Made for the Minds of Children

Three rather nice images that some nice person scanned from their old children's books. Presenting a Mexican marketplace:


The house of the future:


And your circulatory system, as explained by an Italian canary:

The Minus World

A large part of why I started to like video games as a child stems from the strange features that these Japanese-created pieces of software sometimes presented. Often, the simple eight-bit graphics presented visual ambiguities that my little mind couldn’t comprehend. For example, at the end of a level in the original Super Mario Bros., what was that design on the flag supposed to be? A mushroom? A peace sign? A skull? I never knew. But I’d notice these little things and my curiosity would suck me into the world of these games — however pixilated their presentation — and I’d be hooked.

A prime example of this was the Minus World. For the uninitiated, the Minus World is a glitch in the original Super Mario Bros that, with some finesse, could sneak Mario into a glitch level. (Level in this game are named “1-1,” “1-2,” “3-3,” “3-4,” etc., all the way to the final level, “8-4.” The so-called Minus World, however, didn’t display the first digit. Instead, the level name was displayed “-1,” which looked like “negative one,” hence the term “Minus World.”) Once there, the level didn’t really present anything all that spectacular: only an endless underwater stage that players could send poor Mario through over and over again, until the timer ran out and he died. At the time, however, I had no reason to suspect anything other than that the Minus World was a deliberate secret that developers put in the game, and that there was some important meaning behind it.

There wasn’t, of course, but the idea intrigued me nonetheless.

Today, the gaming blog Kotaku posted this video of an alternate version of the Minus World, from the Japanese Famicom Disk System version of Super Mario Bros. As Kotaku notes, it’s all the more surreal. Seeing this today made me feel once again like the awestruck little kid that first stumbled into the Minus World so many years ago.

To Buffalo

This morning, the righteous Dina sent me a link to the Wikipedia page for a certain linguistic parlor trick. “I'm sure you've seen this and probably blogged about it, but it makes
me happy, and I would like to share,” she said. In fact I had not heard of this, but Dina nailed it on the head when she decided it was something worth sharing.

Generally credited to William J. Rapaport, an associate professor at the University of Buffalo, the following sentence is grammatically correct, at least in a technical sense.

“Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.”

Technically correct, of course, is the best kind of correct. It describes the social hierarchy of buffalos at the Buffalo Zoo in Buffalo, New York. It employs three definitions for the word “buffalo”: the animal, the place and the verb meaning “to intimidate.” (Also, I should note that this is one verb I neglected to list in the post regarding animal name verbs, “Don’t Make Me Platypus All Over You.”) Translated into easier words, the sentence is trying to relate the fact that some buffaloes from the Buffalo Zoo that other buffaloes intimidate themselves also like to intimidate a third group of buffaloes in the zoo. Initially the sentence was problematic to me, even with the explanation. I kept feeling that any way I read it, the sentence omitted a crucial “that” whose presence grammar demanded.

In my mind, the sentence should have either read

Buffalo buffalo that buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.

or

Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo that buffalo Buffalo buffalo.

Then i realized I was leaving out one "buffalo." Furthermore, neither of these interpretations really express what the sentence should, however, and I had to read the Wikipedia’s explanation of it several times in order to get it. Even still, the correct interpretation fades out of my head the instant I avert my attention to anything else, kind of like how you can work to see the alternate interpretation in an optical illusion, but then revert back to the initial image if you stop concentrating and then have to work back to the secondary one. A major clue is which words are capitalized, as you can tell those words have to be the city, excluding the first one, of course.

To explain, I’m going to employ so font modifications. In the below sentence the bold buffalo represents the city name, the italicized buffalo represents the animal and the plain one represents the verb.

Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.

This, to me, is the easiest way to parse the sentence. Think of every "Buffalo buffalo," with the capitalized one followed by the lower-case one, as "a group of buffalos from the city Buffalo." With that, you have

Various buffalo at the Buffalo zoo that other buffalo at the same zoo tend to intimidate in turn go and treat this third group of buffalo at the zoo in a similar way.

or

[One group of] Buffalo buffalo [that other] Buffalo buffalo [tend to] buffalo [themselves] buffalo [other] Buffalo buffalo.

or

Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.

It's like making algebra out of grammar, which you'd think I hate but apparently don't. Still, I can't believe I've typed the word "buffalo" this many times. Likely, more than a lot of people have in their lives, rather than Buffalo Bill. I can no longer even look at the word "buffalo" without thinking that it now looks wrong, just by virtue of me having stared at it for so long and noticing how weird it is.

The Wikipedia article also suggest others, including "Badgers badgers badger badger badgers." but I don't even want to attempt delving into those today. All of them, however, are what is known as "garden path sentences" — that is, a sentence you can't correctly understand without doubling back and re-reading. "The horse raced past the barn fell," for another example, in case your head doesn't hurt like mine.

And it's with no small sense of humor that I note "buffalo" can also mean "to confuse." Seriously, who thought "buffalo" was suitable to being a real word, anyway?

[ link: Wikipedia on "garden path sentences" ]

The Kendall Effect

If there’s one thing I love more than self-referencing TV shows, it’s self-referencing TV shows that references other self-referencing TV shows.

Case in point: the Kendall effect. Before Sarah Michelle Gellar became the girl who spends her time running from or after various supernatural terrors, she had a two-year stint on All My Children as Kendall Hart, the scheming long-lost daughter of the Susan Lucci character. I never saw her in action, but Gellar apparently won a Daytime Emmy for her performance. Years later, Gellar was on Buffy, where she frequently butted heads with Cordelia Chase, the snobby cheerleader character played by Charisma Carpenter. Cordelia was often aided in her efforts to make Buffy feel bad by her cohort, Harmony, who was played by Mercedes McNab. Despite her vapidness, Harmony is actually the longest-lived character in the Buffy universe. She appears in both the original unaired half-hour pilot for the show and the series finale of Angel, the spin-off in which she appeared as a regular during the last season. Midway through her run, however, Buffy’s gang goes searching for Harmony, using their senior yearbook as an identifying photo. There, viewers saw for the first time that Harmony’s last name was, in fact, Kendall. Knowing Joss Whedon’s pop culture savvy, I have to believe the reference is intentional, especially given that Gellar’s soap opera work is what landed her the title role to begin with.

That brings us up to the present, with me watching too much Veronica Mars. In the most recent season, Veronica clashed with a new character, played by Charisma Carpenter. The scheming step-mother of two of Veronica’s classmates, the character’s name was Kendall Casablancas — which, by the way, would be a great soap opera name. Seeing as how series creator Rob Thomas — no, not that one — has a propensity for referencing the other great TV shows of our day — there’s an episode featuring George Michael and Maebe from Arrested Development, for example, and another one featuring the cursed numbers from Lost and another in which Joss Whedon himself actually appears — I have to again believe that the presence of this name is no accident. In fact, this name seems to have traced through three TV shows and each time attached to attractive, minorly villainous women.

And things like that make watching TV fun.

A Wild Butterfly

I'm shocked — shocked — to know that the 80s hit "Obsession" is not, in fact, by Human League, as I've long thought. The song was actually song by the band Animotion, whose lead singer, Michael Des Barres, later had a son who started what was once my favorite publication: Diehard Gamefan.

Weird what Wikipedia teaches you.

The Lady in the Lampshade

And from way back on Fiesta weekend, here's a little sketch the talented Dina Dina Canklesaurus drew in the dust on my lampshade. Those familiar with Dina's artistic style should not be surprised.

Don't Make Me Platypus All Over You

Some time ago, I posted an entry here that detailed what, as far my experience and research yielded, was a list of verbs the English language has derived from its words for the various parts of the human body. There were many, and quite a few more so were pointed out by my readers. The post, “Don’t Cock This One Up,” stands today as the one that generated the most comments ever. This surprised me somewhat.

In any case, I was struck this weekend by the inability to recall the animal-derived verb we English speakers use to mean “to search out, to rummage, the produce with much effort.” Only because my dad eventually spoke this phrase later the very day I was trying to remember it did I get to put my mind at ease. “Something something and then he ferreted out what was really up.” I can’t remember what the context was. But does it not seem odd that we’d have such a readily recognized expression taken from an animal with which most English speakers, I’d wager, I have little to no contact? Yes? It does? Good. I thought so as well.

As a consequence of this very problem, I’m listing here below what, as far as my experience and research can yield, is a list of the various verbs we derive from animal names.

• to dog (as in, “to fix a negative, aggressive facial expression on someone”)
• to hound (used similarly, but more in the sense of fixing a vendetta upon someone)
• to wolf down
• to horse around
• to monkey around (meaning much the same as the previous one)
• to pig out
• to pony up
• to ape
• to parrot (again, meaning much the same as the previous)
• to fox (though this one is most always spoken as “to out fox,” with the adverb preceding the verb, it stands to reason that it is as valid as “to horse around” despite its jumbled word order)
• to cat around (meaning, surprisingly, "to look for a sexual mate")
• to duck (which does come from the same word as the kind of bird, I found)
• to goose
• to skylark (though I think we usually just call them “larks”)
• to leech
• to sponge (most often meaning “to freeload” or something like it, though I’d bet this came from the synthetic, inanimate kind of sponges used for cleaning and not from the sea creatures, which, I think we can all agree, are for all practical purposes just barely count as animals)
• to clam up
• to mole (which apparently can be used in the sense of acting as a mole, though I can’t imagine how those near-sighted tunnel-diggers ever got tangled up in espionage)
• to coyote (in a similar sense, when speaking of illegal immigration across the Mexican-U.S. border)
• to beaver (though it’s more referring to the anatomical sense rather than to any function of the animal)
• to pussy out (and likewise)
• to dragon (in the sense of inhaling from a cigarette and blowing it out one’s nostrils; though I’ve heard this spoken, I must admit it is a stretch at best)
• to rat
• to crow (which may be spurious in that the verb only connotes making a noise like the animal does)
• to snake (as in “to steal”)
• to fish (perhaps the only of these verbs that derives from the act of killing the animal it is named for)
• to worm (okay, so there's two)
  
• to whale (okay, so there's three)
  
• to chicken out
• to squirrel (most often spoken as “to squirrel away”)
• to weasel
• to badger
• and, of course, to ferret

If you’ll note the “Don’t Cock This One Up” post, you’ll notice that the list of body part-derived verbs is longer. I find this very surprising, for although we, being human beings, spend much of the day with out bodies and their various parts, we also have a long history of interacting with animals — certainly for as long as English has been around. And though we have a limited number of body parts, there's a far greater number of animals for us to interact with. Granted, there are other expressions that I’ve kept off the list. They’re all mainly longer ones that incorporate some form of the verb “to be” and an adjective derived from the animal’s name, like “to become sheepish” or “to be bullish” or whatever.

(Also, just so nobody calls me on it, I’d like to point out that a handful of homonym verbs that resemble animal names but have no actual animal associations, like “to bear.” I think I’d also be remiss if I didn’t mention “to cuckold,” which if I’m not mistaken arrived long ago into English from an old version of French, hence the fact that it doesn’t directly resemble the word “cuckoo.” Most wordologists, however, agree that the word comes from the notion that the cuckoo bird kicks out the eggs of some unknowing hen and tricks her into raising a brood that’s not actually her own.)

