Finding a band I’ve never heard before is always fun, but finding a jewel like the Cardigans is a real treasure. A good friend recently turned me on to their music, and I was entranced. Their music ranges from driving rock (pun intended) like “My Favorite Game “ to catchy pop tunes like “Erase/Rewind” to introspective ballads like “You’re the Storm.” They’re a Swedish act, but you wouldn’t know it from their accents, which are pure American rock. If you haven’t heard their music yet, you can check them out on YouTube, where a number of their songs are posted. And if the thought of a Swedish pop/rock group makes you shake your head a bit, keep this in mind—Abba they ain’t!
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Posted by HECK
Here’s a phrase I’ve almost always heard in refefence to heavy people, and it’s meaning was always a little fuzzy to me, as if it had to have something to do with an overweight person, but recently I had it exemplified for me, and not by anyone of the heavy persuasion, either. A friend of mine came to visit with her 11-year-old son, who is quite skinny and anything but light on his feet. When the child would come down the stairs, the whole house would thunder and shake, and when he walked about in the room above the den, you could follow his every step. Now, this little guy weighed less than 90 pounds, but he put the full force of every ounce into every step—and new meaning for me about being light on your feet.
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Posted by HECK
Last night I watched Nova Science Now on PBS, and they had an interesting segment on the genetic component of language acquisition and the similarities between the human brain and the avian brain. They weren’t claiming birds have language, but rather that the acquisition of song patterns and production of sound used similar parts of the brain in certain song birds as the human brain did in learning and producing words. What I want to comment on, though, was the joke in the introduction to the segment.
Neil deGrasse Tyson led off with his usual amusing comments, all the while with what looked like a computer-generated parrot on his shoulder, and when he finished his monologue, the bird remonstrated him for splitting an infinitive. The horror! Even parrots know better, don’t they, Neil?
Of all the silly, stupid rules people put forward in prescribing how others should speak, ‘infinitive splitting’ has got to be the silliest. The truth is that technically English doesn’t have a true infinitive at all; that is, it doesn’t have an inflected verbform marking the infinitive. In English the infinitive form of a verb is expressed through a prepositional phrase, and as any native speaker of the language knows, you can place all the modifiers you want between a preposition and its object. But then, parrots aren’t native speakers of English, are they? So I guess at least they can be forgiven for their misapprehension.
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Posted by HECK
Last Friday night I caught a few minutes of Bill Maher’s show on HBO, and I was struck by a comment he made about people who call themselves spiritual. He said he didn’t used to understand what people meant when they said they weren’t religious but they were spiritual, but now he did—spiritual people, he said, aren’t afraid of dying. Then he went on and said he could tell he wasn’t spiritual ’cause he was afraid of dying.
I haven’t watched Bill Maher very much, but I have heard him enough to know he claims he’s an atheist, and so this comment struck me as very odd. How can a professed atheist who actually believes what he says be afraid of dying? If he really believes he’s nothing but his body, then when he dies, it will be as if he never existed in the first place. How can he be afraid of that? True atheists can’t possibly be afraid of dying—removing that fear is the one comfort such a belief can bring (and if you don’t think atheism is a belief, you need to think about it again). Anyone who thinks he’s an atheist and yet fears his own certain death is only fooling himself. Bill Maher’s subconscious is trying to tell him something, but he’s not listening.
So if, like Bill Maher, you think you’re an atheist, take this simple test and find out what you really believe—take a moment right now and regard your own mortality (it’s easy to do, ’cause your body’s gonna die as sure as the shit you push out of it stinks—that’s an absolute fact, and nothing you can do will stop it), and if this thought—you, dead, moldering in the ground—-bothers you in the least, if you find it difficult or even just unpleasant to ponder your own death, then you need to pay a little more attention to your subconscious too—it’s trying to tell you something.
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Posted by HECK
One of the problems with English is the lack of a sex-neutral singular pronoun—not gender-neutral, we already have one of those, it, so don’t be confusing gender with sex, as if you didn’t know where to stick yours or couldn’t tell the diff between yours and a hole in the ground. Most of us were taught our grammar in the seventh grade—which is as far from the seventh heaven as Allah could put it—and were told that in English if you wanted to refer to an indeterminate individual by a pronoun, you used the masculine he. And since we were taught this by the demi-god, demon, or djinn who ruled that special part of hell—which used to be called grammar school—we naturally assumed this was a primordial rule of the language, bequeathed to us by the Medieval Brits who spawned New Bastard English out of Old Low German and Old Norman French—a rule inviolate, which we, good rebels all, proceeded to willfully, though usually unconsciously, violate by the promiscuous use of they for gender-neutral singular as well as gender-neutral plural. But if the good folks who write On Words over at the Gray Lady are correct, it didn’t happen like that at all. According to them the heritage is just what we all do anyway—use singular they. It seems the use of he for both sexes is yet one more fiat of the grammar nazis, like preposition stranding and infinitive splitting. Why am I not surprised?
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Posted by HECK
In a recent column, Mr. Safire is up to his usual complaints. For some reason the growing usages of the word model seem to annoy him. Nothing new in that; long-time readers of Mr. Safire know he is wordly conservative, so he puts in a dig at the (new for him?) phrase back in the day. Maybe if people said back in the good old days he wouldn’t be affronted by its usage.
But the really strange grouse comes when he implies only geezers would recognize the use of the word model for someone “on whom clothes designers draped their creations.” I think he is digging on the use of supermodel, a word which designates the most highly-paid models, and of course that usage comes from Andy Warhol’s use of superstars to designate the nobodies he used in his unwatched films. Which usage, of course, emerged ‘back in the day’ when Mr. Safire was able to procure dates with what would come to be called supermodels. Come on, Mr. Safire—we don’t have to be geezers to know what clothes models are. And as for supermodels, how ‘vogue’ can a forty-plus-year-old usage be? Or perhaps he’s complaining of his own use of geezersphere?
