IRONY BORED

In a review of the movie, A Prairie Home Companion (The Weekly Standard, June 12, 2006), John Podhoretz kept insisting on the unrelenting "irony" of Keillor's radio program. He says, "The radio show we see in the movie is not the blue-state condescension fest that warms the cockles of every blue-stater's sentimental heart."

He says the radio program is not only a parody of old time variety radio shows that no longer exist, it's a "put-on", "a work of blue-state sophistication that spends two hours furiously winking at its public-radio audience" (except for the good musicians). Skits such as those with Guy Noir "gently poke fun at left-liberal ideology without poking any holes in it" while the Lake Wobegon stories are affectionate but condescending about churchgoing, farm-country Americans ~ poking holes in them, I guess.

Podhoretz confesses that he loves the show, "but then, it was tailor-made for blue-state city boys unable even to take out the garbage without first having an ironic exchange with the wife." Maybe something like,

"Honey", I'm taking out the "garbage".

Wink wink nudge nudge. What a very tiresome man he must be to live with.*

I've listened to PHC for years, and I don't think that Keillor is only making fun of the church-goers and farmers. Would he have come back from New York if that were so? Would two hours a week of nothing but irony about life, death, religion, and love would have captured radio listeners for 32 years? Constant irony would suggest there is nothing real about these people's lives ~ that is, everybody between New York and Los Angeles ~ or about life, death, religion, and love. Humor is not the same as parody is not the same as irony. PHC has all of those, but not necessarily all at the same time.

*By the way, Fred says he saw Britney Spears interviewed on TV (purely by accident) and she kept making air quotes around all kinds of things where no irony was intended. This is the first case I've heard of where erroneous quotation marks to create emphasis (when italics or something should be used) were made with hand gestures. Poor Britney was complaining about the paparazzi, and now to be attacked because of her incorrect air-punctuation...

CHURCH NEWS

Who Or What's A Saint?

The Episcopal church has been in the news with the election of a female bishop, but what caught my eye was a related news item ~ the Episcopalians are considering electing the late Justice Thurgood Marshall as an Episcopalian saint. I didn't even know they had saints, but now I find that some of their saints are "Martin Luther King, Catholic theologians such as St. Thomas Aquinas, Methodist Sojourner Truth, even suffragette Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who biographers say opposed organized religion". When Catholics pick a saint, that person is believed to have interceded with God to work miracles after intercessory prayer to that saint. It looks like the new Episcopalian saints just have to be politically active, not necessarily religious. But famous.

Sex, Violence, Religion

Did you know that a Baptist movie about football called Facing the Giants has been given a PG rating because it's partly about religion? Parents are advised that this movie has thematic elements of concern, and if movie goers are of a different religion, well, they've been warned. The "narrow focus" of this movie means that the characters think one thing but not a different thing, and that one thing is not what everyone else thinks, so we need to be warned.

Now if we have warnings for religion as well as sex and violence, why not for every movie that has any kind of idea or belief or values at all? What movie would not require a PG rating? Is there a movie that does not have some point of view or belief about reality, at least by implication?

Paper, Scissors, Rock

Some Presbyterian churches are now offering alternatives to calling the Holy Trinity "Father, Son, and Holy Spirit". There's also "Mother, Child, and Womb" or "Rock, Redeemer, and Friend".

(I'm not making fun of religion and anti-religion, I'm just mentally putting quotes around their words.)

WEE KNIGHTS

The DaBees are on top of hyphenation. Anne DaBee (Dave's mom) sent this:

Many years ago the entire staff of our local newspaper got word processors or computers or some such magic machines with spellcheck, after which the paper fired all the proofreaders ~ tsk, tsk. Since then there have been many interesting statements in print ~ tourists coming to Annapolis to see the sites, for instance. One could justify that by pointing to various historic sites with plaques on them, but that's a stretch.

My favorite was in an article about regularly occurring events, some of which happened on weeknights. This was hyphenated at the end of a line as "wee-knights", which not only breaks all the rules but also creates amusing visions of teensy little guys in chain mail racing around on their teensy little chargers... I don't know whether this was done by a machine or a real person, but who cares?

As Jane Austen wrote, "Who so capable as Anne?" Anne's well brought-up son Dave DaBee weighs in with his technical knowledge:

Hyphenation is one of those technologies that went from something to nothing during my career in typesetting, as text got computerized. I'm sure you know that the classic "dumb hyphenator" example is

the-

rapist.

But any hyphenator worth its salt has a decent exception dictionary built in, and allows local exceptions as well, where "local" means specific to the document or template or project. The Godfather sequel folks did an Oops if they didn't add such words, or at least attach an Italian dictionary. (Heck, even Word can do that.) Of course the problem with adding dictionaries is that the more words you add, the more things the system thinks are okay. ...

In de olden days, it was a miracle when a cheap newspaper typesetting machine could take an unhyphenated wire service feed and convert it to composed newspaper columns. Unfortunately for traditionalists, this was done with a total of 13 rules of logic and no exceptions. One of those rules was "you can hyphenate before ing at the end of a word," which resulted in this too-common outcome:

th-

ing

I seem to remember that feminists who were fed up with therapists used to make a th-ing out of breaking the word therapist into the-rapist.

HIGAMOUS, HOGAMOUS, THEY WERE TRIOGAMOUS

In a TV documentary about two men and a woman who carried on a long-term ménage a trois, they called themselves "triogamous", after "monogamous". However, monogamy is when one person has one partner (mono = one), making a couple; bigamy is when one person has two spouses (bi = two), thus three people are involved. But these people did not each have three (tri) mates, they were just trying to avoid the word bigamy. Boston Globe reviewer Janice Page said triogamous means they're in love with one other and themselves ~ which, as we know from Whitney Houston, is the greatest love of all. Sadly, after eight years and a couple of babies, they broke up because the men wanted to explore their homosexuality more thoroughly (though not with each other). I'd call it just plain gamy.

Some sci-fi humorist once invented a planet with 10 different sexes. Trying to set up a tryst was a nightmare.

SHUT MY MOUTH

A writer for News of the Weird said that a description of fried food "watered readers' mouths". What a peculiar image. Anyway, Garner's Usage Tips (is he reading my mind?) had something to say about ergative verbs (ergative coming from the Greek for work), which can do both transitive and intransitive work:

He broke the window. The window broke.

Mouths water. Food waters mouths? Nah.

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