Paradise Dogs

February 1, Presidential Losers: John Hancock

2012-02-01T03:02:00.000-08:00

Presidential Loser #1: John Hancock 1788

Technically, the first election for the President of the United States wasn’t much of an election because George Washington ran unopposed, but John Hancock had already lost years before in 1775 when the Continental Congress selected the Commander in Chief for the Continental Army. People must’ve pretty much figured whoever led the army, assuming he didn't get himself killed, would someday probably also lead the country. Hancock, who was already President of the Congress, assumed he would get the nomination. John Adams records in his diary that Hancock had a big smirk on his face when Adams rose to give the nomination. Hancock and the Adams boys were tighter than a button-down shirt on a body builder, or at least they were up to that time. Adams gave his speech, building up with glowing praise their nascent country’s leader and when he got to the name, “George Washington,” Hancock looked like he’d just found a dead cat in his lap. Ever after that, Hancock’s star was pretty much on the decline. He did do the thing with the fancy signature, on July 4, 1776 when he said in front of the other delegates, “King George will be able to read this without his spectacles.” Except he never said that. He did sign on July 4, but that was just on the copy they sent off to the printers. He didn’t get around to putting on his fancy signature until August.
In 1788 not hoping to be president, Hancock allowed his name to be put forth for Vice President. He got a measly four electoral votes, none of them even from his own state of Massachusetts. Those had gone to John Adams, the man who’d done him dirty back in ’75.

The Result

George Washington: 69

John Hancock: 4

STOOPID CONTEST January 31

2012-01-31T02:16:00.000-08:00

Can you guess the classic Sci-Fi movie represented by the cartoon below. Send your guess, along with your name and address, to manmartin@manmartin.net One entry, chosen at random from the correct answers will receive an autographed copy of the award-winning Days of the Endless Corvette, hand delivered to your hovel or basement apartment by a PAID REPRESENTATIVE OF THE US GOVERNMENT.

"... and this one was removed from Angelina Jolie's left buttock."

The winner of last month's contest was Paul Vincent of Winnipeg, Canada. Paul says the problem with fog is it never comes on a clear day when you can get a good look at it. Paul wins a copy of Paradise Dogs.

Dang it! It's the same thing every time!

Answer: The Unbearable Lightness of Beans.

Echidna January 30

2012-01-30T02:19:00.000-08:00

"And I understand everyone of them has a different father."

Echidna was the daughter of Gaiea and Tartarus. Echidna was half-woman, half-snake, but compared to her offspring, she was Angelina Jolie. You’ve heard the phrase “The Mother of All…” as in “The Mother of All Battles,” “The Mother of All Cheezy-Curls,” well, Echidna was the Mother of All Monsters, and it wasn’t just hyperbole. If you wanted to be a monster in a Greek myth you had to be one of Echidna’s kids or otherwise get turned into a monster by an angry god. ¹ The strange thing was how little family resemblance there was among her children – only two of them, the dragon that guarded the Golden Fleece, and Scylla, even remotely looked like snakes, and none of them were human. One was actually a pig. ² Most of them didn’t amount to much except as sword-fodder for one hero or another, but some of them made themselves useful: for example the eagle who tore out Prometheus’ liver each morning at dawn. Steady work and free meals. Or Cerberus, the watch-dog of Hades – three times the barks with one-third the fleas.

1. Lucky, there were plenty of angry gods around, so it wasn't like a glass ceiling as far as getting to be a monster.

2. The myth calls her a "sow." I guess that's more dignified.

Prometheus January 29

2012-01-29T02:30:00.000-08:00

"God, I hate Mondays."

Prometheus and his brother Epimetheus ¹ had the task of creating all life on earth for which purpose they were given a big bag of gifts to distribute to their creations. When you hear the word gifts, don’t think SmartPhones or gift cards to Outback; these are metaphorical gifts. Epimetheus made a whole bunch of animals really quickly because animals are simple to make, whereas Prometheus, who was making humans, worked very, very slowly because the human body is so elegant and exquisitely crafted. ² Anyway, by the time Prometheus was done, his brother had used up all the gifts on the animals. So Prometheus was like, “You gave the gift of regenerating severed claws to the snow crab – I was going to give that to the humans!” and “You gave all the Trichonympha microbes to the termites! Now how will my people be able to digest cellulose?” So Prometheus sneaks up to Mount Olympus and brings down fire to give to mankind, which is why we are the only creature who can make fire. This led to all sorts of other technological advances. ³ Zeus was way pissed and he said to Prometheus, “I’ll let you off this time, but don’t ever…” Well, Prometheus didn’t listen to the rest off it, but he should have because Zeus really had a terrible temper. So Prometheus pulls one more trick on Zeus. Zeus decides he wants some sacrifices from the people – termites and horseshoe crabs he left alone – so Prometheus makes two piles of meat: one which is bloody and gory, but is actually porterhouse steaks and rib-roasts, and the other, which looks shiny and pretty, but is really the “beef by-products” you read about on dog food labels. Naturally Zeus chooses the pretty but unappetizing pile, so after that, the Greeks sacrificed only the parts of the animal no one wanted to eat anyway. ⁴ When Zeus discovered he’d been given chitterlings when he could have had filet mignon, he was so displeased, he caused Prometheus to be chained to a mountain where every morning an eagle would come and eat out his liver. Since Prometheus was immortal, the liver always grew back, and the next morning the eagle came and ate it again. Prometheus was finally freed by Hercules, but he never got into trouble with Zeus again. A few thousand years of having his guts eaten by a bird had taught him a lesson.

1. Don't you hate it when parents give their kids rhyming names? Like naming two boys Jimmy and Timmy. Why would you do that?

2. It goes without saying this story was written by humans.

3. Some eels can produce electricity, but they never learned to make iPods.

4. They also sacrificed a lot of brussels sprouts and pickled beets.

Medusa January 28

2012-01-28T02:23:00.000-08:00

Medusa was the eldest of the three gorgon sisters, having snakes for hair and a pair of leathery bats' wings on her back. ¹ The myth says that anyone who looked at her would turn into stone, which begs the question: how would anybody know how she looked? Maybe she had snakes for hair, maybe not; maybe she had candy canes or red wigglers; none of the eye-witnesses were talking. We can see why the snakes were frightening but I’m not sure exactly what terror the wings held. Maybe if something’s really ugly, the last thing you want is to have it flying around. Imagine a flying warthog. Anyway, there’s a couple of myths about Medusa’s origin: one is that her parents were a couple of sea-gods, Phorcys and Ceto, but the one I like is that she was once amazingly beautiful. ² She outraged the goddess Athena by doing a horizontal tango with Poseidon outside the temple, so the goddess made her into a monster. After that, Medusa lived with her two sisters Stheno and Euryale, and never seemed to make trouble for anyone until Perseus came and killed her.

1. But she had a terrific personality.

2. Stories where gorgeous people suffer make the rest of us feel better about ourselves.

Orpheus January 27

2012-01-27T03:28:00.000-08:00

Orpheus: Take Li’l Wayne, roll him in Paul McCartney and John Lennon, dip him in Beethoven and Mozart, and sprinkle with Louis Armstrong: that was Orpheus, greatest musician who ever lived. They say when he played, the trees would bend down and rivers would stop to listen. ¹ Orpheus was one of the original Argonauts, which is a pretty impressive thing for a musician to have on his resume, but his big claim to fame had to do with Eurydice, his lover. He and Eurydice were deliriously happy until she was bitten by a snake and died. ² Distraught over her loss, he went into the underworld to retrieve her. He played so movingly, that big fat tears rolled down Persephone’s face – Hades doesn’t seem to have been a music lover – and agreed to send Eurydice back with Orpheus. On One Condition. There’s always One Condition, isn’t there? Just when you think you’ll get your sweetheart back from the dead, here comes One Condition lurking into the room to lob a stinker. Orpheus’ One Condition was he couldn’t look back – Eurydice would follow him back to the land of the living, but he couldn’t take a peak to check until they were safely out. A snap, right? Well, not for Orpheus. Great musician, but no willpower. Just as he was reaching daylight, he stole one quick glance. What he saw was this: Eurydice’s back as she turned around to head back down because he’d blown it. So having lost his lover, not once, but twice, to death, Orpheus did the only thing he could do. He wrote a song about it. Orpheus came to a bad end in Thrace. Some Thracian groupies, learning he was single again, wanted him to party with them, but Orpheus just wanted to sing about Eurydice. "Quit singing about her!" they said. "We like your old stuff!" Finally they figured enough was enough, and they tore him to pieces. ³

^{1. The river part is pretty impressive, but what else has a tree got to do?}

^{2. They always blame a snake, you notice that?}

^{3. Fans!}

Persephone and Demeter January 26

2012-01-26T02:39:00.000-08:00

Persephone and Demeter

"Can't we ever watch anything besides golf?"

So anyhow, one day the goddess of Nature, Demeter (rhymes with trimeter) and her daughter Persephone (rhymes with telephony) are out walking around, and who should pop out of the ground, but Hades (rhymes with Slim Shady’s). Hades grabs Persephone and takes her down to… well… Hades. The god and the place are sort of the same thing, like with Trump Towers. Demeter was pretty flummoxed, I can tell you. Zeus was pulling stunts like this all the time, so you would have expected it from Zeus, but Hades usually kept to himself, so this was something new. But Hades had an impulsive side people didn’t know about. His motto was, “What the hell?” So Demeter starts grieving over her lost daughter, and nature begins to die: leaves fall from the trees, the birds stop singing, pigeons won’t eat popcorn, the works. The other gods are pretty upset about this, because if everyone dies, it’s like, who’s going to worship us? So they sent down the messenger god Hermes (rhymes with Burmese) to get her back, which he did, only there was one small thing. While she was down there, Hades offered her something to eat. She was all like, “No, I’m full really,” and he was like, “Just a little something. You’re practically skin and bones.” And she relented and ate six pomegranate seeds. ¹ So for every seed she ate, she has to spend a month with Hades to be his wife, even though there wasn’t any warning on the package or she didn’t sign anything to that effect, and when she’s gone, Demeter goes into mourning all over again, which is why the weather is so crummy in winter. ²

^{1. In the old days it was only five. Someone added two months to the calendar.}
^{2. We still don't have an explanation for August.}

Perseus, the Final Chapter January 25

2012-01-25T02:15:00.000-08:00

Perseus returns with Andromeda back to the island where King Polydectes was hoping to ravish Perseus’ mother. (Remember that part?) Well, Perseus had been gone a pretty long stretch by now, but Danae had managed to put off ravishment, but just barely. It was a near thing, I can tell you; another week or two, and I couldn’t have answered for the outcome. So Perseus whips out Medusa’s head, which he fortunately had in his trusty sack, and turns Polydectes into stone. So finally Perseus returns to the kingdom of Argos where his grandfather, King Acrisis lived. Now another thing you need to recall – and if there’s one thing you need to read mythology it's a good memory, that and nothing else better to do – is that Acrisis had dumped Perseus and his mother in the Mediterranean in the first place owing to a prophecy that Perseus would grow up and kill him. So Acrisis lights out, leaving the whole joint to Perseus to do as he likes. Well. Everything goes along ducky, until one day Perseus was playing a game of quoits which is pretty much like horseshoes, except instead of a horseshoe you use a quoit, and please don’t ask me what a quoit is, because I don’t know. Well, anyway, one of Perseus’ throws goes wide, and there just happens to be an old stranger watching from the sidelines, and the quoit beans him on the head, and it kills him, and guess who the stranger turns out to be? That’s right: Acrisis! Now I’ve never played quoits, but if it’s anything like horseshoes, which my sources say it is, it would take a pretty hard and wild throw to bean a stranger on the sidelines, and even then, I don’t think an ordinary horseshoe could kill you unless it still had the horse attached, but anyway that’s what happened and I don’t see any reason for us to doubt it if we’ve already swallowed the part about Medusa. These days, and I’m not saying he would have served time, Perseus would have at least been investigated for negligent quoit playing or homicide by accidental beaning or something, but in those days the Greeks could find you Innocent by Reason of Prophecy, and that would have been the end of it. And it is the end of it. The End.

Perseus Part Five, Andromeda January 24

2012-01-24T02:55:00.000-08:00

"Now there's something you don't see everyday."

When Perseus was on his way home with Medusa’s head, he passed through Ethiopia, where he saw a beautiful woman chained to the rocks, about to be sacrificed. He really needed to get home to prevent his mother being ravished by King Polydectes, but Perseus probably figured even the slowest ravisher on the planet could have gotten around to it by now, so what was the rush. So he stopped and saved the princess whose name was Andromeda, as you probably guessed. Somewhere around here in the Ray Harryhausen movie is when Zeus bellows, “Release the Kraken!” Only there wasn’t any Kraken, just an ordinary sea-monster, and it wasn’t Zeus who did it, it was Poseidon. Poseidon was angry because Andromeda’s mother Cassiopeia had insulted the Nereids. The Nereids were very sensitive about those things, and Poseidon was very solicitous of their feelings. It would have made more sense perhaps to sacrifice Cassiopeia but Poseidon wanted to teach her a lesson, and if you get sacrificed yourself you don’t learn a lesson, you just get sacrificed. Anyway. Unfortunately, Andromeda already had a fiancé and this just happened to be their wedding day; the guy had shown up in a fancy rented toga and everything, and the caterers had already come in. Phineus, that was the fiancé’s name, had been very understanding about calling off the wedding on account of human sacrifice, but seeing this complete stranger swoop in – literally “swoop,” Perseus was wearing flying sandals – and kill the sea monster and carry of Andromeda was just too much. He started to make a fuss about it, but Perseus popped Medusa’s head out of the bag and gave him a good look at it, which turned him into stone, fixing him pretty good.

Perseus Part 4, Medusa January 23

2012-01-23T02:56:00.000-08:00

Perseus and Medusa

Perseus Sneaking Up On Medusa

So Perseus flies up to the island of the Gorgons and enters the cave where Medusa was sleeping.¹ He knew that looking straight at her would kill him, so he used the reflection in his polished shield to sneak up on her. Perseus sliced off Medusa’s head and put it in the sack he’d been given to prevent accidentally looking at it. ² Out of Medusa’s blood grew the flying horse, Pegasus, which some people find improbable, but I think is a whole lot more likely than being able to sneak up on somebody while looking at their reflection in a polished shield. If you’re looking at someone’s reflection, you have to be facing the opposite way. If you think it’s easy to do this while sneaking up on somebody, try it and let me know. Naturally, Medusa’s two sisters were furious and gave chase, but Perseus put on his helmet of darkness and became invisible and so escaped, which begs the question, why didn't he just have the helmet on the whole time.

1. The myth is not clear if this was at night. Maybe Gorgons just slept a lot. If your expression turned people into stone, you wouldn't get out much.

2. He may have been dissappointed when he got the bag as a gift, but I bet he was sure grateful to have it now.

Perseus Part 3, January 22

2012-01-22T02:21:00.000-08:00

Perseus

"It turns out winged sandals aren't
as practical as you might think."

So now that Perseus had the information from the Graeae, ¹ he headed off for the Hesperides, which was at the end of the world. At the Hesperides, the gods gave him several gifts. From Zeus he got an adamantine sword, from Hermes a pair of winged sandles so he could fly, and from Hades a helmet that made him invisible, and Athena gave him a polished shield. Someone else gave him a sack. I wonder what Perseus’ reaction was when he got the sack. “Hey! It’s a … sack… No, it’s great, really. I needed a sack. Hermes gave me the power of flight and you gave me a sack. Terrific. Thanks loads.” Now with these gifts, he was ready to set off for the isle of the Gorgons. Remember, he’d set off on this adventure at the behest of evil King Polydectes who wanted to ravish Perseus’ mother. If he wanted to get back before that happened, he’d really have to step on it. Fortunately, Polydectes turned out to be an extremely slow ravisher.

1. Or possibly Greaea or Graaeeaa. I can never keep the spelling straight.

Perseus Part 2, The Gray Sisters January 21

2012-01-21T02:45:00.000-08:00

Perseus, Part 2

Having resolved to slay Medusa, Perseus’ next step was to find out just where she was. Since anyone who looked at her turned into stone, this made tracking down eye-witnesses tricky. Also, he needed special weapons with which to kill her, because there aren’t many weapons you can use without looking at someone. The weapons in question were in the Hesperides, which was not a place you could just ask directions to from a passing stranger. He was advised by Athena to ask directions from the Graeae; she could have told him how to get there herself, but she didn’t. Graeae just means “gray,” which was a good name for them because they were gray all over, but no one could explain why their parents had named them Dread, Horror, and Alarm. Why would you give a kid a name like that? They were three crones who lived on an island and shared a single eye and a single tooth and were also Medusa’s sisters. ¹ The Graeae were so old, they could not remember their own childhood, but they knew a lot of other stuff, like how to get to the Hesperides. Anyway, Perseus outsmarted them by stealing their eye. He wouldn’t give it back until they gave him the information, which they did. Even though this was thousands of years before Jeresey Shore, you can’t blame them for betraying their own sister to get back their eye. Without that, the only thing they’d have to fight over would be the tooth.

