the other Pokemon names? 

AAAAUUUUGGGHHH

I could swear I've already written this post, but I can't find it in the archives, and it's so important it bears repeating anyway. Thanks to Denny for reminding me.
You may not know it, but you have probably heard this sound effect dozens, maybe hundreds of times:





This scream was first recorded for the movie Distant Drums in 1951. The scream, originally titled, appropriately enough, Man being eaten by alligator, next appears in the 1953 film The Charge at Feather River. It is from this movie that the scream gets its name - a character called Wilhelm makes the noise after being shot in the leg with an arrow.
The scream was worked into the soundtrack of B monster movies over the next many years - a sort of in-joke, a way for sound designers to leave their mark on a movie. It somehow manages to show up twice in the Judy Garland film A Star is Born, probably my favorite use of it just because it's so friggin random.





The scream got a revival when Benjamin Burtt Jr., sound designer for just about every Lucas film, stuck it into the first Star Wars movie, and then every Star Wars movie after that, as well as the Indiana Jones movies, and, I suspect, every other movie he ever worked on.
It then became a phenomenon, with sound designers sneaking it in where ever they could. Often, directors would catch it and demand it be taken out, so people began slipping the scream in all sneaky like.
What I love about the scream is that, once you know to listen for it, it sounds absurdly out of place. Like, is that really a sound that a Storm Trooper would make? An orc in Lord of the Rings? Buzz Lightyear?
And I totally get it. At my job too, I write all of these things all day, and they're dry and clinical and there's nothing of me in them. I wish I could find the visual equivalent of a Wilhelm to sneak into my Help documents.
By the by, there's a good chance that the first guy to utter the Wilhelm scream was none other than Sheb Wooley - the guy who first recorded Flying Purple People Eater. By the by the by, does the Purple People Eater eat purple people, or is he himself purple? I've never been able to figure that one out.
Here's a little compilation for your viewing pleasure.





Info from an On The Media story, supplemented with Wikipedia.

Target Demo

I attended a conference today on church fundraising, and the question of tailoring fundraising to various age groups was brought up. When the subject of reaching out to young adults, people under 35, all eyes fell on the guy next to me and myself, the only young adults in the room. 
I said that if there's one generalization you can make about all of us is that we know when we're being played, and we don't like it. 
Maybe it's because our generation has spent every moment from birth on squirming under marketing demographers' microscopes. We're the Underoo generation - some market researcher somewhere woke up and said "Hey, kids love Superman. Let's put Superman on their underpants." And it worked so well that they put Superman everywhere.
I'm not saying the Underoos don't work. If they made Underoos in my size, I'd probably be wearing them now. I guess what I'm saying is that we're accustomed to being bombarded with messages, pictures, products designed just for us. Because we're special. And for trivial stuff, like Underoos and the awesome Hello Kitty PJs I'm wearing right now, it's cool. But you can't sell me things of substance the same way you sell me underwear. 
For people as bombarded with advertising as we've been all our lives, most fundraising organizations aren't capable of the clever marketing tricks, fancy pitches, or heavy-handed manipulation required to suck us in. Unless you're a Jedi, your Jedi mind tricks won't work on us. See, if you try to trick us and you fail, which you probably will, you've lost our interest and our trust.
So the only option you've got left, in my estimation is just to say "My organization needs some money. Can we have some?" Or maybe that's just me.
And I was thinking, bear with me here, that this may be part of why so many people from my generation get all their news from The Daily Show. See, we've got no patience for the cloying manipulation of Fox News. Rupert Murdoch's got nothing on Mattel or Hasbro when it comes to convincing me I want to buy something, whether it's a product or an ideology. MSNBC can't win me by selling themselves as the anti-Fox News, HLN can't win me by making stories for people with no attention span.
But John Stewart, he's not trying to hide his agenda. He's not trying to pretend he's fair or balanced. He's not sneaking vegetables in with your cheeseburger, if you will. Where folks on Fox and MSNBC and even NPR at times are trying to feed you opinions as facts, Stewart feeds you facts as facts and opinions as punchlines. There's no smoke or mirrors. The man's biased, of course. He's got all kinds of opinions with which I disagree. But he's not trying to trick me into agreeing with him with manipulative headlines and selective reporting. He's not bullshitting me. And my Underoos and I appreciate that.

