6x6

dress the flesh: the rise of the plant-butcher, via Kottke’s quick-links

three is a magic number: the creative talent behind “Schoolhouse Rock!”

linear b: excellent, freshly available image and textual library of the Voynich Manuscript and Codex Seraphinia 

neural handshake: meet the neurosurgeon who tried to hack his brain and nearly lost his mind

the genlteman’s recreation in four parts: seventeenth century common dog names included Ranter and Jollyboy

 chicken dance festival: a creative and award-winning re-imaging of The Shining is classified under the genre of cinegraffiti

6x6

a fifth of beethoven: brilliant remixing, superposition of classical compositions

sprockets: the future of dance according to a 1960s West German Sci-Fi series

just happy little accidents: out-of-focus stars reveal their true colours

duzen, tutoyer: the revolution that relaxed Sweden’s forms of address

blueprints: Atlas Obscura tells the story of the first publication in the world to be illustrated with photographic plates, a book on the algae of Britian

kineoscopic: Colossal features the newest hypnotic installations by sculptor Anthony Howe

applestand or given and received

I’ve really been enthralled lately with the discovery of a well researched and executed educational podcast series called Medieval Death Trip, which explores medieval chronicles and other texts more in depth than the usual footnoted references that they receive and the bidden commentary that they entail. Voraciously, I’ve been working though the extensive archive of episodes and am finding it a welcome change that a different light is cast on the Dark Ages, ethnographically speaking, rather than the usual cloistered and superstitious pall that’s afforded that epoch of history. As telling as linguistic developments and throw-backs are, one of the more illuminating points that revealed itself was in the urgency with which the need for family names came about.
Of course there was the administrate embargo of record-keeping in the form of the Domesday books that followed the Norman conquest of England for the assizers, but there was also a strong cultural emulation to give one’s offspring that patent of their usurpers, just like in the diglossic dissonance between the vernacular Old English—seen as backwards—and the courtly French. Quicker than ancient parlance fell away, giving one’s children Celtic and Nordic names went out of fashion. As few are called Cletus or Bethany any longer, within a single generation parents found it uncouth to draw on their heritage and no longer named their Æðelþryð, Ealdgyth, Ælfwine or Ælfgifu (respectively, friend or gift of the elves)—though Alfred (advised by elves) and Edgar (prosperous spear, rich prick) have survived. Old English and modern France, taken as an amalgam, have an embarrassment of names to choose from, but the Normans, though themselves of Scandinavian mercenary roots, only had a few: namely, Guillaume (reconquered as William) and Matilda (wife of said conqueror)—plus a few other crossovers, like Richard, Roger, Guy and Gilbert, which were not nearly as popular on the rankings of baby names in 1086. The potential for confusion was apparent soon enough, with brothers and sisters within the same nuclear family having to wonder who was being summoned. It sounds like a proverb, like how the camel got its hump or the Tower of Babel, to remove surnames from patronymic and codified reason, but it struck me as true and curious nonetheless. Incidentally, the name of the podcast refers to “Wisconsin Death Trip,” a thesis paper (adapted into a book and then as film) presented in a series of episodic newspaper clippings revelatory of the hardships of living in the US Midwest around latter decades of the 1800s.

bonhomie oder in a word

The German Sprachraum Unwort of the Year has been announced, and among many other nominees vying for top spot, and it is Gutmensch—having already been accorded second place in 2011 and in common-parlance for far longer. Politically- and journalistically-speaking, it’s sort of a catty, backhanded tactile term, coded word for a group (Gutmenschtum) that counters counter-thinking.

Someone described as such maybe touting the rhetoric of popular opinion—what’s politically-correct (Politische Korrektheit)—but in doing so betray a moralising naivety. Though the term evokes the idea of the Good German or the Good Soldier Švejk and is ultimately of Yiddish origin for an unpretentious person—ein gutt Mensch (itself having a very dicey provenance, cited in Mein Kampf as a do-gooder mentality that was a liability), opposing sides of especially divisive issues can parlay this characterisation as their antagoniser’s goon squad or deputised useful idiots. It’s strange how such loaded words can be used to cloak innocence and arrogance, but all rests in the context. What do you think? Is this selection inviting too much controversy, something as subversive as the un-word itself, especially considering on-going developments—or is political-correctness something deserving of assault?

