What's the Word?

Puddle Jumper

April 6, 2012

noun Date: 1942 slang lightplane

I remember the days I flew to and from Chicago, a round trip flight from a tiny airport in rural Ohio to Meigs Field in the downtown area of the Illinois metropolis.

The plane was small. I don't remember nor would I have recognized the style or genre of the plane, but it fit 4 people including the pilot.

The flight to Chicago took far longer than expected on account of the muscular headwinds blowing like constant thunder at the nose of the plane. The pilot indicated that we were slowed to about half our expected speed by the sharp winds. His anxiety was palpable even as his concentration seemed never to waver. Anxiety might have consumed me but for the apparent confidence and shared assurance of the pilot. He was a general Renaissance man who piloted planes, conducted orchestras, built bombs, and had been married (and divorced) 7 times.

At about the halfway point of the flight (which should have been the end of the journey by the standards of the time that had elapsed) the pilot grew restless. He indulged in a well-deserved fit of laughter that consoled his nerves, or at least plundered his gut of its available weakness.

He turned to look at me, sitting at the back of the plane. I was calmly reading a book. This amused the pilot. No, it more than amused him. It made him laugh uncontrollably, until tears oozed like bitter sap from his eyes. He laughed. He chortled and guffawed and wheezed. He raised his cackling face to the nearer-than-usual heavens, barking out spittle-filled comments of what could be interpreted as admiration but which I recognized as an expulsion of tension.

"Look at this guy! He's reading a book, relaxing, like he does this every day. Like he flies to Chicago in a tin can with 60mph headwinds every day of his life! Bahahahaha!"

puddle_jumper definitions

Earnful

April 5, 2012

Earnful Earn"ful, a. [From Earn to yearn.] Full of anxiety or yearning. [Obs.] --P. Fletcher.

What a strange word: Earnful. As in, full of earn. The proper definition is "full of anxiety" but earnful sounds like it wants to describe a vessel full of earn, where "earn" is just a part of full-out earnestness. "Earn" is only the gesture, or the facial expression of concentration and the work of deep thought, but it is not the full equation.

Sing a song of sixpence, a pocket full of earn.

The word "reckless" randomly prances through my conscious mind sometimes. The word reminds me of an interview with Judith Exner. Larry King introduced her as a weirdly prestigious if vestigial connection to the JFK/Camelot mystique. Basically, he banged her (JFK, that is, not Larry King).

Among other pronouncements Ms. Exner described the president as "reckless". That word puzzled me until I realized how it was spelled. It is not "wreckless" but "reckless". For years, though, I thought it was "wreckless" and to me the meaning of the word as used in common parlance seemed self-referentially oxymoronic. "Lacking in wreck" sounds perfectly safe to me, so why would JFK's dangerous dalliances be described as that?

Thus every time that word tramps about my mind I re-visit the always-hard-to-remember logic by which I remember that the word is not spelled "wreckless" but "reckless" and thus it does not mean "lacking in wreck" but rather "lacking in reck" and "reck" has something of a relationship in spirit if not etymology with "reckoning". Thus I laboriously and over the years repeatedly have explained to myself that Judith Exner said JFK was "reckless" not "wreckless" and that she should not have chosen "wreckful" even if that's a better sounding word.

Earnful, though. That's a new one. well, no it's not, it's an old one. An old, obsolete one that is no longer in use. But it's new to me, and it's amusing to think of earnestness broken down to its constituent parts.

Its original and now obsolete meaning has no traction, but a well-paid laborer could describe herself as "earnful" if only to make an impression on a resumé. "From 2008-2011 I was earnfully employed at XYZ Company..."

earnful definitions

Adminicle

October 29, 2010

Adminicle: collateral evidence of the contents of a missing document.

I need a new language. A new spoken or written language. Arabic looks beautiful at a glance, and esoteric. Japanese, for as much as I understand of the way it works, might be the easiest for me to pick up.

There is a feeling I have had since youth, a feeling that I am missing something in the English language, missing a history of expression, a heritage of context from which today's words and biases of articulation evolved. I feel like today's English is but a headline, a "Daily News" resource which is rich but nevertheless only symptomatic of the rising, the rising of ideas from sparsity to baroque and back to sparsity, the same ideas trading places back and forth across centuries.

During my first forays into musicology texts I felt a certain constipation when reading materials translated from other languages into English. This should come as no surprise, but I remember next moving from those texts back to "natural" American English and feeling the same unease, the same sense of gruff inarticulateness moldering thickly in the words which swirled on the page before me.

I want to know what is missing, and the quest to learn another language might open some windows into that abyss, but I do not imagine that other cultures and societies have answers that America lacks. I do not expect answers, only questions. If I do pursue speaking or writing/understanding other languages then it would not be a culturally- or politically-motivated pursuit but a human and possibly spiritual one. I have never trusted language as a documentary tool and yet lives and civilizations are regularly reduced to a few lines of text. And nothing communicates chaos and unrest like text. War and violence are ephemeral but text is forever.

adminicle definitions

Wharfage

October 27, 2010

WHARFAGE, n. The fee or duty paid for the privilege of using a wharf for loading or unloading goods, timber, wood, etc.

I knew an artist who groused constantly about his lack of money and bleak prospects for future sources of income. We worked on some projects intended to financially enrich him in the future. I donated my time out of a sense of honor and servitude, the sort of vassalage to which one submits themselves when they feel they are in the presence of a great and worthy artist.

I was surprised, then, when one day he mentioned that he owned a boat. He also owned a car and rented a private parking spot, which seemed like preliminary extravagances already, but the boat seemed like a statement of privilege incompatible with his stated persona.

