2009, AUGUST

August 31: Miss Grundy regrets…

You may have noticed we are having a bit of a problem with wildfires again. The big one, the Station fire, has been “5% contained” since they put the first hose on it. Last night it doubled in size to 85,000 acres, and every day it has been described as “totally out of control.” And “5% contained.” How does that work, exactly?

But that’s not what I want to bitch about today. Today’s topic is “surrounded,” as in “surrounded on three sides by fire.” YOU CAN’T BE SURROUNDED ON THREE SIDES. “Drop the gun a little, Louie, and come out with your hands mostly up; we’ve got you surrounded on three sides.” It would be a moderately unique problem, like the time my wife was sort of pregnant.

Our semi-illiterate newspaper also covered the bizarre 18-year Jaycee Dugard kidnapping, which occurred in an area described as an “unincorporated island largely surrounded by the hard-knock city of Antioch.” YOU CAN’T BE LARGELY SURROUNDED, EITHER, unless you’re in the middle of a herd of elephants.

My mother and Joe Pulitzer are both turning over in their graves, but that won’t help. (This rant won’t either, but it makes me feel better.) There was a time when reporters had some basic grasp of grammar, but now they all go to college and major in journalism, where proper usage is an elective only offered on Monday at 8:00 A.M. And editors are too busy looking for other jobs to pay much attention.

The impending demise of the newspaper is sad, but maybe not undeserved. The only problem is that means we’ll have nothing to read but blogs….

By the way, we have some new names for cloned mules for your consideration. See the last post.

COMMENT:

Pardon me, but does not "mostly surrounded" convey a clear concept, whether or not it is "correct"? You know exactly what they mean, don't you? Not much doubt in your mind? And is not the primary function of language to communicate?

How would you alternately word this concept?

-A

I knew you were going to say that.  "Give it up, Louie, you're mostly surrounded."  Is this not a negation of the entire concept?  Doesn’t it really mean "run, Louie, through the gap in our perimeter"? [can a perimeter have a gap?] Can't you have fire on three sides (or 4, or 12 for that matter, but I'd stick with 3), or around 300º, (spatial degrees, not thermal) without having to say surrounded? Surrounded doesn't have a mostly, it's an absolute, and the absoluteness IS the concept. If you allow modifiers like mostly or completely surrounded, you must also accept mostly or completely unique.

I could accept "nearly surrounded" more easily than "mostly." I once nearly got my girlfriend pregnant, but not mostly.  While we're at it, could your house (or your TV transmission tower) be mostly engulfed in flames?

You’re arguing that any usage is permissible as long as it’s comprehensible—OK, I’ll give you this one, unambiguous. But I say that subverting the meaning of a word even if unambiguous in a given context, must inevitably corrupt its meaning in general. “Surrounded on three sides by fire” is clear enough (I will even accept the implication that the surroundee has 4 sides), but the next time you use the word it will not mean the same thing. If the cops tell Louie he’s surrounded, he will have to ask “how surrounded am I?”

August 27

Yesterday’s Times carried the obituary of Dr. Gordon Woods, Professor of Veterinary Medicine at Colorado State, who helped create the first cloned mule. The very notion of a cloned mule doesn’t sit entirely comfortably in my consciousness, but I can’t quite come up with the word to describe my sense of it. Irony, maybe. That there are both male and female mules seems ironic enough.

Later in the article was the mention that the mule, Idaho Gem, went on to success on the mule racing circuit in Nevada and California. Mule racing circuit? The things you wouldn’t know if you didn’t read Brain Static! Oh, one more thing: Idaho Gem is a good name for a potato, but if you were smart enough to produce the first cloned mule, couldn’t you come up with a better name for it? Ladykiller, maybe, or Stud. How about Undaunted? Trojan? Why not Doodad or Stewballs? Or my favorite so far, Nosiree. Okay, a contest. I’m sure one of you can do better, so I offer a prize to whoever comes up with the best name for the first cloned mule.

ENTRIES RECEIVED:

Extra Virgin

Straight Arrow

Broken Arrow

Unpopular

Bent Double

August 24

“Ward” is an interesting word. As a noun, it means someone under another’s protection, like Dick Grayson (Bruce Wayne’s ward back in the days when a single male body-builder could have a young ward named Dick without eliciting sniggers). As a verb, it means to protect, so a warder wards his ward. Unless you are warding something off, which is to protect from. If you’re a farmer, you can ward chickens; if you’re a public health official worried about SARS, you ward off chickens. If there’s a riot in a prison ward, the warden may have to ward off his wards.

As a suffix, -ward means “in the direction of, as in “Look Homeward, Angel.” So while “to ward” means to guard or protect, “toward” is merely redundant.

