Wisdom from the 42nd Page

How to Talk Minnesotan

On the forty-second page of “How to Talk Minnesotan: A Visitor's Guide” author Howard Mohr wrote (some emphasis added):

Phrases

• Yep
• Well?
• So?
• Greetings

When you travel to Minnesota, I hope you're not expecting to be met at the border by a bunch of hyper people in colorful clothing. Our black-and-white signs at the state line say it all: MINNESOTA. If a smiling group of people with colorful clothing does meet you at the border, lock the doors and don't get out of the car. They probably escaped from someplace.

Minnesotans do not favor the big hello. We do it, we just don't overdo it.

A few years back two brothers from Minnesota ran into each other at a highway restaurant near Alexandria. The restaurant keeps a picture of the brothers by the cash register. The eastern newspapers carried the story and used it as evidence that Minnesotans' obsession with winter was reflected in our manners and feelings—what they meant was that we were a cold people.

The two brothers—Frank and Gary—had not seen each other for sixty-four years, not since they were split up somehow on a MIssissippi paddleboat. It involved a young woman from a river town and a girdle—and a catfish. I don't remember the exact details. They were twenty-two and twenty-three years old when that incident happened, whatever it was.

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(Penguin Books, August 1987. Paperback, 221 pages. ISBN: 0140092846; EAN: 9780140092844.)

Language and Species

On the forty-second page of “Language and Species” author Derek Bickerton, wrote (some emphasis added):

green, for instance, or between blue and yellow. These represent distinctions within a continuous spectrum. Other attributes, however, come in pairs (hot and cold, young and old, rich and poor, long and short, wet and dry) and yet, unlike color terms, they seemto lack any specific neural substrate. For instance, it would be bizarre indeed if we found that we had cells that fired with maximal frequency when confronted by rich people and with minimal frequency when confronted by poor ones.

Why are adjectives paired in this way? For most adjectives such pairs represent a continuum (those that do not, such as married or single, can be ignored for present purposes). It is not immediately obvious why a continuum cannot be represented by a continuum. In other species it often is. For instance, a robin indicates its willingness to defend its territory by the intensity of its song, a bee indicates the quality or quantity of a honey find by the vigor with which it dances, and so on. You might think that some language somewhere might have represented temperature, for example, by a continuous vowel sound, short for very low temperatures, gradually lengthening for higher ones. Such a process might seem at first sight to be much more informative than one of simply saying whether something is cold or hot. Yet no known language has ever chosen this process, and probably none ever will.

For the function of adjectives is not to place the attributes of creatures on any kind of absolute scale. To do so would be impossible, in view of the many and often very different entities to which a given attribute may be attached; for attributes, like behaviors, are not normally limited to single species, but are assigned across the board. This effectively makes the sense of adjectives dependent on the nouns they qualify. A small elephant is bigger than a big donkey, a long letter is shorter than a short novel, a cool oven is hotter than a hot summer's day. Attributes are predicated of things in order to place them relative to the norm for their class: a small elephant means something that is small for an elephant, rather than an elephant that is small, and so on.

The fact that for many adjectival pairs there may be intermediate terms (middle-aged, for instance, between young and old) or even pairs of such terms (cool and warm, between hot and cold) does not really affect the argument. These terms, too, merely divide a continuum into slightly smaller chunks, allowing for a closer approximation to the class norm, rather than representing that continuum iconically.

Thus the level of representation given by the lexicon abstracts away from and interprets (sometimes over-interprets) the flux of experience. By doing this, it derives a wide range of entities, together with the behaviors and attributes that can be predicated of these entities. This range

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(University Of Chicago Press, April 1992. Paperback, 305 pages. ISBN: 0226046117; EAN: 9780226046112.)

The Thinker's Thesaurus

On the forty-second page of “The Thinker's Thesaurus: Sophisticated Alternatives to Common Words” author Peter E. Meltzer wrote (hyperlinks & most emphasis added):

towards learning higher vocabulary, he quotes an educator who visited a classroom of 12-year-olds and observed them studying verbal analogies in anticipation of the SAT. "I learned that they spend hours each month... studying long lists of verbal analogies such as 'untruthful is to mendacious as circumspect is to caution.' The time involved was not aimed at developing the students' reading and writing abilities but rather their test-taking skills." McWhorter states that "the passage got around in the media, intended to make people shake their heads at such a sad sight," and that:

"[I]t is telling that it spontaneously struck [the educator] as being so sad, so beside the point of education, that twelve-year-olds were being taught the meaning of written words. ... [He] assumes that this learning of words is unrelated to the developing students' reading abilities. ... [H]is discomfort at seeing twelve-year-olds drilled on words like this marks him as a man of our times, for whom learned levels of English are less a main course than a garnish in an education [and that] learning high vocabulary [is] an imposition."

