waste

Reduce, reüse, recycle

As you all know, I'm sure, this is a time of financial uncertainty, and it thus behooves us to use our resources wisely. This goes not only for material goods, but also for less tangible stuff: if we can save mental effort in some realms, we may be able to put it more profitably to work in others. Thus I encourage everyone to follow my example and produce jokes which use either setups or punchlines that already exist (or, for real savings, to make new jokes by matching an existing setup with the punchline from a different, existing joke). For instance, this joke uses the technique of radical recontextualization to lend new life to its otherwise completely played out punchline, which is given below:

Q: What's purple and the victim of fratricide?

Word order

"An … Catilinam orbem terrae caede atque incendiis uastare cupientem nos consules perferemus?" -> "So Catiline wanting to ravage the world with slaughter and flames we consuls should put up with?"

Ok, you have to relocate "cupientem" and "uastare". But noway does it sing.

What does that mean—integrity? A pocket fulla firecrackers—looking for a match!

I had half an idea to whine at length about the various flaws in this little squib, but obviously it's not meant to be a good argument or anything like that, so treating it as if it's fallen away from some such standard isn't really apropos—suffice it to say that it's facile and glib in an aggravating way, probably beyond what the form calls for; what follows, then, is extraneous.

I am told, or perhaps gently exhorted, "you remember the teleological suspension of the ethical", and I do, Leon, I do—only I don't, based on what you go on to say, think that you do. A pro-lifer praising someone for not having an abortion is not suspending the ethical, and if the telos in virtue of which they were suspending the ethical were something as general as "life", one would expect them to treat all people who carry babies to term similarly (indeed, this generality is part of the problem). That whole section just doesn't make very much sense; I really haven't the foggiest notion what Wieseltier thinks he's saying.

That crap about the "etymological origins" of "integrity" really boils my canker, though. Even saying "in its etymological origins" annoys me, though I realize that's probably idiosyncratic. The idea that what a word meant "originally" (usually the person making some such claim actually means "at some more or less arbitrary point in the past", and I suspect Wieseltier is thinking, if he is thinking of anything in particular and not just armchairing* things, of integritas, which doesn't even really support his assertion (if you can even make a coherent assertion out of the motley things he claims that "integrity" originally referred to; he gives a list, apparently in apposition, of things that are not the same), since the first definition is "completeness", not "wholeness", especially since it can be aptly translated by … "integrity"—in other words the appeal to the Latin meaning doesn't narrow things down) is necessarily going to have anything to do with what the word now means, or be relevant at all to a discussion of the concept it denotes, is, one would have thought, laughable, and I say this as someone who often finds etymologies revealing. (An example that's not perhaps particularly strong as an instance of etymology coming to the rescue but which is the only one that comes to mind is "mistake"; my reaction to Austin's famous example with the donkeys is to say, ah, of course, he shot his neighbor's donkey by mistake in the case in which he wrongly took his neighbor's for his own.) But those cases are often ones of reconfiguration of the way I look at a word, or a relation of words (I believe I've mentioned before my disappointment at learning that "rue" the feeling and "rue" the plant have distinct origins), but they only have their effect because I can see how whatever it is that I'm getting from the etymological angle fits with, and perhaps explains (or explains-and-modifies in some satisfying way: this isn't an exact science) what I already thought about the word. Etymological data aren't bludgeons with which to tell people what words really mean; you have to relate whatever you get from them to that is already recognizable. Wieseltier doesn't even attempt to do that, probably because if he did, he might have to soften his point (he might also have to acknowledge that "being immediately what one is" doesn't necessarily have anything to do with it).

*Someone once, in print or in the website of a print magazine, used "armchair" or some conceptually similar noun as part of a putdown of the ns plus one; this is of course next to impossible to search for and I swear to god, it's driving me batty. (I thought I had published this, but evidently had not; in the interim I remembered: "delphic armchair", and I encountered it first on Dial M. It was in TNR, but wasn't applied to the ns plus one. Writ by Taruskin, whose Text and Act was just peremptorily recalled from me, for some damn course or other. Sheesh!)

