Bonnet Blanc vs. Blanc Bonnet

Bonnet Blanc versus Blanc Bonnet

(Or, synonyms, at daggers drawn)

I once wrote an MA thesis called Linguistic Life on the Left, a historical-semantic survey of the Berkeley linguiscape during my time there as a graduate student.  It sifted out correlations between a sect’s self-expression,  and its (sometimes partly subconscious) ideology.  A favorite schematic example  was this  one:

Given that: Groups A, B, and C are all part of what popular or pre-theoretical conception would consider “the Left” (albeit that seeming Big Tent  turns out to be a granfalloon).

And that:  Group A denounces Group C as ‘pigs’, while Group B denounces group C as ‘swine’.

From this we can conclude: virtually nothing about Group C; but that Group A and Group B are bitter enemies, barely sharing any verbiferous ether that could even attempt to pass coherent messages between them.

For: Group A derived the epithet from the rants of the American Black Panthere; Group B derived theirs from the European Marxist polemical tradition (nineteenth century et seq.)  A vast host of incompatible cultural assumptions go with each.  In keeping with the expressive ethos of the two groups, we can call the vituperative practices of A as "badmouthing"; of B  as "the ironical-polemical style".  Both manners, when well done, can afford aesthetic pleasures.

~

And now we have the following situation, in the context of the controversy over illegal immigration.

Entity A described the immigrant-source regions as “shit-holes”.

Entity B described them rather as a ‘snake-pit’.

Once again, these two entities, along with their fanbases, are not on speaking, let alone reasoning terms.

Entity A is POTUS;  Entity B is a Circuit Court of California.  [My source for that was NPR’s All Things Considered; for some reason, a string-search in Google news is not turning up anything relevant.  Thus evanescent are the bubbles that burble from the media.]  From similar observations, A and B draw opposite conclusions.  A: Who would want to bring in people from such areas?  B: Who would be so unconscionable as to send people back to such areas?

There is another linguistic/political parallel between that case and the one described in the previous section.  In either case, one term of the “synonymic antithesis” is more populist in tone (pigs; shithole), the other more literary and traditional (swine; snake-pit).

Meta-Modernism

On the occasion of a new biography of Donald Barthelme, who once appealed to my undergraduate taste, Louis Menand considers whether that author should be considered a Modernist or a Postmodernist;   and adds an acute discussion of the ambiguity of the prefix “post-” in such employment.   In the first, “Mission Accomplished” sense, “being postmodernist just means that we can never be pre-modernist again.”   In the snootier “epitaph” or “we’re so over that” sense, “being postmodernist means that we can never be modernist again.”

As for the original project of the Modernists (as, Picasso, Joyce), “they did it by shifting interest from the what to the how of art,  from the things represented in a painting or novel  to the business of representation itself.

[The New Yorker, 23 Feb 2009, p. 68]

As in other cases of such self-consciously trendy, navel-gazing devolutions,  the gambit was not original.  In Curtius’ chapter on the post-Classical period in Greece,

The materials and implements necessary for writing  now also became worthy of a poet’s art.  We have epigrams on the writing tablet; on the wax with which it is covered; on the calamus;  as well as a threat to the boring beetle, “enemy of the Muses”.

[Ernst Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (1948), p. 306]

From thence  it is but a few steps down to exhibiting urinals in museums (thus Duchamps), or penning an ode to a chamber-pot, as in Gide’s accurately titled Les Faux-Monnayeurs:

La Vase Nocturne

Quiconque à quarante ans    n’a pas d’hémorroïdes …

Word of the Day: "branquignol"

French politicians have  of late  been coming up with choice epithets for their opponents.   It’s fun, plus it guarantees headlines.  The latest:  Today’s JDD reports that premier ministre Edouard Philippe has mocked Les Républicains (the current cover-name for the disgraced UMP) as branquignols.  That means they’re barmy.

As for the etymology, the word is likely a blend of branlant ‘unstable’ and croquignole ‘a mild insult’.