6x6

now hist. and rare: the OED’s rather murderous beginnings and criminal contributors

memory & function (& memory): Scarfolk, the English town forever doomed to repeat the decade of the 1970s, is coming to the air-waves

stranger danger: get cyber safe

life-long learning: adult Norwegian teaches herself to play the violin and documents her amazing improvement

presto the magician: an analysis and appreciation of the Saturday morning cartoon Dungeons & Dragons

nengajo: beautiful collection of Japanese greeting cards for the Lunar New Year, via Everlasting Blort

6x6

octarine: there’s a robust movement to name Element 117 after fantasy author Terry Pratchett, not to the exclusion of honouring Lemmy Kilmister with a heavy metal homage

★: for the artist’s 69th birthday, a review and analysis of David Bowie’s 25th album

putting on the ritz: a fascinating exploration of the luxury hotels, secret vertical villages of 1920s New York

dialogue ballons: beluga whales communicate with bubbles

montage: gorgeous, expansive architectural collages, via the Everlasting Blort

amanuensis: New York Public Libraries release thousands of archival images and seek a resident remixer

minced oath or lightwater syndrome

Swearing came about as a linguistic loophole to prohibitions against blasphemy. Socrates’ frequent but rather timid exclamation of “by the dog”—referring to constellation of Canis Major and not “god” backwards, of course—was even known as the Rhadamanthine oath in order to forever ridicule that king’s embargo on invoking the names of the gods in vain.
All sorts of stealth cursing came about and though a lot of the inventions ring as old-fashioned and mincing profanity, which is almost equally unacceptable in polite-company as one’s dancing around the taboo and not making the effort to really distance oneself from vulgar language. Self-censorship’s euphemistic history extends as far back to when we first learned to mask our unmitigated reactions with language: consarnit, Sam Hill, Land of Goshen, Jesus wept (which is considered suitable as one is reciting the shortest verse in the Bible), ‘zounds for by Christ’ wounds and ods bodilns—by God’s nails. If we’ve somewhat matured in keeping our speech cultured (and possibly our own minds out of the gutter), it’s interesting then that we’re being drawn back into the phase of snickering humour by those filters we put in place to keep content age-appropriate and our immediate environment relatively smut-free. Those automated bowdlerisers (despite advances in the industry) perennially and incredulously inconvenience residents of the English towns of Sussex and Penistone and the titular village—as well as many unfortunately named persons—and the phenomena is called the Scunthrope Problem, after another municipality in Lincolnshire with Norse etymology. Keeping a swear-jar near at hand is a good motivator to be as colourful with one’s metaphors as possible or at least to retain adult-decorum.  Alright governor.

5/5

The ever-intriguing Kottke shares an interesting look on how emoji data labels can be effective, subjective tools for prompting the formation of better sleep-hygiene. Immediate instructions such as the routine presented in the interview at the link can be habit-forming, it seems, and is reflective of the presence this iconography has as a complement to language.
Ages ago, I developed my own system of short-hand and employed this vocabulary (which struck me as a quite memorable hieroglyphics) for note-taking and felt my retention was better for it and still think in those symbols from time to time. Beyond personal rankings and pet-use, there’s also apparently a trend in critics’ circles that gravitating away from “stars” towards more expressive pictorial scale. We’ll see how long this approaches lasts and hopefully it will have run its course before a Rosetta Stone is needed to decipher what two moai and one Great Wave off Kanagawa means for a restaurant. What do you think? Do you defer to the experts in the first place? Maybe simpler is better.

6x6

tactile: using ultra-sonic puffs of air, researchers in Japan have created holograms that one can feel 

odeon: a tour of the documentation and preservation project sponsored by the Goethe Institute to catalogue the classic movie houses of Africa

nasa-eames: 1970s conceptions of the future of space colonies, via Puppies and Flowers 

mâché: beautiful and inspired paper reliquaries  

potnonomicaphobic: though holiday left-overs are nearly spent by this point, here’s a nice celebration of words for acute food phobias

procrastination: tsundoku is Japanese for letting books pile up on one’s shelves without being read

solipsism or monkey see, monkey do

One of the more compelling ideas that I’ve encountered lately supposes that humans have developed such a relatively advanced range of expression over other animals—not that other creatures are silent and without cognition and we are constantly underestimating the mental worlds of our close and more distant relations—due to the limiting factor of solipsism. Metaphysics usually does not rear itself in the study of biology and evolution, but perhaps this position, which is one of the hallmarks of Cartesian philosophy and refers to a mode of thought where only one’s own mind can be accorded absolute surety and trust and there are impressions out there whose essence and depth is unknowable and might not exist at all.
Apes might not wonder if they are brains in vat or regard their fellow primates as philosophical zombie—possibly but we are not privy of course to those thoughts, and do display a limited sense of collaboration when it comes to things like bonding or child-rearing and can learn. A test that’s always interesting for all sorts of species is how they react to their reflection in a mirror. One does not see evidence, however, of the kind of advanced cooperation and planning dependent on others that might prompt the cultivation of vocabulary and language. In colonial species, like bees, ants and mole-rats we see apparently the opposite extreme, where there is no self, only the hive. I wonder if it’s in the human psyche to transcend that doubt in order to get along yet retain and be able to articulate those nagging concerns—whether our world is a delusion crafted by an Evil Genius and we are in the Matrix—that endowed and nurtured communication and abstraction. Following the old regime of esteeming animals as dumb and insensitive and without souls, humans did not see any value in reaching out to them and similarly, if one was unable to escape (even provisionally) his or her epistemological prisons, there would be little need to communicate beyond the most basic level. What do you think? Given the near gentic and physiological sameness, could origins of language lie in this skepticism and dissociation?

