Thursday, January 04, 2007
The Schmaltz and the Smooth
From "In the Street, Today." _Thrasher_ 1.1 (January 1981):
"A curb is an obstacle until you grind across it. A wall is but a ledge until you drop off it. A cement bank is a useless slab of concrete until you shred it. A street is another downhill to be tucked. A multi-level garage is built for cars until a gang of skaters discovers it. You've got to give the streets fair due, rolling is way cooler than walking. Don't restrict your boundaries, skate architecture is everywhere, grind every edge--You've gotta find all the lines you can."
This rhapsodic quote, which, like excerpts from many skateboarding editorials, is both endearing and cheesy. This nostalgic approach to skate aesthetics often provides room in skate videos and other places for a particularly schmaltzy soundtrack that both enthralls and repulses. Part Husker Du, part lost 80s never-rans, this music occupies a strange place in that it would seem out of place anywhere but as the soundtrack to skate videos. Here is an example from Transworld's _i.e._:
The song is by Built to Spill, which I guess people listen to without skate videos, but I really don't see how. It's sort of evocative of the controlled-noise, you-can-do-it attitude exhibited in the _Thrasher_ editorial. Especially "I got the words and the music wrong / but life goes on."
Both works (that is, the Thrasher editorial and the Built to Spill song) break the normal rules. They're both self-conscious and blushing but nevertheless touch a nerve with anyone familiar with skatboarding. The works become yet more endearing when the reader approaches each as an artifact of human labor, not as a piece of inspiration that fell from the heavens. The same way people enjoy their friends' bands, blogs, and books even when they break the rules of good lyiricism, writing, journalism, or even compelling diaryism.
By the way, _Thrasher_ has published its first twelve issues online at this url: [http://secure.thrashermagazine.com/index.php?SCREEN=articles_1st12]. Good for both nostalgia and a peek into the longest-lasting, most far-reaching codification of the skateboarding-punk connection. Found via boing boing. (wah wah.)
Wednesday, January 03, 2007
The Collapse of the Englishlanguage
At my previous copyediting job, publishers and editors would sometimes lament a current (or perhaps enduring) trend: Compound words are continually being replaced with a one-word amalgam. Dictionary.com offers the following explanation:
"The trend in English is for frequently used word combinations to 'grow together' from two words to one, sometimes passing through a hyphenated stage. The two-word phrase 'data base,' for example, is now most commonly written as one word: 'database.'" (http://dictionary.reference.com/help/faq/language/g22.html)
This appears alarming in part thanks to George Orwell's _1984_, in which havoc is wreaked in part because of the condensation of English words into a limited and difficult vocabulary. The Party created ridiculous-seeming constructions like _doubleplusungood_ to limit possible uses of language, thereby stifling dissent.
My first (and obviously not my best) thought was that the URL was a corroborater in this Orwellian trend. For some reason you can't put spaces in a url, so I figured that this spaceless block of information was responsible for the continued condensation of our compounds.
Not so; people have been making word mashups before either the Internet _or MTV_ existed. In the age of Old English, people would take concepts from foreign languages like Latin and enunciate them as one word that had formerly been two:
"The words that Old English borrowed in this period are only a partial indication of the extent to which the introduction of Christianity affected the lives and thoughts of the English people. The English did not always adopt a foreign word to express a new concept. [. . .] _Patriarch_ was rendered literally by _heahfæder*_ (high father) [. . .]. For _baptize (L. _baptizare*_) the English adapted a native word _fullian_ (to consecrate) while its derivative _fulluht_ renders the noun _baptism_." (Albert C. Baugh, and Thomas Cable. _A History of the English Language._ Fifth Edition. Prentice Hall: Upper Saddle River, NJ, 2002. 90.)
Baugh and Cable then list the following word connections.
fulluhtbæ[th]** (font)
fulwere (baptist)
fulluht-faeder (baptizer)
fulluht-had* (baptismal vow)
fulluht-nama (Christian name)
fulluht-stow* (baptistry
fulluht-tid* (baptism time) [Like Skating Time!*** I wish the link button were here! Youtube vid coming soon] (90).
The concept of shooting words together to create new ones is not new or even particular to English (cf., for example, Chinese _mei guo_* [_America/"beautiful land"_]). What creates anxiety for me, though, is that we feel the need to eliminate spaces in between words. Maybe we do this to trick ourselves into thinking we've created a new morphological unit where really very little has changed. At the very least, collapsing words is an unnecessary inconvenience for copyeditors.
