The Wrathful English Major

Debauchery

2008-05-10T17:09:00.000-07:00

Two short thoughts today, on the rougish and dubious topics of vandalism and narcotics:

I was on the ride down from Flagstaff, headed towards home, when nature called and I asked my dad, the one driving, to pull us over into the next rest stop. That thankfully came quickly, and I hurried myself into the restroom. While there, I made note of the usual stall graffiti. It came equipped with the usual: Individual's names, sporadic profanity, proclimations of eternal love--

And then I noticed one graffito that seemed a bit out of place. In crude, scratched handwriting, someone had scrawled the moniker "Monster Blood."

"Monster Blood?" Honestly. Given the maladroit nature of the scratching, I am inclined to believe it was a child who wrote that particular bit of doggrel--but again, I find myself asking, what child young enough to think the phrase "Monster Blood" sounds edgy or frightening would have the time to scratch it into the metal walls of a rest stop bathroom stall? Could there honestly be some gangster out there with "Monster Blood" as his or her calling card?

If so, I think you may need to think of a better commando name.

And while we're on the subject of lawbreakers, the nicknames that junkies give to their brain-scramblers of choice are just baffling. In particular, using the phrase "wacky tobaccy" to describe cannabis just seems silly. The absurd rhyme--not to mention the mere presence of the word "wacky"--make it sound like something a prospector would say. And I really can't imagine a miner 49 toking in a dorm room with his buddies.

The truly sad thing is how long this thought has been with me: Five years. Ever since a presentation by a parole officer in a high school class that included a long list of "street names" for various drugs.

W|R|A|T|H|F|U|L|N|E|S|S: My anti-drug.

This Language Ain't Big Enough Fer the Two of Us

2008-04-20T23:10:00.000-07:00

There are certain sayings in this language that, for some reason or another, are entirely two similar to one another.

As an example of this, I present the expressions "ham-fisted" and "ham-handed." I am constantly getting the two confused. Both of them involve porcine meat products and the manual extensions of the human arm, and yet they don't have anywhere near the same meaning. The first, "ham-fisted," means having large, beefy hands. Quite plainly, hands like hams. The second is an idiom, meaning "forced or artificial." It is frequently used to refer to the themes or "messages" of a textual work.

Friends, is it really fair of English to do this to us? Having two common phrases that are this similar in sound, regardless of their meaning, is simply not fair. It's just begging mix-ups. Misunderstandings will run rampant, and wacky sitcom-style hijinks with ensue, and somebody will misplace their clothes and end up having to duck behind random objects in order to avoid being caught in their altogether.

The English language needs the equivalent of Wikipedia's Canditate for Speedy Deletion system. The only question remaining is which to get rid of. Me, I nominate "ham-handed." It's an idiom, and we all know how dumb THOSE are.

The Top 10 Greatest German Loanwords

2008-03-10T17:04:00.000-07:00

I was pulling my hair out recently trying to spell "schadenfreude" correctly, despite having used it in an early blog post here. (This eventually lead me to the Wikipedia article on Avenue Q, which lead me to YouTube, which consequently ended with me going around all day whilst humming, "Didja ever clap when a waitress falls / and drops a tray of glasses...") It occured to me as I did this quite how many words English barrows from its close linguistic cousin, German. (Although many dictionaries and similar sources will call English and German brothers, due to the high number of common English words that come from Germanic sources, English's own origins are more Gaelic than Gothic.)

So, for absolutely no reason at all, I present to you my top 10 favorite German loanwords in English. Enjoy!

10. Doppelgänger

Noun. A double, especially of a person. Literally means "double walker." Comes from the myth of the Doppelgänger, a ghostly spirit that follows behind all people and mimics their every move. Can only be seen by the person who possesses them, but because they move in exact time with a person's actions and are always directally behind them, catching a glimpse of one's Doppelgänger is difficult. To see it is seen as a sign of death.

Outside of morbid mythology, it's an exceptionally useful way to describe a lookalike or double without having to resort to--well, to "lookalike" or "double." And it's so much more evocative than "evil twin!"

9. Blitz

Noun; sometimes verb. A powerful or unexpected attack or burst of movement; to move or attack in a manner characteristic of a blitz. Literally means "lightning." (Occasionally you'll get an RPG spell or two that uses it in the literal sense.)

Aside from being a great way to describe someone going reallyreallyfast (how do you say "greased" in German?), this word seems to have wormed its way into a number of absurdly catchy rock songs. Although it seems that not many are familiar with Sweet's "Ballroom Blitz," I know of very few human beings who will not respond (if perhaps negatively) to a rousing cry of "Hi! Ho! Let's go! Hi! Ho! Let's go!"

8. Zeitgeist

Noun. Those artifacts, mindsets, attitudes, and social constructs indicative of a certain era in time. Literally means "spirit of the time."

In case that definition left you more puzzled than elucidated, allow me to expand. It essentially means something which you associate with a specific era in time. Mullets, bad clothes, cheesy cartoons, and disco-esque pop music despite the mentality that disco is dead? That's the Zeitgeist of the 80's. The consistant fear of nuclear attack and the desire to prepare for such? That's a more serious example of 50's Zeitgeist. This is one of those words that I like simply because trying to describe the same concept in English is clunky.

7. Wunderkind

Noun. A prodigy; an exceptionally talented child. Literally means "wonder child."

Like doppelgänger, this word is so much more enjoyable to say than its English counterpart that I end up using it far more than any other. Although "prodigy" means nothing to someone simply seeing the word for the first time, "wunderkind" is immediately understandable--being that "wonder" and "wunder" are cognates, and plenty of people are familiar with "kind" for "child" from fellow loanword "kindergarten." I suppose this concept also has the term "phenom" attached to it, but for some reason, I can't hear it without thinking of surfers...

6. Dreck

Noun. Something awful or terrible. Literally means "dirt."

Incredibly emphatic. It spits so wonderfully off the tongue! Calling something rotten or no-good is satisfying, but but there's something so fulfilling about calling it "utter dreck" that no other word can provide. A properly-placed tongue even sends a little spray of spittle flying after the final phoneme, in a final insult to whatever deserved the dreck-ing.

5. Über

Prefix; sometimes noun. Has a similar meaning to "super"--above, greater than, extremely, etc. Literally means "over; above;" as a single word it can mean "about."

Oh, über. Or "uber," as the laymen spell it. Where would the online gaming scene be without you? We would have no way to describe ridiculously powerful characters! We would have to resort to "very" for emphasis! I'm only being half sarcastic, of course--although we anglophiles tend to misuse über somewhat, it is a handy way of describing something "to the extreme."

4. Kaput

Adjective. Out of order; not working. Literally means "not working."

Falling apart. No life left in it. A goner. It done broke. Although not a proper ideophone, there's no denying that kaput sounds an awful lot like what it means. Although originally German, it probably came to English through Yiddish. However it got here, though, there's no denying the popularity it's enjoyed since then--especially in this electric, mechanized age, where there are more and more things to go kaput on us.

3. Schadenfreude

Noun. A feeling of happiness derived from seeing others' failure or pain. Literally, "joy of pain."

Another wonderful case of us stealing a word for a feeling which we have no name for, schadenfreude is that wonderful feeling that you get when other people mess up worse than you do. Skateboarders falling on their faces, comedians corpsing their acts, anyone anywhere getting hit in the groin--it's hard not to laugh, thanks to that pesky human nature.

It also inspired the decidedly-not-safe-for-work ditty I found myself humming recently. "Schaaaadenfreude--people taking pleasure in your paaaain!"