1. It wasn't a very attractive family.

Perseus January 20, mythology

2012-01-20T02:39:00.000-08:00

Perseus

Acrisius, Perseus’ grandfather, was told by an oracle that his grandson would one day grow up and kill him. At the time Acrisius didn’t have a grandson, so naturally he made up his mind he wasn’t going to get one either. He locked his daughter Danae in a bronze room with a skylight figuring if no one saw her, no one could get to her. The skylight was where he miscalculated. Zeus came down as a shower of gold and impregnated her. ¹ Now Acrisius was really in a fix. His daughter was pregnant with his future murderer, but since it was the son of a god, Acrisius couldn’t take the obvious step of just killing both of them. Instead he put them in a chest which he threw into the sea, figuring when they died it would be Poseidon’s fault. ² Poseidon, evidently, wasn’t going to take the rap, so the chest floated safely to Seriphos, where they were rescued by a fisherman who took them in. Unfortunately Seriphos was ruled by a lustful king named Polydectes who right off spotted Danae as a MILF. It was hard scoring with Perseus around, so he pretended to have a wedding, and invited everyone on the island, with the understanding that each person would have to bring a gift. Since Perseus had nothing to give – he was being raised by a fisherman, what could he offer – a mackerel? – Polydectes sent him on a quest to bring the head of Medusa.

1. These days a golden shower is something different entirely.

2. This is like blaming a fatal shooting on the bullet.

Bellerophon January 19

2012-01-19T02:24:00.000-08:00

Bellerophon

Bellerophon never gets the attention he deserves as far as I’m concerned, and I don’t know why. Bellerophon had a flying horse named Pegasus, which had sprung fully grown from Medusa’s blood. Some say Bellerophon himself grew from Medusa’s blood, but that’s just silly. He got into a scrape early in his career killing either his brother or else a complete stranger – the myth is vague about this ¹ – and he went to King Proteus (no relation to the sea-god) to be cleansed of his sin. Unfortunately, Proteus' queen took a shine to Bellerophon, and when he rebuffed her, she cried, “Rape.” Bellerophon was completely innocent. ² In punishment for this, Bellerophon had to go off and fight the Amazons. They were women but very tough, and no man had ever been able to vanquish them. But then, no man before Bellerophon had a flying horse, and he dropped rocks on them from the air, which proved very effective. Next, he had to slay the Chimera, a fire-breathing monster which was part lion, part snake, and part goat.³ Bellerophon tipped his sword in lead, which melted in Chimera’s hot breath, and poured down its throat, suffocating it. Bellerophon was so full of himself, he decided to go up to Olympus and live with the gods. Unfortunately Pegasus was stung by a horsefly, and Bellerophon fell all the way to earth and landed in a thorn bush. He’d beaten Amazons and a dragon, but he never got over the thorns.

1. He was dead anyway, so what did it matter?
2. Keep in mind, this was Bellerphon's version.
3. I swear, sometimes it's like they're just making this stuff up.

Sisyphus January 18

2012-01-18T02:27:00.000-08:00

Sisyphus: Sisyphus was the king and founder of Corinth. Greek mythology is full of great heroes like Hercules and Achilles who get into all sorts of scrapes and constantly throw themselves in harm’s way, risking their lives and everyone else’s, whereas great rogues like Sisyphus and Odysseus who are pretty much determined to live forever or die trying. When Hades came to drag him in chains down to the underworld, Sisyphus was all like, “I never saw chains like those before, how do they work?” Hades obligingly put the chains on himself to demonstrate and so Sisyphus threw the god into a chest and shut the lid. ¹ While Hades was in chains no one could die, so a bunch of young men waiting for their inheritance and would-be widows who’d already picked out their next husbands were praying and making sacrifices to Zeus, like “What’s up with this nobody-dying thing?” Angriest of all was Ares the god of war because if you’re having a nice battle but nobody gets killed, I mean, what’s the point? So finally Ares shows up in person and frees Hades and sends Sisyphus to the underworld. But Sisyphus had one more trick up his toga. His funeral instructions to his wife were to throw his naked body into the street. So when Sisyphus arrives in the underworld he’s naked as the day Zeus made him, and Persephone is all like, “Put some clothes on, you’re frightening the children!” When Sisyphus explains what his wife did to his corpse, Persephone sends him back topside to teach her a lesson, giving Sisyphus one more reprieve. Finally Sisyphus ran out of tricks and ended up in Hades for good and all. To punish him for the sin of not just dropping dead and being a good sport about it and of loving life too much, Sisyphus was condemned to roll a rock uphill for eternity. Each time the rock is nearly at the peak, it rolls back down and Sisyphus must begin again. ²

^{1. Hades didn't get out much.}
^{2. That's life.}

Agamemnon January 17, Mythology

2012-01-17T03:14:00.000-08:00

Honey, I'm home! What's for dinner?

Nobody names their kids Agamemnon anymore, and there’s probably a good reason. When the wife of Agamemnon’s brother Menelaus ran off with another man, Agamemnon was even more eager to go to war over it than Menelaus himself. When the winds weren’t favorable, Agamemnon sacrificed his daughter Iphigenia to the goddess Artemis. To get Iphigenia out of the house, Agamemnon told his wife Clytemnestra that Iphigenia was going to marry Achilles. Unfortunately, Clytemnestra happened to run into Achilles and when she mentioned the wedding, Achilles was like, “Wedding, what wedding?” and she caught wise. In later versions of the myth, Iphigenia shows up at the sacrifice, and at the last minute Artemis supplies a deer to take her place, but personally I trust the earlier versions. If Iphigenia had survived the sacrifice, it seems like somebody would have mentioned that right off. Anyhow, Agamemnon got to the war right on schedule, where he made himself as a fierce and unrelenting fighter – unfortunately, he did most of his fighting with his fellow Greeks, especially Achilles. Usually these fights were about women one or the other of them had captured and the other one wanted. First it was Chrysies, then it was Bresies, until finally Agamemnon ended up with Cassandra. Cassandra went around telling everybody about the future and what was going to happen and everything, so nobody wanted her very much, not even Agamemnon, but she was better than nothing. When Agamemnon returned to Mycenae, his wife had a couple of big surprises for him. One surprise was that she’d taken a lover. The other was that she was going to kill Agamemnon. Maybe she could have put up with Agamemnon going off to fight a war for nine years, and maybe even bringing home a talky female slave to do the hibbidy-bibbidy with, and maybe even sacrificing their daughter to Artemis – it was doing all three that was hard to swallow. Anyway, Cassandra avenged Iphigenia’s death by murdering Agamemnon, then it was left to Agamemnon’s son Orestes to avenge his death, and then… but that’s another story.

Jason the Conclusion January 16

2012-01-16T02:28:00.000-08:00

In the end, Jason never did amount to much. He seemed to do fine as long as he was defending helpless old men from harpies or helping old ladies across the stream, but when it came to looking after himself, he was worse than useless. He finally found a kingdom that wanted him, Corinth, a real plum. Princess Glauce – or possibly Creusa ¹ - fell in love with him and wanted to marry him. This presented a small difficulty in that Jason was already married to Medea and had a couple of sons. But Jason went ahead with the wedding, even accepting a beautiful bridal gown from Medea as a gift. Now this was beyond stupid. Jason had already witnessed Medea chop her own brother up and toss him into the sea, and knew how she tricked his father into jumping into a pot of boiling water, but he goes ahead and takes a gown from her. If he’d learned one thing, he should've learned don’t cross Medea. Anyhow, Glauce or Creusa puts on the robe and sure enough it seals itself to her skin and then bursts into flames. The entire palace is consumed along with all the wedding guests except for Jason; the magic of the robe spares him because Medea has a little surprise waiting for him at home. When Jason returns, angry as Ricky Ricardo ever was with Lucy, he finds Medea drenched in blood. She’s just killed his two boys and waited all day for him to come home and see. Satisfied with Jason’s reaction, Medea flies off on a chariot pulled by two dragons. ² Jason lives to an unhappy old age, and finally, sleeping in the shadow of the Argo where he had his best days, he is struck and killed by the collapsing prow. ³

^{1. Even Jason couldn't keep her name straight.}

^{2. She always knew how to make an exit.}

^{3. And it served him right.}

Jason, Part Six, Arrival in Iolchus Janurary 15

2012-01-15T04:31:00.000-08:00

When Jason returned home Medea warned him that his wicked uncle Pelias probably hadn’t become any less wicked during Jason’s absence and to leave everything to her. Medea went into the city of Iolchus disguised as a witch. ¹ She brought along with her a cauldron and an old ram. Saying she knew how to make the old young again, she sprinkled magic herbs onto the boiling water and threw in the old ram; instantly out jumped a new lamb. It didn’t take Pelias long to size up the potential of this demonstration; he didn’t know about Viagra, but if he had, he’d have said this beat it all to heck. He said to his daughters, “Go down in the courtyard there and get me some of them magic herbs.” They came back with the herbs and instructions for their use, and once they had a cauldron of water boiling they sprinkled on the herbs and threw in Pelias. Then they were all like, “I don’t know what’s cooking, but it smells yummy.” Turns out the herbs Pelias paid for were just rosemary and oregano or something and not magic herbs at all. So Medea and Jason entered the city in safety BUT when the citizens discovered the trick Medea had pulled on Pelias they didn’t want anything to do with her, so after all Jason had gone through, he didn’t get to be king after all.

1. It didn't take that much disguising.

Jason Part Five, The Golden Fleece January 14

2012-01-14T04:21:00.000-08:00

When Jason arrived in Colchis King Aeetes greeted him and said, “Golden Fleece? Sure, you can have the Golden Fleece, only you gotta do three itsy-bitsy chores.” Naturally, these chores were doozies. Luckily, the Princess Medea – and this is the way it always happens –fell in love with Jason and helped him out. She said "I'll help you get the Golden Fleece, but you gotta marry me." Jason was all like, "Okey-dokey," but secretly he was thinking if something better came along later, he could always dump her. (This was a big mistake.) For Jason’s first task, he had to plow a field with fire-breathing bulls. Trying to plow anything with a bull is a bad idea, especially if it breathes fire. ¹ The flames did not harm Jason because of a special salve Medea had given him, so he lived to perform his second task which was sowing a bagful of dragon’s teeth. This does not sound like such a big deal, except if you know anything about dragon’s teeth, you know if you throw one on the ground, a soldier is bound to spring up. So Jason sowed the dragon’s teeth, and presto! Suddenly there’s an entire battalion armed and ready to kill them. But these soldier were really stupid – you heard the expression “born yesterday,” well, they were born more recently than that, so, following Medea’s advice, Jason threw a stone into the middle of them. The soldiers turned to face it and hacked each other to pieces. Next Jason had to overcome the sleepless dragon that guarded the fleece. Using another potion, Medea put the dragon to sleep. ² Before they set sail, Medea invited her brother Apsyrtus, “Hey, why don’t you come along too.” Medea never invited Apsyrtus anywhere, so naturally he jumped at the chance. When King Aeetes’ ships pursued them, Medea killed Apyrtus and threw his body, one piece at a time, overboard. Aeetes’ ships had to slow down to retrieve the prince’s corpse, giving Medea and Jason time to escape.

1. Plowing a field with a fire-farting bull would be even worse, but Aeetes didn't have one of those.

2. Which seems sort of anti-climactic.

Jason Part 4 The Clashing Rocks, January 13

2012-01-13T02:28:00.000-08:00

"I don't like the looks of this."

Before Jason could reach Iolcus and retrieve the Golden Fleece, he had to navigate the Symplegades, “the clashing rocks,” two huge rocks on either side of a narrow channel that had a way of mashing together and crushing ships. Robert Graves and others suggest that since Jason was sailing to what is now the Black Sea Coast of Georgia (The cold one, not the Peach State) these were actually icebergs. But since this is myth, these are mythological perils and had to be dealt with in a mythological way. No use telling Jason, “No worries captain, these are ordinary icebergs. Just wait for the end of the current ice age, and they’ll melt right up.” He wouldn’t have listened to you. Instead, he followed the advice of Phineas, the starving king he’d saved from the harpies. ¹ He shot an arrow (some say he released a dove, but I think the arrow is cooler) through the rocks. Sure enough they smashed together barely clipping the feathers on the arrow’s tip. Knowing they could make it now, the crew rowed forward with all their might, and the rocks crashed together, but only slightly damaged the stern-most part of the ship. ² After that the rocks never moved again, which is the way it works in myths sometimes: after you answer the Sphinx’s riddle or get through the clashing rocks, the spell is broken. Once is all it takes.

1. And what's the point of saving a man from harpies if you're not going to follow his advice?

2. Which doesn't quite make sense, because a ship is a lot bigger and slower than an arrow, or come to that, a dove.

Jason Part Three, En Route to Colchis, January 12

2012-01-12T02:34:00.000-08:00

The first stop along the way was the Isle of Lemnos, where the women had murdered all their husbands in their sleep and now were desperate for male companionship. ¹ Heracles was against consorting with them, but Jason shrewdly pointed out he didn’t plan to sleep with any of them. Jason may have once been told by a woman, “Not if you were the last man on earth,” and this was his chance. I’m not sure what Atalanta did during this episode. Probably just stayed onboard and sulked. After a time – or a couple of times, anyway – the men sailed past Lemnos to the island of the Doliones. ²There, the men went foraging on Bear Mountain where they met a race of six-armed giants. ³ Jason’s men managed to defeat the giants, but meanwhile Heracles’ little buddy Hylas, who was out gathering wood, drew the attention of some water nymphs who pulled him into a stream. (They only wanted to play with him.) Heracles was distraught and refused to go any further, and so Jason sailed without him to Salymdesus, where they found King Phineas beset by harpies. Each time his servants laid a feast before him, harpies would swoop down and gobble it up. Whatever they couldn’t gobble up, they pooped on. By the time Jason and his men got there, Phineas was so emaciated, he was just about ready to eat harpy poop, but fortunately, among Jason’s crew were the winged sons of the North Wind, and they chased the harpies away for good. ⁴ Phineas begged the Argonauts to stay and enjoy his hospitality, but Jason pointed out that between killing harpies and six-armed giants, and hunting for Hylas, and not sleeping with Lemnians and so forth, they were already between schedule, so they set off once more for towards Colchis and the Golden Fleece.

1. They really should have thought about that before.

2. The Mediterranean is lousy with islands, you can't throw a rock without hitting one.

3. The name Bear Mountain isn't very helpful is it? They should have called it Six-Armed-Giant Mountain.

4. They came in handy after all.

Jason, Part 2 Assembling the Argonauts, January 11

2012-01-11T02:22:00.000-08:00

Q: What's long and hard and full of seamen?
A: The Argo!

After getting the go-ahead from Pelias to go fetch the Golden Fleece, Jason began reading resumes to select a crew. Overall he chose pretty well. Heracles, the son of Zeus, was a no-brainer in more ways than one. Ioalcus, Heracles’ nephew had to be included, because if Heracles wants to bring along a relative you don’t say no. Ditto for Hylas. Hylas was Hercules’ friend. His very special friend. Ahem. If you catch my drift. They had to take along Hylas to keep Hercules happy and because on a long voyage you didn’t want Heracles trying to strike up a special friendship with you. Calais and Zetes being sons of the North Wind had wings growing on their shoulders, which probably made bringing them along seem a better idea than it actually was. The Argonauts were on a boat. You had to bring along Argus, of course since he was the one who built the boat and it was named after him, but they also brought along Argus the son of Phryxius, who was no relation. Maybe Jason got confused. They also had Orpheus who was the world’s greatest lyre-player. A musician, for crying out loud. If you’re heading to the other side of the world and sailing into almost certain death, you don’t bring along Li’l Wayne. Depending on how you count it, there may have been as many as eighty-four Argonauts, which if you ask me is a right smart more Argonauts than you can use. Of course, some of them probably weren’t on the boat and only claiming to be after the fact, like all the people who say they went to Woodstock. Still. It sounds like Jason had a hard time saying no. ¹ He wanted to reject Atalanta on the grounds she was a woman, but by that time he already had Mopsus, who claimed to talk to birds, and Asclepius who brought along a pet snake, so Atalanta was like, “Hey, you brought these weirdos, you gotta bring me.” ²

^{1. The word for "no" in Greece is something like "oh-shee," which really isn't that hard to say.}

^{2. She had a point. Atalanta's particular attribute was how fast a runner she was. This must've come in handy}

Jason: the Early Years January 10, Mythology

2012-01-10T02:21:00.000-08:00

When Jason was little, Chiron made him practice
carrying heavy things across water. He figured it would
come in handy someday.