5x5

gnomon: sundial with exacting perforations shows the time of day in digits with instructions to make your own

race to the bottom: more and more countries are outfitting outposts in Antarctica, via Superpunch

biscione: the heraldic serpent borne on the Alfa-Romeo logo is a viper eating a child—or possibly a Moor

out standing in the field: more winners and runners up for National Geographic’s photography contest

fist-bump: handshaking protocol from around the world

trivium and hoi polloi

I’ve really been enthralled with my latest podcast discovery in Doctor William Webb’s Heritage Podcast project (thanks to a hale and hearty recommendation by Sharyn Eastaugh, creator and hostess of The History of the Crusades, to get on board with the syllabus before the ambitious project gets too expansive to catch up on back episodes) and had a welcome reminder on the virtue of a Liberal Arts degree—not just one in name but one that’s true to original core curricula as it was expounded in ancient times.
With participatory democracy burgeoning and society becoming more hierarchical but also urban, leaders of the Polis recognised the need for a basic civics education requirement to attract and retain individuals with the ability to distinguish philosophy from sophistry and developed a three-pronged prospectus called the trivia—grammar (the basic rules of communication—stringing together λογος), rhetoric (the art of persuasion and articulacy and perhaps the training to wield it for one’s own ends) and logic (the faculty to soberly judge the validity and truth of argument and perhaps keenly peer beyond grandiloquence). Once the tradition of active and engaged citizens started to be supplanted by feudalism and the fealty of labourers and the political man became a subject, his affairs rarefied and to be managed by hereditary kings, as the Classical World came to an end, basic education was something seditious and there was no demand for an informed and potentially rebellious under-class. Of course, the institution of the Church—with its own vested interests in sustaining a community of inquisitive and engaged members—was the mainstay of continuing-education—augmenting the trivium with four additional disciplines: mathematics, geometry, music and astronomy.
Perhaps these subjects smack of something a bent a bit toward the practical and vocational, their coursework—as with the unfolding of word, language—however, can be expressed as the germination of number, leading to number in space, number in time and then with astronomy, number in time and space. Perhaps we’ve again entered a time when a liberal education (the motto of my alma mater—which evolved out of a preparatory school and is rather a singular beast in higher-education is a Latin malapropism “facio liberos ex liberis libris libraque”—I make free men from children by means of books and a balance) is something to be disdained as a superfluous luxury or even a liability when the plebiscite is expected to keep its collective head down and not stint the ceremony of elections with engagement and activism that goes beyond party-membership and reinforced believes. Being schooled in a little bit of logic seems especially vital now for countering the techniques in the media and politics that present the fallacious and specious as something incontrovertible, and something (regardless whether one becomes a charismatic or not—I think one can’t truly start believing his or her own deceits if discovered through honest means) for disabusing ourselves of our own biases. Despite the tenor of the age, there’s no excuse for letting one’s faculties atrophy. Don’t let it rest on the President’s desk. Q.E.D.

4x4

yavin 4: a graphic designer from New Zealand designed flags for one hundred planets of the Star Wars expanded universe

hang low the mistletoe: an appreciation of the parasitic plant whose Yuletide tradition is probably its least interesting attribute

oracle bones: Quartz furnishes an engrossing account of the historical development of Chinese writing and the language’s font foundry

