Hermenautic Circle blog

Many thanks for all the kind words about the Semicolon Appreciation Society!

Here are some followup links, in case you just can’t get enough semicolon in your online diet:

Some letters to the NYT about the original story [Thanks to RLE for the link]

Trevor Butterworth sent me a link his longer article in the Financial Times, back in 2005, in which he outlines a purported American bias against the semicolon. (I believe Americans use fewer semicolons per capita, but more as a nation, in a kind of reverse image of our carbon footprint …)

The Semicolon’s Dream Journal [exactly what it says on the box]

Here is a good story about first kisses, sent in by Cameron Moore, OCR News Assistant. Written by Lori Basheda at the Orange County Register

Sue will never forget their first kiss. Bob, on the other hand, forgot it almost as soon as it happened.
Read more.

After all the recent discussion of the semicolon (in the NYTimes and other places) I couldn’t resist the urge to make Semicolon Appreciation Society T-Shirts. Because, really, if a thing is worth talking about, it’s certainly worth wearing.

Here’s the back (on the white/light shirts only, no back printing on dark shirts):

I also made some 3×5 stickers, so you can edit signs to add semicolons where they ought to be:

And, of course, a membership card:

Although I’m not happy with the wording of it. Anyone want to suggest new wording that actually, you know, includes a semicolon?

I was thinking that the Semicolon Appreciation Society’s bylaws should be like those of humorous WWII servicemen’s associations, with riddles and having to forfeit the price of a drink if you can’t write a sentence including a semicolon on demand. Suggestions for further bylaws entertained in the comments.

Thanks are due to Garth, who recklessly encouraged me, and India Amos, who suggested the completely wonderful Cooper Poster font as the one that included the platonic ideal of the semicolon form.

We’re happy to announce that Mark Peters has joined VERBATIM as a Contributing Editor. Mark is a frequent contributor to VERBATIM, and a language columnist for the parenting website Babble, as well as writing for American Speech, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Columbia Journalism Review, Esquire, The Funny Times, Good, Grist, Mental Floss, Nerve, and Psychology Today.

His book Yada Yada Doh! 111 Television Words That Made the Leap From the Screen to Society is forthcoming from Marion Street Press in 2008. He also has his own blog, Wordlustitude. And, quite conveniently for the editor, he lives in Chicago! We’re glad he’s coming on board to help us with reading submissions as well as keeping the blog updated.

If you’d like to send him a “welcome” message, his new email is Mark at verbatimmag.com.

These are representative upright Nordic male citizens of Kingston, New York, in the year 1909. They are in fact--someone wrote on the back of the card--the Van Alen murder jury, although they might as well be the Ale and Quail Club. They do seem to have been put together by someone with an eye as attuned to physiognomy as Preston Sturges's: the bearded sage, the hapless pale accountant, the man whose mustache is bigger than he is, the tall and insufferably earnest farmer, the butcher whose jacket sleeves are always too short, the malevolent elder, the town slob--and that's just the front row.

I've just moved to Kingston. Well...it's a long story, but let's just say that while I've hovered in the orbit of Kingston for some time, I now am truly of the place, a homeowner on a quiet street, one of those settled in the mid-nineteenth century and given a Dutch name in honor of the oldest families. Kingston is one of those sociologically stratified towns; you can tell at a glance that the accountant might have lived on my street, while the banker would have lived one block west, the butcher one block east, and the dog barber two blocks east. Kingston has dozens and dozens of such stratifications--it is an unexpectedly vast town, with at least four and up to a dozen distinct sectors plotted along two perpendicular axes. It was once quietly prosperous, a microcosm of the United States in its early middle age. Now it's merely quiet, and has spent the last half-century bravely trying not to crumble.

I never quite thought I'd fetch up in a place like Kingston. I was meant for the bright lights, I liked to think. But no, life has instructed me: I was meant for Kingston. It is not the bright lights. It possesses a number of railroad grade crossings, two chop suey joints preserved in amber, a bus depot, a dozen diners, some seventeenth- and eighteenth-century stone houses, giant bronze statues of Henry Hudson and Peter Stuyvesant, an authentic-looking Dutch step-gable house that turns out to have been built in the 1920s as a hotel, patches of fairly dense woods within the city limits, a few buildings in the port section that look as if they took a wrong turn on their way to lower Manhattan in the 1880s, collections of varyingly derelict tugboats and trolley cars, two outfits that sell medieval fantasy costumes for adults, the remains of a brickworks, a large and extremely variegated array of places of worship, a model railroad club in its own dedicated building, an empty lace-curtain factory, a string of functioning shipyards, a brewery, and two competing urology clinics that believe it pays to advertise. I wouldn't have it any other way.