Jason’s father Aeson was king of Iolcus and had everything a man could want including a jealous little brother who ate his heart out everyday wishing he were king instead of Aeson. Finally Pelias, that was the brother’s name, got tired of eating his heart out and decided to do something about it, overthrowing Aeson and killing the royal family. Lucky for Jason, his mother managed to sneak him away to a distant land to be raised by the Centaur Chiron. ¹ Finally Jason returned to Iolcus, along the way meeting the goddess Hera in the guise of an old woman standing by the riverbank. ² Jason offered to carry her across, and to test his strength, she magically made herself heavier and heavier as they went across, until she was so heavy, Jason’s foot sank in the mud, losing one sandal. Hera was pleased that Jason did not set her down or even suggest she go to step class, so she secretly resolved to help him if she could. Meanwhile Pelias had been warned by an oracle to beware of a man wearing one sandal, ³ and when he saw Jason, he did not think, “Why the heck would anyone go around in just one sandal?” but “uh-oh.” Pelias pretended to be glad to see his nephew but said that to claim the throne, he must retrieve the golden fleece which was in the land of Colchis and was guarded by a fierce dragon. ⁴ Jason, suspecting nothing, readily agreed. ⁵

^{1. Some Centaurs were wise and some weren't. Chiron was one of the wise ones.}

^{2. As guises go, this was a pretty simple one.}

^{3. And he made things pretty hot for all the one-legged men in Iolcus, I can tell you.}

^{4. Aeson/Jason - Colchis/Iolcus? Do all these names sound alike, or is it just me?}

^{5. Pelias probably didn't mention the dragon.}

Zeus January 9, Mythology

2012-01-09T02:27:00.000-08:00

Zeus. Before Zeus was even born, his father Cronus had already swallowed Zeus’ three older siblings. To save him from this fate, his mother Gaeia hid him in a secret cave with a she-goat who nursed him. ¹ To Cronus she gave a large rock to swallow, claiming it was Zeus. ² Zeus grew to manhood or possibly godhood, returning to cut open Cronus’ belly and free his sister and brothers. Gaeia offered to become Zeus’ consort which was the Greek term for "friend with benefits," but Zeus said for a god to lay with his mother was indecent. So instead he married his sister Hera. With his two brothers, he divided up the rest of the universe, giving the sea to Poseidon, the underworld to Hades, and keeping the rest for himself. ³ Once, after making love with Hera, Zeus began complaining of a terrible headache; it was so excruciating, he begged one of the other gods to split his skull open with an ax. When this was done, out popped his daughter Athena, fully grown and wearing a suit of armor. ⁴ Somewhere around this time Zeus began fooling around with other women. Zeus’ MO was to sidle up to a comely lass in the guise of a bull, or thundercloud, or possibly swan. If one guise didn’t work, he’d try another. He didn’t need pick-up lines because he was Zeus. Then the girl would give birth to a hero. One woman gave birth to Hercules, another laid an egg. With Zeus, you never knew what you’d get, and that was part of the fun. Of course, these days we no longer believe God goes around getting women pregnant. We’re Christian.

1. That she-goat has got to be symbolic of something, but I can't imagine what.

2. Did I mention Cronus wasn't the brightest guy on the block?

3. Notice who got all the good stuff.

4. You'd have a headache, too.

Theseus January 8

2012-01-08T02:21:00.000-08:00

Theseus: Theseus was perhaps the greatest hero in Greek mythology. ¹ Theseus was the son of Aethra and King Aegus and Poseidon. Aerthra had slept with her husband and the god in one night, giving Theseus two fathers. ² Aegus returned to rule Athens, abandoning Theseus, but first leaving him a sword and a pair of sandals hidden under a massive stone. ³ Theseus was raised by a wise Centaur and when he reached adulthood, he went to Athens to claim his rights. Theseus had many remarkable adventures on the way to his father’s kingdom, one of which was killing the Crommyonian Sow. ⁴ Theseus did not reveal his true identity at first, and Aegus, suspicious, sent the young hero off to kill the Maranthonian Bull. Only after Theseus returned in triumph, did Aegus look down and say, “Hey! I recognize those shoes! You must be my long-lost son!” Now Theseus embarked on one last venture – to kill the dreaded Cretan Minotaur, the half-man, half-bull offspring of Queen Pasiphae and a sacred bull. ⁵ The Princess Ariadne, half-sister of the Minotaur, fell in love with Theseus and offered to help him. She went to Daedalus, the inventor who had designed the labyrinth to be so labyrinthian that neither the Minotaur or any of his victims could ever escape. ⁶ Daedalus told Theseus to bring along a ball of string when he went in the labyrinth, unwinding it as he went, so he could find his way back. ⁷ Theseus killed the Minotaur and fled with Ariadne, promising to take her as his wife; however, stopping on an island, they encountered the god Dionysius, who fell in love with her and kept her as his own. ⁸ Theseus’ return to Athens was marked by a tragic coincidence; Theseus had set off with black sails raised, promising Aegus he would replace them with white sails should he be victorious. However, in the rush of events – killing a monster and meeting a god, and everything – Theseus forgot to take down the black sails, and when Aegus saw them on the horizon, he threw himself to his death.

Theseus returned to find himself king, but was heartbroken to learn it had been due to this oversight. ⁹

^{1. Or so Theseus claimed.}

^{2. Those Greeks didn't know much biology, did they?}

^{3. Thanks, Dad!}

^{4. For some reason this adventure isn't much publicized. I can't think of why.}

^{5. See footnote 2.}

^{6. Daedalus also built the wooden cow in which Pasiphae hid to copulate with the bull. Daedalus was a multi-faceted guy.}

^{7. Surprising no one had thought of that before, really.}

^{8. Or so Theseus claimed.}

^{9. Or so Theseus claimed.}

Achilles January 7, Mythology

2012-01-07T05:14:00.000-08:00

Achilles: When Achilles was little his mother, Thetis, dipped him into the River Styx to make him immortal. Unfortunately, she held him by the heel, and… well, you get the idea. Towards the end of the Trojan War Achilles got into an argument with Agamemnon. Achilles insisted Agamemnon return the comely maiden Chryseis, whom he’d taken slave, to her father. Agamemnon said okey-doke, but you’ve got to give me Briseis, the comely maiden whom you’ve taken slave in return. ¹ Achilles did not care for this arrangement and went to his tent and pouted. ²Following a surprise attack from the Trojans, it was left to Achilles’ BFF Patrolcus to don Achilles' armor and beat back the Trojans – Patrolcus was killed by Hector, and now Achilles was really mad. Just before Achilles went to avenge Patrolcus, Thetis had a special suit of armor made by Hephaestus to protect him in battle – you’d have thought she’d be satisfied with dipping him in the River Styx, but she wasn’t. Her biggest fear was that Achilles would have to go to battle. She wasn’t thinking clearly: making a man invulnerable and giving him a magic suit of armor is guaranteed to send him into battle. If she wanted him to stay clear of battle, she should have dipped him in a river that made him nearsighted and gave him flat feet and then made him dress in corduroy. ³ In a grand exciting chase scene, Achilles chased Hector three times around the gates of Troy before the goddess Athena got tired of it and tricked Hector into turning around so Achilles could put a spear in him. ⁴ Achilles was finally killed by a lucky – or unlucky, depending on your point of view – shot when Hector’s brother Paris managed to get an arrow into Achilles’ heel. ⁵Oddly, Paris is viewed as a coward whereas Achilles and Hector are praised for their bravery. But Achilles, in spite of being invulnerable, spends most of the Iliad sulking or possibly pouting in his tent, and Hector’s big scene is running away. Go figure.

1. Achean soldiers didn't receive a salary in those days and were paid in comely maidens.

2. Some scholars claim he sulked.

3. She did try cross-dressing him, but that's another story.

4. Actually, it wasn't all that exciting. The Acheans were more excitable than we are.

5. Say! "Achilles Heel," that's where that comes from!

Arachnea January 6, Mythology

2012-01-06T02:52:00.000-08:00

Arachnea: Once upon a time there was a very skilled weaver who made the mistake of believing her own publicity. She got so carried away, she once bragged she was better than the goddess Athena. ¹ Well, Athena shows up and is all like, “Alright then, you think you’re so hot, let’s just have a contest and find out.” And Arachnea is all like, “It was just a figure of speech, it didn’t mean anything.” She wanted to back down, but by that time it’s too late. You might think a god has better things to do than challenge humans to contests, but it was the middle of the week and a light work day. So they have a contest, and guess who wins? Well, duh. Arachnea was just using ordinary silk, but Athena had special thread you can only get on Olympus and you can’t find in stores. So then Athena is like, “Since you love weaving so much, I’ll let you weave forever.” And Athena changes Arachnea into a spider which is where we get the word arachnid, you can check it out in the dictionary, and from that day to this, Arachnea weaves her beautiful silken webs.²

^{1. Stop me if you've heard this one before.}

^{2. The part about eating bugs Athena threw in for free.}

Odyseus January 5, Mythology

2012-01-05T02:51:00.000-08:00

Odysseus: When it came time to fight the Trojans, Odysseus pretended to be crazy so they wouldn’t him go, making him the original draft-dodger. Agamemnon, though, saw right through him. “You can’t stay in here Ithaca hiding from battle,” is what he said to Odysseus, “you have to come to Asia Minor and hide from battle.” And that’s just what he did. He spent the next nine years running from battle. He usually did this by running to the rear of the lines telling stragglers, “Get up there and fight, you cowards!” Then he’d go even further to the rear, looking for more cowards. Odysseus gets the credit for the idea of hiding soldiers in a big wooden horse, but some scholars say the idea for the horse was really Epeius’. Odysseus just came up with the part about hiding. When Odysseus got to leave for home, he proved himself every bit as good a navigator as he had a soldier. It took Odysseus ten years to get home, and during that time he battled monstrous giants, conversed with gods, and became Calypso's boy toy.¹ During this entire time his wife Penelope had been completely faithful to him.² She had fended off suitors for ten years pretending to weave a tapestry in honor of Odysseus, which each night she would un-weave.³ Disguising himself as an old man, Odysseus outwitted and slew the suitors ⁴ and was reunited with his wife and son. If he didn’t live happily ever after, it certainly wasn’t for lack of trying.

1. No one ever seems to comment on the fact that the only eye-witness account of Odysseus' stories was Odysseus himself, and that Odysseus by his own admission was a shameless liar.
2. She said.
3. Suitors were a lot easier to fool in those days.
4. He'd been gone for twenty years, so it took a lot less disguising than you might think.

Heracles January 4, Mythology

2012-01-04T02:58:00.000-08:00

Heracles, more familiar under his Roman name, Hercules, was the son of Zeus and the strongest man on earth. Each culture seems to have its “strongest man on earth” figure; in the biblical tradition, the strongest man on earth was Sampson.¹ Heracles was also famous for his bravery, but he was the strongest man on earth so big deal. Heracles was the son of the god Zeus and Alcmena, the wife of the Tyrinian King, Amphitryon. One thing many people don’t know about Heracles is that he had a twin, Amphityron’s son, Iphicles. This is unusual, but it does happen from time to time, and not just in Greek mythology, either. Not much came of Iphicles; it must have sucked being Heracles’ brother. “Heracles” means “glory of Hera,” which is odd because Hera did everything she could think of to kill him. When he was still a baby, Hera sent two poisonous snakes into Heracles’ cradle, but Heracles easily strangled these. ²When Heracles was still a youth, he showed signs of anger management issues that would plague him all his life; frustrated with his music lesson, he threw a harp at his teacher, Linus, and killed him. ³ Later, returning from a battle, he became enraged and killed his wife and sons believing they were wild animals.⁴ In punishment, he had to perform twelve labors for the King Eurystheus; there were originally supposed to be only ten labors, but the gods adjudicated he’d cheated on two of the early ones, and so they added an additional two. ⁵ Heracles was pretty much invulnerable, but his naïve wife, Deinera, gave him a cloak soaked in Centaur’s blood. She thought it would operate as a love potion, but in reality, it was the blood of Heracles’ mortal enemy Nessus, and when Heracles put it on, the robe fixed itself to his skin and began burning his flesh like acid. ⁶ All Heracles could do was climb onto a funeral pyre and allow himself to be burned alive. He was welcomed by the gods on Mount Olympus, however, and even Hera forgave him.

1. Some people worry who would win in a fight between Heracles and Sampson. These people have way too much free time.

2. Hera’s problem was she was too fancy. She should have just dropped a big rock on him.
3. He wasn’t much of a harpist, but he had good aim.
4. And yet he had no difficulty remarrying. Go figure.
5. Another possibility is Heracles just couldn’t count.
6.Why would anyone fall for this? Everyone knows you don’t use Centaur’s blood in love potions.

Odin January 3, Mythology

2012-01-03T02:18:00.000-08:00

Odin, King of the Norse Gods, was also known as Woten, Wotan, Woden, and Wooten. He and his brothers killed the evil Frost Giant Ymir whose body formed Midgard, or the earth, and whose blood formed the lakes and streams. His brothers, Vili and Ve, never amounted to much after this, but Odin was ambitious. First thing he did was hang himself upside-down for nine days by his own spear; during this period he learned the nine songs of power and eighteen runes. He had some time on his hands. Later, he traded one of his eyes for a single drink from the Well of Wisdom.¹ With his wife Frigg he fathered Baldar, Hod, and Hermod. With another goddess, Jord, he had a son who was Thor. ² Each year, Woden leads the other gods, the Aesir, in battle against the Frost Giants in order to turn back winter; one day however, it is prophesied the Frost Giants will win and the Earth be overcome with ice. ³

1. He could have had a second drink if he'd given his other eye, but by then he was already too wise for that.
2. Frigg was pretty thor too. Ha ha ha. Sorry.

3. So much for Global Warming.

Cronus January 2, Mythology

2012-01-02T02:27:00.000-08:00

Cronus was the son of Gaiea and Uranus¹ He conspired with Gaeia to kill his father, afterwards becoming her consort, which is the Greek way of saying they were “doing it.” Later mythographers said he married Rhea, not Gaeia, but that was just trying to make the gods look better adjusted than they really were. ² Gaiea gave birth to three children by Cronus ³ but Cronus, fearing one of his children would murder him ⁴ swallowed each as soon as it was born. The fourth child, Zeus, she hid, giving Cronus a large rock to swallow instead. Cronus was a god, but he wasn’t very bright. Zeus was raised in secrecy in a mountain on Crete. ⁵ When he reached adulthood, he confronted his father and sliced his belly open with a sickle, which may have symbolized the annual death of the sacred king. ⁶ Out of Cronus’ stomach, fully grown, came Zeus’ siblings, Poseidon, Hades, and Hera. Gaiea offered to become Zeus’ consort as well, but he’d already seen what came of consorting with her, so instead he took his sister Hera as his wife.⁷

1. No jokes, please.

2. It didn’t do much good.

3. I know, ick, but remember, it’s just a myth.

4. And who can blame him?

5. By a she-goat, which somehow seems symbolic of something.

6. On the other hand, it may just be a handy way to kill someone.

7. That marriage didn’t work out so well either.

Oedipus January 1, Mythology

2012-01-01T02:39:00.000-08:00

"Boy, that's a poser alright...
Why did the chicken cross the road?"

Oedipus: Oedipus was born to King Laos and Queen Jocasta in Thebes, which is what the Ancient Greeks called Egypt.1 The Oracle of Delphi told Laos that the baby would grow up to kill his father and marry his mother. Horrified, Laos took measures to prevent this disaster.2 He ordered a shepherd to leave the infant to be left exposed to the elements, but instead the shepherd gave the child to Queen Merope and King Polybus of Corinth.3 When Oedipus achieved adulthood, he went to the Oracle of Delphi, who said that he would murder his father and marry his mother. The Oracle did not mention that Oedipus was really the son of Laos and Jocasta.4 Fleeing this dreadful prophecy, he ended up in Thebes,5 where he met and murdered Laos at a crossroads. Arriving in Thebes, he found the city besieged by a terrible monster, the Sphinx, who asked all travelers the same riddle: "What goes on four legs in the morning, two legs at noon, and three legs in the evening." Correctly guessing the answer was "man" - the four legs representing infancy, two legs adulthood, and the third leg being a cane.6 Oedipus slew the monster and liberated the city, which in gratitude let him marry Jocasta, whose husband had mysteriously gone missing. Older than Oedipus, but still attractive7 Jocasta bore Oedipus four children, Polyneices, Eteocles, Ismene, and Antigone. Eventually Oedipus discovered his crime, and in remorse tore out his eyes.8 He left Thebes, never to return.9

1 They were Greek and didn't know any better.
2 Stop me if you've heard this one.
3 You just couldn't trust shepherds in those days.
4 And yet people trusted the Oracle of Delpi completely. I can't say why.
5 Naturally.
6 Who knows how the riddle would have gone if they'd used walkers.
7 The original MILF
8 It seems like there might have been more relevant parts of his anatomy he could have torn off, but who's to say.
9 He was later taken bodily up to Olympus by the gods. He'd been through a lot and they felt sorry for him.

