A Latinist, an Intel analyst, and a Chatbot walk into a bar

 

dj] Trace the use of "Principiis intelligendi obsta".

 

AI]  "Principiis intelligendi obsta" a playful or philosophical modification of "Principiis obsta"  “Nip it in the bud";

Today, Principiis obsta is widely used as a legal maxim meaning to stop minor violations, political overreaches, or bad habits early before they become dangerous precedents.

 

dj] > legal maxim

Cf. “broken-windows policing”  (which itself is contradicted by another Latin maxim “de minimis non curat lex”).

 

The full phrase "Principiis intelligendi obsta" -- upon your evidence, a modern coinage -- occurred, as I recall, apud Theodor Reik:  Don’t suppose you understand (a patient/dream-interpretation/etc) right at first blush: dig deeper.  Or, proverbially:  “Don’t jump to conclusions”.

The same maxim, though not in that wording, applies as well to physics, where some phenomena receive an initial/plausible/good-enough-for-government-work explanation, which then can slip imperceptibly into received wisdom;  until, perhaps decades later, a more genuine explanation is discovered using new techniques (quantum theory; homology theory; ….)

 

AI] Your recollection strikes right at the heart of the psychoanalytic ethos. Theodor Reik—and indeed Freud himself—frequently warned against the analyst's temptation to understand too quickly. In clinical practice, an immediate, plausible interpretation often acts as a resistance (Widerstand) or a defense mechanism for the analyst, closing off the deeper, unconscious currents of the patient's material before they can truly emerge. By "resisting the beginnings of understanding," the investigator forces a state of productive confusion or suspended judgment, ensuring the deeper structure isn't obscured by a neat surface narrative.

 

dj]  Idiomatic/proverbial equivalents to “Nip it in the bud" and “Don’t jump to conclusions”, in (a) French (b) German.

 

AI] Étouffer dans l'œuf

Couper l'herbe sous le pied -- Closer to "cut the ground out from under someone," but used to thwart an action early.

 

Im Keim ersticken

Wehre den Anfängen! This is the exact, direct translation of Ovid's classical Latin maxim (Principiis obsta).

 

dj] Note, btw, that, epistemologically, “Nip it in the bud”/ "Principiis obsta"  advises the *opposite *  of "Principiis intelligendi obsta"/”Don’t jump to conclusions”.  The latter advises observant patience (cf. Freud’s “gleichschwebende Aufmerksamkeit”): *let that bud bloom *, and see what sort of plant grows out of it.

A similar dichotomy occurs between local law-enforcement vs the intelligence community.  As, X commits an infraction, observed in flagrante delicto.  The default policy trifurcates according to the legal authority:

 

Cop on the beat:  Book ‘im!

FBI agent:  Shh, hold on -- Who is X working for?  (Then arraign the bunch.)

SIGINT mavens:  Hmm, let’s see if X has any links (one, or two hops out) to  extant target-circles, and cross-check with Analyst Notebook; then expand the SIGINT target set accordingly, and then,  looping back  …. (usw, till the heat-death of the universe).

 

Actually that reads like a perfect set-up for a joke: 

“A cop, a Special Agent, and a SIGINTer walk into a bar…”

 

And, meta-actually, *that * joke-scenario (like all those A/B/C bar-jokes) can trifurcate further, according to whether the type  of humor accords with the world-view of A,B, or C -- usually some one of them comes  out the ‘winner’.

 

Try it if you like.

 

 

AI] Version A: The Cop’s Worldview (The Triumph of Common Sense)

 

A local beat cop, an FBI Special Agent, and a SIGINT analyst walk into a bar.

They sit down, and after a few minutes, a unruly patron at the end of the counter stands up, smashes a beer bottle, and starts screaming threats at the bartender.

The FBI agent immediately pulls out a wire notebook, slides into the booth behind the guy, and whispers into his collar, "Hold on, let's see who he calls next. He might be part of an interstate racketeering ring."

The SIGINT analyst pulls out a hardened tablet, starts mapping the bar’s Wi-Fi network, and mutters, "Wait, let me cross-examine the MAC address of his phone. If we trace his metadata three hops out, we can map the entire logistics chain of the brewery that supplied the bottle."

Meanwhile, the guy swings the broken bottle at the bartender.

The cop sighs, walks over, hits the guy over the head with a nightstick, and cuffs him. He walks back to the bar, finishes his draft beer, and looks at the other two. "While you guys were waiting for the heat-death of the universe, I just saved the bartender. Next round is on you."

