Smart Energy

We like to eavesdrop, OK? Plus, sometimes you just can’t help overhearing.

Walking back from Mariner’s Market in Cannon Beach, Oregon; twilight; a group of Youths (oh, yes, cap-Y boys) sitting outside of the pizza place downstairs from our room. And one says,

Where are we going to find midgets at this hour? The whole day is ruined!”

Overheard while standing in line at Penguin Ed’s BBQ in Fayetteville, Arkansas:

Little boy: Mama, what’s a chicken dinner?

Mama (exasperated drawl): It’s chicken meat on a plate!”

Overheard on a Pullman Transit bus:

If wheel chairs could float I’d break both my legs.”

Bits and pieces of a rant (or maybe just an anecdote, but judging from the listeners’ expressions, I’d say more of a rant) heard at the Whoop ‘em Up Hollow Cafe in Waitsburg, Wash.

I’ll run you off this goddamn job with a goddamn ax….
Swift Tracy chased me off with an ax.
Swift is a lot more important than me. Do you understand?
And I understood my Dad.”

At L’Ecole Winery, near Walla Walla, Wash., a group of young men dressed like designers, cut in front of two lovely women (who were not dressed like designers, or even in designer clothing) to get a few drops of wine sooner rather than later:

We’ll just crowd in front of these people. They look like the salt of the earth.”

I just learned from World Wide Words that the New Oxford American Dictionary has chosen “locavore” as its word of the year. Locavores are folks who try to get their food from as close to home as possible. Michael Quinion, the author of the weekly e-newsletter, World Wide Words, to which I subscribe, cites the Oxford press release naming their choice:

the word was coined in 2005 by a group of four women in San Francisco; it notes that “The choice reflects an ongoing shift in environmental and ecological awareness over the last several years. Lexicographers at Oxford University Press have observed that this social transformation is having a noticeable effect on the English language.”

The word previously appeared in Puck in my review of Barbara Kingsolver’s book, Animal, Vegetable, Mineral. You’ll find Quinion’s tracings of the word here.

Bob’s island was being carried around on the back of a turtle. The turtle didn’t seem to mind, and moved real slow. The island sometimes experienced earthquakes, volcanoes and other natural disasters, but Bob didn’t think these were the turtle’s fault. Certainly not the tidal waves. The island was, after all, very big. It was bound to make waves, even slow as the turtle moved.

The above microstory can be translated, via Gizoogle, into Snoop speak:

Sizzept. 19, 2006. Bob’s Island.

Bob’s island was being carried around on tha back of a turtle. Drop it like its hot. The turtle didn’t seem ta mind, n moved real slow cuz its a pimp thang. The island sometizzles experienced earthquakes, volcanoes n nigga natural disasta, but Bob didn’t think these were tha turtle’s fault. Certainly not tha tidal waves fo’ real. The island was, pusha all, very big like this and like that and like this and uh. It was bound ta makes waves, even sliznow as tha turtle moved.

Essay by Brian Charles Clark

A tapestry of metaphor

In this essay I speculate on a possible relationship between “word,” “writing,” “weaving,” and “work.” While the essay is speculative in its etymology, I think it does show a definite intertwining of the histories of metaphors that underpin the changes in meaning we see from Indo-European, Greek, and Latin, into English. Because of limited space, my investigation into the histories of these words is of need cursory. My intent here is to entertain and provoke the reader’s own imaginative speculations, not to create a definitive history or an airtight case.

A *wer is a “high raised spot” (American Heritage Dictionary, wer1). I can imagine a letter or word carved in stone or wood being called a “high raised spot.” *Wer (ibid., wer3) also means “to turn, bend.” From this root we get our Germanic “worth,” because value is a turning toward fair exchange, and Latinate “verse,” the fruits of the poet’s turns of phrase. In olden times, a traveler was worth his board based on the value of his conversation. And everybody knows the value of the devil’s silver tongue, whose conversation can pivot on a dime, and suddenly turn to your soul’s worth. Read the rest of this entry »

essay by Brian Charles Clark

A secret war has been raging for millennia. The battle lines can be roughly drawn between those who insist that empiricism can answer all our epistemological questions, and those who insist that knowing is fundamentally an imaginative act, one that is forever becoming and shrouded in mystery. Plato is typical of just how “rough” those battle lines are. In the Republic, Plato wrote of the dangers of the imagination, especially as displayed in the poetic consciousness or “divine madness” of inspiration. This is the same Plato whose beautifully erotic love poems grace the pages of the Greek Anthology.

