Uncle Jazzbeau’s Gallimaufrey

iacta alea est

You’ve probably seen it blogged about by now: the page twenty-three sentence five meme. The LaughingMeme has a post-mortem on the epidemiology of the critter. He refers to it as the p23s5 meme and tracks it back through an earlier and lengthier p18s4 variant. Here it is in all its simplicity.

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 23.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.

I tried it and here’s what I got:

1. OK. Der große Duden, Band 4: Duden Grammatik der deutschen Gegenwartssprache, 1966.
2. Drat! It’s the table of contents.
3. No real sentences, but here’s the fifth line from the first column: “Der überschwere folgende Leichten, Voll- oder Kaumschwere ... 662.”
4. Done.

[via the sum of my parts via Klastrup’s Cataclysms via thinking with my fingers via Jerz’s Literacy Weblog]

smack dab

[This entry intentionally left blank.]

less unique

While listening to a rebroadcast of a Letter From America, I heard Alistair Cooke say:

As a human being Valentino was no more unique than any of the other superstars we've come to know. He was simply the first exemplar of what a new medium—the cinema—can do to magnify a famous face to the point of hypnotising the audience and frightening the victim.

[Alistair Cooke The Effects of Fame]

Interesting. His ‘no more unique’ seems A-OK with yours truly, but I wonder what the grammarians would have to say? Icily, no doubt, a lapsus linguæ.

less brutal than saddam

An interesting article on Fallujah [via Kerim at Keywords] written by Rahul Mahajan.

A gentle, urbane man who speaks fluent English, Al-Nazzal is beside himself with fury at the actions of the U.S. military. (When I asked him if it was all right to use his full name, he said, “It’s ok. It’s all OK now. Let the bastards do what they want.”) He talks of coalition snipers targeting ambulances, being hit, of them killing women and children. Describing the horror that the siege of Fallujah has become, he says, “I have been a fool for 47 years. I used to believe in European and American civilization.”

Mahajan is also running a blog called Empire Notes about the war in Iraq. On April 12th, 1:20 PM EST [no permalinks], he had this to say:

Let’s just call [what’s happening in Fallujah] what it is. It’s an incredibly brutal collective punishment in defense of a regime, that of the occupation, that is less brutal than Saddam was but more than makes up for that with its negligence. Fewer people in the mass graves, more children dying for lack of medicine, more people being murdered on the streets or kidnapped. Hard to weigh all of the factors, but I’ve heard so many say, including Shi’a, that things are worse now.

Amongst the answers the President gave in his press conference yesterday was this:

Q: April is turning into the deadliest month in Iraq since the fall of Baghdad, and some people are comparing Iraq to Vietnam and talking about a quagmire. Polls show that support for your policy is declining and that fewer than half Americans now support it. What does that say to you and how do you answer the Vietnam comparison?

The President: I think the analogy is false. I also happen to think that analogy sends the wrong message to our troops, and sends the wrong message to the enemy. Look, this is hard work. It’s hard to advance freedom in a country that has been strangled by tyranny. And, yet, we must stay the course, because the end result is in our nation’s interest.

post paschal potholes

Some nice links this morning on some of my favorite blogs:

1. Mark over on Languagelog has posted a field guide to prescriptivists. Too funny, if it weren’t too sad. Here are his five motivations usually given as strictures to usage:
   1. Tradition—how our forebears talked. Innovation is degeneration.
   2. Fashion—how an admired group talks. Deviation is alienation.
   3. Universal grammar -- how one ought ideally to talk. Inconsistency is illogical.
   4. Standards—how we should agree to talk. Variation confuses communication.
   5. Revelation—how God taught us to talk. Alteration is transgression.
2. C R Culver over at Nephelokkugia has started posting his LaTeX for Classicists. (I hope he gives the TeXy secret for putting accents over macrons for Sanskrit transliterations of Vedic texts.)
3. Mr BaliHai of Eye of the Goof has posted a link to a completely digitized 1961 comic called This Godless Communism.
4. Ben Boyd of Zonkbonk sent a link to a US presidential candidate I hadn’t heard of, Roy Moore. Nice to see that the religious right is upset with their former darling.

I can only assume that the unholy degeneration of the English language was precipitated by godless communism and linguistics.

helbiggius fhaked me

I got off to an historically linguistically geeky morning [via Nephelokokkygia], searching the web for information on the faked quality of the Prænestine Fibula and its famous archaic Latin inscription:

MANIOS:MED:VHE:VHAKED:NVMASIOI
Manius made me for Numerius

While trying to figure out why Wolfgang Helbig might have faked the inscription on the fibula (basically a Roman safety pin) I ran across a new book I want to read, Margaret M T Watmough’s Studies in the Etruscan Loanwords in Latin, and, because of that, an entry in a new linguistics blog called Cælestis. Professor Watmough is involved in a project called Imagines Italicæ which “aims to place in the hands of scholars the primary evidence both for the texts of the inscriptions of the peoples of Central Italy and for the monumental and archaeological context of these inscriptions.” Too bad about the fibula. Looks like Helbig may have faked it to further his career ...

unseen olaus wormius obtains

If you’re looking for some eldritch horror à la Howard Phillips Lovecraft then look no further than Cthuugle. [via Laura at Limon] There’s also a blog. The link to the Tales of the Plush Cthulhu is worth a crore gajillion pings of slashdottian n-dimensions.

risotto

Lists, lists, lists.

1. Claims vs. Facts: Condoleezza Rice’s Opening Statement. [via Kerim at Keywords]
2. Dr Rice’s 1984 book panned. [via Kevin Drum via Unfogged]
3. Dr Rice’s bio at the Whitehouse and Disinfopedia.

tongue askew

Making the rounds of the various linguistics blogs has been the grammar quiz at Quizilla. Yours truly got the following:

You are a GRAMMAR GOD!
If your mission in life is not already to
preserve the English tongue, it should be.
Congratulations and thank you!
How grammatically sound are you?
brought to you by Quizilla

Rather than making the world safe for prescriptivists, you’d do better reading what others in the community have said about it: Languagehat, Bill Poser at Languagelog, Ryan at the Audhumlan Conspiracy, and Matt at Grammar Folies.

cms under review

Padawan dot info has a nice entry summing up content management systems (CMS). It boils down to: you can’t replace writers with technology. Having worked as a writer most of my IT life, I can say that’s also true outside the realm of CMS. But then it’s impossible to replace knowledge workers, in general, with technology, as much as management would love to. Sending work abroad is just the teeny tip of the iceberg of what Mahogany Row would really love to do, that is replace all personnel with unconscious non-human resources. And that includes, of course, the removal of middle management. Tsk.

last action hero

Well, I went to see Mel Gibson’s theological snuff film on Sunday. It was better than I thought it would be, but it was definitely not much to write home about. Best laugh was when one of the Roman soldiers (who historically were probably non-Latin-speaking Syrian recruits) said “Facta non verba.” Other than that, the acting was wooden, the script leaden, and the violence ultra. It dawned on me—somewhere in medias scourging—that what Gibson has made is a religious action film. You know there’s always a part in the action film where the stubborn hero gets the snot beat out of him. (Think Clint in those spaghetti westerns, Bruce dying harder, and even Mel in search of lethal WMD.) Then in the last act, the hero catches his wind and annihilates the villains. I liked Shupov as Pilate, but there was very little for him to work with. And at times Caviezel looked like he’d morphed into Mel. The most daring departure from the story line was having JC fall five times instead of three as in the stations of the cross. My suggestion for those who haven’t seen it yet: rent Scorsese’s Last Temptation for the story or Derek Jarman’s Sebastiane for the Latin.