I’m pleased to announce that Katexic Clippings is now a regular part of Robert Hannon’s Northern Soundings radio show. Listen for our word-a-licious segment at the end of each episode airing Tuesdays at 10a AKST on KUAC radio (and via live streaming) or anytime on the Northern Soundings site. Even if you’re tired of me, Robert’s interviews on the show are uniformly great and deserve a much wider audience!
“For these beings, fall is the ever normal season, the only weather, there be no choice beyond. Where do they come from? The dust. Where do they go? The grave. Does blood stir their veins? No: the night wind. What ticks in their head? The worm. What speaks from their mouth? The toad. What sees from their eye? The snake. What hears with their ear? The abyss between the stars. They sift the human storm for souls, eat flesh of reason, fill tombs with sinners. They frenzy forth. In gusts they beetle-scurry, creep, thread, filter, motion, make all moons sullen, and surely cloud all clear-run waters. The spider-web hears them, trembles – breaks. Such are the autumn people. Beware of them.”
—Ray Bradbury
—from Something Wicked This Way Comes
oronym /OR-uh-nim/. noun. A sequence of words or which sounds like a different sequence of words because of ambiguous word boundaries in speech. “I scream” and “ice cream” are perhaps the most common examples. An oronym is essentially an extended version of the homophone, which usually refers to single words that sound alike. Many puns are oronymic, such as “visualize whirled peas.” Mondegreens, or misheard song lyrics (“excuse me while I kiss this guy”) are musical oronyms and many mistakes in popular sayings result from this kind of confusion such as “it’s a doggy dog world.” Coined by Gyles Brandreth in his 1980 book The Joy of Lex.
“The seamlessness of speech is also apparent in ‘oronyms,’ strings of sound that can be carved into words in two different ways: The good can decay many ways. ¶ The good candy came anyways.” (Stephen Pinker)
“…a computer has no way of telling the difference between ‘The stuffy nose may dim liquor’ and ‘The stuff he knows made him lick her.’” (Joshua Foer)
“She argued passionately against stopping violins in the street.” (Gilda Radner on Saturday Night Live)
See the classic “Four Candles” sketch by The Two Ronnies. And not related to oronyms, you might as well take a few minutes to watch the “Sweet Shop Sketch” too!
If you are seriously geeky, you might enjoy skimming Jennifer Hughes’ M.S. Computer Science thesis on the “MisheardMe Oronyminator” and “a nice cold hour.”
Clamor favorite Marian Call’s Grand Tour continues on the West Coast through November and early December. Catch a show (or two)!
Art and writing vending machines are a thing there should be more of (what better way to use old cigarette machines?). Check out Montreal’s Distroboto aka the zine machine and the Art-o-Mat.
I wish I’d heard this story a long time ago. → Remembering U.S. Soldiers Who Refused To Kill Native Americans At Sand Creek
Who knew that figuring out how to unboil an egg could lead to a revolution in cancer treatment (and make “unboil” a word?
Setting aside the controversy over the Booker Prize expanding its eligibility to any English-language novel, George Saunders 2017 win for Lincoln in the Bardo is well deserved. See also: George Saunders and Jason Isbell in conversation || George Saunders on life after the Man Booker Prize || A performance excerpt from the novel.
The ampersand (aka the “commercial and” or “esperluette”) is arguably the most beautiful glyph…this is a nice bit on its history with delightful illustrations. As always, I can’t bring up the ampersand without pointing you to Keith Houston’s short, illuminating series on the character and plug, again, his book Shady Characters.
Mansplaining is a problematic, perhaps over-used, idea…but two new words stemming from that conversation caught my eye this week: the funny (and equally problematic) mantrum and the significantly more useful, and sadly observable, hepeating.
Nostalgia’s unexpected etymology explains why it can feel so painful.
Woman Earns Over $70,000 a Year Showing Her Feet on Instagram.
Today is National Cat Day in the U.S. (but why limit yourself?), a day intended to “celebrate cats and help them to find forever homes.” They’ve even got a blog with “think pieces on life with felines.” See also: 20 Ways to Celebrate National Cat Day || the “Purr-fect Purr-sonalities” photo contest. But for my allergies, I agree with Mark Twain, who wrote, “If animals could speak, the dog would be a blundering outspoken fellow; but the cat would have the rare grace of never saying a word too much.”
A powerful story of forgiveness: ►Debbie Baigrie befriends, and eventually helps free, the young man who shot her and was serving a life sentence.
Were you ever asked “if they jumped off a bridge, would you jump too?” Well, ►245 people did just that in a rope jump in Brazil. Note that this was a rope jump, not one using elastic bungee cords as you might expect. This ►first-person video of the jump is illuminating.
Reader R. – err - L.: “Loved the asemic writing link! Part of the hypnotherapy background includes what we call ‘automatic writing’, so this was a nice connection between that part of my life and proper literary pursuits.”
Reader B.: “Crash blossoms are awesome. Thank you. ¶ Zone Rouge: a fine metaphor for the way WWI looms like a homicidal ghost throughout the next century.”
Reader C. remembers a nice ‘crash blossom’: “…from our own Daily News Miner: ‘US urges North Korea to drop nukes.’ This was probably 15 years ago. ¶ I used to have the clipping from the paper, but I can’t seem to find it right now.”
Reader J. makes a great point: "It strikes me that ‘crash blossoms’ (and more particularly garden path sentences) are strategies poets use all the time, or are related to their strategies, which are often given a special inflection with line breaks I only have time to look for an example from my own stuff, but you can surely find better:
Like Aleph and Zed,
crossbreeds dearly crosshaired, a couple
does and a coupled ease …
I think this is related also both to pre-Chomskian syntactic models (which were more linear, and more common-sensical, than his transformational grammar–though his ‘syntactical ambiguity’ is at the heart of all of this) and to Donald Davidson’s understanding of semantic behavior as a kind of hypothesis machine (which, I believe, contemporary linguists don’t like at all, though I’m working on very limited data). But the combination of enjambment and sound-play in those lines of mine (a crosshaired couple of does/ a couple of those and a couple of these/ what a couple does [duz] leading to a coupled ease) seems to me to point up a more general expectation that the kind of compression poetry allows (like the kind of compression headlines require) presses us to doublecheck our backtracking and revisit our anticipations all the time."
I hadn’t thought of enjambment in this way before, but it makes perfect sense. An example from a poem appropriate for the season, Burlee Vang’s “To Live in the Zombie Apocalypse”:
The moon will shine for God
knows how long.
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