A tactfully suggested emendation

The NYRB characterizes the RNC delegates thus: a whiter than usual collection of politicians, aspiring politicians, true believers, and hail fellows hoping to be well met. There's no such thing as a "hail fellow" (unless, perhaps, the recipient of a grant from meteorological institutes might count); fortunately, a convenient substitute exists that not only preserves the reference to the idiom through handy homophony, but also makes sense, and is accurate, in its own right: hale fellows hoping to be well met.

Sour persimmons, indeed

Is it possible to undervalue Duck Amuck?

Even this much more straightforward cartoon is pretty great.

The mysteries of etymology—revealed!

Were you aware that the "farious" in "multifarious" and "nefarious" come from the same root? 'Streuth! Viz., far, the Latin word for spelt/grain/meal/etc.. Grain supplies were of course an important matter in Rome (consider Gracchus' corn laws), and "multifarious" was a term of envy, or praise, or, as is not unheard of, both: of someone who had both much grain and many varieties thereof, spelt and barley and wheat and whatnot, one might say that he was multifarious; with time the emphasis on plenty gave way to that on variety, and it began to be used in what was at first sensu lato but has become by our day sensu stricto. The history of "nefarious", "no-grain", is even more closely linked to the importance of grain to Roman society; indeed, similar words with similar histories are attested in nearly all farming cultures. Among the harvesters it was customary to burn a few sheafs as a sort of sacrifice to the harvest deities, and there were two reasons that someone might not pursue this custom: either because he had nothing to burn, or because he deliberately spurned it (of course one might deliberately spurn it and therefore have saved nothing, but you know what I mean). In the former case one was held to have been disfavored by the deity; in the latter, certainly to be about to incur the disfavor. In either case the epithet "nefarius" was applied to the unhappy soul. As with "multifarious" the word underwent an expansion in meaning, though in this case it wasn't quite as general, for its expansion concerned for a long time merely the number of deities whose disfavor might earn one the title of nefas, which increased to include the entire pantheon, regardless of how the god or goddess felt about grain. By our time, of course, it means anything sinister, immoral, or impious.

"Ambiguous" is both of much more recent vintage and wholly unrelated to the above, but I'll tell you about its coinage here anyway: it comes from Belgium, of all places, in the period of time when brewers were experimenting with different ways of bottling fruitless lambics. At that time anything which underwent a secondary fermentation in the bottle would be called "gueuze", regardless of its composition—that is, regardless of whether the lambic in the bottle was "old" or "young". Some brewers and bottlers, realizing that a more complex and interesting flavor could be had by mixing old and young lambics, marketed it to the upper classes, attempting to appeal to their sophistication, with a Greek prefix: an ambi-gueuze, that is, gueuze made with both. Though this style of beer never caught on in England, the word did drift over, signifying anything in which two elements were mixed, not cleanly again to be recovered, and, after the spelling and pronunciation were suitably Angularized, became our "ambiguous".

Herman Melville*, reasonable man

Quo' he, only without such errors as my transcription will have introduced:

To some, it may raise a degree of surprise that one so full of confidence, as the merchant has throughout shown himself, up to the moment of his late sudden impulsiveness, should, in that instance, have betrayed such a depth of discontent. He may be thought inconsistent, and even so he is. But for this, is the author to be blamed? True, it may be urged that there is nothing a writer of fiction should more carefully see to, as there is nothing a sensible reader will more carefully look for, than that, in the depiction of any character, its consistency should be preserved. But this, though at first blush, seeming reasonable enough, may, upon a closer view, prove not so much so. For how does it couple with another requirement—equally insisted upon, perhaps—that while to all fiction is allowed some play of invention, yet, fiction based on fact should never be contradictory to it; and is it not a fact, that, in real life, a consistent character is a rara avis? … If reason be judge, no writer has produced such inconsistent characters as nature herself has. (The Confidence Man, pp 94–5 of the Dalkey Archive edition)

* there is a note attached to the chapter heading: "The first of three chapters (the other are 33 and 44 [this is 14, lest you think a system lurks here] in an authorial voice (but not to be construed as nonfictional or unmasked) about the nature of fiction).". I clearly transgress its warning in titling the post as I have—anyway, I have done so if one insists on reading the title as having anything to do with the post, an unfortunate tendency of the naïve reader against which I've warned in the past—but then, it's not as if any argument is brought forth against so construing the voice of the chapter. Nothing prevents Melville from speaking in propria persona at occasion in his works, except perhaps the obstinacy of critics who prescind from any such identification; in an environment rich in such critics, no textually-embedded protestations regarding a passage's actually representing the opinion of the author could be dispositive, because of course an author who was speaking in another's voice could have that other voice them as well.

