Labor Day indeed

The human year needs public holidays, each with its own import, to give structure to the cycle of experience, the way a body needs a skeleton, which would else be a flabby blob.  The traditional Church is rich in these;  we in the secular world need cherish what few we’ve got.

For long, the Labor Day weekend served as a sort of Mardi Gras, marking the end of the lotus months of summer, a last family fling before knuckling down to to the autumnal duties of work and school.   That role has been undermined by lobbies that, in many places, have contrived to start up the school year prematurely.   (In our area, thus jumping the gun  proved especially pointless, as we've had a streak of sultry weather, and some classes had to be cancelled on that account.) Kudos to the governor of Maryland for putting a stop to that.

[re-posted from 2016]

For the roster of our posts concerning public holidays, click here.

For labor matters, here.

In Stir

Jailtime means waiting.

Waiting for morning,

then waiting for night;    wanting to eat,

waiting for visitors   and begging for sleep.

-- Susan Stern, With the Weathermen (1975).

Wardrobe Malfunction

Wardrobe Malfunction,
Then and Now

With a waist and with a side

White as Hebe's, when her zone

Slipt its golden clasp, and down

Fell her kirtle to her feet,

While she held the goblet sweet

And Jove grew languid.

-- Keats

Beginning at the Bottom

Supreme perfections  in each insect  shine;

each shrub is sacred,  and each weed  divine.

-- Richard Blackmore

Such is the scene  at the foot of the scala naturae.

For glimpses of that lofty natural ladder, try these posts:

   The Great Chain of Being

And for God’s least creature, the lovable bug, these:

   Bugs

Frontiers of Paleozoology

The world throbs anew with the announcement of the recent discovery in New Zealand, of a new penguin genus, Crossvallia, in size second only to the celebrated Pinguinus ingens,  of which  more here:

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2013/02/when-penguins-ruled-earth.html

“Friending” -- Then and Now

In a book  valuably organized by neighborhood, we hear an Upper West Side resident, Olga Marx (b. 1894):

On New Year’s Day, all the women stayed at home  to receive callers. … When a man would call, it was a sign of gentility to leave an engraved visiting-card in an urn at the door.  Then my mother would use them to compare with friends.  Of course, it was very important to have more cards than anybody else.

-- Jeff Kisseloff, You Must Remember This:  An Oral History of Manhattan  from the 1890s to World War II (1989), p. 203

Ungainly Acronyms

The thing we’re trying to do, to prevent another 9/11, keeps getting rebranded.

Stylistically, the low point came with the designation “GWOT”, which stands for “Global War on Terror”.

Those who prosecute this mission, normally pronounce it “GEE-watt” (though the acronym has largely fallen out of use);  but I persist in pronouncing it as a monosyllable,  the gwot -- rhyming with blot, not, sot, rot, snot, and other words less respectable still.   “How goes the gwot?” I greet those thus engaged.

An even uglier acronym (if such be possible), likewise self-important in origin, was used, satirically, against Hitler:

Before it was over, his commanding generals  were referring to him bitterly as Gröfaz:  a name ugly enough to have served some monster of mythology, some twisted kobold or goblin  embodying and spreading evil.  In actuality, it was a contraction of the title that General Keitel bestowed upon the Führer  in June 1940:  Größter Feldherr aller Zeiten.

-- Gordon Craig, Germany 1866-1945 (1978), p. 714

As to the pronunciation of this ungainly confection:  it is best described as something between a grunt and a groan, followed by an escape of acrid gas.
(For a similar exercise in non-IPA transcription, cf. the case of "oahspe".)
[More empirically:  GRU-fahts, with "U" as in "put".]

For a nice rhyming poem about this unusual creature, click here:
http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2013/08/gare-le-grofaz.html

*

Für psychologisch tiefgreifende Krimis,

in pikanter amerikanischer Mundart,

und christlich gesinnt,

klicken Sie bitte hier:

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

*

The US military-diplomatic world  abounds in acronyms pronounced phonetically as words.   Another ungainly one, designating (so to speak) the “Gröfaz” of the United States, is POTUS;  he rules over CONUS.   -- In the opening episode of “West Wing”, a young fellow gets an emergency call on his cell, explaining to his girlfriend that it is from “Potus”.  She said the fellow should learn not to call at ungodly hours, and moreover “Potus” is a strange name.  “It means ‘President Of The United States’”, he explains.

Note:  The pronunciations of such things is normally alphabetic-phonetic, rather than etymological.  Thus CONUS (meaning, ‘the Lower 48’) is pronounced CONE-uss, with long “o”, even though it is from  CONtinental United States, with short.

~

Und nun:  HoGeSa.

Further, re Cambodia in May 1970:

Formation d'un gouvernement en exil, le GRUNK (gouvernement  royal d'union nationale du Kampuchéa).

-- Mémoires du XXe Siècle , vol. 8, 1970-1979 (Bordas, 1989), p. 56

.

Threshing-Day at Dawn

[A farm in Wisconsin, late 1800s.]

the east

began to bloom,

and long streamers  of red   began to  un  roll ll ll l

along the vast gray dome  of sky

[from: Hamlin Garland, A Son of the Middle Border (1917), chapter V]