fates not worth opposing

brenne to scamelliche askes

2009-06-30T12:14:00.000-07:00

here is the phrase:

...inozequin intechmonequiz, ipan Incahuitl chicohuazen mextli...

the first four words should mean "additionally thereupon is needed a period of time"

chicohuazen does not appear in any dictionary nor in any google book
chico- according to one dictionary is a prefix usually meaning "to one side, perversely"
chicohuia according to another, means "to do things unfairly, to favor one side", but the form we have doesn't exactly match any inflection of chicohuia
cem means "one," and at the end of the word [m] becomes [n], but this particular scribe we have noted that sometimes he leaves off written 'n' at the end of a word, and -cen normally doesn't appear as a suffix, if i remember correctly
mextli, according to the first dictionary, is a variant of mixtli, which all sources agree to mean "cloud." additionally the second dictionary includes this example phrase from the florentine codex "intlâcahmo tleh mixtli," (if there aren't any clouds => provided that the weather is favorable)

so we'll just have to guess and say

"additionally thereupon is needed a period of time to allow for inclemencies"

and the record does not indicate whether this is a guess or a certainty, when all is done.

traducing the speaker

2009-06-30T00:02:00.000-07:00

to waste time but not prodigally i like to read things in middle english. what i was supposed to be doing instead of reading middle english was translating from nahuatl a document that is nothing but variations on scamel. here is a passage from Langland's Piers Plowman (14th century), where he explains the meaning of Job 15:34 in the vulgate bible:

ignis devorabit tabernacula eorum qui libentur accipiunt munera, &c.
Amonge this lettered ledes, this Latyn is to mene
That fyre shal falle, and brenne al to blo askes
The houses and the homes of hem that desireth
Yiftes or Yeres-yyves bicause of here offices.

the trusty oxford english dictionary says:
lede = race, group of people
brenne = burn
blo = a dark-blue color, like a bruise, or lead
askes = ashes
yifte = gift
Yeres-yyve = a new year's gift

the latin is, more or less, "fire shall devour the tabernacle of those who please to take gifts"

munera is usually translated as bribes in english language bibles

Langland's elaboration is from having to write in a type of alliterative verse, and his description of munera (Yiftes or Yeres-yyves) is a more accurate description of the concept than "bribe" is.

whoever has tried to translate Piers Plowman to modern english and keep the alliterative verse must struggle, since lede, blo and yeresyeve are extinct as english words. even if yeresyeve were revived, it would no longer start with the same sound as gift. one would have to set out looking for new pairs.

for thise aren men on this molde that moste harme worcheth

2009-06-29T18:23:00.000-07:00

now we have a kitten, because i am a pragmatic person.

a controversial claim from Chomsky and Halle's Sound Pattern of English:
"There has, in other words, been little change in lexical representation since Middle English..."

i also have a playstation 2 controller that plugs into the computer.

these are things that i can do in the summertime.

in texas it was warm, over 100 degrees every day. there were many people there, all familiar with each other. at spiderhouse coffee shop, they now offer table service, which makes it difficult if you intend to go there and buy nothing. as i understand it opened in 1995. in the year 2000 i used to go next door to sell plasma and the homeless teenagers were one time lying there talking about how with these fifteen dollars apiece, and the thirty dollars we can borrow from X, and Y, who can front it to us at the lowest quality, we can rent a motel room of the seediest variety, far from the shelter where they don't allow alcohol, and we each have a seven dollar 175mL bottle of jack daniels. i think the plasma place is shut down now. i best remember that i was taking physics 2 and it was difficult. and this very skinny girl told me that i should join her to study at spiderhouse coffee shop, where you don't have to buy anything. this was the year 2000 and i decided to not go to spiderhouse, but only to stay at the plasma center, because at this time i had it calculated to where i would get one hamburger ($2.50), one order of french fries ($1.25), one glass of ice water (free), four times a week at either 1am or 1:30am, which would be $15, then i'd have $20 left for the weekend, and buying a cup of coffee would throw everything off in multiple ways that are so distant from important now in 2009. when i went i ordered a coffee. the oldest man at the table paid for everything, because he is powerful. you might think that i now regret it, because i could have ordered a cucumber margarita or anything else to BEAT THE HEAT, but in fact i was hung over.

i brought that coffee with me. it was cold, but i was even able to take a sip from it ten hours later. this was after i had finished overseeing the grill.

