Sir, —Stephen Halliwell is right to defend his use of the “standard” translation “wide-arsed” for an adjective in Aristophanes. This rendering is vivid and faithful to the Greek compound word it translates. However, it may be possible, by a slight modification, to take account of Simon Goldhill’s objection that this translation misleadingly connotates a fat, not a repeatedly buggered, fundament. I have wondered before whether ambiguity may be removed by translating Aristophanes’ work with the less subtle, but more expressive, “arse-widened”.
—N.J. Sewell-Rutter
—from TLS: The Times Literary Supplement
coffle (kaffle) /KAW-fəl/. noun. A train or chain of humans or animals, usually slaves. From Arabic qāfilah (caravan).
“Before sunrise she hear them—one, two, three hundred foot hitting the ground and rumbling like slow thunder. They used to wake her and scare her so much that she thought they was a militia marching to hell. The slave coffle.” (Marlon James)
“You say you have offers to buy me, and that you shall sell me if I do not send you $1000, and in the same breath and almost in the same sentence, you say, ‘you know we raised you as we did our own children.’ Woman, did you raise your own children for the market? Did you raise them for the whipping-post? Did you raise them to be driven off in a coffle in chains?” (Jermain Loguen)
“Once all experience is finally reduced to marketable image, once the receiving user of user-friendly receivers can break from the coffle and choose freely, Americanly, from an Americanly infinite variety of moving images hardly distinguishable from real-life images, and can then choose further just how he wishes to store, enhance, edit, recombine, and present those images to himself in the privacy of his very own home and skull, then TV’s ironic, totalitarian grip on the American psychic cojones will be broken.” (David Foster Wallace)
If I were a rich man, one of these would be mine. → Inside the New York Public Library’s Last, Secret Apartments
Awesome photo series and story, shared simply and directly. → I quit my job, bought an army truck, and spent 19 months circumnavigating Africa.
I’ll have the ampersand pizza…and tattoo. → Miscellany № 77: amperbrand.
I’m not sure I’m buying what they’re selling even though I’m watching. → Why television writing has become the new home of verbal complexity
Is “Snarxism” a thing? Is it killing conversation? → The Snarxist Temptation
@DeepDrumpf is a Twitterbot from an MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) postdoc that uses neural networks trained on Donald Trump’s speeches and debate language to create Tweets that are sometimes indistinguishable from the real thing. Pair (or rinse your palate) with @AMightyHost, which uses data sources including WordNet and Wikipedia to invent new fleets inspired by the catalog of ships in The Iliad.
It hurt me more than it hurt them… → Kids Are Judgmental, Morally Pure Little Jerks
On CBC’s q, an episode in which graphic designer Christopher Rouleau and writer Anne Trubek discuss the question Is handwriting obsolete in the digital age? Also, Every Day Commentary writer Anthony Sculimbrene takes issue with Trubek, Trubek responds and then Sculimbrene has one more go.
Today is Leif Erikson Day in the United States, as established by the US Congress in 1964. Believed by many to have landed in North American more than 500 years before Columbus, Erikson established a settlement in an area he called Vinland (named after the abundance of grapevines found there) that was likely in the north of Newfoundland (though Cape Cod makes a persistent claim as well…and why not?). October 9 marks not any particular day of Erikson’s life, but the arrival of the Restauration in New York City, commencing the first organized immigration from Norway. Leif Erikson day is a state holiday in seven US States including, naturally, Minnesota and Wisconsin.
Walk around in a 3D splendid house from the ancient Pompeii
Edward Barton - I’ve Got No Chicken But I’ve Got Five Wooden Chairs. Barton had a minor hit in the 80s with a strangely memorable unaccompanied singing of one of his poems by Jane Lancaster, then his girlfriend, now a Nia instructor. Note: the odd Japanese Kleenex ad that eventually brought me here could’ve been a WHAT!? entry on its own.
Reader J. was the first, but not only one, to correct me: “Stevens and Frost weren’t at all chummy—Stevens said Frost spun yarns, and Frost said Stevens made ‘bric-a-brac’ —but it was Hemingway Stevens brawled with in Key West. I do wish I could have been there with a smartphone.” — You are correct, of course. Why I thought Stevens punched both of them, I do not know.
Reader F. was first of a few with another correction: “‘The supreme fiction…flickering’ oh, yes, Wallace is the only book I would have on a desert island or anywhere else. I carried my paperback of The Necessary Angel everywhere during my travel/consulting days. […] but re the Faulkner bit… ‘about he,’ etc.??? How did that get by your eagle eyes?” — An editing/moving/pasting error of the worst kind…because no one will believe that’s what it was!
Reader N. celebrates Wallace Stevens too: "Thank you for featuring Wallace Stevens. I am going to celebrate this week by posting a poem every day about Wallace Stevens, including one by Berryman. — I’m guessing it will be the Dream Song with “he crowed good / that funny money man?”
Reader C. shares a word: “A while back you wrote, ‘UPSIDE DOWN can be spelled upside down using letters that are right-side up: umop apisdn.’ As it turns out, there’s a word for this: symbiotogram, which is a kind of ambigram.”
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