Twas brillig and the slithy toves...

Some storytellers, being bereft of other hobbies, I guess, invent languages for their characters to speak. Tolkien, on the other hand, created characters to speak the languages he'd written - two forms of elvish, two fully articulated languages, he just made them up. You know, just because. 
Languages like Klingon and Vulcan from Star Trek are invented languages, yet aren't quite well-developed as Tolkien's - they have a vocabulary, but no grammar or inflection. This is similar to the language Esperanto, one that was created in the 1880s, in the hope (and, in fact, the word Esperanto means one who hopes in Esparanto) that people from different countries could use to communicate with each other. It was a good idea that, like the Sacajawea dollar, never really took off. It's out there in circulation and used by some, but mostly people stash it in their drawers to give to children on their birthdays. "Here honey, a brand new gold language!"
Still other storytellers create semi-languages - languages that contain both English words and made-up words, and I love it when they seep into our own language; I like to do my best to help them along. A few of my favorites:

• Cromulent: One of a surprising number of terms that The Simpsons has coined, meaning acceptable or appropriate. It comes from an episode in which someone comments that the word "enbiggens" in the Springfield town motto isn't a real word. Another character replies "Enbiggens is a perfectly cromulent word." Awesome, awesome word.
• Doubleplus: 1984, meaning something like "very, very." It's a nice, juicy word. I like the totalitarian nature of Orwell's Newspeak; it is completely devoid of creativity, because creativity has become a crime.1984, in many ways, was a novel about the tyranny of efficiency.
• Karass: From Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle, meaning a group of people whose lives are interrelated, often without their knowing, because they together must serve a common purpose. As I write this, the idea reminds me a great deal of the characters on Lost.
• Horrorshow: From A Clockwork Orange, meaning good, maybe similar to the slang meaning for epic nowadays. The word does an amazing job of reflecting the culture the novel creates - it's like when you're watching Dead Alive, and the dude shreds his mother with a lawnmower, and you point and laugh because it's freaking epic. I guess with horror movies, the audience are the clockwork oranges - we see things that should make us sick, but we laugh instead. Perhaps that's where it starts?
• Ka: Stephen King, meaning fate. Comes from the Dark Tower series, but shows up elsewhere. I love the term te ka from Hearts in Atlantis, which means "fate friend." Like soulmate, only without the romantic implication. We don't have a word for te ka in our language, which makes this an especially cromulent word.

Then there's Lewis Carroll, who doesn't translate a lot of his words within the text of his books. I was disappointed when I learned the meaning of brillig. He said that it referred to the time of day when dinner's about to be prepared,  the time when one starts broiling (in case you weren't sure if he was English). What a boring definition for such a smashing word. I imagined it to mean a hot, noxious sweltering time just before a violent storm. My definition = so much better. 

Riddikulus!

Pursuant to yesterday's post, I feel I should talk about a term completely unrelated to Bogart, boggart.  A boggart is mythological critter that gets inside your house and breaks stuff, much like a poltergeist, gremlins, or children. They're said to be destructive but not always dangerous, although if you give them a name, they'll go all bananas and fling poo at your children or possibly eat you. Like giving gremlins water. This term is apparently related to bogeyman, but I've always thought of boggarts as destructive but imp-like, whereas I see bogeymen as the sort to eat your family. Maybe a bogeyman is a boggart who has been named. Or maybe it's Harry Potter.


In Harry Potter, the boggart was a nasty little beast who took the form of whatever you were most afraid of, sort of like Stephen King's It. Except to beat Stephen King's It, you inexplicably needed an orgy and fake battery acid, whereas Harry Potter's boggarts can be gotten rid of by turning them into Professor Snape in drag. The Online Etymology Dictionary claims that the term bogey, as in an unidentified aircraft, is related to boggart, which, it claims, comes from the Scottish word for ghost, bogle.


It does not appear that these terms are related to booger or boogie, though. Too bad.