Unnamed Main Characters

A couple of years back, Dr. Who was a doofy old BBC show that even my dad was too cool to watch. Now, all the cool uncool kids are all over it. And why wouldn't we be? It's a totally good show. Especially when starring the alternately dreamy and creepy David Tennant. Whose Hamlet is by far the best I've ever seen.*

Right now, Dr. Who has me thinking about unnamed main characters. I'm not sure the significance behind Dr. Who's not having a name, other than it being a funny clever bit. Here are some memorable others

• Poe: He's got unnamed narrators running around all over the place in his short stories. Once, I referred to one of the unnamed narrators in one of his stories as "Poe" and my 11th grade English teacher exploded. True story.
• It: The name of the clown in the book/movie It is Pennywise, but that's not Its name. Some might argue that It and the guy below are one and the same.
• The Gunslinger Series: Roland is chasing the mysterious Man in Black. Later, he has a name or three, but I don't think any of them is his real name, and if it is, I don't remember because round about book six I stopped trying to understand anything.
• Lost: Another mysterious Man in Black, another thing I should have stopped trying to understand long before I actually did. 
• The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, Fistfull of Dollars, and A Few Dollars More: Clint Eastwood's character is called The Man with No Name. Unnamed strangers are common in Westerns, actually. Seriously could not get past the fact that all of the Mexicans were Italians speaking in Italian. 
• The Yellow Wallpaper: This one's easy - dehumanization of women in society and so forth.
• Fight Club: The narrator, often called Jack because of his catch phrase "I am Jack's X" (e.g., "I am Jack's smirking revenge"), is never actually named. You could say it's because he's only an aspect of Tyler Durden's persona, but you could probably just as easily say it's because Chuck Palahniuk's a little pretentious. I mean, I would certainly never say that. 
• Rebecca: The only clue we have as to the narrator's name is that people tell her it's pretty and unusual. Perhaps her identity is eclipsed by the memory of Rebecca.
• 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea: Oh no, you say, the captain is called Nemo. Nemo, however, is Latin for No Name. Fooled you.

I know you are but what am I?

This has been floating around in my head a while, but I keep forgetting to post it here. 

Some months ago, I read this New York Times article, which describes how the police force in one area of China has hired 13 attractive women to improve public relations. Seems the police in this area are known for being particularly brutal, and the pleasant, attractive women are supposed to defray that.

I don't find the story particularly interesting - I'm not even sure why it's a story. Doesn't every industry in every country use attractive people as a pubic relations tool? What I found interesting about the article was this picture and quote:

Four barely-past-teenage girls in white gloves and identical olive jackets and pants snapped to attention. Four pairs of black pumps lined up ruler-straight. Four prim hats perched perfectly atop hair bound in blue and white striped bows.

See, the obvious point of the article is to make the Chinese look backward and sexist... and least that's what I took away from it. But look at the way the author describes the officers. I see a picture of four professional police officers in dress uniforms not terribly different from those worn by police officers here. Can you imagine if the New York Times ran a photo of four young American police women and described them as "barely-past-teenage girls"? It would be inappropriate and disrespectful. Why is it different if the women in the photo live in China?

The story uses this wording to accentuate the fact that the police women's roles are largely for show - they're not allowed to do the same things the male officers are, they have to have certain measurements and physical features to serve, and they have to be under a certain age. I certainly discern that to be sexist and trivializing, although I'm not familiar enough with the culture of the area to make an educated judgement. However, the wording that the authors of the article chose is also sexist and trivializing. It fails to acknowledge the fact that, regardless of whether they're being used as eye candy, these women are professional adults who have chosen a difficult and potentially dangerous line of work.

You know that old adage about what happens when you point one finger at someone else?