Coty's Weblog

It's Not You. It's Them.

Jon Swift is dead on in his post on Time Magazine's 2006 Person of the Year.

They have been all over they place this year. Threatening our heterosexual marriages. Invading our borders and taking our jobs. Not standing up so that we can stand down. Wanting to cut and run. Gays, Mexicans, Iraqis, Liberals, and so many others. Who else has had such an impact? I wish it had been you, or better yet, we, but it was definitely them.

solche schöne Hände

I was just flipping through Franz Wright's God's Silence and those words from the poem “Event Horizon” really affected me. Like the hands to which they refer, they are beautiful—all the more so in the German for some reason.

I wish there were a way for me to link to the poem. It always surprises me when I can’t. It is National Poetry Month, though, so you might find the collection on display at your local bookstore. That is how I ran across it.

Христос воскрес!

Christ has risen!

The title of this post is the Russian translation. I love the sound of it, and I can't get it out of my head on Easter.

Happy Easter!

The President believes many things...

I somehow doubt "morphological regularization of toponymic adjectives" is among them, but it was charitable of Language Log to attribute such belief based on his use of "Great British" to describe the (former) nationality of the port management company that is now part of Dubai Ports World and at the center of the controversy over foreign (particularly Arab/Muslim) ownership of U.S. port operations.

Further analysis of the linguistic issue can be found in this Language Log post: W's Conundrum.

As for the political issue, I think Thomas Friedman's War of the Worlds piece has one of the better assessments. The security issues is bogus, but the administration is reaping what they have sown.

How I love Language Log. How I hate this administration.

It was going to be a really cool post, too

I was just about done with a relatively long post. I was using Performancing's Firefox blog posting extension and switched from the editing view to the markup view to see whether an HTML entity I'd typed in would carry over. It didn't. Nothing did. Crap.

Oh, well. It was a post about Mark Liberman's Old School post on Language Log commenting on Joel Spolsky's The Peril of Java Schools post and how it was cool for two otherwise unrelated blogs to come together like that. Maybe I'll try to resurrect my thoughts, but it probably isn't worth it.

Why I Love Language Log

Ab Surd

I was just getting a review of the irrationals/surds in Fermat's Enigma. I think I have that Cordwainer Smith story somewhere. I'll have to dig it up.

Hadn't run across the Lewis Carroll poem before, but I like it. I'd never heard of a Surd joke, but now I may know more than most.

that (redacted) is yours

Catching up on reading Language Log, I ran across this in the Language, trade and sex post:

Dubner and Levitt start their article with the famous quote from Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations about how "Nobody ever saw a dog make a fair and deliberate exchange of one bone for another with another dog. Nobody ever saw one animal by its gestures and natural cries signify to another, this is mine, that yours; I am willing to give this for that" [Wealth of Nations, Book 1, Chapter 2]. What seems to contradict Smith is that capuchins sometimes trade food for sex: "this (marshmallow) is mine, that (redacted) is yours; I am willing to give this for that".

The "that (redacted) is yours" just made me chuckle. I don't know particularly why, but I thought I'd pass it along.

I also liked the first sentence in the post, "The orthographically diverse Ste(x)ens of 'Freakonomics' -- Stephen J. Dubner and Steven D. Levitt..."

Chiasmus

Chiasmus, the reversal of the order of words in two otherwise parallel phrases, is one of the great mainstays of rhetoric: Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country. This is not the beginning of the end, but, perhaps, the end of the beginning. And so on.

Apparently, anyway. No, I didn't know the word either. Hoorah, then, for Chiasmus.com for collecting them. Here's another for you, from George Bernard Shaw. Included only because I like the word Shavian:

"People are fond of blaming valets
because no man is a hero to his valet.
But it is equally true that no man is a valet to his hero."

[Ben Hammersley.com]

I think I might have known the definition of chiasmus at some point in the past, but I certainly haven't thought of it in a while. Thanks to Ben for the refresher.

Like Ben, I too am a big fan of the word Shavian.