2. Angst

Noun. A feeling of depression or anxiety. Literally, "fear of nothing."

Quite possibly the single most useful word on the Internet, this single term sums up half the population of MySpace, one-third of the population of Livejournal, and one Potter Puppet Pals video. Describing the way every teenager has ever felt ever--usually to the consternation of everyone who reads their online ramblings--the word "angst" is so singularly handy I don't know how the language ever survived without it. How on earth did people complain about their 15-year-olds before then?

1. Earworm

Noun. A tune or piece of music that one subconsciously repeats. Comes from the German "ohrwurm," literally meaning "ear worm."

The definition of earworm is the Russian folk tune "Korobeiniki."

What you probably know this song as:

You're welcome.

On the Pronunciation of Internet Acronyms

2008-03-08T00:36:00.000-08:00

The above YouTube video serves two purposes as the introduction to my post. Its first purpose is to help illustrate precisely what I mean when I talk about the pronunciation of Internet acronyms. The second is to inflict upon you a merciless earworm that will continue to torment you long after you depart my blog.

As I hail from a group of exceedingly nerdy friends, and tend to associate with websites and online communities were geekiness is reveled in (not against, as I hasten to note), I have come across real-life (or, in a tone befitting this post, IRL) pronunciations of acronyms coined mostly for ease of communication online. Among these: LOL (Laughing Out Loud), ROFL (Rolling On Floor Laughing), LMAO (Laughing My @$$ Off), and PWN (Not technically an acronym, but likely derived from a typographical error in the spelling of "owned." It has the same meaning). The Internet literati seem to be of two minds concerning such spoken cultural allusions. Some treat them as pure acronyms and speak each individual letter. LOL is Ell Oh Ell; ROFL is Are Oh Eff Ell. Others turn them into words, slurring their individual letter sounds together and creating neologisms. LOL is Lawl, ROFL is Rawful. The above video is an example of the latter, though it does take it to a slight extreme. It takes some terms and phrases generally only spoken in letter form (such as DM--Dee Em--and WTF--Doubleyou Tee Eff) and tries to sound them out phonetically, despite their derth of vowels.

I've noticed a few oddities and idosyncracies in these pronunciations, however. Certain acronym phrases, especially those consisting of three words or letters, tend to have spoken equivalents that are neither phonetic aproximations or letter-by-letter re-spellings. Instead, they're something... else.

Take the example video above. One of the terms it uses is OMG, short for Oh My (insert your favorite expression of shock that begins with a G here--Goodness, Gosh, God, Gadzooks, et cetra). Two common real-world pronunciations of OMG exist--Oh Em Gee, and "ohmig." In my experience, Oh Em Gee is the more common of the two. However, seemingly more prevalent than "ohmig" is the phrasing used in the video above: "Oh muh guh." This pronunciation actually appears to be a form of the full phrase (most likely "Oh My God" in this particular case) in which the syllables of the second two words have become slurred and assimilated with those of the first, resulting in a kind of "half-spoken" version of the full phrase.

Other phrases this tends to happen to (as demonstrated in the above) are FTW (For The Win) and WTF (What The... well, I'm sure you can guess). It is slightly more difficult to make the "assimilation" argument for FTW, as a true assimilative version of FTW would probaly sound more like "Fer Ter Wer" as opposed to "Fuh Tuh Wuh." Instead, the spoken form of FTW sounds more like a reversed version of WTF's: "Wuh Tuh Fuh." (For WTF, one could possibly make the case for abreviation as well).

I wonder what causes these pronunciations to come out like they do? I'm not sure--it's not like I've done research on this sort of thing--but I can say that it does seem to have some common mental genesis for all of the geeks who use Internet acronyms in their everyday speech. I know that I was mentally pronouncing "WTF" as "Wuh Tuh Fuh" long before I ever heard it out loud, and I wasn't the least bit shocked when I finally did that my suspicions were confirmed.

On the Unisexification of "Guy," "Dude," "Man," and "Bro"

2008-02-25T21:45:00.000-08:00

Today, the universe got its sweet, sweet revenge on me for the 19 and a half years of hideous jokes it has had to endure on my behalf.

A Wrathful English Major walked into a bar...

Ouch.

As I sit here, nursing my bruised brow with an entirely fictitious slab of cold meat, I am lead to ponder the incidents which took place prior to my unfortunate, schadenfreude-enducing encounter with a piece of entirely too-solid metal. This particular collision took place at the school book store, where I had gone to pick up some graph paper and a blue book for my history exam. I was noodling throughout the notebooks section, looking for one posessing the particular variety of gridded paper I needed to complete my math homework. As I did so, a very, very tall young gentleman rounded the corner and proceeded to nearly trip over my very, very short self.

"Woah. Sorry, man," he said, and went on his way.

I did not think much of this initially. (I am, however, beginning to think I use that phrase too much.) However, later, at the checkout counter, the young woman handling purchases said to me,

"Thank you very much, guy."

I believe I have mentioned before that I am female. And while I have myself been known to use phrases such as "guy" and "dude" in strictly unisex senses, I can't say I've ever seen "guy," as a direct term of address, used for a woman before. Certainly, a group of females can easily be "the guys," and in some registers of colloquial American English, any person one doesn't know particularly well is a "man." The sense of "man" meaning "all of humankind," double-X and XY chromosones included, has been around longer than that, even. But "guy" as a direct term of address for a woman?

The phrase "guy," meaning "generic bloke," itself stems from the masculine name "Guy." In my little corner of the States, it is rarely used as a term of direct address as it is--while I certainly know of its existance, due for the most part to its oddly frequent use in Mario and Zelda games translated by Nintendo of America, it isn't something I tend to hear in everyday use. So being called "guy" today, by a rather spry young blonde girl with a spray of curly hair, no less, seemed distinctly out of place in my view of reality. Had she called me "dude," I don't think I would have noticed. I myself have been using "dude" as a generic term of address for yonks, and the etymology of "dude" is fairly generic and unisex. (I believe--though please, do correct me if I err--that Charles Dickens coined the phrase "dude" from the union of "dud" and "attitude," though this may simply be literary apocrypha.) But "guy" seemed a bit oddly specific to me.

Of course, it may simply be my unfamiliarity with it that is causing me this bemusement. Perhaps the young lady would have been equally startled had I said, in response, "You're welcome, dude."

I've been thinking about this in a roundabout way for a while now, as I've seen male fictional characters of various origins refer to their female friends as "bro." But it wasn't until today I really began to consider it.

This is to say nothing of Marcy, who still hasn't figured out that Peppermint Patty doesn't like being called "sir."

Lolwut?

2008-02-19T18:03:00.001-08:00

How very odd.

2008-02-08T14:58:00.001-08:00

I was writing a homework assignment down in my planner today when I made a curious observation.

My planner, like so many others I've had in the past, has little quotes in the heading of each week. They're all very general, very standard "inspirational" fare, the sort of thing you'd find on those motivational posters with the black borders and nondescript pictures of people snowboarding and large, block serif letters. ("DETERMINATION - A goal is just a place to stop and catch your breath before you move forward." Mountain climber with a constipated expression.) I haven't paid much attention to them, in general, until I saw one today that I thought I could use as a chapter header in the Wordkeepers somewhere.

I thought, Hey. I need more chapter-heading quotes. Lemmie look through this thing and see what I can find.

"So?" you say. "Then what?"

Well, my eyebrows made a few interesting movements as I noted something peculiar about all the quotations.

Mainly, that they were all made by women.