I don't mind a reasonable amount of trouble

One of my favorite slang terms is "Bogart," a verb which means "to hog." My favorite part of the word is its history. Sadly I don't remember exactly where I read this, but it's filed away in my brain as having come from a Reliable Source, so I'm guessing I didn't read it on Yahoo! Answers or anything. 
The term first shows up in the 50s or so, and it means, basically, to strong-arm, or rough somebody up to get them to give over the goods, or the papers, or the falcon, or whatever else it is that Bogey wants you to give over. I knew that the term later referred to the act of hogging the pot, as in "Hey, don't bogart that blunt" (see how hip I am with the lingo?). A pretty big shift, over a relatively short time, I thought.
Turns out, apparently, that the term "bogart" used to refer to hog the pot, has its very own etymology. It refers to the fact that Bogey was always smoking. Apparently, the two terms sprang up independently of each other. If, of course, the unnamed Reliable Source is as reliable as my mental filing systems seems to think it is.
So now I'm thinking about other folks whose names have been borrowed and verbed, if you will. There's Echo, of course, the nymph of myth whom Hera cursed by taking away Echo's voice, so that Echo could only speak to repeat another's words.
More recently, we've got the verb "MacGuyver," which means to improvise something brilliant with unconventional materials, as in "My bike was stolen, so we had to MacGuyver a new one together out of old parts and duct tape." This term is often used to mean "jury rig," but I think for an action to truly be a MacGuyver, you have to be making something, like an airplane, out of random crap, like duct tape and PVC piping, rather than repairing something that was broken.
Chuck Norris is on the verge of being verbbed, but his popularity is waning, so I doubt our kids will be using the expression "So I Chuck Norrised him into next Tuesday." The term "Chuck Norris" should only apply to roundhouse kicks, in my opinion.
Ninja doesn't refer to a specific individual, but I do like that "ninja" has become a verb lately, as in "My boss caught me playing online poker after he ninja'ed up on me." This probably first appeared in multiplayer online games, in which some folks would stand around while you fought the bad guy and then ran over and took the dead bad guy's swag before the victor could do it - this came to be known as "to ninja someone's loot." 




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One of my favorite poems, appropriate for this occasion: 
Narcissus and Echo


by Fred Chapell


Shall the water not remember    ember
my hands slow gesture, tracing above  of
its mirror my half-imaginary    airy
portrait? My only belonging    longing;
is my beauty, which I take    ache
away and then return, as love of
teasing playfully the one being unbeing;
Whose gratitude I treasure   is your
moves me. I live apart        heart
from myself, yet cannot        not
live apart. In the water's tone,  stone?
That brilliant silence, a flower   hour,
whispers my name with such slight light:
moment, it seems filament of air      fare
the world becomes cloudswell.      well

Whole world

Is redundant redundant.


Whole entire world is redundant redundant redundant.

And a hungry little boy with a runny nose plays in the street as the cold wind blows

Someone told me the other day about a person they'd met who claimed to live "on the ghetto end" of an obscenely opulent gated community down the road. Oh, well as long as you live on the ghetto end, I guess I can't call you... hey wait a minute.

So when I hear the term "ghetto," the first thing I think of is Jews and Nazis, which isn't how most people seem to see it these days. And it's hard to come up with a current definition, really, when everybody on earth claims to be ghetto. And I'm guilty, admittedly, of referring to the neighborhood where I grew up as the ghetto, for lack of a better term. So mea culpa, I repent.


One of my Facebook friends posted a status about how "ghetto" is often used as a synonym for "black," which I hadn't thought of, but which is true a lot of the time, which is pretty awful. And a lot of the time privileged people like me claim to be from the ghetto because we think it makes us seem less privileged somehow, and that's, I've realized, an appalling insult to people who actually did grow up going to bed hungry and dodging bullets and having no hope of getting out. It's a perversion of the term too, which Wikipedia defines as "a portion of a city in which members of a minority group live; especially because of social, legal, or economic pressure." Digest that for a moment. I can't even imagine being told that my skin or my family or the way I talk mean I'm destined to live a certain way in a certain place. But I want to insult people who were told that by claiming I was that too? Not cool, Brigid, not cool. 


Wikipedia also tells me that the word "ghetto" comes from the term "ghet," which means "slag" in Venetian. I wonder, then, what the word "slag" refers to. Does it mean that the people who live there are slag, or does it mean that the place itself is really crappy and horrible? Wikipedia goes on to say, though, that the term may not be quite so metaphorical in nature, but related to the fact that Jews were once confined to an island on which slag was also stored. 


Also, I just had to look up the word "slag," having noticed that I had no idea what slag actually is.

This picture came from the end of the street where I grew up. Back when this place was still a bar, legend has it that a guy got his nose bitten off in a fight. And I'm pretty sure that the reason the bar shut down was because someone got shot and killed in there. So ghetto isn't a complete exaggeration.

The Internet said it, it must be true!

