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Friday, June 29, 2012

Pixels Crashing on a 16-Bit Shore

I can’t remember the last time I set foot in an actual ocean.


That might be excusable if I lived in Ohio. But I live in California, and for the last decade have never resided more than a short drive from the beach. Still, as the thick heat of a Los Angeles July is creeping up on me and into my house, I’m looking at this Super Nintendo approximation of sun and sand and just getting lost in it. It doesn’t bother me that I can see the tile pattern in the ripples on the water or that I can tell that the palms are so clearly the same arrangement of pixels, copied and pasted. I love it. It’s nostalgic. It’s aspirational. It’s calming.

Mom was right: I did spend too much time staring at screens.

Thursday, June 28, 2012

Porn for Border Collies

~ WOOLY WILMA ~


“Hi. I’m a fully grown ewe who’s been from one end of the pasture to the other. I’m currently separated from my flock, as I’ve been sunning myself on a grassy knoll all afternoon and now I'm sitting all alone. I’m looking for a big, strong herding dog to bark in my face and nip at my legs until I’m ushered back to safety. Do I hear your collar jingling already?”

~ MISS MUTTON ~



“Baa baa. I’ve just been freshly shorn, and the feeling of the brisk Scotland air against my skin has made me impudent. I’ve been stomping my hooves and jumping up on the feedbox where I’m not allowed. Please, I need a collie to come and stare directly into my eyes until I can’t help but do what he wants. Help me be a good little lamb again.”

~ COTTON & CLOUD ~



“We’re twins. We just turned a year old today, and a guess what? Our ears have never been chewed. Ooh, yeah — the cartilage is still so resilient. Later today, we’re both going to wriggle through a hole in the fence and eat milady’s daffodils. Since we suffer from the typically poor ovine memory, we might just wander back and forth all day along the fence, searching for just the right spot to get back into the pasture. Hope we don’t tire you out!”

{ FIN }

Wednesday, June 27, 2012

The Singing, Dancing, Mystery-Solving Actresses of the 1940s

Ann Rutherford has died.

This may not mean anything to you. But because Ann Rutherford starred in Gone With the Wind, I had to take note of her passing at work. I researched her life a bit. I found out what else she did during her life aside from play Scarlett O’Hara’s sister, Carreen, she with the car accident verb name. It turns out that Rutherford had a rather rich body of work, and she played roles as diverse as the Ghost of Christmas Past in an adaptation of A Christmas Carol to Lydia Bennet in Pride and Prejudice. As near as I can tell, the best role of her career didn’t occur onscreen, however, but in a book: According to Wikipedia, Rutherford in 1942 starred as herself in the Nancy Drew-esque mystery novel titled Ann Rutherford and the Key to Nightmare Hall.


Rutherford didn’t write the novel, nor was the novel about “her,” strictly speaking. Instead, it’s about what amounts to an alternate universe version of her in which she’s not famous and leads a life wholly different and more skeleton key-rich to the one she led in actual 1942. It’s not as ridiculous as it might initially seem. Really, didn’t the Olsen twins have an entire line of books based on this very concept? (And if they somehow didn’t, shouldn’t they have?) In spite of the strangeness of this concept, the book was not unique. It was just one entry in a series of similar books — not centered around Rutherford but a who’s-who of actresses popular enough but not so prestigious that they’d be above lending their likenesses and names to a story in which they’d be imperiled but presumably not killed. The Whitman Authorized series, as these books are known, often pitted its actress-sleuth protagonist against various Axis powers, sometimes even mentioning how the heroine performed for the troops between detective escapades. (Patriotic! Emulatable!) 

There are sixteen books in all:


The best titles, by far, have to be Ginger Rogers and the Riddle of the Scarlet Cloak (because “Hey! Way to do something more than just dance!”), Shirley Temple and the Screaming Specter (because “Hey! Way to extend that career beyond the ‘child actor’ years!”), and Gene Tierney and the Invisible Wedding Gift (because “Bitch, who brings an invisible gift to a wedding?”). In a different way, it’s also amusing to see titles like Jane Withers and the Swamp Wizard and Bonita Granville and the Mystery of Star Island, because I feel like these books would be the modern-day equivalent of Rachel Leigh Cook and the Haunted VHS — in short, no one knew who the hell the protagonists were approximately ten minutes after the books were published. (Alternate jokes: Leelee Sobieski and the Demonic Dial-Up and Stacey Dash and Fiendish Furby.) But far funnier than any just-short-of-modern-day equivalent is the fact that these books actually existed. Really, can we look as the beyond-child-stardom Shirley Temple on the cover of Shirley Temple and the Spirit of Dragonwood?


What kind of World War II-era, dragon-symbolized, anti-Japanese adventure could pseudo-Shirley Temple possibly have gone on?

And then there’s also Judy Garland. Now, for everyone else featured in these books, the stories were purely fictional, but given Garland’s history, I prefer to imagine that The Hoodoo Costume is actually a nonfictional account of her investigating such mysteries as “Who the hell drank all my rum?”, “Why won’t the doctor prescribe me more pills?”, “What day is it?”, “Toto? Where are you, Toto?” and “Where the hell do I live?” I mean, look at the illustration below. I think she’s actually trying to find her own house.


And what the hell is she carrying? Some sort of Basset Hound-skin handbag that matches her coat? The world’s wrinkliest muff? Does she just have one long arm? Where the hell is Liza?

I’m clearly already committed to this world of star-studded mystery. In closing, I’d like to express my hopes that we all one day become entangled in an actress related mystery.

Tuesday, June 26, 2012

Putting Fabiano in His Place

Meet Fabiano.


He swears he’s the one Italian who likes Americans, and he thinks it’s downright quaint how little you and your friends know about this region of Italy. Have you been backpacking long? From what tailor do you get your clothes that have so much writing on them? Oh, yes, he’s been to California, and he’s heard that you’re very proud of your wine. It’s important that you have some pride, no matter where you’re from, he says. Then Fabiano points out that it’s probably better than you don’t try and pick up a little Italian while you’re in the country. He doesn’t think your American mouth could do it justice, but you’re certainly speaking English loudly enough. Is it true you’ve never used a bidet?

And this whole time, you’re standing there, fully aware that Fabiano doesn’t have the highest opinion of you and your culture and your apparently obvious Americanness, but you have one bit of information to hold over him. Fabiano and other names in that family — Fabio, Fabian, Fabiana, Fabiolaall mean “bean.” Like fava bean, which, by the way, means “bean bean,” or the rather unflattering adjective fabiform, “bean-shaped.” And though you keep it to yourself, there’s just something magical in the fact that completely undercuts any notions of culture or superiority you might have about some Italian schmuck named Fabiano.

Aw, you know what? Fuck it. “You know your name means ‘bean,’ right? Did you know that?”

Etymology, previously:

Monday, June 25, 2012

Who Put the Smile on the Cheshire Cat?

More than Lewis Carroll could have ever dreamed, Alice in Wonderland has crept up the rabbit hole and into pop culture consciousness. Thank Disney and thank that particular sort of blacklight-happy head culture, but it’s a book people tend to drop references to a lot more often than other works published in the last 150 years, to the point that falling down a rabbit hole now functions as a readily understood shorthand for accidentally happening upon some strange world and losing yourself in it. (And that’s handy, now that we have the internet.)

But just as it’s rarely noted today that the book’s actual title was actually Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, a few of Carroll’s references today get lost as a result of Alice growing more popular than anything of-the-period that Carroll was riffing on. Take the Mad Hatter, for example. It’s somewhat well-known today that this particular tea party attendee acts so strangely because hat-makers in Carroll’s day used mercury to cure felt and therefore lost their minds. The whole character is a literalization of the then-popular expression mad as a hatter. As I said, a lot of people have heard this explanation, but a great many more people would have heard of the Mad Hatter than those who have actually come to understand why Carroll invented him.

And even fewer people know the logic behind the Cheshire Cat.


If there’s one thing to know about the Cheshire Cat, it’s that it smiles. It smiles even when the cat itself is not present, in fact. If you’re like me, you have unsettling memories of the Alice in Wonderland ride at Disneyland, which at one point sent the passengers through a dark tunnel and towards the Cheshire Cat’s grinning face, which vanished all but the grin, which then just wobbled back and forth in the darkness, detached from a body.


But why does it smile?

In the same way that the Mad Hatter arose from the phrase mad as a hatter, the Cheshire Cat comes from the phrase grinning like a Cheshire cat. And while a few theories exist about why anyone in Carroll’s region of England would have used it, the simplest and most widely accepted is this: Cheshire, England, had a lot of dairies, so plentiful, flowing milk would have made any local cats extremely happy. Barring a few theories to the contrary, that’s why the Cheshire Cat can’t stop smiling.

As far as making one more pop cultural connection, it’s worth noting that DC Comics has since 1983 had the villain Cheshire. And while she’s retained the same look more or less since her inception — long black hair and a green ninja dress, making her look more or less like a complementary color Elektra — she’s depicted more and more often with a grinning cat mask. Here’s how she appears on Young Justice.


It’s a nice way of making her costume reflect her literary origins, especially when consider how she’s a ninja that, like the Cheshire Cat, disappears whenever she wants to.

Memories of Boom Boom Mountain

My apartment’s nook-like room is featured on Offbeat Home this morning.


Here’s to not throwing anything away, being indecisive about wall art!

Sunday, June 24, 2012

In Defense of My Instagram Account

This:


“Denied a spot in the oxygen tent, she perished shortly after.”

What You’re Calling Your Finnish Copyeditor

I’ll be upfront about this one: You will seldom have an occasion to use this latest word of the week. However, if you love words and especially love well-crafted insults, you’ll go through the rest of your life feeling just a bit happier that this word exists.
pilkunnussija (pill-KOO-noos-EE-ja) — noun: a person with exceptional and unnecessary attention to detail; a punctilious person; a pedant.
In short, pilkunnussija names every micromanaging, nitpicking, calling-you-out-on-a-technicality asshole who’s ever made your life terrible. But why would I go out of my way to introduce a new word when English clearly has a rich vocabulary for describing dickish people? It’s what pilkunnussija literally means: “comma fucker.” And that, friends, a thing of beauty. What a creative way to capture the essence of some terrible person who lusts for the opportunity to check and re-check the minutia that no one else cares about and which likely doesn’t matter in the long run — “comma fucker.” Someone who literally gets off on commas.

Brilliant. A hearty way-to-go for all your Finns out there — and a happy thumbs-up for me, too, for I now know one thing about Finnish people.

(An aside: I actually didn’t find a clear pronunciation for this word, so I just sounded out how an English-speaker would tackle those letters. Do correct me if you know better, Finnish-fluent portion of my reader base, which maybe exists for all I know.)

Previous words of the week after the jump.

Saturday, June 23, 2012

No, I Can’t Think About the Sun Right Now

In the shower this morning, I thought about whether the long-ago people who invented and told myths actually believed that the moon was the sun’s wife and that a dyspeptic giant caused earthquakes. It’s possible people some people didn’t believe the stories, even back then. Maybe some of them took an atheistic or agnostic stance and regarded those old stories as a method of putting the world in a context that people could deal with. Could anyone have been that clever back then? Maybe some math-minded person who saw the world as its bare components instead of imagining a face on everything, Super Mario Bros.-style?


In fact, I’d be shocked if the ancient world didn’t have a few pessimists walking around, imagining they lived in less of the fairyland that everyone perceived. But how lonely it must have been for them — having no one with whom to discuss the fact that dueling gods in heaven were not, in fact, responsible for a recent spate of bad luck, not to mentioned that they wouldn’t envision a spirit inhabiting every rock and tree. They’d be alone. Not only would their view of the world put them in a minority, but they’d know that humans, as a race, were flying solo.

Then, after showering, I began putting on sunscreen. I burn easily, so I put on sunscreen everyday. But today, mid-application, I stopped, because the whole of me was consumed with the realization that I have a personal relationship with the sun.
The sun — a giant ball of fire that has burned for the entirety of existence as I can perceive it. Dinosaurs saw it, Cleopatra saw it, my great-great-grandparents (none of whom I was able to meet) saw it, and it will be hanging in the sky eons after you and I aren’t here anymore. 
The sun — a deep-space chemical fire so massive that it could fit a million Earths inside in, and which I notice every day but I can’t even look at directly, because it’s powerful to the point that it’s harmful to perceive it, to say nothing of attempting to get much closer to it than we currently are. 
The sun — a celestial body that, almighty though it may seem, is merely one of many stars also pulsating with unimaginable energy throughout the galaxy, heating up space and making existence happen.
Because of this entity, which I’ve read about in books and which I am unable to not notice during every daylight hour, I have to pay Rite-Aid a few bucks in order to purchase goop that I put on myself to prevent my skin from revolting against me and causing me to die early. The sun is the source of all energy. The sun could kill me and not think twice about it. I have to buy goop. I live on Earth, close-ish to the sun, relatively speaking.

. . .

It is perhaps preferable to imagine instead that the sun is a magical man driving a shiny chariot across the sky every day.

Friday, June 22, 2012

With “It” Being a Set of Dead Doll Eyes

Generally speaking, I would agree that Kim Kardashian should be mentioned less. However, when I’m reading an old Tezuka comic and a come across an evil, soulless sex robot with a vacant expression framed by a wall of dark hair, I think that warrants a mention.


It must be the eyes that give me a Kardashian vibe — that blank expression that says both “Whatever, do me, I guess” and “I’m unacquainted with this love you speak of.” Not that I’m saying Kim Kardashian is a robot. No, I’d guess she sucks too much at math to be a robot.

Who Wore It Better?, previously:

Wednesday, June 20, 2012

The Terror of the Bird Clock

It’s not that I intended to blog about something as mundane as clocks twice in one month or even that I wanted to write more than one post about haunted clocks in particular. Yet here I am, writing about the possessed timepiece that rules over my office.

You see, my office has a bird clock — a chronometric equivalent of Big Mouth Billy Bass that every hour, on the hour, lets out with a birdcall. (It’s a relic, I think, from some previous incarnation of the office in which employees liked birds.) Most hours in the day, I can deal with it just fine. However, the two-o’-clock bird — allegedly a black-capped chickadee — needs the intervention of priests and rabbis and imams to drive out the evil spirit that has caused it to make an awful, ungodly noise. If I had to guess what sort of demonic infestation we were dealing with, I’d say it was probably the same sort of presence that occupies those automated Halloween dishes that scare trick-or-treaters when they attempt to take candy. Because that’s exactly what this sounds like.

Using a cutting-edge, ectoplasm-ready iPhone app, I made the following video of the demon unleashing its evil upon the office:


Right? It’s totally an evil candy dish demon. Please, I need your prayers and positive energies, for every day I’m just counting down the hours until dreaded strike of two.

An aside: Why aren’t nuns sent to drive out demons? Nuns are far scarier and far better as forcing others to do their bidding.

Monday, June 18, 2012

Emoji That I Demand Should Exist

Kissy-faced, Flirtatious Squid

Weeping, Devalued Yen

Turtle Representing Rapidly Aging Populace

Island-Bound Xenophobia (Represented by Raccoon)

Ashamed Deer

The Six-Tailed Fox of Rigid Business Practices

Puppy Cautioning Recipient Against Honor Suicide

Cat Purchasing Soiled Undergarments from Erotic Vending Machine

Sparkling, Whale-Free Ocean

Less Happy-Looking Poo


Because let’s face it: Sometimes you want to make sure that the recipient knows you’re not emoji-ing about coneless chocolate soft serve. You want your poo dollup to be angry.

Sunday, June 17, 2012

The Hadouken of the Undersea World

— “Hey Drew, what’s the coolest thing you learned this week?”
— “Oh, just something that made me more impressed with crustaceans than I ever thought possible.”
— “Is that a fact? Well, can you some up this whole miraculous marvel with a word that sounds too goofy to be scientifically accurate?”
— “Why, yes I can. You know, I should make it my word of the week.
shrimpoluminescence (SHRIMP-oh-loom-in-ESS-ens) — noun: sonoluminscence — that is, the emission of short bursts of light from imploding, sound-agitated bubbles — caused by the pistol shrimp or mantis shrimp.
According to Discover magazine’s blog Not Exactly Rocket Science, one sea creature has a left hook mean enough to destroy even the toughest mollusk shells and crustacean exoskeletons: the mantis shrimp. Bruiser reputation notwithstanding, it looks like the offspring of a Chinese parade dragon and that gay lobster that the B-52s once sang about. 

Observe:


Also, it’s neither a mantis nor a shrimp, as the NERS article points out. Take care to remember this. You wouldn’t want to offend this creature, for he owns a set of claws that he can unfurl at speeds of 23 meters per second — about the speed of a .22 caliber bullet, according to Wikipedia and the fastest “punch” of any animal, according to NERS. And if that first punch doesn’t break through the target — say, an oyster shell or your scuba-masked face or whatever — the mantis shrimp can punch again. And again. Just from a “Hey, look what nature gave me!” perspective, that alone is impressive, but these blindingly fast attacks have surprising results in addition to reducing fellow undersea-dwellers into ceviche with brute force. According to NERS, “[The punch] creates a pressure wave that boils the water in front of it, creating flashes of light (shrimpoluminescene — no, really) and immensely destructive bubbles.”

So a real-life hadouken, more or less.

(modified from creative commons-friendly photo found here.)

Now hold on: My analogy is actually less stupid than you might think. According to Wikipedia, the shimpoluminescent attack allows the mantis shrimp to further damage its opponent without physically touching it.
The collapse of these cavitation bubbles produces measurable forces on their prey in addition to the instantaneous forces of 1,500 newtons that are caused by the impact of the appendage against the striking surface, which means that the prey is hit twice by a single strike — first by the claw and then by the collapsing cavitation bubbles that immediately follow. Even if the initial strike misses the prey, the resulting shock wave can be enough to kill or stun the prey. The snap can also produce sonoluminescence from the collapsing bubble. This will produce a very small amount of light and high temperatures in the range of several thousand kelvins within the collapsing bubble, although both the light and high temperatures are too weak and short-lived to be detected without advanced scientific equipment.
Among the myriad special moves that an animal could unleash in a fight, you probably wouldn’t imagine that bubble creation would be among the most damaging, but it apparently is. The shock waves created by the collapse of these bubbles — inertial cavitation, in sciencespeak — can create small dents in the stainless steel boat propellers, NERS claims. Amherst’s Patek Lab features some videos that offer us slow-eyed humans are best chance at seeing the mantis shrimp’s attack in motion:


Given all the build-up of preceding paragraphs, that may not look like much, but consider that the video was shot at 5,000 frames per second and is shown in the above clip at only 15 frames per second. See the little flash? That’s shimpoluminescence in action. Isn’t it strange to know that there’s a real-life equivalent of those cartoony smacks and pows you see illustrating when a punch has connected? Here’s another video:


And yes, in case you’re wondering: Mantis shrimp can break through aquarium glass — in a single strike, no less.

(Hat tip on this one: this tweet by Adam Norwood.)


Previous words of the week after the jump.

Friday, June 15, 2012

Who Names Their Daughter Pistol?

(A quick one for Friday.)

Hey, remember Goof Troop? Remember how Goofy lived next to Pete, the old-timey Disney bad guy? Remember how Pete had a wife and daughter who kind of receded into the background behind whatever Goofy and Pete were doing with their sons? Remember how the daughter’s name was Pistol? Wasn’t it weird that that was her name?

Here’s Pistol, in case you don’t remember:


So why was her name Pistol? Well, back in the day, when Pete was playing this villain or that villain, he took on different names. When he was a pirate, he went by Peg Leg Pete, hence Pete’s wife normal-seeming name, Peg. When he was a bandit, his name was Pistol Pete, and Pistol’s name is a callback to that.

And that, my friends, is why a minor Disney cartoon character was named after a firearm.

Thursday, June 14, 2012

Danger in Deling City

I’m going through a Serge Gainsbourg phase. That’s something awful people say to indirectly tell you that they’re classy, worldly, cultural, hip and other adjectives that, when combined, usually equal awful. Nonetheless, it’s true. I have been listening to him lately, because in spite of the pretentious people who may count him among their most recent obsessions, he’s actually quite phenomenal. In fact, he’s so good that you can be a non-French-speaking person who’s missing out on his expert worldplay and still enjoy his songs, and that’s saying quite a bit, seeing as how his lyrical prowess is one of his best qualities.

The song I’m posting today, however, is instrumental, so you monoglots and francophobes needn’t worry any.

Gainsbourg scored the 1970 Anna Karina film Cannabis, and one of the tracks happens to be one of my all-time favorites of his compositions. It’s titled “Danger.” Here it is:


But the thing about this track is this: It’s good on its own, but every time I hear it, I think of a track from a video game soundtrack I played years ago: “Under Her Control” from Final Fantasy VII. Here’s that one:


Can I explain why one makes me think of the other? No, not really. There’s not one specific detail about the former that I could say reminds me of the later. However, the whole gestalt of the Gainsbourg track nonetheless makes me think of the one my Uematsu. It’s certainly not the first time I’ve heard something “legitimate” in something from a video game, but somehow this one seems to linger more heavily than the others.

Anyone?

Wednesday, June 13, 2012

With “It” Being an Octopus Hat

I have exactly two posts on this blog featuring the label “what I think happened” — the one from Monday about the secretary posing with the opium in the candy box and then one from last October with the girl trying to do her best Mila Kunis from beneath a crocheted octopus hoodie. And it’s kind of weird that just two days after the candy box post, I get to refer to the other of the two posts. See, this new Fiona Apple video came out and lord-oh-God WHY IS WEARING AN OCTOPUS HAT?!

Who cares why, really? It gave me an opportunity to make this little side-by-side.


And while I hate to be a member of the faction saying “Boo, Fiona Apple, you demonstrated realistic aging since 1997 and now you no longer look like a teenager,” I have to say that Mila Poonis over on the right might look better with a cephalopod affixed to her noggin.

All that aside, I would just like to say that I’m really excited about the idea of more people wearing octopuses.

Who Wore It Better?, previously:

Monday, June 11, 2012

The Triumphant Return of Fluffy Butternums

I spent last Easter at my parents’ house and, while there, had a close encounter with a real, live, wild rabbit — a baby jackrabbit, in fact. And though he could not offer me chocolate in any traditional, acceptable or edible sense, he did exhibit commendable courage in the fact of what to him must have looked like a pink, hairless giant. And that’s something.

A photo:


Just today, while sorting through old photos on my phone, I realized I’d also taken a video of him. Just by virtue of nose-wiggling cuteness, this is a video the world needs to see. Apologies in advance for any motion sickness-inducing camera work. I am a novice rabbit documentarian.


I don’t know what became of him — and to be frank, his lack of fear in the face of a towering camera monster does not bode well — but I wish him the best.

Sweets for the Sweet Who’s Addicted to Opium

From the UCLA archive of old L.A. Times photos, I present a photo that ran in the June 5, 1947, edition of the paper with the following caption: “UNDER THE CANDY: A District Attorney’s secretary exhibits $40,000 worth of opium found concealed beneath candy in box. Drug was discovered in connection with investigation of robbery, kidnapping ring.”


