SENTENCE: Karl per dium
WHERE: Post-It note shown to me by a confused Korean colleague.
CORRECTION: Carpe diem.
CRITIQUE: I don’t normally do Latin, but this sentence was just too funny to pass up.
[the interregnum]
The Interregnum was a dark time. How dark? Your help is needed in figuring that out.
The Interregnum: Its Multiple Causes, Various Personages, and Glorious End is an important scholarly website devoted to the true history of the Interregnum, and it sorely needs people who are willing to make that history up.
[happy diwali]
DEEPAVALI DEEPAVALI (MP3)
Balasaraswati
Old Telugu Songs
THE DIWALI SONG (MP3)
Steve Carell and Rainn Wilson
Nirali Magazine
Tonight begins the festival of Diwali (or Deepavali, or Tihar), the South Asian festival of lights. This seems like a perfectly good excuse for digging up a few Indian songs from various corners of the web. I don’t know much about any of these songs, but here goes.
“Diwali Di Rat Deevay,” by Bhai Kanwarpal Singh, is part of Gurmat Sangeet Project, “a grass-roots level effort dedicated to the preservation and propagation of the Gurmat Sangeet tradition, which can be traced all the way back to Sri Guru Nanak Dev Ji, the founder of the Sikh religion.”
“Deepavali Nee” is on a website called TamilBeat.com and seems pretty contemporary, but I couldn’t find anything beyond that. Info is welcome.
“Deepavali Deepavali” is a mournful song, which seems odd for the holiday, but it’s part of a movie and presumably has something to do with the plot. Sung by Balasaraswati, a famous South Indian dancer (or at least I think it’s the same Balasaraswati; for all I know, finding Balasaraswatis in Hyderabad is like finding guys named Anthony in Brooklyn).
And finally, we come to The Office and its loopy celebration of Diwali. Have a happy, happy, happy, happy Diwali!
[μ (sic)]
I’ve decided to break out my music posts into a new blog, [μ (sic)]. Enjoy.
[the origins of g-funk]
FUNKY WORM (MP3)
Ohio Players
Pleasure
DOUBLE DUTCH BUS (MP3)
Frankie Smith
Children of Tomorrow
Let’s start this off right!
Welcome to my new blog dedicated to music. The Ohio Players’ Pleasure is a good place to start, since pleasure is at the heart of my love of music, and few forms of music give me quite the gut level of pure pleasure that funk does.
“Funky Worm,” from 1972, is narrated by Grandma and tells the story of “the funkiest worm in the world.” Naturally. What makes the song really stand out, though, is the astonishing synthesizer noise that takes off at 0:45, from which the entire edifice of G-funk was built. I only recently discovered this track, but it demonstrates definitively that Dr. Dre owes his whole career to about 10 seconds by the Ohio Players. As Grandma says, “Like nine cans of shaving powder: that’s funky.” A statement like that brooks no argument.
While we’re at it, that whole wacky Snoop Dogg “Izzle” language also has a point of origin: the proto-hip-hop song “Double Dutch Bus” by Frankie Smith, from 1981. The Izzle kicks in at around 1:51.
Enjizzle.
[trod and true]
SENTENCE: It’s Alive! Creature Trods From Grave to the Stage
WHERE: New York Times headline.
CORRECTION: None.
CRITIQUE: This headline, sent in by a reader, has a very odd word in it: trods. Isn’t trod the past tense of tread? Isn’t saying trods the grammatical equivalent of saying walkeds?
Well, yes and no.
It struck me as possible that trod might be not only the past tense of tread, but also an admittedly obscure present-tense verb in its own right. So I looked it up in the OED, and sure enough, it’s in there, though labeled “Obs. or dial.” What does it mean? “(U.S.) To pursue a path.” Returning to the headline above, it would certainly make sense to say Creature Pursues a Path from Grave to Stage.
Even more germane, perhaps, is the most recent usage reference listed in the OED: a 1909 headline from the New York Observer, “Trodding to Self-Support,” about church finances. Not only is trod a word, with a suitable meaning; it also has a pedigree in New York newspaper headlines.
I hope this won’t be the last time a reader sends in a tip. There’s a great deal of awkward English out there just waiting to be parsed, and I can’t possibly find all of it myself. But no cheating: Engrish.com is officially off limits.
[are suburbs the new bohemia?]
The New York Times reported recently on the decline of gay enclaves. Places like San Francisco’s Castro District, New York’s West Village, West Hollywood and Key West are gentrifying. High real estate prices and a changing ethos are transforming these neighborhoods from bastions of wild nightlife to comfortable places to raise kids, and there is attendant hand-wringing over the disappearance of a vibrant culture, along with soul-searching about whether there’s even a reason for gay neighborhoods anymore.
There is a long discussion to be had about the mainstreaming of homosexuality in America, the consequent coming out of a more diverse group of gay men and women, and the ongoing debate over gay assimilationism. But I’d rather talk about hipsters and real estate.
