The full Katexic Clippings newsletter will resume next Sunday, assuming I’ve seen the last of this fever by then (though I do enjoy the strange dreams borne of my boiling brain). Until then, a truncated version comprised of a few items typed up before the fire set in.
WORK
The Hebrew Bible’s penchant for euphemism can lead to surprising reinterpretations of familiar passages. Everyone knows that Eve was created from Adam’s rib, right? But ribs aren’t mentioned anywhere in the Hebrew—that is a translation made by the Septuagint, the early Greek version of the Hebrew Bible. The word actually used is side (tsela), and, as we’ve seen, side can be used as a euphemism for the genitals (Gen. 2:20–23). Scholar Ziony Zevit takes this euphemism and runs with it, arguing that in the Genesis narrative Eve is actually made from Adam’s penis, in particular from his penis bone. Most mammals have a baculum, a bone in their penis, which helps with erections. Only humans, spider monkeys, whales, horses, and a few other species lack it, achieving erections through blood pressure alone. Zevit thinks that the ancient Israelites would have been quite knowledgeable about comparative anatomy, given that they probably encountered lots of skeletons—of animals in fields, and of humans in caves where bodies were entombed. They would have known that men and women have the same number of ribs, another mark against the rib theory, and would have seen that the bone men were in fact missing was the baculum. It makes a certain kind of sense, then, to have God create Eve from Adam’s baculum. This explains the bone’s disappearance in humans and gives new richness to Adams famous welcome of Eve: “This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh”—flesh, of course, being one more euphemism for the penis.
—Melissa Mohr
—from Holy Sh*t: A Brief History of Swearing
WORD
tmesis /tə-MEE-sis/. noun. The splitting of a word by interjecting one or more other words. Similar to last week’s diacope but at the level of word rather than phrase. The use of a curse word as the intervening word, as in un-fucking-believable, is the most common example in English and is called expletive infixation. From Greek tmēsis (cutting).
“Oh so loverly sittin’
Abso-bloomin-lutely still.
I would never budge
Til Spring crept over the window sill.”
(George Bernard Shaw)
“I greatly admire [Peter Lubin’s] definition of tmesis (Type I) as a «semantic petticoat slipped on between the naked noun and its clothing epithet»” (Vladimir Nabokov)
“This is not Romeo. He’s some other where.” (William Shakespeare)
“It’s gettin’ to be ri-goddamn-diculous around here.” (John Wayne)
“It’s a sort of long cocktail—he got the formula off a barman in Marrakesh or some-bloody-where.” (Kingsley Amis)
WATCH
Watch Space Station Fisheye Fly-Through 4K, “a fly-through of the International Space Station […] shot in Ultra High Definition (4K) using a fisheye lens for extreme focus and depth of field.” Just one of many offerings from the NASA Ultra High Definition Video gallery.
WHAT!?
A twofer from the doll factory by British Pathé: 1963 and 1968.
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