But maybe it gets worse. At the publishing house, the big headache had to do with policymakers, which has recently entered the lexicon (formerly policy makers, like database/data base). The ostensible justification for this is that policymakers (people who somehow by definition make decisions) are different from policy makers (people who just sometimes happen to make decisions). By this rule, rhyme sayers become rhymesayers, snow beasts become snowbeasts, baked-goods makers become bakedgoodsmakers, and we get a bunch of whole new words, by virtue of eliminating the space. We also get a whole new kind of people--those who were destined to become doers of the various tasks their names indicate.
This is the kind of thing Orwell was worried about; when class or politics comes into play, the use of language becomes much more important. Feminists had something to say about _congressman_, and pretty soon we had political correctness as a bandage to put over these psychological barriers created by language. I'm skeptical that anything changes in the space between policy makers and policymakers, so the creation of these new words looks a lot like a falsehood perpetrated by hegemons. Because not much changes in terms of denotation when we get rid of the space, though, I'm also not sure that putting the space back in will serve to counter the political effects of language collapse. Politically correct language failed for similar reasons.
However, an interesting thing happens if we reverse compound-word creation. It is possible to create word phrases that convey new meanings by separating existing compound words into their possible (though nonlegitimated) morphemes. Witness Jay-Z, who was on the right track on the Diamonds Remix f. Kanye West. (Although the actual track listing shows Jay-Z featured, careful listeners really know who was featuring whom.) Jay doesn't exactly follow the scheme I've outlined in this paragraph, but he does transcend the trend and electrify listeners by cutting _businessman_ into pieces:
"I'm not a _businessman;_ I'm a _business,_ _man_!"
It gets even crazier when puns are introduced. Other possibilities, of the top of my head:
Trans former (former of transexuals, from _transformer_ =robot in disguise)
Cross dresser (Jesus Christ [wearer of crosses], from _crossdresser_ =wearer of women's clothing)
Punt er (kick her out [punt+'er], from _punter_ =football kicker in bad situations)
Space bar (watering hole in outer space, from _spacebar_ =the thing you hit to separate words)
I think Urban Dictionary, Juelz Santana, and Young Jeezy have all done a lot of work already in this category, but the possibilities appear endless; we can create new words out of two disparate ones, then separate them at different places to create new phrases. And in the meantime, we get puns, misunderstandings, and end-line rhyme (rapping)!
Subquestionz: Is there a way to prove that there is a finite (or infinite) number of word-combination/separation possibilities, just like the proof that there is an infinite number of prime numbers? Does anyone apply number theory formalization to words to answer such "big questions"?
*I apologize for the lack of accents on OE and other words. I can't figure out how to do em on a mac.
**OE Thorn has been replaced with [th].
***http://sulkynotes.blogspot.com/2006/12/no-joke_27.html
"The trend in English is for frequently used word combinations to 'grow together' from two words to one, sometimes passing through a hyphenated stage. The two-word phrase 'data base,' for example, is now most commonly written as one word: 'database.'" (http://dictionary.reference.com/help/faq/language/g22.html)
This appears alarming in part thanks to George Orwell's _1984_, in which havoc is wreaked in part because of the condensation of English words into a limited and difficult vocabulary. The Party created ridiculous-seeming constructions like _doubleplusungood_ to limit possible uses of language, thereby stifling dissent.
My first (and obviously not my best) thought was that the URL was a corroborater in this Orwellian trend. For some reason you can't put spaces in a url, so I figured that this spaceless block of information was responsible for the continued condensation of our compounds.
Not so; people have been making word mashups before either the Internet _or MTV_ existed. In the age of Old English, people would take concepts from foreign languages like Latin and enunciate them as one word that had formerly been two:
"The words that Old English borrowed in this period are only a partial indication of the extent to which the introduction of Christianity affected the lives and thoughts of the English people. The English did not always adopt a foreign word to express a new concept. [. . .] _Patriarch_ was rendered literally by _heahfæder*_ (high father) [. . .]. For _baptize (L. _baptizare*_) the English adapted a native word _fullian_ (to consecrate) while its derivative _fulluht_ renders the noun _baptism_." (Albert C. Baugh, and Thomas Cable. _A History of the English Language._ Fifth Edition. Prentice Hall: Upper Saddle River, NJ, 2002. 90.)
