PARVUM OPUS

 

 

HOT ICE

 

Years ago, in my nomadic phase, Rose, an old (now 80+) friend of mine gave me this advice: If I was in a small town, and I was broke and needed a place to stay, I could go to a black neighborhood and ask for help, telling someone "I'm hot ice." She didn't elaborate, but I assume it was a simple metaphor for melting financially. She meant someone would help me, presumably because using this bit of slang would make me appear less white and less alien. Rose is a white woman who owned a couple of black neighborhood bars (or joints, as she called them) years ago. I never had to take her advice, and I probably wouldn't have inspired much confidence, using slang that wasn't familiar to me. But she always said if you need help, you'll get it on the street.

 

Speaking of slang, Idiom Savant is a good book on idioms/slang/cant/argot/jargon. There are lots of books on slang, but this one appealed to me because it is organized by the profession or subculture from which the slang vocabularies originated. Of course it doesn't cover all of them ~ there's no section on teachers or writers, and no ethnic categories. But there's lots of good stuff there and I'll be referring to it from time to time. One of my favorites, which I've heard before, is one of the medical profession's terms (there are several) for nearing death ~ circling the drain.

 

WHAT DOES VANILLA ICE CREAM TASTE LIKE?

 

Some things aren't easy to describe verbally. My dad told me that he ate dog when he was stationed in the Philippines in the early '50s. So I asked him what it tasted like and he said it tasted like a dirty, wet dog smells. Maybe he was just trying to discourage me from tasting Snuffy.

 

At Jack Hatfield's Smoky Mountain Banjo Academy, when Fred was having some frets replaced and consequently agreed to have his banjo set up and "hot-rodded" by Tom Nechville, Nechville said his banjo sounded "porous." Fred said, "Maybe it's translucent?" What's a porous sound? I've heard of a hollow sound. Anyway, now his banjo sounds neither porous nor translucent.

 

REVERSE ENGRISH

 

Sue wrote:

 

On things not translating well into English: When Coca Cola was introduced into Japan, the slogan was "Coke adds life to everything". The product didn't sell well there. Upon investigation it was found out that the closest translation to this slogan was "Coke brings your ancestors back from the dead." A new, more Asian-flavored slogan was hastily devised.

 

EARWORMS

 

This and that from Dave DaBee:

 

I learned "earworm" from my chorus community. In any case, the best definition(s) I found with Google's "define: earworm" is on UrbanDictionary.com/earworm.

 

Btw, UrbanDictionary.com is something to note: the living language, on the hoof.

 

The origin, as I've heard it, is at Earworm ~ Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

 

Thank you for saying "squirrelous" so my mom and I didn't have to. (It would have come to that sooner or later.)

 

CARBON-BASED LIFE FORM

 

I asked a kid working in Staples for carbon paper, and he said, "What's carbon paper?" Would he know what "carbon copy" means, or is that becoming a metaphor that has no real meaning for the yutes of today? In which case eventually it will be used but garbled. "It's a carbo copy" for a duplicate carbohydrate recipe? "It's a carb copy" for an after-market carburetor?

           

BLEEP REVISITED

 

My son Jude responded to the Skeptico reference Mike sent. (I placed it at the bottom of the page because it's so heavy.)

 

The movie's argument about natives not being able to see Columbus' ships is called into question. I read that one person couldn't find any reference to this on a Google search, thus it must be fabricated, thus the movie must be false. Let me ask this, if you hold a cat to a mirror why doesn't it react as if there was another cat? They react quite evidently when looking out a window at another cat. Does the cat know it is a mirror? Does the cat already recognize itself? Is the cat unable to accept the possibility of another cat's presence? . . . I wonder how a cat would react if it were placed on a large mirror laid flat (something I'm sure I'll explore).

 

. . . the current view in quantum physics, or "New Physics" (used to differentiate itself from classic physics of Newton and Einstein), is full of really strange possibilities that could easily be interpreted into any paradigm. These paradigms would all be partially correct.

 

Here's the crux of the weirdness. There are the two possible and most accepted answers to how the probability issues quantum world works when it is viewed on the macro scale. One is the Copenhagen Interpretation, which states that a quantum field collapses into one state or another and literally becomes one thing or another, depending on how it is observed. Thus the observer affects the observed at the quantum level. This is the most accepted postulate. Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg developed it based on the work of Max Born who discovered the probabilistic nature of quanta. The work they were doing began to eclipse Einstein's work, from which he never caught up again. He died trying to unify his relativistic work that focused on gravity (the weakest of the four forces) and electromagnetism (leptons, which are variations of the mass of electrons), Strong Force (which binds the nucleus, protons and neutrons and are made up of even smaller units called quarks), and Weak Force (produces radiation) of the quantum world.

 

The other interpretation is the "Many Worlds" theory that states that when something happens at the quantum level, an equal universe is born where something didn't happen. In either view, if you take the average of all events in the quantum world, you get what we perceive to be consistent reality. But it really isn't . . . at any moment some phenomenon could occur according to Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle.

 

Without uncertainty, there's no free will, [thus] everything is preordained from the first break of the pool rack. All things can be predicted with enough calculation.

 

The real magic to me is in the idea that we can form thoughts which are sublime, control the macro world with that thought by making the electro-chemical processor known as the brain react, and physically drag a cup of coffee to our lips to ingest chemicals that then alter our consciousness/thoughts. How in the world does the mind communicate with the physical world? Wouldn't it be simpler if we could just will things to happen through a quantum chain reaction, impacting events by influencing probability? Information, being non-local as theorized by John Bell and recently experimentally proven, suggests that the chain reaction doesn't even necessarily have to be a chain. It seems as if it's already right next-door.

 

I definitely recommend The Elegant Universe and see if there isn't anything there to inspire your own paradigm.

 

______________________________________________

 

NEED A SIMPLE WEB PAGE? WOULD A NEWSLETTER, ELECTRONIC OR PRINT, HELP YOUR BUSINESS? TALK TO ME ABOUT PROFESSIONAL EDITING AND WEB WORK.

 

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.

 

Parvum Opus is a publication of KeithOps / Opus Publishing Services. Back issues may be found at http://www.keithops.us/. You may comment in the Guestbook, linked below the back issue links. Also, feel free to e-mail me with comments or queries.

 

If you don't want to receive Parvum Opus, please reply with "unsubscribe," "quit," "enough," or something like that in the subject line, and I'll take you off the mailing list.

 

Go to Babelfish to translate this page into Chinese, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, or Spanish!