I was 25 and I think he was about 48 at the time.

I was surprised to find this self-styled starving artist spending his weekends pursuing a leisure activity I associated with profligate wealth, but at 25 I took some humble comfort in the age difference between us. I soon remembered the wise words of a sleazy real estate agent I encountered early after moving to New York. A well-dressed, rudely demanding gentleman who had never seen any of the apartments he rented, I said something to him about possibly not having the money for the listings he pushed on me. I had come in response to a newspaper ad promising apartments at a certain price, and as became routine for this pursuit I arrived at the broker's office to be told that all those listings were gone.

I would call a real estate agency at the number shown in the classified ads, and I would ask for a "Mrs. Arnold." There was no Mrs. Arnold. Instead I would talk to whoever answered the phone. "Mrs. Arnold" was a code signaling which newspaper ad I responded to, similar to click-tracking in today's Internet advertising. By asking for Mrs. Arnold they knew I called in response to a specific ad in the Village Voice. Had I asked for "Mr. Pardo" they would know that I responded to a different ad in the New York Times. The vagaries of this system included differences in the listings among publications, and the differences included the basics of apartment types and rental prices as well as the name of the company and other details which differed from ad to ad, from paper to paper.

In response to the "Mrs. Arnold" ad I met a well-dressed older gentleman who never mentioned the ad to which I responded but instead pushed a series of apartments considerably more expensive than the ones I came to see. I meekly suggested that these were too expensive, to which he turned surprisingly reflective, saying that when he was my age he imagined he would never have enough money, but that "as you get older you'll find ways to get the money together when you need it." His exact words are lost to the witches of memory but the words of this Upper East Side real estate agent echoed those of a college counselor at my high school. Addressing a classroom of students in the throes of applying for college the counselor attempted to quell our anxieties about the day-to-day consequences of our affairs by stating that "In 15 years no one is going to care that you failed an Algebra test." She offered other examples of seemingly significant events of our high school hungerings, explaining that little if any of it matters on this highway of life, and that we would get through these eventful times and "find ways to prosper."

I think the real estate agent had it right. We do not prosper. We find ways to survive, and we craft a view of the world in which our dignity relies on the shortcomings of others and the lies we supply ourselves, lies about the misfortunes of others. cherry-picked anecdotes, selectively nurtured trivia, and ever more lies about all things.

wharfage definitions

Aquaplane

April 13, 2010

aquaplane v 1: rise up onto a thin film of water between the tires and road so that there is no more contact with the road

During a hurricane evacuation I had been awake for 30 hours and, in the back seat of the car, I don't remember why but I noticed we were going the wrong way. It was true, not a lucid dream, we really were seeing thousands of cars lined up on the Interstate heading north while we had the soutbound side almost completely to ourselves. Our only company on that road were emergency vehicles and other cars moving at what was easily 90mph. As I lurched between being awake and asleep I saw those cars lift off. A police car roared past us, spraying water like a firehose, and I snapped awake when I saw that car rise up off the road. Why were we going the wrong way? Was someone sick? What was our personal emergency that sent us into the jaws of a dangerous hurricane while virtually everyone in the region got the hell out? I've never had an answer to that question, but I know that these evacuations were routine and my mother disregarded most of them. As a child I had dreams about my mother driving me into war, I helplessly in the back seat and gradually being made aware that we were nearing a combat zone as my mother dismissively drove on, cursing. I thought of these dreams in later years, when she became addicted to video games. I saw her techniques of game play as a reflection of her outlook on life. Instead of learning the subtleties of a game and its characters she would just plow through them, sacrificing whatever points or life she had to start the game. To her driving a car was a form of combat, in which there were winners and losers. Truckers always won and she bitterly allowed them to cut in front of her, remarking "Who do you think's gonna win?" She similarly regarded certain villains and bad guys in video games as insufferable bastards who could not be defeated, but in that realm she was able to do what she could not do on the road. She showed her frustrations by just mowing through the bad guys and, by surviving, winning.

aquaplane definitions

Absonous

April 12, 2010

Absonous \Ab"so*nous\, a. [L. absonus; ab + sonus sound.] Discordant; inharmonious; incongruous. [Obs.] ``Absonous to our reason.'' --Glanvill.

As the era of the super-virtuoso reached its "me too" apex it was not uncommon to see pianists and composers attach their names to arrangements and transcriptions already hyphenated and appended with the names of earlier virtuosi. When Liszt arranged Paganini's Caprices for piano solo the scores were published under the name of Paganini-Liszt, the arrangers name placed respectively in sequential deference to the original composer. Similarly, Liszt's name appeared in numerous hyphenations, including Schubert-Liszt, Wagner-Liszt, Bellini-Liszt, and so on. With regard to the Paganini-Liszt studies it was the Italian pianist and composer Ferrucio Busoni who arranged Liszt's arrangements, publishing his scores under the name of Paganini-Liszt-Busoni. In later years Vladimir Horowitz got in on the fun, embellishing Busoni's embellishments, and performing a selection of Paganini-Liszt-Busoni-Horowitz Etudes.

Add to the mix Mr. Softee. As summer arrives in New York the noise pollution of the Mr. Softee ice cream truck re-asserts itself after its winter absence. I found myself listening to a recording of Carlo Grante playing Godowsky's arrangements of Chopin's Etudes. At a certain point the music was way high in the register of thepiano, I guess you might describe the sound as that of a music box, but for some reason it sounded wrong to me. These Godowsky arrangements, described by Claudio Arrau as sounding like "ants", bustle with chromatic whirrs and counterpoint too complicated to imagine or even hear. With a spirit of good humor I often listen to these pieces, as repeat hearings tend to reveal some strain of humor previously unnoticed.

