Was looking through a notebook I keep at work and found the following four words:
And no context for them at all. Where do they come from? I’m sure I wrote them down for looking up purposes, but I have no idea what they could having in common.
What the hell?!
The first official Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince trailer is out:
It’d be nice if they included more than one plot point, don’t you think? I am pretty cheesed off right now. Maybe they really think there are people out there who don’t know who the Half-Blood Prince is. But it didn’t stop them with The Prisoner of Azkaban. What gives? You know he’s not a villain and never was. Snape is sex on toast, so start advertising it already! I don’t need to see some random chick might be Merope Gaunt. Let’s get down to it: McLaggen, Slughorn, Malfoy, and last, never least, Severus Motherfucking Snape.
Am I right or am I right?
The story I’m writing lately—the one where I’m obviously such a man with all my war and spaceships—is coming due. As such, I sent it out to thoughtful people who are nice enough to read through it and make notes like, “You need a comma here” and “Your POV is all fucked up.” Neither of those is actual quotes, but I do go far too lightly with the commas and the point of view does tend to get away from me.
One of those people is Zooey Glass, who hangs out around here every once in a while. As a beta reader, she is frighteningly thorough. For instance, she read the sentence:
[He] scoffed with such scorn it made [her] blink.
And proceeded to take it apart thusly:
I’m a bit unsure about this… ‘scoffed with scorn’ doesn’t really work for me, as technically scoffing is not an action in itself, but a description of other actions (even though it is a verb on its own).
… I feel like scorn is already so implied in scoffing that you cannot scoff with scorn – I’d be tempted to changed one of the two.
It’s like that all over the place, y’all. Dude is no longer scoffing with scorn. Now he is scoffing intensely. His wife is still blinking at him. But it gets even better!
On a non-beta note, while I was looking that up I found an AWESOME word – ‘to fleer’:
fleer suggests grinning or grimacing derisively:: the saucy jackanapes fleered at my credulity. I feel this word needs to be reintroduced into the langauge!
Fleer! To fleer. I fleer at you. Is this a new word for all of us? I hope so, because it’s brand new to me and how useful is it? I think extremely useful. It’s from Middle English flerien which comes from Norwegian flire, a grin. I can’t find anything farther pack than that, to see what else it might be related to, even correcting for [f] < [p].
A jackanape, which you’ve probably heard of before, is an impertinent, presumptuous person, usually a young man. Synonyms include whippersnapper. Very interesting etymology here: from the early to mid-15th century, late Middle English jakken-apes, which literally means jack of the apes, here “jack” a synonym for “man.” It was the Duke of Suffolk, William de la Pole’s nickname, after his heraldry. His Wikipedia entry says that he was, in the Hundred Years War, defeated by Joan of Arc at Jargeau.
Wow. Etymology and warrior women, which brings us back around to the subject of the story, which I am cagey about. Regardless, go forth and note some fleering! Use it in conversation if you can. It needs to be reintroduced to the language. And I do mostly everything Zooey Glass tells me to. You should, too.
Starting the week off with words, a few I learned from reading Vox Popoli. Which is not for everyone. But I enjoy it and I get to learn new things.
Like rugose and squamous in the same paragraph:
As for Stross’s work, while I loved Accelerando and enjoyed Halting State, I like his Bob Howard novels best of all. If you have any appreciation for things squamous or rugose and haven’t read The Atrocity Archives or The Jennifer Morgue, you’re really missing out.
It’s from a short post on Charles Stross’s remarks on recent trends in science fiction. Day agrees, but expands his own thoughts a bit to include fantasy. He essentially says that speculative fiction is better when it remembers that people worship. It’s an interesting point. Off the top of my head I can think of relatively few sci-fi novels that incorporate this idea without using it as the crisis catalyst. Dune, maybe?
Regardless, rugose is wrinkled and squamous is scaly. Knowing what those words mean it makes me, on one hand, a little less inclined to try those books. On the other hand, wrinkly scaly novels with “atrocity” and “morgue” in the title? That could be worth checking out. Both are straight up Latin, too, in their etymology.
The third word, omniderigence, led to a lot of research, mostly because it wasn’t listed in any dictionary. Omniderigence is a protologism: a word that Vox Day invented. It means, if I understand it correctly, the primary quality of a God whose omniscience has run wild:
I was simply searching for a word which would describe the concept of an all-acting God, a puppet master, of the sort envisioned by some Christians … who conflate being all-knowing and all-powerful with being all-controlling in the active sense. An omniderigent deity is one who not only knows the number of hairs on your head, but actually pulls them out, one by one, or alternatively, turns each of them grey at his specific command. An omniderigent deity is one who not only comes up with a plan for your life, but forces you to walk every step of it.