STOOPID CONTEST - December 31st!

2011-12-31T02:33:00.000-08:00

DECEMBER

STOOPID CONTEST

Dang it! It's the same blame thing every time!
I can't stand it!

Can you guess the name of the Kundera novel and Daniel Day Lewis movie represented by this picture?
Email your guess along with your name and address to manmartin@manmartin.net. The winner, selected at random from the correct entries will receive an autographed copy of Paradise Dogs, selected by Atlanta Magazine as one of the top five novels for 2011! to be delivered directly to your residence by a paid representative of the US Government!

Last Month's Puzzle

"They've been like this all week!"

The answer, "Days of Whinin' Roses," was submitted by Peter Fontaine. Peter points out that time flies like an arrow, but fruit flies like a banana. Peter wins a copy of Scoring Bertram Wiggly.

Non Sequitur December 30, Figures of Speech

2011-12-30T02:13:00.000-08:00

"Welcome to the department of non sequiturs.
Pull up a molar and start treading hay bubbles!"

Non Sequitur: From Latin, literally, "does not follow." This is a figure of speech in which a piano, and by the way, I do mean a piano with breasts. You get the idea. Just good old fashioned nonsense, that's what. It's hard to come up with a decent non sequitur because the blackberry hoppers keep getting stuck in the transmission. And then with the weather like it is. A video of one of the masters of non sequitur, Durwood Fincher, is below. Durwood demonstrates that on the other hand, you have different fingers.

Syllepsis December 29, Figures of Speech

2011-12-29T02:22:00.000-08:00

First he made himself emperor,
then a nice salad.

Syllepsis: A type of pun in which a single word is used with two different senses in the same sentence. "The sky was falling and so were my hopes," "I called her a tramp and myself a taxi." Writers from Alexander Pope - "great Anna! whom three Realms obey, Dost sometimes Counsel take - and sometimes Tea" - to Tim O'Brien - "He carried a strobe light and the responsibility for the lives of his men" have used syllepsis. The master of the syllepsis, of course, was Groucho Marx, who said, "You can leave in a taxi. If you can't get a taxi, you can leave in a huff. If that's too soon, you can leave in a minute and a huff."

Nonaphor December 28, Figures of Speech

2011-12-28T02:25:00.000-08:00

Nonaphor: Don't bother looking this one up on Wikipedia, this blog is the only place you'll find it. Anyone can tell you that a metaphor is a direct comparison between two unlike things without using "like" or "as." A nonaphor is a comparison between one thing and itself. It is the discovery of my good friend, Jamie Iredell. It is not everyone who gets to create their own figure of speech, but Jamie did it. A typical nonaphor might be "the chili tasted like chili," or "the mountains mountained up," achieving a strange sort of lyricism and a ruthless realism. There is also the Extended Nonaphor, which starts of like a regular metaphor or simile, "He was as mighty as the ocean, if the ocean could bench press three hundred pounds and run a mile in seven minutes."
There is no statue to Jamie Iredell, Inventor of the Nonaphor. There ought to be. It ought to be as tall as a statue and made out of solid statue-material.

Kenning December 27, Figures of Speech

2011-12-27T02:25:00.000-08:00

Dang it, Hrothgar! This is no time
for your fancy kennings!

Kenning: A type of metaphor usually made of a compound noun, as in "Whale road," for sea or "battle-dew" for blood. Kenning comes from ken, "to know or understand," and that's exactly what a kenning it, it's an understanding that the sea is to whales as a road is to travelers. Usually associated with Anglo-Saxon poetry, there are plenty of kennings around us today as in "eye candy" and "brain fart."

Parallelism December 26, Figures of Speech

2011-12-26T02:29:00.000-08:00

Let's see... Life, Liberty, and Free Parking... No, no. Life,
liberty, and kittens!... No, that's no good. Life, liberty, and
call now and we'll double your order!... And free shipping...
Dang it! And this handy carrying case! Basketball...
Life, liberty, and a money-back guarantee...

Parallelism is a series of phrases or clauses with similar grammatical structures. Usually we think of parallel phrases coming in threes, like Mamma Bear, Pappa Bear, and Little Bitty Baby Bear. "I came, I saw, I conquered," Caesar said, crossing the Rubicon and demonstrating a handiness with rhetoric. Parallelism is especially effective when combined with auxesis or climax, when the three terms are arranged in ascending order of importance: "Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," for example. You have to be alive to have liberty, and you need liberty to pursue happiness. Locke's original formulation of "life, liberty, and property," flatlines by comparison.

Inverted Syntax December 25, Figures of Speech

2011-12-25T13:03:00.000-08:00

Merry Christmas, Everyone!

Cornsarn it, General! This ain't no time for your
fancy inverted syntax!

Inverted Syntax: This is the reversal of the normal sentence order. Usually it's a good idea to stick to normal subject-verb-compliment order for the sake of clarity if for no other reason. Just try getting a bunch of highschool students to parse out a sentence like Bryant's "To him who in the love of nature holds communion with her visible forms, she speaks a various language." But sometimes Inverted Syntax is just cool. It adds a certain gravitas to an otherwise plain sentence. "In God we trust," is just plain better than "We trust in God." Moreover, Inverted Syntax lets you postpone the meaning of the sentence until the end for greater impact. "The man was bitten by an alligator," has more punch - more "bite" if you will - than "An alligator bit the man." And in the spirit of Christmas, look how beautifully Luke's Inverted Syntax holds us in suspense about the angel's "good tidings" until the very last phrase:

And the angel said unto them, Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people. For unto you is born this day in the city of David, a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord.

Onomatopoeia December 24, Figures of Speech

2011-12-24T02:38:00.000-08:00

Onomatopoeia, which oddly enough sounds nothing like what it means, is a word that imitates a sound. We are familiar with onomatopoeia from the old Batman show with its "biff!" and "bam!" sound effects superimposed over the fight scenes and old Don Martin cartoons which rendered the sound of a steam roller inexorably squooshing someone as "squelllge." Roy Blount Jr points out there's lots of unsuspected onomatopoetic qualities in words all around us. He calls this "sonicky." To give just one example, the word "asphyxiate" requires us to tighten our throats slightly as we pronounce it, simulating asphyxiation.
The catch with onomatopoeia is that even what we would consider fairly unambiguous sounds are capable of a wide variety of interpretations. For example, in America cows moo, while in England, they low. Moo and low are at least somewhat similar, and everyone around the world seems to agree that to make a bee sound, the letter "Z" must be employed. But whereas in America, dogs say "Woof! Woof!" or in extreme cases, "Bow-wow!" (I have never once heard a dog go "bow-wow" but I have it on good authority, they do.), in France they seem to go "ouah, ouah!" To be fair, I can imagine that "oauh, oauh," exclaimed with a certain level of bravura might sound effectively canine, but how are we to account for Russian where evidently they go, "gav gav." I have never been to Russia, but it makes me want to go there, if for no other reason than to hear one of their dogs.

Sophistry December 23, Figures of Speech

2011-12-23T02:18:00.000-08:00

"We didn't lay a hand on it."

Sophistry is a plausible-seeming but misleading argument, often involving telling a partial truth with the intent to deceive. It comes from a Greek work meaning "wise," and the original Sophists were a school of philosophers; however, they were so ridiculed by Socrates that the word came to mean any logician who makes falsehood seem true.
A famous piece of sophistic cross-examination runs thus.

Sam: You're a son of a bitch.
Joe: I am not.
Sam: I can prove it. Isn't it true that you own a dog?
Joe: Yes.
Sam: And furthermore that this dog has puppies?
Joe: Yes.
Sam: Therefore this dog is a mother? And that she belongs to you?
Joe: Yes, yes.
Sam: So therefore, she is a mother that belongs to you? She is your mother?
Joe: Yes - no, wait a minute. That's not right.
Sam: Moreover, the puppies also belong to you, do they not.
Joe: Yes, of course.
Sam: And the puppies are brothers and sisters, correct?
Joe: Right.
Sam: So all those brothers and sisters are yours. They are your brothers and sisters.
Joe: Wait a minute!
Sam: I rest my case.

Ma and Pa Kettle provide another piece of sophistry.

Homeric Simile December 22, Figures of Speech

2011-12-22T02:43:00.000-08:00

So what's the difference between a Homeric Simile and just a plain ol' garden variety simile, anyhow? Well, here's an example of a Homeric Simile.
"As a fisherman, seated, spear in hand, upon some jutting rock throws bait into the water to deceive the poor little fishes, and spears them with the ox`s horn with which his spear is shod, throwing them gasping on to the land as he catches them one by one--even so did Scylla land these panting creatures on her rock and munch them up at the mouth of her den, while they screamed and stretched out their hands to me in their mortal agony."

Homer launches into one of his famous similes

Get the idea? Homeric Similes are lo-o-ong. Any othr poet would just've said Scylla grabbed up those sailors like somebody gigging frogs, but not Homer, oh, no! That wouldn't be good enough for Homer, he's got to go and elaborate on every little detail. (Incidentally, and I don't know if it's just in translation or the original Greek, but Homer refers to the spear as being "shod" with an ox horn. Since spears don't wear shoes, what we have here is a simile so long that it has another metaphor inside it.)
I have noticed that Homer is not the only one to employ Homeric Similes; many a Southern story-teller, so enraptured with the power of his own words he forgets precisely what his point was, will wander off into very specific descriptions of something he only mentioned as a point of comparison in the first place.
I myself (ahem) in my award-winning novel, Days of the Endless Corvette, (on sale through Amazon and a dandy gift for all occasions) employ Homeric Similes as in the following description of Earl, who is unable to rise to his feet following an epic ass-whipping:
Earl let his head drop again and considered his next move.
A gopher turtle tumped on its back flails its legs to its utmost ability and abruptly pauses; its reptile eye assumes a distant thoughtful expression as it works out a turtly puzzle of geometry that would have stumped Archimedes. How do I, positioned as I am, dome-shaped as I am, fulcrum myself in such a way as to turn the world right-side up again? The legs flail afresh, and the turtle neck cranes back and forth, less in expectation of righting himself, than in the hope of gathering more data. Having conducted the experiment, the turtle pauses to weigh the new information and see if it sheds any light on his predicament.
That's how it was with Earl.
No one who read that passage has once, not once, commented on my use of Homeric Simile. Instead, to a person, my agent, editor, everyone, have all asked the same question.

Can't you make it shorter?

Apophasis December 21, Figures of Speech

2011-12-21T02:44:00.000-08:00

Apophasis: When the other figures of speech ask me who I like best, I always say, "I love you all equally in different ways." But the truth is, apophasis has always been my favorite. From Greek apo "deny" and phani "to say," apophasis is when you say something by claiming not to say it. Marc Antony gets off a gorgeous piece of apophasis in Julius Caesar when he tells the mob, "it's good you know not you are Caesar's heirs." Other pieces of apophasis include statements like, "If I've told you once, I've told you a million times, don't exaggerate," or "I'm not talking to you." The titles of the old Underdog cartoon, I believe it was Underdog, it may have been Bullwinkle, were old-fashioned bills pasted onto walls. The last of the bills said, "post no bills."

Aptonym December 20, Figures of Speech

2011-12-20T02:54:00.000-08:00

After a disastrous week as a diner owner,
John Crapper considers going into another line of work

Aptonym: From apt “fitting” + nym, “name” is when the name of a person describes his character or occupation. This has long been used as a literary device. Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress has such appallingly obvious names as, Christian, Evangelist, Vanity, and Pliable. Dickens, too, stoops to more than one aptonym: the Cherybul brothers are cheery and Peddle and Pool are solicitors. Poe uses ironic aptonyms in “The Cask of Amontillado,” Montressor – literally man+tresser, a man who ties up other men, chains up Fortunato – he is far from fortunate - in the deepest recess of a catacomb. Twentieth Century writers did not eschew aptonyms either. Vonnegut’s Billy Pilgrim, who has come unstuck in time, is every bit as much a Pilgrim as Bunyan’s; Faulkner’s Colonel Sartoris has a sartorial air about him; and there is something small and rodenty in Updike’s Rabbit Angstrom. We can’t mistake Tyrone Slothrop or Humbert Humbert as anything but aptonyms even though their meaning is unclear; they are as apt onomatopoetically as Ebeneezer Scrooge or Sherlock Holmes.
The most apt of all aptonyms are purely coincidental: Bernie Madoff, William Wordsworth, Lorena Bobbitt, Thomas Crapper, Francine Prose, Gary Player, Anna Smashnova, and Anthony Weiner.

Circumlocution December 19, Figures of Speech

2011-12-19T02:18:00.000-08:00

Circumlocution: From the Latin circum- "around" and -loquy "speech," literally to talk in circles. Circumlocution is something to be sedulously avoided except by professional humorists, politicians, and husbands who have forgotten anniversaries. It's hard to find good examples of circumlocution because so often what passes is just plain old wordiness. True circumlocution creates a dizzy sensation as if you were following a toy boat in a whirlpool. Schultz' Linus gets off a masterful piece of circumlocution when he tells Charlie Brown, "That's a terrible feeling to have the need of having the feeling of having..."

Tautology December 18, Figures of Speech

2011-12-18T02:29:00.000-08:00

A panel of experts convened to explain
why "UP" is higher than "DOWN"

Tautology: If paradox had a precise antonym, it might be tautology. From the Greek tautos + logos, "to say the same thing." In The Wizard of Oz, when the Scarecrow sings he'd like to know "why the ocean is near the shore," he's uttered a tautology. When Calvin Coolidge opined that unemployment results when large numbers of people are out of work, it was a tautology. This is somewhat different than a redundancy in that instead of mere repetition, a tautology professes to be a kind of logical proof.

Hyperbole December 17, Figures of Speech

2011-12-17T03:09:00.000-08:00

Hyperbole: from the Greek, huperbole, "excess," oddly unrelated to hyperbola, which also from Greek, huperballein, "to throw beyond." A wild exaggeration such as that hoary old chestnut, "I'm so hungry, I could eat a horse." Jack Benny would say that, and after a Benny-esque pause for consideration, admit, "well, a small horse." The lesson with hyperbole is that it's not very effective all by itself but can be if it's combined with another figure of speech, for example, a pun, "Your mother is so big that when she sits around the house, she really sits around the house," or a paradox, "That river was so wide, it only had one bank," or go to excruciatingly accurate detail as Snoopy does, writing, "His love for her was deeper than the Mariana Trench, which is the deepest spot on earth, over 36 thousand feet."

Paradox December 16, Figures of Speech

2011-12-16T03:03:00.000-08:00

One pair of docs examines another

Paradox from the Greek para "beyond" and dox "opinion. A seemingly contradictory or impossible statement. The best paradoxes are not nonsense, but just a twisted presentation of the truth. "It is so late," Lord Capulet tells a party-goer, "that we may call it early by and by." Sometimes paradox is used to highlight a transcendent truth, as in Jesus' claim that we must lose our lives in order to gain them.
One last paradox is this seemingly logical series of statements:
1. Crackers are better than nothing.
2. Ice cream is better than crackers.
3. Nothing is better than ice cream.

Chiasmus December 15, Figures of Speech

2011-12-15T03:12:00.000-08:00

You can take the boy
out of the country,
but you can't take the
country out of the boy.

Chiasmus: Literally a "crossing," is one of those words that's easier to give an example of than to define. An example would be Mae West's, "It's not the men in your life that count, it's the life in your men." The definition is something like a figure of speech in which the order of two terms in the first part is reversed in the second part." See what I mean?

Chiasmus is so fun because it can be put to so many rhetorical uses. It can be stirring as in Kennedy's "ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country," or Frederick Douglass' "you have seen how a man became a slave, now you will see how a slave became a man." It can be defiant and curmudgeonly like Robert Frost's, "Keep off each other and keep each other off." Or plain silly like "I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy."