Shakespeare in the park is a feature of summers in Buffalo, NY. residents bring camping chairs and sip wine from their coolers and give out one dollars to the poor players who strut and ask for donations to keep our beloved festival free. the time that i went we saw the Tempest. the tempest contains the word

scamel

which i think is a very nice word, with a delicate nuance of a meaning that helps people to share their feelings. scamel will cause you to have feelings you never had before. the Oxford English Dictionary defines scamel as follows:

Meaning uncertain: the statement in quot. 1866 is of doubtful value. Some have proposed to read staniel.

below are two quotations of the only attested uses (outside of metalinguistic or lexicographical discussion) of scamel. the first quote is from the Tempest,

"And sometimes I'le get thee young Scamels from the Rocke."

the second quote, as we are told, is of doubtful value.

i started to feel a bit dizzy when i was reading the Tempest, and came across a word i didn't know, and looked it up in the dictionary, and the dictionary told me it didn't know what the word meant. we only know that a scamel is a living thing that is edible and found among rocks on beaches. a staniel, which "some have proposed" as the reading for scamel, is a type of falcon, e.g.

i digress. sometimes, even the dictionary doesn't know. one theorem of classical logic is known as ex falso, quodlibet which means "if shit's fucked up, fuck it."

the kitten is always sleeping. if the kitten were grown, it might be able to go hunting for young scamels. perhaps scamels became extinct due to overharvesting before anyone could write down what exactly they were.

this summer i liken my job to the mystery of the scamel. i have to determine something that nobody, at the moment knows yet. and the things that i determine through careful investigation and long hours of study, will be of such interest to the general public as scamels are.

addendum:

From the London Daily News, printed in New York Times, 25 June 1892: A Norfolk man observes that "young bartailed godwits are in Autumn called scamels on the north coast of Norfolk."

giggling

2009-06-02T11:47:00.000-07:00

"The verbs to mother and to father mean very roughly 'to act as a mother/father toward someone', but are entirely different in the exact actions that count as relevant."
Jackendoff, Foundations of Language

solutions to the problem of things that formerly appeared to have no name

2009-05-16T19:55:00.000-07:00

...money rented ad pompam. In such a contract, ... money was transferred to a bailee for the specific purpose of display so that he might impress others with his wealth. The money was not consumed, but used, and the charge was for its use. The Gloss's treatment here seems to assume that the fundamental distinction between this contract and a loan is the incidence of risk.

Noonan, The Scholastic Analysis of Usury

usury

2009-05-14T16:23:00.000-07:00

là dove di'che usura offende la divina bontade, e il groppo svolvi.
-Inferno

wherever usury disturbs, divine grace, and difficulties, dissolve

2009-05-12T09:19:00.000-07:00

these headphones are like a bridle. if i am not watched i will convulse my head and spit them out. still they are necessary for me because when i am wearing them i cannot go off the path and eat the sweet grass that would only give me indigestion. one time the person talking retracted his tongue blade too quickly, but the tongue body was still in place. the sound produced was still quite close to the target.

the cochlea (latin for snail) is shaped like a snail's shell. if you uncoil it then there is a triangular cross section through the middle dividing it along its length into three compartments. the acoustic properties of the tube cause the fluid within to to swell at different locations along its length for a given frequency of vibration. within this triangular ridge there are hair cells connected to neurons. the neurons fire in a random pattern, but if a swelling is localized near a particular cell, then its neuron will fire differently. the hair cells send a signal to the brain, but there is also a fiber through which the cells receive feedback. nobody knows exactly what this feedback does. this is how people are able to perceive sound quality. the cochlea of a cat or a dog is just as complicated. most of what is known about the cochlea was determined by killing cats and dogs.

i have found what i suspect may be an honest mechanic in this city. the asian store proprietress told duylinh, "sure there's a viet mechanic, but there's only one, and he's had my car for a month now, so i can't say i'd recommend him." we had to tentatively revise our racial theory of honest auto mechanics to include certain types of people with polish names.

other muscles in the inner ear act to dampen the intensity of sound. it seems that they evolved that way so that animals' hearing would not be damaged by their own cries. i would like to develop a theory of speech production that is centered around the pleasure of hearing oneself talk.

if people are to peaceably decapitate animals and scrutinize their internal organs, they should have a clean and well-lighted place to do it, and they should not be subjected to too much mental distress or physical distress outside of the workshop.

be on your guard

2009-05-07T13:50:00.001-07:00

"We do not, of course, know exactly why colonial varieties of English around the world have the characteristics that they do ... but we do have very strong evidence that they are as they are because of the way in which people behave linguistically in face-to-face interaction. That is, whole new language varieties, many of them eventually spoken by millions of people, grow and develop out of small-scale contacts between individual human beings."
-Trudgill, Dialects in Contact

rectitude and turpitude

2009-05-05T11:20:00.001-07:00

Investigators say 24-year-old Joseph Jimenez fatally shot 25-year-old Scott Riley after they argued over a game of beer pong at a party Friday night in Bridgeport, about 15 miles outside Philadelphia. (AP)

all young mothers reading, i urge you to encourage our legislators to reinstitute dueling, if our children are ever to be safe. nowadays it is important for young men to go out gambling, and beer pong is the greatest responsibility for the dominant male. if his authority is doubted, then it could endanger the entire band. he must act decisively.