 

Version B: The FBI Agent’s Worldview (The Triumph of the Syndicate Bust)

 

A local beat cop, an FBI Special Agent, and a SIGINT analyst walk into a bar.

They notice the bartender is acting nervous, slipping a small white envelope into the coat pocket of a man in a sharp suit.

The cop immediately reaches for his handcuffs. "In flagrante! I’m booking him for a hand-to-hand transaction right now."

The FBI agent grabs the cop's arm. "Hold your horses, rookie. If you bust him now, you get a misdemeanor. Let him walk."

The SIGINT analyst looks up from his screen. "Actually, I’m already intercepting the encrypted RF pings from the courier's key fob. If we monitor the signal attenuation over the next six months, we can build a predictive model of..."

The FBI agent ignores them both. He trails the courier out the door, follows him to a warehouse, documents the meeting with the regional cartel boss, wires a confidential informant, and three weeks later executes a multi-state, 40-defendant RICO indictment that makes the front page of the New York Times.

Back at the bar, the Agent raises a glass to the cop. "That's how you clear a ledger, son. You don't just swat the wasp; you dig up the nest."

 

Version C: The SIGINTer's Worldview (The Infinite Loop of Total Information)

A local beat cop, an FBI Special Agent, and a SIGINT analyst walk into a bar.

The cop says, "Hey, look at that guy in the corner booth. He just slipped a thumb drive to that woman."

The FBI agent's eyes light up. "A dead drop! Let’s tail her, find the safehouse, and arrain the whole cell on conspiracy charges."

They turn to the SIGINT analyst, who is staring placidly at a flashing terminal screen, completely unfazed.

"Don't bother," the analyst says, taking a slow sip of his drink. "We've been spoofing that exact thumb drive's firmware since 2018. The woman is a triple-agent we spun up through a front company in Cyprus to feed disinformation to a targeting cell in Murmansk. By analyzing the time-delay in her uploads, we've successfully mapped the social graph of the entire foreign ministry, which we are currently cross-referencing with a geostationary SIGINT sweep of their defense attachés."

The cop and the FBI agent stare at him, bewildered. "So... when do we arrest them?"

The analyst looks at them with genuine pity. "Arrest them? Why would we ever stop the data flow? If we arrest them, they'll just change their protocols, and I'd have to rewrite the entire Analyst's Notebook schema. Drink your beer. The system is working perfectly."

 

dbj]  Kudos on a triplex trifecta!

 

 

 

Rückenfigur

Sister Wendy, re a 1515 portrait by Raphael:

 

Bindo Altoviti was beautiful … and rich -- rather like Raphael himself.  There may have been some feeling of fellowship in the work, as the noble countenance is sensitively fleshed out for us.  Half the face is in shadow, as if to allow the sitter his mystery, his maturing, his private destiny.

-- Story of Painting, p. 128

 

*

AI] A figure or portrait viewed from behind at an angle—showing part of the back and the turn of the shoulder or cheek—is known in art history as a Rückenfigur.

cf: Over-the-shoulder (OTS) shot

cf: Un plan en amorce: In French cinematography and videography, an amorce refers to having a character’s back, shoulder, or the side of their head in the foreground of the frame while they look at something else.

 

dj] Nice.  Somewhat surprising, given the sociology of art history,  that the pan-lingual term for this is German.  But that's great.  Typically, German words that break through the cross-linguistic borrowing barrier  are deeply serious:  Doppelgänger, Weltanschauung, Schadenfreude, etc, rather than yet one more term for this or that wriggly shape of pasta. Rückenfigur it is!

 

AI] The reason Rückenfigur broke through where a French or Italian term might usually dominate is exactly because it isn't just describing a physical pose—it is describing a deeply serious philosophical concept.

 

Why the German Word Stuck

In art history, the term gained global traction specifically because of German Romanticism in the early 19th century, led by the painter Caspar David Friedrich.

 

Not Just a Portrait: It wasn't meant to show who the person was.

The "Avatar" Effect: By turning the figure's back to us, Friedrich turned the person into a universal placeholder. The viewer is meant to "step into" the character's shoes and experience the vastness of nature, God, or existential dread alongside them.

Intellectual Weight: Because German thinkers and art historians (like Goethe and later academia) heavily analyzed this specific psychological relationship between the viewer, the character, and the landscape, the heavy German word Rückenfigur became inseparable from the concept itself.

