A couple of weeks ago, Ned Deily and I — both of us having grown up in Pennsylvania Dutch country — were reflecting on the foods of our homeland and mused on chow-chow, a sweet-and-sour relish that was, and is, a staple of the area. Ned wondered about the name, so I’ve spent some time investigating the foodstuff and the name. It’s a monstrously tangled (and largely unclear) story, which looks like a very substantial project for a cultural historian and a lexicographer, neither of which I am. But here are some notes.
Archive for May, 2011
Chow-chow
May 24, 2011The marmaxi
May 24, 2011Today’s Rhymes With Orange:
A marmaxi is a giant martini — the word resulting from a playful reanalysis of martini as mar + tini (though the Martini of Martini e Rossi, the vermouth makers, is an Italian patronymic from the personal name Martino, i.e. Martin, so that historically martin is a unit). Compare the martini variants the appletini and the okratini, portmanteaus in which the -tini is contributed by martini.
Non-predicating adjectives
May 23, 2011Another chapter in the great book of non-predicating adjectives: nude beach, characterized in the Wikipedia entry as:
a beach where users are legally at liberty to be nude. Sometimes the terms clothing-optional beach or free beach are used.
(for comparison, see this posting on naked X composites, with some nude X ones as well).
Another Flandrin pose
May 23, 2011(On art and sexuality, rather than language.)
I start with Jeune Homme Assis au Bord de la Mer (Young Man Sitting by the Seashore) by Jean Hippolyte Flandrin (1836), which has become something of an icon of homoerotic art (though that was probably not Flandrin’s intention):
Discussion on John Coulthart’s blog, here, and my X blog, here (the posting is on my X blog because two images there are “anatomically explicit”).
Now a reader of my X blog has offered another sculpture depicting the Flandrin pose (in addition to the two shown by Coulthart — one by Pierre Yves Trémois and one by an unknown artist):
The work is in the Michael Scott collection of gems at the Bowers Museum (in Santa Ana CA). Günter Petry has a gallery in Hettenrodt, near to Idar-Oberstein (“known as the capital of Germany’s gemstone industry”, according to the Wikipedia entry); both are in the Birkenfeld district of Rheinland-Pfalz, Germany.
Portmanteau to libfix
May 22, 2011OUT magazine June/July 2011, p. 21, letters about Glenn Greenwald:
I could not admire Greenwald more – they don’t call him Glennzilla for nothin’. (Glenn Marc)
Glennzilla’s writing is often depressing, … but following his column has made me a more savvy observer of our political process. (Bob S.)
Yes, Glennzilla (many more cites), attaching the libfix -zilla to Greenwald’s first name. In turn, -zilla has been liberated from Godzilla, which began life as a portmanteau in Japanese (Gojira) — a not uncommon development of a libfix from a portmanteau.
Argument structure of allow
May 22, 2011Ann Burlingham writes with a query about this really geeky Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal cartoon by Zach Weiner:
The query was about allowed to sporting events, with the preposition to, rather than the at she would have preferred. I myself would have preferred at or into, but don’t reject to.
As usual, the full story is complex.
Words for laziness
May 22, 2011Today’s Zippy, piling up ways of talking about laziness:
Act in lethargy, repent at breakneck speed.
On the innovation watch
May 21, 2011After more than a month, the major part of the response to my most recent plumbing diaster is over: the deconstruction (including the many dramatic hours of jack-hammering and concrete-sawing) came to an end, and this week the reconstruction succeeded (quite admirably, I must say), leaving only a day or so’s work of putting the furnishings back in place.
But I found reconstruction a pallid word for the process of undoing demolition. And then I remembered the occasion, back in 1999, when my friends Mike and Sim were faced with a bathroom renovation and Mike came up with a nice lexical innovation.
On the idiom watch
May 21, 2011Stephen Clarke, op-ed piece “Droit du Dirty Old Men”, NYT 5/18/11, about l’affaire Dominique Strauss-Kahn:
French politicians are known to be serial seducers, and as a rule no one bothers them about it. It is widely accepted that a male politician can combine efficiency in his job with a tendecy to leap into bed with as many people as possible.
… The danger is, however, that their reputation as “chauds lapins” (hot rabbits), to use the French term, can give them a sense of impunity. Surely it’s a thin line between thinking that because you’re powerful and famous, everyone will succumb to your charms, and assuming that anyone who resists is being unreasonable. By this logic, forcing yourself on an unwilling partner is only making her bow to the inevitable.