Now, being in possession of a pair of X chromosones myself, I'm all for grrl power. But it struck me as a bit peculiar that every single quote in the notebook was of Strong Woman origin when this fact had never been advertised on the notebook itself. It wasn't specifically marked off as a Feminist Inspiration Planner or Planner For Awesome Chicks. I suppose the flower motif on the inside stationary is a bit girly, but there's no hint of that anywhere on the outside. Nor was there any when I bought it--the outside cover simply says "2008 Daily Planner," and the price sticker, when it was still stuck on, echoed the same sentiments.

Perhaps this was the maker's intention. Maybe the designer of the planner planned a quiet revolt, silently but subversively filling their attractive sea foam green notebook with nothing but heartfelt, inspirational quotes from only the toughest of girls--Marie Curie, Eleanor Roosevelt, Anne Frank--in the hopes that someone would see them. See them, and be inspired. They would kick back in their chair, grinning at each clever quip, newfound respect for the female species beaming across their face, never once expecting to find this source of ineffable inspiration in the pages of a 99-cent planner--

Wait, 99-cent planner? Who the devil am I kidding?

Oh ho ho ho! Devillish laugh!

2008-01-14T19:25:00.001-08:00

Fast Payday Loans

My friends, I have succeeded in the thorough befuddlement of all with my expansive, extraordinarily literate vocabulary. I shall thoroughly enjoy my new cachet forthwith.

(As you can clearly see, I'm now trying to push it up to "Genius" level.)

This can't end well.

2008-01-14T18:39:00.000-08:00

I find it rather amusing, telling people what both my major and minor are. I don't suppose I need to tell you what I'm majoring in (but in case you're curious, read the title of the blog), but my minor is Astronomy. This surprises people, as there seems to be a general notion among physical science majors that we liberal arts folk are a lot of foppish dandies whose romantic, obfuscating worldview distances from the facts of hard science. But I have always been enamored of the stars, I will eagerly devour any books I come across about string theory or general quantum physics, and I am quite possibly the only person in my department who knows what a Schwartzchild radius is, let alone how to calculate one.

Unfortunately, as fascinating as I find most of the world's disciplines, I have never been very good at math. Certainly, I find several concepts within the realm of higher mathematics intriguing (Grahmn's number is always a favorite), most numbers go straight through my head with nary a care.

In order to fulfil my Astronomy minor, I need to take calculus.

The first math course I took upon entering this college was MAT 101X.

Clearly, I have my work cut out for me.

This semester, I am taking MAT 108, best described as "Pre-Pre-Calculus." So, yes, slowly but surely, I am getting there. However, I think I may have trouble concentrating in this class. You see, my professor--

No, this isn't going in the direction you probably think it's going.

My professor, although I do not know his exact genesis, is from somewhere in the general vincinity of India. Perhaps Pakistan, perhaps somewhere else in the Middle East or what the British call the Orient. (I have never been sure whether to classify India as Middle Eastern as Oriental.) His accent is extremely thick, and he occasionally uses grammatical constructs typically avoided in American English. He says things such as "the wedding ceremony of my sister" or "more easier." His speech is notably lacking in some fricative sounds--anthing with a "th" or "sh" in it gets reduced to a /t/, /d/ or /s/.

And rather than being fascinated by his talk on the topic of mathematics (and me realizing that I need to kick myself for forgetting the quadratic formula AGAIN, even though I've had it drilled into me repeatedly), I'm sitting there pondering the nature of the rules that govern his accent (/θ/ -> /d/) and the grammar of his useage of adjectives. As I mentally compile a list of rules for his phonetic pronunciations of words, my hand pantomimes writing them in the air, when I should be simplifying a pair of polynomial fractions.

This is going to be a long year.

Princess of Wails

2008-01-08T14:21:00.000-08:00

Have you ever actually hurled a book across the room, you hated it so much?

As of today, I have.

It was The Ogre Downstairs, by Diana Wynne Jones--one of my all-time favorite authors, and it looked fun and silly--if directed at a much younger audience than myself. Still, I know this particular author, and she never talks down in her writing. She's wonderfully erudite and clever. No matter what age a book of hers is written for, I expect a ripping good yarn nontheless. It was a "group of children have nasty step-brother and step-parent and wonder what to do about them" type of story. But they discover magical powers and that kind of stuff, as is the wont of children in these kinds of books. As they go along they slowly but surely come to love and understand their stepbrothers, all the kids get along, they learn each other's good traits and bad traits, and everyone is shown to be a flawed but ultimately human being.

Until the end.

The end makes my stomach turn.

Right at the end, the "villain" character (the titular Ogre, usename Jack McIntyre) does a complete 360 in personality, becoming the "woe-is-me-I'm-so-misunderstood-and-you've-been-misunderstanding-me-all-this-time" kind of character. He does this within the span of about three pages, tops. There isn't anything that brings on this change, either. He just suddenly starts acting like this (which initially seems horribly out of character) and then never reverts back. Bang. Not even a hint of his "former" self.

Folks, I'm not exactly picky with my reading habits. I've been known to scarf down--and even enjoy enough to reread!--some spectacularly bad books. But I will not, WILL not, stand for lazy charictarization, especially from a book--from an author!--from whom I expect better. This could have been wonderfully and convincingly done. Some of the "excuses" the story gives for his personality do make sense, but others I can't even begin to reconcille. A couple of them that come to mind:

1) We find out in the course of the story that his own two sons--one about thirteen and the other around 15/16--both think of him of as beastly and horrible as his two stepchildren do. So it's not merely a matter of "we don't like charge arglebargle," but that he genuinely seems to be a nasty person. I would especially expect a kid of about 16 to understand his or her parents at least somewhat well. But the older kid never gives any indication of this, but simply goes on and reviles him along with the other kids.

2) He's not just mean to the kids, either. He's horrible to his wife, too. Which causes her to run away. And then when she suddenly comes home at the end of the book, she's all happy and cheerful and all "oh hai guyz" and the incredibly horrible and nasty and cruel things the villain has said to her over the course of the book, including those that caused her to run away, are completely blown over. Me: "lolwut?"

3) Similarly, the kids are never once suspicious of his change. Maybe one character, for a short while. Then it's all happiness and choruses of "why can't we be frieeeeends" all around. All the other character development in the book happens with such wonderful pacing that it feels like having a bucket of cold water suddenly flung over me. People do not just suddenly change from Mortal Enemies to The Get Along-Gang literally overnight, especially when they've had this hostility between them for several months, in the case of the stepkids, or most of their LIVES, in the case of the biological kids.

4) One of the excuses made for the character is that "oh a lot of the things he was saying were just jokes he just doesn't display emotion very well so you can't tell." Which could very well work. If I hadn't skimmed through the book and found almost NO comments made by him that could've been taken in a joking manner. Save, perhaps, for one, about an unusually harsh punishment--which was later revealed not to be a joke at all. But the thing is, if he were actually the kind of person he is SUPPOSED to be by the end of the book, it seems extremely unlikely that he'd make such a comment at all!

5) He also once beat one of his sons so severely that he literally fell ill. And then proceeded not to care. How am I supposed to put this together with his "kinder, gentler" personality?

I'm not saying that 360's in personality can't be done, but they have to be properly necessitated by the plot, happen at a reasonable rate, or both.

I mean, one of my favorite video games of all TIME--Psychonauts--pulls this trick. The player is lead to hate the father figure of the main character up until the very end. The character "hates" him as well up until that point. But (uh, SPOILER ALERT, obviously):

1) The main character is ten years old.
2) The main character was prevented in the past from doing things by his father--incredibly dangerous things which he nonetheless found "cool."
3) The main character was recently punished by said father for disobeying him, and for not doing something important just because he didn't want to.
4) We never once hear Dear Old Dad's story until the very end.