to aim for the head, however, is not appropriate. that only one man should be armed, that they did not have seconds, that they did not wait until noon the following day, etc. the whole fabric of society is crumbling.

in nature it is a poison

2009-05-01T21:02:00.001-07:00

It has been argued that the deaths of the ill-fated balloonists in the Swedish 1897 Andree balloon expedition to the North Pole were due to consumption of polar bear liver when they were forced to overwinter on White Island on their return journey south from the Pole.

Aitken, Dietary Interventions in Autism Spectrum Disorders

new incidents.

2009-04-17T15:40:00.000-07:00

as a marathon runner participating in the boston marathon, i am concerned that i may be murdered in an upscale boston hotel room while working as an escort. naturally i demand accountability from the authorities.

long words in nahuatl

2009-04-05T18:50:00.001-07:00

cozticteocuitlaquixtiloyan : gold mine

pertinence

2009-03-28T12:41:00.000-07:00

cleaning out the fridge can sometimes be better than cleaning out the cracks of your sofa. i found a quarter pound of goat cheese from several months ago. now it is part of a quiche. this is the first in a series of stories about how you can reduce your carbon footprint.

1. eat old leftover food whose mold you can scrape off instead of eating beef.

burdens

2009-03-27T21:16:00.000-07:00

further along in history they will consider our writings. they will be fascinated at how emotional we were about things that nobody will ever understand. and how we really struggled nobly. some few, they will say, did not indulge in moments.

"A few words should be said about privately cast types of the Yi dynasty. There are many records and printed examples in witness of the existence of privately made movable types throughout the Yi dynasty. They were mostly made of wood, but clay and metal were also used. These private types are not so neat as those made by the government. It must be noticed, however, that many small country schools at the end of the Yi dynasty had wooden types to print text books for their own use.
In old Korea, official printing was done by several specialists on the basis of a division of labor under a printing official. The printing official had the entire responsibility for the whole process of printing, and had to be alert not to overlook any misprints in order to avoid the corporal punishment of beating the hip."
-A history of the Korean alphabet and moveable types

clack clack

2009-03-25T06:03:00.000-07:00

"It is une bwEhE."
"Then why were you saying une bwense ?"
"une bwense... Now that children [go] to school, they like to change words."

Interview with a speaker of Munken

toxic assets

2009-03-24T18:11:00.000-07:00

Dicimus ergo quod nullus effectus superat suam causam, in quantum effectus est, quia nil potest efficere quod non est. Cum igitur omnis nostra loquela - preter illam homini primo concreatam a Deo - sit a nostro beneplacito reparata post confusionem illam que nil aliud fuit quam prioris oblivio, et homo sit instabilissimum atque variabilissimum animal, nec durabilis nec continua esse potest, sed sicut alia que nostra sunt, puta mores et habitus, per locorum temporumque distantias variari oportet.

Dante, De vulgari eloquentia I.9.6

l'elan acquis

2009-03-23T18:22:00.000-07:00

opening line of Bolaño's El Retorno

"I have good news and bad news. The good news is that there is life (or something like it) after death. The bad news is that Jean-Claude Villeneuve is a necrophiliac."

news in words

2009-03-17T18:51:00.000-07:00

i am delighted to see, for the first time, the use of "straight up" as a discourse particle in an essay.

"I straight up don't understand this woman or her popularity." My beef with ann coulter

let's analyze what "straight up" contributes in this context. since it is an adjunct, it can be removed without altering the sentence's grammaticality. we will compare these two sentences:

(1) I straight up don't understand this woman or her popularity.
(2) I don't understand this woman or her popularity.

(2) employs a common politeness tactic (indirect criticism via self-criticism) so that what is said (2a. This woman may be reasonable and deserving of her fame, but I have yet to determine exactly how) is different from the meaning inferred by adding pragmatic information (2b. This woman is unreasonable and undeserving of her fame). someone who said (2), asked to account for her remarks, could plausibly claim that she really meant 2a.

(1) differs in that it does not permit someone having said (1) to claim that she really means 2a. so it has interesting metadiscursive properties.

DID

2009-03-12T09:18:00.000-07:00

Unable to take pleasure merely in being able to reveal their love, they insisted on tangible evidence of its effectiveness. They were being punished for their greed, but this they never realized.

