The Consonantal Divide, 2

       All right, if the consonant "w" is made up of two u's, a double-u, how so? 

       Produce the sound the letter makes when it begins a word, [w].  You purse your lips and start to say something like "ooh," then merge into a second sound that's something like "uh."  It's a diphthong consisting of those two sounds.

       In fact, it's two slightly different pronunciations of the vowel "u."  It's the "ooh" sound in words like June, tuba, ludicrous,  lubricate, illuminate, plus the "uh" sound as in sun, run,  jump, rub-a-dub-dub, three men in a tub.  Strange to say, but there really are two different vowel sounds merged in that single consonant "w."

       That is why "w" is often called a "semi-vowel."
       

The Consonantal Divide, 1

       Consider some ironies about letters and sounds:  “h” begins with a vowel; “u” begins with a consonant.

       I don’t mean the sounds of the letters, I mean the names of the letters.  The consonant “h” is pronounced “aitch.”  It begins with a vowel "a."   The vowel “u” is pronounced “you.”  It begins with the consonant “y.”

       Another irony is that the "www" of World Wide Web has nine syllables and the MUCH longer "World Wide Web" with 12 letters has only three syllables.  Say "www":  [dub-uhl-you dub-uhl-you dub-uhl-you]--nine.

       Also, if you listen to the letter "w," you hear what that consonant consists of..."double u"...now turn the printed "w" into written "w," you will SEE the two u's, which are both vowels and not a consonant! 

Some Free Writing about Free Writing

 ...your censor starts “improving,” even before you’ve written.  What kind of fun or advantage is that, espcially when it’s a kind of disadvantage, especially with regard to “free” writing.  Why put quotation marks around free, because you can’t really be free, you think, but only in quotation marks?  I suppose so.  But to keep the words coming is a marvelous desideratum; it takes a free wheelingness, and free willingness, and it takes at least a modicum of courage.  Maybe more than that.  It was the secret to doing my essays, and it was the secret to doing my Ph.D. dissertation finally, I had to say each day I sat down, “I don’t care if it comes out shit.”

Even Kings Get Sick (Not to Mention Cartoonists)

Click on cartoon to enlarge.

               In numerology, letters can be assigned numerical value; numbers can be assigned letters.  There's a certain interchangableness.

               None of this has anything to do with what's going on in this crazy cartoon.

Advertising Language

       Hollywood leads like Christian Bale, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Chiwetel Ejiofor are sporting beards and mustaches in public.   Men's razor and blade sales are going down.

       Proctor and Gamble, owner of Gillette Razor Company, is not without a response.  The company says there is "increased shaving below the neck, particularly among younger men."  P&G spies an opening into what it craftily calls "guys' holistic shaving needs," also known as manscaping.

       New this year is the Gillette Body razor, the first tool of its kind "built for the terrain of a man's body."  (Women have curves, apparently, men have terrain.)

       "Holistic" sounds positive, and "built" and "terrain" so masculine, you could almost forget you're shaving off your body hair.

Cartoonists Prosecuted

                 Some food for thought in this little reversal.

"Reengaged": Engaging a Word

                                                        

                                     reengaged

Up Over

       Cursing Federer for not closing out Murray in three straight sets and my having to watch the finish on recording the next day in order to get any sleep.   Then cursing Australia for its seasons and time zones belng opposite from ours, the land "Down Under."

       Then waking (barely) into our late American morning today, couldn't help thinking through my bleary-eyed consciousness:

       For people from Australia, am I "Up Over"?

Haiku--Issa--Hass

       What strikes me about so many Haiku and makes me prize them is that little "explosion" in the third line.  Hass captures them in his translations of Issa's poems, and in his oral readings of them!  Here are five of my favorites from the nine Hass shared in yesterday's post:

             Don't worry, spiders,                        Goes out,
          I keep house                                    comes back;
             casually.                                              the love life of my cat.


             Even with insects--             The whole time I pray to Buddha                  some can sing,                     I keep on             
             some can't.                           killing mosquitoes.              


                                            Napped half the day;
                                         no one
                                            punished me!
       

            

"Napped half the day;/no one/punished me!"

       I was looking for a particular Haiku today, found it plus a whole flood of others, as will happen on the Internet.

       I had witnessed poet Robert Hass read at the Dodge Poetry Festival; this is one reading I hadn't heard, from his own book of versions of Issa's Haiku poems.

"Ax" for "Ask"?

       In writing lately about Yiddish words I know from childhood, I came upon John McWhorter's piece in the L.A. Times yesterday on the Black use of "ax" for "ask."

       Yes, it's different from chutzpah or mishegas in my recent posts, but not different in the way Blacks can hold "ax" close to them even when educated and "knowing better" just because it's "a facet of black being" as linguist McWhorter puts it.  If you grow up with a way of saying something that's characteristic of and indigenous to your people, and different from the mainstream's way of putting it, you treasure it in a personal way.   "Correct,"  "incorrect," or whether you can find it in a dictionary are not the question.

       A fuller treatment by the black Columbia University Prof can be located here.

