Archive for 2012

aerosol art

April 3, 2012

From the Princeton Alumni Weekly of April 4th, a story (by Greg Rosalsky) on grad student Jonathan Bennett, a spoken-word poet who “also does hip-hop and writes brief poems on his Twitter page” (p. 18) — and appreciates graffiti art:

While grateful for the intellectual training that Princeton has given him, Bennett sometimes finds campus life to be solitary. “I have not found an arts community here that is interested in spoken word, hip-hop, or aerosol art” — also known as graffiti — he said. (p. 19)

The compound aerosol art was new to me, though it’s been around for a while and is a useful replacement for graffiti art.

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a good/bad nervous

April 2, 2012

Caught on NPR’s Morning Edition this morning, in the story “Tyler Saladino’s Quest to Play Major League Baseball”, Saladino admits to being nervous in his quest, but added that “it’s a good nervous”.

A nouning of the adjective nervous, used to convey, roughly, ‘nervousness’.

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Dinner table conversation

April 2, 2012

(Not about language, but family life.)

A photo from a family dinner on March 19th, showing an animated conversation (at the Three Seasons in Palo Alto) between Steven Levine (visiting from Minneapolis) and my grand-daughter Opal:

(Photo by Ned Deily.)

Much Vietnamese food and sushi was consumed.

Useful words

April 1, 2012

Two recent items: misdemeanant and moreish — both new to me, but very much not new.

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More tone without the words

April 1, 2012

The NYT continues its program of taboo avoidance by indirection — see “The tone but not the words”, here — this time in Margalit Fox’s obituary for writer Harry Crews:

To critics who taxed him with sensationalism, Mr. Crews — a plainspoken ex-Marine, ex-boxer, ex-bouncer and ex-barker — replied, in effect, that it took decadence to lampoon decadence. His actual replies are largely unprintable.

In effect is especially nice; largely unprintable strikes me as unnecessary, especially given plainspoken.

As a bonus: Crews’s

novels out-Gothic Southern Gothic by conjuring a world of hard-drinking, punch-throwing, snake-oil-selling characters whose physical, mental, social and sexual deviations render them somehow entirely normal and eminently sympathetic

I wonder if there’s a name for the piling up of synthetic compounds in -ing as modifiers, as here, and in the title of Geoff Nunberg’s 2006 book:

Talking right: How conservatives turned liberalism into a tax-raising, latte-drinking, sushi-eating, New York Times-reading, body-piercing, Hollywood-loving, left-wing freak show.

(Then there’s the out-X X construction.)

Anita Steckel

April 1, 2012

In the NYT on the 27th, an obituary by Paul Vitello:

Anita Steckel, Artist Who Created Erotic Works, Dies at 82

Anita Steckel, whose playful and sometimes unsettling erotic works were little known outside the mostly underground world of feminist art until she was discovered in her 70s and her creations acclaimed as masterly and groundbreaking, died on March 16 in Manhattan.

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Earl Scruggs

April 1, 2012

In the NYT on the 29th, an obituary by Christopher Lehmann-Haupt:

Earl Scruggs, Bluegrass Pioneer, Dies at 88

Earl Scruggs, the bluegrass banjo player whose hard-driving picking style influenced generations of musicians and helped shape the sound of 20th-century country music with his guitar-strumming partner, Lester Flatt, died on Wednesday in a Nashville hospital.

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-phones around the world

March 31, 2012

From the NYT on the 29th, in “In Congo, Self-Defense Can Offer Its Own Risk” by Stephen Castle, about Rwandaphone Congolese:

“There is a tendency to reject the presence of all Rwandaphones,” Colonel [Delphin] Kahimbi [commandant of the Congolese Army’s operations in South Kivu] said.

That’s Rwandaphone ‘Kinyarwanda speaker (n.), Kinyarwanda-speaking (adj.)’. Noun use above; here’s an adjective use:

The contested role of the Rwandaphone communities in eastern Zaire (DR Congo) in the political discussions of the Kinshasa based oppositional printed press, 1991-1996 (link)

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Adrienne Rich

March 31, 2012

In the Thursday NYT, an obituary for Adrienne Rich by Margalit Fox:

A Poet of Unswerving Vision at the Forefront of Feminism

Adrienne Rich, a poet of towering reputation and towering rage, whose work — distinguished by an unswerving progressive vision and a dazzling, empathic ferocity — brought the oppression of women and lesbians to the forefront of poetic discourse and kept it there for nearly a half-century, died on Tuesday at her home in Santa Cruz, Calif.

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language ‘content’

March 30, 2012

From the NYT yesterday, a story by Michael S. Schmidt and Charlie Savage, headlined:

Language Deemed Offensive Is Removed From F.B.I. Training Materials

No, not swearing or racial/ethnic slurs. Not any kind of rewording. Not actually language, in fact, but content; language comes into the matter only because content is conveyed via language. (more…)