AP - RIVERDALE, Utah - Wal-Mart Stores Inc. apologized to a Muslim woman who said she was mocked because of her face veil.

“Please don’t stick me up,” a cashier told the shopper on Feb. 2, according to The Council on American-Islamic Relations.

Wal-Mart apologized Monday in a letter signed by Rolando Rodriquez, a vice president and regional general manager. It was released Tuesday by the council’s Nevada chapter.

jay: wait, larry david is a cashier at a wal*mart in utah?

A Mr. John Shakespeare [I know! Isn't that perfect?] had a question for me, and kindly gave his permission for me to share my answer with all of you.

I just read your interesting and amusing piece, Neologizing 101, in the NY Times. [I did not ask him to say this. —Ed.] Neologizing is the invention of a word; invention seems (to me, at least) to imply copyright. So my questions are: How does one prove invention of a new word? And, how does one copyright that invention, and make royalties (ie; /moolah/) from it?

I realize I’m not the first person to ask you such questions. I’ve been having a lot of trouble finding the answers on the net, though. So, I would be very grateful of any hints you could throw my way.

Respectfully,

John Shakespeare

First off: IANAL (I am not a lawyer), trademark or otherwise. Real lawyers should feel free to weigh in, that’s what blog comments are for.

The short answer, though, is that a word is not copyrightable; you can register a
word as a trademark, connected to a product or service, but you can’t copyright it.

This is, I think, because a copyright is a very limited right, and not an absolute property right. Copyrights came about to encourage authors to write by allowing them a limited monopoly over their work; as you can well imagine, that doesn’t quite work for words. A word, once created, belongs to the language, not to you. You must share it for it to be effective as a word. (And most neologizers need no encouragement to share, whether monetary or any other sort!)

And even though a word is invented, you can’t patent it — again, because the point of a new word is to get it into use, not to restrict its use. Patents are less about granting a right for YOU to use something and more about keeping OTHER people from using it — which doesn’t make sense for words: “Here’s my new word, sorry, you can’t speak, read, or write it.” Words have no value when kept apart from the language as a whole. More practically, there is no mechanism for charging a fee for the use of any particular word. (How on earth could you? Even if you could do it for print & broadcast media, you couldn’t do it for casual speech … )

Trademarks are the association of a word with a particular product, so as to protect the consumer (who wants to know that their Bon Ami powder is, in fact, Bon Ami, and not some other thing). They are not a license to control the use of a word in all situations. The fact that we have Apple Computers and Apple Records and Apple Tours doesn’t mean we are suddenly barred from calling the fruit an apple, too. And you can Google things and get spam in your inbox and Roomba your living room … trademark owners don’t like the use of their trademarks as verbs but they cannot FORBID it.

It’s better to look at your new word creation as a gift you give back to the language as a whole, rather than as a land-grab you can monetize. The English language has (ostensibly) been good to you; why not give something back?

[Have a question for the Dictionary Evangelist? There's an email link up there on the right ...]

My first kiss summed up in one word would have to be awkward.

It was a week after my 17th birthday, and in a week we’d be off to school again – me a senior and him a junior. I had never been kissed before, or even had a boyfriend. In fact, C wasn’t my boyfriend and I knew that it was a mistake to even go to his house but I was determined to have my first kiss before I graduated.

I had always been a flirt, as had he. Two years prior to the kiss I had met him through my at the time best friend. When my friend and I got in a fight about whether we should date or not, C was there to comfort my broken heart and had seemingly stuck around after.

We were in his room, his sister in the one next to us. I had “snuck” in through the back door like he told me, saying “it would be more fun”. Since his door did not lock, he places a small dresser in front of it while I waiting on the bed, patiently, scared.

He sat down on the bed as well, telling me to come closer so he could hug me knowing something was on my mind. I told him it was nothing and lay down on my back while he followed next to me, yet him on his side and facing me.

For some reason or another I turned towards him and he came closer. My conscious thoughts were “Why the hell is he coming so close? Oh my, he wants to kiss. Well, why not?” and went for it. It was wet, and his tongue was much thicker and slimier than I had thought it would be. I had no idea what to do, but he seemed to guide me along and I quickly caught on of when to breathe and when to not. After, we played chess.

