In The Economist issue of June 13th, in print; on June 11th on-line:
Obituary: Veil and beard and nuclear weapon
Marjane Satrapi set out to correct the West’s views of Iran
The author of Persepolis, an international sensation, died on June 4th, aged 56
Yesterday on this blog — in the posting “Merest note” — I whined about, among other things, the incredibly tedious task of getting books organized in my new digs. Hana Filip’s comment on Facebook about my dismay evoked a complex moment of nostalgia for me:
— HF: I find it hard organizing, discarding all kinds of documents, books, letters from the past. Occasionally, there are wonderful surprises because I remember lovely things that I should have remembered, but forgot, but mostly it makes me nostalgic and sad.
Musings on three things — Nairobi, gorillas, and gorilla suts — en soi (as “just stuff:”) vs. those things serving as symbols, with various values / evoked associations, which are typically conventional: cultural meanings. With specific reference to these three things in the 1950s Ernie Kovacs comedy sketch The Nairobi Trio.
Hollow Man Roboputin, dead at the core, and his grotesque consort Drumpfitsa at their gopnik wedding, in an AI image Hana Filip posted on her Facebook page on 2/15, when she was (as she put it) working on her anger at the performance of Roboputin and Drumpfitsa’s baby (James Donald Bowman) at the Munich Security Conference on 2/14/25:
To come: the gopnik subculture (stereotypically conservative, aggressive, homophobic, nationalist and racist) in Russia and its European surround; the source of this image; hollow men (from T. S. Eliot); and Gopnik as a family name
(1/5 through 1/9 were days of great anxiety for me, on both medical and personal fronts; I am at my wits’ end, and I’m also now hopelessly backed up on postings in preparation, probably never to recover. So I’m just posting whatever I can get done fairly easily in the moment.)
In Facebook / Meta / Zuckie’s Litter Box (just Zuckie for short) / whatever on 1/8, Marina Muilwijk posted this diagram from the Terrible Maps site, with a comment:
[Terrible Maps caption:] Europe Divided (again)
[MM’s comment:] See that bit where couscous and herring overlap? That’s where I live [in the Netherlands] (no, I haven’t tried having both in one dish).
Now the site is called Terrible Maps, and the maps are indeed dreadful (but often thought- or laugh-provoking); in this case, having the three regions pictured via circles in a Venn diagram is utterly inappropriate for culture areas, so the picture is absurd (couscous in Wales?).
Coming to the Stanford Humanities Center on November 18 at 4:00 p.m., the 2024 Marta Sutton Weeks Lecture, “Caravaggio’s Americas” by the poet and scholar Edgar Garcia of the University of Chicago; the announcement:
This talk relocates the where and when of the baroque to the sixteenth-century Americas, arguing that the anxieties of eroded sovereignty amidst legal heterogeneity that gave rise to the baroque began not in Counter-Reformation responses to Protestantism but earlier in encounters with the legal and cultural others of the indigenous Americas. In this account, the spirit of the Counter Reformation precedes the Reformation and is, in its expression as the baroque, inescapably entangled with Indigenous cultures and polities of the Americas. In turn, this view of the baroque from the Americas helps to recast, interpret, and even re-visualize the works of the iconic late sixteenth-century Roman painter and living catastrophe-on-legs Caravaggio.
Dense with the abstract vocabulary of sociocultural analysis and cultural and literary history — it makes actual claims about the sources of the baroque / Baroque style in the Western arts, but it might take you some work to figure out what they are — the announcement devolves into a vividly earthy thumbnail characterization of Caravaggio as “the iconic late sixteenth-century Roman painter and living catastrophe-on-legs”. A sting in the tail. [Here we laugh and applaud.]
The term for a region of Europe that’s neither north (Scandinavian) nor south (Mediterranean), but, most significantly, neither west (France, the Low Countries, the British Isles) nor east (Russia plus at least some portion of its sphere of influence, especially in the old Russian Empire). In between lies territory historically under a shifting patchwork of rule, notably including: the Habsburg Empire and the Austro-Hungarian Empire that succeeded it; the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth; Bavaria; Prussia; and eventually a unified Germany.
After World War II the German nation was starkly divided into two: West Germany, allied with France and the UK (and the US); and East Germany, allied with the Soviet Union. Germany was central in Europe only in the sense that that’s where the dividing line between west and east fell.
