A Sand By Any Other Name Would Still Stick Swell

My mother, as a recent Albertan Chemistry graduate in the 1950s, published research on petroleum extraction from what back then was unhesitatingly referred to as the Tar Sands. If you’ve seen that shit, what is technically and politely referred to as Bitumen, you’ll understand the usage. Hint: Don’t step in it if you value your footwear.

Since then, in an effort to turn black sticky sand into clean refreshing profits, there’s been a furious re-branding in favor of “oil” not “tar”, ignoring what it looks like when it’s in the ground. In practice, this means that when anyone uses the term “oil sands” you can safely assume they’re in the pay of the pipeline promoters.

— Tim Bray, ongoing.

"Corporations are people, my friends."

So is Soylent Green, my hearties.

Argumentum ad Tabula

 

 
— via Kieran Healy
 

A List of Analogies

 
She had a deep, throaty, genuine laugh, like that sound a dog makes just before it throws up.
 

Comment Acknowledging Business As Usual for the Sentinel Goes Here

General Puzzlement

There are 18 categories in the 104th King Williams College General Knowledge Quiz, and 10 questions in each category. I've looked at earlier editions of this quiz, and I'd count myself generally knowledgeable if I had one sure answer to a question in each of the eighteen categories. This year's quiz has foiled me again. Here are two of the categories:

7)
1. Which language was developed by a Polish ophthalmologist?
2. Which language of the Romance group has a definite article suffix?
3. Of which European language is the origin unknown, even to the experts?
4. Which geographically Scandinavian language is not linguistically Scandinavian?
5. Which European language is the only survivor of its branch of the Indo-European group?
6. Which Slavonic language is spoken in a country whose national language is not Slavonic?
7. Which European language is spoken by about 1% of the population of Switzerland?
8. Which European language has a past tense form which looks like a future?
9. Which Slavonic language has done away with the case forms
of nouns?
10. Which European national language still retains the dual number?

10) Which river:
1. received the defeated Aunus?
2. floats laden barges by banks of myosote?
3. was central to the non-payment of a mayoral debt?
4. was identified without doubt by the discovery of the initials AD
5. saw Captain Schenk acquire an engineer to replace the deceased Walter?
6. despite being in flood, could be crossed dry-shod following clerical plantar immersion?
7. provided drinks for kine, and horses, and little humorous donkeys?
8. along with Cairo was passed unnoticed by the raft in the fog?
9. was a source of shelly snails and green lettuces?
10. witnessed a case of unwitting filicide?

Now, of these, I'm pretty sure that the answer to 10.8 is the Ohio River in the Adventures of Huckelberry Finn, and I think 7.3 must be Basque. I'd hazard a guess on the rest with a range of confidence rapidly tending toward zero. My modest goal is met if those two are correct, though I have to admit the majority of the questions don't remind me of anything I've ever actually known. But what's a puzzle to me is readily anwered by the specialist as a matter of course; these questions undoubtedly call up an immediate range of unambiguous reference in the minds of those to whom this is the stuff and substance of their knowledge, knowledge which is broadly lingustic in 7 and broadly literary in 10. You can just tell there's a plausible special answer to each of these gnomic utterances in easy reach of those who happen to know.

Wassup 2008

 


Sweet.
 

Interruptus

"You're goin out?"

She's dressed to go out and passing through the room says to her daughter, "I'm going to see a lecture by Naomi Campbell."

"Eh?" or its equivalent from the daughter, naturally. "Naomi Campbell?"

"Oh, ha! I mean Naomi Wolfe."

"Uh, Naomi …?"

"…?… Oh, ah, Klein, Klein, Naomi Klein," says she. They're both laughing at it now.

Krugman, Recently Cited in the Quotidian, Wins Nobel-ish Prize

 
Paul Krugman, recently cited here in the Quotidian (formerly the Diurnal Journal), has won the prestigous Sveriges Riksbank Award in Economic Sciences in Honor of Alfred Nobel, or whatever the hell it's called, briskly and commonly and in fact mistakenly referred to by all as the "Nobel Prize in Economics."

Our condolences go out to Professor Krugman for the inevitable solecism imprecise wording thus forever attached to his deserved fame.
 

George Carlin, Forever And Ever, Amen

Meme Watch

 
Born on this date:

I am aware of all internet traditions.

That is all.
 