As I heard that above mentioned passage, glittering in the upper register of the piano, I though I heard something new, some heretofore unnoticed strand of counterpoint. Was Godowsky quoting Choping quoting Diabelli? I listened closer to the great Carlo Grante, listening for what this hidden line of music could mean, and sadly concluded that it was the sound of the Mr. Softee truck, its grating music box jingle invading my concentration and intertwining itself into the music, its vaguely similay timbre mixing up with this Chopin-Godowsky music to create an ephemral etude by the unlikely relay of Chopin-Godowsky-Softee.

absonous definitions

Funambulist

April 11, 2010

A rope walker or dancer.

In alternating 20-minute segments I watched two movies which oddly complemented each other. Both were documentaries. "Man on Wire" chronicled Philippe Petit's journey to the top of the Twin Towers in 1974 while "The Bridge" captured video and background stories of the numerous people who commit suicide jumping from San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge. In both films the protagonists aim to reach great heights but the relationship between these individuals and their chosen perils is different. It was a strange mix, and I believe that the two movies belong together.

funambulist definitions

Meretriciousness

February 17, 2010

Deceitful enticements.

Reading old magazines
with rubber gloves and a
dust mask on my face
I feel like a postal worker at
Rockefeller Center after the
anthrax attacks on
Tom Brokaw.

So much text,
inch after inch of
cackling effluvia,
formatted for distraction and
knowing physical comedy,
a taut anecdote
(scooped from a
300-page memoir)
stuffed in the
corner of a 3,000-word
profile of the
forgotten dilettante who
fooled his peers with the
genius schtick.

The un-verified anecdote
supports the wordful mass
like a crutch,
that little slip of words
holds the magazine together
so the porous future can
question and disprove the
editorial chicanery that
held a generation by its
gossamer-thick attention.

meretriciousness definitions

Profanation

November 19, 2009

The act of violating sacred things, or of treating them with contempt or irreverence; irreverent or too familiar treatment or use of what is sacred; desecration; as, the profanation of the Sabbath; the profanation of a sanctuary; the profanation of the name of God.

The first time I ever said the f-word was in the 2nd grade. I don't know where I had heard the expression, but I probably learned it from school. My parents cursed like Tom Sawyer but I never heard them use the f-word until adulthood, and even then I found it kind of shocking to hear either parent say it.

The incident involved a frog. We lived in a house at the end of a canal, and among other marvels of sea-creaturedom I saw countless frogs, some of them blooming out of tadpoles and others seemingly born fully-formed.

Leopard frogs were a favorite of mine. I still get a little pique of excitement when I think of how brightly colored they were, and how fast and far the Leopards could jump. Other frogs waddled around in a comparatively slovenly manner but to me the Leopard was sleek and smart.

Enter, then, what remains the biggest frog I have ever seen. As big as a basketball this monster sat like a water-filled balloon outside the garage, on dirt behind a bush, not moving and not even seeming to think. Its broad, frowning mouth reached from one end of its body to the other and its motionless eyes stared, seeming to follow me even as they seemed not to move. Its too-fall feet seemed like irrelevant nubs, like insults. How could they lift something so disproportionately huge?

This was not a fun frog. I could not play with it or watch it jump around. I waited for it to return my stares in a sentient-seeming way. I tried to imagine playing with this unwieldy beast, and visions of trying to roll this blubberful blob around in the grass or on the driveway didn't make me laugh, they made me sour. In my squeaky little voice I muttered "Oh fuck you" to this mass, summoning all the disdain a 2nd-grader could muster.

I stepped away from the playless, warty globule, feeling defeated, feeling I had been schooled with a blunt, ugly lesson, feeling like I must have owed this frog something for it to have made such a crassly torpid appearance in my little life.

profanation definitions

Didgeridoo

November 9, 2009

An Australian Aboriginal musical wind instrument of long tubular shape.

In college the word "didgeridoo" was a source of humor for us, not out of ridicule for the instrument but just because the word itself sounded funny. I would punch and howl the last syllable, lingering for several seconds on the doooooo after racing through the word on a decrescendo. We used the word when we could not remember the words to songs or when anything else slipped our minds, filling in mental lapses with some good old didgeridoo. We had a didgeridoo in the dormitory, but to me its low, booming sound is less memorable than our treatment of the instrument's name. I associated the didgeridoo with the sackbut, though the two instruments share no heritage. The sackbut (another word which provoked post-adolescent titters for its evocation of sack-shaped buttocks) is an early version of today's trombone. I only associate the sackbut with the didgeridoo because I learned of the two instruments' existences at about the same time. The sackbut I associated with Garrison Keillor, who once wrote that every sackbut player he'd ever known thought the world owed them a goddam living. The humor was prescient at the time, as it intersected with my exposure to an "original instruments" movement that threatened to change music and all else, this high ambition a reflection of the movement's self-importance. The sackbut joke soured, though, as I found the humorlessness in Keillor's humor. I think of Keillor as the Edward Hopper of American literature. Hopper, critics, say, had no sympathy for the subjects of his paintings, some suggesting that his ambivalence even reached repugnancy for those blank, cardboard-faced characters. Garrison Keillor has a similar attitude, and I find that his humor is absorbed by the sneering disdain he heaps on his characters.

didgeridoo definitions

Doop

October 28, 2009

A little copper cup in which a diamond is held while being cut.

A friend told me she needed a hobby. I had lots of ideas, but as is normal for an "Idea Man" they were all dismissed. Shooed away with that sweeping hand gesture which says there is no use for that.