As for politicians employing tasty-crunchy insult words  on our own side of the Atlantic, savor this:
http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2017/09/of-dullards-and-dotards.html

Of Dullards and Dotards

“Rocket-Man versus The Dotard”:  it sounds like one of those wrestling events that The Donald used to impresario.   And it has elevated the fine old word dotard, which goes back as far as Chaucer,  into the flickering limelight of public attention.  To explain the word  were needless, as there is a nice summary here:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2017/09/21/a-short-history-of-the-word-dotard-which-north-korea-called-trump/?hpid=hp_no-name_hp-in-the-news%3Apage%2Fin-the-news&utm_term=.d98bc93683c2

Note:  The word is sounded with a long "o":  DOTE-erd, almost rhyming with goat-herd.  Likewise the related word meaning 'senility', dotage.

But what younger readers may not realize (younger, that is, than four hundred years)  is that such spicy language on the public stage  is by no means an innovation.  For centuries, it has been the practice of controversialists   to belabor their opponents with colorful and inventive epithets.   Shakespeare’s plays well illustrate this.   Yet such slanging was not the province merely of playwrights and pamphleteers:  so sober a figure as Sir Thomas More, early sixteenth-century author and statesman (and ultimately martyr), and the subject of adulatory treatment in “A Man for All Seasons”,  whom no less than C. S. Lewis declared "a man before whom  the best of us must stand uncovered",  was a master of the genre.  His writings

… are by no means free from the scurrility which is characteristic of that age of controversy.  His opponents are “swine”, “hell-hounds that the devil hath in his kennel”, “apes that dance for the pleasure of Lucifer”, and so on.

-- The Cambridge History of English Literature, volume III: Renascence and Reformation (1908), p. 17.

Apes that dance, while Satan applauds!  If only Kim the Lesser had thought of that one!

As it is, this recent use of dotard  likely tumbled out of some old-fashioned Korean-English dictionary, rather than springing from the pen of any antiquarian Pyongyang polemicist.   Nonetheless, we applaud the momentary return to the scene, of this roguish old tatterdemalion vocable.

~

Despite the hoopla, dotard isn’t really so rara an avis as all that;  it should be familiar to anyone well-read.   Much more puzzling to American readers was the word wazzock, deployed back in 2012  against then-Presidential-candidate Mitt the Twit (to use another Britishism) after his lamentable junket to England.  You can read all about the word, and the episode, here:

     Word of the Day: “Wazzock”

And, for more on the variegated vocabulary of our present POTUS, this:

    Verb of the Day: “schlong”

 

[Update 29 October 2017]  French politicians have  of late  been coming up with choice epithets for their opponents.   It’s fun, plus it guarantees headlines.  The latest:  Today’s JDD reports that premier ministre Edouard Philippe has mocked Les Républicains (the current cover-name for the disgraced UMP) as branquignols.  That means they’re barmy.

As for the etymology, the word is likely a blend of branlant ‘unstable’ and croquignole ‘a mild insult’.

 

String Theory for Trump Voters

A high-powered team of cybernetic linguisticians have run detailed studies and concluded that, from the standpoint of syntax,  Republican Presidential front-runner talks like a fourth-grader:

http://www.rawstory.com/2015/08/donald-trump-talks-like-a-4th-grader-linguistic-analysis/

That, as regards vocabulary and grammar, merely.  From the semantic-pragmatic standpoint, he speaks like a schoolyard bully.

~

This, however, is by no means to criticize our (potential) next President.   (How foolish would that be, after all;  he’ll have the power to revoke our Junior Woodchuck Blogger License.)   Nay more, we have concluded that it is time to board that train before it leaves the station;  and accordingly, we are preparing a series of scholarly monographs, written at a fourth-grade level, for exactly this audience. 

The debut volume is called String Theory for Trump Voters, Simply Explained.   It responds to an express desideratum from the top.  “So what are these stupid little … stringy things, anyway?” the candidate mused in a recent broadcast.  “Sounds totally bogus!”

(A prerequisite for this opus  is the prequel, written at a third-grade level,  Quantum Field Theory is our Friend!)

