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Wed, 14 Apr 2021 A couple of days ago I discussed the epithet “soup-guzzling pie-muncher”, which in the original Medieval Italian was brodaiuolo manicator di torte. I had compained that where most translations rendered the delightful word brodaiuolo as something like “soup-guzzler” or “broth-swiller”, Richard Aldington used the much less vivid “glutton”. A form of the word brodaiuolo appears in one other place in the Decameron, in the sixth story on the first day, also told by Emilia, who as you remember has nothing good to say about the clergy:
J. M. Rigg (1903), who had elsewhere translated brodaiuolo as “broth-guzzling”, this time went with “gluttony”:
G. H. McWilliam (1972) does at least imply the broth:
John Payne (1886):
Cormac Ó Cuilleanáin's revision of Payne (2004):
And what about Aldington (1930), who dropped the ball the other time and rendered brodaiuolo merely as “glutton”? Here he says:
Oh, Richard. I think you should have tried harder. [Other articles in category /lang] permanent link Mon, 12 Apr 2021A few months ago I was pondering what it might be like to be Donald Trump. Pretty fucking terrible, I imagine. What's it like, I wondered, to wake up every morning and know that every person in your life is only interested in what they can get from you, that your kids are eagerly waiting for you to die and get out of their way, and that there is nobody in the world who loves you? How do you get out of bed and face that bitter world? I don't know if I could do it. It doesn't get him off the hook for his terrible behavior, of course, but I do feel real pity for the man. It got me to thinking about another pitiable rich guy, Ebeneezer Scrooge. Scrooge in the end is redeemed when he is brought face to face with the fact that his situation is similar to Trump's. Who cares that Scrooge has died? Certainly not his former business associates, who discuss whether they will attend his funeral:
Later, the Spirit shows Scrooge the people who are selling the curtains stolen from his bed and the shirt stolen from his corpse, and Scrooge begs:
The Spirit complies, by finding a couple who had owed Scrooge money, and who will now, because he has died, have time to pay. I can easily replace Scrooge with Trump in any of these scenes, right up to the end of chapter 4. But Scrooge in the end is redeemed. He did once love a woman, although she left him. Scrooge did have friends, long ago. He did have a sister who loved him, and though she is gone her son Fred still wants to welcome him back into the family. Did Donald Trump ever have any of those things? [Other articles in category /book] permanent link The ten storytellers in The Decameron aren't all well-drawn or easy to tell apart. In the introduction of my favorite edition, the editor, Cormac Ó Cuilleanáin, says:
I agree, mostly. I can see Dioneo more clearly than Ó Cuilleanáin suggests. Dioneo reminds me of Roberto Benigni's Roman filthy-minded Roman taxi driver in Night on Earth. I also get a picture of Bocaccio's character Filostrato, who is a whiny emo poet boy who complains that he woman he was simping for got tired of him and dumped him for someone else:
When it's Filostrato's turn to choose the theme for the day's stories, he makes the others tell stories of ill-starred love with unhappy endings. They comply, but are relieved when it is over. (Dioneo, who is excused from the required themes, tells instead a farcical story of a woman who hides her secret lover in a chest after he unwittingly drinks powerful sedative.) Ah, but Emilia. None of the characters in the Decameron is impressed with the manners or morals of priests. But Emilia positively despises them. Her story on the third day is a good example. The protagonist, Tedaldo, is meeting his long-lost mistress Ermellina; she broke off the affair with him seven years ago on the advice of a friar who advised that she ought to remain faithful to her husband. Tedaldo is disguised as a friar himself, and argues that she should resume the affair. He begins by observing that modern friars can not always be trusted:
Modern friars, narrates Emilia, "strut about like peacocks" showing off their fine clothes. She goes on from there, complaining about friars' vanity, and greed, and lust, and hypocrisy, getting more and more worked up until you can imagine her frothing at the mouth. This goes on for about fifteen hundred words before she gets back to Tedaldo and Ermellina, just at the same time that I get around to what I actually meant to write about in this article: Emilia has Tedaldo belittle the specific friar who was the original cause of his troubles,