Bookbinding used to seem like it would be enjoyable and even useful but with digitization this little joy could be on the brink of deprecated uselessness. Re-assembling a tattered book for future readers seems improvident when zapping said books to digital image form could allow not just for reading of the content but fuller searchability and (of course) ad revenue for whichever of the searchies gets to it first. One can complain about the lack of physical connection between humans and digitized books, but those jeremiads will likely fade, subsumed by the tireless (if often presumptuous) march of technology.

Model ship building also seems to be a fading hobby. A few years ago I tried to find basic model kits for ships, boats, and planes at any of the mainstream toy stores in my area. I either found none at all or I was unimpressed with what I did find. I looked to mom & pop hobby shops and the like for those classic old model boat kits such as I used to make in grade school. Several web sites sell such products but the prices for these sight-unseen and object-untouched kits were too high for my risk tolerance.

Making your own soap or window cleaner or other household product might be a worthy hobby. I knew a woman who could not believe I spent money on products like Windex and Fantastik when, she believed, you could mix ingredients yourself and get comparable if not superior potions for a tiny fraction of what those brand name products cost. I have never tried this but at times I look at a bottle of Windex and think feel like I see right through the branding and the packaging and see nothing magical at all, just some everyday liquids mixed together with some food coloring. I briefly looked into making my own soaps but it did not suit the time horizons I would have established for such a project.

I don't know if diamond cutting could be classified as a hobby, but other type of stone-setting or cutting might be hobby-worthy. Glass-blowing has interested me for some time, and a conversation with a one-time practicer of that craft led me to believe that it is not as exotic or expensive an art as one would expect.

I occasionally try to chase my dream of being a cartoonist, but I invariably fail for being unable to draw the same thing twice. I can not even do two or three identical circles or squares. Each attempt is different, making it impossible to do what I would want to do, which is develop cartoon characters that readers could consistently and unconsciously identify through the other wanderings of the storylines.

A good hobby is hard to find.

doop definitions

Digitorium

September 7, 2009

A small dumb keyboard used by pianists for exercising the fingers.

I have used digital pianos almost exclusively for the last several years. I fear it might ruin my technique, though no evidence yet suggests that these plastic imitations of "real" pianos have done anything negative to what we pianists sometimes call "the mechanism" (heh).

Like anything digital, the success of a digital piano depends first on its convenience, then its quality. Digital photography overwhelmed film photography in large part for its convenience, this in the same way that digital audio formats will make plastic compact discs obsolete, and this after said CDs made LP records a relic -- though I believe this latter shift was less of a response to consumer demand than to the needs of the recording industry.

Digital pianos have seen a far slower rate of progress compared to other digital products. This is because the convenience that they offer has not yet become a footnote to their quality. Quality is still poor, though digitals offer other features that make them useful and fun. Yet, as other observers have said, it is simply astonishing that digital keyboards and piano-like instruments have been around for decades and yet there is not a single such instrument you can point to and say that that defines the standard for non-acoustic keyboard instruments. Digital pianos carry the stigma of compromise. Digital pianos are disposable and must be replaced regularly (the marketing term for this is "upgraded") to keep pace with rapid obsolescence that is synonymous with gadgetry.

"Real" pianos rarely appeared in the context of an upgrade scenario. Practicing Liszt concerti on a spinet might suggest an upgrade is in order but for the most part a pianist who blamed their problems on the instrument was just making excuses.

digitorium definitions

Vermiculation

August 18, 2009

The act or operation of moving in the form of a worm.

Patrick Duffy was the Man From Atlantis, a 1977 television show perhaps best remembered for the way Duffy swam. He moved underwater with his arms locked to his sides, and only by movement of his waist.

Like a lot of kids at the time I tried to swim like that, my only payoff for the effort being the cackles of my sister, who thought (rightly) that I looked ridiculous. I thrashed and wrangled in the water, never staying fully submerged in the shallow end of an Olympic-sized swimming pool at the University of South Florida.

I can swim but not well. I lied about it in grade school, knowing I could not swim but imagining the ability would natively arise from my bones. In the 3rd grade the Physical Education coach announced that the class would swim in the pool. I was asked if I knew how to swim, and I must have said yes, either intentionally lying or simply not knowing -- I don't remember which but I think it was a mix of the two.

I swam in the Mekong River in Laos but that was different. There were others around to guide me and, in the Mekong where we swam, one did not just swim shark-bait style. It was more like a big hot tub, and while it was deep enough that one could drown it was too shallow and too rugged for the type of swimming one does in pools.

That was my revelation that hot Florida day, when I jumped from a diving board into the shallow end of the school and nearly drowned. I got my footing on the floor of the pool and stood in the water, the coach shouting "Thomas, I thought you said you could swim." "I thought I could" was my response, and it was not a lie. I did not know that swimming in a pool would be so different from swimming in the Mekong. I did not say that, though, as the other 24 kids in the class listened in on the conversation. Everyone stopped. Thomas couldn't swim.

My grade school evidently had no time for this, so I had to go to a program at a local college. This coincided with the airing of Man From Atlantis and as my swimming skills improved my enthusiasm for Patrick Duffy's unique swimming motions reached imitative heights. I failed, of course, but I wonder how many others succeeded in this unusual movement.

vermiculation definitions

Krang

July 16, 2009

The carcass of a whale after the blubber has been removed.

The word "krill" represented one of my great vocabulary triumphs.
I was something of a wordsmith in high school. My writing vocabulary went beyond mere SAT words and rambled into obsolescence and occasional incomprehensibility.

It was not in an English or Literature class, though, where my knowledge of krill was the tonic that sated the confusion that filled the room when the teacher asked us what whales ate.

He asked the question more artfully, I think, but the he asked this question to show that enormous whales do not generally eat enormous things, but oodles and oodles (and oooooodles) of tiny things.