For an old fashioned archivist like myself, one who works with dusty artifacts and iron-gall ink, just being able to dress my avatar in lots of different outfits was exciting enough.

As I move on to other more educational things I feel like I’m way behind the second life learning curve. With some avatars doing things like collaborating with NASA to create depictions of the earth with real time weather patterns, my recent contribution to the education of the second life public seems small. But you’ve got to start somewhere.

I donated a book to the collection of the Caledon Library (Emily Thornwell’s 1853, Lady’s Guide to Perfect Gentility – a handbook of Victorian etiquette). This means making a book, which means: downloading a scanned work from Google, turning it into a plain text doc, editing for mistakes, pagination, etc. then copying text into notecards that are placed into a folder which is then embedded into a three dimensional object in the shape of a book. When you click on the “book” your avatar is presented with a folder that can be copied into her inventory and read at her leisure. Likewise, I could have simply embedded into the book a link to the url which would lead to the original online source which my avatar/typist would have been led to via their web browser. Pretty cool.

So next up is curating my first online exhibition. I’ve chosen as my subject Ada Lovelace, Lord Byron’s daughter. Her association with Charles Babbage and his Analytical Engine I hope will excite the steampunk-inclined. I’ve met with the very lovely and very busy JJ Drinkwater, the director of the Caledon Library, who’s been guiding me through the process of finding an exhibition space and connecting me to potential collaborators. One thing I dig about sl is the ready, steady go go go attitude of residents. What might start as a gentle musing is immediately grabbed by anyone you care to muse with. Possibilities aren’t just discussed, they’re immediately experimented with. This was intimidating at first – “What do you mean we can just do it? Shouldn’t there be Approvals? Budgets? A Memo of Understanding?” This is the free-floating jazz mentality Au was talking about - a total relief from real world bureaucracy.

Long-time readers of VERBATIM will recognize the name David Galef; his pieces in our magazine consistently garner compliments (and the editor is always pleased to find a new one coming across her email transom).

But VERBATIM, as you all know, only publishes non-fiction, so if you’ve ever wondered how David Galef’s light style translates to less-factual writing, you might want to check out his new book of short-shorts, A Man of Ideas and Other Stories.

Here are some teasers to pull you in …

“As a souvenir from her stay in Botswana, Mary Edwards brought home a slave.”

“At age thirty, Daryl knew that his marriage was the best thing that ever
happened to him. At age forty, he felt the same about his divorce.”

“When I think of Duff, I think of the itchiness of everyday life and the
scratchiness of certain individuals. Duff wants to be loved for himself
alone, but what’s he got to offer? He’s a one-man conversation with a
personality like a sound-loop.”

This new book is available at Noemi Press; click on the image above for more information.

Here are some pictures from inside my vestibule. (Pardon our appearance during interminable renovations.)

Pinakothek is enjoying a brief hiatus while its archives are moved to a more secure location. Stay tuned.

Many thanks to Jen who sent me the link to this:

(The stockist is sold out of it (sadly) but they’ll let you know when it’s back if you ask them nicely.)

Enjoy your virtual alphabet-themed chocolate. More new lexicographical content shortly.

Waffle Whiffer has added a photo to the pool:

Happy Valentine’s Day to all my Flickr friends!

McDonald’s gave away Valentines cards over several years in the 1970s. These are from the earliest set that I’ve found from 1973 or 1974.

Here we have our good friend Officer Big Mac, peace keeper of McDonaldLand.

Because M. Marcel Duchamp is currently in America, I am unable to meet today's deadline. Because M. Duchamp is currently indisposed, I am unable to give the matter my complete attention. Because I am indisposed, M. Duchamp will be the one handling your account. Because M. Duchamp has been promoted sideways, I will not be able to answer my emails. Because I am indisposed, your request did not cross my desk. Because M. Dominguez has taken over my email account, I cannot hear you. I'm very sorry. Please call back after the dust settles.

Oh Sarah!

we didn't know what would happen
but things did happen
and things will happen
like that.

but there we were,
sitting in an abandoned ice factory
in our hometown
it was freezing
and we held hands with gloves on
and we had our first kiss
a few weeks after meeting
flirting (I remember, Sarah,
perhaps one day we would
dance amongst the tallest
most majestic trees
under the full moon
elves we would be
I always called you my dear elf
we would dance
and we would hold hands
and we would sing
and we would look
with ancient wisdom
and complete acceptance
when Frodo wishes to look
in our lady's pool
playing music together
I was 14 you were 15
I bought you sparkling cranberry juice
when you didn’t make it to school
and I found you alone
in your home
on the hill
parents still at work
no siblings
only that ridiculous dog of yours
which you playfully tortured
and he loved you for it
you saying you couldn't tell
the difference
between my playing
and the record
and the volleyball marathon
all night
where you put your head on my shoulder.) we
had our first kiss and that was so good
we had another
boards hanging from nails from the rafters
weeds sticking up through the floor boards
the pale winter sky showing
in the glassless sectioned windows.
our heads were not clear
but we'd never drank
our eyes were pools and
neither of us knew that the sun would
ever set again.