Creative Etymology
It’s a logical, if pessimistic, capricious, and depressing, outgrowth of Calvinist theodicy. I’m still trying to figure out how it’s different than dystheism and how, or if, it incorporates free will, but that sort of thing takes time to mull.
Meanwhile, protologism, y’all! Day says that he created the word from the Latin “to guide.” Derigo, derigere, derexi, derectus: I guide, you guide, he/she/it guides, we guide. An all guiding God sounds like a nice thing at first. Then, poking around Indo-European roots to see what there is to see, I wondered if this word comes from *der, which means to split, peel, or flay, and breaks out into words that refer to skin and leather; it would make a certain amount of connotative sense. I was wrong. The PIE root is reg, meaning “to move in a straight line” and turns into words like right, realm, erect, address, rectangle, and reckless. It makes a lot more sense, but lacks a certain amount of atmosphere. Ah well.
I like, too, that Day notes, when defining omniderigence, that he enjoys using words that don’t exist, but not like Douglas Adams. Two things there. If you use them, now they exist. I got crap for this in college all the time. People would ask me, “Sarah, is ______ a word?” I’d say, “Use it in a sentence.” Then they’d give me a sentence. And I’d ask, “What’s it mean?” And then they tell me. And then I’d say, “Yes, it’s a word.” I did this all the time while copy editing the newspaper. Then the editor would feel compelled to holler, “Don’t listen to her! It’s not a word.” Oh, but it is! Words can spring from the ether, just like salamanders. Also, wow, Douglas Adams. Here’s a Monday morning Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster in honor of new words.
A cute video to start your morning off: Font Conference. It’s on College Humor, so watch but maybe don’t scroll down. Honu Girl sent me this yesterday afternoon and we laughed and laughed until we both had a moment of extreme facepalm. I’ll be interested to see if you have the same reaction.
I’m a font snob. I admit it. It’s going to get me in trouble one of these days, possibly beaten up in a parking lot, because I will totally tell you to your face your favorite font is nonsense. Especially if it is Comic Sans.
I’m a big fan of Modern No. 20 if a serif is required. For sans-serif fonts, I like them just a touch on the diffent, pretty side, like Gill Sans.
Do you all get snotty about fonts? Have favorites?
Couple things for fun this morning, then maybe some lexpionage this afternoon. Sound good?
First, an Ode to Improper Orthography: Rediculous.
One little common misspelling, a whole domain of hilarious vitriol. From the section on statistics:
0% of people that spell “Ridiculous” as “Rediculous” aren’t getting enough Omega 3, Biffidus Digestivum or whatever else fucking snake oil is currently doing the rounds with the shite spouting “nutritionist” crowd.
I mean, I get cheesed when people misspell certain words. These people, though, are taking it the next level. And that level is awesome.
Second, under awesome of a different sort, is The Museum of Unworkable Physics Devices. It begins by listing the 13 Principles of Unworkable Devices, after this caveat:
Perpetual motion machine inventors do have principles. Unfortunately the physical principles they assume are often ones not obeyed by nature.
It’s a text-heavy site, but there are plenty of illustrations of the principles and the language is easy to understand, even for someone like me– in love with the idea of physics, but completely boneheaded in all other respects.
I particularly liked looking at the section on “The ‘heavier on one side’ seduction.” There was part of a sculpture at the museum that seemed to use this to create a constantly moving piece of art. People would ask, “Is that a perpetual motion machine?” And no matter how many times I wanted to say, “Yes. It is. Don’t tell, or it’s the heat death of the universe.” I didn’t. I couldn’t. I had to say, “If you look at the corner, you’ll see a little fan. That’s what starts and stops its motion.”
I also really like the names of the Principles. They’re inspiring all out of proportion with what I know about physics. They make me want to write a series of novels with those as titles. Failure to Isolate the System, the seventh novel in the epic series by Sarah, et cetera. Would you buy it?
Via Editrix, I spent some time last week playing around with the Gender Genie. I used large passages of fiction and non-fiction (each nearly 1500 words, since it says that more is better). For fiction I pasted in different passages of the story I’m currently working on. For non-fiction, I pasted in The Opposite of Hallelujah. In both cases? I write like a man!
For the fiction:
Female Score: 1902
Male Score: 2287The Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is: male!
That’s not that far out. It’s a story about spaceships and war and double-crossing people. Not precisely chick-lit.