Other titles in the series:

The Homoousian Controversy:  a Trumponomic perspective.

The Gospel according to The Donald.

In a junior-auxiliary line aimed at lower-information voters will be versions of the smash-hit “for Dummies” series, rewritten in Googolian “Simplified English”.   Offerings include:

“Computers for Dummies” for Imbeciles

“Intermediate Arabic for Dummies” for Deaf-mutes

and the unique, twice-distilled

“ ‘Algebraic K-Theory for Dummies’  for Morons”  for Trisomy-21.

Major credit cards accepted.

Polemical popcorn

For some years now, I have not owned a television set; nor seen the daily comic strips, since letting lapse my subscription to the sorrowfully diminished Washington Post.  (I still take the Times, but they have never featured funny-papers.)  So what do I do for soap opera, or the like low entertainment?

For the past half-century, the NYRB has had great success in luring well-known scholars out of their lairs, for a public display of the polemical equivalent of shirts-off selfies.  A recent instance -- rhetorically at any rate -- does not disappoint.  A verbally (though not intellectually) vibrant slangfest between Patricia Churchland and Colin McGinn appeared here:

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2014/jun/19/brains-and-minds-exchange/?insrc=toc

For those of you who, likewise, possess no goggle-box, yet who, needing a break from your labors in post-Kantian metaphysics or the subtleties of the Hodge Conjecture, have wearied of YouTube kute kittehs or (to be more up-to-date  -- the reference to kittehs shows how far behind I am in current trends)  random hands unwrapping knick-knacks (just learned about this one this morning, from Le Point of all places), here is a selection of the juiciest bits.

First, Churchland berates a dull pupil indeed, it would appear:

In Neurophilosophy I made the point that if you want to understand the mind, you need to understand the brain.  In his review of my recent book Touching a Nerve: The Self as Brain, Colin McGinn gibbles up this simple message [NYR, April 24]. Here is the thing: there is a difference between a necessary condition and a sufficient condition. In Neurophilosophy I made the point that if you want to understand the mind, you need to understand the brain.1 In his review of my recent book Touching a Nerve: The Self as Brain, Colin McGinn gibbles up this simple message [NYR, April 24]. Here is the thing: there is a difference between a necessary condition and a sufficient condition.

(Is “gibbles up” a word?  Okay, it’s a word. -- Thus, updating the Duke of Gloucester’s celebrated gibe against Gibbon:  “Gibble, gibble, gibble, Mr. McGinn!”)

And the little fellow had jolly well better heed her words, since, unlike him, she is famous:

In fact, I have famously argued for the coevolution of sciences at many levels. This explicitly includes the coevolution of the neurosciences and psychological sciences. To my delight but not surprise, the coevolution is now well underway …

And ramming the point home:

Nobody in neuroscience needs McGinn to tell us that structural correlates of a function do not ipso facto explain that function. His sermonizing is just so much spit in the wind. What he fails to get is that sussing out structure is often a major step forward in sorting out mechanism.

She concludes with a feisty variant on the “We’re here, we’re queer” slogan:

And brains do sleep, remember spatial locations, and learn to navigate their social and physical worlds.  Get used to it.

Mistress Patricia, commanding little Colin to assume the position

Unaccountably, McGinn fails to slink off like a whipp’t cur:

It is just possible to discern some points beneath the heated rhetoric in which Patricia Churchland indulges. But none of these points is right. If you hold that “mental processes are actually processes in the brain,” to quote Churchland, then you are committed to the thesis that it is sufficient to understand the mind that one understands the brain, and not merely necessary. This is just the well-known “identity theory” of mind and brain.

(You can picture her fingers  twitching on the quirt  over this bit of insolence.)

