Back of the Cereal Box

Thursday, April 9, 2009

Dharmaville

My pictures may have captured only a small measure of the scenic beauty, but I’m presenting them here anyway: my sole souvenirs from my Monday trip to Santa Cruz Island.

I’ve lived in Santa Barbara since 2000, but only just recently did I set foot on any one of the Channel Islands. They’ve been there the whole time, however, looming in the distance like clouds. I even remember the day I realized that my freshman dorm, San Nicholas, took its name from one of them — the setting of Island of the Blue Dolphins, no less.

Nine years later, I can report back that those cloud islands feel every bit as firm underfoot as the mainland, though practically every other aspect of them makes them seem farther away from California than the two-hour boat ride would indicate. As far as topography and plant life, they look superficially similar to those of rural Santa Barbara or even the grassy backwoods areas I grew up around in Hollister. The biggest difference, aside from the lack of oak trees: Those familiar places boast rolling hills upon rolling hills. On the island, the grass abruptly gives way vast expanses of ocean — dark blue panorama nearly as far as I could see.

Despite being the very definition of a natural setting, the island felt downright unnatural to this person now accustomed to people and noise. I hiked up a small hill, high enough to escape the barking sea lions and could feel quiet pressing in my ears, like a presence. Even the occasional bird didn’t make much noise. Why would it, if it had grown accustomed to not having much else around to hear it?

Down below, reporters and visitors milled about, but the only regulars are rangers and park workers who maintain the island. These workers stay in old buildings, at least some of which exist as remnants from the days during which ranch operations called Santa Cruz Island home. I’m sure island fever strikes, but I can’t imagine ever stepping off the boat and not feeling a profound sense of tranquility. Just you and nature, with the distance to the next person over being limited only by how far you’re willing to walk in a given direction.

I lost track of time during the hike. That means nothing — I lose track of time during walks to the grocery store. But even a person with a better awareness of what’s happening around him could easily float about chronologically. The old buildings take you back to a time when white people were still new to the place — and, by extension, a time white people were new to any place.

Though I didn’t happen across any that I recognized as such, many Chumash artifacts still remain on Santa Cruz Island. The idea that these enduring bits and pieces hide just under the surface is enough to take you back further — thousands and thousands of years, to the point that the people who braved the ocean to get to there would have been barely recognizable as the Chumash we now associate with inhabiting the place. I can’t help myself from forming an entirely incorrect association with Limuw, the Chumash name for the island, and that number one Candace Waid word, liminal.

And because the work being done on the island aims to restore it ecologically — that is, to make it as much as possible like it was before anyone set foot on it, with rare animals and plants interacting with each other in the balanced fashion that humans so famously ruin — you can go back to a point that I’m not sure I can properly imagine: a world without us, where trees would theoretically fall noiselessly. I’m not sure any place has ever made me this: timeless, removed from time, and altogether stuck in my time with only the vaguest hints of any possible alternative.

Tuesday, April 7, 2009

The Point Being Neither Female Nor Canine

Two examples of images that I have encountered today, that were both sent to me by Spencer, that both contain a woman and two dogs, and that both contain one minor detail stole my focus away from the primary subjects.

First, the early twentieth-century actress Ruth Chatterton, in a publicity still from some unspecified date. Though you think I’d be enamored of the dogs, I couldn’t help being distracted by the pile of rolled-up carpets in the background. If this truly was an image released in an effort to generate positive publicity, could no one have removed the carpets? There are only four or five, tops. It’s not as if it were a pile of four or five hundred carpets that simply could not be moved in a reasonable amount of time. After looking at the carpets, I read her expression differently. What was once indiscernible now reads clearly, as “Hey, is somebody going to move those old carpets before you take my — ”

Second, socialite-of-today Tinsley Mortimer, eating pasta on her bed, for some reason, and also feeding it to her dogs, for some reason. (Note: This is not the first post on this blog to associate Tinsley Mortimer with dogs.) What distracts me here is her monogram, which appears on her pillows. It’s a stylized “T” and “M” that would be appealing if it didn’t look like a headless stickman with visible genitalia. Despite that unpleasantness, I still read her expression in the same way I did before I noticed the pillows. She says, “…”

Monday, April 6, 2009

Lola, Laura, Miracle, Milagro

Eric Crapton jokes aside, the tendency to confuse the letters “L” and “R” confusion when translating between Japanese and English does happen. I don’t know why this happens, but I’d bet someone with a background in linguistics could explain it. The phenomenon is not specific to East Asian languages. I recently noticed that it happens in Spanish in a way that is noticeable when you compare some Spanish words to their English cognates.

