Stubbe Peter

Hoorah - there's a new shadow puppet show up on the youtube from our old friend Mrs Kristin Jarvis (www.jarvissilhouettes.com), currently working in the puppetry scene in Atlanta, Georgia:

莎拉裴琳準備2012年選總統?(Is Palin gunning for 2012?)

Middle Naming

In my role as professional names consultant, I've done a lot of thinking about the middle name. Some people have many, some people have none. Some are family names, maiden names, or tributes to someone or something. Others are completely irrelevant, unused, or unloved. Many people just use the initials or even make up their own initials (Harrison Ford first went as a Harrison J. Ford to distinguish himself from an earlier film actor, even though he has no middle name.) The point is, the middle name has a strange and mostly useless history. We have no choice over the matter, we're stuck with them, and we mostly don't use them.

I have a proposal for a kind of new 21st century secular tradition - a Middle Naming. The idea is that parents refrain from giving their child a pointless middle name. Now here's the interesting part: the child gets to choose their own middle name as a coming-of-age right-of-passage- - -, sort of like a Catholic confirmation, but it would actually be legally changed to be their real middle name.

As a white American growing up in a middle-class non-religious household, I had no coming-of-age party. No bar mitzvah, no quinceniera, no coming out ball, et cetera. I like the idea of a party when you're going thru adolescence, and what more powerful way to inscribe upon your evolving identity than a new name? Last names come from your ancestors, first names are chosen by your parents, but middle names could be chosen by the person themselves. I think 14-ish is a good age for this too, I feel 16 or 20 would be too late & rife with teenagery / collegey folly. When a person reaches middle school, they will have had years to think about it and change their mind twenty times, but they still have the wisdom of youth and it's slightly before the insanity of young adulthood.

And, like all good coming-of-age parties, it would include awkward Middle School dancing & a complete booze-up for the parents.

Friend-of-the-blog Mrs Eley-Nelson has already responded with some thought:

They still have the wisdom of childhood perhaps, but they are also on the brink of changing entirely who they are. I chose to be confirmed at 14, for example. I would also probably have picked the middle name "Jackie" after my favourite horse riding heroine. I think opportunities for self-determination are already purportedly infinite for the children of white American atheists, for better and for worse. That fact I was assigned a name by people who came before me helps to remind me that those people are there, and that not everything in life is up to me. I find it comforting.

I don't even know who "Anne" is. She is the stranger in my midst whose presence reminds me of a whole prehistory and ancestry I know little about. This is true even though I don't think I was named Anne after anyone.

Personally, my first and middle names are my two grandfathers, neither of whom I knew, so that's good for me - I'm not saying I wish I had had a Middle Naming, and as a child of the 80's I had plenty of "opportunities for self-determination." However, I propose Middle Naming as an idea with some legs if any expectant parents want to consider it.

#Shakespalin folio

While I was warning not to be too hard on Palin for comparing herself to Shakespeare, I didn't realize that twitter was exploring a hatchtag called #Shakespalin, here are some highlights:

But soft, what light from yonder window breaks? It is the East, and I can see Russia from my front porch.
-@freehawk

To suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous liberals, or to quit halfterm, and by opposing, rake in speaking fees
-@normative

Henry VI, part you know, well, all of them.
-@acoyne

I came, I saw, I refudiated.
-@homescribe

Neither a thinker nor a reader be / for thought oft loses both itself and friend / and reading dulls the edge of Fox TV
-@djsamk

"How's all that bein' and not bein' workin' out for ya?"
-@jon_ames

All the perfume in Arabia shall not sweeten this ink-stained, crib-noted hand.
-@spskenski

All the world's a stage, and I can see all of it from my house.
-@paulandstorm

Friends, Real Americans, countrymen, lend me your ears; I come to bury Caesar, not to play "gotcha" journalism
-@paulandstorm

More on Sarah Palin poetry here. My essay on Palin & the English language here.

A big welcome to "Refudiate", Sarah Palin's new word in the English Language!

I was just reading at Mediaite.com about Sarah Palin's invention of the word "refudiate" (which she tweeted yesterday afternoon), and the tweetosphere's subsequent mocking embrace of her malapropism.

