PARVUM OPUS

Number 170

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SO SHEW ME

I discovered Jane Austen items for sale at CafePress.com. More than one vendor is selling items with quotations from the inimitable Jane or with antique and original art, but The Republic of Pemberley Shoppe is the one connected with the chief Jane Austen web site, The Republic of Pemberley. And they take special requests for products (so will I, at my Parvum Opus shoppe).

I am ordering a T-shirt with this quote, which I think may be from one of Jane's letters because I generally recognize any quote from her six major novels:

Pray shew me how I might render my plain messages into a form better expressing my sensibilities.

</austen>

Note the obsolete form of "show" in "shew".

GET IT?

"Get" is one of those little old English words with quite a long list of definitions in any good dictionary. A usage I've noticed more lately, although it may not be new, is "to get someone". We've always said "get it" for "understand it", as when you get a joke. But recently I hear people say "She gets me" or "We get each other" meaning we understand each other. It's not the same, of course, as "I'm going to get you" meaning I'm going to come after you and thrash, thwack, whack, or attack you.

The other common usage nowadays is "They just don't get it", said witheringly about anyone who does not understand your (mostly political) point of view, and it's always said with the word "just". Actually they probably don't agree, but the phrase presumes they don't understand or else they'd most certainly agree.

PHILES

Are you an Anglophile or a Francophile (English/England lover or French/France lover)? Do you love English accents and English literature; or the French language and French food; or, less likely, English food? (I will, however, put in a good word for English bakeries and Yorkshire pudding.) Although I found Germanophile and Italophile in yourdictionary.com, and Russophile and others browsing the Web, I've never heard or read them. I suppose Anglophile and Francophile have been heard and read so much more often than other philes because we've had more contact with those countries.

I did not find Americanophile at all, though they exist. For instance, I once visited the town of Winesburg, Ohio, which is the title of a book by Sherwood Anderson. The book was really based on another Ohio town, but tourists such as myself ignorantly visited Winesburg, a pretty place in Amish country ~ including a gaggle of Japanese tourists, who were fans of the book, which I found surprising.

WIKITRUTH

Mike Sykes tipped me to Main Page - Wikitruth, with lots of stuff on Wikipedia's truth and lack of it. Wikipedia, like most other sources, must be viewed with a canny eye: it's sometimes the truth, never the whole truth, and sometimes not truth at all.

Wikitruth has a glossary of jargon that has grown out of the Wiki community, including "cruft" meaning "someone else putting in too much detail about an entry before you get a chance to" (as in "fancruft"). Reminds me of dandruff somehow.

Although Dave Barry has retired from his weekly humor column, his old work is still archived online. I noticed that his old columns in the Miami Herald are set up to automatically pull ads at the bottom of the page that link to the headlines and content of his articles. For instance:

"On history's cutting edge" pulled:

16th Century Sword

Low price swords daggers

Renaissance Costumes

"Invasion of the pod people" pulled two ads for whale-watching tours.

These more or less make sense, but "Shop till you drop (in size)" produced:

Plus Size Tunic Top

Huge Mattress Savings

Dresses by Size Appeal

Huge mattress savings?

STRANDED AND INDOLENT

I keep getting the Nigerian scam letters and still sometimes can't resist opening them, because they've been changing their tactics of late. Here's one of particular charm:

Attn Honorable Contractor,

We apologies for the delay of your payment and all the inconveniences and inflict that we might have indulge you through. However, we were having some minor problems with our payment system which is inexplicable, and have held us stranded and indolent, not having the aspiration to devote our 100% assiduity in accrediting foreign contract payments.

This gentleman wanted to split $20 million with me, and included his pleasing and sincere-looking photo, which was a first.

TAKE YOUR NEXT LEFT NEXT TUESDAY

Last week radio talk show host Dennis Prager took a phone call about something we discussed not long ago in PO, "next Tuesday". A caller asked what's the correct thing to say on Friday:

I'll see you Tuesday.

I'll see you next Tuesday.

I'll see you this Tuesday.

Prager said, "Clarity would trump almost anything else here. Say: I'll see you on Tuesday."

Well, that still requires some clarification, as we know.

Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz made a movie called The Long, Long Trailer, in which the couple got lost because of the confusion with the word right. It went something like this: "Lucy, should I turn left here?" "Right." Desi makes the wrong turn and they nearly drive off a cliff.

On another subject, Prager said, "What was liberalism in the '60s is now leftism."

Let us define our terms. Over and over and over.

FOLLOW-UPS

Dave DaBee asked why I used i.e. in "It would have been more practical to go to trade school (i.e. get a degree in computer science)."

And how come youse said "i.e." when youse meant "for instance"? (That is, unless computerese is the only remaining trade school.) Up too late?

My answer: I didn't think closely about the i.e. but what I meant was that the computer science degree is THE equivalent of trade school now. Subtle, hey? Well, that was what I was thinking, but Dave was not wrong.

Dave also wrote:

Re "bureaucratic passive": that may be true too, but when I was typographer for a manufacturer, I always encountered it as the stylistic norm for tech writers, as taught (they said) for the writing of military tech manuals. "Mil standard," they said. It created torturous repair instructions ~ idiotic uncommunicative things like "The screw is pushed in" instead of "Push the screw in."

No longer mil-std, as far as I can tell. The most torturous thing now is avoiding the use of personal pronouns ~ if you can't use the silent-but-understood "you," as in "(You) Push the screw in," you wind up twisting it around so that you don't have to say s/he or his/her.

[Re "enormity"] Similarly, there is no hope for the word "normality," which has largely been replaced by "normalcy."

Regarding the U-trou over-the-head removal by Navy SEALs, Bill R. explained, Think of it as a two-person nuclear wedgie. Besides, as the SEALs assert, "Pain is weakness leaving the body."

SOMETHING NEW! Check out the new "I Eat Dead Things" T-shirts for dogs and people in the Parvum Opus CafePress shop, plus a new Parvum Opus mouse pad! Now you can buy neat products with the Parvum Opus / KeithOps Catti logo at CafePress.com/parvumopus.

The poet Muriel Rukeyser said the universe is not composed of atoms, but stories.

The physicist Werner Heisenberg said the universe is not made of matter, but music.

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