The last is not only chiasmus, but metathesis, because specific sounds are transposed instead of whole words. Another example of combining chiasmus and metathesis is the answer to this riddle:

Q: "What's the difference between a rooster and a lawyer?"
A: "Well, a rooster clucks defiance, and a lawyer..."

Oxymoron December 14, Figures of Speech

2011-12-14T02:34:00.000-08:00

Organized
Religion

Oxymoron: A paradoxical or self-contradictory phrase, such as "Biggie Smalls," "pretty ugly," "Icy Hot," or "organized religion." Some words are oxymoronic in themselves: preposterous, coming from the roots pre and post, means "before after." Piano forte, the original name for piano, means "soft, strong." Sophomore means "wise-fool' (if you taught them, you'd see why) and oxymoron itself: oxy-, meaning "sharp" or "biting" and moron, meaning "dull."

Ellipsis December 13, Figure of Speech

2011-12-13T02:35:00.000-08:00

Ellipsis from a Greek word meaning "omission" or "falling short" is leaving something out, this is noted in punctuation by three consecutive periods (...) whereas the dash signifies an interruption. But an ellipsis can also be accomplished without the marks. "Nice day," is ellipsis for "Have a nice day," and "Can do," is ellipsis for... Well, you get the idea.
I have more to say on the topic, but in the spirit of ellipsis, I won't.
...

Malapropism December 12, Figures of Speech

2011-12-12T02:28:00.000-08:00

Malapropism, the mistaken substitution of a word for one with a similar sound but different meaning. Mrs. Malaprop (Latin for "not appropriate") was a character in Sheridan's play, The Rivals, who was fond of saying such things as "He's the very pineapple of kindness." Most malapropisms are unintentional, the result of faulty understanding. I once worked under a principal who got on the intercom to warn students against "conjugating in the halls." Norman Lear's Archie Bunker was the Twentieth Century master of malapropism, extolling Shriner's Conventions as a way to "break up the monogamy," and quoting scripture that "thou shalt not bear falsies to thy neighbor."

Anadiplosis December 11, Figures of Speech

2011-12-11T03:36:00.000-08:00

An Anadiplosis discovering it has
trodden on an unwary anapest

Anadiplosis: From the Greek, anidiploun, "to double back," it sounds like the name of one of the larger and stupider dinosaurs, but as anyone can tell you, it's the rhetorical repetition of a word or phrase at the end of one sentence at the beginning of the next. I come across this sort of thing all the time, reading my tenth graders' essays: "This report is about Shakespeare. Shakespeare wrote a play called Julius Caesar." Julius Caesar is about Brutus. Brutus is the one who killed Caesar. Caesar was killed by Brutus and some other people. The other people who killed Caesar were..." And like that.

This isn't anadiplosis, though, because though it's got gobs of repetition, it ain't rhetorical. Rhetorical means the writer's doing it on purpose, for an effect, and not just being lazy. A better example, not much better, is when Yoda says, "Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering. I sense much fear in you." Mostly I'm afraid of running into someone that talks like Yoda. An even better example of anadiplosis, is Whitman's, "When I give, I give myself," or Byron's, "The mountains look on Marathon, and Marathon looks on the sea."

Apostrophe December 10, Figures of Speech

2011-12-10T03:17:00.000-08:00

Apostrophe: Addressing an absent person or inanimate object as if it were present and capable of understanding. Wild Bill famously uses apostrophe in Romeo and Juliet, when Romeo standing under the balcony says, "Arise fair sun and kill the envious moon who is already sick and pale with grief." Romeo isn't talking to the sun, which would be an apostrophe in itself, but to Juliet, who, though he can see her, hasn't spotted him, and evidently doesn't hear him, although he's reeling off yards of iambic pentameter right under her window. Comparing her to the sun is a metaphor, while ascribing emotions to the "envious" moon is personification. (Parenthetically, is it also foreshadowing? Is Romeo unwittingly inviting his own death, that if Juliet is the sun, he must be the moon, since he only comes out at night and he himself is sick and pale and he's "mooning" after her? But I digress.)

If Keats doesn't think this is a bird,
I'd like to know exactly what he
thinks a bird is.

Keats also uses apostrophe in "Ode to a Nightingale," "Hail to thee, blithe spirit, bird thou never wert." (Again, parenthetically, Keats is dead wrong about the nightingale, that it never wert a bird, a bird is exactly what it wert.) The Romantic poets generally were big on apostrophe, always talking to West Winds, dead ladies, and sunsets and stuff. Check it out.
But apostrophe is not limited to Wild Bill and poets who go around talking to nightingales and using words like "wert." You can hear apostrophes made all the time, the man who addresses his insensate car on a cold morning when the battery is weak and the engine is weakly growling and sputtering, "C'mon, c'mon, start!" The commuter who curses at the driver who just cut him off changing lanes. "You %@#!!" Is it apostrophe when people talk to their pets? Usually no, we have a reasonable expectation that Rover understands when we say, "Come!" or "Bad boy!" even if he doesn't respond. Once, however, I overheard a woman rebuking her dog, "No barking? Now what have I said about this?" Now that's apostrophe.

How apostrophe came to be a punctuation symbol, I honestly cannot discover. The comes from a Greek root apostrophos, "to turn away." (Perhaps the punctuation is so named because of its curved, "turning away," shape?) (Parenthetically, an apostrophe does not have to address an absent or insentient being, any "turning away" from the stream of discourse, as in a digression, is also an apostrophe. This includes parenthetic remarks such as this one.)

Synecdoche December, Figures of Speech

2011-12-09T03:13:00.000-08:00

Synecdoche from Greek, sunekdokhe, "to take out." This is the familiar "part for the whole." When the captain bellows, "All hands on deck!" he expects more than the hands to show up. A rancher who has a thousand head of cattle is not just interested in the heads. Some outdated slang, "Nice threads," "Nice wheels," are also forms of synecdoche, as is "giving your hand in marriage." This is a type of metonymy because it is a form of meta-name, calling something not by its own name, but the name of some related aspect. There is a difference between synecdoche and metaphor, however. If you tell someone, "Get your ass over here," that's synecdoche. If you call someone an ass, that's metaphor.
In the old days, teachers used to distinguish a certain type of synecdoche as "the container for the thing contained." "The White House said today..." "He drank the entire cup and then ate the whole bowl." James Thurber reversed this, pointing out sometimes we use the thing contained to signify the container.
Woman to Husband in Grocery Store: "If you don't stop that, I'm going to hit you with the milk."

Metonymy, December Figures of Speech

2011-12-08T02:57:00.000-08:00

Metonymy: "The White House said today..." "The pen is mightier than the sword." "It's all about the Benjamins."
These are forms of metonymy, from the Greek meta- "transfer" and onoma "name." What you do is call something as something else with which it is closely associated. In fact, the examples above are so commonly cited, they might as well be metonymy for metonymy.
A special kind of metonymy is synecdoche, using a part for the whole, which we'll look at tomorrow.

Puns December, Figures of Speech

2011-12-07T03:11:00.000-08:00

Pun. What has four wheels and flies? A garbage truck.
Usually dismissed as the "lowest form of humor," the noble pun has a long and varied heritage. From the Italian puntiglio, a quibble. Keats uses a pun in his "Ode on Melancholy" when he refers to "her peerless eyes." Ah-ha-ha-ha! Keats, you're a knee slapper! And Frost uses a pun in "Mending Wall," when he writes, "Before I built a wall, I'd ask to know/ What I was walling in or walling out,/ And to whom I was like to give offense." Get it? "Offense." "A fence"? Stop it, Frost, you're killing me. There are puns in the Bible as well. The Book of Micah in prophesying destruction of the people uses a pun called paronomasia which plays on the names of cities. These are lost in translation but modern equivalents would be "Gainesville will be lost, Edenton will be eaten, and Ashville will be ashes."
So before you disparage the pun, remember to what use it has been put and at whose hands.
A man was about to be executed for cracking such execrable puns. Just as he was on the scafold and the hangman was about to spring the trap, the king interrupted. "I will pardon you," the king said, "on condition that you never, NEVER, make one of those idiotic puns again." "Well," said the man, the rope still around his neck, "no noose is good noose!"

Synchysis December, Figures of Speech

2011-12-06T03:39:00.000-08:00

Syncysis is the rearrangement of words from their conventional order. This is somewhat similar to metathesis, which is the rearrangement of letters. Poets before the 20th Century used synchysis like hot sauce, sprinkling it on everything. Alexander Pope writes, "Matter too soft a lasting mark to bear." Another form of synchesis is to pile up all the adjectives in one part of the sentence and leave the nouns to another. Green, crunchy, the dragon devoured the knight. Doesn't quite work, does it? In Latin, it wouldn've made perfect sense because the adjectives would have had inflections to tell which went with which, but English, last I checked, wasn't Latin, and when we use Synchisis, it's likely to be a plain old misplaced modifier. Some, however, have become so entrenched in idiom, we don't even realize they are syncysis: He went backwards and forwards. (How can you go backwards until you go forwards.) He was head over heels in love. (Doesn't that mean he'd just be standing up normally?)

Litotes December, Figures of Speech

2011-12-05T03:22:00.000-08:00

Litotes - Expressing a positive by negating a negative, from a Greek word litos, meaning "plain." The beauty of a litotes is its subtlety and nuance; it's not exactly a ringing endorsement to say someone's "not incompetent," or the a meal's "not bad." It can also be a mildly humorous method of understatement. "Nec pluribus impar," "Not unequal to most," was the motto of Louis XIV, whose other sobriquets were Louis the Great, the Sun King, and who also is famed to have said, "L'etat cest moi," "The state, it is I." Because double negatives are creeping into our language as a means of emphasis, litotes are losing their effectiveness and clairity. (An Eighteenth Century grammarian would have taken "You're not going nowhere!" to mean you are going somewhere. Now it just means you're really not going.) James Thurber's playful litotes, "not unmeaningless," takes so many steps to decode, we don't realize for a bit it doesn't mean anything. But that's the idea.

Metathesis, December, Figures of Speech

2011-12-04T13:53:00.000-08:00

Metathesis is the transpotion of sounds in a word, as in the childish pronunciation of Pasketti for Spaghetti, and Homer Simpson's pronounciation of "noo-kyu-lar" for "nuclear." Metathesis has been responsible for a few genuine words in English, "butterfly" from "flutterby," and "sideburns" from "Burnsides," but it rarely rises to the level of a bonafide figure of speech. A rather nice simile, "calm as a clam," benefits from its metathesis, and the Reverend Spooner, (from whom Spoonerism, the transposition of initial consonant sounds) gave us wonderful methatheses such as "half warmed fishes" for "half formed wishes," but mostly metathesis is the provence of mispronunciation and the Freudian slip.

Timesis, December, Figures of Speech

2011-12-03T03:43:00.000-08:00

Tmesis. Hard to pronounce, but so much fun, comes from a Greek word, "to cut," and that's what it is. A word is broken in two, and another word inserted, as in "in-freaking-credible." Another, is the strangely emphatic, "West, by God, Virginia." Shakespeare uses tmesis in Romeo and Juliet, "This is not Romeo, he's some other where," but then, Shakespeare has a rather idiosyncratic sense of word order anyway. In the same play, Juliet calls Romeo, "sweet my lord," instead of "my sweet lord," and the apothecary refuses to sell Romeo the poison he wants, worrying that "Mantua's law is death to any he that utters" it. "Any he?" Don't they teach pronoun cases in apothecary college? Tmesis still abounds today, and one piece of tmesis, has become so familiar, that some people have difficulty reconstructing the orginal single word which spawned "a whole nother."

Hysteron Proteron, December, Figures of Speech

2011-12-02T02:56:00.000-08:00

During December, I'll be blogging about unusual figures of speech.

Hysteron Proteron is one I was trying to recall over Thanksgiving during a conversation with my sister Chris. It comes from two Greek words meaning, "latter before." (An oxymoron similar to preposterous, "before after.") The idea is that the normal sequence of events is reversed, as in this example from The Arte of English Poesie "My dame that bred me up and bare me in her wombe." But frankly, that's a rather watery example, which perhaps explains why Hysteron Proteron, in spite of its cool name, is used so infrequently: it's hard to find occasion to do it, and even harder to do it in a way that seems interesting and not merely careless, as in the typical example you may have heard, "Put on your shoes and socks." Another is the commonly used, "to and fro." Think about it, you don't really go, "to and fro," it's "fro and to." Usually, it just comes out as nonsense, as in this headline from the Huffington Post, "Muammar Gaddafi Killed, Captured In Sirte." However, in expert hands like Woody Allen's, with his almost vaudevillian sense of a punchline it can create a little masterpiece of incoherent fury: "I'm going to kill that magician. I'll dismember him and then I'll sue him." Dante, lacking Allen's stand-up experience, fails to get the laugh, but manages to convey to super-rapidity of an arrow's flight:

“Beatrice gazed upward and I gazed on her;/ And in the time perhaps it takes an arrow/ To strike the bull’s-eye, fly, and leave the bow…” Less certain is the purpose of Shakespeare's line from Antony and Cleopatra, "The Antoniad, the Egyptian admiral, with all their sixty, fly and turn the rudder." Is Antony's retreat meant to be so rapid that he's actually in flight before he thinks to turn rudder, like one of those Warner Brother Cartoons where the Coyote plummets off a cliff, but his head is briefly left behind, his neck stretching to it like a hyper-extended rubberband? Or is just that "turn the rudder and fly," was too iambically uninteresting?

Still taking answers for November 30th Stoopid Contest. New Contest December 31st!

The Alphabet Project

2011-12-01T03:04:00.000-08:00

Z, z: From the Phoenician zayn “ax.” The Greeks bent the handle to create zeta, (Z) and the letter has not changed in pronunciation or appearance since.

Zed: The British word for Z, the only letter Shakespeare ever used as an insult: “Thou whoreson zed, thou unnecessary letter!” (King Lear II, ii)

Zeugma: a pun employing the same word with two different meanings in one sentence: “The patient wasn’t.”

zero: One less than one, from the Arabic sifr, “cipher.” The addition of zero to the set of whole numbers facilitated momentous mathematical achievements in the Arabic world, achievements not possible among Westerners hampered by the inflexible numerical system of the Romans and Greeks. (Aristotle offered as proof of the unique intelligence of mankind, the fact that some people could be taught long division.) As the indisputable practicality of Arabic numerals overcame the prejudice of religious zealotry, a number of Arabic words made their way into Western Europe: algebra, azimuth, zenith.

STOOPID CONTEST

2011-11-30T03:32:00.000-08:00

RETURN OF THE STOOPID CONTEST

Can you guess the Jack Lemmon movie represented by the cartoon below? Send your answer along with your name and address, to mailto:manmartin@manmartin.net The winner, chosen at random from the correct answers, will win a free autographed copy of the award-winning novel, Days of the Endless Corvette. The answer and a new puzzle will be revealed December 31st.

"They've been acting like this all week!"

Y, y November, the Alphabet Project

2011-11-29T02:37:00.000-08:00

Y, y: One of five letters of the alphabet, along with F, U, V, and W, derived from the Phoenician waw “peg,” and the one that most closely resembles its ancestor. In addition to its familiar pronunciations as vowel and consonant, it is also on rare occasions pronounced /th/. Typesetters used Y in place of a defunct Old English letter, the thorn, (Þ) which represented the /th/ sound. The “ye” in kitschy signage such as “Ye Olde Gifte Shoppe,” does not mean “your;” it is prosaically and unromantically pronounced “the.”

yoga: Vulgarly meaning a system of exercise, but more accurately, “discipline.” From the Sanskrit for “union” from yogu, “yoke” or “harness.” The three types of yoga as revealed by Krishna to Arjuna before the battle of Kurukshetra, are Karma Yoga, discipline of action without attachment to results, Jnana Yoga, discipline of understanding what is Real and Unreal, Permanent and Temporary, and Bhakti Yoga, discipline of loving devotion to the Cosmos.

TOMORROW! RETURN OF THE STOOPID CONTEST!

X, x November, the Alphabet Project

2011-11-28T03:02:00.000-08:00

X, x: The origins are in dispute whether the Greeks themselves invented the letter or adapted it from the Semitic samek,“fish.” The confusion over the letter’s origin is compounded by the fact samek looks nothing like a fish, and indeed seems to be adapted from an Egyptian hieroglyph djed, which resembles a pillar or scaffold and represented the backbone of the god Osiris. In Greek, samek lost two of its cross-bars, becoming a simple cross, and fell to its side. In Western Greek, the letter was ksi and pronounced like the English X; Eastern Greek, however, which became the dominant dialect, called the letter khi and pronounced it /kh/. English is the distinct loser by adopting the Western Greek pronunciation. Had we done otherwise, XING would not be a bastard expediency of signage, but a legitimate abbreviation, and the words Christ, cross, and crucify would all begin with a cross.

xenos-: “Stranger,” from which xenophobe, “fear of foreigners.”