Soseki, Grass on the Wayside.

ambiguity

2009-03-09T18:53:00.000-07:00

"Her husband found her when he came home."

this is a good sentence where the usual interpretation contains an assumption that cannot be constructed from the meaning of any of its words. the use of find implicitly suggests to the listener that meet might not be the appropriate word to handle the situation.

vide ne

2009-03-07T14:14:00.000-08:00

When an individual is perceived in an occult involvement, observers may not only sense that they are not able to claim him at the moment but also feel that the offender's complete activity up till then has been falsely taken as a sign of his participation with them, that all along he has been alienated from their world ... This retrospective aspect of the offense is often followed by the feeling that all of the offender's oncoming conduct is suspect ... In a sense, then, a paranoid person is someone who has acted in such a way as to cause others to be suspicious and watchful of everything that he does; the persecutory feelings that result may be quite justified.

Goffman, Behavior in Public Places

epistles

2009-03-04T07:42:00.000-08:00

maybe you do not know about writing letters. please consider this shining example from Minjungseorim's Essence Korean-English Dictionary (1972)

My dear Gyeongho,
Thank you very much for your most welcome letter. I've been very busy these days, with studies and fitting in dancing and drama. My week seems to fly like an arrow.
Scotland is quite beautiful, especially up in the Highlands, either in summer when the heather is covering the hills or in winter when snow covers the hills. The only thing to complain about is the weather, because, when winter comes, it is very cold. But it does not worry me so much now.
I look forward to the snow, as I can go sledging on the small hills, not very far from where I live.
Perhaps you are fond of films. I am very fond of them, and usually go when there is a good film. The one I enjoyed most was "Lawrence of Arabia" My favourite actress is Hayley Mills.
I hope you are keeping well.
Your loving friend,

Jane

----------------------------------------------
And while I'm at it, I have to include an excerpt from The Canons of Good Breeding (1839), first cited in Goffman's Behavior in Public Places.

But even in a casual encounter, and upon occasions when your habit can have no connexion with the feelings and sentiments which you have towards those whom you meet, neat and careful dressing will bring great advantage to you. A negligent guise shows a man to be satisfied with his own resources, engrossed with his own notions and schemes, indifferent to the opinion of others, and not looking abroad for entertainment: to such a man no one feels encouraged to make any advances. A finished dress indicates a man of the world, one who looks for and habitually finds, pleasure in society and conversation, and who is at all times ready to mingle in intercourse with those whom he meets with; it is a kind and general offer of acquaintance, and provides a willingness to be spoken to.

en feuilletant

2009-02-25T19:56:00.000-08:00

Mais même au point de vue des plus insignifiantes choses de la vie, nous ne sommes pas un tout matériellement constitué, identique pour tout le monde et dont chacun n'a qu'à aller prendre connaissance comme d'un cahier des charges ou d'un testament ; notre personnalité sociale est une création de la pensée des autres.
-Marcel Proust

out in the air.

2009-02-25T16:37:00.000-08:00

consider several facts:

-two year olds, when their speech is recorded candidly, simply fail to to say Doug and duck enough times for us to know whether or not they know those words.
-i can estimate very specific factors about someone's childhood by the way he folds his towel.
-some people feel lonely.
-all people know how to explain.

i think that in order to know something, you have to take shortcuts and make rash assumptions. you should only check one time whether two things go together in order to learn that they always go together. you only have to look at something once in order to know its essence for all eternity. if two things do not go together, they will never go together. if you are especially interested in one thing, you can look more closely, but surely you will die before you manage to treat more than one or two things with fairness.

but as you see that looking closely clarifies one thing, you will reason that all things can only be clear by looking closely, and every part making up each of those things, in turn, must be inspected. you will begin to feel lonely.

some things, looking at them, you cause them to change, and you have vitiated whatever you sought to respect by learning about it. you will feel lonelier yet.

maybe inspecting is not the right thing to do. better instead to know without inspecting, to know without knowing. only do what is customary. eventually the part of you that does not think will know how to manage things masterfully.

the corporate compliment sandwich

2009-01-30T07:37:00.000-08:00

Thank you very much, sir. The first part of your talk has already been received in peace and happiness. I am in accordance and agreement with you on this, sir. You were given permission to speak and what you said gave me courage and strength. You said things skillfully but not pretentiously. You originate words but also recognize what is traditional. But as for myself I am not an originator of words at all but a borrower. I am more comfortable carrying the spade and basket. You, on the other hand, have smoothed out all faults in the speech; you have woven the holes together. You have shown respect to the elders and respect to the young as wel. This is finished. But... (Criticism begins.)
qtd. in Keenan "Norm-Makers, Norm-Breakers" Explorations in the Ethnography of Speaking