@ sixes & sevens

To the sound of gnashing teeth

From the Daily News letters to the editor, July 31, 2008:

Vote? Why Vote?
Bronx: Why do we even need an election? Why not just coronate the guy now.

And why don't I just crown * you now, guy?

* Informal  To hit on the head.

exaltation / exultation

I'm always attracted by those lists of frequently confused English words (there/their/they're), mentally testing myself and more often than not finding myself to be a genius -- if not a particularly modest one.

Yet I was reading the early pages of Jon Krakauer's Under the Banner of Heaven the other afternoon when I came across the first of this similar sounding pair of words. It brought me up short: Exaltation? Shouldn't that be exultation?

Once I started thinking about it, however, I realized there was a distinction to be made, even if I didn't recognize it. After all the Biblical quotation (Isaiah 40:4, KJV) reads

Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low: and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough places plain.

Mind you, I really know that citation through Handel's Messiah, but that's another story.

On the other hand, the lyrics to O Come All Ye Faithful (second verse) are

O Sing, choirs of angels, / Sing in exultation ...

With any luck I might remember this distinction for longer than it's taken me to write a blog post about it.

Happy Fourth of July

flag
Originally uploaded by sixes & sevens

block that neologism ... but not this one.

comfortability

We heard this from one of the Mets sportscasters the other day. Kiki had her head turned, but when I squeaked "Comfortability?" she said, "Oh, I'm glad you noticed that." This is a classic case of adding on to a word when there's a perfectly useful and shorter word in use -- in this case, comfort.

Mind you, I'm not against word elaboration when there's a semantic need for it. Kiki brought this to mind when she quoted someone in an article in the Times, who referred to an heirloom's divineness. Clearly this 'divine' object had not so much divinity as divineness.

But what then of this word that Kiki came up with: definity? What could be more cumbersome that definiteness -- no better than comfortability, really. And the pre-existing noun definition has by now taken on so many other meanings that a new word is certainly called for.

Cast of thousands (well, the first few)

As if proof were needed that blogs are little more than a parking spot for useless information ...

I have occasionally had fictitious names pop into my head, usually involving what only I think is a cute play on words. It was while wading through piles of papers in our living room that I came across a short list of such names. I have been keeping a separate account in the Notepad section of my cell phone. Herewith a starter set of such fictitious names.

• Holling DeBry (Hauling debris)
• Yábada Bedú (Yabba Dabba Doo)
• Furwad al-Qitti
• Charmelle Shake (Sharm el-Sheikh)
• Perry Tonaitis (Peritonitis)
• Chuck Guzel / Chuck Goozell (çok güzel, Turkish for "Everything's good")
• Wythe Longface / Wyeth Longface (Why the Long Face?)
• Peter "Pete" Bog
• Ed Memoir (aide-mémoire)
• Ceil Antreaux (cilantro)
• Howie Doohan (how're we doin'?)

MTA-Creole Kreyol-MTA

311 vwazwen ou ki fè twòp bwi.

The MTA has been posting public service announcements for the city's 311 information line in various 'foreign' languages heard in New York. (I took a photograph of the Arabic-language version.) On the way home tonight I caught up with the Creole version.

Creole has always been frustrating for me. After years and years of French instruction and on-the-job refreshers, I can't quite master this close-but-no-cigar derivative. Totally anecdotally I have figured out some of the grammar and recognized a word or two.

Tonight I decided to give it another go. It helped that I'd seen the English-language version already. Some of the phrases were pretty easy, such as those for learning how to learn English or to license your dog. But the one above on first glance gave up nothing about its meaning. Strangely it was the unfamiliar first word that began to open the door. Sounding it out I made the connection between vwazwen and voisin, "neighbor".

I had seen ou before, and it struck me as a personal adjective even in the postposition. (What had confused me was that both ou and où have French meanings that make no sense in this context.) Here ou was akin to the French tu or as an adjective, ton.

So: "your neighbor." I think I know where this is going.

ki fè.Ah, of course: qui fait, "who makes": "Your neighbor who makes ...."

That leaves only the mysterious twòp bwi. Getting the hang of this, it was a short step from bwi to bruit, "noise". That leaves only twòp, which was certainly both in context and phonetically trop, "too much".

311 your noisy neighbor.

In A Rumor of War I saw the still normal man my father could have become,

the man with the average sadnesses.

From Tom Bissell's "War wounds: a father and son return to Vietnam," originally published in Harper's  Magazine, Dec. 2004, and read aloud on Selected Shorts in 2008

yet more further words

ventriloquence

1. the practice of projecting one's voice with fluency and aptness so that it seems to come from another source.
2. (fig.) the art of making other people say what you want them to say.

