Conventional Weapons

Last week, cuddly thug and part-time London mayor Boris Johnson committed one of the trademark blunders for which idiotic people seem to delight in forgiving him, by claiming that President Assad's Syrian regime is worse than that of Nazi Germany, on the grounds that "Not even Hitler used chemical weapons, as far as I can remember."

A lot of people have condemned this as thoughtless, and rightly so: for any politician to pontificate about Hitler without keeping the Holocaust foremost in his mind is crass and horrifically insensitive. All the same (and without condoning his fundamental point), I can see from a purely semantic point of view what might have caused Johnson to phrase his statement the way he did.

It seems to me that generally speaking, the conventions of English don't tend to include tools of execution under the category of "weapons". Obviously some execution methods (beheading, firing squad) involve items whose presence in other contexts makes them unambigously weapons, but despite the dictionary definition (which will usually be something along the lines of "Device designed or used to cause harm to a human [or possibly "a living"] being"), I've yet to hear a guillotine or an electric chair described as a "weapon". As far as I can remember, I've never seen crosses included in lists of Roman weapons, either.

So what exactly makes a killing implement a weapon? It isn't use in combat (as Johnson's hasty clarification seems to assume), because a sentence like "Poison was a favourite weapon of assassination" sounds perfectly reasonable. It isn't use by an individual rather than the state, because (to take an extreme example) almost nobody would call the deployment of a nuclear weapon at Hiroshima the responsibilty of the bombardier on the Enola Gay.

Thinking about it, I suspect that what makes the difference is that there's an element of chance in a weapon's operation, arising from the uncontrolled conditions in which it's used. A poisoner's victim may decide they don't fancy the figs today; a sniper may hit a member of the President's security detail by mistake; even an atom bomb may miss its target or fail to go off.

Executions, though -- and all the more so the industrialised mass murder of the Final Solution -- happen under highly controlled conditions, failure is rectified, and death is (barring the occasional miracle) certain. Such killings become a process rather than an act, and English speakers, probably entirely subconsciously, feel that the term "weapon" no longer really applies.

Which is interesting, I reckon.

Linguistics aside, the only real point I have arising from this is that, if we accept methods of execution as weapons, the United States has been using chemical weapons against its own citizens for decades. Are we going to do anything about that?

The Archetype Ark

This morning a Facebook application reminded me: "Valentine's Day is just around the corner! Send a cuddly anima".

Clearly the timekeeping processes at work here could do with some attention, but given the existence of fluffy microbes and plush subatomic particles, the idea of cuddly Jungian archetypes seems, in retrospect, almost inevitable.

They'll probably branch out into Freudian psychic apparatus next. Here, stroke my ego.

Recent Products of My Brain

Forecast, adj.: Having a bifurcated bottom (cf fork-tongued).

Pillowcase, n.: The enzyme responsible for digesting pillocks.

A: I just found my wife hiding behind an evergreen oriental shrub.
B: Japonica?
A: Well, something must have.

[Edit 7-2-9 to add:]

A: I think my wife's joined a Japanese organised crime syndicate.
B: Yakuza?
A: No, I wouldn't dare.

The Post with No Name

All names have meanings, at least originally. (Admittedly some of them mostly mean "Look how stupid my parents are.")

"Philip Alexander Purser-Hallard", for instance, means "Lover of Horses, Saviour of Men, Steward, Steward" in Greek, Anglo-Norman and Anglo-Saxon[1]. Even in English, a good many names are more transparent than that, as both Heath Ledger and River Phoenix could attest if they didn't have that other thing in common.

In some cultures, personal names routinely have entirely transparent meanings, so that the most common Chinese surnames mean things like "Fruit", "King" and "Willow Tree". Generally, however, when people have transparent names, we refer to them by the same sounds they use when speaking their own language, rather than attempting to translate them.

