What's the Word?

Puddle Jumper

2012-04-06T23:24:23Z

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!"

Earnful

2012-04-05T22:39:51Z

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..."

Adminicle

2010-10-29T18:14:46Z

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.

Wharfage

2010-10-27T16:25:50Z

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.

Aquaplane

2010-04-13T14:44:00Z

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.

Absonous

2010-04-12T14:49:51Z

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.

Funambulist

2010-04-12T00:30:29Z

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.

Meretriciousness

2010-02-17T15:43:02Z

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.

Profanation

2009-11-19T23:47:37Z

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.

Didgeridoo

2009-11-09T16:15:50Z

An Australian Aboriginal musical wind instrument of long tubular shape. 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. ]]>

Doop

2009-10-28T16:40:31Z

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.

Digitorium

2009-09-07T12:30:31Z

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.

Vermiculation

2009-08-18T12:30:31Z

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.

Krang

2009-07-16T12:30:31Z

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.

Fraud in Fact

2009-06-17T12:30:31Z

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?