Baugh and Cable then list the following word connections.
fulluhtbæ[th]** (font)
fulwere (baptist)
fulluht-faeder (baptizer)
fulluht-had* (baptismal vow)
fulluht-nama (Christian name)
fulluht-stow* (baptistry
fulluht-tid* (baptism time) [Like Skating Time!*** I wish the link button were here! Youtube vid coming soon] (90).
The concept of shooting words together to create new ones is not new or even particular to English (cf., for example, Chinese _mei guo_* [_America/"beautiful land"_]). What creates anxiety for me, though, is that we feel the need to eliminate spaces in between words. Maybe we do this to trick ourselves into thinking we've created a new morphological unit where really very little has changed. At the very least, collapsing words is an unnecessary inconvenience for copyeditors.
But maybe it gets worse. At the publishing house, the big headache had to do with policymakers, which has recently entered the lexicon (formerly policy makers, like database/data base). The ostensible justification for this is that policymakers (people who somehow by definition make decisions) are different from policy makers (people who just sometimes happen to make decisions). By this rule, rhyme sayers become rhymesayers, snow beasts become snowbeasts, baked-goods makers become bakedgoodsmakers, and we get a bunch of whole new words, by virtue of eliminating the space. We also get a whole new kind of people--those who were destined to become doers of the various tasks their names indicate.
This is the kind of thing Orwell was worried about; when class or politics comes into play, the use of language becomes much more important. Feminists had something to say about _congressman_, and pretty soon we had political correctness as a bandage to put over these psychological barriers created by language. I'm skeptical that anything changes in the space between policy makers and policymakers, so the creation of these new words looks a lot like a falsehood perpetrated by hegemons. Because not much changes in terms of denotation when we get rid of the space, though, I'm also not sure that putting the space back in will serve to counter the political effects of language collapse. Politically correct language failed for similar reasons.
However, an interesting thing happens if we reverse compound-word creation. It is possible to create word phrases that convey new meanings by separating existing compound words into their possible (though nonlegitimated) morphemes. Witness Jay-Z, who was on the right track on the Diamonds Remix f. Kanye West. (Although the actual track listing shows Jay-Z featured, careful listeners really know who was featuring whom.) Jay doesn't exactly follow the scheme I've outlined in this paragraph, but he does transcend the trend and electrify listeners by cutting _businessman_ into pieces:
"I'm not a _businessman;_ I'm a _business,_ _man_!"
It gets even crazier when puns are introduced. Other possibilities, of the top of my head:
Trans former (former of transexuals, from _transformer_ =robot in disguise)
Cross dresser (Jesus Christ [wearer of crosses], from _crossdresser_ =wearer of women's clothing)
Punt er (kick her out [punt+'er], from _punter_ =football kicker in bad situations)
Space bar (watering hole in outer space, from _spacebar_ =the thing you hit to separate words)
I think Urban Dictionary, Juelz Santana, and Young Jeezy have all done a lot of work already in this category, but the possibilities appear endless; we can create new words out of two disparate ones, then separate them at different places to create new phrases. And in the meantime, we get puns, misunderstandings, and end-line rhyme (rapping)!
Subquestionz: Is there a way to prove that there is a finite (or infinite) number of word-combination/separation possibilities, just like the proof that there is an infinite number of prime numbers? Does anyone apply number theory formalization to words to answer such "big questions"?
*I apologize for the lack of accents on OE and other words. I can't figure out how to do em on a mac.
**OE Thorn has been replaced with [th].
***http://sulkynotes.blogspot.com/2006/12/no-joke_27.html
Monday, January 01, 2007
Movie Idea
I haven't been blogging because I was in Upper Michigan with a friend for a couple days to ski, but no matter, because on the chairlift I had an idea for a horror movie set on a ski slope. The rundown is as follows.
The Thing You Would Read about This Movie If You Saw It on the TV Guide Channel:
A group of hard-partying college coeds join some cute boys for a weekend of fun on the slopes in a little out-of-the-way Washington state town, when a blizzard traps them on the slopes. It's all fun and games until they realize there's a killer on the loose. 1/2*
The Characters:
-Stu, the cute boy who parties hard and loves to have a good time. Played by me.
-Eva, the cute girl who parties hard and loves to have a good time. Played by a female actress (or just a friend).
-Jimmy, John, and Joe, Jane, Jeanne, and Jessica, the cute (but not as cute) boys and girls who get killed pretty early (more on that later).
-Carl, the deformed and creepy ski-sharpener who works at the rental desk and sharpens the skis to a razor-sharp point (could he be the killer? or is he just very industrious?).