The major exception to this, bizarrely enough, would appear to be members of the Lakota tribes of Native North Americans, such as Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, Red Cloud et al, all of whose names sound -- unless you have a problem with "foreign" words per se -- perfectly reasonable in Lakota.

The other borderline instances -- that I can think of, at least -- are fictional Chinese women, such as Rupert Bear's friend Tiger Lily (who may in any case be named after Peter Pan's friend Tiger Lily, who is -- very broadly speaking -- a Native American). There's a walk-on Hong Kong masseuse in Die Another Day who's named Peaceful Fountains of Desire, but that seems to be a throwaway racist / sexist joke for the old-guard Bond fans. In any case, the intention is to make the exotic seem less threatening (and therefore fit for childhood companionship and / or shagging) by familiarising it.

Sitting Bull and co I'm less sure about. Is the idea that people who name themselves after everyday objects must be inherently more primitive than people with perfectly sensible names like, say, Earp or Custer? The practice doesn't seem to extend even to other Native American tribes, so I'm guessing it's something very specific about the Lakota's interaction with Anglophone settlers.

I wonder whether a history of North American colonisation written in, say, Spanish would talk about "Tatanka Iyotanka" or "Toro Sentado"[2]?

[1] Actually, I'm not altogether sure what "Hallard" means. This site gives two entirely different etymologies, but family tradition tends to go with the first one, "hall-ward" -- supposedly meaning something along the lines of a butler or estates manager. Although it could equally mean the bloke who guarded the door, I'm amused by the idea that it means essentially the same as B.'s original surname of "Purser".
[2] Any linguistic solecisms are my own. [Edit: And actually, a quick google would have given me my answer there.]

Fun with Sentences

Some educationalists criticised the programme [Teletubbies] for encouraging young children to mimic the infantile sounds of its characters and Christian leaders in the US, who claimed that one of its characters, Tinky Winky, was gay.
[The Guardian, 4 January 2009]

I suspect that this sentence originally began "The programme was criticised by some educationalists...", and was recast from the passive by a subeditor who wasn't quite paying attention. But I do like the idea of toddlers imitating the "infantile sounds" made by Jerry Falwell et al.

A Quantum of Sol

Those of you intrigued by the first and last items in that previous post may be interested in this, the first publication of the full text painted on m'wife's sculpture A Quantum of Sol (Rising Sun). See here for some photographs of the structure (more detailed ones will hopefully come later) accompanying some reflections on the text.

I've broken the passages apart here for the sake of basic legibility: on the sculpture itself they run into one another, with only the solar symbol to separate them.

A Quantum of Sol (Rising Sun)
– text-only version

...shall all ascend into the bright eternal apex of the enlightened and unconquered soul

the blinding helial light of conversion, h to he, exploding into a new clear sight, indiscriminate radiance corrupted by our polarising vision, everpresent effulgent distancy

sole potent parent to mother material, father to daughter spun also from that archane disc, the golden aten split into lead, ice, carbon, mercury, earth the filial and fecund, oval in her orbit, plump to receive the lightwarm seedflash of her father husband brother sun

lord of hours meting and mensurating dawndusk noonnight, nadir zenith, solstice equinox, years sidereal and cosmic, circling the milkblack core, spinning like a parasol while whirling aeroplanetary children, endlessly calendrical, infinitely stonehengible lord horus (lord graciously horus)

bright daybarge sailing the skyward ocean to the blue meridian, making its waves a tidal delta, cyclical waveform mounting in morn, declining in dusk, then passing into neutral harbour-mouth to weather the dark night of the soul

nightbarge setsailing for the netherworld, setting tonight to set-to with the night setspearing turtlesnake apep talk re your communication with the dead of twelvehoured chaos, anticipating your response by return, alimentary canal turned now to re birth

barging in, bursting from the skirts of night to rise with dayheat each dawn since the fourth to measure morning with the mercury

re treating winterly to arctic valley, re turning aestivally to easter vernal spring, an immillennial parousia of recirculation, re birth re curing with cyclic solemnity, in days, in years, in minutes of untimely dark devouring

son of mandala spread on cross, haloed by circle, spun on sunwheel in ecliptic pain, abandoned to mandated exocclusion, three hours dying, veiling and unveiling in the vale of the shade of the death of the son

dying into darkness (amon), graved in underworld (amun), doing nothing by thirds but arising on the first day (amen) a speedy mourning then an easterly ascent into heaven (ra ra ra!)