I never got around to asking my mother about the circumstances under which this extraordinary object was produced, so I can only conjecture. Had I found it in a pile at a flea market I would have assumed such a confection of airbrush and hand-tinting to be a generic romance image, such as the postcards you can still find in places like Greece or Mexico that feature a young woman looking misty, with or without a sentiment printed in cursive. Judging from the hairstyle I'd guess the picture was taken within a couple of years after the end of the war. This print measures roughly 9 1/2" by 7" and I also have a postcard version--on which the lips have been retinted bright red--so I think it might have been a package deal offered by a photographer: one large print and from three to five cards for one low price.

My mother is in her early twenties here, still living with her parents and employed by them as maid-of-all-work as well as holding down a secretarial position with a governmental family-welfare agency. She may not yet have met my father, for all that he sometimes lives with his parents directly across the narrow street from her. Marriage and family are her only prospects, aside from the nunnery the only ones even conceivable to a young woman of her time and her class. She has little education, has principally been schooled in sewing and penmanship. She has been through war, fear, hunger, cold, flight to the south of France in 1940 accomplished in part on foot, strafings by Stukas on the road, bombs falling within yards of her family's apartment, nighttime encounters with Wehrmacht foot patrols--yet none of this has managed to dent her innocence.

To me she is entirely enscribed in this picture: her hazily romantic dreams, her naiveté so profound it might be willed, her deeply buried intelligence, her sufferings at the hands of her family, her enclosing wall of fear, her cruel and only intermittently comforting piety, her constant depression that only fluctuated in its depth, her rigid mask of good behavior. I see a lot of myself in that face: eyebrows, mouth, maybe nose, shape of eyes. We shared many of our worst qualities. We were very close once, and then we weren't. My failings wounded her, and my successes meant nothing to her because they occurred in a world she couldn't or wouldn't understand. She screamed at me and then hung up on me the last time we talked before her death. Her account in my ledger will always remain troublingly open.

No, I didn't attend this show--it was in far-off Boston, and I had neither money nor a car. But the fact that the poster was put up somewhere in New York City for me to steal it tells you something about the reggae scene in 1979. There were relatively few Jamaican expatriates in New York then--there were considerably more in Boston, where I first heard the Wailers on the radio in 1973--but there were people in New York who would have traveled several hundred miles to catch Gregory Isaacs, the cool ruler, the lonely lover, appearing live. He certainly didn't play NYC that I knew about in those years, and I would have known.

His voice then--at least before he "macked it to shreds," in Robert Christgau's phrase--was syrup and pain and swagger all at once. Like the Rastas I'd see at Isaiah's on lower Broadway, who seemed barely awake as they hugged the walls, dancing with an occasional inflection of hip or ribcage, as if it were inadvertent, a reflex that happened to fall on the one, Gregory's affect was languid to the point of somnolence. He was totally bedroom. There was steel just underneath, however. You knew that if you crossed him you were done for. Listening to "Poor and Clean" or "Mr. Know-It-All" or "Stranger in Your Town," I could vividly imagine him slouching across the stage, eyes half shut, crooning into the mic as if he were asking for a glass of water, while the audience cried "Murderer! Murderer!" It was a standard Jamaican bravo of the time, but it just about summed him up.

All photographs are ghostly to one degree or another, but silent-film stills truly belong to the realm of the uncanny. Photographs are ghostly because they are slices of the past; even pictures taken yesterday record things that no longer exist, if only the after-dinner still-life on the table. Silent movies, because of their limitations, were and are more specifically photographic than sound pictures--they could not rely on anything but the image to convey meaning. The most interesting silent movies made use of an arsenal of techniques for this purpose--double exposures, irises, split screens--that have largely disappeared from commercial cinema. In addition, silent movies relied on various pictorial and theatrical conventions that predated the motion-picture vocabulary and have since faded away.

