I was listening to the news this morning, and I caught a reference to “Convicted Lobbyist Jack Abramoff.” It occurred to me that the phrasing is a bit odd. It makes it sound like he was convicted of being a lobbyist, which, last I heard, was still legal.
I suppose “Convicted corrupt lobbyist” sounds too unwieldy… and there are people who might consider it redundant!
NPR’s “Morning Edition” ran a story today on the rise of the Spanish-language television market, and Univision in particular. They led into it with a remark that Spanish-language coverage of the World Cup has been getting higher ratings than the English-language coverage.
This should surprise no one, given that soccer (as we norteamericanos call what everyone else seems to refer to as football) isn’t terribly popular in the USA, with two notable exceptions: Parents of 6-year-olds who want to put their children into a sport, and the duration of the World Cup. El fútbol, however, is wildly popular in Europe and Latin America, and we have a lot of recent immigrants from Latin America.
So no, I wouldn’t be surprised at all to learn that there are more Spanish-speaking hardcore soccer fans than English-speaking ones.
On Friday I received an email about the “IEEE GLOBECOM 2006 D&D FORUM.”
My first thought on seeing the subject was, “Well, it’s clearly not Dungeons and Dragons.” So I thought about other D&Ds, and the next thing I thought of was drag and drop. I knew that couldn’t be it, either. Who would hold a conference on drag-n-drop? (Now, I can see a D&D game dealing with a “dragon drop” contest, but that’s another issue entirely!)
I opened the newsletter, and of course it was a design and development conference. Should’ve been obvious, but I just didn’t think of it.
Any acronyms/abbreviations you’ve mixed up? Not just acronyms for which you know more than one meaning, but the ones that you’ve seen in one context, and the first meaning you thought of was from some other field entirely.
WWW, while convenient to type, is rather unwieldy when spoken (at least in English). “Double-U double-U double-U dot some site dot com” takes a while to say. It’s not like, say, AAA, which can be easily spoken as “Triple-A.” Fortunately, these days most major sites have their servers configured to return the same web with or without the www. prefix, so you sometimes hear a website described with just its domain name.
This morning I caught the end of an interview on NPR’s Marketplace Morning Report, and the announcer explained that the full version of the interview was available on their website, “dub dub dub dot marketplace dot org.”
Yesterday, Mark Evanier quoted Justice Antonin Scalia using an aphorism in a debate on government funding of the arts. The phrase he used:
“He who pays the piper calls the tune.”
It’s a reminder that the person who funds something invariably has a say in just what they’ve funded. (In this case, he pointed out that simply by choosing to fund some artistic endeavors, you have to choose which arts you fund.) But it reminded me of a similar phrase with a very different meaning:
“It’s time to pay the piper.”
In this case, the meaning is basically, OK, you’ve had your fun, now you need to pay the price. I don’t know for sure, but I suspect it comes from the story of the Pied Piper of Hamelin, in which the townspeople refused to pay him after he led all the town’s rats to drown in the river—so he exacted revenge by leading all the town’s children away. Not surprisingly, it’s this phrase that’s most often used with the Flash villain/ally of that name.
It’s interesting that two phrases with the same archaic base—who would describe a musician as a “piper” these days?—should be so different.
KCRW ran a story on the indecency wars this morning, and quoted someone who was concerned that kids are picking up bad language from broadcast media.
Yeah, right. Broadcast media is so locked down they can’t find that kind of language there.
When I was in middle school, I spent a week working at a cub scout day camp. I think I was around 12 or 13 at the time. The adults warned us that we had to watch our language around the cubs (who were probably around 8 or 9), because they didn’t want the kids picking up any bad words from us. They needn’t have bothered. The kids were far more foul-mouthed around us than we were amongst ourselves, and actually managed to shock us. This was in the late 1980s.
Kids don’t need TV or movies to learn bad words. They learn them from their friends at school, or they learn them from parents, or from neighbor kids.
There was a B.C. comic strip a few years ago that I thought illustrated this point well: Two kids (well, ants) walk into the room, one crying, “Mom, he said the Z-word!” The parents send the kid to his room, then have this brief conversation: “Where’d the little %@#&! learn the Z-word?” “Beats the #@*$ out of me.”
When we visited Oahu two years ago, we noticed that aloha was everywhere, and meant everything. Aside from hello and goodbye, it seemed to represent an easy-going, positive attitude. There were signs all over the place saying things like “Drive with aloha.”
Then there was mahalo, Hawaiian for “thank you,” which is used everywhere in place of the English phrase. Either it’s part of the wave of Hawaiian identity, or it’s mandated by the Hawaii tourist board.
Aloha is all over the big island as well, but not quite to the same extent. We didn’t see a single “drive with aloha” sign this time around, for instance.
What we did see was kapu. Kapu is the Hawaiian form of taboo, a word which has lost much of its meaning both in modern English usage and in modern Hawaiian usage. In traditional polynesian cultures, a taboo was a sacred prohibition, and violation was often punishable by death (generally by way of being chosen for a human sacrifice). These days, kapu mainly shows up on “No Tresspassing” signs—of which there are plenty!