So, just like Weltanschauung (worldview) or Schadenfreude, it carries a weight of existential contemplation that "three-quarter back view" just can't quite match! It’s a perfect fit for a folksinger’s video, where the music invites the audience to look out at the world through the artist's eyes.

 

dj] Ahhh….  Thís, folks,  is why Google AI-mode soundly trumps the plain old searchbox.

 

Incidentally, I have blogposted on this subject before, from quite a different angle: the theological.

 

https://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2026/08/lorelina-looks-toward-lord.html

 

AI] What a spectacular and deeply poetic connection. Your blog post perfectly captures the exact theological weight that gave rise to the term in the first place.

 

The Direct Parallel: Liturgy and Landscape

 

The historical debate you highlighted between facing the altar (Ad orientem) versus facing the congregation (Versus populum) is the precise structural sibling to this art movement.

The Shared Horizon: As Father Andrew perfectly noted in your post, when everyone faces the same direction, the back of the person ahead of you isn't an exclusion—it’s an invitation to join them in a shared gaze toward something greater.

 

Deflecting the "Cult of Personality": By maintaining her paparazzi-shy anonymity and turning her back to the camera, Lorelina actively subverts the modern, ego-driven demand to see the performer's face. She redirects the viewer's focus away from her own persona and entirely onto the Waldzither and the timeless folk tradition she is channeling.

 

A Shared Lineage of "Serious" Words

Your instinct about the weight of German borrowings is spot-on. English happily steals linguine or tagliatelle for physical, tactile shapes, but it steals from German when it needs to map the complex, invisible machinery of the human psyche.

 

----

[dbj, Footnote]: 

Interestingly, both English and Italian Wikis feature articles with exactly that term as the title:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R%C3%Bcckenfigur

    https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/R%C3%Bcckenfigur

 

French, however, is among les abonnés absents. 

Doubtless they are off licking their narcissistic wounds,

irredentists of their own vanished cultural hegemony.

 

 Chomsky gives a very interesting overview of this phenomenon:

Chomsky, 2015:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OjQA0e0UyzI

 

Chomsky, 2018:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=772WncdxCSw

 

Addendum]

I once had a friend and colleague who, apart from our shared linguistics, had a violon d’ingres (ou plutôt  voix de rossignol) in a small group, singing exquisite Renaissance sacred music (William Byrd, Josquin des Près) at a very high-church Anglo-Catholic institution in Philadelphia, St Clements.  One evening in 1994, I drove her there to meet up with her group for a practice;  and noticed a sign announcing, in an arcane but characteristic touch, that the Blessed Sacrament had been removed for the duration of the performance, since the choir would have its back to the altar.

 

Leading Questions

We earlier analyzed, and fulminated against, self-posed phony questions; handing out “Greatness” kudos to banal questions (and then dodging them); and the crypto-injunctive “Thank you for…” gambit. 

Thinking along those lines, I noticed something similar on this morning’s “Weekend Edition” on NPR, concerning a recent appropriation bill for the pandemic:

   Some of that is earmarked for testing -- yes?

The questioner was Scott Simon, and the question was posed to an area-expert on the ground, as one of a list of items to be got through.   It came across as time-saving and businesslike, but strictly speaking, as opposed to a neutral “Is some of that earmarked for testing?”, it is what is eristically called a leading question.   That technical term does not mean “a burning question” (nor, for that matter, a “great question”), but refers to the judicially deprecated practice of leading the witness.

* Structurally, considered as an illocution, Simon’s utterance is roughly the dual of the “Rumsfeld ploy”. 

In Rumsfeld, what is in essence a statement  is separated into two clauses:  an initial clause containing the actual content, and phrased as an interrogative; followed by a very brief clause, phrased as a declarative (and addressing the question).  

In the Scott Simon gambit, what is in essence a question  is separated into two clauses:  an initial contentful clause framed as a declarative; followed by a very brief clause, phrased as an interrogative.

*  Rhetorically, considered from a perlocutionary standpoint, the move resembles the “Thank you for…” in that it cogs the dice to elicit a desired behaviour (compliance or assent).

On a scale from most neutral, to most bullying of the witness, we note:

*  Did you take the money?

*  Didn’t you take the money?

*  You took the money -- yes?

*  You took the money, didn’t you?  (with an interrogative up-tone on the final clause)

*  You took the money, didn’t you (with flat declarative intonation on the final clause).   And, on a strengthened prosecutorial note:

* You took the money, now didn’t you.