To understand what’s happening to America’s gay neighborhoods, it helps to look at how they were formed. America’s gay community more or less began with the Stonewall riots and their aftermath. Though usually not presented as such, these events were part of the larger 1960s embrace of counterculture and individual freedoms. It’s no accident that both hippies and gays were into free love, drugs, leftist politics and bikers (though the fascination with bikers remains something of a mystery). Like the hippies, the founders of America’s gay communities tended to be white middle-class baby boomers, and they colonized many of the same neighborhoods (the Castro is just blocks from Haight-Ashbury).
The changes in America’s gay enclaves mirror the changes in formerly bohemian neighborhoods that are not specifically associated with gay life: it’s not just the Castro and Greenwich Village that have seen skyrocketing housing prices, but also the East Village, SoHo, the Mission District, SoMa, and pretty much every other patch of once-hip ground in America’s major cities. For the first time in memory, there is no bohemian frontier in Manhattan.
This connects with another recent Times story, this one noting the discovery by bohemian types of Staten Island’s North Shore. I’ve long believed that the best way to tell what’s going to be incredibly fashionable in three to five years is to look for whatever is most egregiously unhip now (which means, among other things, that you should be preparing to grow your hair out and unmothball your flannels) , and it’s hard to think of anything less cool than the suburbs.
But will hipsters who are priced out of the city really start moving to little houses in Jersey and Staten Island? Hard to say at this point, though I will raise the possibility that a generation raised on Facebook and Craigslist may feel less compelled to form hipster neighborhoods than their forbears. What made the suburbs so awful was isolation, and the Internet provides a way to overcome that isolation without spending $1300 a month to live with rats and roaches. And there is much ironic fun to be had in a lifestyle that embraces garden gnomes.
I now live in a perfectly nice neighborhood that has yet to be discovered by hipsters. Down in Bay Ridge, we have trees, houses, lower rents and safer streets than in Bushwick, and I can still get on the subway and go to Manhattan. Am I part of a vanguard, or just out in left field? Time will tell.
[new york reviewed]
This time out, we have a triple-whammy (or quadruple-whammy, depending on how you count) from the New York Review of Books.
SENTENCES: The larger question is about the Democratic Party as a whole. First, whether the campaign of the nominee and the Democratic National Committee and various state and local Democrats around the country can coordinate a response to attacks; second, whether the Democrats have yet grasped the importance of emotional appeals in political combat, a skill many Republicans have mastered.
WHERE: Tomasky, Michael. “Election Fever.” The New York Review of Books 54.17 (November 8, 2007): 22.
CORRECTION: The larger question is about the Democratic Party as a whole: first, whether the campaign of the nominee and the Democratic National Committee and various state and local Democrats around the country can coordinate a response to attacks; second, whether the Democrats have yet grasped the importance of emotional appeals in political combat, a skill many Republicans have mastered.
CRITIQUE: Fragment! Fragment, fragment, fragment! You can’t just put a couple of clauses out there, hang a semicolon between them, and call it a sentence. To me, the original sentence looks like something that got tried several different ways and ended up bungled in the final edit.
Even as a corrected sentence, what I’ve got isn’t exactly a masterpiece of conceptual clarity. “The larger question” about the Democratic party is actually two question, one of which is about various groupings of Democrats rather than the party itself. Next to that doozy of a fragment, though, we’ll let it go.
SENTENCES: A national popular vote would … force candidates to campaign in states they don’t much bother to campaign in now because they’re either firmly red or blue …. The push it really needs is from the large states that are either reliably blue or red.
WHERE: Tomasky, Michael. “Election Fever.” The New York Review of Books 54.17 (November 8, 2007): 23.
CORRECTION: A national popular vote would … force candidates to campaign in those firmly red or blue states they don’t much bother to campaign in now …. The push it really needs is from the large states that are either reliably blue or reliably red.
CRITIQUE: Oh, Mr. Tomasky! What happened here? There are a number of problems, including an ambiguity about whether it’s the states or the candidates who are firmly red or blue. I’m especially struck, though, by the two misplacements of either.
Let’s look at the first example. Either firmly red or blue describes a noun by saying it is in one of two conditions: on the one hand, it might be firmly red, while on the other, it might be blue. Firmly blue is not one of the possibilities.
You’ll note that my correction uses reliably twice. That might look like a redundancy, but we can’t go with reliably blue or red, because that would simply mean that we can rely on the states in question to elect either a Democrat or Republican rather than someone else. (Think of it this way: a traffic light is reliably red, yellow or green.) The only way to be sure the message is clear is to use reliably twice.
SENTENCES: In a world in which more and more people worked for wages, often in large companies, rather than running their own businesses or conducting independent trades, a significant part of the citizenry was plainly unable to protect themselves against losses and hardships resulting from problems in the economy at large for which they bore no individual responsibility.