Fun with words

RAY SUAREZ: Well, Roben, you mentioned those exotic assets, hard to price. Isn't this a case where you take the hit for a couple of bad quarters, strip out those non-performing assets, write them down, and then you're a healthier, leaner country at the end of it -- company at the end of it, or is this something more dangerous than that to Lehman?

ROBEN FARZAD: It is more dangerous, because we didn't realize that the assets can't really be cordoned off that neatly. Leverage, as I've said before, has really long tentacles. It's almost like rust in a car. You know, the more you scratch away the rust, you find the rust deeper into the car.

Good enough, but what he really said was, "Leverage, as I've said before, has really long testic… um… tentacles." Check it out at 3:13.

In Farzad's defense, I think the idea of using really long testicles for leverage goes all the way back to Archimedes.

Using the wrong word

Aid Agencies Push Myanmar For More Access To Quake Area, by Tom Wright in The Wall Street Journal online, May 29, 2008 7:07 a.m.

A twofer: arguably the wrong word for the country, unarguably the wrong word for the calamity.

How To Be At Once Depraved and Correct

A Moment of Zen from The Daily Show:

Early Strains of Hip, 1959

Del Close, legendary performer and coach of improvisational comedy, in
How to Speak Hip, with John Brent.

It's said that How to Speak Hip was a particular favorite of Brian Wilson.

And, too, The Running Jumping and Standing Still Film, directed by Richard Lester and featuring the Goon Show regulars, Mulligan and Sellers and all.

Part 1


Part 2


It's said that The Running Jumping and Standing Still Film was a favorite of the Beatles, particularly John Lennon.

The Future of Sewage

This is the front page of a leaflet recently mailed to customers of the Santa Cruz Sanitation District. The image is, well, ominous, if I do say so myself.

Quotidian still not written in such a way as to be plainly understood, study says

Sad, really.

From the files of the Bureau of Lost or Stolen Appellations: The case of the loosed word

From the invaluable Silva Rhetoricæ created by Professor Gideon O. Burton of BYU:

ampliatio ampliatio am'-pli-a'-ti-o
from Lat. amplio, "to extend"
adjournment, an old name for a new thing

Using the name of something or someone before it has obtained that name or after the reason for that name has ceased. A form of epitheton.
 
Examples
 
Even after the man was healed from his ailment by Jesus, he was still referred to as "Simon the leper."

In the case of the indicated Simon, the name did not cease with the disease, but carried its baggage of significances forward with each new utterance, extending by ampliatio the allowed reference to the now no longer existent condition. Simon is not a leper, but he remains Simon the leper by ampliatio.

Additionally, as confimed in private email by Professor Gideon O. Burton himself, whose judgement goes unquestioned here at the Bureau, ampliatio can also serve a word back along the arrow of time into a past that happened well before the name itself was first brought up.

Thus, in saying, "Reptiles roaming Montana all those many years ago were the famous dinosaur kind of reptiles, as shown by the bone," a little ampliatio issues out of Montana, casting the word back, a made word, Montana, the newly acceptable something or other to call the indicated American place in the late nineteenth-century hurley-burley of its approaching statehood, ampliatio in our example casting the new name made for the new made state comprehensibly back into a past before that name obtained, and then dragging forward the meaning of Montana made there to suit the needs of saying "Reptiles roaming Montana all those many years ago were the famous dinosaur kind of reptiles, as shown by the bone."

Useful stuff, ampliatio. It allows for the application of the appellation along the termporal plane, the word tossed comprehensibly forward and back along the time line measured from the word's first use, leaving the messy analysis of all the other wanderings of word meanings to all your other tools.

Naturally in an effort to reduce the work flow here at the Bureau to a mangeable stream much of our attention over the years has been directed toward separating out as early as practicable in the application process those cases involving the loosed name, which are properly referred to the Ampliatio Work Group (which has operated semi-independently and only nominally under the direction of the Effectuator for some years now), rather than the lost or stolen name which is our own specialty here at the Bureau. The pre-application interview is meant to redirect such cases, but no system is perfect, and sometimes we find ourselves well along the path of processing a claim before it's discovered to everyone's annoyance that it was the loosed name not the lost or stolen one that was in question all along, the client having taken on advertently or not some appellation that cannot fail to be carried forward or now tossed back at the whim of the ampliatio engendered by it. As that which is left of the past word brought forward is so hard to lose, and what's sent back in time by the new made name can hardly be stolen from a past it never had, it's difficult to see how the resources of the Bureau, such as they are, can be of any help in these cases, but this fact is lost on many prospective clients.