Two thousand years later, in 1817, John Keats would jump into the fray with his eyes wide open. In fact, it was Keats’s viewing of a painting that led him to write a famous letter. (Keats’s letter of December 21, 1817 is quoted in full in, among other places, Rodriguez, Book of the Heart (Hudson, New York: 1993), pages 39-40.) After looking at a painting by the landscape artist West, Keats wrote his brothers that there were “no women one is mad to kiss” in the picture. Nothing in the painting inspired his passion, “there is nothing to be intense upon,” nothing provoked his sense of the marvelous. The hic et nunc flatness of West’s painting admitted no otherness, no “Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without an irritable reaching after fact & reason.” Read the rest of this entry »

Essay by Brian Charles Clark

“Onomatopoeia / I don’t want to see ya / speakin’ in a foreign tongue,” John Prine once sang—or wheezed, depending on your taste in music. We do it all the time. We growl and mewl at our lovers, bark and howl at friends and strangers. At least we do in my neighborhood. But what is it, in any language, that we are doing when we say “arf arf” or “moo moo”? And if “onomatopoeia” simply means “to make a name like the thing itself” then why the heck does it sound like nothing English speakers ever say or hear? Read the rest of this entry »

essay by Brian Charles Clark

Language is muscular and tenacious.

As a tenant in the house of English I have a tender spot in my heart for the histories of the words I live with. Many of the histories of our words are tenuous, at best, while others form thick tendons of literature. The prolific descendants of the Indo-European root forms of *ten- have given rise to tenacious tendril-like histories that, in Modern English, tend to stem from the Latin verbs tendere, meaning “to stretch”, and tenere, “to hold.” These few opening sentences give the tenor of many of the *ten- words we regularly use: tenant, tender, tenuous, tendon, tenacious, tendril, tend, and tenor. [OED, Am.Her.Dic.]

From the first century BC Latin writer Horace we hear tenere in the sense of “holding with strength”: “Iustum et tenacem propositi virum…” (“For a just man and one with a firm grip of his intentions…”) [OxQ, 260:18], where tenacem modified by virum has the sense of “manly tenacity.” Tenere’s holdings in the Romance languages are vast, especially with suffixation (e.g., ex- and in-). This gripping wealth of words came into English with the Norman conquest, and, as the following examples illustrate, we’ve held close to the original meanings ever since. Read the rest of this entry »

essay by Brian Charles Clark

A frame drum, as portrayed in ancient Greek art.

In Praise of English author Joseph Shipley writes: “The sing-song notion [of the origins of language] suggests that man’s first speech was song. Looking down a hillside to a lush valley watered by a limpid stream, all graced by the warming sun, man in exuberant spirits burst into exultant or thankful sound. A sort of primitive yodeling soon became a signal to fellow-tribesman or mate on the opposite hill. The Greeks accepted this idea of the origin of speech; it had weight with Darwin, and the astute linguist Jerperson.” [p. 4-5]

I’m not a sing-songer. There’s something fundamentally missing in the idea that song is the origin of language. Melody and harmony, in my experience, are built on the foundation of rhythm. So I’m a big-banger: The origins of language lie in drumming, chanting, and entrainment. Curiously, neither Shipley nor Thomas (Music and the Origins of Language, an examination of 17th-century French theories), lists “rhythm” in the index. Read the rest of this entry »

essay by Brian Charles Clark

A web of missives...

The practice of letter writing seems to be disappearing along with the word, epistle. In The Re-Enchantment of Everyday Life, Thomas Moore laments the excuse that “we’re too busy.” “In letters and essays written by previous generations, I’m struck by the absence of the common modern complaint ‘I didn’t write because I’m too busy’” [page 6]. If it were just the loss of the word, I wouldn’t worry; but the practice of writing letters is disappearing as well. Moore, in Soul Mates, argues a strong case for the intimacy and clarity of affect that are possible in letters. The epistolary form has been, from ancient times, a way of offering counsel, consolation, and conspiracy. Today, the letter is created to look personal, but it’s just my name ink-jetted on a form. College classes are offered in letter writing—but for the purpose of becoming an effective capitalist, not a good lover or adviser. Read the rest of this entry »

essay by Brian Charles Clark

What does a debutante mean when she says, “Simply sublime, dahling”? And what does that have to do with subliminal messages? Why does “sublime” mean “elevated,” while “subliminal” implies “beneath”? “Sub” means “under, below, beneath, down” [AHD]. To “sub lime” should mean “to sit beneath the shade of a citrus tree.” That, of course, would be wrong—unless you’re a punster.

It turns out that sublime and subliminal both have to do with the “lintel,” Latin limen. The lintel is the beam that forms the upper part of a window or door, and supports part of the structure above it [AHD]. This lintel is thus a threshold; we get the word “limen” to mean the “threshold of a physiological or psychological response” [AHD]. “Sub” + “limen” gives us, in various forms, words that mean passing under, through, and over a metaphorical threshold. (Note: The threshold metaphor is, clearly, I think, part of a much more encompassing metaphor that views “knowledge as a structure,” which lends support to the idea that human “ways of knowing” can be described as an architectonics of epistemology. Architecture and architectonic both stem from the Proto Indo-European root *tek [AHD], from which we also get “text” and “textile.” As I’ve begun to show elsewhere, there is a metaphorical relationship between writing and weaving at the level of “to do work.” I’ve also been investigating the role of mimesis in the formation of these Lakoff-Johnsonian metaphors. In the wake of reading Ruhlen, I’m beginning to wonder if there might not be some proto-metaphor “to make like” or “to do as” that early humans employed to mark off their activities as somehow “above the threshold” of the non-human world.) Read the rest of this entry »