From The Advocate website on the 17th, this death notice:
Transgender Pioneer and Stone Butch Blues [1993] Author Leslie Feinberg Has Died
She was a pioneer in trans and lesbian issues, workers rights, and intersectionality long before anyone could define the phrase. Her partner [of 22 years], Minnie Bruce Pratt, and [her] family [of choice] offered us this obituary:
To help me through a sleepless night recently, I turned to an old favorite, the 1982 action/fantasy movie The Beastmaster. A very silly entertainment, starring Marc Singer and his fabulous physique (he’s in nothing but a loincloth for most of the movie) and big smile, plus a sizable cast of animals. One take, with Singer in fierce mode:
Read this sentence, from “G.O.P. Senate Challenger in Alaska Wins” by Kirk Johnson, NYT 11/13/14, p. A23, quickly and, as far as you can manage it, without reflecting on its syntax:
His Senate race featured bruising attacks, including a pro-Begich television ad suggesting that Mr. Sullivan was soft on a crime – a claim that many voters scoffed at and angered others.
And then note any responses you have to it.
(Yes, yes, I know, it’s hard to behave in an everyday unmonitored way in a context that calls attention to language.)
I chanced to reflect a few days ago on the words widow and widower, noting that there was “no word” (well, no olfesc — ordinary-language fixed expression of some currency) that covered them both; the union of the categories WIDOW and WIDOWER can certainly be expressed in English, but we have no quick and easy way of doing this.
So: some notes on the part of the domain of kinship vocabulary to which widow and widower belong.
In a possibly apochryphal story, someone complains that they can’t appreciate Shakespeare’s plays because they’re so filled with clichéd expressions. Of course, those expressions were either innovations of Shakespeare’s or other figurative language spread through Shakespeare’s. If you come to works of art in a vacuum, with no sense of their cultural context, then even works of genius can seem banal.
Another example: a friend of mine who found Mozart’s music boring, because for him it was all generic “classical” music, only too familiar.
And now, another friend who (despite his attraction to action movies of many sorts) can’t appreciate classic Westerns, like Red River, because he feels they’re too predictable.
I’m sure there are other examples from other arts, though I can’t provide them from my own experience. Probably there are people who can’t appreciate Monet’s water lily paintings, or Charles Dickens’s novels, or John McPhee’s non-fiction books.
It starts with ISIS or Isis as a name for the Sunni jihadist group, inadvertently echoing the name of a goddess of ancient Egypt; the name of the good-guy organization on the tv show Archer; and the name of a non-standard construction in English. The tv show is going to phase out the ISIS name, but I’m sticking with the English usage name ISIS / Isis.
Today’s Rhymes With Orange:
The cartoon is partly about the relations between the sexes, with the man “doing” the crossword puzzle by getting all the words from the woman. It’s also about those words — all of them “crossword puzzle words”, ranging from relatively rare (ARIA) to extremely rare (SMA) in everyday usage.
From Ann Burlingham, a piece of modest taboo avoidance in her own home town of Perry NY. In the Daily News (Genesee, Wyoming, and Orleans (NY) Counties) today: “It happens: Stolen car found in Perry manure lagooon”, beginning:
Perry — A car reported stolen Monday from Creative Food Ingredients, 1 Lincoln Ave., was recovered Friday morning from a manure lagoon of a Perry farm.
Another contribution to the variations on the formulaic expression shit happens. Earlier entrants:
“X happens” of 7/11/11: Chick Happens, Lit Happens
“More X happens” of 8/5/11: Sit Happens [of a dog]
“SOS” of 8/19/11: Ship Happens [a sinking ship]
[Added 11/15: pit happens would have been a possible caption for the Perry photo. Plenty of other possibilities more widely afield: wit happens (cf. lit happens); Schick happens [the razor]; fit happens [in a gym]; nit happens [lice]; Mitt happens [Romney]; etc.]
Very briefly noted.
Thomas Friedman in his op-ed column in the NYT on the 12th, on “Freud and the Middle East”, beginning:
Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates — When trying to make sense of the Middle East, one of the most important rules to keep in mind is this: What politicians here tell you in private is usually irrelevant. What matters most, and what explains their behavior more times than not, is what they say in public in their own language to their own people.
What Friedman discerned was two separate stories about a developing caliphate in the Middle East: a straightforwardly Shiite story and a straightforward Sunni story. Very worrisome indeed.
Yesterday, we had One Big Happy‘s Ruthie and James at cross-purposes on the meaning of bigger (Ruthie was bent on teaching arithmetic, while James wandered into other territory). Another exchange today, on higher:
