Hermenautic Circle blog

I had a piece in the Boston Globe's Ideas section yesterday about Christmas Superstitions.

If you love reading about old superstitions (and I really do), hie yourself to Google Book Search and look for British Popular Customs, Present and Past. Be warned, though, that reading aloud from this to others is something that can be done only in very small doses. There's a limit to how many "Did you know"s? most people want to hear ....

My friend Peter is most definitely not a wine importer--he has chided me many times for describing or introducing as such. Rather he works for a wine importer. He prefers beer to wine, doesn't drink coffee, and unlike everyone else in Manhattan, he does not boast nor brag about himself. He is humble to a fault. At first I found his slackadasical attitude towards the grape (and everything else really) confusing; he knows the restaurant and wine worlds quite well, has an excellent palette, and yet he seems quite bored with it all. He actually says things like, "Oh, it's so hard going on all these wine tours in Italy. I get so tired of eating and drinking." He would rather talk about indie rock harpist Joanna Newsom than argue terroir. But his whatever attitude is actually quite refreshing and it means that when he actually likes a wine, it's very, very special.

Enter a layered, fruity, complex white wine from Valle Isarco in Northern Italy. I recently order a mixed case from Peter,letting him do the selecting. The first bottle I opened was this little dream--Cantina Produttori Valle Isarco EKK Kerner Della Valle Isarco Sudtirol-Alto Adige Eisacktaler DOC - 2006. It is made in a more German or Austrian style than you'd expect from an Italian wine, with a nice amount of crispness. Apples, peaches, a bit of cream, it's utterly delicious, with just enough acid to work amazingly well both on its own or with food.

I served it with Thai food--a super-fast "shrimp in coconut sauce" I made last night. I heated coconut milk with a teaspoon of curry pasted, added some meyer lemon, broiled the shrimp, steamed some broccoli in the microwave and threw all of it on leftover brown rice. Topped with chopped cilantro and green onions, it was a perfectly OK weeknight meal. The wine made it very Friday night.

We finished the bottle watching the Grinch Who Stole Christmas with our two boys, feeling less Grinch-like than usual.

R. Walker posted a photo:

luxante has added a photo to the pool:

Cranky night. Frustrated by rl/sl communications, frequent crashes, and slow-motion collaborations on projects. I suspect some of my cohorts are getting distracted, as Achariya says, "by the shiny". /me snaps her fingers and mutters "let's go let's go".

AP — TUALATIN, Ore. — Police say Ryan Osbrink was getting ready for a job at the sheriff’s department and practicing his draw when his .45-caliber pistol discharged, killing his wife.

Tualatin police say 23-year-old Kimberly Osbrink was entering the room Sunday night when the bullet struck her in the abdomen.

The Clark County, Washington, sheriff’s department has delayed hiring the 24-year-old Osbrink until the investigation is complete. He was to report for duty on Wednesday.

The police say the shooting was unintentional, and the weapon was Osbrink’s.

jay: delayed? delayed! maybe he’s not for hiring, re: wife killing/poor gun habits?

[picture from Flickr -- thanks, bradlauster!]

David Smay sent me a link to a lovely long article in the Guardian about using unusual words: From albedo to zugunruhe, in which the author, James Meek, talks about words he hasn't known and his own uneasiness about using rarer (but more exact) words.

It also has this great quote in it:

The point at which a man starts finding discrepancies in dictionaries is probably the point at which he should go for a long holiday to a place that is sleazy and restoring.

My take (and yes, I know it's self-serving, in that I make dictionaries) is that, in belletristic writing, when presented with an otherwise-equal choice between a fun, unusual word, and a boring, commonplace word, you should always choose the unusual one. Why deny your readers the "aha!" moment of finding a perfectly apt, elegantly descriptive word?

(Of course, I also think "when in doubt, wear orange," so you perhaps should take this with a grain of salt.)

Literary writing is a way to introduce readers not just to facts and ideas and emotions but to beautiful words: imagine writing a guidebook to a place that left out the best restaurants because they weren't on the subway line ... if something is worthwhile, people will find a way to get there. If a word is perfect, people will figure it out.

I am NOT suggesting that technical or workaday writing should be full of fifty-cent words; "This way to the egress" is a scam, not an invitation to learning. (Or, at least, not an invitation to learning that is received gratefully!) But literature, long-form journalism, and essay writing allow for more lexical scope, and you should take advantage of it, to the best of your ability. Why not?

A subscriber from long ago rediscovered us again today, and asked particularly after one article: Noun Overuse Phenomenon Article, from Vol. 2, No. 4. So there it is -- click on the link to read it. It's a favorite!

Please remember that if you are ordering VERBATIM as a gift subscription and our link is recalcitrant, you can always let the order go through and email us with the gift recipient's address. We are not so overwhelmed by the press of orders that we won't be able to match up your payment and your gift ...

