A while back, a friend wrote me about an Anglican indaba in Canada, going on to explain to me that an indaba was a conference with a serious purpose and that the term originated in South Africa. Then the September 14th Princeton Alumni Weekly arrived, with the story
Princeton ‘indaba’ supports effort
to develop new African leaders
So now, a few words about indaba and its spread.
(Eventually there will be some stuff directly related to language.)
Reported several places in the last week, the fate of the musical Kismet in Johnstown PA. Here’s Scott Simon on NPR on the 24th:
Canceling The School Play Won’t Avoid ‘Kismet’
There will be no Kismet in Johnstown, Pa. This week the Richland School District canceled February’s high school student production of the play.
The 1953 musical is the story of a wily beggar-poet; his unruly, beautiful daughter; and the handsome caliph who falls in love with her at first glance.
Kismet is adapted from that collection of folk tales known as Arabian Nights, with a score drawn from the music of Alexander Borodin.
Kismet won the Tony Award for Best Musical. High school groups often perform the show because the songs can be lush and funny, there are good parts for both boys and girls, and the costumes can be colorful, florid, flowing — and cover students from head to toe. Unlike the musical Hair.
“Kismet” is set in ancient Baghdad, a time historians call the Islamic Golden Age. Johnstown is in western Pennsylvania. Flight 93 flew right over our heads, school Superintendent Thomas Fleming Jr. explains. United Airlines Flight 93, of course, plowed into the ground nearby on September 11, 2001 after the hijackers were overpowered by the passengers and crew. They died to keep the plane from crashing into the U.S. Capitol. So, it’s understandable that people might be a little more sensitive perhaps to the play’s content, Mr. Fleming told the told the Johnstown Tribune-Democrat. He said several people had complained because “Kismet” features Muslim characters; the 10-year anniversary of Flight 93’s crash had just passed. Mr. Fleming says he simply doesn’t want his young students to have to face controversy and criticism.
I’ve been sending friends notecards with reproductions of Chagall works on them, which led me to descriptions of his work, which seem to invariably highlight his position as a Jewish artist (and as an early modernist). After a while, I began to be annoyed by this focus, which struck me as diminishing his significance by placing him in the context of Jewish art.
Ben Zimmer’s recent Word Routes column on Visual Thesaurus, “Word-Lore, Nerd-Lore”, returns to the question of the origin of nerd (a topic Ben looked at a little while ago in a Boston Globe column, “Birth of the Nerd”, quoted on this blog here) and links to this entertaining Venn diagram:
Note that all four of the terms in this diagram — dweeb, nerd, geek, and dork — are of obscure etymology. This is a semantic domain where people are likely to just make words up.
Via Jeff Shaumeyer on Facebook, this appalling church sign in Harlem:
Jeff thought it was the first time he’d noticed Uncle Tom used as a verb. Turns out that the slurs Uncle Tom and plain Tom got verbed at least 50 years ago.
From the NYT print edition on Friday, a story on the new ethnic food culture of Orange County CA, with a reference to the vernacular ethnonym Chino:
So last year, Mr. Phan, now 35, began creating fusion dishes like coconut curry chicken with sour cream and roast pork with salsa verde, and taking them on the road in a food truck he has christened Dos Chinos. That’s Spanish for “two Chinese,” but more to the point, “Chino” is how many Spanish speakers refer to anyone Asian.
“Anyone who lives here gets it,” Mr. Phan said. “I don’t think anyone who grew up in Orange County would the word find ‘Chino’ offensive — that’s what they call us, so we might as well embrace it.”
It’s Shrove Tuesday, Mardi Gras ‘Fat Tuesday”, or (as it’s known in my Pennsylvania Dutch homeland) Fasnacht Day. Time for pre-Lenten excesses, like the rites of Carnival, pancakes, and doughnuts (the Shrove Tuesday food of my people).
From Facebook friends Dennis Lewis and Jess Anderson, this poignant editorial cartoon by Mike Luckovich:
This not long after Jeff Shaumeyer provided a link to an appalling scapegoat story in the Central Telegraph (of Australia):
There seems to be no end to books proposing to fix people’s lives by fixing their “grammar” (in that all-embracing sense of grammar — my slogan is It’s All Grammar — that I frequently complain about), usually incorporating any number of factual errors and fallacious assumptions about language and language use and displaying at best regrettable, at worst harmful, shameful attitudes about linguistic variation and social life. I collect these things, usually trying to get them used, so as not to give financial suppport to the authors or their publishers.
Latest to heave into my view (hat tip from Elizabeth Daingerfield Zwicky) is Grammar Sucks: What to Do to Make Your Writing Much More Better, by Joanne Kimes with Gary Robert Muschla, as discussed in a guest blog on Sociological Images by Josef Fruehwald, a grad student in linguistics at Penn who blogs on language variation and language attitudes (among other things) here.