There are side-subtleties, which we shall ignore, except to contrast

   * You took the money, didn’t you?  (Assumes that you did, and purports not to expect you to dare deny it.

  * (Oh, so) you took the money, did you?  (Affects surprise at a suggestion that you did.)

The latter contrasting pair recall the Latin interrogative particles   nonne (expecting a positive answer) and num (expecting a negative).

Rarefied Repartee

James Gould Cozzens is an author whose prose you can chew for grist and pith.  He is of a conservative, Protestant disposition;  he has an especial affinity for Law, and not a little for Latin.   Witness this, from his semi-autobiographical first novel, depicting himself as “Francis”, a rather callow young American, moving somewhat aimlessly around the watering-holes of Europe, as tutor to the adolescent child of a wealthy mother:

[One Mr McKellar speaking, of a headstrong young woman] :
“It will be like trying to get Lorna home from the Casino when she knows that next time it just has to be pair et rouge.  You don’t arise from the table gracefully.  No one does.  Lucretius was an ass.  What does he say?  Well, now I have forgotten.”

“Cur non ut plenus vitae conviva recedis,” Francis said distinctly -- almost viciously, for he felt entitled to one triumph, and what a wretched one this was! “Aequo animoque capis securam, stulte, quietem.”

“Bravo!” Mr McKella said, startled.  He swept a bow to Francis.  “… Plenus, indeed!  You can always use a little more.”

-- James Gould Cozzens,  Ask Me Tomorrow (1940), ch. 5

What is really arch about that exchange  is not so much the having of an apposite quotation from De rerum natura  at one’s fingertips, but rather that “Lucretius is an ass”.  All McKellar has done is to mention Lorna’s likely reluctance to leave the gaming-table, yet in the very next instant he presumes that such a situation, drawn from life, will instantly put the hearer -- or anyone of competence -- in mind of one particular a-propos zinger from a a Roman poet of the first century B.C., and that we -- you and I -- are so familiar, and overfamiliar, with the various bons mots of that man, that we can (using schoolboy phraseology) dismiss the old scribbler as “an ass”.

Quot linguæ, tot homines

[Update of a post from January 2012]

[And, a rhyming version: 

   Quot linguas calles, tot homines vales.
   Karl Vossler's version:  "So viel Sprachen einer kann, so viel mal ist er ein Mensch."
(Replace Mensch by Mann, and you get a rhyming version of that.]

A venerable Latin tag, but I don’t really buy it.  If you spread yourself too thin, you run aground in the shallows:  there is no intellectual depth in maintaining a brain-deck of file-cards à la  book = Buch = livre = libro = kitâb …;  and the question, “How many languages do you speak?”  always makes me grind my teeth. (“No more than one at a time,” I sometimes growl.)  Pursuing multilingualism as a fetish  smacks of calculating-savants, quiz-winners, and that ilk.  Antiquity had its Mithridates of Pontus;  the ottocento, its Cardinal Mezzofanti:  but these polyglots were by no means philologists.

Nonetheless:

There is a quiditas, a je-ne-sais-quoi, a haeccéité  or quintessence, in each linguistic culture, sui generis and untranslatable.   To steep yourself deeply in these, particularly in a language with a long and intricate written history, like Latin or Arabic, or (at somewhat shallower time-depth, but overtaking those in later laps) English, German, or French.  Both at work and in my free time, I use other languages (a different mix depending on the context)  nearly as much as I use English, and am the better for it.   But the point is to go deep, one culture at a time, and not to display some multilingual multitasking like simultaneous tournament chess.   I know many people employed as linguists  who have never read through an entire book in the language that they work with, beyond Harry Potter in translation.  That seems sad.

Anyhow, here is a review, from this morning’s New York Times, of a book on multilingualism, Babel No More, which makes a useful distinction between multilinguals and hyperpolyglots.

(And for a beautiful and elaborate painted depiction of that ancient toppled tower, along with some entertaining philology, click here.)

[Update 18 March 2012] More ammo, from a staff writer of Science:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/18/opinion/sunday/the-benefits-of-bilingualism.html?scp=2&sq=bhattacharjee&st=cse

A propos:

Hugo Schuchardt, best known as a Romance philologist, but who studied a remarkable range of languages, not excluding Basque and Berber, and indeed Arabic (which he traveled to Egypt to master) nonetheless wrote:

Wir glauben nicht an den Segen der Zweisprachigkeit;  wenn man mit Recht gesagt hat, qu’une population qui parle deux langues, a deux cordes à son arc, so hat man vergessen hinzuzufügen, daß keine dieser Sehnen  sehr straff ist.