This was taken down by her people & a correctly spelled one was quickly put up. "Refudiate" was already a big hit tho, & her response is endearingly both self-deprecating & aggrandizing:

She was mocked for comparing herself to Shakespeare. The headline at Mediaite was "Sarah Palin 'Refudiates' Criticism, Declares Self Shakespeare on Twitter". Okay, that's a masterpiece of a headline, but slightly false advertising, because comparing yourself humorously to a great writer is a different bird than Declaring Self. (Somewhat unrelatedly, John Lennon actually said the Beatles were bigger than Jesus, but he didn't mean he wanted them to be. He was just making an interesting point that resulted in a lot of Beatles burning parties. When he later sang "they're going to crucify me," he actually was Declaring Self, but again with a wink. Luckily, bardophiles aren't generally into book-burning, and have a subtler appreciation of celebrity metaphor, or there'd be a lot of "Going Rogue" bonfires.)

I want to urge the blogosphere to back off from defending Shakespeare against Palin's comparison! She's absolutely right! And she even makes an important point that Americans especially of all English-speaking nations shouldn't forget. In France, there is a committee that makes sure no foreign words creep into their pure tongue. And they ended up with a very silly language! English has always been mostly the opposite, letting itself evolve naturally, and gladly welcoming slang, foreign words, incorrect foreign words, mistakes, malapropisms, portmanteaus, nonsense, & coinages from all corners. I think that this makes English healthier, more chaotic, more fascinating, and more honest about the nature of language than faux [sic] French puritanism. Palin was also dead-on to compare it to "misunderestimate", because a number of Bushisms were lovingly adopted by a world that hated him & are now used widely even in contexts which contain no reference to Bush. (Another word, "strategery ", was invented by Saturday Night Live in 2000 to parody Bushisms, & not only became a real English word, but was adopted by the Bush administration itself; they had an official Department of Strategery. Stephen Colbert's word "truthiness", coined in 2005, is included in the latest American dictionaries.) .

If you want to read a good book which discusses the debate between keeping English a controlled language versus letting English be an organic language, I recommend Simon Winchester's easy read The Professor & the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary. On the losing side of this argument was 18th century Irish author Jonathan Swift, here's an excerpt from his treatise "A Proposal for Correcting, Improving and Ascertaining the English Tongue".

There is another Sett of Men who have contributed very much to the spoiling of the English Tongue; I mean the Poets, from the Time of the Restoration. These Gentlemen, although they could not be insensible how much our Language was already overstocked with Monosyllables; yet, to same Time and Pains, introduced that barbarous Custom of abbreviating Words, to fit them to the Measure of their Verses; and this they have frequently done, so very injudiciously, as to form such harsh unharmonious Sounds, that none but a Northern Ear could endure: They have joined the most obdurate Consonants without one intervening Vowel, only to shorten a Syllable: And their Taste in time became so depraved, that what was a first a Poetical Licence, not to be justified, they made their Choice, alledging, that the Words pronounced at length, sounded faint and languid. This was a Pretence to take up the same Custom in Prose; so that most of the Books we see now a-days, are full of those Manglings and Abbreviations. Instances of this Abuse are innumerable: What does Your Lordship think of the Words, Drudg'd, Disturb'd, Rebuk't, Fledg'd, and a thousand others, every where to be met in Prose as well as Verse? Where, by leaving out a Vowel to save a Syllable, we form so jarring a Sound, and so difficult to utter, that I have often wondred how it could ever obtain.

That is right, under Swift's proposals, we would not or should not be allowed to contract or abbreviate words, lest English be difficult to utter. It cannot be! Swift also had grievances about many 'slang' words entering the language, like "banter" & "mob", which he accused of being "invented by some pretty Fellows" & "now struggling for the Vogue." Heaven forfend! Since the beginning of time, every generation has groaned about newfangled words becoming trendy. The word "lengthy", for instance, was once thought to be a horrible American abomination.