WHERE: Friedman, Benjamin M. “FDR & the Depression: The Big Debate.” The New York Review of Books 54.17 (November 8, 2007): 26.
CORRECTION: In a world in which more and more people worked for wages, often in large companies, rather than running their own businesses or conducting independent trades, a great many citizens were plainly unable to protect themselves against losses and hardships resulting from problems in the economy at large for which they bore no individual responsibility.
CRITIQUE: So it is not merely Michael Tomasky who’s at a loss in this latest edition of The New York Review. Apparently their copy editor just snoozed through this issue.
Here Benjamin Friedman makes a pair of classic mistakes, but in sort of an unusual way.
It’s quite common for people to get confused about agreement in number (making sure the subject and predicate are either both singular or both plural) when a prepositional phrase gets in the way.
Consider this example: A huge number of people are waiting in the hall. The example is incorrect because the subject of the sentence is number, which is singular, not people, which is plural. The correct way to say it is A huge number of people is waiting in the hall. (And yeah, I know that sounds a little goofy. Idiomatic speech, to sound normal, sometimes has to violate the rules for standard written English. David Foster Wallace has a great essay in Consider the Lobster that touches on this topic.)
Friedman does fine with his subject and predicate — part and was — but then blows it by using the plural pronouns themselves and they. We can see the error clearly if we remove the prepositional phrase, which leaves us with a significant part was unable to protect themselves. And that’s just not right.
In my correction, I take a bit of a gamble and leave out the word significant, replacing it with the more colloquial great many. If the word had been majority or plurality — some word that had specific implications in terms of proportion or quantity — I might have worked harder to keep it in the sentence. Significant, however, in this case merely means noteworthy, which can go without saying because we’re in the process of noting it. It is left to the reader to imagine what might constitute a significant part of the citizenry. Eighty percent? One hundred thousand? Five brothers from Minnesota? The sentence doesn’t say, but we can assume that the idea is many.
[overflow]
SENTENCE: Please do not put any papertowel in toilet
Thank you
Em management.
WHERE: Bathroom of Em’ Thai Kitchen in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn.
CORRECTION: Please do not put paper towels in the toilet.
Thank you,
Em’ Management
Em’ Management
CRITIQUE: This handwritten sign in the bathroom of a too-hip Thai restaurant has a slew of minor grammar, usage and style problems, and I’d like to tackle those first, before we face the real problem.
So let’s get to the quirks:
- Papertowel should obviously be paper towels.
- The word any is unnecessary, particularly when papertowel is made into a plural rather than a collective noun.
- The sentence requires a period.
- The last two lines should probably be turned into a letter-style greeting, and Em management is certainly not a sentence requiring a period.
- Em’ should be consistent about the cute, graphically bold apostrophe that they stick on their name (the bathroom doors are labeled “Em’ily” and “Em’anuel.”)
Good. Fine. No big deal. To the credit of the non-native speaker who penned the message, it comes across clearly despite several small mistakes.
So what’s my big problem with the sign? It’s that the sign is needed in the first place! Is there anyone in the Western world who does not know that paper towels clog up toilets? I mean, I recognize that crazy weird homeless dudes in the bathroom of a Midtown Starbucks do unspeakable things to the plumbing, but that’s not who I usually see patronizing the fashionable ethnic eateries of Smith Street. And even if it were, I don’t think the kind of crazy weird homeless dude who would decide to take a paper sponge-bath in a restaurant that offers calamari tempura is the kind of crazy homeless dude who carefully observes handwritten instructional memoranda.
I’m always a little surprised when an establishment that goes to great trouble over every detail of the decor — the sign above the bathroom sink at Em’ says “Em’ployees must wash hands,” with the “Em'” in the restaurant’s stylish font — plasters up a hand-scrawled plaint about power-towel-bombing the toilet. The obvious explanation is that these signs go up after all the decorating is done — that they’re put up after some idiot plugs up the toilet and floods the bathroom, which means that some idiot is going to every restaurant in New York and doing exactly that.
That idiot should stop it. It’s disgusting. And the signs look lousy.
[mctatorship]
Recently I had a conversation that turned to politics: specifically, we began to wonder exactly how Mayor McCheese achieved his mandate.
Well, now I know. And it’s not pretty.
Based on this commercial — a rare look into the Hermit Kingdom that is McDonaldland — it appears that the McCheese regime went through the motions of an election, sort of the way the old Soviet Union used to do, and with about the same sense of fair play. Mayor McCheese seems to be running unopposed, but even so, the Hamburglar is busily stuffing ballot boxes. And the real power behind the throne, of course, is Ronald McDonald, Father of the Nation, who tells McCheese what to say, counts the ballots and announces the results.
Actually, this bizarre pastiche of banana-republican politics is one of a series of old McDonald’s commercials that are all deeply bizarre and well worth viewing (via Slate).