The question was asked and I saw the others in the class flipping madly through their class notes and textbooks, whispering "What the hell do whales eat? Huh?"

Confidently I raised my right hand and, with the knowledge of one about to deliver a shocking bolt of news I raised both hands in a half-halleluiah gesture and said "Krill."

Every single student turned to stare at me for a moment. The teacher was a bit chagrined, not because I knew the answer but because no one else did.

This was a science class but I knew the word from crossword puzzles, not from studying.

krang definitions

Fraud in Fact

June 17, 2009

Actual deceit; concealing something or making a false representation with an evil intent to cause injury to another

Something I heard on the radio yesterday has lingered in my mind.

A call-in discussion about printers prompted a college professor to call in and say that she requires her students to have printers in their dorm rooms -- as opposed to using a printer at the school's computing center or at a copy shop.

A printer (and more significantly its expensive and over-packaged cartridges) was described by an on-air guest as an unnecessary expense for college students, but the college prof. called to disagree. She said that her students' quality of writing and scholarship improved dramatically when they proof-read and edited documents by taking pen to paper versus editing on screen. You only think you are editing on a screen, she said, and you are not really writing as well as you think you are.

I think about these things a lot, that these cheap plastic keyboards and the digital output they produce are insignificant tools of the craft that establish little connection between the mind and the product.

Another radio commentator last year dismissed Internet blogger death-threats against him as "hyperventilating at the keys", a phrase that could have been applied to the earliest BBS malcontents as easily as today's drive-by insulters who routinely litter comment boards with disembodied anger.

Is it fraud, though? Does lack of depth in public discourse rise to the level of fraud? Does the culture of digital-only content -- an environment whose anger is typically vanquished by in-person debates on the same subjects -- does this digital-only culture constitute intellectual fraud? What about bogus research scooped up as fact by thousands? Is it fraud to seed public web sites with seemingly harmless nonsense and watch as that nonsense travels?

fraud_in_fact definitions

Sozzle

June 16, 2009

A sluttish woman, or one that spills water and other liquids carelessly.

I remember Diana.

A college cutie of mixed heritage, she claimed not to know all the nations and cultures represented in her DNA. She knew she had Cherokee, Japanese, and Mediterranean in her bloods, but other nationalities were mostly speculation. There was talk of a British ancestor who married an Egyptian, and through that a purported connection to old, old, old money. There was also known to be Eskimo blood in the lineage but details were sketchy.

That was her story. It was her only story. She repeated it faithfully, with faith to who I do not know. She never embellished by adding other exotic nationalities or peoples. I suppose embellishments were unnecessary but to me it seemed like an inevitable temptation to lie. One must keep their lies in order, though, and I do not think Diana had the self-referential complexity for maintaining a swarm of lies.

She was beautiful, though, and at that age beauty still influenced my infatuations. In her litanies which outlined her heritage I tried to dig deeper, to find more, I listened for fresh nuance and distraction which would allow me to change the subject, to take another path. The farthest afield I got was her dreams. but her dreams were routine, the stuff of textbooks, dreams which expressed common anxieties and everyday concerns.

One night I felt a breakthrough. She stood and walked to the kitchen sink. She turned on the water. When she turned on the water it leaked from the faucet, down the length of the fixture to the Hot and Cold dials. From there the water crawled along a crack in the countertop and it somehow leaped to a table, where it splayed into a veined lightning-bolt formation, dispersing itself in several directions and eventually slowing and stopping its growth.

It did not grow wisteria-like but the water's spontaneous sprawl was the spark of romance for which I hungered. To me it expressed Diana's character, or the character I longed for. She let the water leak in this way, I thought, as a tacit signal of deep meaning, as a wordless representation of her winsome character. Words, I decided, were inferior tools for her.

sozzle definitions

Tummals

June 15, 2009

A great quantity or heap.

I questioned excess as a child.

A newspaper advertisement from a car dealership listed several vehicles for sale, with specifications for each. 4-wheel drive was one feature. AM/FM/Cassette was another.

But one feature stuck in my mind as being excessive. That feature was "Ice Cold Air". At 13 years old I thought to myself "Who needs 'Ice Cold Air?' We, as a people, do not need 'Ice Cold Air' in our vehicles."

I imagined myself standing up for this cause, embodying the common-sense antidote to this particular excesses of marketing and American language.

Ice cold air, I would explain to a grade school auditorium occupied by my 3 followers, is too much. Icicles form on the windows, obstructing your view of the road. Your breath is smoky-looking vapor. To simply drive to the grocery store on a hot day you need a winter coat and thermal underwear. And are our vehicles designed for 100-degree weather on the outside and 30-degree temperatures inside?

I would wait for a response from the audience. There would be none. I would thrash in my mental cud, unable to fit it in my mouth for clearer articulation but never backing down from my conviction that car dealers advertising "Ice Cold Air" promote decadence and

As a child I had fantasies of myself as a politician or self-appointed activist hunting for micro-issues, starved for unique problems to solve. Matters of excess seemed particularly easy prey for me, and I find that today I still see conspicuous wealth and concentrated abundance as targets of derision.

The fantasies endure, though -- fantasies of educating the public about how tummals of Ice Cold Air in your vehicle will suffocate you with its wastefulness.

Today I imagine summoning the articulata to describe the fringes of waste that litter every human dealing, every social and mental transaction. Everything generates waste. Every thought, every gesture, every deflection of memory.

tummals definitions

Dissilience

June 12, 2009

The act of leaping or starting asunder.