I've been reading lots of books on language and linguistics lately, and I'm coming to notice that the authors of these books spend a whole lot of time quoting each other. At one point in Roy Blount Jr.'s "Alphabet Juice," he quotes Stephen Pinker ("The Language Instinct") quoting Zinsser ("On Writing Well"). At least I think he does. It was all getting a bit too much like a game of telephone, and I was sleepy.


It struck me as quite funny to wonder if one of the dudes in the chain of books on writing guys could just be making all this crap up. Like if Bill Bryson regularly gets drunk, makes up crazy crap, shoves it into the log flume, and the next thing you know, Pinker's using Bryson, and McWhorter's using Pinker, and Bob's your uncle, Bill Bryson has conned the world into believing there's a city in Kentucky called Sugar Tit. Oh wait, there is a city called Sugar Tit? My bad, Bryson. But I've got my eye on you - you know far too much on too many subjects to be trustworthy.


I thought of this, because back in high school, I dated "The Liar." Everybody knows this guy. The dude who just makes crap up for absolutely no reason. Like he'd tell me he'd had eggs for breakfast when in fact, he'd had toast. Seriously, what made him decide to tell me his middle name was Sebastian when it wasn't? So That Guy, I've just discovered, has written an obscure academic text. If he's still, in fact, That Guy, he could be reinventing truth as we speak. Some academic somewhere takes a quote, sites it in her own academic text (Guy, That p. 457), and the next thing you know, Bill Bryson's written a smash hit book on that corner of academia all filled with That Guy's senseless factoids. Note: Those of us who know who That Guy is aren't going to name names.


An interesting factoid, by the way about the word factoid. We usually use it to mean "bit of trivia," but when Norman Mailer coined the term, he defined it as a false or baseless assertion, stated as fact - a factoid is a fact like a humanoid is a human. But since I've called this fact a factoid, perhaps Norman Mailer didn't invent the term, and a factoid really is a bit of trivia. If a factoid is a bit of trivia, then it IS true that Norman Mailer coined the term to mean a false or baseless assertion. See? Truth reinvented. This is some deep shit.


A flower-oid to go with your factoids.

Ugly shoes that lesbians wear

At church yesterday, I learned that early feminists like Margaret Fuller were called "Blue Stockings" because they had a reputation for wearing sensible and comfortable blue wool stockings over the black stockings a true lady wore. People have been obsessing over feminists' footwear since 1750. Which is to say that bigots have been characterizing feminists as ugly since feminists first appeared.

The title of my blog refers to an episode of a game show (Pyramid?) in which one player gets another to guess "Birkenstock" with the clue "ugly shoes that lesbians wear." (On a side note, I spelled Birkenstock wrong, and one of the suggestions spell-check gave me was "Bluestocking."). And of course, every anti-feminist idiot will site ugly shoes as a defining, and damning, characteristic of feminists.

You know, if the worst thing they can say about us is that we wear ugly shoes, you've got a pretty flimsy case against us, kids. If the best you can do to argue with people who believe in equality for men and women is that we're ugly, well then, you don't have an ugly shod leg to stand on. I happen to be gorgeous, and I have fantastic shoes.

I wonder, though, exactly where the stereotype even comes from. Is it that women who have the audacity to try to break free from discrimination could only want to do so because they can't find a man? Is it that being pretty is a full time job and doesn't allow any room for having thoughts or careers? How do you contest an argument that is so fundamentally stupid? What logical response could stand a chance against such an alarming lack of logic? 

Some other arguments floating around the Interwebs about us man-hating ball busters:

We're all lesbians. Obviously.

Rape isn't real - feminists largely made it up to punish men for having sex.

Women are taking all the men's jobs, and they're not qualified to do them

Nobody holds us accountable for our actions

We won't be happy until men are submissive (OK, well who can argue with that?)

That last argument, though, tells us a lot. If women were once dominated and want to now dominate, and that's a bad thing, than it is correct that men should be the ones who dominate. In making this argument, anti-feminists are explicitly saying that men should dominate women, and then they claim that men do not want to dominate women.

Thanks to Renee for the info on Margaret Fuller.

   

This is an attempt to collect a debt

We've had our home number for going on five years now, and we're still getting collections calls from all over town for some Jean Hagle lady (or some Gene Haydle guy). They're pretty friendly, as far as collections people go. They don't believe that I'm not Jean Hagle (or Gene Haydle), of course, but they wouldn't be very good bill collectors otherwise.