I was watching Dollhouse this week, and I noted that the actress who plays Mellie is Miracle Laurie. Aside from sounding like an improved version of Regular Old Laurie, the name is notable to me because I’d never heard of anyone named Miracle before. I had, however, met a few Hispanic women with the name Milagro, Spanish for “miracle.” You can easily see from their similar structure how the words miracle and milagro might be related — and indeed it seems that they are. I don’t have handy resources for Spanish etymology, but a simple Google search did turn up a few documents indicated that milagro comes from Latin via a rarer Spanish word, miraglo. (Yes, it sounds like a new floor-cleaning product and perhaps it should be, especially in Spanish-speaking countries.) It should be noted, however, that none of the Spanish-to-English dictionaries I checked included miraglo, so perhaps it’s obsolete and therefore not of use to the rudimentary Spanish-speakers who would use these online dictionaries.

My question is this: Why would Spanish switch these sounds/letters around? When you’re talking about people who grow up speaking Japanese (or other East Asian languages), the explanation for why “L” and “R” get moved around is that those sounds don’t exist in those languages, at least not in the same distinct way they do in English. In Spanish, however, they do. Is there something about these sounds that lends themselves to getting confused/merged in multiple languages? All languages?

Sunday, April 5, 2009

Rhoda Penmanship

Sometime last year, I watched The Bad Seed and finally understood the terror that is Rhoda Penmark, a sociopathic eight-year-old whose behavior suggests an cross between Patrick Bateman and the girl from the Swiss Miss package. Today, for no reason I can think of, my mind retuned to The Bad Seed — one plot point in particular. Rhoda’s first evil act involves drowning a classmate, Claude Daigle, because he received an award that she felt she deserved. It’s this little medal that I’m concerned about, because it’s for penmanship and Rhoda’s last name is Penmark. Isn’t it strange that the first evidence that Rhoda Penmark is some kind of monster would be her efforts to get an award for a thing that so closely resembles her last name? Taken literally, Penmark means something close to penmanship. I have to assume that William March intentionally wrote this bit into the 1954 novel off which the play is based. I haven’t read the book and can’t conjecture why he might have included such a detail.

Just an odd thought about something I didn’t have any real reason to be thinking of, that’s all.

Saturday, April 4, 2009

Ceci N’est Pas Un Nihilartikel

Google anything — anything — and you’ll probably get Wikipedia near the top of the stack. If not the pedia then maybe the tionary or some other member of the extended Wikimedia family. But don’t think of the wikis only as compendiums of collected information. No, like a little developing country that eventually turns out its first international pop star — “My name is Uhkla. Now is the time to be rocking.” — the wikis have managed to send a little something back into the non-wiki world: a word-of-the-week. Or at least I think it’s the case.

nihilartikel (NEE-hil-AR-ti-kel) — noun: a deliberately fictitious entry in an encyclopedia or dictionary, which is intended to be more or less quickly recognized as false by the reader.

I love the notion of a nihilartikel, not only because it exists as a means of catching plagiarists and other academic villains but also because any phony article passed off as fact has a chance at taking on a life of its own. Case in point: mountweazel, a word that has come to work as a synonym for nihilartikel as the result of a entry in the 1975 edition of the New Columbia Encyclopedia for the entirely fake Lillian Virginia Mountweazel. The supposed Bangs, Ohio, native was described as being remembered for a photodocumentary on rural American mailboxes titled Flags Up! before dying young in an explosion. Her status as a copyright trap has not prevented her from enough fame to merit her own Wikipedia page. (Of course, nowadays it seems just about anyone gets to have a Wikipedia page.) And then there’s Agloe, New York, which first appeared as a location on a 1930 map as a copyright trap. No such place had ever existed there. Later, when someone set up a general store at this specific spot, they checked the map, saw the game Agloe and named the store after this mystery location, thereby actualizing something that had been intended as a non-entity.

The catch, of course, is that nihilartikel isn’t really a word. For example, it only started appearing recently, by most accounts, and it isn’t included in any dictionaries that I checked. Etymologically speaking, it’s an improbably bastard child of the Latin noun nihil, “nothing,” and the German noun Artikel, “article.” The most obvious reason I can think of these two words being smashed together into one bilingual compound would be to sound more highfalutin than nihilartikel’s literal translation, “nothing article.”

I first learned about nihilartikels during the early days of Wikipedia via its list of unusual articles. It no longer appears there, however, because its page has since grown to became that of all fictitious articles and also because the origins of this particular word for such bogus entries is unclear.

On the subject of where nihilartikel came from, the website World Wide Words states that “There’s some doubt whether this is a genuine German word, or one formed in English as a joke and unknowingly copied.” Wiktionary, however, is a little more exact, saying that the word is “considered a loan word from German [and comes from] from a fictitious March 2004 English-language Wikipedia article, referencing a September 2003 article in the German-language Wikipedia now titled Fingierter Lexikonartikel.” This was my understanding — that the term arose specifically on Wikipedia and may have itself been a nihilartikel, but I hesitate to say that this is true. One on hand, those wikinuts would know if nihilartikel truly did originate on Wikipedia. However, if the original Wikipedia nihilartikel was, in fact, made up but nonetheless managed to end up online, then what’s to keep a similar-minded prankster from inserting a fake etymology for it on Wikipedia’s sister site?