For our own contribution to sound and fury on this issue, try these:

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2014/04/eliminative-materialism-expanded-update.html

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2012/07/the-latest-from-neuroscience.html

The Perils of Publishers

A story I showed around to friends having met a friendly reception, I sent it off to an appropriate publisher, whose name I shall not stain by mention, lest it join the rogues gallery of those  who rejected the manuscript of Harry Potter, back in the day.  The periodical was chosen, not at random, but as having been the one to spring upon an unsuspecting world  my first mystery story, the eponymous offering of the later collection I Don’t Do Divorce Cases, available at your local bookstore -- or rather, might be, if local bookstores any longer existed, which they do not;  still, you can find copies online at Amazon or Barnes & Noble, and at a price too nugatory to allude to.   And yet, like that base [ethnicity deleted], who threw away a pearl, greater than all his tribe (an incident recorded in the annals of our nation’s literature, somewhere), the editor -- at that particular juncture, on that particular day, the moon being in some unfavorable phase, and Mars having passed into the House of Detention -- did not choose to pick it up.  Whereupon the spurned offering, like some younger son packed off to the Colonies, shows up, uncloaked against the bitter winds, upon this very site, as though upon the doorstep  of an unfeeling world, to be gawked at by surfers and idlers:  and all for less than the price of a penny.

(“A Narrow Escape”:  vide infra.)

A typical publisher, in his lair

~

These dark events have prompted me to reveal the following vignettes, fruit of my similar experience the last time I attempted to venture  where angels fear to tread.  (The period covers my time in Princeton, an epoch you might have an opportunity of reading about, should ever my current publisher, asleep at the switch or possibly kidnapped by pirates, or spirited away by faeries, come out with the collection Princeton Follies  as long ago promised!)

Appropriate beverage to accompany this narrative:  

            Fifty-year-old port.

Consonant soundtrack: 

            Something tenebrous for the chamber,  with plenty of cello.

~       ~       ~

ANNALS OF THE UNPUBLISHED

A stifling day in August.  The editor is having her periodic indisposition.  Over the transom my manuscript comes.

*

The publisher stops by the office of the tweed-clad editor; coughs, hesitates; he hates to say it  but… "…the pressure of investors.  And that comes down to circulation.  Now unfortunately, no-name material, however we-would-both-agree worthy, -- does  not  sell. So…"

The editor bites his lip and nods.  With determination he reaches into the slush pile.  Ha!  Something-or-other by some nobody  named “Justice”.  Discard without reading.

*

"Well there's only room for one of them, and this Princeton fellow shows real promise.  Your cousin's stuff is glittery, but shallow -- no staying power."

Casting about for a comeback and finding none, she abandons debate; then relaxes, as a cool smile forms upon her face.

"Pretty funny, coming from someone whose contract is about to be renewed – by my uncle."

"I—By-- ?  Well yes, I take your point.  Style, substance, all that, your cousin's got it, or may someday; let's go with it."

*

He shakes his head from side to side.  This is good, dammit, this is good, and from – what is his name?  from Princeton?

Enthralled, he scarcely notices  as the mother ship hovers outside the window of his fifty-seventh-floor office.  A beam enters slowly, completely silent.

Later, the office is empty.  The incident is never explained.

*

Syphilis: the Silent Killer

            In a shed in Tijuana, a sordid night of bought amours.   The man leaves behind a couple of silver dollars, takes with him something he hadn't bargained for.

            Years later, with another, a child is born.  The boy seems healthy, becomes an editor, moves to New York.

            That morning, a manuscript from an unknown author, from – New Jersey, of all places.  Yet he reads with growing interest.   A realization dawns.  He puts the manuscript down slowly, as he gazes at the framed portrait of Maxwell Perkins on his wall.  Their eyes seem to meet.

            He presses the buzzer.  "Miss Anscombe?  Something extraordinary…"

            The sound of a scraping chair from the outer office.

            Yet at that moment the spirochaete, having lain  long undetected, while having silently multiplied many times, obeys its bioprogram  and unleashes the full fury of its corruption.  Intelligence, morals --  nothing is spared.

            -- "Yes, Mr. --?"

            "Huh?  Um, -- oh,  -- Mother, the sun! give me the sun! ---  Ahhh… --  whyncha call up Bret Easton Ellis, see if he has anything left moldering at the bottom of his drawer."