WEDNESDAY - RETURN OF THE STOOPID CONTEST!

W, w November, the Alphabet Project

2011-11-27T04:44:00.000-08:00

W, w: Indirectly derived from the Semitic, waw, "peg." Originally as the name suggests, co-joined Us. (V, as a distinct letter did not exist except as a variant of U, which is why the letter is not named “Double-Vee.”) In some typefaces, such as Garamond, we can still see the overlapping tops. Along with Y, W is one of only two letters that is sometimes a vowel, as in a few archaic Welsh-derived words, such as cwm, “a steep hollow.”

wed: From the Old High German, wetti “to pledge,” similar to the Gothic gawadjon, from which also come engage, wage, wager.

word: From the Latin verbus, whence, also verb. Capitalized, it refers to the Bible, “the Word of God,” as well as the Son of God: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was God, and the Word was with God.” (John 1:1) The original Greek, logos, meant not only word,” but “reason” or “purpose.” John seems to have had in mind the Aramaic translation of Isaiah, 45:12 "I, 'by my word,' have made earth and created man upon it."

work: Effort undertaken unwillingly or for pay. (wûrk) The lips squeeze together and then pull apart, expressing a resolute pant, followed by /û/ and /r/ in a straining combination between grunt and growl as if urging some ponderous boulder up a pyramidal slope before concluding with a plosive /k/ as it drops into place amidst a puff of dust. From the Old English worc, werc, and woerc, and thence from the Latin urgere by way of the Germanic, werk, which comes from the Greek, ergon – from whence also energy and erg. Changes wrought by six millennia have almost restored the word to its original Proto Indo-European root, werǵ- as one of the earliest words ever spoken.

Only a few more days until the RETURN OF THE STOOPID CONTEST! November 30th

V, v November, the Alphabet Project

2011-11-26T04:11:00.000-08:00

V, v: The direct descendent of U, with which it was once used interchangeably. Johnson omits V from the first edition of his dictionary, although conceding it “ought to be” considered as a separate letter. The Latin V was pronounced /w/, so that Caesar’s famous boast, “Veni, vidi, vinci,” came out somewhat effeminately as “waynie, weedy, winky.”

Venus: The Roman goddess of love and desire takes her name from the Latin uenus, but even more anciently from the Proto Indo-European, wen- “to desire,” a fertile root, which has grown into venerate “to respect,” wish, winsome “desirable,” venison derived from “to hunt,” venereal, pertaining to sexual desire, and win, to obtain by purposeful desire.

very: Commonly used to mean “to a great extent,” but originally “true,” as in “the very thing.” From the Latin uerus, “true,” whence veracity, “truth,” verdict, “to speak truth,” verify, “to ascertain truth,” and verisimilitude, “true-seeming.”

Coming November 30th, RETURN OF THE STOOPID CONTEST

U, u November, the Alphabet Project

2011-11-21T03:51:00.000-08:00

U, u: Like F, From the Semitic waw, “peg,” but with the bottom stem lopped off altogether. U is the immediate ancestor of letters V and W, which as late at the Seventeenth Century, were not represented by distinct letters, so the word value would have been ualue. Given that in the Middle Ages, J had not yet become a letter a either, juvenile would have been iuuenile.

Uranus: Roman sky god, husband of Gaiea, “earth,” from the Greek ouranos, “heaven,” possibly akin to the Hitite wara, “to burn,” therefore, “giver of light” (?)

Coming November 30th, Return of the Stoopid Contest

T, t November, the Alphabet Project

2011-11-20T02:56:00.000-08:00

Throughout the month of November, I'll be blogging about the alphabet and etymology.

T, t: From the Semitic taw, “mark,” a meta-letter unique in the original so-called Phoenician alphabet in that instead of a monkey or a house or an ox or a throwing stick, it is a mark that represents nothing but a mark.

time: The interval between events. (See space) From the Old English tima, also meaning tide, the sea-faring Anglo-Saxons not differentiating the swell and sink of ocean from the abstraction embodied. From the Greek kairos, and ultimately from the Proto Indo-European di-mon, a compound using the root da-, “cut in pieces.”

tmesis: (tə mē΄ sĭs) A figure of speech in which a syllable or word is inserted into another word, often for dramatic or rhetorical effect, as in “a whole nother” or “in-freaking-credible.” From the Greek tmesis, “cutting” or “cut.” (See time.)

Coming November 30th, Return of the STOOPID CONTEST!

S, s November, The Alphabet Project

2011-11-19T03:27:00.000-08:00

November I'll be blogging about the alphabet and etymology.

S, s: From the Phoenician shin, “tooth,” the original letter looked a good deal more fang-like than its modern incarnation. The Greek sigma resembles shin laid on end, but the earliest form of sigma was a backwards Z. It was from this earlier form that the Etruscans, and later the Romans, derived our current S. S has the distinction of being the only letter to become the name of a US president; the S in Harry S Truman, does not stand for anything; his middle name is only an initial.

spork: An appropriate portmanteau of spoon and fork for an object which itself is a portmanteau. One knows hearing the word for the first time, precisely what it is, and that it will be made of white plastic.

Coming November 30th, Return of the Stoopid Contest!

R, r November, the Alphabet Project

2011-11-18T02:38:00.000-08:00

R, r: From the Canaanite resh “head.” The Greek rho (P) faced the opposite direction. The Romans added a leaning-post under the nose to prevent confusion with P. In the lowercase R, the entire bottom half of the face is amputated.

real: Almost incredibly, this monosyllable is a compound. From the Latin re “thing” and –al “real.” Real is not real by itself. It must be a real thing.

redundant: Needless repetition, as in “bare naked.” It would be as redundant listing redundancies here as listing clichés under the heading cliché would be cliché. From the Latin, redundans, “overflow,” the unda meaning “water in motion, wave,” whence inundation, undulate, surround, and abound, but not under which seems to come ultimately from the Proto Indo-European andher.

Coming November 30th, the RETURN OF THE STOOPID CONTEST

Q, q November the Alphabet Project

2011-11-17T03:07:00.000-08:00

Q, q: From the Semitic qoph, “monkey.” The monkey’s tail curves like a contented cat’s in our uppercase Q, and in the lowercase, hangs as if a lead weight were tied to it.

quack: Onomatopoeia for a duck call, also any irritating noise. A healer who incessantly boasted or quacked about his salves was called a quack-salver, hence quack as a term for a bogus physician.

Coming November 30th, Return of the STOOPID CONTEST!

P, p: November, the Alphabet Project

2011-11-16T03:14:00.000-08:00

P, p: From the Semitic pe “mouth,” a letter than must have been frequently mistaken for the third letter, gimel. The Greeks avoided confusion by changing the shape to bridge-shaped pi. The Romans curved the right leg into a loop, making it an upside-down b.

palinode: A retraction at the end of a written work. From the Greek palin “again” and ode, "song," the Latin recantation is an exact calque. Stesichorus, stricken blind for defaming Helen in one of his poems, recovered his sight after writing a retraction: “There is no truth in that story/ You didn't ride in the well-rowed galleys/ You didn't reach the walls of Troy.” He claimed instead that her mere replica had gone to Troy, while the genuine Helen, faithful to Menelaus, was held incommunicado in Egypt. Later, Courtly Love poets, after pages of heated erotic verse, appended feeble palinodes to jibe with official Roman Catholic morality. C. S. Lewis notes, in the truest of these poems, no retraction is needed. “Life itself provides the palinode.”

phatic communication: Social language stripped of propositional content, coined by Bronislaw Malinowski in The Meaning of Meaning. For example, in the exchange, “How’s it going?” “Great, how’re you?” no actual information is sought or given, both question and response ritualized to meaninglessness. Each culture has its conventional formulae, some very elaborate, made of questions asking nothing, replies meaning nothing, and statements announcing the dazzlingly obvious or stunningly untrue, as in, “Nice day.” So prevalent is phatic communication, that many people, after engaging in a lifetime of nearly nonstop talk – pausing only to chew, swallow, use the bathroom, sleep, go into comas, and die – are buried without ever saying anything.

Coming November 30th, the RETURN OF THE STOOPID CONTEST

O, o November, the Alphabet Project

2011-11-15T03:23:00.000-08:00

O, o: From the Canaanite aiyn “eye,” although in the modern alphabet, it more resembles the open mouth of someone pronouncing the letter. Its simple shape has changed not at all in thousands of years. The Greeks called it mikron, “small.”

onomatopoeia: A word, which, strangely enough, does not sound the least bit like what it means.

orgasm: The kinship to organ is more distant than we are first tempted to believe. Organ derives from the Greek root organo- and ultimately from erg “to work,” and orgasm from orge, “impulse,” and ultimately the Proto-Indo European root –uerg, “to swell.” Partridge notes that the –asm ending, while associated with abstract nouns, seems to connote more vigorous activity than –ism: to wit, orgasm, enthusiasm, spasm. (Origins. Greenwich House, New York: 1983)

oxymoron: A self-contradictory phrase such as “pretty ugly,” the word itself is an oxymoron, derived from the Greek oxus “sharp-witted” and moros, “stupid.” From moros, of course, we also get moron as well as sophomore, another oxymoron, sophos meaning “wisdom,” so that sophomore literally means something like “wise idiot.”

Coming November 31st, the RETURN OF THE STOOPID CONTEST

N, n November, The Alphabet Project

2011-11-14T03:27:00.000-08:00

N, n: From the Canaanite nun “fish.” Between the waterfall, mem, and the fish, nun, leaping up like a lightning-bolt, comes the alphabet’s midpoint, dividing the most common letters, placed within easy reach, from the least common, shoved against the back wall. A typical dictionary devotes a hundred pages on Aardvark to azygous, whereas we can get all the way from xanthate to Zyrian in less than ten.

nonce word: A word coined for a single occasion and never used again. One might reasonably ask if such a thing can even exist. For example, if someone made up the word gulk to mean “I cannot believe what I am hearing,” could this properly be considered a word at all if it were never repeated? And once spoken, if it were printed in a dictionary somewhere as an example of a nonce word, wouldn’t it cease to be one?

Coming November 30th, the RETURN OF THE STOOPID CONTEST

M, m November, The Alphabet Project

2011-11-13T04:20:00.000-08:00

M, m: From the Canaanite mem “water.” Modern M still has the same sharp, steep waves, but rather than cascading, stands planted on two feet, touching the ground with a beak-like middle, so it now more resembles twin mountains than a waterfall.

metathesis: The transposition of sounds in a word, as in the childish pronunciation of “pasketti” for “spaghetti” or the doltish proclivity for saying “noocular” for “nuclear.” Metathesis is responsible for some genuine words in English: butterfly was once more logically known as a flutterby and sideburns take their name from the metathesis of Burnsides, the Civil War general who popularized the style.

move: To change location. From the Latin movere, from whence also motion, motor, demote, promote as well as emotion and motivation. Movement is expressed as the ratio of distance and time, distance being the interval between objects, and time the interval between events: miles per hour, feet per second. We use time to measure movement – see above – and movement to measure time – the gliding of a second hand around a clock face; the march of numbers from square to square across the Cartesian grid of a calendar; the gradual flight of color from wisteria and dogwood, to azalea, to gardenia, to mimosa, crepe myrtle, Rose of Sharon, and lantana, the leaves of hardwoods, and thence to the ground. Without movement, time could not exist.

L, l The Alphabet Project

2011-11-12T02:58:00.000-08:00

L, l: From the Canaanite lamed “ox goad.” A liquid consonant, formed sensuously by pressing the underside of the tongue to the alveolar ridge.

Love: With roots reaching to the Proto Indo-European lewb, love arguably means something different each time it is used. Aristotle believed words have essential meanings, so love is the same whether we say, “I love bacon,” “I love my wife,” or “God is love,” a problematic idea because Aristotle himself had four different words for love: storge, "familial love," eros, "sexual love," philia "love of friends," and agape, "unselfish pure love." Wittgenstein, to the contrary, posits that a word’s disparate meanings are no more than family resemblance. If so, love offers in-laws and multi-removed cousins to perplex the most patient genealogist. Overview of Neurology (Arthur Limongello, MD, MD. Kakos Publishing, New York: 2009) defines love as “the release of endorphins and oxytocin, creating sensations of well-being and promoting emotional bonding.” But the definition seems insufficient. Surely we love even when we release hormones for anger or fear. Does it overstretch Wittgenstein’s familial similarity to say animals with other hormones than ours feel a version of love? Do chickens, who display motherly concern for their chicks, feel storge? Do turtles, companionably sharing a floating log, have a sense of philia? Do they love the sunshine on their backs? Is a chicken closer than a turtle to understanding the essential meaning of love? Are we closer than a chicken? Can God, who, if He exists at all, has no limbic system or hormones whatsoever, love us?

Coming November 31st, the RETURN OF THE STOOPID CONTEST

K, k The Alphabet Project

2011-11-11T03:59:00.000-08:00

K, k: From the Canaanite, kaph “hand,” the original Egyptian hieroglyph having already lost several of its fingers. Since the Canaanite yodh, (I), from which we get I, also means hand, and since J is derived from I, K makes three hands in a row, lined up between the fence of het and the ox-goad of lamed.

kiss: Defined by Freud, with characteristic Viennese suavity, as “the sexual use of the mucous membrane of the lips and mouth.” Directly traceable to the Old Norse, koss, but unmistakably similar to the Proto-Indo-European kus. Ernest Crawley (The Mystic Rose, 1902) claims erotic kissing was unknown in ancient Egypt, a notion easily disproved by an Egyptian tomb inscription by an anonymous poet 2000 years before Christ: “I kissed her open mouth and it made me drunker than wine.” A similar sentiment is expressed in the Song of Solomon, “Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth, for thy love is better than wine.” The comparison to intoxication is apropos; studies show dopamine levels during kissing rival those caused by cocaine.

Coming November 31st, the RETURN OF THE STOOPID CONTEST

J, j: The Alphabet Project

2011-11-10T03:19:00.000-08:00

November 11th, 7:00 PM, come see me at Peerless Books in Alpharetta!

All November I'll be blogging about the alphabet and word origins.

J, j Originally a variant style of I, J did not appear as a letter in its own right until 6th Century Spain where it was pronounced as /h/ as in junto. In England, adoption was spotty and uneven; in his Dictionary of the English Language (1755) Johnson omits both J and V, leaving a twenty-four letter alphabet. Noah Webster’s American Dictionary of the English Language (1828) includes all twenty-six letters, but on the other side of the Atlantic, the twenty-four letter alphabet still had prominent defenders until the middle of the 19th century.

Jehovah: One of the variant pronunciations, along with Yahweh, of the tetragrammaton, (יהוה‎) the ineffable name of God. Perhaps deliberately so, the word’s etymology is as obscure as its pronunciation. Possibly derived from a Western Semitic root meaning “to bring into existence,” but with equal likelihood coming from a Southern Semitic root, “to destroy or bring low.” Some scholars argue it means simply “to be,” an explanation supported by God’s impatient retort when asked his name by Moses, “I AM THAT I AM… Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I AM hath sent me unto you.” (Exodus 3:14)

Jupiter: The greatest Roman god takes his name from the Greek god Zeus and the epithet, “father,” as in “Father of the Gods,” or “Father of Earth.” Zeus + pater → zeupater → Jupiter

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Coming November 30th, the RETURN OF THE STOOPID CONTEST!

I, i: November The Alphabet Project

2011-11-09T03:07:00.000-08:00

November 11th, 7:00 PM, come see me at Peerless Books in Alpharetta!

All November I'll be blogging about the alphabet and word origins.

I, i From the Canaanite yodh, “hand.” The Greeks pared it down to a single stroke, (I) iota, which, being their smallest letter, became a metaphor for anything tiny or insignificant, “not one iota.” The King James Bible translated iota as “jot;” “Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled.” (Matthew 5:18). To this day, jot remains a noun, “a small or insignificant thing” as well as a being a verb, “to write quickly or briefly.” Parenthetically, a tittle refers to a small mark over a letter, such as the dot floating over the lower-case I, introduced during the Middle Ages to prevent confusion with similar-looking letters.

Ignus and lignus: Medieval scholars proposed an ingenious etymology for the Latin words, ignus, “ignite,” and lignus, “wood.” Wood, they supposed, burned easily because it already had fire inside it. Modern etymologists chuckle up their sleeves at this, as they do at the folk etymology that woman means “woe to man.” These naïve guesses lack empirical support, but are meaningful to anyone who believes them. Who can doubt there is evil in the devil?

