Mantras for modern times
Tara Brabazon on the rise of the soundbite over analysis.
Some extracts:
- Currently, the only way to express ideas is through a micro soundbite. This problem – which I term two-word Tourette’s – dominates media and popular culture.
- The contractions in our culture will not only restrict the language circulating through popular culture, but also the range and scope of what it is possible to read, write and assess in education. Encouraging the development of well-constructed sentences, paragraphs and arguments is a challenge. But if we do not intervene, then our prose will drip away, leaving only punctuation and the symbol of the musician formerly known as Prince.
The Click Song
South African singing legend Miriam Makeba has died yesterday,aged 76, after being taken ill in Italy. Here is Miriam Makeba performing The Click Song:
The Click Song is is a Xhosa wedding song, Xhosa being one of the official languages of South Africa. One of the most distinctive features of the language is the prominence of click consonants which explains the English song title. The actual song title is Qongqothwane.
It ain’t over ’til the fat lady sings
Just heard Bart Simpson use this expression… It ain’t over ’til the fat lady sings is a proverb, essentially meaning that one shouldn’t assume the outcome of some activity (frequently a sports game) until it has actually finished.
This phrase in turn refers to the impression by many that at the end of every opera, an aria is sung by a heavy-set woman dressed like a valkyrie. A famous example of this is Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen (aka the Ring cycle). This is a set of 4 separate operas (lasting about 15 hours), in which the final scene includes Brünnhilde (a very large Valkyrie) singing, and then riding onto Siegfried’s funeral pyre. The set collapses and the entire cycle ends up in the Rhine river, where it started. The “fat lady” is often illustrated with a horned helmet, a spear, possibly a shield, and possibly blond braids (to suggest Scandinavian ancestry).
Source – wikipedia
Having Right and Being Right
Juliet Everts Robb reflects on the difference between having right and being right. A Frenchmen makes a clear distinction between j’ai le droit and j’ai raison, but the English speaking part of our planet seems to confuse both expressions.
International Journal of Ethics, Vol. 30, No. 2 (Jan., 1920), pp. 196-212
The Super Bowl and Super Tuesday: How’d They Get So “Super”?
Americans have two “super” events coming up on the national agenda: Super Bowl XLII on Sunday between the Giants and Patriots, followed two days later by Super Tuesday, when about half the country will vote in Democratic and Republican presidential primaries. Fox, the network that is broadcasting the Super Bowl, is even creating a Super mashup before the game begins, with two hours of coverage on Sunday morning mixing politics and football. It’s all quite super, some might say super-duper. So how did we get to this level of superheated superabundancy? An explanation at the OUP blog.
Lacrimae rerum
sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt
–line 462 of Book I of The Aeneid, an epic poem written in Latin by Virgil
RK sez: What a way to reflect on pain, death and the futility of human warfare. BTW: do you know in which book Coetzee is using this quote from Virgil ?
George Orwell and the English language
Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the English language is in a bad way, but it is generally assumed that we cannot by conscious action do anything about it. Our civilization is decadent and our language — so the argument runs — must inevitably share in the general collapse. It follows that any struggle against the abuse of language is a sentimental archaism, like preferring candles to electric light or hansom cabs to aeroplanes. Underneath this lies the half-conscious belief that language is a natural growth and not an instrument which we shape for our own purposes.
Boutonnière
n., a flower or floral decoration worn by men. It is typically a single flower or bud. Traditionally, a boutonnière was worn pushed through the buttonhole of a jacket, but in modern times is often pinned onto a jacket lapel. The word comes from the French “boutonnière”, from bouton which means “button”.
Oxymoron
An oxymoron (plural oxymorons or, more rarely, oxymora) is a figure of speech that combines two normally contradictory terms. Oxymoron is a loanword from Greek oxy (“sharp”) and moros (“dull”). Thus the word oxymoron is itself an oxymoron.
Examples:
- Pretty ugly
- Deafening silence
- Old news
Other examples that you might not agree on:
- Microsoft works
- Military intelligence
Ancient Scripts
Ancient scripts is a web site by Lawrence Lo and is -as he describes- a compendium of world-wide writing systems from prehistory to today. A fantastic resource for everyone interested in this topic.
Twenty odd people is not the same as twenty-odd people
The five-yearly update of The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (SOED) came out last week. One matter has caused a lot of comment — the decision by its editors to omit the hyphen from some 16,000 words in the work.
Continue reading here
Happy Anniversary
It was a serious contribution to the electronic lexicon. 
Twenty-five years ago, Carnegie Mellon University professor Scott E. Fahlman says, he was the first to use three keystrokes – a colon followed by a hyphen and a parenthesis – as a horizontal “smiley face” in a computer message. Article at Wired News.
Cyril and Methodius
Cyril and Methodius were two Byzantine Greek or Slavic brothers born in Thessaloniki in the 9th century, who became missionaries of Christianity in Khazaria and Great Moravia. They are credited with devising and spreading the Glagolitic alphabet, which was used for Slavonic manuscripts before the development of the Cyrillic, the alphabet derived from Glagolitic, that, with small modifications, is still used in a number of Slavic languages. After their death their pupils became missionaries among other Slavic peoples. Both brothers were glorified in Eastern Orthodoxy as “equal-to-apostles” and were canonized by the Roman Catholic Church. They became the patron saints of Europe in 1980 (among others).
(came across this in a book I’m reading -discovered this in my library a bit by coincidence…-, The Historian, which makes me want to visit Bulgaria, Romania and of course Istanbul)
Chironomia
Chironomia is the art of using gesticulations or hand gestures to good effect in traditional rhetoric or oratory. Effective use of the hands, with or without the use of the voice, is a practice of great antiquity, which was developed and systematized by the Greeks and the Romans. Various gestures had conventionalized meanings which were commonly understood, either within certain class or professional groups, or broadly among dramatic and oratorical audiences.
One of my favorite (e-) magazines, Cabinet, has a great article on it. If you want to learn even more on the subject, use the Agenda for Gesture Studies.
Klingon Language Institute
The Klingon Language Institute (KLI) is a Flourtown, Pennsylvania based organization devoted to studying and teaching the constructed language, Klingon from the Star Trek science fiction universe. It was founded in 1992, and publishes a quarterly journal called HolQeD (language science). Each year it holds a qep’a’ (meeting) that is open to all members. And even the Klingons seem to have a wiki…
majQa’ (well done in plain English)
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