But if we're going to go that far, there's no reason I can see to take the voice of ch. 14 as "authorial"; it could be critical or commentatorial, for all that: an interlude in which an unnamed extra party assesses the book thus far. True, ch14 does begin "As the last chapter was begun with a reminder looking forwards, so the present must consist of one glancing backwards", suggesting that he who made ch13—made ch14, but this suggestion need not carry the day: we simply postulate that the critic gets a few chapters to himself, and here he chooses to begin his first chapter with a reference to the preceding.

I haven't read up to ch14, I just opened to that page in the bookstore.

"Sooner rather than later"

People who want to something to be done, or are ordering something to be done, which will be done at some point anyway, but who want the executors to get a move on, have adopted the locution "sooner rather than later" to describe what they're after: "we should file the thingum sooner rather than later in order to frobnicate the geezer", or whatever. An adaptation of "sooner or later", obviously. Sometimes, evidently, people who are advocating stupid positions will use this locution seemingly without realizing quite what they're saying:

The NIH proposal “will sooner rather than later destroy the commercial market for these scientific, technical and medical journals,” Ralph Oman, a copyright lawyer from George Washington University Law School, told the subcommittee (Chronicle of Higher Education).

Well garsh, if the commercial market is going to be destroyed anyway, shouldn't you offer an additional argument for why that destruction shouldn't be done in some managed fashion right now?

The CHE article contains another odd line from Oman: "Later, during a question-and-answer session, the lawyer got a laugh by asking whether we really wanted "the hairy snout of government" poking around in science publishing."—like, say, by passing a law preventing an grantmaking institution from imposing conditions on the grants it gives? If the law under discussion "forbids federal agencies from conditioning funding agreements -- like NIH grants --- on a requirement that authors make copies of their peer-reviewed articles public", that seems like governmental involvement too, does it not? (So, for that matter, does government funding in the first place, though who knows if Oman also wants the NIH to be shuttered and the government to stop providing funds to universities.)

Doniger agrees

The march to the ocean to make salt led by Gandhi in 1930, and its aftermath, are justly famous as exemplifying non-violent resistance through moral force. There is, however, a relatively uncelebrated, and amusing, historical resonance to the fame of this episode, which I feel it my duty to help disseminate further. We don't quite have a parallel on our hands, but perhaps we can think of it this way: the Hindu Gandhi's efforts to subvert the British imperial regime in India by disobeying its laws regarding the production and sale of salt constituted a sympathetic tone produced from the resounding event that was the birth of Buddhism.

Walter Kaufmann claims in his introduction to Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre that existentialism is a philosophy which has been discovered and rediscovered countless times owing to the bleakness and emptiness of this life; the same could not be true of Buddhism, for which the ground had carefully to be prepared: it is essential that Siddhartha have been born into a life of kingly luxury and ease, for, had he been accustomed to the meaningless pain and suffering endemic to human life from an early age, their discovery could never have been revelatory to him. Encountering them for the first time as an adult, no cynical or world-weary responses (this is all there is) are elicited; instead, the shock spurs him to go beyond the appearances embraced by Kaufmann's heroes. This could never have happened had not Siddhartha's family had the power to shield him from the realities of this-worldly existence for as long as they did, yet it is rarely asked, how came they by the resources and power to do this? What was the source of their familial wealth and influence?

Were the question posed in another context, I would not expect any of my readers to know the answer; having introduced it the way I have, however, I do not think anyone will be surprised when I say: they (or rather their forebears) controlled the salt trade in India. In fact, they were so widely known for this that in the Hellenic word India was occasionally referred to as the mono-sodium Gautamate. Siddhartha did not, of course, attempt to undermine his family's empire, though a single-minded and tendentious commentator might describe his abandonment of his father's house as something like civil disobedience, where the authority disobeyed is that of grasping desire itself, this does not seem quite apt. But there can be no doubt that the system Siddhartha founded was momentous in India's history, and that Gandhi's peaceful, almost passive resistance in the face of British imperialism owes much to it: the mineralogical coïncidence is, if its significance is not immediately obvious, at the very least interesting, and worth pointing out.

