New Yorker “Tables for Two” entry by Leo Carey, June 13 & 20, about Al Fiori, a high-end Italian restaurant in a high-end hotel, the Setai (400 Fifth Ave. at 36th St.):
The restaurant is up a spiral staircase just inside the Setai’s entrance. Windows of fritted glass suggest that the establishment wants to have as little as possible to do with the neighborhood’s garmentos and electronics shops …
Garmento was new to me — but obviously not to many readers of the New Yorker.
On the NYT‘s op-ed page yesterday, a hilariously wry piece by Thomas Vinciguerra about apologies by public officials for sexual misbehavior of various sorts: 24 quotes, from Eliot Spitzer, Anthony Weiner, Newt Gingrich, John Ensign, Bill Clinton, Gary Hart, Mark Sanford, Larry Craig, Jesse Jackson, John Edwards, Christopher Lee, James McGreevey, and Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Probably not what you would have guessed.
From Gina Kolata’s “Side Effects? These Drugs Have a Few.”, NYT Week in Review for June 5:
In a new paper in the Archives of Internal Medicine, Dr. [Jon] Duke [of Indiana University] and two colleagues report that the average drug label lists 70 possible side effects and some drugs list more than 500. “This was beyond even what I’d expected,” he said.
… In 2006, troubled by the ever-expanding lists of side effects, Dr. Jerry Avorn and Dr. William Shrank of Harvard Medical School wrote a paper in The New England Journal of Medicine calling it “linguistic toxicity.”
Thought these lists were getting longer? Apparently they are.
From the June 5 NYT Week in Review section, a piece by Thomas Vinciguerra on “The ‘Murderabilia’ Market”, beginning with an online auction of property belonging to Unabomber Ted Kaczynski:
The items put to auction were the latest high-profile examples of “murderabilia” — artifacts of notorious killers that end up in private hands. In the case of the Unabomber, the auction’s proceeds will go to his victims and their families.
But that is not typical. Almost always, the sellers are in the business for their own profit. And that makes for some strong feelings.
“It’s a sick and despicable industry,” said Andy Kahan, director of the Crime Victims Office for the City of Houston and the individual who coined the word murderabilia to describe it.
There’s a Wikipedia entry on murderabilia (“collectibles related to murders, murderers or other violent crimes”), also crediting Kahan as the portmanteauist responsible for the word.
The world of political commentary and political reporting is much given to digs via portmanteaus. Today’s political portmanteau: Newtiny (Newt + mutiny), as reported with evident snarky relish by Alex Massie today on the Spectator site:
Newtiny! Newtiny! They’ve All Got It Newtiny!
Oh look! Newt Gingrich’s preposterous Presidential “campaign” has imploded. His top strategists and campaign staff have resigned en masse and so has his Iowa staff. What a shame. Turns out that staffers didn’t appreciate Newt taking his latest wife on a cruise around the Greek islands while they were working hard to sell the impossible dream of President Gingrich. Hence the Newtiny.
Details in the calmer, cooler media.
In conversation with Elizabeth Daingerfield Zwicky a few weeks ago, the topic of what to call what she does at Yahoo! (essentially, finding solutions to ill-defined problems involving networks) came up. She and some of the people she works with were inclined to refer to it as network forensics or simply forensics. This puzzled me, since I didn’t see how legal matters came into it.
And then I recalled a different non-legal use of forensic reported to me some years ago: as a noun referring to a gathering with a formal program, such as a speech or a film.
So, two different semantic extensions of forensic(s).
This morning Michael Sheehan asked ADS-L:
One family I know uses “foo foo rah” to describe a raucous party, especially one in which many participants get drunk. Does this term have currency outside that one family?
It started with my dismayed reaction to recent political assaults on teachers (and, more generally, public employees) as drains on the economy, selfishly demanding decent wages and benefits while being “unproductive”, producing nothing of significance. Lots of things are going on at once here — contempt for the working classes and for service workers like maids, cooks, gardeners, and janitors (and, yes, teachers); classic American anti-intellectualism (cue Richard Hofstadter); marketplace valuation of people’s worth; and more — but parallel attitudes surface in the way many people view academics, so it hits close to home for me.
Then the anecdote. Some years ago I was at some large public function involving people of money and substance and, wine glass in hand, struck up a conversation with another attendee. This guy plunged right in by asking me what I do [for a living]. (In many cultures, the leading question would be some version of “Where are you from?”, meaning “Who are your people?”, but in ours it has to do with occupation. All such questions are designed to position a stranger socially.)
I said I was a university professor, and, without waiting to identify himself occupationally, he said
Artists and scholars are parasites on the body politic.
Reader Jenny Ellsworth writes:
My daughter, who is in first grade, brought home a book for a book report. It was called Frindle, by Andrew Clements, and it was the best kids’ story about language I ever read. We took turns reading it to each other. Since you have a granddaughter of about the same age, I thought I’d share it with you.
And back on 4/3/08, Brett Reynolds (of the English, Jack blog) wrote some of the Language Loggers with the same recommendation:
My kids and I have just finished reading Frindle. If you have any children in your family, you’ve got to get this book into their hands. Even though it’s over a decade old, it certainly deserves a mention on Language Log. I can’t imagine any better way to get 6-9 year olds interested in linguistics.
I do in fact have the book and like it a lot. Actually, I thought I’d posted about it, but it seems that I didn’t, and neither did any of the other LLoggers. So it’s time.