PARVUM OPUS
Number 208
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I used to sit up and take notice when something happened three times in a row, but now it only takes two times to get my attention. Between the two of us, Fred and I received five Starbucks gift cards for Christmas, and most welcome they are. Event 1: One card came in a pretty little folder of flocked paper, which is paper with a fuzzy surface*. Event 2: Now the new Vermont Country Store catalog has an ad for flocked Valentine cards reproduced from a 1954 Golden Book, for only $4.95. I'm going to have to buy it for my own amusement; my kids no longer send out batches of valentines, as far as I know. But I must have that flocked paper. The valentines are the old-fashioned sweet and corny kind. Now they're all licensed cartoon or movie characters, directing the valentine givers and receivers away from themselves and out into the world of commercial entertainment.
*Flocked paper and a flock of sheep have the same
linguistic root, a Latin word meaning a tuft of wool.
Herb H. rebuts Tim Bazzett's memory of "Hula Love" and sent this:
There
came to court her, o'er the water
From
the savage zing-a-zula land
A Bolo
chieftain grand
Sang
he this song
And he
sang hu-la, Hawa-ya hula, smile on your zing gang a zula
Moon
shine above on my sweet jungle love
For
you my love song I'm singing
For
you my bolo I'm swinging
Come
along and be my hula, hula love (yea, yea, yeah, yeah)
"Oo-wa,
oo-wa, oowa" is not in that song, but is from Bob Dylan's "Talkin'
World War Three," where he's wandering around in the aftermath of nuclear
holocaust and . . .
"Turned
on my record player . . . It had Rock-a-day Johnny singin'
Tell
your ma, tell your pa, our loves a gonna gro-oh, oo-wa, oo-wa, oo-wa."
And
some Knox guy recorded "Hula Love," but
1) It
was really Lead Belly's "Hawaiian Song," and
2) The best it was ever sung was by a buddy of mine named Fred.
("Oo-wa" is in a lot of songs.)
I am not a linguist and
have not read Noam Chomsky's work on language, but I ran across an interesting
argument refuting what I guess is his main tenet: that the brain is hard-wired
to understand language and grammar. John
Williamson gives a pertinent grammatical example, which I won't copy here
(showing that meaning derives from more than basic grammatical structure), then
concludes:
...when
we say that people learn a language, including one’s own, this doesn’t mean
that one merely turns a switch and all the structures light up in the brain. It
means that we learn the structures by imitation, by analogy, and by a logical
building process which goes on for many years. Some people master all the
various structures relatively quickly, some get most of it but miss a few
things, and some never gain much mastery over language. One can see this
phenomenon in daily life...
That is, the fact that we
make mistakes in grammar, which are sometimes mistakes in logic, shows that we
don't automatically understand our own language in its entirety, we have to
keep learning language ~ and learning to think. I wouldn't use this brief
example to refute a theory I haven't studied, but I know I am still learning
about language.
Dea R. pointed out that I ought to have written
"grinding gears" instead of "shifting gears." Also, he asked
about the rule that says you shouldn't end a sentence with a preposition. I
wrote about this back in PO
24, so it's time to talk about it again. This is a rule that should never
have been. Like some other rules of English grammar, such as not splitting an
infinitive, it was mistakenly transferred from Latin grammar.
You can just forget the preposition rule.
Vanewimsey (guess where this reader got that e-mail name?) found this about "floy-floy":
In 1938, jazz musicians
Slim Gaillard and Slam Stewart had a novelty hit record called "Flat Foot
Floogie With the Floy Floy." In the 1981 film Atlantic City, Burt
Lancaster nostalgically remarked that in the late 30s, "Atlantic City had
floy floy coming out of its ears . . ." Turns out the jive song title
means a prostitute with venereal disease.
FYI: I remember
hearing that "floy floy" meant a venereal disease. I may have gotten this from G. Legman's Rationale of the Dirty Joke but I am not about
to comb through both volumes and all 1200 or so pages to confirm this.
A quick web search has turned up a handful of sites stating that that "floy floy" means a venereal disease, but I don't know how authoritative they are.
I myself didn't find anything much on floy-floy or floogie, but if, as Mike Sykes said, a floogie is a floozy, the rest follows logically. But by the time the song became popular and Ella Fitzgerald sang it, I suspect the original meanings had faded or perhaps were never really known by most of the listening public, like the word jazz, and it was just a fun song to dance to.* When S. J. Perelman wrote "love me for my floy-floy alone" he must have meant a dance step.
(By the way, notice that "venereal disease" has been replaced by "sexually transmitted disease" or STD. Why? "Venereal" comes from the name Venus, goddess of love. Perhaps it's best not to associate love with disease, but sex is another story. But STD isn't perfectly precise either. You can catch a cold from someone you have sex with, but that's not what's meant.
*Note the preposition at the end of that sentence.
Dave DaBee remembered one of his teachers using the phrase "ancipital edge" to mean a pun, but couldn’t find the phrase among any rhetorical terms. However, he found that "ancipital" means two-edged, like a sword or a sword-shaped leaf, so you can see where the pun reference came from, words used with dual meaning.
Along the way he found an interesting site about rhetorical terms which includes part of a discussion between Socrates and Phaedrus about the Sophists, who elevated rhetoric over truth:
The fact is, as we said
at the beginning of our discussion, that the aspiring speaker needs no
knowledge of the truth about what is right or good. . . In courts of justice no
attention is paid whatever to the truth about such topics; all that matters is
plausibility. . . There are even some occasions when both prosecution and
defence should positively suppress the facts in favor of probability, if the
facts are improbable. Never mind the truth ~ pursue probability through thick
and thin in every kind of speech; the whole secret of the art of speaking lies
in consistent adherence to this principle.
Dave also thought he remembered the phrase from a story called "The Most Dangerous Game" but it isn't there when I looked. On the other hand, I found a limerick web site that lets you look up limericks by key words, with more than 35,000 limericks entered! And would you believe there are two limericks with the word "ancipital" or "ancipitous"? I decided to look up my name, and here is one of the results (by Chris Doyle):
A
thrice-married mogul from Texas
Buys
autos for each of his exes:
A
Chrysler for Rhonda,
To
Mildred a Honda,
And Cassie "the chassis"? A Lexus.
I do happen to drive a Chrysler product.
The limerick web site has a glitch, however, because when I went back for another go-round, it found nothing for "Rhonda" when I used the Go button; just the Search button produced. Why the two buttons?
Anyway, you can write your own limericks and submit them. Make sure the meter is good, though. Some of them are limping.
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The
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The physicist Werner Heisenberg said the universe is not made of matter, but music.
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