It's kind of interesting, actually, to see the process from the outside. I mean, it's a lot less intimidating when I'm telling them I don't owe them any money and I'm actually telling the truth. One thing I've noticed about bill collectors is that they're never Gary or Tina. They're always Miss Robinson or Mister Nash. Rather a graceful trick, really. From the first word you're a petulant child. 

It's hard for me not to see bill collectors as monsters. I mean there are logical arguments, pro and con, but it's hard for anybody who's been there to get past the visceral. The constant calls, the snarling sarcasm, the way they act like you're not working three jobs just to pay the bills and you're not even sure you do owe them money? It's hard to imagine somebody like that going home to their husband and kids and eating casserole and playing Monopoly, but they probably do. And they probably find it hard to believe you're working three jobs just to pay the bills and aren't sure you owe them money.

Bill collectors were probably the single worst thing about being poor. 

As for Miss Robinson, Jean (Gene), and me, it'll be straightened out by tomorrow. And here are some tips for dealing with the green meanies (I friggin love HowStuffWorks.com).

And here are some more forms of address, for when you're dealing with sources more powerful than Miss Robinson, courtesy of the "Oxford Essential Writer's Reference."

• American Ambassador: The Honorable Miss Robinson
• Lawyer: Mr. Mister Nash, Attorney at Law 
• House Speaker: The Honorable Speaker of the House of Representatives (that's a tough one to remember)
• Rabbi with Doctorate: Rabbi Miss Robinson, DD
• Associate Justice of the Supreme Court: Mr. Justice Mister Nash
• Catholic Bishop: The Most Reverend Miss Robinson
• Pope: His Holiness Pope Mister Nash III
• When in doubt, go with The Honorable, or Your Excellency if you're feeling fancy.

You saw me standing alone

The first time the term "blue moon" appeared in English, some 500 years ago, it referred to something preposterous and impossible, used in a manor similar to the expression "Next you'll be telling me that the sky is green."
A couple hundred years or so later, the expression "blue moon" was used to mean never - as in "That will happen in a blue moon"; it meant something like "when pigs fly."
More recently, the term "blue moon" has come to mean something that happens every now and then, as in "Every once in a blue moon, I get a taste for pickles and ice cream." In addition, "blue moon" can refer to the second full moon in a given month. We're not sure whether the chicken or the egg came first on this one - it may be that one term sprouted from the other, or it may be that they sprouted all by themselves.


It would be pretty cool if I brought this up on the occasion of a blue moon, but the next one won't happen until 2012.

What's interesting about this to me is that the meaning of the term did an abrupt 180 at some point. It used to mean "never" and now it means "sometimes." How weird is that? I can only think of one other expression that has done that, sort of. "Fat chance" and "slim chance" ("fat chance" is used sarcastically, but has been used that way for so long that the term's not usually considered irony). I wonder how many others there are.

I am writing

One day I got my eyebrows threaded at the mall. If you're not aware, "threading" is a method of hair removal most commonly associated with India in which thread is used like tweezers - it's as effective as waxing, but painful like a root canal. 


In response to my wincing during the torture session, she kept saying "You are having many fine hairs."
The experience made me wonder two things. One, why on earth I would choose to pay someone to remove harmless stray hairs in such an excruciating manor? Two, why do people from India seem to add unnecessary "ings" to words? Must be something to do with the Indian language - maybe in India, people use gerunds in place of verbs for some reason.


But, as I just read in John McWhorter's "Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue," it's not the Indians who use gerunds in place of verbs, it's us. A gerund is a verb that's been made into a noun, usually by adding "ing." So if I say "Writing makes me happy," I'm saying "The act of writing makes me happy," and "the act of writing" is the subject of a sentence - a noun, basically. What I've never noticed is that the English language uses "-ing" words unnecessarily a lot, and it's one of only a handful of languages that does. For instance, right now, I am writing a blog entry. In this, the writing takes place in the present tense - it's what I'm up to right now. However, the present tense of "write" is "write," not "am writing." It would make more sense to say it the way every other language does, "I write this entry," but in English, that sentence isn't quite right.


So the nice Indian lady torturing me didn't say "you are having" because of some peculiarity of her language, but because "have" is one of the only verbs we don't add "-ing" to when saying something in the present tense. Her error was only that she forgot which words are the exceptions to the nonsensical rule.

And the moral of this story is that I was guilty of something Americans are so often guilty of; I assumed that because she wasn't born in America, I was doing it right and she was doing it wrong, when in fact, English speakers are doing it wrong... well, English speakers are doing it kind of counter-intuitively.


And... random flower. I think this is my mom's yard.