Somewhere along the line, the region-term Central Europe came to be applied to Germany (plus more) as the hinge between regions called Western Europe and Eastern Europe (as well as between Northern Europe and Southern Europe); I don’t know the history of the term (so I hope someone has already studied it). But if you just look at a map of modern Europe and look only at national boundaries, there’s a huge territory between Germany and Russia, with a swath just to the east of Germany that looks like something that you could reasonably call Central Europe (and brings to mind the Habsburg Empire); without going south and east into the Balkan peninsula:
(A) Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Austria, Hungary, Slovenia
Then there’s a more eastern strip that would (with western Russia) count as Eastern Europe; without going north into the Baltic states, at least:
(B) Belarus, Ukraine, Moldova, Bulgaria
Meanwhile, at the other side of Germany, there’s Switzerland, with strong cultural and linguistic ties to both Germany and France (plus, to confound things further, shared boundaries with Austria and Italy).
I took up some of the nomenclature back in 2018, as an interested party (I am only two generations away from German-speaking Switzerland — canton Glarus in the northeast, to be specific). And then on 9/15, along came another interested party, Hana Filip (born in the Czech Republic — in Moravia in the east, to be specific). Both of us reacting to specific nomenclatural proposals.
From Sunday’s’s (7/21) New York Times Magazine, in the section “The Ethicist: Bonus Advice From Judge John Hodgman”:
Angel writes: My co-worker Nick suggested we have a baked-goods potluck at work. I got excited because I have a great baked-mac-and-cheese recipe. But Nick said it wouldn’t count. He says it must be something made with a batter or dough. I disagree!
—–
Many things are baked (potatoes, Brie, Alaska), and like macaroni and cheese, they are good. But they are not “baked goods” in common usage. … In your case, most of the cooking happens outside the oven, and the baking is just a finishing touch. That said, who cares? [and on from there]
Angel has run aground on the shoals of idiomaticity; they suppose that the meaning of baked goods is straightforwardly compositional, ‘goods that have been baked’ — the meaning of the plural noun goods as modified by the meaning of the adjective baked, using the primary senses of the two words. But that won’t fly here, because the nominal baked goods has developed a specialized use, in which it refers to not just any stuff, even not just any foodstuff, that’s been cooked in an oven, but only to breads (and similar foods) and cakes (and similar foods) from an oven. The category of baked goods is expansive, but not so broad as to embrace lasagna, roasted vegetables, baked chicken, baked beans, baked ham, etc. … or mac and cheese.
For some time now, I’ve been collecting examples of a scheme of English derivational morphology I’ve called beheading, as in
crude (Adj) oil (N) -> crude (N), where the derived item crude ‘crude oil’ is a Mass N (like oil)
commemorative (Adj) stamp (N) -> commemorative (N), where the derived item commemorative ‘commemorative stamp’ is a Count N (like stamp)
A great many of the examples come from jargons, the vocabularies of specific occupational or interest groups, like people in the energy business or philatelists — or medical professionals (N attending ‘attending physician’), food preparers, servers, and sellers (N Swiss ‘Swiss cheese’), and so on. More generally, most beheadings are notably context-specific. But some come from everyday language and don’t need much contextual backing.
Here, after a somewhat more careful account of what beheadings are, I’ll add a few everyday beheadings to supplement the ones in my files (see the Page on this blog). Then I’ll veer all the way to the other pole and note that with enough contextual backing, completely novel beheadings can be coined and understood. Finally, I’ll cite the everyday beheading that inspired this posting: three squares a day ‘three square meals a day’, from US President Joe Biden, which I put off because some commenters took it — or, possibly, the idiom square meal itself — to be outdated, hence a sign of Biden’s being old and out of touch, a development that merited some discussion on its own. But there are plenty of cites, including a NOAD entry for the beheading square; and then all those comments vanished from the net, so I had no one to bash.
Today’s Wayno / Piraro Bizarro hinges on a bit of language play that cuts across two categories of play: it’s a pun based on a portmanteau, a punmanteau:
(#1) A cummerbund in the shape of a Bundt cake (Bundt punning on bund), with a name that’s a portmanteau of the names for those two things: cummerbund + Bundt (cake) = cummerbundt (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are only 2 in this strip — see this Page)
(Note: The Cumberbatch is something else entirely.)
(Further note: Wayno’s title for this one is “Frosted Formalism”, alluding to the icing (aka frosting) on the cummerbundt in the cartoon — though Bundt cakes are not necessarily frosted.)