-Assorted bed-and-breakfast people who also get killed throughout the movie.
Sample Dialogue:
"We're trapped here at this creepy resort for like five days until the blizzard blows over."
...
"Let's Shred!"
Ways People Can Get Killed:
-Someone gets hog-tied to a ski pole
-Someone gets strapped to the cord that holds the chairlift and gets grinded up in the pulleys that make the chairlift go up the hill
-Ski decapitation
-Pushed off a cliff/chairlift
-Fed to the snow machine
-Forced to do awesome tricks in the half-pipe until they die of exhaustion
-Thrown in the fireplace
-Fed to Bears
The Ending:
I will not give away the ending.
[. . .]
Ok so it turns out that there's kind of a 1977 movie called Snowbeast that involves people getting killed on the slopes. At the IMDB Entry, Big Movie Fan from England says:
"Some Sasquatch type creature is butchering people staying at a ski resort and no-one seems to be able to locate it or kill it. Throughout the movie it kills people and causes some carnage. [. . .] I recommend Snowbeast to anyone."
My movie is just like Snowbeast except the killer is not a yeti, it is just a crazy person. 1/2*
I haven't been blogging because I was in Upper Michigan with a friend for a couple days to ski, but no matter, because on the chairlift I had an idea for a horror movie set on a ski slope. The rundown is as follows.
The Thing You Would Read about This Movie If You Saw It on the TV Guide Channel:
A group of hard-partying college coeds join some cute boys for a weekend of fun on the slopes in a little out-of-the-way Washington state town, when a blizzard traps them on the slopes. It's all fun and games until they realize there's a killer on the loose. 1/2*
The Characters:
-Stu, the cute boy who parties hard and loves to have a good time. Played by me.
-Eva, the cute girl who parties hard and loves to have a good time. Played by a female actress (or just a friend).
-Jimmy, John, and Joe, Jane, Jeanne, and Jessica, the cute (but not as cute) boys and girls who get killed pretty early (more on that later).
-Carl, the deformed and creepy ski-sharpener who works at the rental desk and sharpens the skis to a razor-sharp point (could he be the killer? or is he just very industrious?).
-Assorted bed-and-breakfast people who also get killed throughout the movie.
Sample Dialogue:
"We're trapped here at this creepy resort for like five days until the blizzard blows over."
...
"Let's Shred!"
Ways People Can Get Killed:
-Someone gets hog-tied to a ski pole
-Someone gets strapped to the cord that holds the chairlift and gets grinded up in the pulleys that make the chairlift go up the hill
-Ski decapitation
-Pushed off a cliff/chairlift
-Fed to the snow machine
-Forced to do awesome tricks in the half-pipe until they die of exhaustion
-Thrown in the fireplace
-Fed to Bears
The Ending:
I will not give away the ending.
[. . .]
Ok so it turns out that there's kind of a 1977 movie called Snowbeast that involves people getting killed on the slopes. At the IMDB Entry, Big Movie Fan from England says:
"Some Sasquatch type creature is butchering people staying at a ski resort and no-one seems to be able to locate it or kill it. Throughout the movie it kills people and causes some carnage. [. . .] I recommend Snowbeast to anyone."
My movie is just like Snowbeast except the killer is not a yeti, it is just a crazy person. 1/2*
Saviors 2006:
The Hold Steady
Heldref Publications (editing)
Shaw Recreation Center
Bud Heavy
Poker
No Resolve
NFL
Saviors 2007:
Big Titty and the Bobbies
Unemployment (writing/blogging)
Mount Ranier
Bud Heavy
Weightlifting
Resolutions
NBA
Scourges 2006:
Full-Time Employment
John Mellencamp's Sunday omnipresence
Parties and Our Forcible Removal Therefrom (?)
(Anticipated) Scourges 2007:
Substitute Teaching
God's Sunday omnipresence
Tacoma, WA
The Hold Steady
Heldref Publications (editing)
Shaw Recreation Center
Bud Heavy
Poker
No Resolve
NFL
Saviors 2007:
Big Titty and the Bobbies
Unemployment (writing/blogging)
Mount Ranier
Bud Heavy
Weightlifting
Resolutions
NBA
Scourges 2006:
Full-Time Employment
John Mellencamp's Sunday omnipresence
Parties and Our Forcible Removal Therefrom (?)
(Anticipated) Scourges 2007:
Substitute Teaching
God's Sunday omnipresence
Tacoma, WA
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