A Poem's Bow to Art

 
       Rabbi Leib 's reminder in yesterday's post that "nature itself" is "the greatest wonder we can know" is echoed in "Notes from Prehistory" by Linda Bierds, a poem on the cave paintings at Font-de-Gaume in France.  Bierds says, in a beautiful phrase, the purpose of art is
                              "to venerate the living world. "

Nature = Miracle

       I'm not sure we believe much in miracles any more.  So it's inspiriting to come across a few words that remind us of such things:

                [We] should understand that miracles and nature are all one. 
                In fact there is no miracle as great and wondrous as nature
                itself, the greatest wonder we can know.

                           from The Language of Truth:  the Torah Commentary 
                           of the Sefat Emet  by Rabbi Yehudah Leib Alter of Ger

Spell it Out for 'em, Cowch!

Click on Cartoon to Enlarge

A Culture Dies When a Language Dies

       Reminded of one thing today I had heard of and apprized of another I hadn't. 

       There is a Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages.  The attempt is to save disappearing tongues before they die.  For example, when speakers of 27 Native American languages were forced into one reservation in Oregon in 1885, they developed a "cross-over" language out of necessity that allowed them to speak to one another; only one of the 27 original languages has a living speaker.   The institute has made a talking dictionary of that last language.  You can find the Institute here. 

       There's also a website in which speakers of minority languages can send tweets to one another, such as in Gaelic, yes Yiddish, a host of Native American languages, many others.  The site can be  reached at this location.  

"Peregrinations"

       I used this word in an email today.  It seemed to come out of thin air.  Writing of a former student,  now friend of long standing, I mentioned that "I followed her job peregrinations."  She'd had a few different ones in those years after graduation.  Was it a right use?

       First contact with online defining made the meaning sound like "traveling on foot."  Oops.  Asking Connie, she thought "wandering," which was more in my ball park.  Online, Reference.com used the word in a sentence:  "His peregrinations in and around the mediums of drawing and photography nearly amount to a second and third career."  That echoes my own use pretty closely.

       Gathering from a few dictionaries:  Latin roots meaning "through the land"; journeying or traveling from place to place; wandering, migrating.  I'll claim victory.

      

      

"Mishegas"

       The post about Yiddish a couple days ago reminded me I'd written the following over two years ago:

       My Grandma used to look at the new TV set in our living room; any new face that came on, she would say, "Is Jewish?"   A public medium, but she wanted to see her own kind looking back at her, a reflection, a confirmation.

       Today I saw a word used by theatre critic Charles McNulty.  He was reviewing a new play with myriad plot lines with multiple family members, each
                                  "adding to the spiraling mishegas,"

(mish-uh-GAHSS), a Yiddish word meaning "mixed up" and "crazy." And I felt proud.  Why?  Word I recognized, heard family and friends use, was a part of me.

       But look, Charles, "chutzpah" became good American English; maybe next time you don't even need to italicize.

Better than "Hairpiece"?

       Lead actress Sandra Bullock, who spends a lot of time in a cramped space vehicle in the movie "Gravity," was given an offer early in the filming that she couldn't believe.

       As Mexican Alfonso Cuaron reminded her in accepting his Golden Globe award as best director last night on NBC:  "Sandra, I want to thank you for not quitting when I told you I would give you herpes.  My thick accent got in the way.  What I was trying to say to her was 'earpiece'."

       To find his inimitable and charming way of speaking at the Globes, go here.

I'll Drink to Yiddish

       My daughter gave me a mug with Yiddish expressions and sayings on it.  My mother and father spoke some Yiddish, nowhere near as much as their parents, and I know a handful of words.  Thus the progression with each generation a little more distanced from the Mother tongue.  Yet Yiddish makes its way into English:  "Chutzpah," for example.

       My favorite saying on the mug is, "Life is nothing but a dream, but don't wake me up!"

       The Yiddish (transliterated)?  "Dos lebn iz nit mer vi a kholem, ober vekt mikh nit oyl!"

       Yiddish is a combination of German and Hebrew, and English with large Germanic background allows one to make out a few of the words.

       There's an element of street smarts, common sense, and a good deal of humor in these Yiddish expressions.

A Way to Think about Writing

       "Writing is like washing windows in the sun.  With every attempt to perfect clarity you make a new smear."

                                      James Richardson

"Obliterate"

       I've had occasion to think about this word today.   I was worried that something I'd done could end up obliterating my whole blog.  Hopefully this will not happen though I'm still worried.  So I sat and looked at the word "obliterate" and realized the word for "letter" is in there, from Latin littera, and in fact you have the whole English word "literate."

       But I thought "obliterate" meant "destroy utterly" anything the word is referring to.   Of course that is what it often does mean, but it's by extension from the meaning embedded in the Latin root, to "wipe out, erase, the letters, the words."

       So in this case, though I hadn't realized it when the word came to me, I was literally concerned about my blog being obliterated.

Beware of Cartoonist with Hammer

Click on Cartoon to Enlarge

Once again Piraro is here jerking our linguistic heads around.  Check                                                 out any neck pains.

"It's Not Your Way. It's Yahweh."