When I lived in Florida I drove long, long miles, directionless and free, with limited regard to the time spent or the destination. I never memorized the roads, just as I have never (in 19 years ofliving in New York) memorized Central Park or even the seemingly obvious numbered street names of midtown Manhattan. I do not like to know where I am, not to a level of detail that today's geo-coded urban anthropologists assume is normal.

My mind wandered far and deep on some of those long drives. Among the smells of cow shit and polecat I remember certain structural elements of the Interstate that seemed exciting or evocative to me. These were new developments, new roads, new styles of open Interstate designed to accommodate the future of the Tampa Bay area's ever-growing automobile traffic. I heard stories of traffic solutions (proposed and implemented) from big cities of the world and I imagined Tampa with triple-decker Interstate passages and underground tunnels connecting Bayshore Boulevard to Lutz.

There was one road division I found poetic. I can not remember where but it was a miles-long stretch of Interstate somewhere near Tampa. For several miles the 2-lane road became 3-lanes, and then split into 2, like a hydra. The second 3-lane road was called the same as the one from which it split. Its destination was the same, and even the exits were shared. It was, nevertheless, a completely separate piece of road, a passage used by those ghostly companions of the highway whose lights in your rear view mirror guarantee something -- what that something is I never could tell -- and whose travels are still the same as yours though they use the newer road.

dissilience definitions

Coak

June 11, 2009

To unite, as timbers, by means of tenons or dowels in the edges or faces.

I do not own a desk. I type these words sitting at a table which I sometimes refer to as a desk, but which is in fact a large table made of wood. It was sold to me by a friend who also helped me assemble it. He called it a "work table", a name which could mean a lot of things. I work at this table with the throwaway plastic tools of the digital crafstman but by appearance this table seems better suited to a basement or garage filled with chain saws and sandpaper.

The table is flimsy. I warn visitors not to pound or lean heavily on this table. Despite its appearance of strength I suspect that these 2 hands (and those 2 hands of he who sold it to me) assembled this platform in such haste as to make it a perilous platter.

As with most of my affairs I would probably need to build this thing at least twice before I got it right.

The expression "built with my own two hands" has always rung hollow to me. I may have first been introduced to the expression at summer camp in 1978. After a rabble-rousing series of song-singing and foot-stomping in the cafeteria the camp's Director diplomatically delivered a speech in which he praised the enthusiasm of us campers and the counselors who so energetically sang Native American tribal songs and chants, but he suggested we be careful about how much abuse we gave to the building. "I built this cafeteria with my own two hands," he said, suggesting with self-deprecation that this should not give us any particular confidence in the integrity of the structure. "I don't know if these walls are designed to withstand the kind of energy you men showed last night."

Indeed, it was an exceptional outburst. The walls and floor and roof of the cafeteria shook as each group of camers took its turns singing its song.

There were four groups of campers, each named for an Indian tribe, and each group had a theme song that invoked its name. The tribes were (in order of the members' ages) Chickasaw, Cherokee, Catawba, and Tuscarora.

My favorite song was the Catawba. The words, usually accompanied by hand-clapping and foot-pounding, were:

MMM, mmm-gawa, Catawba got the power! Sing

Repeat ad lib. At the cue of the camp counselor the song ends with:

PEACE!

For some of the chants a camp counselor would lead the singing -- in the style of a miltary drill sergeant who sends out the first line of a song as the members of his platoon respond with the next lines.

This question-and-answer format gave the Chickasaw chant a distinct character. A 20-something year old camp counselor would, with his deep basso voice, shout out "WE ARE CHICKASAW!" and in response a chorus of 10-year-olds with squeaky, pre-pubescent voices shouted "WE ARE CHICKASAW!" The deep-voiced leader would next say "MIIIIIGHTY MIIGHTY CHICKASAW!" and the youngsters joyfully and high-pitchedly responded with "MIIIIGHTY MIIGHTY CHICKASAW!"

coak definitions

Lactescent

June 10, 2009

Abounding with a thick colored juice.

The Astoria Diving Pool is one of the nastiest holes in the ground you will find in New York City. Maintained by NYC Parks this huge toilet is terminally filled with thick, viscous sludge.

The diving pool appears to be abandoned, though it conspicuously abuts the wildly popular Astoria Pool at Astoria Park.

The filth of the diving pool sits in blunt contrast to the adjacent and immaculately maintained Astoria Pool. While one can assume that the city at least bombs this diving hole for West Nile Virus, mosquitos and other disease-transmitting pests I find it amazing that such an apparent disease-pit is allowed to fester so openly, so hideously, and in such close proximity to a public pool.

The diving pool could have been slated for renovation had New York been awarded the 2012 Summer Olympic Games. We did not get those Olympics, and after brief flurries of attention the city returned this diving pool to its place as a rotting footnote.

The Astoria diving pool does not seem to represent an income opportunity or a revenue stream for the city. Because of this I fear that something bad will have to happen before action would be taken to remove this standing water. A drug-fueled loner might have to break in to this lightly-secured area and dive from the platforms into the muck -- crushing their head and causing severe injury -- before attention would be turned to this obvious health and safety hazard. While none among us wish for such calamities to occur we do, nevertheless, see eyesores like the Astoria Diving Pool as a virtual invitation to such misfortunes.

lactescent definitions

Peen

June 9, 2009

The part of a hammerhead opposite the flat striking surface (may have various shapes).

I do not handle tools very often.

I recently dug up a small screwdriver, which I used to pry slides out of metal wrappers trapped inside Argus and Airequipt slide magazines. Normally those slides come out easily but sometimes they do not. Rather than use my precious bare hands to force the slide out (a gesture which can cause slides to bend or become otherwise damaged, not to mention cut my hands) I found a tiny flathead screwdriver that has served little other purpose in its 15 or so years under my rule.