Soon I will be invincible

Yesterday I took a spill from my bike while going through Golden Gate Park and managed to scrape up both sides of my left elbow, which is itself still all swole up. Both of the scrapes are scabbing up nicely, and on one of them the scab is black: I assume this means that I will soon become some sort of asphalt-based superhero, with such powers as:

1. Seasonal expansion and contraction.
2. The ability to absorb and radiate heat extremely well (related to above).
3. The proportional speed and strength of pavement.
4. The ability to rapidly heal from wounds by immersing myself in the La Brea Tarpits.

And so on and so forth. I also chopped a bit of my left middle finger off, but prospects for carrot- or knife-based powers seem, so far, grim.

Noted in passing

We already knew that German Emo has deep roots*. But did you know that there is an equally powerful French strain?

—What! he said. Do you not realize that there are souls in endless torment? They are craving for dreams and action, the purest passions, the wildest pleasures, and thus they cast us into all kinds of fantasies, and foolishness.

Then she looked at him just as you gaze upon a traveller come from a far-away land.

—We don't even have that consolation, we poor women!

—Sad consolation, for it brings no happiness.

Rodolphe has also recently professed a sometime desire, of a melancholy night, to join the happy in the churchyard. True, he's certainly not being sincere and is just attempting to get into Emma's skirts, but the mere fact that such methods work constitute an indictment. (Rodolphe himself is more likely to gild a tortoise than to black his eyes, I suspect. It's Emma one must look out for. And I don't know, at this point, if his methods will turn out to have worked. But they seem to be working, progressive aspect.)

Did you know that "emo drama baby" is very nearly an anagram of "Madame Bovary"? FACT.

* The last line is translated as "will you grind your organ to my songs?". (a) Five'll get you ten it's really a hurdy-gurdy. (b) Heh.

Linguistic intuitions

A few days ago I was curious about the origin of the final "s" in "whereabouts"; it turns out to originate in a genitive form, used adverbially, of the adjective "whereabout". The full story, or as full a story as one will get from the OED, is told in that dictionary's entries for "-ward" and "-wards". It's interesting! One thing that interested me was that the adverbs in -ward are claimed to generally have been preceded (at least in Old English) by preëxisting orthographically identical adjectives, as in, I suppose, "a backward glance". One is naturally led to wonder, then, what are the adjectival uses of "toward" are, especially presuming one can't really think of any.  Not all of these uses are explicitly marked as obsolete, but the only one that I think I wouldn't be puzzled to encounter is marked "rare": definition 4b, "Of things: Favourable, propitious: the opposite of untoward." Though this is puzzling, since I think of "untoward" not as meaning unfavorable or ill-tiding, but as more like, though not all that much like, the opposite of the explicitly marked as obsolete 4a, "Disposed to do what is asked or required; willing, compliant, obliging, docile", which the OED claims is the opposite of "froward", which, were I to use it, I would use in the sense of forward def'n 8: presumptuous, pert, bold, immodest (I take great pleasure, incidentally, in the phrase "partitive concord" as deployed in def'n 1 there)—that is, I take "untoward" pretty much solely in the sense of def'n 5a, and the only adjectival use of "toward" that I can see myself using is as the opposite of that: compliant insofar as apt to behave becomingly.

But even there I think I would be puzzled by any use that wasn't both negated and predicative, which is not the case with the hardier "untoward". That is:

Your cousin's proposition to the bride was rather untoward, don't you think?

I hope you're happy; once again, your cousin's untoward behavior has ruined another get-together.

That comment of your cousin's was not exactly toward, was it?

But:

*I was much gratified finally to see some toward behavior from your cousin.

*I thought your cousin's conduct was admirably toward, for once.

I'm on the fence about absolute uses:

His behavior, toward though it may have been compared to the standard he usually sets, still left something to be desired.

And I'm not sure I can think of a negative attributive "toward" that doesn't seem awkward on general stylistic grounds.

Anyway, those OED entries on -ward and -wards are worth reading.