goldnaturedly doling out the wisdom luck and cancer, sole leonine pharaoh of the fifth house, mane sequence helionhearted millionmile yellowgold dwarf, far distanter than icarus may fly, winged eye melting featherwax and numbing nerve

feeding all, filling all, fuelling all, sustaining all, yet one day mere trillennia hence devouring all, re absorbing all earth’s sunstuff, if never first devoured by dragon monkey wolf serpent or blackholy goddess of galactic night

food of algae, idol of flowers, boss of roosters, sauna of lizards, lamp of lovers, garment of nudists, blight of deserts, torment of vampires, scourge of snowmen, wellspring of moonlight, yoke of oceans, pivot of planets, wheel of seasons, father of pharaoh, aim of archer, mango of monkey, spoil of scarab, dinner of direwolf, eye of heaven, light of vision and vision of light, seen now through dark glasses but one day eye to eye, unblinkingly unblinding

for this light of the world, epitome of glory, sun of heaven blazing with conversion light, the monad, carrion kissing, darkness lightening, nightperil delivering and all sustaining, is a mere lamp to light the way

a type, a symbol, font of wisdom, all seeing icon, sign to lead us, cycling now but soon to dismount, to the axle of all, samsaran wheels halting near vantage point to view the bright empyrion

circling sun and earth, comet and cluster, light and dark matter, stars and humanity, a joy to end soul enmity, the love that moves the son

and day is grey now, light is night now, fire is liar now, shown unknown now yet when dawn comes...


© P. and B. Purser-Hallard 2008

Meat Processing

I keep getting spam with the subject line "Your soft", which seems to distill two of the most pervading themes of the unwanted junk I receive down into one succinct phrase of two four-letter words. Is it referring to some item of software which I might -- in that ethereal imaginary netherworld from which these messages emanate -- have notionally purchased? Or is it instead discussing my widely-hypothesised erectile challenges, incorporating into its introduction of the subject a habitual your / you're solecism?

We'll never know, because I'd have to actually open one of the fucking things to find out.

On a more whimsical note, though, a message just came through from someone called "Darth Natalie".

The Bat Dome

Yet more fun with predictive text:

"I'll get the cat food"

...is predicted as:

"I'll get the act done"

Or -- if you remember to correct the first time but not the second -- the rather more apposite:

"I'll get the cat done".

Pressing Linguistic Questions of Our Day, No. 41,686

Why isn't a female bulldog a cowbitch?

Work in Progress

Apply this rule after the message arrives
Where the Subject line contains 'cock' or 'penis' or 'rolex' or 'replica' or 'fuck' or 'stick' or 'watches' or 'schlong' or 'erectile' or 'sexy' or 'phallus' or 'bodypart' or 'dick' or 'pharmacy' or 'erection' or 'viagra' or 'cialis' or 'tabs' or 'willy' or 'pen!s' or 'medication' or 's'e'xual' or 'sexual' or 'loser' or 'giant' or 'FDA' or 'OEM' or 'pill' or 'length' or 'organ' or 'shlong' or 'masculinity' or 'masculine' or 'pleasurable' or 'pleasure' or 'lover' or 'girlfriend' or 'boner' or 'd'ick' or 'di'ck' or 'dic'k' or 'love wand' or 'ejaaculation' or 'gambling' or 'poker' or 'herbal' or 'pharma' or 'repl1ca' or 'hero' or 'phalli' or 'inches' or 'anatrim'
Move it to the Spam folder

This now works about 50% of the time. 'Casino' was removed from the roster after it filtered out a mailing-list discussion of the recent James Bond film.