At which point the main character is revealed to be a predictable child who threw a temper tantrum just because he didn't get to do whatever he wanted all the time.

(The spoiler-conscious may resume reading.)

Gosh, I was so frustrated with this book. It's not just that it was sloppily rushed in the last act. It was that it was so bad, and it was by an author I love. And all the other characters in the book were so elegantly done! It really felt like a slap in the face.

So, yes. I literally threw it across the room. It hit the drapes and now resides next to the leg of the chair situated in front of the family's computer desk. However, having ranted, and having given the manuscript itself a goodly heave, I feel healed. Now I can take it back to the secondhand bookstore and forget its existance.

Word Association With TWEM

2008-01-03T01:46:00.000-08:00

Wow! I just beat Psychonauts! That was an amazing game. Tim Schafer is a mad genius. Thank you, GameTap, for letting me enjoy this masterpiece free of charge (and legally, at that), and thank you, Richard Horvitz, for bringing yet another one of my now-favorite characters to life.

Hey, there were a lot of characters in that game with weirdly-spelled names. Like Lili instead of Lily or Lilly. And Dogan instead of Doogan. And Razputin instead of--

Wait. Rasputin. Wasn't he some evil guy?

Yeah, he was! He was that evil Russian dude who, like, killed the Romanovs or something! They made a movie about that. He had a talking bat.

AWESOME! He was a zombie in that movie! I have got to see this.

...Mom, where's the tape that had Anastasia recorded on it?

Oh, God, I remember this song! "Faaar away, loooong ago, glowing dim as an eeeemmber, things my hearrrt, used to knoooow, once upon a Deceeeemmmber!"

Wait. It's not December anymore, it's January! Why am I watching this again?

Hey, there's Rasputin! He's got singing cockroaches! His head comes off! Cool!

Hey, isn't Razputin the name of the main character from Psychonauts...?

Clearly, We Have Different Definitions Of--Oh, Never Mind.

2007-12-26T22:46:00.000-08:00

Standing in line at the store today, several yards of fabric under my arm, I scanned the covers of the tabloids, gossip rags, and miniature "recipie" books.

Is it wrong that I giggled about Michael Jackson being on the cover of "Jet?"

(Happy birthday, Nikolai Griffin!)

My Holiday Spirit Presents: Words You Only Hear In Christmas Carols

2007-12-18T13:21:00.001-08:00

Christmas carols are funny things. Although the English language has plowed steadily forward in its life, our Christmas carols have remained much the same. Those that have been with us since long before our grandparent's grandparents were children have change little since their genesis. They do not vary with dialect or region (though some occasionally have alternate lyrics). Their lexicons can be--archaic, to say the least. And yet, every year, without fail, they find their way onto the radio and into the songbooks of various carolers, who happily blurt them out without the slightest clue as to what they're actually saying. Oh, yes, occasionally someone will spot an odd or out-of-place word--and I'm not just counting those boyish types who giggle at the phrase "Don we now are gay apparel." But for the benefit of those who would not think to turn to the dictionary for something as simple as a Christmas song, I give to you: Words you Only Hear in Christmas Carols.

Colly
The 12 Days of Christmas: "Four colly birds..."
Meaning: Very dark black, as if besmirched by soot.
Dictionary.com
Note: This line is typically rendered as "four calling birds" in English, avoiding this potential bemusement altogether.

Dale
Carol of the Bells: "Oh how they pound, / raising the sound, / o'er hill and dale, / telling their tale..."
Meaning: A valley.
Dictionary.com

Lowing
Away in a Manger: "The cattle are lowing, the Baby awakes..."
Meaning: To moo; the sound that cattle make.
Dictionary.com

Troll
Deck the Halls: "Troll the ancient Yuletide carol, / fa la la la la, la la la la."
Meaning: To sing, esp. in a round fashion.
Dictionary.com
Note: Let us not get into the "folk version" of this song, which contains such words as "hoar," "redouble," and "jovial." In the words of a figure famously associated with Christmas television specials, good grief.

Wassail
Here We Come A-Wassailing: "Here we come a-wassailing / among the leaves so green..."
Meaning: To toast to the health of another; to pass someone drink..
Dictionary.com

In memoriam of a man with a language all his own:

2007-12-08T20:58:00.001-08:00

I am a frequent frequenter of the blog, The Comics Curmudgeon. It is a blog dedicated to making fun of--or as those in the blogosphere call it, "snarking"--on old, assembled-by-committee, chronically unfunny, badly-drawn newspaper comic strips. They tackle both the strips that are allegedly comical--Garfield and Marmaduke being prime examples--and the absurd "soap opera" comic strips, such as Mary Worth and Mark Trail. (Here's a tangental question: Why do all of the soap opera strips seem to be named after their principal characters? Mary Worth, Mark Trail, Judge Parker, Rex Morgan... only Apartment 3-D seems to escape this odd trope.) However, at least one strip on the blog was, despite its frequent ribbing, actually rather admired by the patrons of the blog.

They'll Do It Every Time is a slice-of-life comic strip that makes note of life's little ironies. Nearly all of its strips are based on reader submissions--a great many of which, as of late, have in fact been those of the Comics Curmudgeon readers themselves. Although initially lambasted by many for being an unfunny funny, many of the site's readers admitted that they had grown to non-ironically love the strip, for a couple of reasons.

For one thing, the strip is full of amusing little anachronisms, such as an allegedly modern-day teenager blaring loud music on a record player. Right next to a lovingly-detailed flat screen computer, albiet one in "Tandy Tan."

For another thing, the art is actually quite good. The backgrounds have a lot of detail put into them, and the people are drawn in a distinctive style. Before taking over the strip (previously helmed by a man with the curious name of Hatlo) the current cartoonist got his start in, and worked for, Cracked Magazine.

For a third, the strip has a curious dialect all its own. Often dubbed Scadutoese by CC readers (after the cartoonist, Al Scaduto) It cannot be perfectly pinned down to any one geographical region or time period, though it seems vaguely relate to the 1950's. Filled with odd little catchphrases like "Howcum," "The Urge," and "Oh Yeah-h-h-h," it is nearly indescribable but immediately identifiable. It is also confirmedly fun to use in everyday conversaion, if only to pepper one's conversation with curious little phrases: "I've got the urge to e-mail him to the moon!"

And finally, the spoken-of cartoonist was a real gentleman. Friendly and affable in all of his communications with readers, he replied warmly to all of the missives sent to him and often let those who sent the ideas he delegated to strips in on his creative process--showing off sketches and the like. One CC submitted noted how he'd credited a woman with her idea even months after she'd sent it, and even though he also drew on his own experience--a real mensch was how some of the commentators described him.

Being a lover of language, especially unique ones, I've been wanting to a post on "Scadutoese" for a long time. The lexicon, the unique sentence structure, the patterns it invokes--but as I admit that I lack certain faculties with regards to linguistics, I don't think I could do a proper, scholarly analysis of the dialect. Yet one can still single out particular, notable examples of the tongue--"Oh yeah-h-h-h" being a particular favorite--and wonder, thinking, "I wish I was creative enough to say things like that." One can still look at the unusual ways it organizes its sentences or toys with its words and think about how they differ from standard English. Indeed, it's something I've been wanting to do ever since I began this blog, once I had enough time to simply sit down and devote myself to such an exercise.