This was so delightful that I had to write a whole blog post just to show it to you. I look forward to calling other people soup-guzzling pie-munchers in the coming months. But, as with the earlier article about the two-bit huckster I had to look up the original Italian to see what it really said. And, as with the huckster, the answer was, this was pretty much what Bocaccio had originally written, which was:
Delightful! I love Bocaccio. While I was researching this article I ran into some other English translations of the phrase. The translation at Brown University's Decameron Web is by J.M. Rigg:
which I award full marks. The translation of John Payne has
and two revised versions of Payne, by Singleton and Ó Cuilleanáin, translate it similarly. But the translation of Richard Aldington only says:
which I find disappointing. I often wonder why translators opt to water down their translations like this. Why discard the vivid and specific soup and pie in favor of the abstract "fat-witted glutton"? What could possibly be the justification? Translators have a tough job. A mediocre translator will capture only the surface meaning and miss the subtle allusions, the wordplay, the connotations. But here, Aldington hasn't even captured the surface meaning! How hard is it to see torte and include pie in your translation somewhere? I can't believe that his omitting it was pure carelessness, only that Aldington thought that he was somehow improving on the original. But how, I can't imagine. Well, I can imagine a little. Translations can also be too literal. Let's consider the offensive Spanish epithet pendejo. Literally, this is a pubic hair. But to translate it in English as "pubic hair" would be a mistake, since English doesn't use that term in the same way. A better English translation is "asshole". This is anatomically illogical, but linguistically correct, because the metaphor in both languages has worn thin. When an anglophone hears someone called an “asshole” they don't normally imagine a literal anus, and I think similarly Spanish-speakers don't picture a literal pubic hair for pendejo. Brodaiuolo could be similar. Would a 14th-century Florentine, hearing brodaiuolo, picture a generic glutton, or would they imagine someone literally holding a soup bowl up to their face? We probably don't know. But I'm inclined to think that “soup-guzzler” is not too rich, because by this point in Emilia's rant we can almost see the little flecks of spittle flying out of here mouth. I'm offended by Aldington's omission of pie-munching. [ Addendum 20210414: More translations of brodaiuolo. ] [Other articles in category /book] permanent link Mon, 29 Mar 2021The King James Version of Job 19:26 says:
I find this mysterious for two reasons. First, I cannot understand the grammar. How is this supposed to be parsed? I can't come up with any plausible way to parse this so that it is grammatically correct. Second, how did the worms get in there? No other English translation mentions worms and they appear to be absent from the original Hebrew. Did the KJV writers mistranslate something? (Probably not, there is nothing in the original to mistranslate.) Or is it just an interpolation? Pretty ballsy, to decide that God left something out the first time around, but that you can correct His omission. [Other articles in category /book] permanent link Fri, 26 Mar 2021
Something I didn't know and I bet you didn't either
The Panama Canal has a loyalty program. If you're planning to ship at least 450,000 TEU per year, you can register in advance and get a discount on your tolls. [Other articles in category /misc] permanent link Sun, 21 Mar 2021
Two sentences that made me stop to think
In The ancient fabric that no one knows how to make:
Whaaaat? Then I realized: It's someone named “Islam”. Okay. In Wikipedia's article on some comic book person called “Steppenwolf”:
For this to be correct, Steppenwolf would have to have a second head growing out of his main head. Then if someone cut off the second head, the main head would be a decapitated head. Not out of the question for a comic book person, but in this case not correct. I changed it to “disembodied head”. [ Addendum 20210322: Shortly afterward, another editor changed it to “severed head”, which I agree is better. ] [Other articles in category /misc] permanent link Sun, 14 Mar 2021Many years ago I bought tickets to see Depeche Mode live, and I wondered if I wasn't making a mistake. Would they appear on stage, press “play” on the sequencers, and then stand around doing nothing while Dave Gahan sang? And yes, it was pretty much like that. They were definitely overstaffed. I think there were four people on stage and at any particular time one or two of them were standing around looking bored. I hadn't thought of this in a long time, but I was reading a Washington Times article about the German synth-pop band Alphaville, contemporaries of Depeche Mode. The article is from 2017, and includes this exchange:
Meaning, they couldn't play any actual instruments. Marian Gold sang, but the rest of the music was preprogrammed on sequencers or assembled in an editing studio. The group composed and produced the music, but there simply was no "performance" in real time. I have to credit Alphaville for refusing to pretend to be performers and instrumentalists. (For an contrasting approach, consider The Residents, who face the same issue and have dealt with it in a completely different way. The Residents’ stage show is elaborate and spectacular. You hear the music, but there's no way to know who's playing it. There are people on the stage, but are they the composers? Are they instrumentalists? Are they even in the band? Who knows? And does it matter? No, not really. The Residents have never had names or separate identities anyway. I imagine that Daft Punk took a similar approach.) [Other articles in category /music] permanent link Fri, 12 Mar 2021For no particular reason, I looked up the Trans-Siberian Railway today and learned that its name in Russian is
pronounced roughly “trans-siberskaya magistral”. The Транссибирская is clear, but what is магистраль? Wiktionary says it means "main line" or "trunkline". But it doesn't give an etymology. Still, it's not hard to guess: it's akin to the French (and also English) word “magistral” which means something that relates to a master. So it's the Trans-Siberian master train line. But "train line” is implicit, the way English-speaking recording engineers use "master" to refer to a master tape, or Americans will call a trunk road an "arterial". English loves to turn adjectives into nouns in that way, but I didn't know that Russian did it also. [Other articles in category /lang] permanent link Thu, 11 Mar 2021I recently read Finkel and Taylor's excellent little book Cuneiform. On page 27 they discuss the kinds of texts that young boys studied in school :
“Hey,” I said. “I've read that!” I love when this happens, something pops up that I would have wanted to know a little more about, but it's already something I do know a little more about. I feel like I'm getting somewhere in my project of reading every book ever written. Progress! From The Debate Between Bird and Fish, Sumerian, around 4000 years ago:
Bird retorts:
It's not so much a debate as a diss battle.
[ Addendum 20210312: Now I would like to see an cartoon version of the debate, animated by Chuck Jones. ] [Other articles in category /lang] permanent link Mon, 08 Mar 2021
Canon in Euopean languages and Arabic
Today I was reading about Avicenna's work The Canon of Medicine and learned that the original Arabic title
is rendered in Latin script as al-Qānūn fī al-Ṭibb with al-Qānun (“the law”) being translated into English as “Canon” (“rule” or “law”). The English word comes via French and Latin, ultimately from Greek κανών, “rule”. Is the resemblance between Qānūn and κανών a coincidence, or is the Arabic word originally borrowed from Greek? I was about to write the next sentence “and where could I have looked this up?” but then I remembered that this kind of thing can be looked up in English Wiktionary. English Wiktionary is not a dictionary of English, but a universal dictionary in English. It not only defines English words, but also words in many other languages, with the descriptions and etmologies written in English. So I looked it up, and it is a Greek loanword! The Internet is amazing and wonderful. Truly, we live in an age of marvels. [Other articles in category /lang/etym] permanent link Sun, 07 Mar 2021(Summary: Henry Baker's web site has disappeared after 30 years. I kept an archive.) Henry G. Baker is a computer programmer and computer scientist, one of the founders of the Symbolics company that made Lisp Machines. I discovered Baker's writing probably in the early 1990s and immediately put him on my “read everything this person writes” list. I found everything he wrote clear and well-reasoned. I always learned something from reading it. He wrote on many topics, and when he wrote about a topic I hadn't been interested in, I became interested in it because he made it interesting. Sometimes I thought Baker was mistaken about something. But usually it was I who was mistaken. Baker had a web site with an archive of his articles and papers. It disappeared last year sometime. But I have a copy that I made around 1998, Just In Case. Baker's web site is a good example of mid-1990s web design. Here's his “Gratuitous Waste of Bandwidth” page. It features a link to a 320×240 pixel color photo of Baker, and an inlined monochrome GIF version of it.