Yaroo! Cave! Etc

You won't see me getting nostalgic here about my old alma mater, the minor-with-pretensions-to-major public school Lancing College.

This is because, while my all-fees-paid scholarship placement there certainly benefitted me in the long run, it's only on balance over my five years of attendance there that I could say I enjoyed it more than I hated it. I made some good friends (all of whom I then lost touch with completely), and I owe a great deal to certain teachers, but the school as a whole... pfft.

Boarding-schools (not that I ever boarded, thank God, or I would have gone mental) are hermetic subcultures, geographically isolated, with limited channels to the outside world. Considered as speech-communities, their language can evolve in some peculiar and baroque ways.

For a while I've been thinking that it might be a service to philology (albeit a minor service, probably performed in a tiny rural church at 11 o'clock at night according to a scandalously misprinted prayer-book all copies of which were supposedly burned in 1762) if I documented some of the weirder slang that was in currency at the school between 1985 and 1990. Preferably before it all falls out of my head, as much of it has done already.

What follows, then, is a brief dictionary of (what I remember of) Lancing College slang of the late 1980s, with notes.

Some of this language was doubtless transitory, some perennial enough that I'm sure it must survive today. A lot of it's also self-evidently ridiculous, which is why it's hilarious to remember my contemporaries (and, to be scrupulously fair, me) using it in all seriousness as part of our adolescent dominance-rituals. What knobs we were.

• amphi, n. The school amphitheatre, used for open-air drama and illicit smoking.
• dodds, n. A clumsy person. (An eponym, obviously. During my time at Lancing it was gradually giving way to barclay, n., after a particularly unfortunate classmate of mine.)
• dossage, n. Relaxation, laziness. (Etymology obvious, and I'm surprised it isn't in wider use.)
• foetus, n. A stupid or useless person. (Used as a general all-purpose insult with truly astonishing ubiquity. Quite how this state of affairs first arose, I couldn't even begin to speculate.)
• glip, v. Masturbate (of a male). n. (Male) masturbation, semen. (Onomatopoeic, presumably, although to be honest I'd rather not think about it. I don't think the possibility of female masturbation really figured as a concept for any of us, except presumably the sixth-form girls.)
• glip-rag, n. Handkerchief etc used to clean up after masturbation.
• grove, n. Toilet. (This one was historic -- none of my contemporaries actually used it. The only people who did were a few nostalgically-minded masters who found the equally pastoral-sounding "bog" aesthetically troubling.)
• Head Man, n. Headmaster (or school principal, for those of you who were born after 1980 / in the United States and have never read The Beano. This is another one the masters used more than the pupils.)
• herman, n. Person with ginger hair. (As clear an illustration of metonymy as I've ever seen. The word originally applied to a boy nicknamed "Herman" because of his close physical resemblance to Herman Munster -- a resemblance which his ginger hair marred only slightly. Before long, however, it was assumed that gingerness was the defining characteristic of a "herman", and the Munster connection was forgotten entirely. I heard this applied to petite, pretty redheaded girls.)
• irrelevant, adj. Keeping a low profile, and therefore unlikely to be widely recognised. (Not knowing someone in your year was usually a major social faux pas, so I suspect the cool kids made this one up to mean it wasn't bad when they did it.)
• juvie, n., adj. (Person showing signs of being) marginally more immature than oneself at a particular moment.
• pitt, n. Study-bedroom. (This one was in official use, and had probably been so since the first such rooms were adopted at the school. It was always spelt with the double "t", suggesting that the etymology wasn't the obvious one.)
• prole (also proll), n. Member of the working classes, particularly the support staff. (This wasn't, of course, unique to Lancing, but it was shockingly universal among the pupils there. More interesting than the simple fact of its use were the limits of the same: the school librarian, for example, an educated, clearly patrician man, was never a "prole" -- although nor was the School Marshal, a distinctly working-class ex-army N.C.O. dragooned into instilling some semblance of discipline into the pupils[1]. That may just be because we were too scared of him, though. Groundskeepers, cleaners, kitchen staff, people who served you in shops, students at state schools -- all of these were "proles".)
• rip, v. Mock, tease, ridicule. (For some reason outsiders were always surprised to discover that our use of "ripping" differed from that current at Malory Towers in the 1940s.)
• ronnie, n. Short person. (A somewhat less extreme parallel to herman (q. v.), since being short was at least one of the characteristics which the history master nicknamed "Ronnie" shared with Ronnie Corbett, rather than one of the few which distinguished them.)
• smeggy, adj. Smelly, disinclined to wash. (Derivation obvious, and deeply unpleasant.)
• square, n., adj. (One who is) hard-working and clever, and thus not cool. (I can only assume that "square" had been applied to overly conformist pupils in the late 60s, and had shifted its focus since then.)
• twos, n. See below.
• vegetable, n. One who fails to enjoy, or does very little, exercise. (This, like "square", was usually applied to me.)
• wicked, adj. Ugly. (Used of boys who were considered hideously, fantastically grotesque, and any girl who wasn't a potential supermodel.)