-- Romanisches und Keltisches (1886), repr. in Leo Spitzer, ed., Hugo Schuchardt-Brevier (1921; 2^nd edn. 1928), p. 363

Note that this assessment did not, however, prevent him from pioneering the study of the neither-this-or-that Mischsprachen known as creoles;  he even put in a good word for those culturally decidedly slack-stringed confections -- not foam-born but test-tube-engendered -- the artificial entities Esperanto and Volapük.

[Update Oct 2014]
http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/10/more-languages-better-brain/381193/

[Update Dec 2019]

The cool eye  and tart tongue  of Rebecca West  opines, in her Balkan travelogue:

…one of those strange polyglots  who seem to have been brought up in some alley  where several civilizations  pour out their ash-cans, since only bits and pieces have come their way, never the real meat.
-- Rebecca West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1941), p.707

.

Words of the Day: sublunary, postlapsarian, …

Re Melanesians:

“When a native says that he is a man, he means that he is a man and not a ghost; not that he is a man and not a beast.”

-- Robert Louis Stevenson, In the South Seas (1896)

~

Perhaps the first word we heard, ourselves still children, which, rather than simply denoting something new (like a previously unencountered animal), designated something old in a new way, and thus reframed us, was:   Earthling.   In terms of reference, the word is synonymous with people;  but its intension  (with an -s-, not -t-; a term of art among linguistic philosophers, referring to the way it picks its referent out) is different.  (Thus likewise morning star and evening star, both referring -- though from different lookouts -- to Venus.) 

We meet this first in science fiction, and it permanently expands the mind.   When the exploits of the spacemen are forgotten  along with other tales of the nursery, we yet retain the spaciousness of the new view.  “I went to the mall with three of my friends”;  “I went to the mall with three…. fellow Earthlings”:  we sense the wider world beyond our plankboard stage.

(We just came across a mirror-term to earthling:

Suppose that an archaeologist who had visited us from outer space  were trying to explain human history to his fellow spacelings.

-- Jared Diamond, The Rise and Fall of the Third Chimpanzee (1991), p. 172 )

Another take on the same referents (namely, our earthly selves) is human.  Though the word is of course by now quite common, it was not always so, being a scientific word, borrowed from Latin (humanus, from homo; if there be a further relation to humus, then we have an interesting parallel -- again ‘earthling’, but now in the sense of ‘sons of the soil’).   By this term we are distinguished from animals;  but as everyone learns that perfectly well from an infant age, we do not need this word to teach us the species perspective.

Rather otherwise is mortal -- again from Latin, from the word for ‘death’.  In this secularized age, the average reader might think of this as a kind of moldy Sunday-school word, but the original sense among the pagan Greeks and Romans  was as opposed, not to God, but to the immortals -- the gods.  This is the sense that survives in the phrase “What fools we mortals be” (in Shakespeare’s most robustly pagan play).
An unexpected limitation in this word immortal  is evidenced by the following splendid epigram:

The actual infinity of a Platonist  is as seen by a mathematician who is eternal;

The potential infinity of the Intuitionists  is as seen by a mathematican who is merely immortal.

This is brilliant.  We expect the distinction to be between an idealized immortal mathematician, with all the time in the world to count to infinity, and a mortal one, who feels time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near, though he might make do with Supertasks:  accordingly, we initially take eternal simply as a stylistic synonym for immortal, before the second strophe brings us up short.  The Cumaean sibyl was merely immortal -- and consequently longed for easeful death.   Whereas the Platonist beholds the world of Forms  sub specie aeternitatis.  

(The epigram above comes not from a treatise of theology, but from a book of set theory and its logic.  I am quoting from memory, and possibly amiss, since Google finds, not that, but mostly philosophical and theological works.

-- Ha!  wait, found it, nestling on my shelves.   It is from Understanding the Infinite, by Shaughan Lavine.  He states it thus:

The idealization of experience that yields the actual infinite of classical mathematics  is that of the Eternal Mathematician, while the one that yields the potential infinite of intuitionistic mathematics  is that of the Immortal Mathematician.

But I like my misquotation rather better, and so shall leave it.)