Browsers at the time could inline GIF files but not JPEGs, and it would have been rude to inline a color JPEG because that would have forced the user to wait while the browser downloaded the entire 39kb color image. It was a rather different time. Some of my favorite articles of his were:
(The Internet Archive also has a more recent copy of the site.) [Other articles in category /prog] permanent link Sat, 06 Mar 2021Last week I thought “there must be a restaurant in California somewhere called ‘Pasta la Vista, Baby’”, so I asked the Goog. The Goog says it does not know of one! It says there is a ‘Pasta La Vista’ in Winnipeg, which I was not expecting, and also one called ‘Pasta A La Vista‘ which has an acceptable excuse, since it is in Bella Vista, AR. There are quite a few Pasta La Vistas in Europe. And there is one called ‘Pasta la Vista Baby’. It is near the University in Örebro, sixth-largest city in Sweden. This isn't the last place I would have expected to find ‘Pasta la Vista Baby’, but I don't think it's in the top thousand either. [Other articles in category /food] permanent link Tue, 02 Mar 2021Often when I'm reading something that was translated from another language, I get to wondering what the original was. Often this appears in connection with some sort of wordplay. For example, the first chapter of Stanisław Lem's novel The Cyberiad begins:
In the end Trurl asks the machine to make “nothing”, which is an important plot point. Okay, but The Cyberiad was written in Polish. I wondered for years: was it “N” in Polish also? If the Polish word for “nothing” happened to begin with a “W”, then the Polish text would have had to have had a machine that could create anything starting with “W”. Then the translator couldn't keep the “W” the way it was, because the whole point of the story leads up to “nothing”; they have to rewrite the whole thing with “N”. One day I met the translator, Michael Kandel, and was able to ask. And yes, it was originally “N”; the polish word for “nothing” is nic. (Here's a related question on SF Stack Exchange. It discusses how the original “N” items turn into their somewhat-similar “N” counterparts in English.) But anyway, I meant to talk about Pippi Longstocking, which was originally written in Swedish. Pippi and the IbexIn one episode, Pippi goes to school, where the teacher tries to teach her the alphabet. She shows her a card with a letter ‘i' and a picture of an ibex. Pippi says:
(I could not find the ibex translation, so that is from memory.) Clearly Pippi is describing a lowercase letter ‘i’. “Ibex” is a pretty strange choice of animal, in English or in Swedish, so I wondered: was the picture an ibex in the original Swedish? It turns out it was not! “Ibex” in Swedish is stenbock. In the original Swedish, the picture is an igelkott, a hedgehog. Well, in the translation I had as a kid, by Florence Lamborn, it was an ibex. But a different English translation (by Tiina Nunnaly) makes it an iguana, and another that I found, by Edna Hurup, contains the following elaborate invention:
My philosophy of translation is opposed to this sort of thing. I will take all sorts of liberties, and I might make up an island if I have to, but having done so I would not describe it in detail as Ms. Hurup did so shamelessly. In the original the hedgehog is not described:
(“Therefore, she took out a small, beautiful poster depicting a hedgehog.”) PluttificationToday I was thinking about Pippi, and I recalled that one of her goals in attending school was to learn “pluttification”:
In English “pluttification” is obviously Pippi's misunderstanding of “multiplication”:
What was pluttification in Swedish? It turns out, it wasn't any different. The Swedish for “multiplication tables” is multiplikationstabellen.
