9 posts tagged “language”
Actually, your corners are a little too poky for that to work so well.
This thread on Unfogged did not wind up being very well directed towards answering Ogged's original request, but it made me very happy by sending me on a trip through Books I Love Land. Oh, hello, A Change of Climate! Wonderful to see you, A Maggot and Woman in White and Mating and An Instance of the Fingerpost! I don't really have anything more to say about any of it, but I had just been feeling super cranky as I tend to do when I am working to many deadlines at once and thought it would be pleasant to revisit the way that thread pepped me up. C'mere books, let me give you some snorgles.
Then she said, "ahh. smell that lovely decomposing vegetation."
While I'm reminding myself that, in fact, this week has not been devoid of cheer, I should also remember that I got to spend a lot of time reading around in MICASE, the Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English. This is always a great treat for me, because it is chock full of delights. It's a nice big corpus of some 190 hours of recorded and transcribed speech from lectures, seminars, lab meetings, advising sessions, campus tours, dissertation defenses, and various other academic adventures. I think my favorite are the off-campus labs where people are doing field research on fish and birds. Like this!
SU-f: you're not dictatorial you just want your own way.
SU-m: he's a despot (face it.)
S1: <LAUGH> yeah, pleased to meet you too. <SS: LAUGH> can you think what it would be like if you ever had me as a patient?
SU-f: (xx) is this mine? over there?
SU-f: um, yeah they were over there.
<PAUSE:30>S1: dee di dee you know it's a really tough job but, someone has to do it.
SU-f: <LAUGH> me
<PAUSE:11>SU-m: uh oh
SU-m: uh oh
SU-m: uh oh
SU-f: <GETS THROWN IN WATER> oh
About damn time.
Annnnd, we had a really good speaker at the department colloquium this week, smart and charming and practical and organized. So what exactly I have to be grumpy about, I really do not know. My hug meter is so low LOOOOOVE MEEEEEE
Just for the record, despite the depiction of vast laziness in that last post, Gary Indiana works hard.
Snark and I have an ongoing thing about this. Any time you drive into Chicago from the east, you drive through Gary, Indiana first. Gary is an industrial city in decline, like so many steel towns that went before. But there is still a lot of belching smoke and industrial activity of the sort going on there, and much of it is visible from the freeway. It also has a tendency to smell not so great along this route. So one day we were driving through there and in response to a comment about the smell, Snark took on the role of Gary Indiana (who talks about himself in the third person, much like Rickey Henderson). "Gary Indiana knows that he doesn't smell so good. But Gary Indiana can't help it! Gary Indiana works hard. Hard work smells bad. Gary Indiana has to work hard to support his family!"
Now whenever we want to comment on how hard we have been working, and how virtuous but ground down we feel, that is what we say. Gary Indiana works hard. He does.
Would you prefer to have your last name be:
(a) Walnuts,
(b) Thursday,
(c) Handsome, or
(d) Praxis?
Some time ago I wrote about the use of "smurfy" as a pejorative meaning dinky, lame, embarrasing, stupid, or perhaps some flavor of jackassical. I couldn't find any attested examples, and you all said, "I don't know what you're talking about, crazy person," so I thought I should make note of the following, from a Television Without Pity recap of Jericho. I haven't ever watched the show or read any other recaps about it, so I don't have the foggiest idea what's going on, nor who Jake or Emily is, but it seems pretty clear that the meaning is along the lines of what I had in mind:
My guess is that Jake is protecting someone other than himself. That it's not just his secret to keep. Either that or he has amnesia. Or has an evil twin, Jack, who actually was the one involved in the incident. Hey, that would explain that it wasn't just abject smurfiness that kept him from remembering his and Emily's song.
It's time for Clews You Can Use, or A Walk Through the OED. Previously I have had an excellent time traipsing about in the environs of "numps" (a nickname for Humphrey, as if you didn't know, and also a fine word for a stupid person). Today, I was in the vicinity of "wot", as in "A garden is a lovesome thing, God wot," when I happened across a word very much like one I'd encountered on my previous num- outing: "wortle."
A wortle is an implement used in the drawing of wire or lead-pipe, that is, in spinning it out to the length and thickness you desire. It is also an exceedingly Cold Comfort Farm sort of word, in that it seems just that side of plausible earthy British dialect -- except that, unlike "capsy" or "cletter", it is genuine. But I defy anyone who has read Cold Comfort Farm and thus been expxosed to its brand of parodic country dialect (or indeed any of the rest of you) to read any of these examples soberly:
- Your Wire-drawers know, that if they take a short piece of Wire,..and drill it through, that then though they draw it out to the smalness of a hair, yet will it still remain hollow quite through in despite of their Wurdle.
- Wire, breaking into short lengths when being pulled through the wortles.
- It is also probable that the earliest wortles were hard stones.
Or how about "whortle", which was the word I'd come across last time? It's actually a bilberry, but for funny-talking eighteenth-century rustics, apparently.
- Our whortle-gatherers... sit down for their ‘nummock’ of bread and whortleberries, washed down by water.
- The bog-whortle, whose white flowers, pink-tipped, stuff the ptarmigan's crop.
- I see her swift foot dash the dew from the whortle.
Pure poetry, isn't it?
While I was at it, I learned that "wotcher" is descended from "what cheer" (I should have guessed), and also that a "wortling" is a young vine plant and that "wouldingness" is the quality of feeling some yearning or other.
Rereading a Dorothy Sayers novel the other day (The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club) I came across the following superb phrase: "not exactly the clean potato". It would seem to mean "not quite on the up and up." I recommend that you add it to your repertoire immediately.
S. and I are happy to have identified a phenomenon we call "overly fine-grained following". To illustrate: the cat does this a great deal, when he is trotting along close at your heels. You go walking off towards the kitchen, say, and realize you wanted to grab a coffee cup on your way in. As you backtrack a single step, he whips around in order to follow you in this new direction, only, of course, to have to do it all over again when you return to your original path, when if he'd been a mere half-second slower to respond, he would have been just as well off.
Although first observed in this particular cat-human configuration, I think you will find that this terminology is more widely applicable than you might expect, and that the concept is a useful thing to have a name for. Try it and see.
Play any instrument or speak any language, which do you choose?
Question submitted by cruftbox.vox.com.
Speak any language, without a shadow of a doubt. This is probably my most persistant fantasy, of the longest standing. It's particularly sad because I don't speak any language even remotely competently other than English.
Does anyone else use "smurfy" as a term of opprobrium? The meaning I have in mind is something along the lines of appallingly dinky, embarrassing, squirm-inducing in a sort of overload of lame sincerity kind of way. Or did I just make it up? I have no idea, and can't seem to find any examples of this usage in a quick internet search, but it just feels so right.
To help you get the idea:
"Mother, please don't tell me my virginity is a precious flower! That's so smurfy. God !"
"That guy down the hall freaks me out. He's so fucking smurfy."
"No, you cannot wear that hat and maintain any shred of dignity, because it is totally smurfy."