One suspects that those who would object to the use of words contained in this thesaurus also concur with the notion that teaching of analogies such as "untruthful is to mendacious as circumspect is to caution" is a waste of time. However, McWhorter notes that this is "hardly self-evident" and quotes an English professor from Rutgers who conducted a study that found "an extraordinary high correlation" between SAT verbal scores and final grades and a much lower correlation between grades and socio-economic status. In other words, mastering the types of verbal skills tested by the SAT is not an exercise in trivia or one which has no predictive values of furture performance in broader academic areas. The same may be said of the synonyms in this thesaurus: learning their use is not an exercise in trivia or becoming lexiphanic.

In a Utopian lexicographical world, the synonyms that appear in this thesaurus will be as familiar and accessible to everyone as the mundane synonyms which now appear in ordinary thesauruses. Perhaps this book is a small step in that direction. However even though none of us can be expected to know every word in the English language, or even

20. The word "insouciant" once again points out the flaw with Mr. Kilpatrick's argument. About that word, we may safely assume, first, that Mr. Kilpatrick nows what it means (and has likely used it himself from time to time), second, that he would never equate it with any of Mr. Buckley's word choices which Mr. Kilpatrick mocks, and third, that he would find ludicrous the notion that it should be jettisoned from the language. And yet, despite these assumptions, two things are true: First that the simpler words "nonchalant" or "carefree" could be substituted for "insouciant" just about every time. Second, and more importantly, there are many people who do not know the meaning of "insouciant." But, given our assumptions above, what can Mr. Kilpatrick say to those people? The only thing he could say is that literate people should know that word. Of course, that brings us right back to the problem of setting him up as the standard we would have to consult on every word. One wonders where, for example, would he stand on a less common synonym for "insouciant," such as "dégagé" which is used in this thesaurus? In any event, the point is clear. Of course, it is entirely possible that some words may appear in some dictionaries but not in others. However, this is almost always by virtue of the simple fact that some dictionaries are more comprehensive than others and thus will necessarily contain more words, particularly the kind of which appear in this thesaurus. For example, the number of entries of the typical college dictionary is exceeded by the number in the 4th edition of The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language. This in turn is exceeded by Webster's Third International Dictionary, which in turn is exceeded by the Oxford English Dictionary.

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(Marion Street Press, September 2005. Paperback, 461 pages. ISBN: 0972993797; EAN: 9780972993791.)

Orality and Literacy

On the forty-second page of “Orality and Literacy” author Walter J. Ong wrote (emphasis added):

for in oral cultures an audience must be brought to respond, often vigorously. But narrators also introduce new elements into old stories (Goody 1977, pp. 29–30). In oral tradition, there will be as many minor variants of a myth as there are repetitions of it, and the number of repetitions can be increased indefinitely. Praise poems of chiefs invite entrepreneurship, as the old formulas and themes have to be made to interact with new and often complicated political situations. But the formulas and themes are reshuffled rather than supplanted with new materials.

Religious practices, and with them cosmologies and deepseated beliefs, also change in oral cultures. Disappointed with the practical results of the cult at a given shrine when cures there are infrequent, vigorous leaders—the 'intellectuals' in oral society, Goody styles them (1977, p. 30)—invent new shrines and with these new conceptual universes. Yet these new universes and the other changes that show a certain originality come into being in an essentially formulaic and thematic noetic economy. They are seldom if ever explicitly touted for their novelty but are presented as fitting the traditions of the ancestors.

(v) Close to the human lifeworld

In the absence of elaborate analytic categories that depend on writing to structure knowledge at a distance from lived experience, oral cultures must conceptualize and verbalize all their knowledge with more or less close reference to the human lifeworld, assimilating the alien, objective world to the more immediate, familiar interaction of human beings. A chirographic (writing) culture and even more a typographic (print) culture can distance and in a way denature even the human, itemizing such things as the names of leaders and political divisions in an abstract, neutral list entirely devoid of a human action context. An oral culture has no vehicle so neutral as a list. In the latter half of the second book, the Iliad presents the famous catalogue of the ships—over four hundred lines—which compiles the names of Grecian leaders and the regions they ruled, but in a total context of human action: the names of persons and places occur as involved in doings (Havelock 1963, pp. 176–80). The normal and very likely the only place in Homeric Greece where this sort of political information could be

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(Routledge, July 2002. Paperback, 232 pages. ISBN: 0415281296; EAN: 9780415281294.)

The Rosetta Stone

The Rosetta stone—which gave linguists the keys necessary to begin decipherment of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics—was discovered by Napolean's armies 209 years ago today in 1799.