Bill was a good friend. One day, as all curious preteen good friends of the opposite sex do, we decided to take our friendship to the next level: we were going to make out. I don’t remember the reason why we decided to complete such a mature part of our lives that particular day; it was broad daylight on a summer afternoon and Bill’s mom, a school employee who was off during summer, was lurking somewhere in the vicinity. Thus we decided we had to keep this tonsil hockey session discreet. We snuck around the back of Bill’s dad’s tool shed: it was perfect.

We got ready. I licked my lips, took a deep breath; not only was I about to taste whatever Bill had for lunch, but I would also get a taste of what it was like to be a woman, or at least a teenager, which every 11 year old girl desperately longs for. This was it.

Bill leaned in, and I took a slight step backward and just as the magic started happening I lost my balance and stepped backward right into a ditch. The moment was over. Our hearts stopped fluttering, birds stopped singing, sweet music stopped playing and the ambient noise of cars and the hum of lawn mowers came back, along with our we’ve-never-done-this-before nervousness. Bill helped me out of the ditch and we decided to go play videogames instead – maybe we’d give adulthood a try later.

As we were walking across the yard, my foot felt a little sticky. I took a glance down and realized my entire foot and the grass surrounding it was covered in blood, and there was a fresh supply spurting from a gaping wound in my left ankle. Bill raced off to find his mom and I hobbled up the sun-faded wooden stairs, sat down, and waited patiently on the deck. His mom came dashing out of the house, wide-eyed and frantic with a cordless phone in one and a dishtowel in the other.

Her face was paler the tan line where my socks should've been (a combination of socks and shoes could've probably prevented this mess in the first place). She dropped the phone twice as she fumbled to dial my mom and shoved the towel on the gash; as it soaked with blood she would peep under it to see the carnage, mumble some kind of frantic "oh dear" concerned mother type of mumble, and ask me how I was feeling. Perhaps I was still reeling from my recent brush with adulthood, but I wasn’t feeling much of anything. All I kept saying was, "wow, it's so cool, look you can see bone!" Every time I said it, her face turned from white to green and back again.

My mom's car flew into the driveway and she charged up the stairs. A nurse for a million years, she automatically went into nurse mode. It was determined that I needed stitches, stat! We called our family doctor and were instructed to go to a hospital that we had never been to before, in area we knew nothing about. My leg continued to saturate towel after towel as we turned around, backed up, and made U-turns around the unfamiliar town. Once we found the hospital, a disenchanted receptionist casually glanced at the cascade of blood erupting from my ankle, told us to take a seat and handed us a box of tissues to dam the bleeding. After we finished the first box, we were given a second one and told to wait patiently; apparently nobody saw this as an emergency.

I got seven stitches, which completely impressed my fifth grade friends. When they asked what happened, I just said I fell in a ditch –- no need for details. I may not have become a woman that sultry summer day, but I became "the girl with stitches, cooool!" and that was good enough for me.

I keep meaning to post versions of the various talks I've given (the ones that are not videos) but I haven't yet, for myriad reasons ... including trying to get actual work done. But the Ignite talk I gave was pretty short (five minutes!), so I thought I'd try to put it up here.



Slide 1: I always include a definition of 'lexicographer' when I talk; keeps people from elbowing their neighbor and asking 'what did she say she did again'?



Slide 2: Because this was a tech talk, I also pointed out that I was a geek. (I wore this skirt, by the way, for visual reinforcement of the concept.)




Slide 3: We all think of dictionaries as very concrete, solid objects. (You wouldn't want to drop one on your foot, would you?) But actually ...



Slide 4: Dictionaries might be solid, but their innards are really collections of ABSTRACTIONS. Definitions are made by taking a lot of specific datapoints (uses of a word in context) ...



Slide 5: ... and averaging them out to a more general meaning.



Slide 6: This may seem really obvious to YOU ... [note: this is my favorite Flickr image EVER]



Slide 7: But many people think that lexicographers just "decide" what a word means. Nope! That would be really hard work ... it's easier (and more accurate) to look at examples of use.



Slide 8: What can you tell about this word [pirgate] from these examples? Well, I bet you know it's a verb, that you can do it TO something, and that it's something you might not want to do. This is all information you know implicitly because you know how English works.



Slide 9: How about now? Now you know this use is a noun, and it's a kind of person -- the kind of person you don't want to be, probably.



Slide 10: The truth is that "meaning" is created by lots of little points of data, in the same way that persistence-of-vision effects are created by lots of little points of light. A diffuse set of data can look pretty solid if it moves fast enough ...



Slide 11: But you really do have to have ENOUGH data for this persistence-of-vision effect to work. If I say a guy is wearing a tux and holding a martini, is he a waiter, or is he James Bond? You don't have enough data to tell.



Slide 12: So lexicographers in their labs try to distill all those usage data points into high-octane liquid definitions.



Slide 13: Now, if you want to brew your own, and want a lot of examples of use, there are more places than ever to try to find them ...



Slide 14: Although it doesn't work for every word ... (especially not 'pirgate', since I made it up).



Slide 16: And, of course, the examples you DO find might not be helpful.