A daub of art criticism

In principle we refrain from dabbling in commentary upon the visual arts, criticism of which, for us, consists simply in nodding benevolently in the direction of Norman Rockwell (upon whom be peace).  Yet we could not help noticing a recent news item, buried between the police blotter and the racing results:

A celebrated portrait by Francis Bacon of his lover and muse George Dyer could raise up to 30 million pounds ($49 million) on auction in London next month, Christie's said on Wednesday.

A Bacon triptych sold last year set an auction record of $142 million.

The "Portrait of George Dyer Talking" from 1966 is one of the most famous images of Bacon's lover and was exhibited at his Retrospective at the Grand Palais in Paris in 1971, a Christie's statement said.

The Irish-born Bacon met Dyer in London's Soho district in 1963, drawn to him by his fragility and need for protection. An anxious, constant smoker and problematic drinker, Dyer went on to dominate Bacon portraits for the rest of the decade.

Dyer committed suicide in 1971.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/01/15/us-art-auction-bacon-idUSBREA0E0YQ20140115

(Not before time …)

For any of you who are so blessed as not to be acquainted with the painterly excretions of this individual:  they are the visual equivalent of projectile vomiting.  And now this framed sputum has become the speculative plaything of moneylenders, and kingpins flush with cash.

There would be no point in polemicizing against this, any more than against pit bulls or scorpions.  Our duty is simply to note, that Homo sapiens seems to have split into two subspecies:  which, given time, might no longer be able to interbreed.   All that is quite normal, quite within the Scheme of Things;  for just such gradual and aleatory processes gave rise to such creatures as the toad, the slime mold, and the baboon.  H. sapiens baconiensis should fit right in.

The silver lining to this (as we darkly contemplate the future of our race) is that baconiensis, being wholly given over to unprocreational paraphilias, is unlikely to produce offspring, at least in the normal way.  Though, with the aid of certain Satanic medical procedures (human cloning, IRF [Intra-Rectal Fertilization], implantation into swine wombs), humanity as we have known it throughout civilized time, might yet be swamped by wave upon wave of eyeless, suctorial, creeping, anus-breathing, mephitic albino hypoanthropoids, swarming crabwise over the last remaining ramparts of civilization.

Cato the Elder was right.

Caton Major

.

In further defense of M. Fr. Hollande

[A footnote to this: 

My apologies to M. le Président ]

[Update 18 January 2014] In the matter of the Président’s behavior  and the dignity of France, a  grotesque point of etiquette is currently being mooted in the Press:  Which of his two chippies shall be considered as “First Lady”.

 Pour préciser. 

In further defense of the much-maligned Président, who has presided  like a toad squatting on a stone  over the further decline of France, allow me to object, contra  his various detractors, that his sordid moped-borne nocturnal trysts  do not//NOT  constitute actual “adultery”,  since  wife  has he none.   Rather, they were an infidelity (if you can even call it that, for someone with no conception of faith) vis-à-vis his current (and easily disposible) concubine (a different hetaira, whose name is here -- and elsewhere -- of no consequence).   Hollande himself has always denounced the sacrament of marriage as a “bourgeois institution”, and can in no way be criticized for demeaning something of which he has not the slightest understanding:  any more than a garden slug, having (which God forfend) somehow slimed its way up onto the communion table, could possibly spiritually desecrate the consecrated Host (though it might rather mess with its "accidents").

For indeed, true Sin has a certain dignity, as only upon a foundation of Morality can it raise its head.  Chimps in their lubricious oestrus cannot be considered “adulterers”.  In this sense, we are not certain that M. Hollande has actually committed any “sin”.

[Update 19 January 2014]  A well-weighed article by Robert Zaretsky  in this morning’s New York Times, characterizes Hollande as a “weightless president” in an office of great gravity;  and says he continues “la peopolisation”  pioneered by Ségolène Royale (on which see further  Word of the Day:  “la pipolade”.)

Is the Fifth Republic Burning?