This is (as far as I can tell) a neologism.

personalty

This is a real world, or at least a word used in the legal profession. American Heritage Dictionary online defines it as "Personal property; chattels." This came up while talking with the estate lawyer yesterday afternoon. Of course, there in the forms I was signing was the very word "chattels" used in the definition above. In a sense, it's personality with the 'I' taken out. (yuk, yuk)

It put me in mind of other -ty words. The first one that sprang to my mind was admiralty, and it seems that the root word needs to end in al for it to work. [My literate and lawyerly neighbor reminded me of both realty, the apposite of personalty, and fealty.]  Is there a use for "the liberalty"?

I found Joy in a cemetery ...

I found Joy in a cemetery
Originally uploaded by sixes & sevens

... Literally: my art library colleague Joy Kestenbaum, in New Union Field Cemetery in Queens. Joy, it turns out, has made a lifelong studies of the cemeteries of New York with a particular (and personal) interest in the Jewish fields. We compared notes and visits, and I learned about Jewish mortuary sculpture in New York City.

It's an unofficial ritual of mine to visit a cemetery for either Memorial Day or Labor Day, or both, or any other holiday when I have time on my hands. Today I decided to tackle the Borough of Cemeteries, Queens, starting with the Evergreens near the Broadway Junction subway station and then swinging around to those on Cypress Avenue and Cypress Hills Avenue. (In the interest of accuracy, Evergreen is in both Queens and Brooklyn -- though I can't see any distinction on the ground between the two).

I optimistically thought I could do all these and maybe move on to a few more. What I neglected to take into account was the beautifully sunny and warm day; the amount of walking within cemeteries I'd do; and the long distances between cemetery entrances (if you find them). What I did discover was the Jewish Cemetery District, as it were, once a agglomeration of individual synagogal plots and now a loosely confederated set of cemeteries: Knollwood Park, Mount Judah, Old and New Mount Carmel, Union Field and New Union Field, Mount Neboh, Machipelah, Hungarian, Shearith Israel, Salem Fields, Maimonides and Mount Hope.

I haven't edited my flickr photographs particularly. What I have done is left their exact locations vague, in deference to the cemetery authorities (some of whom forbid photography -- oops!) and to preserve in whatever way these glorious monuments. More than a few of the porcelain enamel portraits had been broken or removed and the stained glass in the mausoleums destroyed. I confess to having skipped over sections with newer monuments, which tend to be rather boringly uniform (probably by fiat).

One suprise, from a photographic point of view, were the stained glass windows, which came out perfectly clear when shot through the windows in the mausoleum doors.

The other surprise (and it was more for lack of prior research) was the grave of Harry Houdini (né Weiss or Weisz).

I'm pretty certain I'll be doing this again in Ogden, Utah, when I head out there in July. I have some forebears to locate there.

words near to the heart

in·com·pas·sion·at·ed
adv. Rendered unable to show sympathy.

I was wallowing around trying to sort out my emotional state today when I struck upon the notion of the inability to expression compassion. I knew that uncompassionate, which my online Rogets defines as "not sympathetic," was in fact too harsh. I wanted instead to express the idea of someone who might want to show compassion but for whatever reason is incapable of doing so. "Incapacitate," with its definition of "To render powerless or motionless, as by inflicting severe injury," came closer to the idea of outside agency and not an innate lack of feeling. By blending incapacitated and compassion you end up with incompassionated. Voilà!

Truth told, it wasn't so much compassion that I first thought to address as sympathy: "the fact or power of sharing the feelings of another, esp. in sorrow or trouble," which the definition then goes on to gloss as "fellow feeling, compassion, or commiseration." [source] (Oh how I love the archaic and alliterative sound of "fellow feeling"!) But sympathy is complicated by a host of other less apt connotations.

I have a good and sympathetic friend to thank for capturing why this was all spinning around in my head in the first place. Explaining my mood in a chat, I put forward the following:

 me: true

5:45 PM i'm not one to ask for sympathy, and then when i don't get it i get pissed off

 [Friend]: lol

 talk about unspoken expectations

"Talk about unspoken expectations." Brilliant. And in only four words.

But here's the crux: If you've accustomed those around you to avoid lavishing unwanted (and to your mind, unwarranted) emotional attention on you, how can you fault them for being consistent when maybe a little emotional engagement might be welcome? Solve that and you can figure out how to correct the imbalance.

There are certainly those with little experience of expressing sympathy nor any inclination to do so, facing the prospect with fear and trepidation. Emotions are, after all, so messy. For these people it would be hard for me to insist upon it. Spurning their emotional engagement serves only to justify their distance.

Maybe incompassionate can be a transitive verb too: "to discourage others into concealing their sympathies." And apply to the object as well as the subject: "to render unreceptive to shows of sympathy."