Pippi's NameLong ago I wondered about Pippi's full name, which in the Lamborn version I read was:
The original Swedish was:
and the English was a fairly close translation. Viktualier is “victuals”, and I think turning it into “Delicatessa” is clever. (Viktualia is actually a real Swedish name, although quite rare.) Rullgardina is exactly “windowshade”. (Literally “roll-curtain”.) Krusmynta is a nonsense compound of krus (see below) and mynta (mint). I thought that krus was “mackerel” but I can't find anyone to agree with me; everyone says that the Swedish for “mackerel” is makrill, as in most European languages. The Nunnaly translation has:
“Commestibles” is terrible, but “Curlymint” is just fine, because krusig is indeed “curly”. The Hurup translation says:
I don't like “Provisionia”, but it can be defended as a more literal translation than “Delicatessa”. I can't imagine why Hurup decided to replace “Windowshade Curlymint” with “Gaberdina Dandeliona”. English Wikipedia has a whole section about this if you are not tired of it yet. NegerkungI recall that in the version I read, Captain Ephraim was "formerly the Terror of the Seas, and now a cannibal king", and that the original Swedish version of “cannibal king” was negerkung, “king of the negroes”. Mathilda Haraldsson's undergraduate thesis describes this as a “quite strong expression”, but adds that in the 1940s neger was considered inoffensive. (Recall that in the United States at the time, “negro” was the polite term.) It does appear that some people today consider negerkung offensive. And in any case it was never accurate; the people in question are not Africans, but Polynesians. In the Swedish version I looked at just now, the word has been changed to söderhavskung, “King of the South Seas”. To me the most offensive part of all this is Lamborn's description of Ephraim's subjects as “cannibals” . As far as I can tell, the original Swedish says nothing about cannibalism, and this is a disgusting and completely unnecessary invention. Nunnaly makes it just “king of the natives” but Hurup inexplicably retains “Cannibal King”. Norwegian Wikipedia has an article about Lindgren's use of negerkung, but Swedish Wikipedia does not! [ Addendum: I just noticed that my discussion of the cannibal thing omits the word “racist”. This was an oversight. The cannibal thing is racist. ] [ Addendum 20210303: Justin Pearson, Anders Nielsen, and Adam Sjøgren have each informed me that krusmynta
is not a nonsense compound as I said. It is a standard term for
spearmint. Also,
[Other articles in category /lang] permanent link Mon, 01 Mar 2021
More fuckin' user interface design
Yesterday I complained that Google couldn't find a UI designer who wouldn't do this: Today I'm going to complain about the gmail button icons. Maybe they were designed by the same person? Check out the two buttons I have circled. One of these "archives" the messages, which means that it moves the messages out of the Inbox. The other button moves the messages into the Inbox. I don't know the right way to express this, but I know the wrong way
when I see it, and the wrong way is How about, ummm, maybe make the arrows go in opposite directions? How about, put the two buttons next to one another so that the user at least is likely to notice that both of them exist? Maybe come up with some sort of symbol for an archive, like a safe or a cellar or something, and use the same symbol in both icons, once with an arrow going in and once with an arrow coming out? Or did Google test this and they found that the best user experience was when one button was black and one was white? (“Oh, shit!" says the confused Google engineer, “I was holding the survey results upside-down.”) I explained in the last article that I consider myself an incompetent
designer. But I don't think I'm incompetent enough to have let Hey, Google, would you like to hire me? Someone once said that genius is the ability to do effortlessly what most people can't do at all, and it appears that compared with Google UI engineers, I'm a design genius. For an adequately generous salary, I will be happy to whack your other designers on their heads with a rolled-up newspaper until they learn to stop this bullshit. [Other articles in category /tech] permanent link Sat, 27 Feb 2021
Fuckin' user interface design, I swear
I'm so old I can remember when forms were introducted to the web; as you can imagine it was a big advance. The initial spec included the usual text boxes, radio buttons, and so forth, two types of “submit” buttons, and a “reset” button. Clicking “reset” would reset the form contents to a defined initial state, normally empty. So you'd have a bunch of form widgets, and then, at the bottom, a Submit button, and next to it, a Reset button. Even as an innocent youth, I realized this was a bad design. It is just setting people up for failure. They might get the form all filled out, be about to submit it, but click a few pixels off, hit the Reset button by mistake, and have to start all over again. Obviously, the Submit button should be over on the left, just under the main form, where the user will visit it in due course after dealing with the other widgets, and the Reset button should be way over on the right, where it is less likely to be hit by accident. (Or, more likely, it shouldn't be anywhere; in most cases it is nothing but an attractive nuisance. How often does someone need to reset the form anyway? How badly would they have to screw it up to decide that it would be quicker to start over than to simply correct their errors?) Does my “obviously” come across as superior and condescending? Honestly, it comes from a place of humility. My thinking is like this:
But maybe I'm not giving myself enough credit. I said “obviously” but it sure wasn't obvious to many people at the time. I remember 90% of the forms I encountered having that Reset button at the bottom, at least into the late 1990s. And it's on my mind because my co-workers had a discussion about it at work last week: don't put the Cancel button right next to the Submit button. If this was obvious to dumbass me in 1994, why isn't it common knowledge by now? Don't put the Yes button right next to the No button. That encourages mistakes. Obviously. Don't put the commonly-used "close this window" keyboard shortcut right next to the infrequently-used and irreversible "quit this application" shortcut. In particular, don't put "close this window" on control-W and "quit this application" on control-Q. I'm looking at you, Firefox. And that brings me to my real point. Can we talk about Google Meet? These three buttons are at the bottom of the Google Meet videoconferencing app. The left one temporarily mutes and unmutes the microphone. The right one controls the camera similarly. And if you click the button in between, you immediately leave the meeting and quit the app. Now, as I said I'm pretty damn stupid when it comes to design, but geez, louise. Couldn't Google find someone less stupid than me? [ Addendum 20210228: Google fucks up again. ] [Other articles in category /tech] permanent link Tue, 16 Feb 2021Katara is toiling through A.P. Chemistry this year. I never took A.P. Chemistry but I did take regular high school chemistry and two semesters of university chemistry so it falls to me to help her out when things get too confusing. Lately she has been studying gas equilibria and thermodynamics, in which the so-called ideal gas law plays a central role: $$ PV=nRT$$ This is when you have a gas confined in a container of volume !!V!!. !!P!! is the pressure exerted by the gas on the walls of the container, the !!n!! is the number of gas particles, and the !!T!! is the absolute temperature. !!R!! is a constant, called the “ideal gas constant”. Most real gases do obey this law pretty closely, at least at reasonably low pressures. The law implies all sorts of interesting things. For example, if you have gas in a container and heat it up so as to double the (absolute) temperature, the gas would like to expand into twice the original volume. If the container is rigid the pressure will double, but if the gas is in a balloon, the balloon will double in size instead. Then if you take the balloon up in an airplane so that the ambient pressure is half as much, the balloon will double in size again. I had seen this many times and while it all seems reasonable and makes sense, I had never really thought about what it means. Sometimes stuff in physics doesn't mean anything, but sometimes you can relate it to a more fundamental law. For example, in The Character of Physical Law, Feynman points out that the Archimedean lever law is just an expression of the law of conservation of energy, as applied to the potential energy of the weights on the arms of the lever. Thinking about the ideal gas law carefully, for the first time in my life, I realized that it is also a special case of the law of conservation of energy! The gas molecules are zipping around with various energies, and this kinetic energy manifests on the macro scale as as pressure (when they bump into the walls of the container) and as volume (when they bump into other molecules, forcing the other particles away.) The pressure is measured in units of dimension !!\frac{\rm force}{\rm area}!!, say newtons per square meter. The product !!PV!! of pressure and volume is $$ \frac{\rm force}{\rm area}\cdot{\rm volume} = \frac{\rm force}{{\rm distance}^2}\cdot{\rm distance}^3 = {\rm force}\cdot{\rm distance} = {\rm energy}. $$ So the equation is equating two ways to measure the same total energy of the gas. Over on the right-hand side, we also have energy. The absolute temperature !!T!! is the average energy per molecule and the !!n!! counts the number of molecules; multiply them and you get the total energy in a different way. The !!R!! is nothing mysterious; it's just a proportionality constant required to get the units to match up when we measure temperature in kelvins and count molecules in moles. It's analogous to the mysterious Cookie Constant that relates energy you have to expend on the treadmill with energy you gain from eating cookies. The Cookie Constant is !!1043 \frac{\rm sec}{\rm cookie}!!. !!R!! happens to be around 8.3 joules per mole per kelvin. (Actually I think there might be a bit more to !!R!! than I said, something about the Boltzmann distribution in there.) Somehow this got me and Katara thinking about what a mole of chocolate chips would look like. “Better use those mini chips,” said Katara. [Other articles in category /physics] permanent link Mon, 15 Feb 2021Today someone tweeted about an earlier blog article of mine, saying