~

A particularly delightful word,  containing, as were it a microcosm, a whole philosophy, is the word sublunary:  meaning, in the old cosmology, all that is to be found beneath the Sphere of the Moon.   (The allusion is not to the Moon’s own sphericity, wonderful though that be,  but to the celestial shell whereon that glowing queen is constrained to move  in regal splendour.)  Which is simply to say:  our everyday world;  except that now, instead of moving about in it like a tadpole in a pond, taking it all for granted, our thoughts now float upwards, and our hearts do yearn.

A simple swain -- yet fain to peer, beyond the sphere

The sublunary world is, in other words, this life Here Below.  And this brings us to a curious etymological fact:  for in Arabic, there are two common words meaning ‘world’:   al-`âlam, which is neutral, like world;  and al-dunyâ, which adds the notion of a contrast:  though now, not to any physical supralunary realm, but to al-âxirah ‘the hereafter’.   Morphologically, dunyâ is a feminine elative adjective, meaning ‘lower, nearer’:  thus precisely encapsulating the notions expressed by sublunary and Here Below, but in a single morpheme.

(The term sublunary has joined its age-mates in the medieval museum;  yet we still retain a kindred metaphor, "everything under the sun".)

~

At last we arrive at the final word of our title, postlapsarian :  a word that contains multitudes.  It refers to life subsequent to the Disaster in the Garden -- the only life that any of us ordinary folks have ever known.

In Adam’s Fall

we sinned all.

Our earliest ancestors, rueing the day

*

For a portrait of Grace and Reprobation,

try this:

The Penitent and the Impenitent Thief

 *

Once again, it is a word that picks us out, every one of us (for even Eve and Adam were postlapsarian at the end), but in a new way, thus differing most starkly from the bland philosophical agnosticism of the coreferential but non-synonymous term human.   It bears within it a deep and stark perspective -- one which we are inclined to disregard, as we scramble for sales at the mall, or lounge back glassy-eyed before the goggle-box (the behavior, however, belying the complacency).  

Yet in a better age, it was borne well in mind;  as when Condillac, in the preface to his L’art de penser (1780), though that work is seen in retrospect as having paved the way to atheism, yet was careful to remark,  that his analyses apply only to the postlapsarian soul:  much as a myrmecologist  (one more modest than Edward Wilson), should preface his monograph with the caveat that the generalizations made therein  might not apply to the world outside the termitary.   Our favorite Neothomist speaks of

… la précaution qu’il prend,  au début de son Art de penser, de rappeler qu’il va décrire l’âme telle qu’elle est à présent, après le péché originel.  Avant le péché, elle avait des idées  antérieures à l’usage qu’elle fait des sens,

«mais les choses ont changé  depuis sa désobéissance».

-- Etienne Gilson, Linguistique et philosophie (1969), p. 28

 Condillac, perhaps having second thoughts about what he unleashed 

We are, thus, all of us, earthlings, mortals, sublunary and postlapsarian.   Each of these words picks us out from among all else in the Creation, yet each from a different angle, in a way that enlarges our humanity.

~

Linguistic footnote:  We have chosen these philosophically rich words for the fun of it; but the basic phenomena here under discussion  occur more widely.  Thus cordate and nephrophoric (in their somewhat specialized use among philosophers) ‘having a heart’ and ‘having kidneys”:  non-synonymous but co-referential.

Or, to take an example quite similar to that of sublunary:

The expression dry land evokes the ocean in a way that land itself does not,  and by this very fact seems filled with sea breezes -- or rather, tempests, since the particular light in which the land is thereby set, is as a place of safety, reached at last after perilous voyages.  "Earthling"-style designation of the denizens of this default environment, from the salty perspective of the mariner: landlubbers.
Likewise terra firma:  it’s a place where you can finally find your foothold, after your return -- O Earthling -- from your voyage to outer space.

~

[update July 2020]

 

Mensch is a rather friendly-sounding German for any human being;  in Yiddish-English, a mensch is a solid, kind-hearted guy.   In the following, the word is contrasted invidiously with ‘policemen’, who thus are delimited outside the circle of humanity:

“ein Mensch schwer und vier Polizisten leicht verletzt. „ https://www.welt.de/vermischtes/article211457365/Stuttgart-Festnahmen-wegen-Auseinandersetzungen-vier-Polizisten-verletzt.html#Comments

Reader comments:

“ein Mensch schwer und vier Polizisten leicht verletzt. „ So klingt linker Sprachgebrauch. Macht ihr Journalisten schon unterbewusst. Als ob Polizisten keine Menschen sind.