Are Tools such as screwdrivers under their user's rule? Computers and other devices are sometimes called tools but I generally feel those "tools" guide and even control the jobs their marketers say they help us accomplish.

Computers and software environments frame and even caricaturize much of the work produced on them -- and they deliver myriad distractions in the meantime.

One with even cursory experience in certain softwares can tell at a glance what software was used to produce a document or a web site -- and this without the residual "Sent From" taglines and "Powered By" follow-ons that litter so much digital communication.

Hammers and screwdrivers, on the other hand, are more anonymously utilitarian, and their reputation or name would rarely assert itself into a finished product.

As I rarely handle tools I usually find it distracting or even nerve-wracking at first to pick one up. My hands tremble as I try to place a screwdriver into a tiny screw. Removing the back of a computer a few months ago I thought at first I would never get the screws out because I could not get the screwdriver to settle in to the first of 4 or 5 screws. I quickly got used to the environment, though, and by the 4th screw I was hoping for more. I had confidence after a rocky start. That is, in a nutshell, my relationship with tools and even with much of life. Nervous at first, my confidence increases as I build a rapport with objects and living things, but for the most part I feel owned by these things. My confidence increases not so much in myself as in my understanding of the tools' capacities and their designs.

peen definitions

Metaphrastic

June 8, 2009

Close or literal in translation.

I became a fan of Ben Katchor’s Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer the day I discovered it in 1990. I landed in New York in October of that year and quickly discovered the New York Press, a free weekly newspaper that carried Katchor's Knipl cartoons. If you have never seen them then you are missing something not just beautiful but which exquisitely captures the sadness which some of us understand saturates the world.

Ben Katchor is, as far as I know, the only comic artist to receive a MacArthur Genius Grant.

I always found the name of strip's main character to be a little awkward. It provokes titters, no matter how deliberately I enunciate the K in ”Knipl". I find myself saying "kuh-nipple" or "ka-nipe-ul" in efforts to avoid saying anything that sounds remotely like "nipple" but, like any written correspondence which refers to the New York Public Library as "NYPL" it is simply unavoidable that lingering adolescence will intrude.

Just recently, in fact, I attempted to introduce Katchor's Julius Knipl to an older man at the Old Town Bar near Union Square. Our conversation -- which came about because of a comics convention happening in the city that day -- had seemed seasoned and adult enough until I tried to pronounce "Knipl", falling once again in to the nipple trap. The old man looked at me, cock-eyed, asking if I had just said what he thought I said. I attempted to spell the word but he was unimpressed, and moved his genteel attentions to the drunk woman sitting to his right.

Knowing the thoroughness of poetry which infuses Katchor's work I guess I should not have been surprised to learn that “Knipl” actually means something. “Knipl” is, according to a reviewer, an untranslatable Yiddish word meaning “the handful of change or small bills required to get by or just get home from some unforeseeable urban adventure.” Since discovering that definition I stash my knipl in a pocket when my wayward wanderings lead me away from this spot.

metaphrastic definitions

Adumbration

June 5, 2009

A faint sketch; an imperfect representation of a thing.

HUMAN MEMORY IS NOT SEARCHABLE

adumbration definitions

Hornswoggle

June 4, 2009

Deprive of by deceit.

I have been thinking about the history of the universe, the history of our planet, and the histories of all interdependent globes (planetary and earthly) whose revolutions rely on those of others.

How, I want to know, does history treat the floatation of human memory, flirtations of recall adroitly omitted from routine accounts of our selves, gently edited out of our attempts to structure our own reputation?

Is it the responsibility of the memory-holder, of the individual in charge of these units of record, to make these ephemera indexable, searchable, inheritable? Connectable.

These flashes of memory float in the oceans of time, lingering with material stubbornness and inaccessibility, depriving other lost memories the chance to connect, the opportunity to resolve mysteries unknown to each other.

This infinite matter passed through the morning jumble of my mind, during my wake-up conversation-with-self in which I imagine myself closing the open ends of a puzzling line of questions, in which I imagine myself sealing a discussion roiled with inexplicable vagaries and residual blossoming conspiracies. I, in my continuation of the dream state, felt that spark of genius which connects the unconnectable, only to wake up completely and rediscover how the genius of the dream state is often nothing but a dull thud of wit to the wakened mind.

It reminded me of a Czeslaw Milosz poem, "A Treatise on Poetry", from 1957, which contains these verses which impressed me to golly. This is from Part III, which is called "The Spirit of History", and it depicts history itself traveling through the infinite ephemera and un-recorded experiences and events of our planet.

— "King of the centuries, ungraspable Movement,
You who fill the grottoes of the ocean
With a roiling silence, who dwell in the blood
Of the gored shark devoured by other sharks,
In the whistle of a half-bird, half-fish,
In the thundering sea, in the iron gurgling
Of the rocks when archipelagoes surge up.

"The churning of your surf casts up bracelets,
Pearls not eyes, bones from which the salt
Has eaten crowns and dresses of brocade.
You without beginning, you always between
A form and a form, O stream, bright spark,
Antithesis that ripens toward a thesis,
Now we have become equal to the gods,
Knowing, in you, that we do not exist.

"You, in whom cause is married to effect,
Drew us from the depth as you draw a wave,
For one instant, limitless, of transformation.
You have shown us the agony of this age
So that we could ascend to those heights
Where your hand commands the instruments.
Spare us, do not punish us. Our offense
Was grave: we forgot the power of your law.
Save us from ignorance. Accept now our devotion."

Milosz next refers to undocumented history as "the possessions of time" and captures what I, for one, feel is the ceaseless, continuous escape of experience into the limitlessness of time.

hornswoggle definitions

Opprobrium

June 3, 2009

Reproach mingled with contempt or disdain.

