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“The Purist”
I give you now Professor Twist,
A conscientious scientist,
Trustees exclaimed, “He never bungles!”
And sent him off to distant jungles.
Camped on a tropic riverside,
One day he missed his loving bride.
She had, the guide informed him later,
Been eaten by an alligator.
Professor Twist could not but smile.
“You mean,” he said, “a crocodile.”
—Ogden Nash
—from The Selected Verse of Ogden Nash (1945)
etiolated /EE-dee-ə-lay-təd/. adjective. Whitened due to lack of sunlight. Figuratively, weakened and/or stunted and/or having a pale, sickly appearance. From French étioler (to become pale, to grow into stubble). From éteule (stubble). From Latin stipula (a stalk or straw).
“They ate and drank but were silent. The six candles in their branched entwined stems seemed to burn less brightly than on their first evening so that their features, half shadowed, were sharpened into caricatures of their daytime selves. Pale, etiolated hands reached out to the fruit bowl, to furred and flushed peaches, the curved shininess of bananas, apples burnished so that they looked as artificial as Ambrose’s candlelit skin.” (P. D. James)
“The one she hated most was Williams. He was a sort of defective, not bad enough to be so classed. He could read with fluency, and had plenty of cunning intelligence. But he could not keep still. And he had a kind of sickness very repulsive to a sensitive girl, something cunning and etiolated and degenerate.” (D. H. Lawrence)
“Stained and frayed, these three hung together without speaking, Woodward very tall, giving the impression of an etiolated newt, Whipp small, his glasses repaired with Sellotape, Woolmer-Mills for ever launching himself back and forth on the balls of his feet.” (William Trevor)
A powerful story providing one small entry point into an amazing and amazingly different world. → Raising a DeafBlind Baby
Turns out our tears are more artistic than even the most dramatic amongst us might have thought. → Rose Lynn Fisher’s microscopic photography, the Topography of Tears. || Earlier: Fisher’s stunning BEEyond series of microscopic photos of bees.
From micro- to macro-photography… → The Turn-of-the-Century Pigeons That Photographed Earth from Above
This might make me start not only believing that the “millennials” label means something, but also that I like them. Alas, it is but a dream. → How Millennials Killed Mayonnaise || See also: You Can Now Watch A Livestream Of This Mouldy Fatberg 24/7 || And while I’m just free-associating: Animal fat on ancient pottery reveals a nearly catastrophic period of human prehistory
A really well-written article about the trying dynamics of civility and dialogue in a small town characterized by both a liberal arts college and a philanthropic family with deep roots in the region…and the NRA. → How Civil Must America Be?
Via Reader B., who says, “my favorite part of this was the Russian AI.” → The Quantified Heart
Love this: students author a handbook for teachers (and it includes a lot more than just the fascinating “Philly Slang” section). → Jawn? Ocky? Philly kids school teachers with new handbook
Last week it was forensic linguistics…this week, food linguistics. → The Creepy Language Tricks Taco Bell Uses to Fool People Into Eating There
I try to stay away from links to Atlas Obscura, which all Clamorites should be reading anyway, but this was too interesting not to note. → Tattooing in the Civil War Was a Hedge Against Anonymous Death
MOAR TWITTERZ! → First, from Reader A., Deleted Wiki Titles (@DeletedWiki) posts “actual article titles that have been removed from Wikipedia for various reasons.” On screen right now: Oscillating penguin of ultimate seduction – Five clicks to jesus – Category: Farts in literature – I DONT NO HOW TO MAKE A WIKERPEDIA ATRICLE. || Second, a thread of “metaphorical invective” that made me literally LOL and has that old-school-twitter vibe or, in the words of Reader S., who shared the link, a “community feel.” || And finally, the sometimes fascinating examples of real-time text-to-image generation in this thread.
Today in 1902, Ogden Nash, perhaps the finest light verse poet ever (in the English language, anyway), is born in Rye, New York. Perhaps most famous for his 1931 poem “Candy / Is Dandy / But Liquor / Is Quicker” (updated in 1968 with the additional line “Pot is not”), Nash composed over 500 pieces, may of which used unexpected rhyme schemes, twists-of-words and turns-of-phrase that word nerds in the Clamor should appreciate. “Further Reflections on Parsley,” the first Ogden Nash poem I read, when I was not yet ten, I still remember completely: “Parsley / Is gharsely.” See also: ► Ogden Nash recites ‘Oh, Please Don’t Get Up!’ and ► Common Cold by Ogden Nash (read by Tom O’Bedlam).
► What if English Were Phonetically Consistent? The result sounds kind of like Finnish to me. I’m amazed the narrator was able to pull this off. Also, Shakespearean language loses all of its verve when rendered “consistent” in this way.
“With their basic package they will take your actual cremated ashes and press them into 30 discs, each with 24 total minutes of audio (12 minutes on each side). You have to supply the sound, so you can record something original like a message or have them use a favorite song, but the discs come with standard artwork and labels that include your name, date of birth, and date of death.”
Reader T.: “In honor of this week’s theme, ‘Wow.’”
Reader M.: “Kya bol raha hai?! (What are you saying?!) I’m a hindi and english speaking Indian, and I’ve never chatted with anyone using ‘ek number’. I wonder which part of India it comes from…”
Reader A.: "Thank you for another great start to my Monday. ¶ A while back you shared The Disconnect. I really enjoyed it. They have a new issue out now. Inside, there is an interview about the gamification of social media that is well-thought-out and not alarmist. I recommend it. – Great article! Jurgenson writes, “However far we go back, we’ll find this same conversation. Because the world feeling inauthentic and post-truth and more technical than natural is the state of modernity. We just constantly call each new thing fake in a futile attempt to solve the modern problem of not grasping the real and the true.” Indeed.
Reader B.: “Another glorious Katexic! ¶ Fore-edge painting [See 1, 2, 3, 4, 5]: the used bookshop I used to work in had a small collection of these. I loved presenting them. Such a hidden gem within the book. What a fine intrusion of painting. ¶ That Nation poem: I admire your diving into it, but I’ve only found it to be a rabbit hole. I keep running into limitations of time as well as ideologies.”
Reader J.: “I passed along the Daily Mail forensics article to my niece who’s fascinated with blood splatter, etc. I also sent her this Irish Times article on the ‘Commision of Inquiry’ into the supposed complicity of Charles Stewart Parnell in the assassinations of Frederick Cavendish and Thomas Henry Burke. I first heard of this in Finnegans Wake, but I’m not going to dig back through that to find the reference–there’s only so much time in one person’s world.” – Interesting! The omnipresent Wikipedia says of this connection in Finnegans Wake:
“…notable real-life Irish figures are alluded to throughout the text. For example, HCE is often identified with Charles Stewart Parnell, and Shem’s attack on his father in this way mirrors the attempt of forger Richard Pigott to incriminate Parnell in the Phoenix Park Murders of 1882 by means of false letters. But, given the flexibility of allusion in Finnegans Wake HCE assumes the character of Pigott as well, for just as HCE betrays himself to the cad, Pigott betrayed himself at the inquiry into admitting the forgery by his spelling of the word ‘hesitancy’ as ‘hesitency’; and this misspelling appears frequently in the Wake.”
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