“Greensward” comes from a different root: “sweard” is Old English for a skin or rind, so grass growing on the earth’s skin is a greensward. This leads to the interesting circumstance that the guy who maintains the fairways is a greens ward for the greensward. I’m not sure what to call his associate who keeps the greens in shape.

Tomorrow we’ll discuss “pleonasm,” which means “redundancy.” A “neoplasm” is a tumor. Since a tumor consists of redundant cells, it follows that a neoplasm is a pleonasm. (We won’t really deal with that tomorrow—I just always wanted to say it.)

August 18: It’s impossible.

As you probably know if you have heard the infernal noise and foul invective coming from my upstairs window, I am trying to learn to play guitar. My current assignment is to play barre chords, about which I will elaborate at another time. For now suffice it to say that it is not difficult so much as physically impossible.

That got me to thinking. Stories about musical compositions that players insisted were unplayable are too numerous to cite. I am told that the orchestra, led by the clarinetist, threatened to go on strike rather than perform the debut of Brahms’ Serenade #2 in A. And until David Helfgott, nobody could play “Rach 3” except Rachmaninoff himself. And of course there was Liszt.

The point is that somehow music once considered too difficult to play got played, and over the years became part of the general musical repertoire. How? Did it get easier?

Let’s not limit ourselves to music. The four-minute mile was once considered impossible, but today you’d barely qualify for a high school track meet with a time like that. Usain “Lightning” Bolt just ran 100 meters in 9.58 seconds. (What is it about Jamaica, anyway? The fastest woman and two of the three fastest men in the world are from Jamaica. What is there to run from in Jamaica???) I can remember when 10 seconds was considered undoable for 100 yards, let alone meters, but now everybody does it.

What happened? How is it that achievements once thought not humanly possible are now commonplace? Pianos didn’t get easier. Track shoes are improved, but not that much. Pole vaulting—well, maybe that’s a different story. When I was a kid, (Before Fiberglas) sixteen feet was thought to be about the limit. Now the record is what, twenty or thirty feet? Sometimes I wonder why those guys don’t achieve low earth orbit with those fiberglas slingshots.

Dunking a basketball used to be considered impossible. The players are taller these days, and it’s not surprising that somebody who stands 7 feet can do it, but even the “short” guys routinely fly that high these days. Spud Webb, who was (and probably still is) 5 1/2 feet tall, won the NBA slam dunk contest more than once. Are Nikes that springy? Why couldn’t Bob Cousy do it? Did he have lead feet?

I’m still waiting to meet someone who can lick his elbow, but it’s just a matter of time.

August 14

My father was old and feeble, cranky and demanding, occasionally incontinent.

Then he was dead.

It hardly seems right that that’s how I remember him. For 90% of his life he was none of those things, except maybe demanding. He was bright, witty, engaging, vigorous and creative, interested and interesting. I lived in his house for the better part of two decades and less than an hour away for another four, but my memory is formed mainly by those last few years. I feel bad about that.

I also feel bad about the fact that although I’m still continent, I am rapidly picking up all those other traits. And I’ve got a good twenty years—and maybe a few more not so good—before I’m done. I wonder how I will be remembered.

I’m not sure wondering how you will be remembered is a good thing. You might think if you were concerned about your legacy, you would try to be a better person, but Kim Jong Il seems to put the lie to that. Anyway, I’m not sure it works: I remember my dad the way he was at the end, but what about Michael Jackson? The instant he died, everyone seems to have forgotten the last 20 years.

Maybe the thing is to live so that when your time is near, you will like the way you remember yourself. Come to think of it, though, it may be problematic, or already too late: by the time I finish flossing my bottom teeth, I can't even remember if I've already done the top...

August 9

Time for another look through the Laxicon. This time, as promised, limited to Latin. Sort of.

AB INIRTIO: the overhanging belly of one who does not exercise.

AD LIBATUM: drink all you want.

AD NAUTEUM: a Victoria’s Secret commercial.

AMICUS PURIAE: platonic friend.

AMO, AMAS, ALAT: I have had many lovers.

BASSO PROFANDO: someone who sings off-color songs in a deep voice.

CAVEAT UMPTOR: if you're going to call a game in Yankee Stadium, watch for flying bottles.

COGITO ERRO SUM: I think I added it wrong.

DEJA BU: it’s Hallowe’en again.

E PLURIBUS TUNUM: after getting all the dolphins out of the net, we caught one lousy albacore.

EX POST FUCTO: lost in the mail.