When I started scanning my grade school essays and writing assignments I was surprised at how cutting and how incisive still were the comments written in red ink by my English and Creative Writing teachers. Decades later the fresh pain of a teacher's disdainful, lecturous comments scrawled across my stories still stings. I have a sense of humor about it now but at first glance I see these papers and remember the disillusion I felt at writing what I thought was a great story only to have it dismissed on technicalities.

One story was supposed to have been in booklet form, with construction paper front and back covers. I stapled the pages three times along the side and turned it in that way, earning the dismissive comment that my story was not in the assigned physical format. Space for the teacher's comments was limited so I got little feedback on the story itself, only its lack of construction paper binding and my poor handwriting.

I wrote way too much as a youngster. By high school I was churning out page after page of unread mental dross, and by senior year of high school the natural cynic in me had strong suspicions that large parts of my stories went unread by the teachers. I had no evidence to support this, but the last story I turned in to an English teacher was quickly returned with a crisply lettered "A" on top. The story was returned with such speed that it seemed impossible it could have been read in such a short time. There was no comment, no evidence that the words had been read, and nothing but my suspicions of the teacher's attitudes toward me at the time to suggest that he didn't care any more but appreciated the grandiloquent effort.

As a parting shot I littered the final issue of the school paper that year with a coded obscenity. No one in charge caught it, and I thought it was all in good fun, though I later learned that some kids at another school in town pulled a similar stunt and were expelled just days before graduation.

In college my suspicion that lengthy papers were not fully read by the professors was confirmed. At a few spots in a lengthy paper about sonata form I launched into incongruous obscenities and Tourette-like vulgarities. None of them were spotted by the professor, and I had to warn my mother about these lurchings when she read the paper. I got an A+, and while I actually do think the apper deserved a good grade I think the prof. just gave up on reading it and threw his highest award at it as a show of appreciation for the time spent.

opprobrium definitions

Infumate

June 2, 2009

To dry by exposing to smoke; to expose to smoke.

I have never understood what attracts people in New York to outdoor dining. While sitting at a table on a sidewalk I find myself inhaling truck exhaust and bus fumes, and I must occasionally confront a particularly friendly and/or not-so-friendly self-invited guest.

When I lived on the West Side I vividly remember sitting at an outdoor place and being served a dinner of seafood and a salad, only to have a portion of the salad grabbed by a hungry passer-by who ran off.

Similar incidents have occurred indoors but the invitations that outdoor dining extend to a range of nuisances makes it seem like a phyrric enjoyment.

Outdoor dining extends the floorspace of an establishment. Often times when outdoor dining is offered the doors and windows of the café or restaurant are opened wide. Outdoor patrons smoke cigarettes. Whether or not, under the city's smoking ban, it is technically legal to smoke at outdoor tables I do not know, but it is a common occurance. With breezes and general air movement this has the effect of turning the indoor part of a place into a smoking establishment.

I recently came home with bloodshot eyes and a smelly shirt and it took me a while to realize that I had been indoors at a place where a half dozen people sitting 3 feet away were smoking like chimneys. It was not as bad as in years gone by, when a few moments spent inside a pub guaranteed that one's clothing would smell like an ashtray and one would be teary-eyed from the fumes.

Nevertheless, as a non-smoking barfly I find myself maneuvering around a place, looking for wind-tunnels of clean air, when the doors are open and outdoor patrons light up.

infumate definitions

Oenology

June 1, 2009

Knowledge of wine, scientific or practical.

I got into a near-argument with a business owner about the cost of wine versus beer and other liquors. Like many people I know, I rarely buy wine at a bar or restaurant because the cost markups are irrational. In some cases one could go to a store and buy 2 bottles of a wine for the cost of a single glass of that same wine at a wine bar. Beer, I was then informed, is usually marked up at comparable if not greater percentage when compared to store-bought products. To me the analogy does not connect, at least where draught beer is in play. Draught beer is generally a superior product to canned or bottled beer, and it is generally not available in homes (in-home kegs exist but they are not common). If one pays $10 for 4 cans of Guinness one would get, for the same price, 2 pints of said beer at a pub. That 100% markup (and I'm not including tips) is still far less than markups of 500% or higher that I tend to see in bottled wines. Bottled wine is, however, the exact same product you could get at a store, while draught beer is (arguably) a better product than what is available in most shops. That's my point of view. I may be full of it but if I am then so are a lot of other people.

oenology definitions

Knickknack

May 29, 2009

A small inexpensive mass-produced article.

knickknack definitions

Nugatory

May 26, 2009

Trifling; vain; futile; insignificant.

I arrived at a shell of a thought last week.

The whiff of mortality crossed my palette.

The reality of this earthly vessel's failure tickled the back of my mind while
thinking about baseball. Yes, baseball.

If we can accept and assume the use of steroids by a majority of players in the country's only genuinely competitive baseball league then I think we can abandon our perceived indignities and look to the future of these things -- a future where comparable drugs are not just undetectable but safe and legal. Players will hit hundreds of home runs per season and -- without ever tiring -- play baseball from sunrise to midnight 365 days a year. Professional athletes will not just live longer, they will live forever, and their secrets of immortality will eventually trickle down to commoners who choose immortality.

Not in this lifetime, not for this body, not for this person who finds that none of this life's adventures or quotidian battles find comfort in knowing they will be extinguished when my earthly paces are finished.

nugatory definitions

Bohemia

May 25, 2009

A group of artists and writers with real or pretended artistic or intellectual aspirations and usually an unconventional life style

bohemia definitions