I think the archtype for an American nonsense word becoming common in languages around the world, is "okay." The etymology of "okay" is shrouded in academic controversy, probably because some academics have trouble accepting that it could have originated in a dumb joke. To sum it up, incorrect acronyms were popular jokes in New England newspapers in the 1830s, and "O.K." (meaning 'All Correct') came to being during the presidential campaign between Andrew Jackson (who was supposedly a bad speller) and Martin van Buren (who maybe tried to re-define the acronym to stand for his nickname, Old Kinderhook.) According to the wikipedia, "The country-wide publicity surrounding the election appears to have been a critical event in okay's history, widely and suddenly popularizing it across the United States." But there you go, political humor leading to the creation of a word that's now ubiquitous all over the world. It's alternately been attributed to Greek origin, Native American (Choctaw), & African slaves, each of which is a more tidy & rational explanation, but language isn't tidy or rational.

Anyway, the speed with which trendy words or political jokes can become language has increased with the internet, so that Sarah Palin can coin a word on Sunday & I can write an essay defending it on Monday. Welcome to the English language "refudiate", whatever the fuck it means.

(PS, to prove it wasn't a typo, and actually a word that Sarah Palin thought existed, here's the archive video of her actually saying it earlier this year.)

Scribd Illumination: Consideration Song

And now (after several unreadable copies with bad fonts) I present an illuminated digital book for the nonsense poem Consideration Song. The photographs were taken by Miss Minnie Molly Mary at the Belgum Sanitarium in the hills above Richmond, California, and the cover photo was photoshopped by my brother.

Consideration Song

With these scribd books, I recommend F11 to fullscreen your browser, and then fullscreening the scribd document (there's a button). The original text of the poem was published here. My epic 163-pg 2009 illuminated poetry book Prophecy & Doggerel has been up for sale for $2.15 at scribd, after being on the market for twelve months, you can still be the first person to ever buy it!

From the Lewis Carroll Blog:"Happy Snark Day"

From the blog at www.lewiscarroll.org:

_____________________________________________________________________________


Thanks to Mahendra Singh for reminding us that 136 years ago today Lewis Carroll began his composition of The Hunting of the Snark, "and thus, in a semiotic and hypermetaphysical manner, began decomposing the non-existence of The Hunting of the Snark." Read more at his excellent blog.

In celebration of Snark Day, here is the full text the first edition, published by Macmillan and Co. in 1876.



In lieu of a rendition of "Happy Birthday To You," we suggest listening to Billy Connolly as the Bellman in the 1987 April Fool's Day performance of Mike Batt's Snark musical. When the musical was originally released as a concept album in 1986, the part of the Bellman was sung by Cliff Richard, possibly the only time Billy Connolly and Cliff Richard have proved substitutable in popular culture.



Finally, Mr. Singh (an LCSNA member and Knight Letter editor) is publishing his own beautiful Snark illustrations, coming out November 2nd, 2010, from Melville House, and it's already available for pre-order on Amazon.com here. Only $10.08! (Don't be fooled by Amazon's "look inside," it links to another edition.) Previews of many of Singh's illustrations can be seen on his blog, and I've reprinted one below.

A Song from the Wiggly Tendrils: "why can't we get along (mute the vuvuzela)"

The blog band, The Wiggly Tendrils, creates songs upon request for people, based on a questionnaire. Friend-of-the-Blog Miss Enid Darius was inspired by an incredible song created with only a days notice for a birthday of one Ryan Keeley, forever immortalized now in a song called "Someone Stop Ryan Keeley". So we took a stab at the questionnaire, (I've had both jugs & vuvuzelas, both dubious instruments, on the mind recently.)

who is the imagined singer

a disco jug band

who is the intended listener

all the nations of the world

ask three questions

why can't we all get along? (like when the earth was a single continent--gandwanaland/pangea)

Can we mute the vuvuzelas?

what is this strange feeling I have in my body?

describe your song in one word

rickety

The song can also be heard there & the mp3 downloaded here.

mute the vuvuzela

mute the vuvuzela

what's this feeling in my body

probably martians probing blindly

they must see us like pangeas

they don't know we're incompleted

why, why can't we get along, why can't we get along

why, why can't we get along

why, why can't we get along

why, why can't we get along

why can't we get along