Alas, the dear Mr. Scaduto is no more. He shuffled off his mortal coil today, the 8th of Devember 2007, at the age of 79. Quite thankfully, his passing was peaceful--to borrow a term from not-just-for-children's author Chris d'Lacey, he simply wuzzled off, heading toward that great drawing room in the sky.

I've toyed with the idea of sending in my own They'll Do It Every Time idea, largely concerning my soon-to-be-former-roomate's obsession with opening and closing the windows of our room. Although the nearly centennarian comic strip will doubtless be picked up by another author, it just won't be the same without the same man at the helm. I hear from submitters that his written replies to ideas were in the exact same ageless, nationless tongue of the comic strips--although it was likely empty of any Dragbutts, Migranias, or Loopinas.

Perhaps now would be a good time to write that article, in honor of the man and the unique language he took with him.

See you in the funny papers.

Completely Unnecessary, Yet Cool

2007-12-06T23:20:00.000-08:00

Get a Cash Advance

As I was saying.

This is a nifty little gadget that rates blogs based on readability. It looks at the words you've chosen, sentence structure, and other dandy doo-dads and pieces together the reading level necessary to read a blog. Or any webpage with a lot of text on it, really.

Only high-school level? Clearly, I am slacking. Quickly, to the big words!

Vituperation! Denouement! Demense! Antipodes! Pismire! Crepuscular! Ineluctable! Filigree!

Did it work?

It's Sad What We Nerds Fantasize About

2007-12-03T20:42:00.000-08:00

<...recieving transmission from human brain #600,167,966,431...>

Prosecutor: So tell me, Mrs. Wrathful, when did you stop beating your husband?
The Wrathful English Major: I have never beaten my husband, and I believe your attempts to obtain false evidence with a loaded question represent an obstruction of the justice system.
Prosecutor: Your honor, this woman is out of line--
Phoenix Wright: OBJECTION!

<...ending transmission...>

Making Fun (Of Unnecessary Parentheticals)

2007-11-28T12:21:00.000-08:00

Folks, I am not a punctuation Nazi. I think I've made this abundantly clear already. However, as I noted previously, I will get a little twitchy when such mistakes create some fundamental difference in meaning. Thus, watch your parentheticals around me. Misplaced parentheses can not only change the flow of a sentence, but they can alter the information that is conveyed.

This is the cover for the new single "Making Fun (Of Everyday Life)," a novelty song released to promote the new video game "Rayman: Raving Rabbids 2." In general, parentheses are used to indicate extra or unnecessary information or inserts. In song titles, they indicate name duality. A song with parentheticals in the title usually has an official, "short" title and a "longer" title, typically due to the "short" title being part of a longer line in the chorus or other prominent place. (Pulling a random CD out of my collection--"Pure 80's"--I find "Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)" by Eurythmics. Those who've heard the song know that "Sweet dreams are made of this" is the first line of said song's chorus, but it's perfectly acceptable just to call the song "Sweet Dreams.") Occasionally, you'll find them used to show the discrepancy between a song's "official" title (what the artist[s] called it) versus what it is commonly known as. (I've seen a lot of people write "Baba O'Reilly (Who Are You)", though I don't know if any album ever referred to that song as such.)

What we are looking at here is an example of the former, certainly (I braved listening to it just to make sure), but the parenthetical is so oddly sectioned it baffles me. The whole idea behind parentheses, in song titles or in writing, is to indicate that the material contained within is optional or dropable. It can be cut without affecting the meaning of that which comes before or after.

The problem here (similar to my "rebel against/revel against" quandary several posts ago) is that "Making Fun" means nothing by itself in English. Well, literally, it would mean the process of creating fun, which is not quite semantically nonsensical. But it is clearly meant here to be part of the compound verb "to make fun of," which has a clear and definite meaning that is quite distinct from simply "making fun." "Making fun" by itself cannot be used to mean "to tease or mock." It is a transitive compound verb, and you can't split it, either (I temporarily forget my jargon). Just try and say "When I was little, I got made fun." Sounds awkward, doesn't it? "When I was little, I got made fun of." Better. "They made fun me." "We made fun the bad movie." O where O where has my little preposition gone?

Of course, if they rescued the "of" from the innards of the Parentheses Jail and put it back where it belongs, it'd still sound pretty strange. Prepositions without modified noun phrases sound pretty weird all by their lonesome. (But again, ending sentences with prepositions is perfectly normal. You do it all the time when you ask questions. If a preposition is at the end of a sentence, it just means that its noun phrase has moved somewhere else in said sentence or is implied.)

Why is the parenthetical even necessary here? "Making Fun of Everyday Life" seems like a pretty satisfactory song title to me. It's not even that long. There are plenty of even longer song titles that make do without.

In the vein of the original Rabbids promotional videos: "Bunnies Can't Use Parentheses Properly."

[Via GoNintendo]

Today's Post is Brought to You By the Atomic Symbol "Bi"

2007-11-16T22:41:00.000-08:00

Which, by the way, has nothing to do with bisexuality.

In the "I Never Noticed That Before" department, I was picking up some Pepto-Bismol up at the store for a stomach complaint I'd recently had. I was reading the front of the box (because there's not much else to read in the OTC meds aisle) and noticed that the official, chemical name for the rancid anti-barf bubblegum is "Bismuth subsalicylate."

Subsalicylate? Oh, there's aspirin in this stuff. Does that mean that you shouldn't give it to kids? I used it all the time when I was a kid and...

Wait. Bismuth. Bismol. Duh.

Medicine brand names are weird stuff. But it's interesting to see where they come from.

And yes, my stomach feels much better now.

Milk dispenser UPDATE!

2007-11-16T10:55:00.000-08:00

Yes, folks, someone finally complained to the people in charge! Either that, or they wised up on their own. I strongly suspect the former, however, due to the nature of the edit.

One of the milk dispensers now bears a sign saying:

"For your convenience, soy milk is available inside THIS milk dispenser."

And now I know to avoid that dispenser like the legumy plague.

No Grammar For You!

2007-11-15T23:35:00.000-08:00

I always find it funny when people who claim to be snobs are completely ignorant of the thing they're trying to be snobbish about. A few fortnights ago, I posted a rant in my deviantArt about this very subject. To sum it up, for those of you who don't want to read it and/or couldn't care less about my opinions about the anime community, I was lamenting the fact that the majority of the Internet's many gaggles of Howl's Moving Castle (the movie) fans don't even seem to know that Howl's Moving Castle (the book) even exists. I got a little vituperate about it, I will admit. I then conjectured that this ignorance was due to anime snobbery--"true" fans never watched dubbed anime, thus they had never seen the note in the title logo of the English version of this movie, which says, quite prominently, "Based on the novel by Diana Wynne Jones."

Now I turn my ignorance-seeking eyes on a different Internet target: The vast battalions of Grammar Nazis, stationed in platoons across the many message boards of the World Wide Web, eager to ambush those unwary souls who dare to forget the captalize proper nouns. You know them, I guarantee you do. You have seen them ravage the digital flesh of many an unwary newbie before; their savage fangs, dripping with crimson correctional ink, severing the bulging jugular modem sticking out of their necks, causing bytes to spurt into the...

Alright, this metaphor is quickly descending into the disgusting. It's unnecessary too. You know EXACTLY whom I'm talking about, and I don't think I need to elaborate on this. Now let me explain why I, an English major who aneurysms over word choice and sentence organization, hate them.

These people have absolutely no idea what "grammar" actually is.

