Number 57
An old New Yorker cartoon depicts a mother reading a bedtime story to her child: "And then three Wise Men came from the East bearing gift items."
What makes this so funny? (Of course the way to ruin a joke is to explain it, but that's what I'm all about.) First, the familiar passage has been altered with a "modern" phrase. Second, the new phrase is commercial, a complete contrast to the original. Third, the word "item" is of Latin origin. The following word history from yourDictionary.com helps explain the vast difference in feeling between the words "gift" and "item":
The word "item" seems to us to be very much a noun, whether it refers to an article in a collection or a bit of information. But it began its life in English (first recorded before 1398) as an adverb meaning "moreover, also, in addition." "Item" was typically used in front of each object listed in an inventory, as we might put "also". This use in English simply reflects a meaning of the word in Latin. However, it is easy to see how "item" could be taken to stand for the thing that it preceded, and so we get, for example, the sense "an article included in an enumeration." The first such usages are found in the 16th century, while the sense "a bit of information" is not found until the 19th century.
Incongruous juxtaposition is the soul of humor. The three gifts of the Wise Men are not part of a warehouse or department store inventory. The sophisticated urban mom seems to have found a sophisticated urban translation of the New Testament.
What if the cartoon had read, "bearing free gifts"? We would still have had that incongruity, the simple, old Anglo-Saxon "gift" sullied by the commercial, and in this case redundant, promotional tag "free".
Fred discovered a new tongue twister at a Christmas get-together: cheap peach schnapps. Say it quickly three times. Or drink it quickly (no, don't).
We have considered the necessity, and lack of it, of a consistent orthography, i.e., whether spelling matters. Although I think it does, a case has been made against the necessity of punctuation. Archy the cockroach was a character created by newspaperman Don Marquis (1878-1937). Archy would climb onto a typewriter at night when the offices were empty, compelled by the need to express himself, and throw himself down on each key one at a time. This was a slow and painful process so he eschewed punctuation. How he managed the carriage return on the old-fashioned typewriter was never explained.
You can find out about Don Marquis and read some of Archy's writing online. I was happy to find a Don Marquis poem I memorized years ago, not on this site but on a 1994 page of e-mail about origami, of all things. (I learned that apparently there are codes of correctness in origami, not just instructions.) Anyway, the poem wasn't attributed to Marquis but here it is:
oh deride not the camel
for if grief should make him die
his ghost will come to haunt you
with tears in either eye
and the spirit of a camel
in the midnight gloom
can be so very cheerless
as it wanders round the room
I've typed this a la Archy, sans punctuation, but it may have actually come from some other Don Marquis source.
The camel poem also reminds me of a high school English teacher who did not understand "either" in a paper when I used it as above, "in either eye," which here means "in both eyes".
Speaking of teachers, I'm reading The Feel-Good Curriculum by Maureen Stout, PhD, a professor of education. She reports the same thing I encountered in my tragic teaching episode (see POs from last May, 22 to 25 and maybe after). In a class of future teachers, she found the students to be "apathetic, motivated not by the excitement of discovery but by grades that they seemed to think they deserved, whether or not they had earned them. These students seemed to think that they should get A's for effort rather than achievement, that high expectations were a form of oppression, and that they were entitled to good grades just for showing up in class." I'm still reading the book, so I may have more to say on it later.
Here's another bit of light verse I memorized a long time ago (though not as long ago as it was written):
The rain it raineth on the just
And also on the unjust fella;
But chiefly on the just, because
The unjust steals the just's umbrella.
~By Charles Synge Christopher Bowen (1835-1896)
I actually had an umbrella stolen from under my nose once, or strictly speaking behind my back, in a restaurant. The umbrella was hooked on the back of my chair and when I got up to leave, someone at the next table had lifted it. I remembered this verse the other rainy day as I got out my umbrella, which I had stowed in my car with great foresight. Here's my own (not as good) variation on the theme:
The rain it raineth on the just
And also on the unjust fella;
But chiefly on the just who once
Again forgot her darned umbrella.
The late great Edward Gorey wrote a charming little book about a lost umbrella called The Sopping Thursday.
I may not agree with the way you parse your sentences, but I will defend (let's hope not to the death) your right to say them. American Conservative magazine has an article about the recent official creation of a "free speech zone" at Bush appearances. As someone pointed out, this whole country is supposed to be a "free speech zone." It's not just Mother Jones, the Dems, etc. who are starting to sit up and take notice. Thanks to alert reader Dave DeB for bringing this to my attention. Read it and weep.
Did you know that Virgin Atlantic, the British airline, offers upper class seating, rather than first class? Two paths diverged in a wood, and England ended up with upper class seating, bringing to mind an ancient class structure, while the U.S. ended up with first class, suggesting (in this context) the best that money can buy.
I was startled to hear that "the people were incensed" when a priest used a thurible. But now I know that "incense" comes from the Latin root meaning "to set afire", from which we derive both "incense" and "anger".
A better URL for the Gutenberg Project mentioned in last week's list is http://promo.net/pg/ (the URL I sent last week used to work, but didn't tonight; this is the official web site).
By the way, I posted last week's PO 56 on my web site, and now each listing is a link but the URL is not visible as it was in the e-mail. In case you don't already know this, if you want to see the URL (or other coding on a web page), in the MS Explorer browser you can go to View, Source in order to, well, view the source code. In Netscape go to View, Page Source. This can be useful at times when an e-mail address or URL link isn't visible.
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