Furthermore, a surprising number of the entries in the above list have duplicate meanings: namely “to horse around” and “to monkey around”; “to ape” and “to parrot”; and “to clam up” and “to turtle up.” Why, the cunning linguist must ask, should such disparate animals yield verbs with the same meanings? Why must everything that a parrot and an ape do, for example, be boiled down to mere mimicry? I for one have observed both animals — though, admittedly, never at the same time — and I feel that their collective actions should rightfully include clucking (parrots), snapping (parrots), scratching (apes), eating bananas (apes), crawling up cages (both), exposing their genitals (apes), frightening me on some level (both) and mastering crude sign language computer programs (apes). Parrots copy us as a parlor trick, sure, but do apes really even imitate humans? Or does their mere existence as our distance evolutionary relative renders them mimics? And isn’t that a little self-centered, especially since apes have been around longer than we have?

Additional weirdness: “to squirrel,” “to weasel,” “to badger,” and “to ferret.” Why should four slender, nimble, toothy, furry and altogether similar beasts all get verbs, when animals that are much more frequently the subject of interaction by humans — cows, for example, or goldfish or seagulls or rabbits or raccoons or ants — get the shaft?

And finally, why should any of the meanings we associate with these verbs have stuck so soundly? Humans, as a rule, generally love dogs. And dogs, in my experience, generally love us back, a fact that is so often exhibited by the glazed, tongue-lolling expressions of absolute mirth and complete loyalty they shoot us. Rightly, “to dog” should mean something else — to fetch a ball or trot faithfully by one’s side or to eat one’s vomit only moments after having purged it. For this, I feel that the notion of “dogging” as we currently understand it is a total misnomer.

I speak no language besides English fluently, but I know enough of others to understand that we writers are lucky to have it. Its status as a verbal melting pot makes it a convenient one to write in since we’re afforded so many ways to say the same thing that we’re nearly never without a word or phrase that can describe the precise shade of meaning we’re striving for. Thus, I’m not suggesting that we should crawl back through centuries of lexicon-building and omit these words. No, as much as some of their strange associations bother me, I’m happy to keep them. However, I have to wonder why we don’t utilize other members of the animal kingdom — both domestic and exotic — in a smarter way and derive more of these spot-on, that’s-exactly-what-I-meant terms from the various unused beasts.

For what else could one mean by the expression “to penguin about” than to frolic and slide about on the tundra while eating fish and dressed in formal wear? If I said that Barnaby’s younger, slighter brother refrained from speaking to the party guests and merely moused about his family’s grand ballroom in an earnest attempt to remain at the event but escape notice, wouldn’t you know exactly what I meant? Would any explanation be needed if I told you that Yoyo Ellenboggan could have easily avoided the wrath of the minister’s daughters had she refrained from peacocking about town in her new jewel-encrusted dress and matching hat? To mosquito? To sphinx? To vulture about a buffet table, awaiting the appropriate time to dive in for seconds? I find it’s all fairly straightforward, especially if you simply take in the words and the images they suggest, rather than rhinoing through without any caution to the deliberation the writer took in selecting each word.

And beyond the mere colloquialisms we could use the ignored animals for, the writerly readers currently reading this and readying to write their own response should stop to consider the more poetic implications of pairing the perfect animal for the action needing to be described. “By late October, the leaves had already begun to lose their green and, one by one, butterfly away from their branches in their final act of natural beauty.” How perfectly does that verb — one, as far as I know, undiscovered by English speakers — capture the motion of a leaf through the air? And what could be meant by the verb “to moth,” other than the notion of being destroyed by the thing that one desires most? And how obvious? And how beautiful, if even in a melodramatic sense?

And how — for God’s sake — could any of these await coinage while every one in the United States can immediately understand “You’re badgering the witness” despite the fact that relatively few have ever actually been harassed by a badger?

Off the Grid

Towns and former towns I was in, was near or drove through this weekend:

• Mi-Wuk
• Sugarpine
• Confidence
• Standard
• Soulbsyville
• Twain Harte
• Ralph
• Tuttletown
• Quartz
• Chinese Camp
• Angels Camp
• Copperopolis
  

Ah, the Gold Rush.