H, h November, The Alphabet Project

2011-11-08T03:19:00.000-08:00

During November I will be blogging on etymology and the origin of the alphabet

H, h: From the Phonecian Khet “fence,” H’s status has always been marginal. The Greeks knocked off the top and bottom rails, calling it Eta (H) and changing the pronunciation from /k/ to /h/, finally changing it again to our equivalent of long /a/. The Latin alphabet restored the /h/ sound, but not without cavilers. In 500 AD the Latin grammarian Priscian claimed that H was not a true letter, a position was seconded in 1529 by Geoffory Tory, who nevertheless included it in the alphabet. In 1712, Michael Maittaire’s English Grammar attempted once more to strike H from the alphabet; however, by that time H had received the imprimatur from Ben Jonson’s more influential English Grammar (1640) so H was here to stay. The name “aitch” is from the French hache, “hatchet,” the lowercase H resembling an upside-down ax.

handicap: A plausible but mistaken etymology has it that this word derives from disabled beggars waiting “cap-in-hand,” but in reality handicap was a horseracing term hundreds of years before the euphemism for disability. Bettors held money in their caps as an ante while a neutral arbiter determined how much additional weight the superior horse had to carry, hence, a hand-in-cap race.

Hobson-Jobson, Law of: The tendency to corrupt exotic words to conform to familiar patterns. e.g., “oxycotton” for “oxytocin,” “Old-Timer’s” for “Alzheimers,” and “very close veins,” for “varicose veins.” (See hocus-pocus) British Soldiers in India corrupted as “Hobson-Jobson,” the Arabic cry, Ya Hasan! Ya Husayn! "Oh, Hassan! Oh, Husain!"

hocus-pocus: A jocular incantation, too foolish-sounding even for Vegas magicians. A corruption by disdainful Protestants, following the law of Hobson-Jobson, of the Latin formula, hoc est corpus meum, “This is my body,” spoken by Catholic priests at the moment the sacramental bread and wine is believed to transform into the body and blood of Christ.

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Coming November 31, THE RETURN OF THE STOOPID CONTEST!

G, g November, The Alphabet Project

2011-11-07T02:54:00.000-08:00

During the month of November, I'll be blogging about etymology and the origins of the alphabet

G, g: By all that is reasonable and logical, G should derive from the Phoenician Gimel, "throwing stick," pictured left. However, it does not. Rather, it is the only letter in the alphabet attributed to a specific individual. If we are to believe Plutarch, a freedman turned grammar-school teacher, Spurius Carvilius Ruga (parenthetically, the name Spurius means "false" or "illegitimate") created G from the Greek Zeta, (I) which resembles a majuscule I and is pronounced /z/. Latin having no /z/ sound, Spurius reassigned it the hard /g/ of gold and glimmer. (Plutarch also credits Ruga as the first Roman to get a divorce.) In time, the leftward bars were lopped off, giving the letter a bracket look ( [ ). Almost as if under the gravitional influence of C, which did descend from Gimel, G curved into a bow, retaining as a fish-hook bend in its lower half, the bottom bar of the original zeta. The soft /g/ sound of gem and giant did not occur until Late Latin.

God: By definition indefinable, the most that can be said is what God is not. For example, God is not a chipped white mug of Red Zinger Tea. Nor is God a vagrant standing at the access road to 285 with “Will work for food” written on cardboard with a magic marker. Unless God actually is those things, in which case, we’re back where we started. Derived from the Old Norse goth and ultimately from the Proto Indo-European, gheu, “to invoke, or call upon.” Hence, God is “the one prayed to.”

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Coming November 31st, THE RETURN OF THE STOOPID CONTEST!

F, f November, The Alphabet Project

2011-11-06T04:01:00.000-08:00

During November I'll be blogging about etymology and the origins of the alphabet.

F, f: From the Phonecian Waw, “peg.” Originally it seems to have been designed to drive slant-wise into the ground, but the Greeks straightened it up and twisted the top over to resemble our own F. They called the result digamma, but it didn't catch on, and by the time of Socrates the letter had disappeared, but not before being picked up by the Etruscans and passed to the Romans, who changed its sound from /w/ to /f/. A less-altered version of waw, the Greeks called upsilon (U), which became the immediate ancestor of Y. Chopping the stem off yielded U, V, and W.

Factoid: An unlovely neologism from the Latin fact and the Greek suffix –oid, a bastardy compounded by almost universal misuse as “a small fact.” Logically, the word does mean “a fact,” but something that resembles one. An asteroid is not a small star, but something that resembles it, and a humanoid ony resembles a human; it is not a dwarf. Genuine factoids include such generally accepted nonsense as domestic violence’s rising during Super Bowls (it decreases), the Eskimo’s having twenty-four different words for snow (Eskimo per se is not a language, but the Aleut and Inuit have about the same number of words for snow as English.), and during the equinox its being possible to balance an egg on end (It is always possible to balance an egg on end; it merely takes repeated attempts.) Add to the examples of factoid above, the mistaken definition of factoid being “a small fact.”

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Coming November 31st, THE RETURN OF THE STOOPID CONTEST!

E, e November, the Alphabet Project

2011-11-05T10:01:00.000-07:00

During November, I'll be blogging about etymology and the origins of the alphabet.

E, e: From the Phonecian He, an ideogram shaped like a waving flag, meaning “prayer” or possibly “jubilation.” (See hallelujah? Haleil “praise”+ya “Yahweh.”) If the order of the Phoenician alphabet reflects the progress of the Late Stone Age, mankind...

Built Shelter

Domesticated Animals

and Built a Door for the Shelter

Developed Weapons

before anyone got around to being grateful to a higher power.

English: The language this happens to be written in, as well as the name of the people who speak it, from the Old English englisc or anglisc, "of the Angles." It seems unlikely that Angle, as in Anglican, Anglophile, and Anglo-Saxon, would have anything to do with the geometric concept angle, but in fact, it does. Angle comes from Angul, an angular-shaped spit of land, now Swasburg, whence the Angles migrated, the word's meaning taking an abrupt right turn once they arrived in what is now England - "land of the Engles, or Angles."

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Coming November 31st, the RETURN OF THE STOOPID CONTEST!

D, d: November, the Alphabet Project

2011-11-04T02:44:00.000-07:00

November I'll be blogging about the alphabet and etymology

D, d: From the Phoenician Daleth, “door.”

day: The interval between sunrise and set. The d- rises straight up before falling to a squinting -a-, after which –y sinks below the word’s horizon, curving back again toward d-. The Proto Indo-European root for day, déi-no-, is unmistakably kin to the root for god, déyw-o-, that is “shining.” From these two derive, therefore, not only date, dial, and diary, but deity, theology (owing to a consonant shift d > th) and divine.

door: The sideways lid of a room. The ideogram for door itself opens the word (See D), a down-stroke with a knob on one side. We pass the portals of two -o-s before reaching -r, a panel with a latch on the far side closing the word. The Proto Indo-European root, dʰwer, leads back before doors themselves, to the late Paleolithic, evidently a meaning assigned existentially, its creators not knowing what lay behind it.

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Coming November 31st, the RETURN OF THE STOOPID CONTEST!

C, c: November, the Alphabet Project

2011-11-03T04:32:00.000-07:00

November I'll be blogging about the alphabet and etymology.

C, c From the Phoenician Gimel, “sling” or “throwing-stick.” Hence, the three great achievements of the Neolithic, as represented by the first three letters of the alphabet, were domestication of animals, man-made shelter, and warfare.

calque: A word formed by translation from another language. Typically English adopts words wholesale, as in déjà vu, amuck, or kindergarten, but calques especially picturesque or apropos phrases, as in “losing face” from the Chinese diū liǎn, or “scapegoat,” possibly a mistranslation of azazel, a demon of Hebrew mythology, for 'ez ozel, "the goat that escapes.”

cliché: I will forego the whimsical catalogue of clichés a lesser lexicographer would mistakenly think witty and original. French printers called a ready-made phrase cast as a single piece of type a cliché, onomatopoeia for the liquid slap and hiss as a hot letter mold drops into cold water.

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Coming November 30th, the RETURN OF THE STOOPID CONTEST!

B, b: November Alphabet Project

2011-11-02T02:59:00.000-07:00

November 11, Come see me at Peerless Books in Alpharetta

All November I'll be blogging about the alphabet and word origins.

B, b: From the Canaanite Beth, “house,” eg: Bethlehem, “house of bread.” The Greeks inverted the letter, renaming it beta and adding a lower story room in the uppercase: B.

Babel: The legendary site of a biblical tower threatening to reach “unto heaven itself,” until God “confounded the tongues,” of man, creating the profusion of languages we know today. As tempting as it is to imagine otherwise, babble does not descend from this, but from baby and the Germanic suffix –le, connoting small repetitive actions as in wobble, twinkle, and gobble. Babel is derived from Babylon, an ancient city whose cuneiform script was cousin to the Canaanite alphabet, whence all Western alphabets are derived.
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Coming November 30th, the RETURN OF THE STOOPID CONTEST!

A, a: November Alphabet Project

2011-11-01T03:13:00.000-07:00

November 11th, 7:00 PM, come see me at Peerless Books in Alpharetta!

All November I'll be blogging about the alphabet and word origins.

A, a The first letter of the alphabet, from the Canaanite Aleph,“ox.” The Greeks renamed it Alpha and turned the ox’s head so the horns pointed downward. In the lowercase, we see an ox head in profile, a single horn curving over its head like a cricket’s antenna: a.

Alpha and Omega: The first and last letters respectively of the Greek alphabet (A and Ω) Metaphorically, God, ie, the “first and last,” from Revelations (1:8), “’I am the Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the ending,’ saith the Lord.”

Alkahest: A substance sought by Medieval alchemists believed capable of dissolving anything. Why would anyone search for such a thing? What would you keep it in?

Alphabet: The letters of a language arranged in an established order. From alpha+beta, the first two letters of the Greek alphabet.

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Coming November 30th, the RETURN OF THE STOOPID CONTEST!

Grousing About the Core Curriculum

2011-08-07T14:28:00.000-07:00

First of all, let me say I'm an Episcopalean. We Episcopaleans are famous grousers. Grouse, grouse, grouse, go the Episcopaleans. When we adopt a new prayer book, half the congregation grouses because they preferred the old prayer book. The other half grouses because they still preferred the prayer book we had before the old prayer book. Never satisfied, that's us.
So this rant probably comes under the heading of my being a grouse-prone Episcopalean and should be given no further mind, but here goes.
Georgia is joining 47 other states in adopting what is called a Common Core Curriculum. The thrust is to integrate the curriculum so that there aren't such sharp divides between, for example, what's taught in math class and what's taught in social studies. All subject matter is relevant to all other subject matter. Also, the CCC, as it's being called (we teachers love our acronyms!) is to instill more rigor into the curriculum. Rigor is a very popular word in teacher meetings these days, and is fast replacing "paradigm" as the mot du jour.
All of this is good, and actually, I'm 100% behind it, except that I've also noticed that the CCC is going to change the balance between literary, ie fictional, works and informational, that is, nonfictional ones. Boiled down to the small, there's going to be a whole lot more nonfiction read, and a whole lot less fiction.
I have to admit, that as an author, I sense my ox is about to get gored. If the CCC delivers what it promises, we will be raising a generation of students much less apt to read fiction than nonfiction. This is happening in an era when fiction sales are already trounced by nonfiction, when the only people going out of business faster than fiction publishers are bookstores themselves, when even jaded tv producers find it easier and more profitable to spin out one reality show after another than just to do what they've always done before, which is rewrite old episodes of The Honeymooners and rename it King of Queens or Everybody Loves Raymond.
But I'd like to think my objection goes deeper than that. My deeper objection is incohate, unformed, and unsubstantiated, and I'm either too damn lazy or too damn busy to go around substantiating it, so if you want to challenge me on it, I'll back down like the most spineless jellyfish that ever crawlt. But I have the feeling - again, I cannot and will not even attempt to prove this - that while nonfiction is very good at all sorts of things, it is fiction that feeds the soul. Nonfiction may tell us how to program our dvrs - the clock on my VCR was always flashing 11:00, and the thing was obsolete and in a landfill before I ever learned how to change it - but that things like truth, beauty, and the aspiration of the human spirit are the provence of literature. Again, this is not something that I can prove, but is there any evidence youngsters need more nonfiction? I don't know if Gibbon, Darwin, or Freud were tutored under the CCC, but they did okay for themselves in the nonfiction department. Surely most of what Galileo read was Dante and Virgil and most of what nonfiction he did read - ie Ptolemy - might as well have been fiction. Which brings up another point in favor of nonfiction - unlike mathematics, science, and history, fiction doesn't change. Hamlet is Hamlet, but the War of 1812 is, at best, our current understanding of the War of 1812. Maybe instead of Fiction and Nonfiction, we should label them Imagination and Guesswork. At least the field would be tilted a little more in my favor.
But again, I'm probably just an irrational grouse. After all, I am an Episcopalean.

More Chickens

2011-08-01T14:27:00.000-07:00

This weekend Nancy and I picked up three new chickens while we were in Macon, Rhode Island Reds, good layers albeit Yankees. Also, and I won't say this in front of them, they're not as g-o-o-d l-o-o-k-i-n-g as Sorche, my bantam barred roc.
Sorche, also, has not fully integrated with the new birds. She keeps herself to herself. They have not actively mistreated her, but I have the sense they never let poor Sorche join in their chicken games.
All this asid, I'm so happy to have some more chickens. One chicken just does not a flock make. And I'm looking forward to fresh eggs again.
One other thing that's been troubling me:
We've been watching Sex in the City reruns, and I've noticed something. Carrie Bradshaw's supposed to be this hotshot writer with a column in a New York paper, then a job at Vogue, and finally a best-selling book, but the only thing we ever see her actually write are rhetorical questions like, "Are love affairs unfair?" or "If you get pissed on, do you feel pissed off?" and like that.
What's with that?

Me and Steak

2011-07-31T06:20:00.000-07:00

The other night my sweet father-in-law took Nancy and me out for steaks, which reminded me of an incident from my courtship.
When I was dating Nancy, my mother, Mur, would have us over Sunday nights for an elegant dinner and to watch Upstairs Downstairs on Masterpiece Theater. Mur had not turned out gourmet meals on a regular basis up to that time, nevertheless could put on quite a sumptuous spread when she chose. My childhood meal growing up was a hamburger patty, boiled spinach, cottage cheese, and apple sauce. Breakfast was oatmeal, or on special occasions, poached eggs. Another thing Mur liked to make was steak; my maternal grandmother was a Montana girl, so Mur was quite the carnivore and passed on her tastes to me. Steak was to be eaten as rare as you could stand it, salt and pepper only - no steak sauce. Even to mention "ketchup" around a good cut of meat would have been an affront.
But during my courtship, as I say, Mur put one spectacular meal after another on the table. I think Mur had sized Nancy up and decided I would need all the help I could get. The meals and Masterpiece Theater were contrived to convince Nancy that the Martins were high-tone people a gal'd be lucky to marry into. I think the campaign must've been a success because I was pretty impressed myself.
But then one Sunday night we showed up, and Mur met us at the door in her bathrobe. She hadn't been expecting us. Upstairs Downstairs had come to an end, and so, Mur wrongly assumed, had our visits. But Mur was too good a hostess to turn us away. She insisted we come in and let her fix us dinner.
Spinach was dumped from a freezer bag into boiling water. Was there cottage cheese in the refrigerator, and applesauce in the cabinet? Yes! And even cinamon to sprinkle on the applesauce for that extra je ne sais quois! No need to ask if there were steaks in the freezer, there were always steaks in the freezer! Mur threw some coals on the hibachi, soaked them with Gulf Light and as soon as the flames subsided klunked three frozen-solid t-bones on the grill.
That night we feasted as I had feasted in days of old. The cottage cheese was yummy and satisfying, but eat the applesauce first - technically a dessert, but you want it off your plate before the green liquid from the spinach has a chance to seep over and contaminate it. And as for the steaks! Done to a turn, they were! Blackened charred on the outside, with that wonderful lighter-fluid aroma and aftertaste, and raw and pink inside with little crunchy ice crystals at the core. Mur and I fell to the meat like neanderthals; after doing all you can with knife and fork, there is always that tantatilizing little tidbit on a t-bone that can only be gotten at by forcing the right angle of the bone against your face and gnawing. Even little Charley, our dog, growled with happy impatience, waiting for us to finish our bones, reverting to some paleolithic racial memory, when packs of miniature schnauzers followed nomadic cavemen, chewing on caribou scraps thrown from the campfire.
Nancy, when I looked up from my greased fingers, had turned a color indescribable: imagine, perhaps, cottage cheese that has been unwisely left until spinach juice has mixed into it - that would have been her complexion.
But, to Mur's and my relief, she did not dump me on the spot, but ate as much as she could bear - "Are you going to finish that?" I asked, pointing at her steak. She sweetly let me have her share. Mur never subjected Nancy to another authentic Martin family dining experience, but nor did she extend herself to lay out another gourmet meal. If Nancy hadn't left me after that, the damage had been done.
I'd won her.