Disputes about its beginnings aside, I hope nihilartikel persists. Considering that English lacks a word for this particular thing, I’d say it’s the best candidate for the position to come along so far. (A near second: trap street, the term for such a device used in maps to deter subsequent cartographers from ripping off the work of the guy who did all the work in the first place.) It certainly has a better chance at full-fledged word status than past nihilartikels, memorable though they might be.

zzxjoanw, which Rupert Hughes’s 1903 book The Music Lover’s Encyclopedia defines as a type of Maori drum even though the Maori language lacks the letters “Z,” “J,” and “X.”
The New Oxford American Dictionary includes an entry for the non-word esquivalience, “the willful avoidance of one’s official responsibilities.”
And perhaps most famous is dord, “density,” which appeared in the 1934 edition of Webster’s New International Dictionary as the misprinted phrase D or d, either of which can be an abbreviation for the word density. Its origins have prompted some to term it a ghost word, which is perhaps an even better name than even nihilartikel
The near-unpronounceable apopudobalia appeared in the 1986 book Der neue Pauly, Enzyklopaedie der Antike as a supposed Roman pastime that is essentially soccer.

Previous words of the week:

Sunday, March 29, 2009

Ultimate, Indeed

Found on George’s blog, under the post title “Sign of the Times,” which proved to be cleverer than anything I could come up with.

Where shall we realize our potentials now?

Saturday, March 28, 2009

The Lactating Fish

For those of you who read this blog and know Dina, that she supplied this week’s word should come as no surprise.

milt (milt) — noun: 1. fish semen. 2. the spleen of a domesticated animal.

Uncmmon. I feel like only those in specific professions or subcultures would have reason to refer to fish semen by its proper name. The Wiktionary definition for milt offers the word roe as a synonym. This would be true only certain circumstances: when milt isn’t referring to animal spleens and when roe isn’t referring to fish eggs or crustacean ovaries. More interesting to me, however, is the likelihood that someone — likely an older man, possibly your grandfather — is or was named Milt Roe or at least Milt Rowe, because this is now funny to me. Such men do exist, and I’ll bet they’re not aware that names refer to fish sex in two separate-but-equally hilarious ways.

Wiktionary links milt to the Old English milte, also meaning “spleen,” as well as the German and Swedish words for “spleen,” Milz and mjälte. The American Heritage Dictionary most agrees, but also suggests that milt comes from both Old English milte and a Middle Dutch word spelled exactly the same way. There’s no entry for it at the typically handy Online Etymology Dictionary. Perhaps I’m disclosing my ignorance of anatomy in revealing this, but I don’t quite understand the connection between semen and the spleen. Can anybody explain it to me?

Google Books offers another take on the etymology of milt: Reverend Abram Smythe Palmer’s 664-page Folk Etymology: A Dictionary, published in 1882. From what I’ve read, Palmer seems to debunk folk etymologies with a sense of glee. I’d like to picture him, white-haired and hunched over stacks of books, muttering and sputtering about bastardizations to his beloved English and scribbling out the etymologists’ version of a holy crusade. His book’s subtitle, “Verbal Corruptions of Words Perverted in Form of Meaning, by False Derivation of Mistaken Analogy,” gets quite close to what I imagine Palmer’s mindset was as he wrote this book.

Clear though Palmer’s ambitions may have been, however, I’m not entirely clear what he means in his entry on milt. He writes:

Milt, the soft roe of fishes, so spelt as if identical with milt, the spleen of animals, A. Sax. milte, Dan. milt, Ger. mil. It is really a corruption of milk, so called from its resemblance to curd or thick milk, as we see by comparing Dan. fisfa-melk, “fish-milk,” milt; Swed. mjolke, from mjolk, milk; Ger. milch, milk, milt.

And from this, I’m not sure whether his claiming the notion of milt and milk being related is true or rather a folk etymology. He mentions milt again in his entry on milk, however, so perhaps the former is the case. Regardless of what Palmer says, I’m not what to think, aside from that even a possible etymological connection between milk and a word for semen makes me uncomfortable in a way I’ll try to put out of my mind when I next eat cereal for breakfast.

If that’s not enough to make you feel uneasy, consider this: As we’re on “M” this week, we’re halfway through the alphabetical order I began in the first week of January. Since two runs-through of the alphabet will fit perfect in the span of one year, we are therefore one-quarter done with 2009.

Previous words of the week:

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