(Those of you with sensitive stomachs or allergies to ch4tsp34k should look away from the next paragraph.)

Believe it or not, the sentence "cn u come 2 c me l8r 2day" is completely grammatically correct. The sentence "Can you comes to sees me latest today?," easy as it is on the punctuation-parched eyes, is not. However, most Grammar Nazis will at least begrudgingly accept the later, possibly even as a jovial jape. Yet say the first example out loud. Yes, really. Ignoring the vowel slashed out of the first word, it is phonetically identical to the properly-typed "Can you come to see me later today?" Those of you who know a little bit about linguistics already know what's happening here, but for the rest of you, let me tote out my handy dandy Bag O' Definitions.

Grammar is the set of rules or properties which govern the usage of the language. I imagine that you are now a bit confused. "But how is that different from...?" Ah ah ah. Sit down. I'm getting there. Grammar concerns things such as... verb-subject agreement, tense, word order, verb valency... the like. Most of the rules of grammar you know without having to think of them. You have to actively think to break most of them. If you are an English speaker, you do not say things such as "I have a cat brown" or "I'm thinking of" unless you intend to do so for some specific reason (such as right now, when I consciously broke the rules of English to bring you those examples). You say, "I have a brown cat" or "I'm thinking of going for lunch."

Now say the following, grammatically correct sentence out loud: "I can't imagine it, Suzie."

You did NOT say, "Capital-I can-apostrophe-T imagine it comma capital-S Suzie period."

This was meant to illustrate to you the difference between grammar, the rules governing the structure of a language, and conventions, the prescriptions made for the use of written language. Conventions concerns the the standards we make for writing. They concern things such as capitalization, punctuation, et cetra. Conventions are things that we, as writers, have invented for the ease of reading. They help us divide up ideas into sentences. They help us mimic the patterns of speech in writing. They help us do many things. But they have nothing to do with grammar.

Conventions Nazis, as they should properly called, have an artificial job. Punctuation and conventions have no real bearing or presence on language. They only apply in the sphere of writing, which is in itself little more than a pale analogue of actual, fluid, dynamic human speech. Many of the thousands of languages spoken in the world today don't even have written forms. Oh, yes, I suppose, you will get the occasional hound who has a problem with sentences ending in prepositions. But this is as far as they'll generally go. (That is a nasty, artificial rule, by the way. It was invented by pompous snobs who were embarrassed to be seen speaking English--the language of common folk!--and tried to "dignify" it by making it more like Latin, instigating passels of odd "rules." But English is not a Romance language and it never was, despite the many words of Latinate origin we've picked up over the centuries. Face it--our closest linguistic cousins are lederhosen, kilts, and, far back enough, saris.)

The truth of the matter is, very rarely will anyone flub up true grammar. If they're not making a Felines that Laugh Out Loud caliber I-can-has joke, they're probably using a dialect with different rules than the "prestige" version of whatever they're speaking. Or they're not a native-speaker. There are many possibilities. If you're going to be a Grammar Nazi, there's really not much to persecute. But if you like to nitpick, there's plenty of work to be found in the camps of the Convention Nazies. But "Convention Nazi" isn't a catchy title, so their spies have covertly snuck into the enemy Grammar Nazi camps and stolen their identity. Now thousands of these disguised Convention Nazis walk among us, sullying the name of Grammar wherever they dare raise their heads.

There are a few convention-related gripes that I will side with the Convention Nazis on, but they are few and far between:

1) The use of the apostrophe-s suffix as a pluralizer is abhorrent and needs to stop.

This is not a simple matter of punctuation, however. Apostrophe-s is one of the Seven Sacred Inflecitve Affixes that serves a distinct grammatical purpose. Using it in place of a regular s IS a grammatical error, because pluralization and possessives are matters of grammar. Also, it causes me to mentally aspirate at the end of words. "Chicken Pot Pie-eh-s" just sounds silly.

2) Two, to, and too; their, there, and they're, all that junk.

Again, using the wrong word causes a substantial difference in meaning, so this one occasionally irks me. It's usually not worth being a pedant about, but if it's in a register where correctness is necessary and expected (such as academic writing), I will point it out. I usually don't bother getting my dander up over it, though.

3) OK, there really isn't a number 3. The two issues listed above are more or less it.

If they would call themselves what they are, I might not have a problem with them--well, OK, this is a lie. I have a problem with officious, bloviating jerks(for lack of a better word) with holier-than-thou attitudes wherever they spring up. But even more so when they claim to enforce a standard they scarcely understand. I don't think the informal register of the Internet demands perfection, and while I myself tend to use my prestige dialect here, this is simply the way I speak. And I use "like" as a quotative, too.

Of course, neither Grammar Nazis nor those they pursue will bring about the downfall of civilization. So long as we humans can communicate--which we are notedly adept at--society will chug steadily on.

But I'd be wary of anyone you see wearing a schwa armband.

T'su Kipasium Biblium Zihio

2007-11-13T22:35:00.000-08:00

I get bored. (Incredible but true.)

I am also quite adept with language. (Incredible, yet also true--really, I'm far too modest.)

Utilizing both my boredom and my faculties in the language department (ho ho--wordplay), I have created my own language. (So what? Some guy callin' himself Dr. Espera-something did the same thing like a century or two ago.)

One which has significantly different grammatical rules than my mother tongue, English. (Um, yay?)

The benefits of having your own language, however, are quite limited when no one but you knows how to use it, and even I admit that I lack fluency in conversational Valencian. The Valencia in this case having nothing to do with anything Spanish (although the verb conjugation system owes a few dues to the Hispanic way of going about verb/subject agreement), but rather refers to the Valencia, the goddess to whom the mythical peoples who spoke this language prayed. One can, however, translate random things into one's personal language just for fun. Which is incidentally what I have been doing for the past half an hour.

I am merrily working away at translating Fine, the sarcasto-go-lucky, synth-happy tune from Lemon Demon, into Valencian. Naturally, the translation is not exact. Few translations are. Colloquialisms and idioms have to be localized, adjectives must be modified to fit the Valencian way of things, oh me oh my... But it is enjoyable, and a chance for me to stretch my linguistic muscles.

It's not done yet, but here are the first two verses for you.

English:

Today has a way
Of scarring your eyes
With negative light
But it’s a disguise.
I put on my shades
And see through the lies.

The convenient truth is:

Light is on the way;
We’ll be having a fun time.
It’s such a lovely day
We should pocket the sunshine
And never give it back
Even if there’s a heat wave
Or terrorist attack
It’ll just be a close shave.

Valencian:

Aleut mediuo
Cul raduo foruo di t’su
Pepii mul
A paal cul piimul.
Suum velan liuln
I opiu faru ul ninvarinh.

Ul varin tesiol cul:

Pii cul adderon;
Halahar.
Cul ale olplisuo
Sostiaut deus nurius piira li valesolot
I ninrio genus pepaal valesolot
Jinin paalut oligiuo
Re olrad tu “terrorist”
Sostia widi ato a pesirit.

You don't have to know how to pronounce words in Valencian to know that it doesn't quite have the same flow.

Of creatures of the piscene persuasion and cylindrical liquid storage devices

2007-11-08T13:35:00.000-08:00

I've been debating with myself as to whether or not I want to feature bad translations in this blog. I decided as soon as I had formulated the idea that "engrish" and other similarly mangled speech would be right out. Although it is often humorous, the goal of my blog is to make fun of people who should know how to speak English properly, but don't--I.E., befuddled native speakers. It is amusing when nonnatives err, but any second-language-learner will make those kinds of mistakes. Have you ever tried to learn a second language? It is guaranteed that, at some point during your education, you will sound like an idiot. This is going to happen whether you want it to or not, because it happened when you were 2, and such mistakes are hardwired into your cranium.