That’s all Jeanine will let me put in for one day, and I've barely scratched the alphabet. I didn’t realize there were so many Latinisms—maybe I should start another book…

August 5

I’m in no particular hurry and I don’t mean to tempt fate, but if I were to drop dead right here at the keyboard I would die a satisfied man, for now I have truly seen everything. There is a new website designed to provide help for those members of the cinemagoing public that are prostatically overendowed. Called Runpee.com, it tells you at which points in currently playing movies you can get up and run to the bathroom without missing anything important.

In case you failed to plan ahead, it comes with an iPhone app (are there 2 p’s in “app”? Only one in “Runpee.” Maybe two if it’s a long movie and you really have a problem.) so you can dial it up during the show and find out that when Dumbledore says “off to bed now, pip pip” you’ve got a good five minutes before anything happens that advances the plot.

If you’re really compulsive, Runpee.com will even tell you what little actually did happen while you were gone. Or you could take your phone to the john with you and check it out there so you won’t miss something else while you’re watching your phone after you return to your seat.

Seems to me the next step, for perfect continuity, is to put the whole movie on Runpee and have some way to sync it with the theater showing so you truly won’t miss anything. It probably won’t be long before people just watch the whole show in the bathroom. And the next step will be to just stay home. If only somebody could come up with a way to watch movies at home….

Come to think of it, why should this concept be limited to movies? If Runpee is successful, they could expand into plays and concerts, parades, political speeches, funerals…. Who knows where this could lead? The ultimate would be to extrapolate from the average wait at your doctor’s and tell you whether you have time to go pee before you get in to have the Detrol discussion.

August 1

We’ve all heard about penicillin, x-rays, and the role that serendipity, or accident, plays in scientific innovation. It has been said that good inventions are the result of hard work, but great inventions are accidental. You may or may not remember these other stories:

A scientist at 3M was trying to produce a stong adhesive, but the best he could come up with was a really lousy glue that came off with almost no effort. Nobody higher up in 3M’s heirarchy wanted the stuff, but some years later one of the inventor’s pals thought to put some on his hymnal bookmarks to hold them in place. Voila! Post-It!

Superglue, on the other hand, wasn’t supposed to be glue at all. Chemists were trying to come up with a clear plastic for making pistol sights, but the damn cyanoacrylates kept polymerizing and sticking all the test materials together.

Coca-Cola didn’t work as a headache remedy, but has had some success at the other end of the drug store, in the fountain.

Walter Diemer was an accountant for the Fleer Chewing Gum Company who fiddled around with gum recipes in his spare time. He never intended to make a gum that was less sticky and more stretchy, that just happened. But when he discovered it made bubbles he thought he might be on to something. When he sold five pounds of the glop in a grocery store in one afternoon, he was pretty sure. And when he sold one and a half million dollars’ worth in the first year (and those are 1928 dollars), he knew bubble gum was a winner. Unfortunately, it was a winner for Fleer—Diemer never made a nickel on it. He didn’t care; he was a god with the kids in the neighborhood.

One of the things that keeps chemists (and other scientists, too, I suppose) pushing forward is the knowledge that if they invent something that has no other use, they can always market it as a toy. That’s how we got Silly Putty, a compound developed at General Electric during WWII that was supposed to be a synthetic rubber. Play-Doh never really made it as a compound for cleaning wallpaper, but the kids loved it. Slinky? It was supposed to be a spring, until it fell off a desk and walked across the floor.

There’s a new one out there lately: Silly Sludge. I don’t know what it was intended for, but its current function is to be watched. For only $2.69 you can get an ounce of black glop. Once you get it out of the packaging, you can “Watch it ooze! Watch it drip!” If this actually amuses the children today, you can ask for no further proof of the devolution of the species.

Or maybe you can. Bindeez Beads were Australia’s Toy of the Year in 2007—until it was discovered that if you ate them, a chemical in them broke down into GHB, the date rape drug known as Fantasy. In case you want some and can no longer find Bindeez at Toys-R-Us, you can make it by mixing floor stripper and drain cleaner. I guess, by a large stretch, that could be considered an invention that became a toy…

College students in Bridgeport CT who bought pastries from the Frisbie Baking Company found a better use for the pie tins.

At least once, it went the other way: what was supposed to be a toy became a scientific instrument. In the middle of the Pacific, a container of bathtub toys split open in a storm and dumped 29,000 rubber duckies into the drink. When some of them washed up in Alaska months later, oceanographers realized they could use them to track ocean currents.

And finally, I’m not sure if it counts as a toy, but Viagra was originally developed as a treatment for angina. It didn’t work very well and was about to be dumped when one of Pfizer’s researchers noticed an interesting phenomenon in the rats being given the drug…

The opinions expressed herein are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect--well, yes, come to think of it, I guess they do.

all materials on this site ©michael grossman. all rights reserved.

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