-

Ein Mensch und 4 Polizisten- habt ihr das aus Versehen aus einem linksextremen Kampfblatt übernommen??

.

Like a duck in thunder (II)

Recently I had occasion to seek the origin and meaning of the phrase (in full) “like a dying duck in a thunderstorm”.   If you google that phrase, you’ll find plenty -- mostly pages and pages of ill-informed and inconclusive forum-discussion;  even if an authoritative answer lies buried there somewhere, it is not worth one’s while to sift through the debris.

So here is the entry from a standard reference-work, A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, by Eric Partridge (first edition 1937; many subsequent updates), in its entirety:

To have a ludicrously forlorn, hopeless, and helpless appearance :  coll., orig. rural:  from ca. 1850 (Ware).

Now, as it happens, we can antedate that date;  and this, in a lexicographically most interesting way:  not with a simple antecedent Erstbeleg, but something more powerful though more roundabout.

~

Back when I was an editor at Merriam-Webster dictionaries, I had full responsibility for the two technical disciplines of Etymology and of Pronunciation, but none at all for the company’s meat and drink, which was defining;  let alone for deciding which new words were to be entered in the flagship Collegiate ™ dictionary, which was lightly revised each year, and wholly reedited each decade.  That privilege fell to the Editor-in-Chief, Dr. Mish -- an intelligent and well-educated man, and not without a certain wry humor;  but as regards the humors, he rather took after his atrabilious and phlegmatic predecessor, Doctor Johnson, whose sour frowning portrait hung over his desk, exactly matching the successor’s habitual mood.  I used to despair at the chef-rédacteur’s obstinate sluggishness against admitting culturally key new words -- they’d make it in eventually, but only after the kairos had long passed -- and occasionally would champion some one particular word for inclusion, loading the files with attestations for the definer to refer to next time around.

One such, at the height of Gorbachev, was glasnost.   Many were the citations I supplied, to no avail.  However (one might argue) you can always pile up stats for some particular term, no matter how specialized, by drawing from specialized sources:  which would prove nothing.  The Collegiate is not for the specialist, but for the general educated public;  and glasnost is, after all, in origin  Russian:  the Collegiate is quite rightly chary of letting in too many foreign terms (like Erstbeleg -- common in the lexicographic literature, but unknown outside it).  So, how to show that the word had passed into English common currency?

In support of the suggestion that glasnost be included, I submitted slips attesting such derivata as glasnostic, with fully English morphology (and phonology:  the stress shifts to another vowel, which additionally is detensed).  Now, that was a nonce form, unworthy of inclusion on its own;  but it did witness the fact that, by then, glasnost had already passed into the everyday Wortschatz of American English, for a confection like “glasnostic” presupposes the antecedent currency of the base.

~

And so, back to our duck.

Consider the following passage from Dickens’ novel Martin Chuzzlewit:

‘What,’ he asked of Mr Pecksniff, happening to catch his eye in its descent;  for until now  it had been piously upraised, with something of that expression which the poetry of ages has attributed to a domestic bird, when breathing its last amid the ravages of an electric storm …

Now,  this circumlocuitous, scarcely lapidary, obscure expression, is (as the annotator notes, in the Penguin edition) nothing more nor less than a winking allusion to the set expression (alliterative, assonant, and striking in its imagery) a dying duck in a thunderstorm.  Moreover, the allusion could not possibly work unless that expression were antecedently quite familiar to the reader, since -- much more than the morphological presupposition of glasnost by glasnostic-- there is a significant gap (lexical, though not semantic) between the original and the pastiche.   The case is often to be met with in literature -- more usually in a droll setting, as here, though we do find  “like the cat in the adage” in MacBeth, an allusion  (one requiring rather a lot of the groundlings, one should have thought) to the Latin catus amat piscis, sed non vult tingere plantas (a cat likes fish, but doesn’t like to get its paws wet).

The key point here is that the first half of Martin Chuzzlewit  (where our passage appears) was initially serialized  in 1843,  thus antedating the Ware/Partridge date.  And if the proverb had occurred literatim, it would antedate matters no further.  But as it stands, we can deduce that the adage was already in wide circulation among Dickens’ anticipated readership, well before 1843:  else he could not have counted on them to get the reference:  and without that, the passage falls flat.

