Number 85
Someplace I read or heard that at a Cheney rally at Rio Rancho, everyone attending (including reporters) had to sign a loyalty oath that read, "I [name] do herby endorse George W. Bush for reelection of the United States." Could mean (1) they had to get high (or "herby" as the hipsters say) and (2) W, he is l'etats unis? Alors! Voila! Merde! And other French expletives. But no, that would be "as the United States." Or could it mean W is electing states? Stop me, I'm feelin' herby.
A marine archaeologist said on TV, "I always had a fascination for things underwater." He meant "with things underwater." If he had a fascination for things underwater, that would mean that fish and anemone and so on would be studying him.
And as Judy Holiday was supposed to have said of a friend's houseplant, "With fronds like these, who needs anemones?"
Packets of pretty note cards for sale in the local coffee shop say "Blank Verse Inside." As opposed to sonnets, for instance? In fact, there was nothing inside; I peeked.
Blank verse is unrhymed iambic pentameter, a la Shakespeare. Free verse (vers libre) has no fixed pattern. Archy the Cockroach (see PO 57), the creation of Don Marquis, was a human in a previous life who transmigrated into the body of a cockroach as punishment for writing free verse.
Why anyone cares about the Scott Peterson murder case, I don't know, but in yet another "news" "story" about him, the newscaster said that Peterson and his GF Amber "did it" on their first date. (At least the reporter used the past tense, and pretty much a grammatically complete sentence, rather than "Peterson and Amber do it" or "Peterson and Amber doing it".) I do not accept that "it" always means sex. This isn't how grown-ups talk. It's bumper sticker rhetoric. "Reporters do it, reportedly."
In a similar vein, more than one person has lamented the loss of earlier meaning of the word "gay," which now means, almost exclusively, "homosexual." I suppose it was thought to be more upbeat than the word popular in my youth, "queer," although now that's been reclaimed, as it were, by homosexuals who are here and queer and so on. But "gay" used to connote something that isn't easily expressed by cheerful, happy, sunny, etc.: "Our hearts were young and gay." You just can't use the word without thinking, more narrowly, "homosexual." Same goes for "queer." Honestly, can you read Robert Frost's "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" without being fleetingly distracted by that word? Try it (and "it" does not mean, you know, it):
Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.
My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farm-house near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.
He gives the harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.
The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
Three people responded to the WIMP acronym, which I found on the Web, of course.
Kindly Bob said: "Nice column! I think WIMP stands for windows ~ icons ~ menus ~ pointing devices. The way you have it, mice and pointers are redundant. Cheers. bob"
Makes sense. (What I'd found was windows, icons, mice, and pointers.) Give yourself a capital B, Bob.
Dave daBee wrote, "That sounds as urban legilexiconic as 'for unlawful' etc. Cripes, Wimpy was borrowing hamburgers in Popeye cartoons long before DOS or Star ~ not to mention the chance that Wimpy was around before T&V."
I didn't mean to imply that the word "wimp" was invented by computer geeks, er, guys, only that it got a new twist as a slightly insulting acronym, according to more than one Web site.
A friend of mine forwarded PO 84 to a friend of hers, who then wrote the following to her, which she forwarded to me:
"No context leads to shallow assumptions. David [Canfield Smith, icon inventor; is this writer a friend of David?] admits to making such a statement in a paper (trying to get credit for a pithy rational[e]), but has always maintained that, as computers and programming are, in their own divine right, religious in nature, ‘icon’ is an appropriate term."The WIMP reference is BS, etc., etc. And mention of the Xerox PARC ‘Star’ system in one paragraph, then Apple in another (when Jobs stole the interface and icon idea from the Star) shows a lack of context.
"In essence, I guess that, as a cyber-journalist, the writer selectively used information to support their [her] already drawn arguments and conclusions. Someone should warn her that The Code Breakers and Cryptonomicon will probably make her head explode.
"(I did like the stuff about ‘clerical geeks’ and Polish names.)
"for [sic] what it’s worth . . . everyone always has an opinion."
Well.
First, the "iconography" piece wasn't opinion about anything ~ it was just a collage to further explicate the word "icon" and its evolution (or devolution ~ and I am from the land of Devo) from religious art to the little cartoons on your computer screen. My research on computer icons was, admittedly, superficial, but what "shallow assumption" are we talking about? Must be the observation that in the early days of home and office computing, the tech experts didn't share knowledge graciously.
Second, I don't think reading The Code Breakers or Cryptonomicon would make my head explode, but I'll be careful.
Furthermore, computers and programming are not more religious in nature than other artifacts.
And finally, I am not a cyber-journalist just because I use a computer to write and the Internet to publish; these are merely tools. That's like thinking that getting excited while exchanging instant messages about sex is "cyber-sex." Would that make computers and programming sexual in nature? Only to geeks.
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