non-canon: the next Star Trek film will treat the last as apocryphal

oversight or sense and sensibilia

Advocate of plain speaking, believing that heuristically people ought to be able to explore perception and reality and arrive at insights and truths through logic and simple language alone, Oxford professor John Langshaw Austin (no relation to author Jane, though much of his linguistic speculations were posthumously packaged under the above title) in the 1930s greatly expanded the nuanced understanding of the way meaning is imparted, demonstrating that sentences can be more than just interrogative, declarative or directive and in fact usually are none of these things and instead fall somewhere on the spectrum of doing things, a social task or a phememe.
After his wartime service in his majesty’s secret service (a tenure that a whole cadre of Oxbridge instructors took up) for which Austin was credited for as being instrumental in the success of the D-Day Invasion, Operation Overlord—however, perhaps influenced by his intelligence work, his research became even more engrossing in its accessibility. Packing his philosophical quiver, Austin dissected the language of excuse and pardon that people toss about with apparent abandon to find the pregnant meaning in all the ways to say that one is sorry and distance one’s self from moral decrepitude and omission. Not only is there an endless buffet of expressions to choose from to exculpate oneself—oversight, accident, mistake, mishap, misunderstanding, misstep, confusion, etc.—they all have subtle ethical connotations, on second look, that warrant further investigation. Though not naturally duplicitous, people are probably most honest about their feelings when they’re begging-off.

5x5

queen of the nile: Egyptologists are most assured that Nefertiti is buried in a newly discovered chamber in Tutankhamun’s tomb

lorentz invariance: next month, the European Space Agency will launch a probe to confirm or deny the last major phenomenon predicted by the General Theory of Relativity—gravitational waves

bulla bulla: one linguist takes on the nomenclature and naming-conventions of a Swedish furniture giant

pretty maids all in a row: the brilliant BLDGBlog ponders further on the cyborg plant trials

arachne: genetic analysis of spider webs reveal that they incorporate the DNA of their prey in their weaving

docomo or the queen’s english

As is my wont, I must have glossed over this rather disturbing announcement and I truly appreciate Bob Canada for reviving this discussion—thinking that the Word of the Year as nominated and elevated by the venerable institution of Oxford University Press was “emoji,” which I thought to be pedantically behind the times, and not an emoji.
Albeit their flagship OED aims to capture language as it is actually used and not prescribe how it ought to be—despite the authority that it enjoys, I am not sure what to make our language and lexicon when “Face with Tears of Joy”—which sounds like a title museum curators would give to distinguish a work with no name, is celebrated. What do you think? I certainly use the glyphs for punctuation, I guess at the expense of full-stops, but in general not for a whole thought. Maybe Oxford’s contender was chosen too because of the ambiguity that can be substituted and encoded and be assigned different signals and meanings—like the suggestive eggplant or nail-polish representing some hollow accomplishment or indifference or the agony of being pepper-sprayed here pictured.

orthograph or parts of speech

The fantastic Æon magazine has a very fine retrospective essay on the singular strangeness of the English language that hits all the big, perplexing points for this, the only language that subjects its young and impressionable speakers to the rigours of spelling-bees (French students have dictation contests, which seems a more practical skill to develop).
This language (from an anglo-centric point of view) is the outlier in terms of using gendered nouns, declension, fails on intelligibility and has a very motley grammatical structure. Though others have been exposed to the say waves of conquest, English seemed one of the few clever and stubborn enough to survive in one form or another by adopting and incorporating the form and style of its invaders—the Romans, the Norse and the Normans. Whether these unsystematic traits make the language difficult or at a point unpenetrable is hard to say—it’s hard to argue, no matter one’s take on it, of English’s dominance and attempts to supplant those quirks with constructed, universal languages have not been met with overwhelming success.

language laboratory oder verenglischen

The Local, Germany’s English language daily, profiles an Italian living in Berlin who, frustrated with obstacles to practising the German language properly and gaining a better mastery of it in an international office setting turned to inventing needful compound words to express contemporary, specific anxieties that no word exists for. Though this lexicon is by its nature a non-standard and idiosyncratic one, building it is a clever way to strenghten one’s vocabulary and imagination. For the nonce, verenglishchen is to rebuff a foreigner’s best efforts to address another in his or her native language by replying in English. I ought to embark on the same sort of project.

nuance and nudge

Mental Floss has a funny and informative comparison chart of how emojis are rendered differently on different devices, and the deviation from the norm seems quite significant for much of the core vocabulary.
It’s really interesting to think that we rarely stray from our familiar, native ecology and might never appreciate how one meaning is subject to code-switching (alternating between two different syntaxes) in a sort of meta-communication. Of course, it is humorous rubbish that our short-hand might become garbled but the general ramifications might become something broader in terms of precision and understanding.

5x5

genealogy room: via Boing Boing, a service that maps the prevalence and distribution of one’s family name

the plot thickens: a 1919 screenwriters’ resource of ten million photoplay expositional combinations

die roboter: elementary school class in Mainz perform Kraftwerk

your brain on drugs: testing the web-spinning capabilities of spiders under the influence was an abortive forensics ploy for drug-testing

lowered-expectations: due to a profound lack of same-species mates, the coywolf is emerging