I looked at that and frowned, and said “What language is that? … is it Azerbaijani?” And it is Azerbaijani! Last time I encountered Azerbaijani I did not recognize it. So I not only learned something last April, I remembered it the following February when it came up again. Yay me! [Other articles in category /lang] permanent link Sat, 13 Feb 2021Yesterday I wondered who Robert Altman had cast as Bluto in his 1980 live-action film Popeye. The answer turned out to be Paul L. Smith, who seemingly was born to play the part: I have thought for years about how Shelley Duval was seemingly born to play the part of Olive Oyl. (I remember the Mad magazine parody making this observation at the time, and it wasn't funny because it was so obvious.) I have somtimes wondered if Altman got the idea to make a Popeye movie specifically so that he could cast Duval as Olive Oyl. Anyway, Paul L. Smith, who already looked like Bluto. He was in a fair number of TV productions in the 70s and 80s, and I think it's possible that I saw him in one or another one. But the only other role of his that I remember clearly is from David Lynch's 1984 Dune. He plays Glossu “the Beast” Rabban. Who in many ways is not that different from Bluto: Large, violent, dangerous for his brutality but not his cunning. Obviously the Baron wanted to cast Feyd-Rautha as Popeye, but events got away from him and Paul became Popeye instead. In a Dune-Popeye crossover I can see Alia as Swee'Pea. That means that Chani has to be Olive, which I can live with. The correspondence isn't perfect, of course. There is nobody in Popeye like Lady Jessica or Stilgar. (Leto is obviously Poopdeck Pappy.) On the other side, where is J. Wellington Wimpy? It's been a while since I read the book, but I don't remember hom appearing. Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam is clearly the Sea Hag. Me spinach musk flow! If ya controlsk the spinach, ya controlsk the uni-voice! Ag-ag-ag-ag-ag! [Other articles in category /misc] permanent link Mon, 08 Feb 2021I was reading The Life and Prankes of Long Meg of Westminster (1655), which opens with the story of how Long Meg first came to London with a posse of three or four girlfriends. After long travel they came within sight of London, “which joyed their hearts greatly.” But as they got closer, Meg's friends became less cheerful, and she said to them:
If someone had asked me to guess when “in a dump” or “in the dumps” had been coined, I think I would have guessed sometime in the early 20th century. Nope! The Big Dictionary has cites back to 1535, which is when Long Meg takes place. It also cites a 1785 dictionary for “down in the dumps” specifically. The phrase is not connected with the dump where you dump a load of trash, which is of much later coinage. It transpires that the lasses are in a dumpe because they realize that time has come to pay the carrier who has helped transport them to London, and believe he is likely to try to cheat them and take everything they have. Meg says she will reason sweetly with the carrier, and if that doesn't work, she will beat the crap out of him. The carrier does try to take everything they have, but becomes much more helpful after Meg has beaten him with a cudgel. Here it is if you would like to read it yourself. [Other articles in category /lang] permanent link Sun, 07 Feb 2021
More things that changed in later editions of Snow White
As you know, I've recently been looking into the original version of Snow White from 1812. ([1] [2]) I knew that the 1812 version of the Grimm stories was a lot rougher and more gruesome than the later editions, but I missed many of the details. For example, in the later versions, the evil queen orders her hunter to bring back Snow White's liver and lungs as proof that he has murdered her. In the first edition, she wants the liver and lungs so that she can eat them. After Snow White is poisoned with the apple, the dwarfs put her in a glass coffin. A prince happens by and begs them to give it to him, which they do. In the later versions, the servants carrying away the coffin stumble, the apple is dislodged from Snow White's throat, and she returns to life. In the original version, they get the coffin back to the prince's palace without mishap. There the prince has the servants carry it from room to room so that he can gaze at it always. (Ugh.) Finally, the servants are so fed up with this that one of them takes Snow White out of the coffin, stands her up, and, saying
he clouts her in the back from pure spite. The apple is dislodged, and Snow White marries the prince. [Other articles in category /book] permanent link Sat, 06 Feb 2021Git comes with
a very complicated shell function,, called
But
or
instead. If
The
Here The Lately I have been experimenting with appending
and these annoyingly long names appear in the output of One way to deal with this is to have the local branch names be
abbreviated and configure their upstream names to the long versions.
And that does work: I now have a little program called The supplied But The goal is now:
How to tell
|