[Note:  The essay appears in the print edition of the Week in Review section, but is buried on the Website, and I couldn’t find the link.]

And it reminds us of something I’d forgotten: that the minx whom he ditched for Julie Gayet, Valérie Trierweiler, had herself been the bit of jam for whom Hollande (he of the twitchy Y-fronts) ditched his mistress floozy “partner” of the time -- none other than the ineffable Ségolène Royale !   And this is significant beyond the gossip-columns, for Royale is no thong-snapping starlet (though she does pose in bathing-suits for the tabloids), but the woman who came within spitting-distance (I choose my words with care) -- within spiting-distance  of being elected President of France.

[Update]  An excellent radio essay about the matter can be heard here:

Hollande, vie privée, vie publique...

[Update 16 mai 2014]
http://www.lifesitenews.com/news/notre-dame-refuses-to-recognize-pro-marriage-student-group

How to pronounce “Boehner” *now*

In view of the following tremendously welcome development,  we are revising our advice as to the pronunciation of the honorable Congressman’s name.   It is now to be:  BANE-er, rhyming with saner and plainer.

With a vote on a bipartisan budget deal looming, House Speaker John A. Boehner escalated his feud Thursday with outside conservative advocacy groups that have repeatedly undermined his agenda and now are taking aim at the $85 billion compromise agreement.  “Frankly, I just think they’ve lost all credibility,” Boehner (R-Ohio) told reporters.

“They’re using our members and they’re using the American people for their own goals,” Boehner said Wednesday. “This is ridiculous.”  He expanded his criticism Thursday, screaming into the microphone at one point …

http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/boehner-escalates-feud-with-conservative-groups-as-vote-on-budget-bill-looms/2013/12/12/3986871c-634f-11e3-91b3-f2bb96304e34_story.html?hpid=z3

You are right, sir;  the crazies have lost credibility.  Now let us see if you can regain your own. 

You nursed a viper in your bosom, and it bit you.

We reproduce below our original post, merely in order to retract it.

(WDJ is never too proud to offer an olive branch;  for other abject attractions, click here:

 Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. )

~ ~ ~  Original Post ~ ~ ~

Upon many an occasion, this jolly and scholarly site  has provided guidance on the pronunciation of surnames, courtesy of Doctor J, former Editor of Pronunciation for a major named CONUS-based dictionary-publisher, coffee-house wit, and man-about-town.  Thus:  Bashar al-Assad;  Amos Oz; Adalbert von Chamisso; and Tawakkul Karman.  Not to mention such de-onomastic adjectival derivata as:  Quinean, or Pigovian.

And thus we come to the pronunciation of the surname (I would say, “family name”, except that his family has presumably disowned him)  of the most despised, reptilian, contemptible man in America,  code-named John Sphincter, but referred to in the media as Johannes Boehner.

To pronounce "Boehner",  the essential phonological motion is that of the gag reflex

The answer may come as a surprise, though it should not:   It is to be pronounced precisely as you would imagine, given its spelling.  The Boe- part is like toe, roe; and the “h” just emphasises this, as in O, oh.  Thus, the name is pronounced Boner;  rhyming (appropriately enough) with stoner, loner, and zoner.   The prevailing expression in Washington for making an unanticipatedly idiotic political statement is to spring a Boehner.

{ Zur Aussprache:

  Man macht, als wenn etwas ekelhaftes dir im Kehlkopf steckt,

  das man nicht wagt, weder hinunterzuschlucken

 noch hinauszukotzen:

 bööööööhhhhhhhhn’rrRRRRRh  }

Now, admittedly, there are those misguided creatures who opine it should be sounded as though it were spelled (which it is not) Baner or Bainer:  as in, “bane of our existence” or “Bain Capital”.  But here they are surely deceived.   I mean -- Look at how it’s spelled:  Boehner,  yo!  I mean seriously -- How do you get “Bainer” out of that?

