Kaveh Waddell sketches Adlam: a script not yet 30 years old, invented for speakers of Fulani, a language spoken by 40 million West Africans.
Category: Words Words Words
Faulkner decoded: 2
… the spring weather, the spring which an American poet, a fine one, a woman and so she knows, called girls’ weather and boys’ luck.
—William Faulkner, The Town, chap. 20
Not too hard to track this one down, as it’s been decoded by other writers. It’s from Ryder (1928), by Djuna Barnes, from the “Rape and Repining!” chapter:
It is Spring again, O Little One, the Waters melt, and the Earth divides, and the Leaves put forth, and the Heart sings dilly, dilly, dilly! It is Girls’ Weather, and Boys’ Luck!
Bleached
Oh, dear Fox, yes: Stop Saying ‘I Feel Like.’
This is what is most disturbing about “I feel like”: The phrase cripples our range of expression and flattens the complex role that emotions do play in our reasoning. It turns emotion into a cudgel that smashes the distinction—and even in our relativistic age, there remains a distinction—between evidence out in the world and internal sentiments known only to each of us.
Not letting snuck sneak past me
Oh, dear. How did this escape my notice? For many speakers, a button-down shirt now does not refer specifically to a shirt with a buttons securing the collar, but rather to any shirt with buttons down the placket.
OP vs. RP
David Crystal and Ben Crystal talk to Michael Rosen and Laura Wright of BBC Four’s Word of Mouth about Shakespearean Original Pronunciation (OP), with generous audio demonstrations. David Crystal has a reference book, to be released this summer, The Oxford Dictionary of Original Shakespearean Pronunciation.
Composure
Craig Havighurst has proposed a new umbrella term for that thing that most people call classical music, that my friends in college (particularly in the School of Music) encouraged me to call art music or serious music, and that I have also heard described as Western concert hall music. Havighust likes the term composed music, and he makes some good points.
Composed Music’s primary virtue is its blunt veracity. It is what it says it is: works by a singular mind, fixed and promulgated in written form. …it emphasizes the actual creator of the music, giving credit where it’s due in an era when the general public has been conditioned to associate works with performers.
And lest we forget,
The awkwardness of there being a Classical Period in Classical Music becomes moot.
In a follow-up, he points out that he intends the term to include jazz and third stream compositions as well, written by artists as diverse as Brubeck and Zappa.
Of course, we can always go with the dichotomy associated with Edward Kennedy “Duke” Ellington:
There are simply two kinds of music, good music and the other kind.
Connell decoded
In Mrs. Bridge, Evan S. Connell’s “log-log duplex decitrix” (Chapter 49) appears to be a small error for the Keuffel & Esser Log Log Duplex Decitrig slide rule.
Similarly, this sentence from Chapter 13, “Guest Towels,” is initially confusing:
She had a supply of Margab, which were the best, at least in the opinion of everyone she knew, and whenever guests were coming to the house she would put the ordinary towels in the laundry and place several of these little pastel towels in each of the bathrooms.
Slantwise searching turns up Cynthia’s Linen Room:
Marghab Linens were produced in Madeira, Portugal between 1934-1984 and were marketed as some of the finest embroidery of the time. Vera Way Marghab was the driving force behind the imaginative and beautiful designs executed by her company, Emile Marghab, Inc.
The linens were hand-embroidered as a home industry by the Madeirans.
Max has got it
Baseball considers itself the most thoughtful of games, a pastime more than a sport, written about with reverence and lyricism, in which pitching is considered more art than athleticism.
Yet the primary term used to explain the art of pitching, which often determines who wins and who loses, is an inelegant word of ill-defined mush.
Syllabary
ᏍᏏᏉᏯ (Sequoyah) explains how Cherokee script has evolved and adapted with changes in technology.
Shipped
Learning Ally staff posted on the bulletin board the log sheets for several books that our team of transcribers had recently completed. Sometimes it’s nice to get a little attaboy. I worked on at least one of these titles. The books we recorded include:
- United States Government
- Texas Science Fusion: Lab Manual Grade 8
- Economics: New Ways of Thinking, 2/e
- Working with Young Children, 7/e
- Basic Drama Projects
Stories in sound: 1
Cory Turner listens to the work of neurobiologist Nina Kraus: an audio-driven screener for children at risk of literacy challenges.
Expressions
Laura McKenna considers her son’s acquisition of idiomatic language.
Ian has learned English like an ESL student. I suspect that English wasn’t his first language. I often wonder what his first language was. Was it images?
Rare precision
Mark Memmott, interviewed by Scott Simon, takes the time to parse out the meanings of the word “suicide,” and explores when the word is (and is not) appropriately applied to someone who takes other lives along with his or her own. Memmott wants to inform, not inflame.
But I should note that the phrase suicide bomber can be problematic, and I want to be very careful with what I say next. I am not suggesting anything about what happened aboard the Germanwings jet, but, especially when information is scant, it’s important to remember that what seems obvious may not be. For instance, there is evidence that some of those who have been called suicide bombers have been forced to or tricked into carrying explosives into buildings and crowds. Should they be called suicide bombers? I don’t think so. I don’t think most people would. And I know I’m a nag on this topic. It’s usually best to avoid labels, and the phrase suicide bomber is a label. Unless you’re sure those labels apply, stick to the facts, be precise with your words, choose them carefully.
Genre
Emily Nussbaum in a recent issue of The New Yorker:
The Fault in Our Stars has inspired a roiling debate about the popularity of Y.A. fiction, particularly among adult readers…. The messy part about this discussion is, of course, that plenty of the most potent and enduring “literary” works focus on adolescent identity, from Romeo and Juliet to The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. Often, it’s hard to distinguish the debate about art from the one about marketing, and from the thrumming anxiety about the economic survival of literary fiction—which is, after all, a genre itself. As with crime novels or science fiction, labelling entire genres “popular junk” or “ambitious art” is too simplistic: the teen book you like is Y.A.; the teen book I like “transcends the genre.”
Serialized
Good advice (i.e., advice I agree with) accompanied by useful local lore and an extra helping of snark: Washington City Paper‘s manual of style and usage.
- NoMa
- M is uppercase, but feel free to grumble about it.
* * *
- Penn Quarter
- Neighborhood south and west of Chinatown defined better by the overconcentration of José Andrés restaurants than by definitive boundaries.
* * *
- theater
- Not theatre, except as part of a proper noun. We don’t know how the obsession with French spelling arose, but we’re not playing along. Studio Theatre, you’re doing it wrong. Howard Theatre, WTF? Signature Theatre, just stop. You’re making our spellcheck misfire and our copy editors gnash their already worn-down teeth. Take a hint from our star pupil, Arena Stage’s Mead Center for American Theater, or we may start calling you thee-AT-ruhs.