/p.r.
Secretary to the Deputy Effectuator
Bureau of Lost or Stolen Appellations
WAAGNFNP (ret.)

Becoming Resigned

Sat Oct 20, 5:27am
TEHRAN(AFP, via Yahoo! News)- Iran's top negotiator on its controversial nuclear programme, Ali Larijani has resigned, the state news agency IRNA reported on Saturday, quoting the Islamic republic's government spokesman.
[…]
Elham added that Iran's meeting with EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana will go ahead "as scheduled with the new head of supreme national security council," which was headed by Larijani as his official title.
[…]
Despite several meetings during the past year, Larijani and Solana have not overcome the deadlock over Tehran's refusal to suspend its sensitive uranium enrichment activities.
[…]
The West, led by the United States, believes that Iran's nuclear programme is cover for a drive to develop an atomic bomb, but Tehran insists it is for civilian objectives only.

If Iran wishes to transform itself now from an oil-producing economic power to an electrical-energy producing economic power by way of nuclear energy, then this is certainly the time to do it, while Iran's diminished supply of oil is still raking in huge amounts of cash that can be spent on such a far-sighted transformation.

In the years since the invasion of Iraq by the United States, the price of oil has risen from near $50 a barrel to nearer $90, lots of that profitable rise making its way into the Iranian economy. With all that money sloshing around in a system that is formally closed off in certain directions by international sanctions, things cost more in Iran over time. The cost of living there increases inexorably, and the general attitude so acutely labelled social unrest becomes intrinsic to all those increasingly unable to afford to live there at all.

If the belief on the part of the West, led by the United States, that "Iran's nuclear programme is cover for a drive to develop an atomic bomb" is a belief fueled by the incorrigible foriegn policy fantasies of the Bush Administration, then it is unlikely to be true in any meanigful sense, or, believed in one way or the other by anyone speaking for the Bush Administration on the matter, each of whom I personally suspect of having their own reasons for making any claim.



"Head of supreme national security council" is the official title of the position Mr. Larijani held until his resignation, according to the report by AFP. Perhaps there's a more acute translation of Mr. Larijani's job title; however it's said, introducing the blunt granduer of "supreme" into the mention of any arbitrary government job is not an uncommon move. Evidently this is the case in Iran, where millennia of government jobs have experienced the inflationary effect of introducing progressively more exalted terms for what was commonly called something else before, to the point where the significance of "supreme" itself, the logical end of such inflation, becomes deflated by regular use, and only the degree of utter generality expressed by the rest of the job title can lift it back up. The more general the rest of the title, the greater the degree of supremacy being claimed by its owner.

Mr. Larijani was given a portentious and succinct title, and a job he tried to resign from many times.

He mentioned on Wednesday that Vladimir Putin had floated a proposal to break the deadlock in the crisis when he spoke with supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei during his visit to Iran earlier in the week.

On Friday, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad told the Fars News Agency there was no nuclear proposal.

It's not clear where President Ahmadinejad got this idea, which contadicts what Mr. Laijani said just a few days before. Perhaps he was told to say it by supreme leader Ayatollah Khomenei for some reason. Maybe Putin asked him to say it. Or maybe he just came up with it on his own.

At any rate, Mr. Lijani is out, and Mr. Solana, who is tasked with reporting back by mid-November to a consortium of nations including Britain, France, Germany, Russia, China and the United States on Iran's willingness to forswear its uranium enrichment program, is left with no one to dance with at the present time.

Think Thing

If you think that, you've got another think coming.

If you think that, you've got another thing coming.

Never once in the long years I'd assumed I was familiar with the phrase had I considered that the actual asserted value of x being offered in the common enough phrase you've got another x coming, might be the word "think." Not once.

"…another think?" I thought, when apprised of this a few years back. "Think? Really?"

Now and then I notice a brief eruption of controversy over which word is correct.

But for the most part I don't think about the thing at all. And if you think I might be swayed by one side of the argument or the other, well, …no. No, I am not swayed at all.

Because, you see, I've never used the phrase myself as near as I can recall. It's just not the way I talk to people.

If you think that, you're a fucking idiot.

Yes, yes, I've used that. And…

Do check your priors!

But not the thing with the think, no.