       Spying this saying or motto stenciled on the back of the car ahead of me this morning reminded me of an earlier saying or catch-phrase I'd seen on the front of a church as I passed by it in a vehicle:

                                                  Let Go.
                                    Let God.

My eyes wouldn't let me look away until I was sure I had this one:

                             It's not your way.  It's
                     Yahweh. 

"Yahweh" is an Englishing of the Hebrew for "Lord," and, of course, a pun on "your way."

       The similarity between the two sayings is striking.  Both catch-phrases promoting God in your life, for sure; both wonderful playing with the language; both transforming the ego-driven secular into the transcendence of the Deity in the flash of an eye.

"Abscond"

       A word used in a newspaper's front page lead story made me realize I must not have known what that word meant.   Yesterday's L. A. Times spoke of ex-prisoners evading probation by absconding.

       I somehow had learned at an early age that "absconding" meant running off and disappearing with money that didn't belong to the person.  Here it seemed money didn't play a part in it at all.  Hiding and not making set meetings with probation officers was itself "absconding."

       Dictionaries confirm my misunderstanding.  Latin abs ("away") and condere ("put" or "stow"), make abscond an intransitive verb that's self-reflexive, meaning "to hide (oneself)."

       I must have read a lot about people stealing funds and then "absconding with the money," thinking money an integral part of absconding.  Not so!    

"Defenestration"

       While going to the Merriam-Webster website to look up another word, I discovered their video feature on interesting words.  "Defenestration" is certainly one of those, and while it's not one you and I are likely to need in our everyday vocabulary, the story behind it is worth knowing.

       Its Latin derivation might lead you to think the word means something like "out the window," and you'd be right.  But then how did such a word come into existence?

                                          You can learn that here.

Double Negatives: Writer Beware!

       Today's (Jan. 5th) L.A. Times has an article on the release of Vladimir Horowitz's Carnegie Hall recitals over 35 years:  41 CDs.

       The caption under a photo of the musician at the piano reads
VLADIMIR HOROWITZ performs in 1965 at Carnegie Hall, a venue whose               importance to the pianist's career can't be understated.
Most likely the caption writer made the mistake; the author said "overstated" in the body of the article.

       Let's see:  "Was Carnegie Hall important to Horowitz's career?"  "Uh-uh.  It was unimportant.  No, it was really worse than that.  It was terribly unimportant.  Somehow that doesn't do it justice.  Carnegie Hall meant nothing to his career."

       Using a double negative or a negative plus something like "overstated/understated," be careful you don't contradict your own intended meaning!

Saving P. L. Travers

       Connie, David, and I saw Saving Mr. Banks today.  I did it somewhat grudgingly.  I loved Mary Poppins when my mother read it to me as a child...the take-charge-of-the-kids-and-household, not-to-be-stopped whirlwind of governess Mary Poppins.  I agreed with author P. L. Travers the movie was too saccharine.

       Oh, yes, they showed Mary Poppins' author as stern and resistant to seeing her book adapted a la Hollywood, and they made a plausible psychological case for Travers' reluctance to let the Disney team lighten the movie, practically giving her a therapeutic catharsis right before your eyes.  But I still felt the two Disney movies did the same thing, taking the guts out of Travers as they had out of Mary.  These were Disney's stories, not Mary Poppins' and not Mrs. Travers'.

"Fartlek"

       You pop into a chair in an orthopedic physician's outer office waiting for her to see your wife about a foot problem.  You pick up a running magazine because you jog, and you come across a coach's article regarding training for marathons and become puzzled and smile when you read that the coach says he employs fartleks for his runners.

       Did I read that right?  Yes.  I did.  What in the world is a fartlek?

       And then you learn that a fartlek is a training device, especially useful for long-distance runners:  short bursts of fast running with slower paced passages in between.  The OED tells me later the two syllables of the word mean "speed" and "play" respectively, in Swedish.  
       Meanwhile, the English speaker, conjuring up a different "short burst,"  cannot refrain from smiling :).

"Empathy," Literature, and Performance

       Does the reading of serious fiction boost one's ability to feel into another person's emotions, help one understand another person?   Research published in the journal Science suggests the answer is yes, says Robert M. Sapolsky's op-ed piece in last Sunday's L.A. Times.

       This certainly was an article of faith during my college teaching career, now apparently verified with more objective measurement.

       Broadening one's capacity for empathy, for "feeling into" (from the Greek) is a worthwhile virtue for living.  Reading good literature does it,  performing literature can go even further, calling for the enacting of that empathy, for oneself and for audiences. 
      

"To the Point," Happy New Year

       I have praised this radio series before.

       This New Year's Day prompts me to wish the program success for the coming year and to thank it for over a decade of great programs.

       Do I value words?  Yes.  Spoken words in a way especially?  Yes.  The auditory art of radio with particular affection? Yes.

       The visual is great with TV news to see what's happening.   Hearing the complexity and gaining understanding through pointed interviews with excellent spokespersons for frequently contradictory positions,  better yet.  Even topics I'm not necessarily avid to hear about like today's "Should College Athletes Be Paid?" turn out to be interesting, multi-faceted, controversial, illuminating!

        Be instructed by the series "To the Point" here.