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PLEW

In "When the Wombats plew the Pink Sox," James J. Kilpatrick explains why we need more irregular verbs (like "plew" as the past tense of "play").

I've often had to stop and try to figure out if "snuck" or "sneaked" is correct, for instance. Kilpatrick has a worthy suggestion: "The choice should be governed not by fixed rules of conjugation, but by principles of context, cadence and connotation." What we call irregular verbs follow a form of conjugation that was at some point, in the English language, regular, and they're all from old English. Newer acquisitions from other languages follow the regular pattern.

Along the lines of the late Lewis Grizzard's explanation, that "naked" means you don't have any clothes on, but "nekked" means you don't have any clothes on, and you're up to something, I suggest that someone who was up to something probably snuck around.

ACCIDENT

Last week I wrote about the meaning of the words accident, yield, and weed. This week I had an accident. Both of us walked away, but our cars were towed away. She caused the "accident". Wish the word "weed" from the same article had been the trigger word instead.

LET'S HOPE NOT

From a TV documentary about Winifred Wagner, wife of Richard Wagner's son and Hitler fan: "Winifred Wagner remained Hitler's muse until her death in 1980." She may have remained a Hitler devotee till her death, but let's hope Hitler has no more muses beyond the grave. A muse is the source of an artist's inspiration. Winifred Wagner was not the muse for Hitler's early painting attempts. She liked his politics.

SWAHILI

I learned from a visiting priest who works in Kenya that Swahili was created by Arab merchants on the East Coast of Africa. "Swahili" means "coast". It combines Arabic with Bantu languages. One web site on the history of Swahili says its syntax or grammar is Bantu, while much of the vocabulary is Arabic and Persian.

BC/AD VS BCE/CE

You may have run across the use of BCE (before the common era) to replace BC (before Christ), and CE (common era) to replace AD (Anno Domini, although when I was a kid I used to think it stood for after [His] death). The reason for this attempt to change a centuries long calendar reference, which is indeed based on the life of Jesus Christ, is not to offend the two-thirds of Earthlings who are not Christian. How would you feel, the argument goes, if you read BB and AB (before Buddha and after Buddha)? I'd think I was in a different country, and would not expect it to be like the United States. A counterargument goes, why should we be "forced" to use days of the week and months that are named after pagan gods? We'd have to totally wipe out our linguistic, and for that matter artistic, literary, and other, culture if we want to avoid "offending" everyone by mention of things that they don't believe in. When you throw atheists in the mix, you'd have to eliminate an awful lot.

THE MOVIES: GROUNDHOG DAY

In the February 14, 2005 issue of National Review Jonah Goldberg reviewed the movie Groundhog Day, one of his favorites and one of mine too. He was surprised to find it has a serious following among religious teachers from Judaism and Christianity to Hindus and Buddhists to Wiccans and Falun Gong followers. Goldberg wrote,

Charles Murray, author of Human Accomplishment, has cited Groundhog Day more than once as one of the few cultural achievements of recent times that will be remembered centuries from now. He was quoted in The New Yorker declaring, "It is a brilliant moral fable offering an Aristotelian view of the world."

If you haven't seen the movie yet, don't be alarmed. Rent it (though it's on TV frequently). It's funny and Bill Murray is perfect. I don't agree with Goldberg that Andie MacDowell isn't charming enough to justify the Murray character's love. She's beautiful, bright, and good, and more charm on her part would have distracted from his story.

LIT CRIT

While looking for Goldberg's article about Groundhog Day online (which I didn't find), I ran across a literary parody by Florence King that explains why I gave up modern English lit in favor of reading mysteries.
At the end she quotes John Simon: "After reading such outpourings of hypersensitivity in quotidian conflict, one feels positively relieved to be an insensitive clod." (Quotidian means routine or everyday.)

By the way, "everyday" is an adjective. "Every day" (two words) is not.

READING GLASSES FOR YOUR MONITOR

Did you know you can get software to enlarge the text and images on your computer screen? I don't know enough about this to recommend anything specific, but you or someone you know has difficult reading, do a search for computer monitor enlargement or magnification.

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I have a contribution in a new anthology about the "center of life", Changing Course: Women's Inspiring Stories of Menopause, Midlife, and Moving Forward, edited by Yitta Halberstam.

Copyright Rhonda Keith 2005. Parvum Opus or part of it may be reproduced only with permission, but it is permissible to forward the entire newsletter as long as the copyright remains.

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