Additional errant souls may object, that the loathsome outcast gentleman in question  himself demands (fruitlessly, for who would heed him at this point?) that it be pronounced with a long “a” as in anus.   But after months of bending unphotogenically over  and spreading his cheeks to be shtupped up the butt by the Teabaggers, he has forfeited any right to weigh in on the pronunciation of the surname which he has so basely disgraced.

These, then, are the teachings of phonetic science.

~ A simplified and illustrated version of this lecture ~

~ is available to teachers   for use in classrooms ~

The subhuman homunculus (artist’s conception)

~

~ Celebrity Endorsement ~

“To distract my mind from current troubles,

I like to dig into a gritty mystery,

starring those tough-talking, two-fisted Private Eyes,

the lovable Murphy Brothers.”

I Don't Do Divorce Cases

Murphy on the Mount.

(My name is Thomas Jefferson, and I approved this message.)

~

~

In all humility, we realize that our attempt at polemic against this blistering pimple upon the heinie of History, is inadequate to meet the case.

Accordingly, we rang up our good friend and colleague, that master of scurrilous invective, Mr. William Shakespeare, via a version of the Wayback Machine, developed in secret cellars by an Agency we dare not name (and for which you are not cleared  anyway).   I inquired, whether he has had time to follow our present terrestrial follies;  he replied that, as a denizen of Eternity, he now has all the time in the world, or rather out of it. 

He intimated that he has indeed been following the farce, with great disgust;  and as regards Mr. Boehner (which he pronounced “Boner”, though with an Elizabethan twang), he could only call him

a stampy, stinking meat-breath minor strudelkopf;

a mimsy-mouthed, curtailed limping clod-wit;

a reeking, bleeding emerod -- a pus-puffed bubo -- a knave,   a nit.

  Good to see that the Bard of Avon has not lost his touch!

*

Für psychologisch tiefgreifende Krimis,

in pikanter amerikanischer Mundart,

und christlich gesinnt,

klicken Sie bitte hier:

http://www.linguasacrapublishing.com/justice.html

*

~

Bonus funfact:  How to pronounce “Koch”

In a fascinating article, the New York Times revealed that this whole supposedly spontaneous outpouring of grass-roots wrath, that led to the shutdown, was in the planning for months, and bankrolled by the billionaire  Koch brothers.  So:  How do you pronounce “Koch”?

The answer is:  It is pronounced Cock.  And people who fall for the Koch brothers’ tricks are technically refered to as Koch suckers.

.

Veterans Day, 2013

Proudly wear the poppy  that honors the fallen dead

[For a selection of posts of interest to our warfighters, click here.]

The poppy is the symbol of remembrance here, owing to the association commemorated in the poem (which schoolchildren everywhere used to memorize) "In Flanders Field, the poppies grow".   The original holiday, dating from 1919,  was called Armistice Day, and focussed on what was then called The Great War.

Only, it turns out, they don't, so much. Odd factoid (from Wiki):

Avant la Première Guerre mondiale, peu de coquelicots poussaient en Flandre. Durant les terribles bombardements de cette guerre, les terrains crayeux devinrent riches en poussières de chaux favorisant ainsi la venue des coquelicots. La guerre finie, la chaux fut rapidement absorbée et les coquelicots disparurent de nouveau.

~

Today in France, commemorative ceremonies were held, though under the curiously bland title of simply “11 novembre”:

François Hollande a présidé lundi matin à Paris les cérémonies du 11 novembre, qui lancent les commémorations du centenaire de la Première Guerre mondiale. Le 95e anniversaire de l'Armistice coïncide avec le début d'un cycle de commémorations qui connaîtront plusieurs temps forts jusqu'au 11 novembre 2014.

The 11-11-2014 centennial is naturally of more interest to France (and to Britain) than to the United States, since in 1914 we were sitting on the fence, and not directly threatened, not entering until 1917.   So, today was supposed to be a big day for President François Hollande, presiding over the festivities in Paris, and doubtless hoping for a boost to his dismal poll figures.   [Flash update: François Hollande a perdu encore trois points de popularité entre début octobre et début novembre, tombant à 21% d'avis favorables et marquant un nouveau record d'impopularité.]

