PARVUM OPUS
Number 216
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We have learned that gay is now used by kids to mean stupid or lame, lame meaning weak or unimpressive. Doesn't lame insult people who, like, limp? Doesn't stupid insult the stupid? I don't know if kids still use retard and 'tard to insult people. Retarded has been replaced by developmentally disabled or learning disabled anyway. Are those euphemisms safe from being picked up by kids?
In a 2006 column, Deborah Kendrick wrote about the naming of parts, or lack thereof, making the point that "special needs" doesn't do the job. Cripple gave way to handicapped, then disabled. In 1990, she wrote, The Christina Foundation offered a $50,000 prize for the best new label, and "differently able" won, though that's sort of faded away, fortunately. Kendrick, who has some sort of disability herself, wrote, "If you can't even speak aloud the name of a disability, then you are obviously either terrified or ashamed of it." She makes the case, first of all, that everyone has special needs, even her dog, and prefers putting the person before the disability, as in, for example, "an artist with quadriplegia" rather than a "quadriplegic artist".
As for insults, in a perfect world we would not insult, or even criticize, anybody, we might only gently ask, "How's that working for you?" Perhaps we should sign up for a course in “Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Compassion” or at least buy the book. "NVC guides us to reframe how we express ourselves, how we hear others and resolve conflicts by focusing our consciousness on what we are observing, feeling, needing, and requesting." Note that thinking does not enter the picture. This web site is selling a game called Grok. Remember "grok" from Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land? It means a sort of mind-meld, which in his utopian sci-fi book led to peace and lots of group sex, as far as I can remember. NVC also sells puppets to teach children and adults to learn to speak Giraffe and to tame Jackals. What's wrong with Jackals, I ask. And they sell ears mounted on a headband to inspire compassionate listening.
I'm not minimizing the virtue of compassion. On the NVC web site a saintly woman named Etty Hillesum is quoted, who wrote in her journal while in a German concentration camp:
... I know that I am
dealing with human beings, and that I must try as hard as I can to understand
everything that anyone ever does. And that was the real import of this morning:
not that a disgruntled young Gestapo officer yelled at me, but that I felt no
indignation, rather a real compassion, and would have liked to ask, ‘Did you
have a very unhappy childhood, has your girlfriend let you down?’ Yes, he
looked harassed and driven, sullen and weak. I should have liked to start
treating him there and then, for I know that pitiful young men like that are
dangerous as soon as they are let loose on mankind.
In recent years, we have suffered from the actions of driven, sullen young men all around the world. What do they need more, sympathy and a nice girlfriend, or good principles?
Stone age and primitive are now taboo words, I heard, because people have used these terms to characterize people in order to steal their land. Calling people something else will not keep the land grabbers off. Remember the eminent domain decision by the Supreme Court, which allows private businesses that want land to have property declared deteriorated? The landowners were all modern American citizens. Nobody called them names.
EASY FOR YOU TO SAY ~ NOT
Sometimes language takes its own head and runs away with speakers who have to talk a lot on radio or TV, as in:
/// What's the opposite of afterglow, Dennis Prager asked on the radio, but I can't think of a word for it. If you're not glowing, you're sucking in light, I suppose. Someone else on the radio said Prager would be offering his "inimical" review of the Oscars, and maybe he really meant that rather than "inimitable".
/// Heard somewhere: "...holding up as good as could be." Colloquially, "as good as could be" means very good, couldn't be better, but this speaker meant "as good as could be expected," not be all that good under the circumstances.
/// Heard somewhere else: "...cast any dispersions on..." The old joke for "casting aspersions" was "casting nasturtiums," but in this case the speaker wasn't joking.
/// And elsewhere: "To find out how this incredulous lapse in counter-intelligence occurred..." Should be "incredible" of course.
Heard in the movie Broadway Melody of 1936: Robert Taylor saying "Los Ang Lez" for Los Angeles." It's odd that anyone in California wouldn't use the Spanish pronunciation or at least a closer approximation of it. Even if we don't pronounce the "g" as "h" we can see that "e" in the middle.
/// Here's another source of online books: Web Books has an odd collection of 1,000 out-of-copyright books you can download, including Chinese lessons.
/// Scamorama: Turning the Tables on Email Scammers by Eve Edelson gives you tips on how to annoy spammers, if you have lots of time on your hands. Check out her web site, Scamorama.
/// YouTube.com has literature too! Check out:
Billy Collins reads his poem "The Dead" accompanied by animation.
Cat Head Theatre performs a scene from Hamlet.
In 1964 the Beatles fooled around with A Midsummer Night's Dream on the BBC.
I pick up a lot of odd bits of information from crosswords and other word games, such as the word "opuscule" from the Latin word opusculum, diminutive of opus, work; see opus. I guess I could have called this newsletter Opuscule instead of Parvum Opus, which has been used by other people anyway. But it sounds too much like a pimple. Maybe "Opuscules" could be a PO department of verbal irritants.
We've heard people use the verb "to be" in ungrammatically, as in "He be goin' to the store" rather than "He is going." How did this develop, since it's so different from the correct construction, yet so common? I think it's related to the subjunctive mood; here's a classic example of the subjunctive:
The
Lover's Resolution by George Wither (1588–1667)
Be she
fairer than the day,
Or the
flow'ry meads in May,
If she think not well of me,
What care I how fair she be?
The first "Be she" is certainly subjunctive, meaning "even if she is fairer than the day." It's an unreal condition. The second, "how fair she be", can be read as "how fair she might be" if we're still reading it as a possibility rather than a reality. So did people start using "be" in a simple declarative sentence because life seemed all too tenuous? "He be goin' to the store, God willin' and if the creek don't rise."
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HUR HERALD
Parvum Opus is
now being carried by the Hur
Herald, a web newspaper from Calhoun
County, West Virginia. See Editor Bob Weaver's interview with me (February 10,
2007 entry), and the PO every week in Columns.
Short Order is a new series of my short stories in 5
1/2" x 8 1/2" booklet format. The first two are available now for $5
each (includes mailing).
/// In Carl Kriegbaum Sleeps with the Corn, a young
computer guy who dreams of becoming a big-time gambler sets up web sites for
his role model, a real big-time gambler, Stockyard Stan of Kansas City. But
when Carl comes up short on his gambling debts, he finds himself wearing
concrete boots in the middle of a Kansas cornfield. 26 pages.
/// Still Ridge is about what happens when the old-time moonshine business meets up with a predatory modern bottled water corporation. How far will Kate, a newcomer to the mountains, go to protect the water supply? 22 pages.
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WHEN SONNY
GETS BLUE! Check out the video clips of Sonny Robertson and the
Howard Street Blues Band at www.sonnyrobertson.com and
www.youtube.com/rondaria, with his new original song, "A Different Shade
of Blue".
Check out the new "Someone went to Heaven and all I got was this lousy T-shirt" shirts 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.
SEARCH
IT OUT ON AMAZON : It is the glory of God to conceal a
thing: but the honour of kings is to search out a matter. Proverbs 25:2
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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Parvum Opus is a publication of KeithOps / Opus Publishing Services. Back issues may be found at http://www.keithops.us/. Feel free to e-mail me with comments or queries. The PO mailing list is private, never given or sold to anyone else. If you don't want to receive Parvum Opus, please reply with "unsubscribe," "quit," "enough," or something like that in the subject line, and I'll take you off the mailing list. Copyright Rhonda Keith 2007. Parvum Opus or part of it may be reproduced only with permission, but you may forward the entire newsletter as long as the copyright remains.