For the non-fiction:
Female Score: 1793
Male Score: 2193The Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is: male!
To me, that one’s a little more perplexing. I talk about being attracted to a man. I talk about crying my eyes out. I talk about a lot of feelings. Possibly it’s the consistent use of the first person? Maybe it’s passages like, “Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck.” Is that masculine?
I don’t have any broad conclusions or anything. And I’m really not so very surprised about the results. I am trying not to be smug about them because they confirm my anti-feminist tendencies. Maybe I just use a lot of prepositions. I do. And when I write fiction, I tend to write short sentences and lots of dialogue without much description. Maybe that’s masculine. I considered trying to write something that would net me a female response, but the only ways I could think of to do it made me make gagging noises like a 9-year old boy. Maybe that should be a third category– Writes like a pre-adolescent!
I have been lucky enough to see some good concerts in my day. I saw Live during the Throwing Copper tour, just as “Lightning Crashes” got huge. I saw Oasis, but more importantly, I saw Oasis’s opening act, Travis, just a couple months after they won NME’s best new artist award. I’ve seen crazy tiny shows, like Kula Shaker, where it was just me and a friend and a handful of other people. And humongous arena shows, like Billy Joel. And none of them compared to seeing Weird Al Yankovic on Saturday night.
It was honestly the greatest concert I’ve ever seen in my whole life. The multimedia, the costume changes, the fact that it was WEIRD AL. It opened with “Polkarama” and rocked solidly for the next two hours and 15 minutes. It was a little more sedate than I thought it would be. I was ready to stand up and dance the entire time, but that didn’t really happen. Nevertheless, it was still an amazing show.
“Polkarama” was the only polka he did, though later in the show he did sort of a medley thing where he did one verse and the chorus of several songs in row, making “Gump” flow into “A Complicated Song” flow into “Ode to a Superhero” and similar. Most of the songs were off the recent albums, but he did go right from, “The Saga Begins” into “Yoda,” which made us all explode with joy. Then, in the middle of singing “Yoda,” he stopped and did the Yoda Chant, which may be the most complex, strange, amazing thing I’ve seen anyone do on stage. And since Al himself did it in the middle of the show, the audience didn’t do it to demand an encore.
The costume changes were a hoot. I particularly liked his singing “You’re Pitiful” while constantly removing layers of clothing until he was down to a SpongeBob t-shirt, a pink tutu, and a pair of white boxer shorts with red hearts on them. And he returned to the stage after “Couch Potato” on a red segway to sing “White and Nerdy.”
He sang relatively few originals, but he did sing “Wanna B Ur Lovr.” On the album, the song is funny the first time, silly the second, and for me, never merited another listen after that. The live performance, though. Al came off stage, out into the audience and sang each line to a new person. Y’all, you will not believe me, but I have to say it anyway: It was the sex. I mean it. It’s the sexiest thing I’ve ever seen live. The pelvic thrusting alone. The line about looking him up in the dictionary under “kapow”? I about lost it.
The show ended with “Fat,” in full costume, with all the crazy gestures and moves that accompany the sound effects.
The encore itself was crazy. Part of the multimedia during costume changes are old Al TV interviews, and one of them is with Michael Stipe. Al suggests they collaborate on a song and tells Stipe to come up wit some lyrics, and says he’ll come up with the music. Stipe says, “We’ve all got cell phones. Let’s be real.” Al then riffs on it, but that’s about as far as it goes. The first encore was a full-band version of that song, the only lyrics, “We’ve all got cell phones. Let’s be real.” It was extraordinary.
And the second encore? Was “Albuquerque.” I’ve never experienced anything like listening to a thousand people shout, “I! HATE! SAUERKRAUT!” Albuquerque, y’all. Wow.
Best concert of my life. Christopher enjoyed it, too, which was the primary goal. This was our anniversary present to one another. To see a concert by a singer we’ve been listening to since we were little kids. A! L! B! U! Querque!!!
Have some Polkarama:
Y’all, Act III of Dr. Horrible’s Sing a Long Blog is a triumph! Definitely my favorite part of the three. And I won’t go too deeply into why, but it’ll be pretty obvious. And also, you’ve got about 14 hours left to see it, so go go go!
The newscasters were Greenwalt and Noxon, so how about that. And it was edited by Lisa Lassek and the costume designer was Shawna Trpcic and it’s a big Mutant Enemy reunion, made extra-Firefly with a special thanks to Ben Edlund in the credits. That said, is it just me or was there a conspicuous lack of Tim Minear?
When’s the DVD come out? I want to buy some special features!