That said, I think that professional translations are fair game. Be they books, movies, or (heaven help us) video games, there are people who get paid to convert these works into English, for consumption by an English native-speaking audience. We expect these translations to express a level of language competency that we ourselves possess. We can tell when they've been bungled, as they don't quite "read" right to our minds. If done well, they can take what made the original text lively and engaging and successfully recreate it in another language.

If you have any experience with video games, however, I'm sure you know that that is one big "if."

It's almost too easy to pick on them. I feel kind of bad about doing it. But these are multimillion-dollar corporations here, producing products in dozens of cultures worldwide. How is it that they consistently manage to avoid finding translators who don't let these little errors slip through?

This particular error comes to us from the Game Boy Advance game "Harvest Moon: More Friends of Mineral Town." The Harvest Moon series, for those of you not familiar with it, is all about farming. You are a farmer and you run a farm. You grow fruit and vegetables. You milk cows. You cook homemade food. You make friends with townspeople, get married, and have children. It's a simple, docile experience, one that plays well with children (as my younger sister will attest), and it's great fun if you need to wind down after a long day. It's a surprisingly popular series, especially when you consider the fact that most folks' ideas of video games and the gamers who play them involve pouch-eyed losers and virtual robots that like to shoot one another.

The translation values of the games, however, are notoriously dodgy. Some games in the series, like the GameCube and PS2s' A Wonderful Life, are well written with clever dialogue and impeccable grammar. More Friends of Mineral Town, not so much. It's usually fairly comprehensible, but every once in a while, it heads solidly into bizarro territory.

My character in the game, "Farmer Ally," lives on the cheerfully-named Rainbow Isle farm with her husband Rick, daughter Vivian, and an entourage of cows, sheep, and chickens. One farmy morn, she rose sleepy-eyed from bed and gave her usual farmy greeting to her farmy family.

"Mama... nigh-night," said the rather confused toddler Vivian. But this particular piece of canned babble, though anachronistic with regards to the fact that it was 6 A.M. in game time, is not the focus of our confusion.

Farmer Ally conversed cheerfully with Rick, and he remarked on how fast dear Vivian was growing up. Also a fairly standard piece of speech. However, attempting to talk with him again, the good farmer ran into something far more peculiar.

I dearly wish I had the ability to make a screenshot of this. Alas, I lack even a cell phone camera to document this. So you'll just have to take me on faith when I report that Rick said...

"Oh... but girls always revel against their fathers..."

Let us ask our good friend Dictionary.com what went wrong here, shall we?

rev·el /ˈrɛvəl/ [rev-uhl] verb, -eled, -el·ing or (especially British) -elled, -el·ling, noun
–verb (used without object)
1. to take great pleasure or delight (usually fol. by in): to revel in luxury.
2. to make merry; indulge in boisterous festivities.
–noun
3. boisterous merrymaking or festivity; revelry.
4. Often, revels. an occasion of merrymaking or noisy festivity with dancing, masking, etc.

I don't know about you, but I've never heard of someone taking great pleasure against someone. I'm certain one could go so far as to say that revel in is a compound verb.

Obviously, poor Rick meant to say "rebel," but the disastrous closeness of the vowel sound /b/ to the vowel sound /v/, as well as their vexing closeness to one another on the standard QWERTY keyboard, have caused him to stutter in a most childish fashion. I don't suppose I blame him. It was early in the morning, and I doubt he'd had his Turbojolt XL yet.

Clearly, We Have Different Definitions of "Playschool"

2007-11-07T18:25:00.000-08:00

I am one of those people who tends to accumulate more reading material than I have adequate leisure time for. Eight out of twelve months of the year, I live within walking distance of a very reasonably-priced used books store that will happily purchase all the dreck I have accumulated over the year, the proceeds from which I will use to obtain new dreck at 4 bucks an 800-page hardcover. The other four months are spent within a $1 bus ride away from two other stores in the same local chain, the cost of which is at least four times the amount I can expect to pay for the cheapest paperback. This alone is enough to make me a regular customer, but when you throw in the fact that they also tend to have difficult-to-find video games and 10-cent CD's in little bins, well, you can expect me to be perusing the place at least once every other day.

Goodness knows I try to be egalitarian with all those 50-cent pulps, but inevitably, my mind will turn to the most interesting-looking tomes first. So it happens that I end up with a pile of books that I've owned for ages, but have yet to crack into the spines of. Luckily, sometimes the well of interest will dry, and I will delve into my emergency rations. This happened recently, and I found myself packing Pendragon: The Merchant of Death, by D.J. MacHale, into the "book pocket" of my backpack. The series is one I often see in the children's section of book stores, and the cover of something like the eight novel in the series piqued my interested. Of course, you can't start in the middle, so I dug up a copy of the first book and had proceeded to chivalrously ignore it in favor of a re-read of the fantastic (by my tastes, anyway) Fablehaven by Brandon Mull. Of course, no book will let you ignore it forever, especially if you leave it in plain sight. I sat there in my desk, waiting for my Spanish professor to arrive, scanning over the pages.

When the following gem of a paragraph, found on page 68 of the Aladdin Fantasy paperback edition, leapt out and caught my eyes. Spontaneous giggles erupted and made the red-haired kid near the blackboard look at me funny.

Mark tossed his bunch of socks out one window and quickly threw open a window. Courtney surveyed the room, stopping in front of two posters on the wall. One was a colorful Hentai-animation superhero cartoon, the other was a gorgeous girl lying on the beach in a leopard-print thong.

Courtney said, "Looks like you've got kind of a conflicted puberty versus playschool thing going on."

...Which is fine, if your version of playschool happens to involve girls in tight bikinis.

Allow me to explain.

Clearly, the author is trying to appeal to the hip anime subculture here. "Hentai" is clearly a Japanese word, with legitimate meaning in the realm of the genre, and Japanese cartoons (anime) and their general style have become very popular in the West as of late. It's gotten to the to the point where American- and Canadian-made cartoons are starting to try and emulate that particular drawing style. (Irony springs eternal here, as the "anime style" as we now know it began as an attempt to replicate the facial features of Walt Disney characters, but that's not the point.) In Japan, there are anime targeted at all audiences--from small children to adults--but here in North America, cartoons are still largely considered to be for children. Hence why might label Mark's cartoon poster "playschool."

Notice how I mentioned that "hentai" has actual connotations within anime? Well, as evidence that the author clearly did not study for his vocabulary test, the actual meaning of the word is completely at odds with Courtney's statement--and with what I think Mark's parents would want him to have displayed in his room.

Hentai, my friends, is anime pornography.
(Warning: So very not work safe. Don't look at me, look at the people who edit Wiki pages.)

To be fair to the author, the word hentai is extremely similar to the anime term sentai, whose meaning is probably much closer to what the author intended. It means, roughly, "task force," but is often used in the anime subculture to refer to superheroes or superhero-related anime. (This association stems from the Super Sentai, a series of corny Japanese superhero TV shows that frequently get repackaged for the US as the corny Power Rangers.) However, the original sentai in Japan are live-action, not cartoons, which still displays some confusion on the author's part.