This is an incomplete list -- in particular, I can no longer remember (except as euphemistic and faintly ridiculous) the name of the rota whereby the younger boys were allocated mundane menial tasks like picking up litter, presumably in an effort to teach us not to be so fucking rude about the people who were doing all the hard work in our vicinity. [Edit 6/12/2007: As John has now reminded me, it was "twos".]

I may well add to this as more words come to me. If you were at Lancing during the relevant period and have (somehow) found your way here, do feel free to comment with further examples.

[Edit 6/12/2007 to add "rip" and "twos".]


[1] The School Marshal during my early years at Lancing was a huge, terrifying man who died tragically and heroically on holiday, saving his fellow-passengers from the capsize of the Herald of Free Enterprise. I couldn't stand him, but that's scarcely the point.

ParaGnomeAsia

I saw an advert today for a digital imaging firm called picselation. There's such a thing as trying just a little bit too hard.

Cruciverbiage

I may have invented a new class of crossword clue in the shower. On the other hand, someone else may well have thought of it already.

Docker to line up, we predict, awaiting first two notes (9).

Highlight the whitespace to read the answer, which is: "STEVEDORE".

B. isn't sure this would be adopted, because (whitespace again: software differs from mobile to mobile, so not everyone's phone will predict "queue" as "steve". On the other hand, I think the interchangeability means it still works.

Have any of you cruciverbalists encountered clues of this type? If not, do you think they might catch on?


[Clue edited slightly 19/8/7]

Largely Random Observations

Or, What I'd Be Blogging About If Only I Had The Time

1. I must stop mentioning the weather in my Surefish column. When this month's number goes live it's going to start "Gosh, isn't it marvellous that summer's finally started after all that miserable rain we were having earlier?" Aargh.

2. B. and I have been married for eight years as of today. Hurrah for us! Eight years is Sodium, if I recall correctly.

3. Thanks to the aforementioned balmy summer weather, I spent today wandering about the office in:

• wet trousers.
  
• a wet shirt.
  
• a wet tie.
  
• wet underpants.
  
• no shoes, because they were wet.
  
• dry socks, because I keep a pair at work.

It's amazing how much difference dry socks make to your comfort levels. I'm beginning to think I should keep a pair of pants at work too, and possibly an entire spare bedroom.

4. Trisyllabic words that should rhyme but don't: "kilobyte" and "trilobite".

5. When I was growing up in Worthing, my parents had a lean-to shed which they referred to -- in an act of 70s middle-class pretension which Margo Leadbeatter would have baulked at -- as "our loggia". It was only when I read A Room with a View that I realised that what I'd always heard as "losure" was an Italian word, rather than being short for "enclosure".