Silent-film stills, then, are slices of heightened experience from the past, which at least potentially makes them preternaturally vivid, but they are mediated by ways of seeing and means of expression that are unfamiliar to us, making them to some degree alien. And since a still isolates one moment of a story, with the steps leading up to and away from it unknown to the viewer who hasn't seen the movie, stills are particularly mysterious and tantalizing--more so than the average photograph, which is designed to fit its entire story within its borders. Silent-film stills at their best are vivid, alien, enigmatic, and alluring all at once. They are not simply pictures of dead people in unguessable circumstances, but views of the subconscious residue of dead minds--a whole other planet.

Today I finally saw Marcel L'Herbier's El Dorado (1921), which I'd been wanting to see for twenty or thirty years, largely on the basis of this shot. It's a melodrama, as the credits announce immediately. The story is maybe laughable--it's a variant of Stella Dallas: the doomed low-life mother who sacrifices herself for the future of her child. It trades on the exotic power of Spain as it then was--the exteriors were shot in Granada and Seville--although most of the movie takes place in the titular nightclub, which in many ways is the same room as every casbah hotspot you've ever seen in the movies, from Casablanca on back. Everything of real visual interest happens in that nightclub: looming shadows, voracious mouths, insistent headgear, expressionistic decor, and smeary distortion employed to convey drunkenness and squalor.

The shot above occurs at the very end, and when I got there I felt as though I should have guessed its context from the start: she's dead, of course, and has now symbolically attained heaven, which is to say the real El Dorado. The lettering is the same as the nightclub's sign, only done up in what we're invited to see as gold. Appropriately, I feel like the man in Stephen Crane's poem, who sees a ball of gold in the sky, goes up to investigate and finds out it's actually mud, then comes back to earth and looks up, once again seeing a ball of gold. I have now seen the movie, which while it is a great deal more than mud is nevertheless a bit of a letdown. But the still retains its uncanny power. I could attempt to break it down: the shimmering letters, their appealing crudity, their relative size, her position relative to them, her position on the table, her makeup, her magician's-assistant bisection, her gravity--whatever. The picture forces my rational mind to surrender. It remains a mystery, even if I can account for all of its particulars.

Thanks to Benjamen Walker for making it happen.

I climbed up behind my house to the cemetery where I would meet my boyfriend; my first boyfriend I did not think had cooties. I could not wait to see him. Whenever around him my heart beat so hard and fast I wondered if something was wrong with my heart, luckily no medical problem caused my throbbing heart.

I sat alone on a huge tombstone labeled Blood, slowly getting soaked by the rain drizzling through the foliage. Somehow the melancholy scene felt quite romantic. I waited and waited for him to come walking up the hill, but as time past my heart slowed to a normal pace and the romantic atmosphere darkened. The wetness soaked through to my skin finally chilling me to an unbearable temperature and bringing the realization that he was not coming. I headed home not sure if I should be mad or sad or not even care. It was the first time I had ever been stood up.

Returning to my empty home I sat in front of the woodstove staring at dancing flames, emotionless. I still could not understand what had happened or why it happened. The phone rang, I did not move. It rang again; I turned as if to see someone else answer it. It rang again. The answering machine picked up, silence, a breath, than his voice. A knot kinked in my stomach making it hard to comprehend what he was saying. I did not want to hear any excuse, he left me in the rain, alone, waiting and all of the sudden my emotions cleared and I was pissed. Then I heard it, “I am so sorry I left you. I need you.” I believed him. I knew with those words the excuse could be understood.

He showed up at my door, soaked, pathetic, and so handsome. His mother became rather ill that morning and he had to run her to the hospital. I had felt completely alone, deserted, and sorry for myself, while he ran around helping someone who needed him more than I. And now he showed up needing me. I wanted him to know I would do what I could. I moved my face extremely close to his not really knowing why and somehow our lips touched. My heart sped up to such an incredible speed I thought he would have to take me to the hospital. I did not know if I should stay there or turn away before my heart exploded. Somehow my heart stayed in my chest and my lips on his. He slowly pulled away, giving me my first kiss.

No, the book did not contain any lyrics, or pages for that matter

Read more about Journey Rock Band here.

AP - BAGHDAD - Remote-controlled explosives strapped to two mentally retarded women detonated in a coordinated attack on Baghdad pet bazaars Friday, Iraqi officials said, killing at least 73 people in the deadliest day since the U.S. sent 30,000 extra troops to the capital last spring.

jay: can someone please tell me how low were we planning on going as a species? we can’t get any lower than this, right? fuhk.