Slide 16: The big question, though, isn't really WHERE to find enough examples -- that's pretty straightforward. The big question is: if we agree that dictionary definitions are abstractions of meaning, is there a better way to represent those abstractions than this:




Slide 17: ... the boring old print dictionary?




Slide 18: Could we show relationships between examples in a less-linear way?




Slide 19: Could we convey those abstractions in a more powerful way?



Slide 20: That's the problem I'm working on every day ... [go visit my blog, yadda yadda, big plug for Creative Commons and the awesome nice sharing people on Flickr.]

(All my presentations are Creative Commons-sharealike, by the way, so if you ever want to remix me into a rap song or create a dictionary-talk novel or whatever, go right on ahead. If you see me speak somewhere and want a copy of my slide deck, just email and ask.]

And that's what I talked about at Ignite last Thursday. More or less. I didn't make any notes, so this is from what I remember of what I said off the top of my head!

JoeAlterio has added a photo to the pool:

"Where the slightly rusty, out of tune magic happens." ®

It was early May and her name was Lena Callaghan. My sister Tasha made me do it. She had known for a long time that I had developed an embarrassingly obvious crush on her long time friend. If I didn’t know any better, I would swear on a stack of bibles that my sister’s only goal was to completely embarrass me in front of her friends and, worst of all, the girl of my many wet dreams and pleasant fantasies. Lena and I started as friends, but before friendship, we were nothing. We weren’t even cordial to one another. We just had nothing to say to each other for whatever reason at the time.


Lena confided in my sister on my birthday in 1995 that she had in fact developed a little crush on me as well. My sister was never good at keeping a secret. She instantly ran to me and told me what Lena had said. Since I shared Lena’s feeling for me, I decided to ask her out and I picked the perfect time to do so—her birthday. She thought I was sweet, comparing my asking her out on her birthday to being proposed to on Valentines Day. I hadn’t made the connection but I didn’t care. I got her!


We were both fourteen years old and in our second year of high school. We hadn’t ever had a relationship before each other so we had no one to live up to and no one to be better than. It was beautiful. Weeks had gone by after we started to date and Lena and I had done nothing more than hold hands. That was it. My sister noticed that we were shy and afraid to give each other as much as a kiss on the cheek. She in her own way tested my manhood and I wasn’t happy.


It was offensive, it was embarrassing and I felt insulted. After several minutes of back and forth bantering, I sat down on the bed next to Lena, grabbed her shoulder and turned her to me; then I planted one on her. I threw her down on the bed, gingerly and kissed her on the lips for nearly forty-five seconds.


Lena gave me my first kiss. I’ll always remember that and I’ll always love her for that. Because of that kiss, I had confirmed what I had known for a very long time but refused to admit to myself - I was gay.

patrick_cates has added a photo to the pool:

Welcomed into a game of blog tag by Achariya (http://www.achariya.net/2007/12/taggz0rzed.html)
here are 8 random facts about self:

I was born on an army base
I’ve studied ancient slingshot techniques in Mallorca, Spain
As a kid I spent a lot of time hanging around funeral homes
I prefer boots but welcome an excuse to dress up
I’m a printmaker and illustrator who hasn’t done either in four years
My first computer game was Adventure (Colossal Cave)
I’m more shy in SL than I am in RL
If it weren’t for Caledon, I would have quit SL in a matter of days…

Extending the charge to the following, if they’re willing to accept:
Project Q
Iason Hassanov
Soleil Snook
Abigail Raymaker
Emily Orr
Tinsel Silvera
Eggberta Echegaray

By MARTIGA LOHN, Associated Press Writer

AP - ST. PAUL, Minn. - On the slaughterhouse floor at Quality Pork Processors Inc. is an area known as the “head table,” but not because it is the place of honor. It is where workers cut up pigs’ heads and then shoot compressed air into the skulls until the brains come spilling out.

But now the grisly practice has come under suspicion from health authorities.

Over eight months from last December through July, 11 workers at the plant in Austin, Minn. — all of them employed at the head table — developed numbness, tingling or other neurological symptoms, and some scientists suspect inhaled airborne brain matter may have somehow triggered the illnesses.

The use of compressed air to remove pig brains was suspended at Quality Pork earlier this week while authorities try to get to the bottom of the mystery.

Quality Pork has not said what it does with the pork brains. Sold fresh and in cans, pork brains are fried and eaten in sandwiches or gravy in some parts of the country. But it is a small market, and the American Meat Institute, which represents most of the nation’s pork processors, does not even track sales.

In a rapid-fire process that is noisy, smelly and bloody, severed pigs’ heads are cut up at the head table at a rate of more than 1,100 an hour. Workers slice off the cheek and snout meat, then insert a nozzle in the head and blast air inside until the light pink mush that is the brain tissue squirts out from the base of the skull.

jay: am i being a sensitive hippie vegan here or is this pretty gnarly to the rest of you, too? sometimes i lose perspective.

R. Walker posted a photo: