The Sound of Leaves Blowing in the Wind

I wouldn’t make a point of writing about words every week if I didn’t think they had value individually, as opposed to just as units in a string that allow you to express yourself. In addition to meaning, words also carry history, and by looking into where a word came from and how it’s been used over the course of its life, you can learn about the everyday lives of your forbearers in ways that you likely can’t from a history book’s sweeping overview of some ancient people. Also, words can be beautiful, even when they’re severed from their meaning. I’d argue in favor of the intrinsic phonetic beauty in words such as espalier, petrichor and cephalophore — the last one especially when it’s disconnected from its meaning.

Today, another beauty.

psithurism (PSITH-ur-izm) — noun: the sound of wind in the trees and rustling of leaves.

Hell, even the very definition of it damn near rhymes, as if the word were so beautiful that other words around it naturally organize themselves into poetry. I found the this world on the language blog Inky Fool, which astutely points out that an intelligent person just might be able to intuit the definition of psithurism without any context and just from the sound of the letters. Some people might, and there may be similar onomatopoetic magic at play with the similar word susurration, “a whispering.”

image via

The word may have began as imitative, but English at least got psithurism from the Greek psithurisma, which in turn descends from the Greek verb psithurizo and has interpretations as far-ranging as “whisper” and “scandal” and “rustle” and “babbling” and “lapping” — all of which, of course, are clearly related. I’d like to think the word stuck around in Greek and now in English because the act of imitating such a subtle, delicate act of nature — leaves blowing in the wind — elevates the language in which the word is being spoken.

Previous words of the week after the jump.

• aasvogel, acné excoriée des jeunes filles, adulterine, ageusia, ambeer, anosmia
• barn, barrack, beeturia, bissextile, bloofer, breastsummer, brinicle
• catholicon, cecaelia, cephalophore, cherpumple, chilver, chyron, cockernonnie, collywobbles, coprolalia, couvade, cranberry morpheme, crwth, culaccino, cummingtonite
• darkle, deasil, decussate, deuteragonist, dingbat, dingle
• eidolon, embiggen, epeolatry, epopt, espalier, etui, exoterica
• fabiform, Feghoot, fissilingual, flehm, Föhnkrankheit, folderol, formication, freekeh, froward
• gallinipper, gnaborretni, grandgore, grue, guilloche, gyaru
• hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia, hobson-jobson, hogo, honorificabilitudinitatibus, hoyden, hyetal
• ignivomous, iracund, isabelline, itaiitai, izod, izzard
• jabroni, jamais vu, jehu, jumentous
• kaffir, kakopygian, kayfabe, knipperdollin
• lagniappe, leman, lemniscate, limnovore, linsey-woolsey, longicorn
• malacia, malison, maroon, merryandrew, milt, mongo, mooncalf, morepork, muzjiks
• narrenfreiheit, nef, nihilartikel, nobiliary particle, nosism, nudiustertian 
• obelus, ochanee, ogonek, ombré, ooglification, orchidectomy, ordured, orf, osculate
• pace, padiddle, paraprosdokian, pareidolia, pavonated, perendiate, perigee, perverb, petrichor, pettifogger, pettitoes, phlegmagogue, phpht, pilkunnussija, pismire, pixilated, pogonip, pong, pruniferous, puggle, pulveratricious, purse
• quacksalver, quagga, qualtagh, quidnunc, quiff
• ronion, roynish, rubirosa, rumpsprung, runcible
• salmagundi, scrutator, seneschal, sharrow, shebang, sherd, shrimpoluminescence, sinople, slampadato, slubberdegullion, stan, stevedore, suovetaurilia, suzerainty
• tappen, tatterdemalion, teratogenesis, tergiversate, tetromino, thagomizer, thon, tiffin, tittery-whoppet, tmesis, toby, tutoyer, tyro
• ucalegon, ultramontane, umiaq, umquhile
• veneficial, verdigris, vespertilionine, vinegeroon
• weeaboo, widdiful, williwaw, witzelsucht, wooper looper
• xenodocheionology, xyster
• yazoo, ypsiliform, yoink
• zanjero, zenzizenzizenzic, zinnober, zugzwang

Before SNL, Tina Fey Was a Valley Girl Princess

Did you know that pinball games had trailers? This one did, at least.

This promo sought to stoke the raging pinball community of 1997 America on Medieval Madness, a game that Williams Pinball hope would push pinball machines to the forefront of arcade gaming. (“It could conceivably be a game that resurrects this industry,” says pinball wizard Steve Kordeck at around the 3:00 mark.) Obviously, it didn’t. You may have noticed there are considerably fewer arcades around nowadays — video game or pinball.

However, this is not a post focusing on the irony of a “next big thing” that turns out to be another little whatever. No, the nugget here is Tina Fey, whom you may have heard is a rapper now. Back in 1997, Fey and 30 Rock bud Scott “Hornberger” Adsit lent their voices to this pinball game — you know, all the color commentary, taunts and cheers you get when you make the ball do something, and of course I’m guessing because I can’t actually remember ever playing pinball. This would be Tina Fey immediately before she began writing at Saturday Night Live and somewhat less immediately before she got all “camera friendly.” Now, the cast actually features two actresses, so I can be sure whether Tina Fey is the one we hear right at 2:16, but ten years of listening to her have made me feel pretty confident that I tell it’s Tina doing the valley girl accent.

Here, I queued it up:

See? And now we all feel less bad about the insulting jobs we have, because we — like Tina — will one day get to look back and refer to them as our “pre-fame jobs.” 

The Tyranny of a Single Comma

Could I have been the only one who didn’t realize that the name of the Rolling Stones song was correctly written as “Paint It, Black” — with a comma? And doesn’t that one stray mark radically change how you read the title?

Just go ahead and try to arrive at a sensible reason why the title would be punctuated this way. According to a 2003 book on the band, Keith Richards says that the record label, Decca, put the comma there erroneously, so my reaction is “Did they actually listen to the song?” But then I realize that the phrase “paint it black” is never actually spoken in the song. It’s always “painted black” — “I see a red door and I want it painted black” instead of “and I want to paint it black.” In any case, the Rolling Stones’ official website has yanked the offending comma, but isn’t it surprising that it was allowed to linger at all, given that Aftermath debuted in 1966 and even non-Americans would have been aware of the growing civil rights movement?

This Is the Girl, But Who Is She?

This is Gila Golan.

However, this is also Zoshia Zavatski, Zusia Sobetzcki and Miriam Goldberg.

It’s appropriate that I came across her photo in one of the L.A. Daily Mirror’s “movieland mystery” photos — photographs of unidentified and sometimes unidentifiable VIPs of yesteryear. But even with the revelation that the beautiful brunette pictured was the Miss Israel-turn-actress who stared in Our Man Flint (which is the movie that Austin Powers was parodying more so than any one James Bond movie), the question lingers: Who is this woman?

Wikipedia lays it out: She was born in Poland around 1940. The exact date isn’t known because she abandoned on the streets of Krakow, where she was found by a Catholic family who raised her as Zoshia Zavatski. Following the end of World War II, she eventually moved to Israel, where she took the name Zusia Sobetzcki, only to later become Miriam Goldberg. A magazine spread launched a modeling career, which ultimately won her the Miss Israel Crown in 1960. By that time, she’d changed her name a third time — to Gila Golan, “to prevent word getting back to her religiously conservative benefactors,” according to Wikipedia — and it was Gila Golan who made her mainstream movie debut in the 1965 Vivien Leigh film Ship of Fools.

That’s a lot of living to pack into the first twenty-five years of one life. And while I hate to impose a narrative into the life of a real, still-living person, I feel compelled to point out the strangeness in this woman, who never knew her biological family nor the name that family presumably gave her, going on to change her name three times and embark on a career as an actress, constantly taking on new names.

For the record, the character she played in Our Man Flint was named Gila, further collapsing the boundaries of who this woman was at any given point.

Now That’s Interesting!, previously:

• Victoria Vetri, a Rosemary’s Baby runner-up
• Shi Pei Pu, a real-life Madame Butterfly
• Meta Carpenter, presciently named girlfriend of William Faulkner
• France Gall, accidental sex puppet

That One Time When the Kombat Wasn’t Mortal

I’m sure Mortal Kombat was the bane of schoolteachers nationwide back in the day, not only because it preoccupied little boys with thoughts of yanking classmates’ heads off their bodies but also for the terrible effect it had on spelling. At least a few kids had to have spelled combat with a “K,” right? Given how big a deal Street Fighter still is today, it’s weird to think back on the 90s and remember how common it was to see the word Kombat everywhere. But there was one instance of Kombat-with-a-“K” didn’t have anything to do with head-ripping and blood-shedding.

So what gives? Surely, this has to be a shameless rip-off of Mortal Kombat, no?

Actually, no. It’s more of a Street Fighter clone, if all 90s fighting games exist in a “Mortal Kombat or Street Fighter?” binary. (They do.)

Released in 1994 for the Neo Geo system, Aggressors got a “K” in its title solely because it was developed by the company ADK and the translators bent over backwards to name this game so that it had the same initials as the company… and Aggressors of Dark Kombat was apparently the best they could do. Personally, I think Apes Doing Kung-Fu would have been better and only marginally less appropriate for this sunny, goofy game, but either way it’s a tragedy that the English-speaking world didn’t experience the original, Japanese title: Tsuukai GANGAN Koushinkyoku, which translates to “Thrilling Intense March” and which I’d place between Aggressors of Dark Kombat and Apes Doing Kung-Fu in terms of suckiness.

And that’s the story of how that one other random game spelled Kombat with a “K.” It’s basically Aggressors of Dark Kombat claim to fame, but it’s always couched in terms of “Does it have anything to do with Mortal Kombat? No? Oh, weird,” before it’s never mentioned again.

There is more, however.

Aggressors isn’t the title that ADK is known for. That honor goes to World Heroes, yet another game in the genre that the Neo Geo specialized in: folks across the globe smacking the hell out of each other in exotic locales. And because Heroes was popular enough to warrant a handful of sequels, ADK tried to piggyback off its popularity by inserting one of its characters into Aggressors: the redheaded ninja Fuuma, even if a feudal-era dude doesn’t make sense in the Aggressors’ contemporary setting and even if Heroes had a far more memorable character to lend. Fuuma is the fighter you see in the video above, kicking ass in one time setting rather than kicking ass in all of them as he’s used to in his home series.

Of all the kombatants introduced in Aggressors, however, only one ever played a sizable role in a game again: its one female fighter, Kisarah Westfield. She’s… terrible. In a world where Chun-Li proclaims herself to be the strongest woman in the world and Sonya Blade gets to represent the American military in a fighting tournament, Kisarah might as well step forth with her own battle cry: “Math is hard!” She’s only in the game because she’s been trying to catch the eye of one of her male opponents. She yips. She squeals. She wears a short skirt. And this is what you get when you beat her:

Yeah, this woman is pretty terrible. And that’s coming from the guy who always chose to play the girl back in the day when there only ever was just the one female character. But I can’t cut a break for a female character whose super move involves kissing a dude and enflaming her opponent with jealousy. No, really. Watch:

And that’s when Kisarah isn’t not kneeing opponents in the crotch — male and female! — and reducing them to quivering lumps of flesh.

So of course when SNK threw a bunch of their characters in a big mix for Neo Geo Battle Coliseum, Kisarah got to be the one and only representative of Aggressors of Dark Kombat. But hey — at least this means that this lesser Kombat’s fame didn’t end with that one single game. Instead, in ended with Neo Geo Battle Coliseum.

And now that’s everything I have to say about Aggressors of Dark Kombat.

(By the way, if you really want, you can think of this as a spiritual sequel to my post explaining the missing “W” in that other Neo Geo fighter, Samurai Shodown.)

A Million Dead-End Streets

A brief announcement of a housekeeping-related nature: If you’re looking at this post in its “natural” context, you’re probably doing so using the URL that has existed since this blog was born back in 2003: kidicarus222.blogspot.com. And while that URL still works and will continue to work, the new, “official” URL for this blog will be backofthecerealbox.com. I can’t tell you how many people have asked me why that wasn’t the URL. At least twice.

So why have I done this?

Honestly, when I registered with Blogger back in my junior year of college, I did not expect I’d still be doing it nearly ten years later. (I thought I’d be too busy counting my money piles, of course.) Not knowing what to put in for a URL, I simply picked the AIM screenname I’d used during my freshman year. Yeah, AIM. I know. Back then, Kid Icarus was an obscure video game that hadn’t received any attention from Nintendo in twelve years. I thought it was mine to keep. However, Nintendo surprised the hell out of me and released Kid Icarus: Uprising this past February, and suddenly there’s a lot more about the series being written online. Besides, I’m 30 now. I’m beyond the young person’s formula for crafting an online identity — pop culture reference plus random string of numbers — and I feel like this blog title is here to stay. I checked to see if it was up for grabs — it was, and it hasn’t always been, historically — and so I took it.

The good news is that all the old links to my blog will still work. But just be aware that in the future, I’ll be treating the old URL as if it doesn’t exist. Get out of here, old URL! Fly away!

And now some lesser items: First, I’ve made a custom error page, following a long period of refusing to be bothered with doing so. Second, if installed a new button in the top menu bar that goes to a visual index of sorts. It’s more of an experiment than anything else, and I’m eager to see what posts end up getting clicked on most. Finally, by virtue of jumping to this new URL, this blog effectively lost the small handful of +1s it received. Google Plus users — lend a blogger a hand?