How the Rest of Us Do It

2011-07-30T07:08:00.000-07:00

If you check this blog periodically, you'll find that once in a while I give away a million-dollar idea, completely free of charge. Here's an idea that's going to make somebody rich beyond the dreams of avarice.
Have you noticed how many men wear baseball caps all the time? This may only be true in the southeast, but I swear there are towns in Tennessee you'd think boys were issued baseball caps at birth and forbidden by law from ever removing them. They wear them inside and out, day and night, rain or shine. (Surely the purpose of a baseball cap is to shade the eyes? Why would you need one after sunset?) So here's my idea: open a clinic that will surgically implant a visor directly into the forehead. Great, huh? Someone's going to make a fortune.
It won't be me, though. I'll be working on my novel.
My current work-in-progress, tentatively titled Bread of Heaven, is about a grammarian who suffers from a mysterious neurological impairment and is also convinced his wife is unfaithful. In my previous draft, which I've been working on well over two years now, he hired a detective who turns out not to be what he'd seemed. Somewhere between Thursday night and Friday morning it occurred to me it wasn't the detective who wasn't what he seemed, it was the neurologist. Did I mention I'd been working on this for two years now? The neurologist and the detective can't both be not what they seem, that would be overdoing things. Out goes the detective.
My previous draft (12c) weighed in at about 301 pages - much of which was scrap, and was destined to be jettisoned anyway. After trimming out all the stuff about the detective - this is only preliminary, I know there's some other parts to take out as well, I'm at 202 pages. So, at an estimate, I've lost a little over eight months' of work, early mornings, most of it, between 530 and 700 AM. I won't say I didn't cuss when I figured this out, and didn't feel like crying a little. Still, what the hell, right? By this time I'd be this much older anyway, whether I'd fiddled away my time writing about a character who didn't make the cut, or spent it productively working on the neurologist. Hell, if I'd started with the neurologist, I might be done by now. *&%$##!
Mark Twain's favorite novel, his third, was Pudd'nhead Wilson. He said he'd gotten the thing finished before he realized it was actually two novels - one a tragedy about Pudd'nhead and one a farce about co-joined twins. He surgically removed all the parts about the twins and produced it separately as a forgettable novella - remembered only because it had once been part of Pudd'nhead Wilson. In his foreward to Pudd'nhead, he explains all this, and says that there is a lot of information on how professionals write novels, but that maybe the reading public would like to know "how the rest of us do it."
I belong to the category of "the rest of us." Pudd'nhead was Twain's third novel; this is my third novel. Maybe it's a kind of a curse or something.
Anyway back to work. *&%$##! Back to work.
I should've gone into surgically implanting baseball caps.

Craving Attention

2011-07-28T03:12:00.000-07:00

Different people write for different reasons. Flannery O'Connor said she wrote because she was good at it, the kind of funny, frank, conversation-stopping comeback she specialized in. But that can't be true, can it? There must've been a time when she wasn't good at it, but was writing anyway, learning to be good at it.
I can't speak for other writers, but I'm pretty sure I took it up because I craved attention.
I wasn't always interested in writing, for the longest time I wanted to be a cartoonist. When I was in middle school, I drew comics about my friends on the debate team. Actually, they weren't properly friends at the time. I was the youngest person on the team, there largely on sufferance of the coach, Ted Carter, because my big sister was on the team. Everyone else was older, sophisticated, wise-cracking and sharp. I covetted their acceptance.
I dreamed up a story line in which the team were super heros, along the lines of the Fantastic Four. I stayed up one night, using a playing card to square off panels on sheets of typing paper, in which I illustrated their adventures. Just wait 'til they see this! They're going to love it, I thought, and sure enough, they were thrilled! They passed them around and laughed and repeated the jokes I'd written and told their friends about it. I wasn't just accepted, I was like a star.
That set a pattern for me. Every time we went on a debate trip, I produced a fresh comic. When I moved to Milledgeville and joined the team there, I did the same. Staying up late, all alone, darkness outside the windows, drawing pictures and writing dialogue - wait 'til they see this! It was the anticipation of people's reaction even more than their actual reaction that began to drive me.
Also while in Milledgeville, I joined the theater group at the behest of my teacher Lee Bowman - ah, what we owe to our teachers, can we ever thank them enough. I loved being on stage and was pretty good at it. I continued acting right through college. But the attention you get performing, while intoxicating, is too strong for a steady diet as far as I'm concerned. I love being on stage, but afterwards my hands are shaking because of the strain. My young friend Carson is soon to debut as a Lost Child in Peter Pan, and I hope he loves it, too. Acting is a real thrill and something no one should miss. But in the long run, it's not for me. Maybe the proportions are wrong - there's too much actual attention and not enough anticipation of it. Everything's all-at-once do-or-die make-or-break. You're on the tightrope the whole time, and while it's a blast feeling their response - and blast is the accurate word: it's like standing in front of an open furnace door - you can't enjoy the prospect of their pleasure. Flannery OConnor, like me, had also been a cartoonist, and I believe acted on the same Georgia College (Georgia Women's College, then) stage that I did. But she gave those things up, even though she must've been good at them, to write - which presumably, she wasn't good at yet. Maybe there wasn't enough wait 'til they see this to savor.
I like this right now. I'm the only one awake in the house. It's dark outside the windows. My second cup of coffee is at my wrist. In a moment, I'll refill it and resume work on The Bread of Heaven, a novel I'm currently on draft 12-c of. But OMG, OMFG, it is really something! Wait 'til you see this! Just wait 'til you see it!

The Great Victorian Moralists

2011-07-27T06:22:00.000-07:00

The funny thing is, when I try to think of Victorian Moralists, I have a hard time doing so. There's Dickens, yes, well, definitely, and then there's... well, Dickens. There's George Eliot, very moral. But then, do moral ladies really go around taking men's names? And the Brontes - forget about it! Have you read Wuthering Heights?
Who else? There must have been scads of them, right?
There's Darwin. He was a Victorian, and he was definitely a model of probity. But do we really consider him a moralist if what he says so scandalizes the public? Freud's another one - he's Viennese, I know, but still the same era. Aren't moralists of the Victorian stripe forbidden from talking about certain topics?
When I think of my favorite Victorian writers - I'm including both sides of the pond here - they don't seem the least bit Victorian. Oscar Wilde who said, "A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, a great deal of it is absolutely fatal." Mark Twain (crossing the pond here) who said, "Honesty is the best policy - when there is money in it." Abrose Bierce (still across the pond) who said, "Calamities are of two kinds: misfortunes to ourselves, and good fortune to others." Saki (back in England) "You can't expect a boy to be vicious till he's been to a good school." Lewis Carroll, "Sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast." W S Gilbert, "No one can have a higher opinion of him than I have - and I think he is a dirty little beast."
Well, you get the idea. Obviously I have a sweet tooth for humorists, but I think the list above is maybe more typical of Victorianism than Dickens. And all of these folks are true moralists: they expose fraudulent public morals in the name of a greater standard. Ditto for Darwin and Freud.
As G B Shaw, that other great Victorian moralist puts it, "My method is to take the utmost trouble to find the right thing to say, and then to say it with the utmost levity." Or - W S Gilbert again, "He who'd make his fellow creature wise must always gild the philosophic pill."

Orlando Home and Leisure

2011-07-26T07:00:00.000-07:00

Nancy Pate, who is as wise as she is no doubt lovely and good, did a very nice write-up of Paradise Dogs for Orlando Home and Leisure.

14 ORLANDO HOME & LEISURE AUGUST 2011

Okra Picks, Nostalgia and

Summer’s Bookish Bounty

am loving summer’s

bounty: blueberries, melons,

peaches, corn, tomatoes –

and okra. Not just to eat but

to read. Let me explain.

Every season, the Southeast

Independent Booksellers Alliance

announces its dozen “Okra

Picks: Good Southern Books

Fresh Off the Vine.’’ Two recent

selections, both with a local flavor, drew me in.

Man Martin’s

Press) shouts “retro’’ with its cover, a neon title

riding in the sky above an aqua car, a roadside

diner and a pink(!) alligator. We’re boarding the

Wayback Machine to Central Florida in the

1960s, B.D. (Before Disney).

“Interstate 4 had come through,’’ Martin

writes early in the book, “but the region still

fairly trembled in anticipation of the next big

thing, the thing that would lift it from being a

largely rural cracker town into something like

modern glory as had happened in Palm Springs

and Miami.’’

His protagonist, Adam Newman, is a homely

real estate agent/dreamer with lots of charm,

great expectations and a talent for reinventing

himself at any given moment. As he gases up

his car at the “Sinclair on Eola,” he ponders

his plan to win back his ex-wife, Evelyn, with

whom he once ran a restaurant that served only

hot dogs. But what of his clingy

young fiancée, Lily?

Complications ensue as Adam

tries to return to the Floridian

Eden of yesteryear. Martin’s allegorically

named characters get

up to all sorts of mischief, and

the resulting comedy of errors

borders on high farce and tomfoolery.

Martin – who grew up

in Florida and now lives in Georgia – has a deft

hand with local color and shows true affection

for his goofy hero. A major plot point, which

includes mysterious land purchases, will come

as no surprise to Central Floridians familiar

with a certain omnipresent mouse.

Paradise Dogs (St. Martin’s
Paradise Dogs
call an “E-ticket,’’ yet it’s still an agreeable ride
back to an orange-blossom-scented past not yet
paved with theme parks.
may not be what old-timers

Faulkner's Unvanquished

2011-07-25T03:11:00.000-07:00

When I was nineteen or twenty I read William Faulkner's The Unvanquished. I did not know Faulkner from Fauntleroy in those days, and wasn't intimidated by his reputation. I was so affected by the story, I rewrote a chapter, switching out word for word, changing it from a Civil War novel into science fiction. Ringo became Ognir. Granny became the Ygrann. You get the idea. It was really unreadable. I called it, "The Unvanquished, novel by William Faulkner, more novel by Man Martin."
Yesterday I finished re-reading it, the novel, not my piece, which has mercifully long since been lost.
Lord, why would anyone read anything else ever?
It really is fearsome to try writing when Faulkner, Percy, and Camus are still on the shelves. You could never top them, can you even hold your own with them?
Reading it a second time, I appreciate how perfectly constructed it is. The first half or so of the novel is an hilarious picaresque about an upright old lady and two boys outwitting Union Soldiers during the Civil War. But there are consequences to be paid for their chicanery, and just after the funniest chapter in the novel - the chapter I tried rewriting, by the way - they begin to pay those consequences. Then, the protagonist has to pay consequences for paying the consequences. By swift gradations, the novel turns from farce to high drama to tragedy.
The book ends with what is quite properly the archetypal ending of Westerns: law comes to the town and replaces the rule of the gunslinger. It is a novel about a boy's coming of age, but also the coming of age of the South.
It is a great book. It pleases me that thirty-odd years ago I was so taken with what a great book it was, I attempted adapting it.

Back to Woik

2011-07-24T03:55:00.000-07:00

If this is late July, my day job is starting again soon.
I'm probably one of the few public school teachers who went into the profession for the money. At the time my comic strip, Sibling Revelry, was folding and I needed steady income, so I went back to school and got my teaching certificate. Teaching is hard work, and had I sales enough, I'd rather spend my time writing, and yet...
Every year, about this time, I begin dreaming of being back at work. Not bad dreams, like the horrible dread of the final exam you were supposed to take that somehow you forgot to show up for, and not particularly good either. Just ordinary work-a-day stuff: planning, instructing, grading. When I have those dreams I realize I'm unconciously looking forward to going back to work.
Teachers bellyache all the time, but the truth is, teaching actually is very fulfilling work. I've even wondered if my wish came true, and the fairy-angel of literary success waved her wand over me, would that be enough? Wouldn't I want to keep teaching, at least part time, to meet this strange desire I have to teach?
Last night, I dreamt about setting up the creative writing class I'll teach this fall, and the way I'll use the internet to give students their outside reading. I woke up this morning with a pleasant sensation, yes, that's just the way I'll do it.
It's time to go back to work.

Working Through It

2011-07-22T03:31:00.000-07:00

The summer, she ain't been an easy one.
Both of our cars decided to give up the ghost. We have bought one car, which is our sole means of transportation.
The swimming pool - I know complaining about having a swimming pool is like griping about caviar being too lumpy - continues to be an absolute drain on our bank account.
My oldest daughter is engaged, which, while in itself is thrilling news, Nancy and I looked at the price tag of the upcoming fete and quailed like unto... well... quail.
On top of this, something's been eating our tomatoes.
Life is hard.
I've been re-reading some of my favorite books and thinking how lovely it would be to have the sunshine and space to create that the great authors enjoyed.
So Albert Camus - he lived a charmed life if anyone did. He'd written The Plague, The Fall, The Stranger and won the Nobel Prize when he was only 44. Of course he died when he was 47. He was born in poverty. His father died when he was 1. He contracted TB, he fought in the war. OK, bad example.
Walker Percy. Well, his grandfather shot himself. So did his father.
David Foster Wallace. OK, another bad example.
Laurence Sterne. Tuberculosis. Wife's mental illness. Death at 54. Miguel Cervantes. Wounded in battle, held four years as a prisoner and slave in Algiers.
Not that hardship makes great writers, but hardship is the common bread of humanity. There's a little something in this world for all of us, and a useless car and a drained bank account are pretty small beans compared to TB and depression.
I'll stop moaning, count my blessings, and get back to work.

Hats Off! (More on Camus' The Plague)

2011-07-21T03:15:00.000-07:00

I'm in the midst of re-reading The Plague. In case you're unfamiliar with the story, it's about the bubonic plague unexpectedly devastating a modern city in North Africa. Although a possible scenario, Camus is not strictly interested in scientific realism as other stories such as Outbreak. At one point, doctors hopefully administer an innoculation to a dying child to test its efficacy. That doesn't quite make sense, does it? You can't innoculate against a disease once you already have it, right?
What Camus is really interested in is how people react. There are those who turn to religion, to love, to service of fellow man, to despair, to mad hope. There is a criminal about to be tried to whom the plague is actually good news, who feels more at ease in a world where everyone is as haunted and hunted as himself. All of these are people attempting to make meaning in a meaningless world. Camus, who must have at times viewed the character as despicable, makes even the priest seem worthy and noble.
In a story like this, every reader searches the cast of characters for the one most like himself. Who would I be? How would I act in this situation? The character with whom I most identify is the aspiring author, Grand. Even before the Plague strikes, Grand finds meaning in his lonely, menial existence, crafting his great novel. (So obsessed is he with perfection, he can never get past the first sentence.)
"What I really want, Doctor," Grand tells Dr. Rieux, "is this. On the day when the manuscript reaches the publisher, I want him to stand up - after he's read it through, of course - and say to his staff: 'Gentlemen, hats off!'"
Rieux was dumbfounded, and, to add to his amazement, he saw, or seemed to see, the man beside him making as if to take off his hat with a sweeping gesture, bringing his hand to his head, then holding his arm straight out in front of him.
"So you see," Grand added, "it's got to be flawless."
Though he knew little of the literary world, Rieux had a suspicion that things didn't happen in it quite so picturesquely - that, for instance, publishers do not keep their hats on in their offices. But, of course, one can never tell, and Rieux preferred to hold his peace.
Elsewhere, Grand explains the extraordinary difficulty of his craft:
"I'd like you to understand, Doctor. I grant you it's easy enough to choose between a 'but' and an 'and.' It's a bit more difficult to decide between 'and' and 'then.' But definitely the hardest thing may be to know whether one should put an 'and' or leave it out."
Of all the characters, Grand is the one I'd like to be. He is laughable, naturally, and absurd, but in Camus' world we are all absurd, struggling against the greater absurdity of the world. I love Grand's passion, though, even envy it. It reminds me of something from Thoreau about a man driven to create the perfect walking stick - just that and no more - and in his pursuit of this simple perfection finds the clue to immortality.
How does Camus, the Nobel-winning author, feel about the writer of his creation, who sweats and labors and entire life polishing that one never-finished sentence? Well, he does name him Grand.
Hats off!