PARVUM OPUS
Number
193
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NATIONAL VOCABULARY CHAMPIONSHIP
High school students can compete for cash prizes in the National Vocabulary Championship, a new competition created by cables game show network, GSN, and The Princeton Review. First online exam will be on October 27, and some cities will have tests in schools.
ALIEN WRITING
You know how things happen in threes, or at least in groups? Same goes for words. I found this blog accidentally, by Fr. John Wauck, an American priest of the Opus Dei Prelature living in Rome. Really. I was looking for an Opus cartoon online (you know, the penguin), not for Parvum Opus. Coincidence? Perhaps. Anyway, I didn't read much of Fr. Wauck's blog but he does have a sense of humor. He commented on this sentence from The Da Vinci Code:
“At the end of the
corridor, illuminated signs bearing the international stick-figure symbols for
toilets guided him through a maze-like series of dividers displaying Italian
drawings and hiding the toilets from sight.” (chapter 12)
Am I the only person who thinks that this sentence may have been written by an alien?
I read that book, chiefly because a couple of my students were trying to read it. Don't remember that sentence. Maybe it didn't stand out enough from the rest of Dan Brown's prose to catch my attention. And maybe he's an alien.
SO DON'T I
Dave DaBee says there's a weird locution common in the Boston area, well, one that I didn't hear when I lived there. It's "So don't I," as in the following example:
"I got hit by a snowball today." "Really? So didn't I!"
If found it hard to believe. It doesn't make sense. I thought maybe people would say it following, "I didn't get hit by a snowball today." But no. So Dave sent me a batch of web sites to prove it:
Bostonspeak Primer (excellent surprise page, Dave added, although some of the Bostonisms are more universal, like "book it," which we've discussed here before)
listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0107c&L=ads-l&P=6098
So don't I "The Massachusetts negative-positive," it says. And we also find that it's pronounced "So dunn-eye," I assume with the stress on "eye."
OK, now I believe it, but I wanna hear it with my own ea-yahs.
SO DOESN'T ANNE
Anne DaBee wrote about "I don't think":
You
seem to be activating a lot of my buttons lately ~ re "I Don't
Think..." ~ If one says "I don't think that's responsible
behavior" the emphasis, to me, at least, differs from that of "I
think that's irresponsible behavior". To me, the positive "I
think" statement carries more weight than the negative. These days, I
wonder how many of us stop to consider such things before opening our mouths. I
usually don't, any more ~ when I'm WRITING, yes, but that's a whole different
thing.
My Granddad, a Scotsman with very pronounced (all definitions) views on just about everything, told me NEVER to say "I don't think..." about ANYTHING ~ with him, "I don't think so" became "I think not". People looked at me funny when I spoke that way, especially my teenage peers. For many years I used synonyms where I might have said "I don't think" ~ I didn't believe, I disagreed, I questioned, I considered (or didn't), but I sure as hell didn't "not think"! About the only place I can remember where people didn't look at me funny because of the way I sometimes spoke was in college, where most of the profs also "talked funny".
Most of my ancestors were Scottish and I suspect most Scots have pronounced views on a lot of things.
LIBRARY TRIP
Bill R. sent a nice bit from The Irascible Professor on libraries written by Jane Goodwin. One of the first things I do when I move to a new town (which I've done quite a bit) is get a library card. When I was a kid, I used to love stocking up with a pile of books every week in the summer. I loved bookmobiles. During school, I'd often make a fast trip to the school library before classes started, find a Nancy Drew mystery or Alice in Wonderland or a Louisa May Alcott book or something, and hide it behind whatever textbook I was supposed to be reading in class. By the end of the day, I might have finished the library book, and I might have time to exchange it for a different book to take home that night. I was always attracted to books that had obviously been coarsely rebound in sturdy cardboard, because that meant the book was popular and probably quite entertaining.
In college, I was caught canoodling in the stacks with my boyfriend, and an old librarian ordered us to "Stop that clutching act!" Very scary. But most librarians are not the frumps and grumps of myth. A bit nerdy perhaps, but they know everything and are happy to tell you where to find it.
Many years later, returning to college and the workforce, I had to submit a piece of writing in application for a freelance job with a Tulsa magazine. I was new in town, but I already had my library card, so I wrote about what I saw in the downtown library. There was a display of photographs taken during the Depression, when even some of the poorest farmers would go to the photographer in town. Near this display, two men sat across from each other at a table reading two copies of the same book, a western called Yankee Longstraw. The men looked like they were homeless, and had come in to get out of the killer August heat. I wondered what made them different from the people in the photographs: and I thought, these men wouldn't get their portraits made.
REMAINS OF TWO-HEADED BEAST FOUND
Herb H. wrote:
The
headline on USA Today yesterday ~ I passed it on display at Walgreen's ~
was,
EARLIEST
CHILD REMAINS FOUND!
It
was a mild relief to see that. How depressing it is when you find your child ~
earliest OR latest ~ and then have it lost again. Any child should remain
found. But who is the earliest child, anyway? Many would think it meant Cain,
the eldest son of Adam and Eve. But no, if Cain were found, nobody would even
know it was Cain. It's not the same as that story of an explorer finding an
age-old man's body frozen in the polar ice and rushing to report he'd found the
remains of Adam himself. (He knew this just from looking at the body through
the surrounding ice, and the listener/reader is invited to work out logically
how the explorer could and did know it was Adam.)
So Cain Adamson could not have been found, therefore could not remain found.
Sounds like Herb's going herbal again.
PROGRESSIVE
Another case of a word popping up repeatedly and unexpectedly. The word "progressive" keeps showing up in my reading, after I thought I was done with it last week and was ready to forget about for a while. But I find that the word appeared in the sense I wrote about as early as the 1930s, when American communists started to use it as sort of a euphemism for communist or socialist. Stalin was murdering so many people that it was embarrassing. The American left wanted to distance themselves a bit with a new word for public consumption, without actually changing their ideas. But that's not its earliest appearance. There's a magazine called The Progressive that's been "A leading voice for peace and social justice since 1909." Much like Stalin.
SOMETHING
NEW! Check out the new "I Eat Dead Things" T-shirts for dogs and
people, and the Protestant Work Ethic items 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.
If you buy books from Amazon using the link below, I'll get a tiny commission, and I'd appreciate it.
Link here to look for books on Amazon.com!
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