Elvis Is Alive… in the Snarls of Horny Animals

How I arrived at this week’s word: +1 for it sounding funny, +1 for it having to do with animals, +10 for it having to do with sex, +.5 for it having come from Dina, +1 for it having an apparently confusing etymology, and you know, now that I think about it, another +5 for it sounding funny.

flehm (FLEM or FLAYM, I suppose) — verb: to exhibit the flehmen response, i.e., to draw back the lips, allowing scent to reach the Jacobson’s organ, an auxiliary olfactory organ found in many animals.

So not so much this:

But more at this:

Many animals can pull off such a stylish snarl, but when it’s a felid — housecats to lions — or an ungulate — deer, rhinos, sheep and giraffes, among others, though horses are by far the most entertaining — they’re not doing it to appear more badass. Instead, they do it to let some stank into their vomeronasal organ, a handy little button inside their mouth that allows them to analyze smells — especially urine smells — for information such as “Who made this?” and “Who long ago did they make it?” and also “Would they maybe want to procreate with me?”

As a verb, flehm comes from the term Flehmen response. In fact, you could also just use flehmen as a verb to mean the same thing, as in, “Is the tapir displeased with me? Or is it just flehmening?” Beyond that, however, I don’t know where this term came from, aside from German. Merriam-Webster says only that it comes from the German flehmen, which means that exactly what the English flehmen does. It had to come from somewhere, but maybe you’d need the German version of Etymonline to find out.

There’s also the weirdness of the pronunciation. Technically, flehmen is pronounced exactly like you’d pronounce flamin’, and that makes me feel a whole new kind of gross about Flamin’ Hot Cheetos. But if the word you’re using is just flehm, I feel like any speaker of American English would naturally pronounce it like you would phlegm. Because this is the sort of word that is only ever going to be used by animal science grad students, there are no dictionary entries for flehm that include pronunciation notes. And in my head, that gives me the authority to just say that it should be “flem,” if for no other reason that to avoid making people think you’re speaking rather nonchalantly about a flaming horse.

In closing, I’d like to share something else that reminds me of Dina: Vlem, a one-off Rachel Dratch character from the season of 30 Rock she was allowed to be on:

Thanks, Dina (who also suggested dewlap and flews), but also thank you, Vlem. Appy Valentime Day to us all.

Previous words of the week after the jump.

• aasvogel, acné excoriée des jeunes filles, adulterine, ageusia, ambeer, anosmia
• barn, barrack, beeturia, bissextile, bloofer, breastsummer, brinicle
• catholicon, cecaelia, cephalophore, cherpumple, chilver, chyron, cockernonnie, collywobbles, coprolalia, couvade, cranberry morpheme, crwth, culaccino, cummingtonite
• darkle, deasil, decussate, deuteragonist, dingbat, dingle
• eidolon, embiggen, epeolatry, epopt, espalier, etui, exoterica
• fabiform, Feghoot, fissilingual, Föhnkrankheit, folderol, formication, freekeh, froward
• gallinipper, gnaborretni, grandgore, grue, guilloche, gyaru
• hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia, hobson-jobson, hogo, honorificabilitudinitatibus, hoyden, hyetal
• ignivomous, iracund, isabelline, itaiitai, izod, izzard
• jabroni, jamais vu, jehu, jumentous
• kaffir, kakopygian, kayfabe, knipperdollin
• lagniappe, leman, lemniscate, limnovore, linsey-woolsey, longicorn
• malacia, malison, maroon, merryandrew, milt, mongo, mooncalf, morepork, muzjiks
• narrenfreiheit, nef, nihilartikel, nobiliary particle, nosism, nudiustertian 
• obelus, ochanee, ogonek, ombré, ooglification, orchidectomy, ordured, orf, osculate
• pace, padiddle, paraprosdokian, pareidolia, pavonated, perendiate, perigee, perverb, petrichor, pettifogger, pettitoes, phlegmagogue, phpht, pilkunnussija, pismire, pixilated, pogonip, pong, pruniferous, puggle, pulveratricious, purse
• quacksalver, quagga, qualtagh, quidnunc, quiff
• ronion, roynish, rubirosa, rumpsprung, runcible
• salmagundi, scrutator, seneschal, sharrow, shebang, sherd, shrimpoluminescence, sinople, slampadato, slubberdegullion, stan, stevedore, suovetaurilia, suzerainty
• tappen, tatterdemalion, teratogenesis, tergiversate, tetromino, thagomizer, thon, tiffin, tittery-whoppet, tmesis, toby, tutoyer, tyro
• ucalegon, ultramontane, umiaq, umquhile
• veneficial, verdigris, vespertilionine, vinegeroon
• weeaboo, widdiful, williwaw, witzelsucht, wooper looper
• xenodocheionology, xyster
• yazoo, ypsiliform, yoink
• zanjero, zenzizenzizenzic, zinnober, zugzwang