Even as I pondered this, I still felt like banging my head into my desk. This is such an impossibly easy error to correct. I don't know who would even know of the existence of the word "hentai" without being an anime enthusiast (which probably explains how this one slipped through editing), and I don't know how said enthusiast could know the word without knowing what it means. The only thing I can imagine is the author rifling through a random list of anime terms (quite possibly on Wikipedia), spotting one, saying, "Hey! This is cool!" and plugging it into his story without bothering to look it up. But this violates not only proper loan word etiquette, but the rules of good writing--heck, the rules of language in general: Do not use a word if you do not know what it means. Do you hear that? It's the sound of Grice's Maxims screaming out in pain! O Logic! O Quality! How the system has failed you!

A simple Google search could have rectified this problem. I don't want to know what turns up if one Googles "hentai," but I'm betting it could have cleared up any uncertainties about this word reeeeally quick. I realize that even the best authors can't meticulously research every minor detail they put into their novels, but is it so much to ask that pornography doesn't end up inside our children's books?

Let us not consider the possibility that this "misuse" was intentional. I don't generally enjoy speaking ill of people, especially those I don't actually know, but if this was the case, I'd be far too squicked out to read further.

For All It's Worth

2007-11-07T18:16:00.000-08:00

My school cafeteria is insane.

You would think that, once you leave the ranks of pub ed behind you for an illustrious career in higher education, that infamously bad school food would be obliterated. And it is. Kind of. It's nothing you'd find in even a low-key restaurant, but the creamed corn isn't going to crawl across your plate and start dissolving your mashed potatoes with its free-flowing digestive juices.

Sadly, the increase in quality is paid for by a decrease in sanity. A significant portion of my student union underwent reconstruction over the summer, and is now officially one clichéd line away from Sparta.

Like most student unions, ours is composed of a hodgepodge of cafeteria-style eateries and a number of brand name take-out places, such as Pizza Hut and Chik-fil-A. (It also houses one of our campus' three Starbucks.) The cafeteria is the main part that underwent renovation, though the Starbucks moved out of the sandwich shop and assimilated the Mexican place no one ate at--so now we have a Starbucks with confetti-esque wallpaper and the lingering smell of burnt refried beans, though that's neither here nor there. Similarly, the "main" cafeteria and the "takeout" cafeteria fused, becoming a singular bloated amoeba of horror. For some bizarre reason, our delightful Board of Bewildering Students decided that something was inherently wrong with our cafeteria. So they gave it a complete overhaul. Now, it is no longer a true cafeteria, but something our school pamphlets refer to as a "diner-style" eatery. This means that, instead of grabbing a plate and pilling random quantities of limp fettuccini, marinara sauce, and pudding on a plate, you pick out pre-prepared meals from beneath a heat lamp. There are several "stations" set up for this purpose.

I'm sure this sounds nice in theory, but it makes dining incredibly inconvenient. You can no longer pick and choose your food, compiling your dinner as you go--it's their way or the stairway. (Specifically, the one that opens out in front of the aforementioned Pizza Hut, which thankfully hasn't changed much, so you can still be in an out in as long as it takes for the pokey employees to finish making the breadsticks.) Quite puzzlingly, they've also abolished the salad bar, which seems quite a curious thing to do for an institution that puts standees on every table proclaiming the merits of a balanced diet yet only grudgingly provides fresh fruit. And you can forget about veggies--unless you like yours boiled to a gummy, rubbery consistency. You may have to resort, as I do, to munching baby carrots out of a bag like potato chips. The only food they serve with any consistency are pizza, hamburgers, and hot dogs. Everything else is either an American-Chinese-Food recipe of the day, something with mushrooms in it (which I'm no great fan of) or sandwiches, which, although custom made, you must wait in an impossibly long line for. I've defaulted to the grilled cheese many a time. On the rare opportunity that they have one of their "lunch specials" available--which is usually just another type of toasted bread product--I pounce. The day they served plain cheese ravioli with canned spaghetti sauce, I practically wept. Largely because they only gave me three pillows of ravioli.

The only institution in that destitute cafeteria that remains comfortably familiar is the cereal bar, which is consistently well-stocked with various varieties of processed, fruit-and-sugar-flavored grain. If all else fails, there are always Frosted Flakes and milk. And yet... The most puzzling addition yet has taken up its fungal residence there.

Naturally, the cereal dispensers are right next to the milk machines. These are ridiculously confusing and awkward contraptions, but they seem to have been there for years, so I assume most students have come to put up with them. Near the beginning of the year, a sign appeared on one of the rectangular chrome devices.

"For your convenience, soy milk is available inside the dispenser."

As an English major, I am both confused and intrigued.

Both dispensers bear this signet, yet neither one actually contains soy milk. Soy milk is generally described as having a taste that resides somewhere between "a handful of dirt" and "two handfuls of dirt," and the milk inside these machines is rather lacking in that gamy flavor. So where is this mythical soy milk? I would like to claim that the issue with the sign lies in ambiguous structure, as that's generally the problem when sentences are unclear, but I am an English major, and I know better. The real issue lies within its frame of reference.

The beauty of language is that it is abstract. We can refer to things outside of ourselves with ease. We can replace entire phrases and clauses with pronouns and still retain all of our meaning, provided there is context for it. In writing, this context usually comes from the previous sentences. In everyday speech, we can point and gesture to our its and hes and shes, and we can use ambiguous determiners in the presence of multiple objects because we can indicate which we mean. A sign, gifted with neither fingers nor hands, has no such faculty. Thus the simple, everyday word the turns this sign into an enigma.
I admit it would be more humorous in its grammatical uncertainty if the sign said "Inside a dispenser" without bothering to mention which one, but the "the" is no less mystifying. There are a total of three milk dispensers that I know of in the cafeteria, making the "the" ambiguous. If the signs are meant to refer to any milk machine outside of themselves, then any determiner at all really isn't a good fit for the sentence. If the sign were meant to refer to the machine it's on, then a good "This dispenser" would suffice. But if the sign is meant to refer to something else--serving as a deterrent for eager vegans, I suppose--then it really ought to be giving directions in order to avoid ambiguity.

In order to be fair to the sign, I checked the labels over the machine's spigots to see if any of them were marked "soy." One machine bears skim milk and 2%, the other two contain both of those and chocolate. No clear indication, then, that any of these machines was a soy-bearing load. I sampled from each to try to determine their origins by taste. All seemed to be firmly bovine in origin. Somehow, I think I would be less incensed if the sign were a complete lie than if it were merely bad at giving directions.

Of course, it is entirely possible that Advanced Soy Milk Technologies have been put in place here, and the beany brew has been rendered invisible next to the real thing. I have never suffered from lactose intolerance, so my stomach does not serve as an accurate barometer in these issues. I may have been pouring legume juice over my cereal for weeks now and been completely unaware of it. If so, I commend the soy milk manufacturers for making it taste more like milk and less like soy; I was able to enjoy my pastrami on rye last week with a tall pale glass of lactic acid, and if I was in fact consuming raw liquid tofu, my taste buds are none the wiser.
Of course, spooning soggy Froot Loops into my mouth, I am inclined to wonder where in fact the real Fountain of Soy Milk lies. Is it hidden behind a counter some where? Must you request it specially, as they do for the omelets they serve at breakfast? Is it part of the secret menu at In-N-Out? If it doesn't exist, why the signs? To give disenchanted lact-ints a second lease on dairy? To convince the vegans that they have not completely forgotten them? Or are they merely there, as a strongly suspect, to confuse the living daylights out of English majors such as myself?

But if that is their purpose, they are awfully subtle. Today's Dinner Special sign commits a far more egregious error, certain to cause ringing in the ears of this university's collective English department.

"Chicken Pot Pie's"

Oh, how I weep.