Number 125
Churned up this week in Web surfing, the Butterflies and Wheels Web site. Here are two entries I like from the site's A Fashionable Dictionary:
The opposite of the Goddess. "But one pernicious effect of literacy has gone largely unnoticed: writing subliminally fosters a patriarchal outlook. Writing of any kind, but especially its alphabetic form, diminishes feminine values and with them, women's power in the culture." [Leonard Shlain, The Goddess and the Alphabet]
Desperate for attention, or publication, or tenure, or promotion, or all those. The route to solid bourgeois comfort in the academy is via being as transgressive as Madonna on speed.
Also good is On Bad Writing. Follow the links to discover that if you're not quite sure what's going on, maybe it's not you. One of the best links is the Post-Modernist Generator. Every time you refresh the page (or I refresh the page), a new page of gibberish is produced that sounds very like the post-modernist theory that keeps so many English majors in beer and pretzels. On which a B&W commenter writes, "Postmodern generator is a good inoculation against our own tendency to make sense out of damn near anything."
It took me quite a while to get over calling music compilations "records" ~ LPs were being phased out well before I got the message ~ but "album" can still apply to CDs. The music industry must have picked the word up from the blank books that hold pictures, autographs, souvenirs, etc. Collections, in other words.
I get tired of acronyms. A few years ago I ran into a co-worker (or cow-orker) in a used music store who told me enthusiastically, "I love CDs!" I thought he meant the medium. He meant music. Ever hear anyone say, "I love tapes?" I never went to a store to buy an LP; I bought albums. I've bought several of the same album over the year, Getz/Gilberto's classic bossa nova album, starting with an LP, then a tape, then a CD. (Never had an 8-track.)
When the technology changes from CDs, we'll have to remember yet another name for collections of recorded music.
While we wait ~ I uploaded a short clip to the Web site I built for Sonny Robertson, from his song, "Kissin' the Monkey". Check it out at www.sonnyrobertson.com. Hope to have more clips from a new album he's just about finished.
In a 1940s movie about spies, referring to invisible ink: "This stuff is fugitive." Then he said it would "dissolve" soon." He meant it would disappear quickly, but surely not "dissolve"?
Old woman to her husband in an eye clinic: "This is the Midwest, not the Mideast." I didn't hear anything else so I don't know if it was a joke comparing Ohio to the Middle East, or if they were from the East Coast, perhaps, and she was correcting his calling Ohio the Mideast. Why is the Midwest called that anyway? When you look on the map, it looks like the North Mideast. Parts of Ohio were once called the Western Reserve. In colonial days, it was far west.
On the radio: Something is, or is not, "adequate enough." "Adequate" is enough, both are redundant. It's like saying "enough enough".
Dave DaBee (who just got back from Hawaii), wrote:
New-Ark is correct, for the Delaware Newark. I wonder if the offender was generally clueless or specifically in error.
Thanks. I never knew there was a Delaware Newark, and never heard that pronunciation.
And he also sent this about "hark back" from Merriam Webster's Word of the Day::
Well,
here's a weird one. (I used to get their word of the day, every day, but at
some point it started being "once or twice a year."
Let
me point out, btw, that one of the things you provide is a sensible place to
send things like this when they pop up! Isn't that a nice addition to life?
hark
back / verb
1
: to turn back to an earlier topic or circumstance
2
: to go back to something as an origin or source ~ Example sentence: Restaurant's
art deco interior harks back to Paris in the 1920s.
"Hark," a very old word meaning "listen," was used as a cry in hunting. The master of the hunt might cry "Hark! Forward!" or "Hark! Back!" The cries became set phrases, both as nouns and verbs. Thus, a "hark back" was a retracing of a route by dogs and hunters, and "to hark back" was to turn back along the path. From its use in hunting, the verb soon acquired its current figurative meanings. In the early 20th century, English speakers began using "hearken back" and its variant "harken back" synonymously with the verb "hark back." (Like "hark," "hearken" and "harken" can mean "listen.") And since the 1980s, there's been another development: "harken" can now be used alone to mean "hark back."
On re-reading Lucky Jim, the hilarious 1953 Kingsley Amis novel about academic life in the north of England, I find that even half a century ago, grade inflation was driving teachers mad. Here's what Amis's characters had to say about it (not one of the hilarious passages):
'One thing I like about Fred Karno,' Beesley said, 'though it's about the only thing when I come to think of it: he'll never try to push anyone through that he doesn't really think's worth it. No Firsts this year for us, four Thirds, and forty-five per cent of the first-year people failed; that's the way to deal with 'em. Fred's about the only prof. in the place who's resisting all this outside pressure to chuck Firsts around like teaching diplomas and push every bugger who can write his name through the Pass courses. What's Neddy's angle on the business? Or hasn't 'he got round to getting one yet?'
'That's right. He leaves most of it to Cecil Goldsmith, and that means everyone gets through. Cecil's a tender-hearted chap, you know.'
'Tender-headed, you mean. It's the same everywhere you look; not only this place, but all the provincial universities are going the same way. Not London, I suppose, and not the Scottish ones. But my God, go to most places and try and get someone turfed out merely because he's too stupid to pass his exams ~ it'd be easier to sack a prof. That's the trouble with having so many people here on Education Authority grants, you see.'
'How do you mean? The students have got to get their money from somewhere.'
'Well, you know, Jim. You can see the Authorities' point in a way. "We pay for John Smith to enter College here and now you tell us, after seven years, that he'll never get a degree. You're wasting our money." If we institute an entrance exam to keep out the ones who can't read or write, the entry goes down by half, and half of us lose our jobs. And then the other demand: "We want two hundred teachers this year and we mean to have them." All right, we'll lower the pass mark to twenty per cent and give you the quantity you want, but for Gods' sake don't start complaining in two years' time that your schools are full of teachers who couldn't pass the General Certificate themselves, let alone teach anyone else to pass it."
A friend tells me that now, not everyone who wants to goes to college in
England, even good students, whereas here, most students can dredge up the
tuition if they try. In the U.S. after WWII the GI Bill enabled many veterans
to go to college who would not otherwise have been able to afford it. I don't
know that grade inflation started here until considerably later, though.
But I wonder if university students in the Middle Ages, for instance, were ever kicked out for being poor students. So few people could go to school then anyway. Perhaps grade inflation is like monetary inflation, or westward expansion: it just keeps going until something breaks down or till you reach the shore, and you have to coin new currency, or turn back.
Meanwhile, the brightest students today have no way of knowing for sure how their work really compares with the others'.
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