But it didn’t go so well.  In France, the unpopular “ecotaxe” has unleashed a furious, Tea-Party-like response, only more violent;  it is the rough Gallic equivalent of the Obamacare brouhaha.  Protestors sporting bonnets rouges (red Phrygian caps, the new symbol of the protest), gave him the raspberry.   Now, in France that’s illegal, and several dozen were promptly arrested:

11 Novembre : Hollande hué, 73 manifestants interpellés

Plusieurs dizaines de personnes ont été arrêtées pour avoir hué et sifflé le président de la République sur les Champs-Élysées. Des appels à perturber les cérémonies commémoratives circulaient depuis dimanche sur Internet

http://www.lefigaro.fr/politique/2013/11/11/01002-20131111ARTFIG00266-de-nombreux-politiques-condamnent-les-incidents-sur-les-champs-elysees.php

[Yes, Virginia, you read that aright:  it is illegal in France to hoot-down the président;  a latter-day echo of the crime of lèse-majesté.   So if you would like to characterize the feckless dwarf who now inhabits, or rather disgraces, that office, as a

=>  bald-faced, two-faced (two bald faces in all)

slinking sniveling  parlour-bobo sub-adulterer,

who has been throning like a bloated toad

over the shameful decline of France <=

then you had best do it from a safe perch in America. -- Not that people who, mm, utter things  are in general safe here either;  but slanging France is one activity  we are allowed, and even encouraged, to do.

Note b.t.w. that I am not here slanging France, but its mortician.]

The police response was, however, decidedly less vigorous in a case from Saturday, in the southern city of Nice.   Here, a band of around twenty “youth” beat up a bakery-owner in front of her store, along with some citizens to attempted to come to her aid.  Eventually some police arrived, but, outnumbered, and essentially forbidden to use their weapons, sustained beatings themselves, sending five officers to the infirmary.  The whole battle raged for twenty minutes before finally being dispersed;  so far, there have only been two arrests (as against 73 for the peaceful though vociferous and disrespectful demonstrators); both the aggressors have already been released.

A reader notes the incongruity:

C'est ça la liberté d'expression à la sauce Hollande ? il est plus facile d'interpeller 70 personnes qui sifflent le président que d'arrêter 20 personnes qui se déchaînent pendant 20 minutes dans une boulangerie ce matin.

 

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Si cela vous parle,

savourez la série noire

en argot authentique d’Amérique :

http://www.linguasacrapublishing.com/justiceexcerptdivorce.html

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What the facts of the case may be, I have no idea;  details are difficult to glean from the often self-censoring French press.   But Nice has recently seen similar disturbing incidents of assault by youth-gangs, and the residents are perturbed that the police seem unwilling or unable to deal with the situation.   The events, moreover, have taken on a profile at the national level (rather like the Zimmerman-Martin case in the U.S.), since it fits into the increasingly strident narrative of Socialist government laxisme (i.e., “permissiveness” -- remember that conservative battle-cry from the ‘sixties?) in the face of rising provocationss  from Gypsies, most recently  in Saint-Ouen (v. the last section of our essay here) and, in this case, possibly North Africans.   That,  at any rate, is the assumption on the part of many readers, who have been told no more than that the perpetrators were “des jeunes”:  a phrase which, like “inner-city youth” in the United States, has become a code-word and euphemism for minority gangs.

The ubiquitous presence of those two groups has been generating a backlash among a sizable segment of the population, who field besieged in their own country.  The irony of having repelled a German attack in the Great War, only to be “occupied” now by unsavory interlopers, has not been lost on some commentors:

C'était bien la peine de se saigner pour faire la guerre de 14-18, et de s'engager dans la suivante... La guerre est maintenant partout, et ce n'est qu'un début.

Now, it is by no means certain that the agressors in this case were anything but français de souche:  for one thing, they were reported as alcoolisés, something forbidden to those who follow Islam.    Nor did the two who were nabbed have a previous police record.    But in the current climate, a significant segment of the French public, short of information, puts the darkest interpretation upon such reports.

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