2009, JUNE

June 25

I recently heard a guest on Car Talk identify herself as “a English professor.” Now do you understand why we’re in trouble? She didn’t know anything about her car, either. Then I heard a writer who should know better talk about something being very unique, but that’s so commonplace as to be almost acceptable. Annoys the hell out of me, though. Listen, people: you can’t be somewhat pregnant and you can’t be very unique. That’s not to say something can’t be mostly unique, though: if you invent a battery-operated blivet that’s entirely novel except for the batteries, it’s mostly unique.

Some words just don’t mean what they ought to. Why doesn’t extraneous describe an April that is wetter than usual? And shouldn’t precipitous mean raining?

How about scurvy? Everybody knows scurvy affected sailors because they didn’t have enough vitamin C in their diet at sea. But “pelagic” refers to the open ocean. So why did they waste the name pellagra on niacin deficiency?

If the prefixes “a-“ and “an-“ mean “without” (as in amoral and anesthesia) shouldn’t alive mean dead? And shouldn’t animal describe the brief, blissful state of the airwaves when Don Imus was unemployed? Why doesn’t annotate mean erase? Why doesn’t annul mean to make effective?

Can you be retired if you weren’t tired before?

Why doesn’t unsavory mean “bland”? The two words, savory and unsavory, don’t even apply to the same things. I’ve never eaten anything that would be called unsavory, and I never met a savory character. OK, there was a girl when I was much younger, but my wife may be reading this, so I’m not going there.

Then there’s “anti.“ Shouldn’t antimony be a culture that encourages barter? And shouldn’t antipathy mean in favor of health?

Probiotic is a word that yogurt makers invented and I don’t really know what it’s supposed to mean, but if it exists at all, it ought to have something to do with a preference for stereo sound (pro+bi+otic).

Yogurt reminds me about irregularity. What the heck is that? It ought to mean, with reference to one’s colon, unpredictability. Once a week or once a month is regular, after all. Why is “constipation” a bad word, one that must be replaced by a word that doesn’t even mean the same thing? If you are concerned that you don’t poop every 24 hours, why not whisper to Jamie Leigh Curtis that your bowels are noncircadian? BTW, have you noticed that all the constipation ads are addressed to women? I guess men just don’t give a …. Or do.

June 21: Happy summer. Also Fathers' Day.

Did I mention we are having the inside of the house repainted? Bet you thought that would be a piece of cake. But sitcom episodes and even entire divorces have been built on choosing the color, so it’s not something to be undertaken lightly. Jeanine and I were not that far apart. In theory. It began to get complicated when she wanted something called “Peach Fade” for the bedroom and “Treasure Map” (how’s that for a descriptive name for a color?) for the living room, and I couldn’t tell them apart.

The process is simple enough: you go to the store and bring home a bagful of those little paint chips. Then you lay them on the couch, on the carpet, on whatever you want the color to go with. Somewhere in that vast sea of available colors, there has to be at least one you can agree on, and really it wasn’t that hard—took only three or four trips to the store. Stores, plural.

So that’s it, right? Oh, my dear, clearly you’ve never done this before. If you had, you would know that a whole wall of whatever you choose is not going to look the same as the little chip. One time we left the painters alone for the weekend and came home to a peacock blue house. So this time we had Lowe’s mix up a half-pint of our chosen color and painted a big swatch on the living room wall. It bore a family resemblance to the sample, but a teensy bit dark: the living room looked a lot like a coal miner’s lung.

More samples. We finally found a nice warmish beige that looked good on the wall and sent the painter off to get some more and go to work.

I knew I should have been watching. He got the hallway and half the living room done before I noticed it was purple.

Much scratching of heads. The purple sort of matched the chip, but it didn’t look purple on the chip. The chip looked kind of like the tiny droplet of paint on the top of the sample can. The sample, allegedly “Treasure Map,” looked warmish beige on the wall, but the gallon, equally allegedly “Treasure Map,” was a distinctly pinkish purple. We finally determined that they had made the sample wrong. Back to the store. The guy at Lowe’s figured out that they had used Olympic’s tints in Valspar’s base, so he tried it with Valspar’s tints. Much better, not purple at all. More like pure pink.

Eventually they managed to match the color we wanted and I’m waiting to see how it looks on the wall. We’re calling the purple a primer coat.

Give credit to Lowe’s: they may not know what they are doing, but they’re very accommodating. They exchanged an empty gallon can of Olympic purple for a full can of more expensive Valspar beige without a question or a surcharge. And the next day they took back two more gallons without a whimper.

Now Jeanine says she likes the purple.

June 17

The other day I talked about sex and told you everything husbands need to know about their wives. (If you missed it, here it is again: shut up and sign the check.) I distinguished between sex and gender, so today I thought I’d address the notion of gender.

The English language doesn’t have any; we don’t care about masculine or feminine with respect to inanimate objects. Maybe a few English speakers do, but they are a very small minority. In other languages it matters. Sometimes it’s helpful for understanding, like in German. With their horrendously convoluted sentences, it makes it easier to figure out what adjective goes with what noun. Sometimes gender is perfectly logical, if superfluous: “dress” is feminine in every language I know. So is “flower,” which seems appropriate to me, if not necessarily logical.

Sometimes gender seems completely arbitrary. In German and the Romance languages, the word for “hand” is feminine, while the word for “foot” is masculine. Unless you are talking about an animal’s foot, which is feminine in all cases. Arms are masculine, at least in French, Italian, and Spanish, but legs are feminine. Come to think of it, maybe that makes sense….

