No, Thursday's Out....

My show comes down on Tuesday, last day of February. It's been a ball, and I'm so grateful to everyone who came to see it, or who tried, but got waylaid by the weather. You are lovely humans, and I'm glad to know you, and much encouraged by your encouragements. 

Linguists like to imagine a scale for English speakers (maybe all speakers – what do I know?)  that runs from Prescriptivist (this is the RIGHT way to speak, write, or punctuate) to Descriptivist (this is how people ACTUALLY speak, write, and punctuate).  As a construct, that scale rings true to me.   Most of the folks I know, myself included, are neither purely Prescriptive, nor purely Descriptive.   We might lean one way or the other, but at selected moments, we become Wafflers, case by case. For instance, I know a few highly Prescriptive types who will say, “It is I!” instead of “It’s me.” but they do it very self-consciously, and as if they are joking just a little bit. Or they may have stopped fussing about   sentences ending in a preposition, even though   they still get bent about how people use “hopefully.”  ( If you would like to get unbent over “hopefully,” I refer you here .) At the same time, many of us who are trying to become less j...

Because I’m auditing a class at PSU, I get to use the wonderful pool in the gym. I showed up for a deep water exercise class one morning, and saw another swimmer struggling with something unseen, below the surface. “Wardrobe malfunction,” she said. I nodded. “I’ve had this suit for years,” she said. I gave her my “been there” smile. “Strange how stuff sometimes disintegrates, isn’t it?” I said. She was annoyed. “The fabric is perfectly good,” she said, “but the stitching is coming apart.” That got me thinking about “perfectly good,” and now I’m noticing it everywhere. “Perfectly good” isn’t like “perfectly balanced,” or “perfectly seasoned,” which are straightforward positives. Something “perfectly good” is generally … not. You wouldn’t say something was perfectly good unless its perfect goodness was at least in question. There’s something defensive about it, or argumentative, or, at a minimum, frustrated. My pool pal was using “perfectly good” in its “don’t be wasteful” an...

There is a trucking company out here (maybe everywhere) named Yellow. The word YELLOW is printed in giant letters on the sides of  their trucks.   The trucks are either white or bright orange. The logo is bright orange, and the lettering is black. Nothing at all is yellow in color. This discrepancy makes my brain hurt. I have tried to convince others that it should be illegal. It's dangerous for me to witness a horror like this when I'm driving.   My Linguistics bauble of the week is  the Stroop test . It's the same basic thing, and it assesses how well you can pay attention to the color displayed, and not the word. It takes all of one minute, if you are tempted to give it a try. I did it four times. At my very fastest, I was "better than 40%" of people who took the test. I'm feeling very sad for anyone worse at this than I am. Ye gods.

The Clinton Street Coffee House sent me an email on Tuesday, asking if I wanted to be the February Artist of the Month, sorry for the late notice, but their February person cancelled. Uh… sure! I had eight days. I could get it together in eight days. Then they wrote on Thursday: Actually, their January person sold almost all her work, and the walls were bare. Could I hang some paintings that very night? Uh…. No? But I could get a few things up on Friday for them, with more to come. That SAME DAY, I got a message from a different coffee shop: their February Artist of the Month cancelled. Did I want February? I thought about that briefly, then had a flash of sanity, and introduced them to my friend Jonathan. (I’m awaiting a Willamette Week article on The Mysterious Disappearance of Scheduled February A’s of the M. What became of them?) The show is hung now, and February is still two days off, so I’m feeling pretty spry and adaptable, but also a little more jumbled than usual (w...

Vocab update: I thought maybe “pusillanimous,” (fancy word for “cowardly”) was somehow related to “pussy,” (insult about being girly), but the OED doesn’t buy it as a derivation or an etymology, even with those matching first few letters.    “Pusillanimous” means “manifesting a lack of courage or determination,” and from the very first entry, it’s used to insult a man’s manliness. ?1611   G. Chapman in tr. Homer Iliads i. Comm.   Who can deny, that there are teares of manlinesse and magnanimity, as well as womanish and pusillanimous? (Here’s a defense of manly crying! Good! Followed by a swipe at womanly crying! Bad! But my personal disappointment is that somehow even with both words playing in the same semantic area, there’s no link between them.   Dang. It looked so promising.) Our friend “pussy,” has eleven OED entries in the cat-coward-female group (also one about hares, and one about people with big bellies, ...

Lately, I find myself telling or showing things to friends who already know (or know more than I do) about them. My news is not new. My paintings of real places are inaccurate. My amazing discoveries were the topic of recent podcasts. I have a name for what my friends are, in these situations. They are pre-edified. I cannot edify them, because they are edified already. One Linguistics assignment this week was to list words we encountered that were new (at least, new to us). We were to note where they occurred, and whether we created them ourselves, or just stumbled across them. You won’t be surprised that I was making words up all the time. (Pre-edified, for instance. You might argue that it’s not a word, and arguing is your right and privilege – we’ve been doing “what is a word?” for two weeks now. Come on down!) Anyway, I am sharing my favorite revelation of the week, which is about something you can do in Finnish but not in English (and vice versa). You may get new words out...