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Posted by HECK
Every now and then I grouse about science. Really, I like science—no, really, I do! But every now and then I just gotta grouse a bit. And one of the things that gets to me is the careless way biologists toss around speciation. You know what I’m talking about—species, like homo sapiens. Like canis familiaris. Among non-biologists, species has a specific meaning, but among the biologists, it’s slippery as a greased pig. Some of them toss the term around like it can apply to whatever they feel like applying it to. Find some snails on both sides of a big river? Well, declare them different species since they can swim across and screw, and you can name the new one yourself.
But really the only reasonable way to define a species is when to organisms can mate and produce viable, fertile offspring. If the organisms can mate but produce only viable and infertile offspring, then they are from different species but the same genus. If they can’t produce viable offspring but still produce to term, they’re in the same family. And if they can’t do that? Well, those animals ain’t really related, are they?
Now, applying this definition would collapse some species together into one. Canis lupis and canis familiaris could fall into this category—as far as I know, dogs and wolves can still produce viable, fertile offspring. And there’s probably lots of others like this. Calling animals that merely look different but can interbreed different species leaves the door open to calling different looking humans different species—and I don’t think anybody wants to do that. After all, any human can breed with any other human, the world around—we’re all people—we’re all the same species. So it should be the same with all the others.
There really shouldn’t be any resistance to defining species this way, but there is, and I think I know one reason why. It might be that humans and some of the apes could breed and produce infertile but viable offspring. I don’t know if anything like this has ever been tried—but if it were, then that ape species would have to be in the genus homo just like us. Common ancestors with apes lots of people can handle, but chimpanzee cousins might be more than anyone could take.
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Posted by HECK
Well, here it is—midsummer and time once again for the All-Star break in the annual season of our National Pastime. Yeah, I know—some people say the National Pastime is past its time, but it’s still The Game. After all, that other game that claims to be more popular still has to tell you what it is in its name—they don’t call it the National League. Yep, baseball doesn’t even have to name itself for you to know it—it’s just the National League. Or sometimes that other league that styles itself major but plays by minor league rules. I know that folks in cities that don’t have a real major league team will dissent, but it doesn’t matter how good the players are—if you play by minor league rules, you’re a minor league. I keep wondering how long before we’ll hear the sweet ping of aluminum bats in places like Cleveland and Boston. At least in cities like Chicago and New York the fans have the choice of watching teams play major league ball if they want to.
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Posted by HECK
I know the title of ‘Most Misunderstood Word of All’ is a stretch, and some—many—people are gonna disagree with my assessment, but this is a word I’ve rarely if ever heard others use in its ‘correct’ meaning, but I often hear it used in another, ‘incorrect’ manner. Now, according to the fourth of the Five Precepts of Linguistics of the Commission on the English Curriculum of the National Council of Teachers of English (as described in this Language Log post) this word is ripe for a major shift in meaning. So far none of the dictionaries I’ve checked has even mentioned this usage, much less recommended it as one of their definitions, so either the misapprehension of the usage is so recent the dictionaries haven’t caught up with it yet, or it’s regarded as still too egregious to be included.
The word I’m speaking of is prodigal, and it comes to me—and to all of us, as far as I can tell—originally from Jesus’ Parable of the Prodigal Son in the Gospel of Luke in the Bible. The misunderstanding of the word seems to stem directly from the parable—apparently people think the main thrust of the story is the son’s leaving his father’s household and then returning, rather than his demanding his inheritance early and then squandering it. And since the word is in the title, people associate it with the misunderstood moral of the story and use the word as if it means returning (said of a wanderer) instead of profligate. I imagine if the story were the Parable of the Profligate Son, people would be confusing that word with the return of a wanderer, though probably not as many since profligate, while still rare, is more often used ‘correctly’ these days than prodigal.
The time cannot be far off when returning (said of a wanderer) will become an acceptable definition of prodigal in the more forward dictionaries—and not just a definition, but in those dictionaries putting the widest usage first rather than going from earliest to latest, returning (said of a wanderer) will have to be given pride of place. Being someone who—now reformed—once tried to stem the tide of usage-driven change, I live for that day!
Post Script: I think the Commission on the English Curriculum of the National Council of Teachers of English sounds like the perfect group to lay down the prescriptive rules of descriptivism. Tra-la-la.
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Posted by HECK
I have no scientific evidence to back up what I’m about to say—nothing but gut reaction—but I’ll let it stand as a prediction. In the realm of quanta, I believe the famous dictum stands—”Seek and ye shall find!” More fully explained, my hypothesis is this—if you can devise a theory which predicts the existence of a specific subatomic particle and then construct an experiment designed to elicit, observe, and measure this particle, you will inevitably find it. Not because this particle existed before you looked for it, but because the looking—that is, the observing and measuring—created the particle!
This is probably just an extreme rendition of the ‘observer effect’ and not original at all, but if it isn’t original to me, I’m unaware of its utterance elsewhere, so I’m gonna claim the presumption of naming it after myself till someone points out another’s precedence. The logical conclusion to Heck’s Hypothesis is simply this—the number of subatomic particles is limited only by the human ingenuity required to ‘find’ them, so therefore the way to immortal fame lies continuously open to all particle physicists possessing the wherewithal. Of course, it’s getting harder, more complicated, and more expensive to construct experiments of this nature—witness the cost and intricacy of the Large Hadrom Collider—but I fully expect success in the effort to find the ‘elusive’ Higgs boson when they finally get it working. Not just expect—in accordance with Heck’s Hypothesis, I predict it.
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Posted by HECK