“Bed” and “pillow” are both masculine in France, but feminine in Spain. In French, Spanish, or Italian what you sit on (“chair”) is feminine but what you stand on (“floor”) is masculine. Unless it’s an armchair, which is masculine in France, or a dance floor, which is feminine in Italy.

In France, the sun is masculine and the moon feminine. In Germany, it’s the other way around. Imagine trying to translate a French poem about the sun chasing the moon across the sky. Germans would interpret the metaphor a bit differently from the French. But isn’t that always the way?

June 14

Differences between sexes—not genders, which is a word belonging to linguists concerned with matching the form of modifiers to their nouns or verbs. It was commandeered for use in social discourse by prudes who didn’t want to say sex. But I like to say sex. There, I’ll say it again: sex—can be useful, annoying, highly pleasurable, inconvenient, infuriating. But not ignored.

I’m all for equality of the sexes, or at least equal opportunity. But let’s not confuse equality with identity. Women are not the same as men. You may have noticed this if you’ve looked at both. Aside from anatomical and physiological distinctions, which I wholeheartedly applaud, there are other, more subtle differences. For instance, no woman is ever satisfied that anything is in the right place. If you live with one, you know what I mean. No matter how long the furniture has been where it is, you need to try a different arrangement every so often, just in case it might be better. And not just furniture; the same thing goes for appliances and anything even remotely moveable. If the microwave is in the corner, it needs to come out about two feet. If the spice rack is two feet out, it might be better in the corner. I don’t know why this is, but I’m pretty sure no man behaves this way.

Women are sort of like this with paint, too. After some years (exactly how long is a mystery buried deep in the X chromosome) they decide it’s time for a home makeover, and the whole house needs to be repainted. We’re going through that now; my wife has picked out a whole bunch of new colors. Never mind that to my eye they look an awful lot like the old colors; male wisdom is knowing when to close your mouth and open your checkbook.

Women don’t like the same movies as men, and they refuse to be fair about it. I’ll go to a chick flick with my wife from time to time, but no way is she going with me to a movie with car chases and stuff blowing up.

Ladies don’t blow their noses, either. It’s something I’ve never understood, and if anyone can enlighten me, I would appreciate it. They hold a Kleenex up in the neighborhood below their eyes and make this dainty little pfft, pfft. There’s barely a sound, not enough wind to ruffle a duckling’s down, let alone accomplish its intended purpose. Jeanine agrees that it’s not very effective, so why bother at all? It’s really more of a blot than a blow, but then why pretend? I just don’t get it.

June 10

I don’t understand the appeal of tweeting: a stunted communication good only to practice for “25 words or less” contests or 2 converse with twit

June 8

So I call American Airlines to check the arrival time of the flight I’m supposed to meet. A machine answers, tells me to “diga Español” if I want to speak Spanish, and informs me that my call may be recorded.

It then proceeds to give me a series of automated choices. My responses are equally automated, since I can only say what the machine requires for any option. I know this because I tried. If you use a word they don’t like (like “representative”), it tells you “that is not a valid option” and repeats the choices it will accept. If you do it twice, the damn thing hangs up on you.

As long as I keep to the script, it works well enough until the machine tells me that the flight is delayed, hasn’t departed yet, and will arrive in three hours. It’s a five-hour flight and it’s still on the ground but it will arrive in three hours. “Umm, wait a minute…” I say. The machine doesn’t understand “umm,” and goes on to inform me that Flight 455 will arrive at Terminal T. “What? There is no Terminal T at LAX. You HEAR me, you idiot? THERE IS NO TERMINAL T!”

Until that moment, I didn’t understand why they would record a purely automatic “conversation.” Now I get it: death threats.

June 3

If you read Chapter 11 (too late now: Chapter 12 is already up), you know I took a walk through the Taylor guitar factory and fell in love. The rest of the story will appear, somewhere, eventually, in Memoir Of An Obsession, the story of my first year of musical studies. If you don’t want to wait that long, I can at least tell you that I bought one. Not a Taylor. Not, in fact, anything I had in mind. It’s just that while trying out instruments in the store, I fell in love again. So I now have a rather dowdy looking but awesome sounding Martin. It’s supposed to make my practice easier. It doesn’t. But I have been trying to learn to play the guitar for almost half a year so I now qualify as an expert on what’s wrong with guitars.

They’re backwards.

First of all, if you play a right-handed guitar (yes, they do make left-handed ones) and you are right handed, your left hand has to do all the work while your good hand just goes up and down. I know fingerpickers have to move their right fingers pretty fast, but they mostly stay in the same place while the left hand flies all over the fretboard. Why not use the hand that’s dextrous to do all that moving?

Hold a guitar and look down at the strings. There are six of them. The one closest to you is called the sixth. It makes the lowest sound. If you strum down to the first, the notes get higher. So you move your hand down to move the sound up. If you read music, you move down the strings to move up the staff, unless you are looking at tablature, a simplified notation unique to the guitar that has a six-line “staff” representing the 6 strings. With #1 on top, despite the fact that in real life #6 is on top.

There are 12 frets (well, 12 useable ones) numbered, logically enough, from left to right. As you go along the neck toward the body of the guitar you are going up, contrary to the usual anatomic arrangement. Anatomy aside, the neck is generally pointed away from the ground (I'm talking about real guitarists here, not those lunatics that fling their instruments around any old where), so you literally have to go down to go up.

So on the guitar up is down, right is left, and high is low. Other than that (except for the finger-crippling strings, which could easily be depressed using a set of keys that would be painless to operate) the guitar is a perfect instrument.

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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