And now, how this happened, according to my brain:
“Hey, Rocko — what’s the name of that set of ankles at the desk in the D.A.’s office? You know, the one who’s been sore at me ever since I busted her ma for pushin’ hop. Doris? Dorcas? Doreen? Ah, okay — Ada. Well, lemme run by you my idea to make Ada sweet on me like she yoosta. I assume you recall that stash of gum that Lou and Maloney found in that Jamaican candy store that turned out to be a dopehouse. Here’s what I say: We ask ol’ angelface Ada to pose for the news hawks tomorrow afternoon and finally yank that sour look off that button of hers. Yeah, see? It’s the ol’ gooseberry lay. Tell her that she needs to go out, find a fancy new set of rags to pin on, get her hair done like Betty Grable and then show ever shamoo in Los Angeles how greats she looks. I even got the lined picked out: ‘That’s some fancy candies you got there, but they’re not half as sweet as you, Doris.’ What’s that? Oh yeah — Ada.

And if Ada’s not my new lady by the end of the week, I’ll just tell everyone she’s a communist.”

Sunday, June 10, 2012

Embiggening Your Understanding of Embiggen

Even in its most Jerkass Homer-y seasons, The Simpsons has always manages to toss off a joke or two that suggest the writers know language well enough to play around with it. This, after all, is the show that assigned Alexander Graham Bell’s short-lived method of answering the phone, ahoy-hoy, to Mr. Burns, that got the phrase cheese-eating surrender monkeys in the news and that made a certain segment of humanity think that the name for a mythical horse with the head of a rabbit and the body of a rabbit is esquilax. The Simpsons popularized both meh as a term indicating apathy or disinterest and yoink as an interjection to punctuate thievery. And now even people who don’t watch the show would know what you meant if you D’oh-ed.

However, if you asked most Simpsons fans what comes to mind first when they think about the show and words, they would probably say embiggen and cromulent — in that order.



They are introduced in the same episode, “Lisa the Iconoclast.” Embiggen first appears in the motto of Springfield’s founder, Jebediah Springfield: “A noble spirit embiggens the smallest man.” When Mrs. Krabappel points out that she’d never heard that word before she moved into town, Mrs. Hoover responds, “I don’t know why. It’s a perfectly cromulent word.” Later the same episode features Principal Skinner using both words in the same sentence: “He’s embiggened that role with his cromulent performance.” However, it’s only embiggen that found a notable life outside the show. And while some may have have heard it used since “Lisa the Iconoclast,” few seem to know that the word began before more than a century before The Simpsons hit the airwaves.

And that’s why it’s my word of the week.
embiggen (em-BIG-en) — verb: to make or become bigger.
There’s a connotation to embiggen that you wouldn’t find in a dictionary entry, and that’s the geekiness inherent in using it. We already have the word enlarge, but when you want to be all cute and reference-y about it, you can use embiggen. That’s why Will Wheaton uses it. And that’s probably why it was used by the science-minded types — or, if you will, dorks — who wrote this paper on gravity duality for the academic journal High Energy Physics. But embiggen was not technically born on The Simpsons, even if the show is solely responsible for the uses mentioned in the preceding paragraph. By a total coincidence, embiggen also appeared on page 135 of the 1884 edition of the British journal Notes and Queries: a Medium of Intercommunication for Literary Men, General Readers, Etc., according to Wikipedia. Quoting writer C.A. Ward:
But the people magnified them, to make great or embiggen, if we may invent an English parallel as ugly. After all, use is nearly everything.
So, yeah — he uses this word but then immediately points out what an awkward and unpleasant construction it is. And then it sat, alone and unloved, until The Simpsons used it. And now it belongs to the dorks.

A few other Simpsons coinages worth mentioning, via this page:
  • acceleratrix and velocitator — what Mr. Burns calls the gas pedal and the brake
  • walking bird and yellow fatty-beans — what Grampa once called turkeys and bananas, respectively
  • ovulicious — a portmanteau of ovulate and delicious
  • unfaceuptoable — which is actually pretty self-explanatory
  • swishifying — gay-making, basically
  • land cow — a buffalo
  • zazzje ne sais quoi for awful people
  • kwyjibo —a big, dumb balding North American ape… with no chin… and a short temper
And yes, by the way, I think that Australians should have to call something chazwazzahs, even if it’s not bullfrogs.

Previous words of the week after the jump.