On the forty-second page of “The Rosetta Stone” authors Robert Solé & Dominique Valbelle wrote (hyperlinks & some emphasis added):

Chapter Seven

Description, for want of something better

The Rosetta Stone was naturally accorded a prominent place in the Description de l'Égypte, a monumental work in twenty-three volumes that was supposed to contain all the observations made by Napoleon's scientists. When it was published, an extra five hundred copies of the plate representing the stela were printed separately.¹

The cast made in Cairo by Raffeneau-Delile was used to reproduce the Greek and demotic inscriptions.² The hieroglyphic text was drawn twice, using Raffeneau's sulphur cast and the plaster impression made in London.³ One of the men in charge of producing the Description, Edme François Jomard, went to London in late 1814 in order to make impressions of the Rosetta Stone and several other monuments. He was very civilly received by Sir Joseph Banks, who had accompanied Captain Cook on his voyages, and was able to carry out his mission.⁴ A note of thanks published in the Description did not spare the adjectives: 'It is to the enlightened zeal of Sir Joseph Banks and to his love for the sciences that we owe our possession of a plaster cast of the monument, and we owe no less to Mr Taylor Combe, the curator of antiquities in the British Museum, for the good will and attentiveness with which he provided the author of the drawing with everything he needed

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(Basic Books, May 2002. Hardcover, 192 pages. ISBN: 1568582269; EAN: 9781568582269.)

A Biography of the English Language

On the forty-second page of “A Biography of the English Language” author C. M. Millward wrote, in a very Zen-like fashion (any emphasis you discern was added by you):

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(Wadsworth Publishing Company, January 1996. Hardcover, 464 pages. ISBN: 0155016458; EAN: 9780155016453.)

Pardon My French

Parlez-vous français? If not, you may be interested in “Pardon My French: Unleash Your Inner Gual,” where author Charles Timoney wrote on the forty-second page (hyperlinks & some emphasis added):

trains are much bigger than Métros, go faster, and often have two floors. In addition to suburban RER lines, there are also suburban railway lines leading to the main railway stations. These lines are run by the SNCF—Société Nationale des Chemins de Fer—which also runs the main long-distance trains. Unless you have a carte orange, you will need separate tickets for the RER and SNCF trains outside central Paris.

Geography

DOM-TOM: When France gave up its empire after the Second World War, the word colonie was officially banned. What remains of the French empire is now known as les DOMS-TOMS. The letters stand respectively for Départements d'Outre Mer, or overseas counties, and Territoires Outre Mer, or overseas territories. The French départaments or counties include four that are overseas, namely Guadeloupe, Martinique, Guyana, and Réunion. These are considered to be ordinary French counties, even though they are rather a long way from all the others. They are generally shown on the handy little map that you get at the back of French diaries or planners. The TOM are more independent and even farther away and compromise New Caledonia, French Polynesia Wallis-et-Futuna, St. Pierre-et-Miquelon, and the French Southern and Antarctic Lands.

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Doubious Doublets

On the forty-second page of “Dubious Doublets: A Delightful Compendium of Unlikely Word Pairs of Common Origin, from Aardvark/Porcelain to Zodiac/Whiskey” author Stewart L. Edelstein wrote (emphasis added):

tail is its predominant feature. (Words for some other animals are based on their dominant features. For example, "dodo" is a compound word from Dutch dot, tuft of feathers, and ors, tail, because it had a tuft of feathers on its tail; "reindeer" is a compound word from Old Norse hreinn and dyr, meaning "horned animal," and "lynx" is so named because of its shining eyes. For more on the derivation of "reindeer" see carrot/hornet, and for more on the derivation of "lynx" see luntaic/lynx.) In addition to its celestial meaning, a cynosure has come to mean anything that strongly attracts attention by its brilliance or interest (as in Milton's reference to a beauty as "the cynosure of neighbouring eyes"), or anything that serves for guidance or direction.

Our expression "dog days" for the hottest days of summer also has an astronomical source. In ancient Rome, the hottest weeks in the summer were known colloquially as caniculares dies, literally "days of the dog." During those weeks, Sirius (literally "scorching, burning"), the brightest star in the heavens, rises with the sun. Located in the constellation Canis Major, Sirius was also known as canicula, Latin for "small dog." According to Roman theory, Sirius added its heat to that of the sun. Thus, this period, roughly from July 2 to August 11, when Sirius's rise coincides with that of the sun, is known as the "dog days" of summer. The technical term to refer to these "dog days" is "canicular."

Other words based on Indo-European root *knon- relate directly to dogs: corgi (from Welsh, cor, meaning dwarf, and ci, meaning dog, an appropriate word because of this dog's short legs), hound, and daschund. A daschund is so named because it was bred in Germany for hunting badgers, the German word for which is Daschs.

The derivation of "dog," first recorded in 1050, is somewhat of a mystery. It appeared in late Old English only once, as dogca (translating Latin canis), but did not appear again in recorded form until the thirteenth century. "Dog" has no known relatives of equal antiquity in other European languages, and is an early example of a native invented word, not borroed from any other language. Dogca was

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