PARVUM OPUS

 

Number 176

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SUPERSIZE THIS

 

Bill R. shares my opinion about subsidizing artists:

 

History majors, too ~ where's that historical subsidy?

If I like an artist's work, I'll pay for it. If not, let the artist find somebody else to like it and pay for it. If nobody likes it enough to pay for it, "Would you like to SuperSize that?"

 

You betcha.

 

Cincinnati now has an art festival going on called the Fringe Festival. If the fringe were publicly subsidized, it would no longer be the fringe.

 

A local man wrote a letter to the editor about Czar's article on artist support:

 

I say good riddance to taxpayer-funded support to individual artists. [I didn't know there was actual tax support.] Forcibly taking the fruits of another's labor so that healthy, able-bodied individuals might express their creative urges is unnecessary.... Some satisfy themselves practicing their art without attaining much success. Consider all the musicians playing in bars past middle age. They do it without "support" because they love it.... But I don't think artists "suffer" disproportionately. People start out with all kinds of dreams that get derailed and either learn to find another way to fulfillment or muddle through.... Artists... are no more deserving of extraneous financial support than anyone else.

 

Past middle age! That's a real sacrifice.

 

And finally, Kingsley Amis had it right in Lucky Jim, when the girl Jim Dixon liked said about her artist boyfriend:

 

'I think he's sort of got special needs, you know, and it's up to others to supply them when they can, without too many questions asked.'

Dixon didn't trust himself to speak. Quite apart from his own convictions in the matter, his experience of Margaret had been more than enough to render repugnant to him any notion of anyone having any special needs for anything at any time, except for such needs as could be readily gratified with a tattoo of kicks on the bottom. Then he realized that Christine must, perhaps unconsciously, be quoting her boy-friend, or some horrible book lent by her boy-friend, whose desire to range himself with children, neurotics, and invalids by thus specializing his needs was not, at the moment, worth attacking.

 

(Here "tattoo" means a rhythmic drumming.)

 

WHERE DO INSURGENTS SURGE FROM?

 

Herb H. wrote:

 

I didn't think our government EVER referred to the enemy in Iraq as "insurgents."  That's a term made up by the media, ostensibly to sound neutral and unbiased, but obviously also to [make them] sound as sympathetic ~ even heroic ~ as possible. 

President Bush mainly calls them assassins and thugs. He rejected calling them "guerillas" because he didn't want to lose votes amongst those nice big monkeys down at the National Zoo.

 

OK, then I don't know what the gov't or the military calls the "insurgents", publicly, I mean. What were the "insurgents" doing when Saddam was in power?

 

RAGE THE LANGUAGE

 

Dave DaBee called me on carelessly saying I hadn't heard "rage" as a verb except in Dylan Thomas's poem.

 

Waddaya mean you haven't heard rage used as a verb? A raging storm, Rage Against The Machine; google "define: rage" lists three verby definitions.

 

And Mike Sykes sent several examples of the verb rage. I re-emphasize, transitive verb: "rage the soup". And "raging storm" uses a gerund, a verb form that becomes an adjective here (could also be a noun).

 

Dave also said that when he asked a Verizon agent if she was reading from an actual printed, paper manual, she said yes, online. (This is sort of like the story about the secretary who made word processing corrections by using Wite-Out on her computer screen.)

 

Sandra G. wrote about the Edgar relationship:

 

What's wrong with "My relationship with Edgar"  or "Edgar's relationship with me" - ? Still only four words and the sense is clear, at least.

 

Yes, these are more good alternatives to "Edgar and I's relationship".

 

Sandra also sent this, from a Wall Street Journal review:

 

The audience can hardly but give it an ovation.

 

Sandra plaintively asked, "Aside from being supremely ugly (and apart from the question of why the

audience would be unwilling to ovate), can this be technically correct?" Let's break it down. She thought maybe it was a double negative (hardly and but), but is it? If you remove either of those, see what happens.

 

            (1) The audience can hardly give it an ovation.

            (2) The audience can but give it an ovation.

 

The first means that the audience cannot give it an ovation, so hardly is a negative here. The second means the audience can only give it an ovation, which is a positive meaning. So theoretically this is not a double negative. But what is it? It's a combination of words never heard in nature, it's confusing, and yes, it is ugly. This is one case where you really can't leave out the implied words: "The audience can hardly do anything but give it an ovation."

 

I have to quote from yourdictionary.com, which has an excellent usage note on hardly:

 

In Standard English, hardly, scarcely, and similar adverbs cannot be used with a negative. The sentence I couldn't hardly see him, for instance, is not acceptable. This violation of the double negative rule is curious because these adverbs are not truly negative in meaning. The sentence Mary hardly laughed means that Mary did laugh a little, not that she kept from laughing altogether, and therefore does not express a negative proposition.

 

The note goes on at length from here, but does not give an example specifically for "hardly but" which is certainly illiterate. Maybe we can't fit this peculiar phrase into any known grammatical rule, but we just know it's wrong.

 

THE BRITISH CORNER

 

Brit Mike Sykes said he's never heard "old wives' summer" that Wikipedia gave as a Britishism meaning Indian summer, which Mike says is well known in England.

 

Regarding the pronunciation of "ate" as "et" he wrote:

 

I have always said 'et' rather than 'aight', having been taught that the latter was, in Nancy Mitford's term, non-U. As evidence of which I attach a very brief snatch of Flanders & Swann.

 

At which point he attached a sound clip called "The Reluctant Cannibal" with someone saying "It must have been someone he ate." I'll try to forward the link here.

 

As for Nancy Mitford, she wrote a famous essay about U (upper class) and non-U pronunciations and vocabulary.

 

Mike also took issue with the little etymology book I referred to, saying:

 

According to my dictionary:

            'cloth' comes from Middle High German 'kleit'.

            'blanket' comes from Old French 'blanchet' (from 'blanche')

            'lucifer' is (also) another name for Venus, because it means 'bringer of light'.

Michael Quinion is very interesting on the subject of etymythology. His book 'Ballyhoo, Buckaroo, and Spuds : Ingenious Tales of Words and Their Origins' is quite fascinating.

 

Quinion writes about international English from a British viewpoint at World Wide Words.

 

ENUFF ROUGH STOUGH

 

Willa M. wrote about bad weather:

 

Yeah, we had some rough stough for about ten days. I was forced to hibernate most of the time that week, unless someone was nice enuff to pick me up in a car.   

 

I love it. Or as we used to say in high school, tuff enuff (i.e. good). Spelling aside, it reminds me of a poem by Don Marquis, where archy the cockroach wrote about Shakespeare:

 

archy confesses

 

coarse

jocosity

catches the crowd

shakespeare

and i

are often

low browed

 

the fish wife

curse

and the laugh

of the horse

shakespeare

and i

are frequently

coarse

 

aesthetic

excuses

in bill s behalf

are adduced

to refine

big bill s

coarse laugh

 

but bill

he would chuckle

to hear such guff

he pulled

rough stuff

and he liked rough stuff

 

hoping you

are the same

archy

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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