6. Heroes is -- so far, at least, which from our point of view synchronises with BBC3's advance showings but not with The Sci-Fi Channel -- pretty great.

7. Cryptic crosswords are surprisingly difficult, though. I've been making a vague effort to start doing them regularly, given that sources as diverse as B.'s granny and Toby off The West Wing inform me that they keep your brain supple well into old age. I'm finding the bastards almost impossible, though, suggesting that I've already descended too far into senility for any non-miraculous intervention to be effective. Oh well.

8. I can't work out quite why anyone would want to visit Ashton Court for the Bristol Balloon Fiesta, given that there are better places across Bristol's multiple hills for watching the launches and flights. On Saturday our preferred vantage point (and that of around 2,000 other people, most of them under the age of six) was up the cliffs near Clifton Observatory, where the balloons pass pretty much overhead. (Sometimes they dip right down into the Avon Gorge first, which apparently is Just Showing Off.) It seems particularly perverse to drive to Ashton Court just as some godblighted football match is finishing at Ashton Gate Stadium, which is what the entire population of Southern England bar those 2,000 were doing an hour or so before the launch.

9. The other day I read an ancient Dilbert strip which included the words "Now I have to hug this guy so it won't seem awkward." Five minutes later I had "Purple Haze" going through my head.

10. After nearly nine years of very occasionally killing mice or other small vertebrates, then sitting and watching the corpses in the forlorn hope that they'll start moving again, Mulder has finally worked out what being a predator is actually about. Or so the mouse B. found on the living-room floor last Wednesday would suggest... if it had any front half left to squeak the news with.

Pressing Linguistic Questions of Our Day, No. 41,685

RAFFLE is to RATIO as FELAFEL is to FELLATIO. True or false?

(The existence of Aer Lingus has always made me feel that the Italian national airline should be called Aero Latio.)

Pressing Linguistic Questions of Our Day, No. 41,684

Shouldn't "piss-poor" be the opposite of "piss-rich"?

FIRST ROMAN MATRON: Ooh Livia, you mustn't go to that tanner to have your cloth bleached, they're piss-poor.
SECOND ROMAN MATRON: All right, Licia, I'll go to the one round the corner. They've got vats of the stuff.

Pressing Linguistic Questions of Our Day, No. 41,683

How come "linoleum" is shortened to "lino", but "petroleum" abbreviates to "petrol"? Hmm?

7468

Further to earlier musings about predictive-text messaging... this may well come as old news to many, but I was quietly amused today to discover that "pint" and "shot" are numerically isomorphic.

Luton Beds England

...So how many U.K. county abbreviations are also verbs? I can think of Bedforshire (see above), Wiltshire ("Swindon Wilts"), Huntingdonshire ("Ramsey Hunts"), Buckinghamshire ("Aylesbury Bucks") and I suppose Staffordshire (er, "Lichfield Staffs"). Including homophones allows for Hertfordshire ("Watford Herts"), Lincolnshire ("Boston Lincs") and, just possibly, Worcestershire ("Malvern Worcs") and Warwickshire ("Kirsty Kingsbury Warks").

Yorkshire only counts if you believe The Meaning of Liff ("Jasmine yorked politely, loathing him to the depths of her being"), which is obviously cheating.

It's only the shires that even have abbreviations, isn't it? Except that I think Glamorgan may be "Glam". Ironically.

I'm ashamed to say that there are entire counties in Scotland I've never even heard of. They made Kincardineshire up, surely?

I'm really tired.

Phil: My Head, With Nonsense

Occasionally -- generally after partaking too liberally of caffeinated beverages -- I find my cranium invaded by thoughts which would seem more at home inside Colin's head.

For instance, what part of a rat is the zinger? Is it the same as the dinger? And what are the similarities between a rat and a schroe?

(The Head wouldn't have provided the explanatory links there, of course. I should be more disciplined about leaving these things as an exercise for the head-reader.)

Sadly, the River Exe and the River Wye turn out not to be at right angles to one another at all.