[Psychostylistic footnote]  It is the very paradoxical absurdity of the original adage, that tempts Dickens to toy with it.  For after all, ducks do just fine in thunderstorms, much better than do squirrels (or the proverbial “drowned rat”) -- rain being, as the expression has it, “nice weather for ducks”.   In just such a fashion does Wodehouse (through his character Bertie Wooster) play, in novel after novel, with the speech in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, that ends “like quills upon the fretful porpentine”.  Or, at a humbler level, such dimestore wit as hasta la pasta (for hasta la vista).

(For our own discourse upon said porpentine, click here.)

For final proof, if proof be needed, this witness from Washington Irving’s fine finger-exercise of a story of 1824, “The Stout Gentleman”:

Rain pattered against the casements.  … There were several half-drowned fowls crowded together under a cart, among which was a miserable cristfallen cock … Everything was comfortless and forlorn, excepting a crew of hardened ducks, assembled like boon companions round a puddle, and making a riotous noise over their liquor.

-- Washington Irving, from Tales of a Traveller

.

Phrase of the Day: “An Abundance of Caution”

The expression,  “Out of an abundance of caution”, has been around for while:  but in the shadows, used only by serious scientific folk, and seldom heard by the populace, over the blare of the mariachi band.   Yet now, of a sudden, it is in every ear, and soon upon every lip.

The phrase contains two layers of CYA:

(1) The authorities resort to unusually sweeping protective measures to protect against a threat that might actually be rather remote, since the political consequences of not having done so, should the threat eventuate, are enormous;

(2) At the same time, the authorities -- well aware that, if the threat proves unfounded, the citizens grumble at the inconvenience they were put to -- protect their other flank by signaling in advance their sober, Solomonic judiciousness  in putting the safety of the public before all else.

Recent examples:  The response to Ebola;  shutting down the entire L.A. school system because someone phoned in a threat (typically, such calls come, not from terrorists, but from students who didn’t study for the exam).

(Note:  Not at all blaming the users of the phrase;  they are darned if they do, darned if they don’t.)

To emphasize that, though he undertook countermeasures X, he strictly speaking didn't really need to (much ado about nothing), the writer may use a turbo version of the phrased:  an overabundance of caution.

~

(Linguistic reverie ...)

Abundance -- a buxom word !  Of classical origin;  its Gallic-lent relative, abound.   And so lushly, deliciously liquid, for whoso (whomso?) can hear, in its etymology, the original Latin, lapping at the lips of connotation …

  ubi ingens

  Sarpedon, ubi tot Simois correpta sub undis

  scuta virum galeasque et fortia corpora volvit?'

ABUNDANTIA

Plus it reminds me of one of my favorite enigmatic French idioms:

  “J’abonde dans votre sens.”

  =  “Suh!  I am entirely of your opinion.”  ….

In German, this choice phrase is being translated as

„aus größtmöglicher Vorsicht“

.

An Image from Paris Uncensored

The following image appeared in my inbox this morning, as part of the daily news feed from Le Figaro:

Couché, chiot !

[Couché, chiot ! :  French for,  Assume the position ...]

It is the latest semi-official Xantippean provocation, from the land of les Femen.   To promote what is supposedly a kumbaya-feelgood-bisounours celebration, she thrusts forward an image of algolagnic paraphilia.

But what is really interesting is that the Figaro article itself, self-censors, cropping the image to obscure the riding-crop, and losing the "assume-[the-position]" bit:

http://www.lefigaro.fr/societes/2014/09/20/20005-20140920ARTFIG00023-l-affiche-trash-de-j-aime-ma-boite-fait-fuir-ses-sponsors.php

Indeed, I tried searching the Net for the full image, in Google Image, and could not find it.  I found the censored image;  if you click on it, among the ‘Related Images’ are a number of items that include the uncensored one;  but if you click on that, it doesn’t work, although all the others in the group click through okay.

The fact of the matter is, the paraphiliac/diabolist lobby in France, has been relentlessly degrading what is publically permissible;  ample documentation here:

  http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2013/07/france-finally-honors-world-historical.html

So they figured, hey, a headless dominatrix, clad all in rubber-fetish Satanic scarlet, cravache à la main, put forward as the official symbol of a national festival of social reconciliation -- sure, these Gallic lapdogs will lap it up.  

Only -- this time, the provocation earned a rasperry;  les bonzes la boudent.  And so the image was withdrawn -- yet more, was censored in the press, and somehow actually wiped from the Internet.

For more on decapitation-porn,  cliquez ici:

    Le théâtre de la cruauté

*

Pour contrecarrer ces immondices,

il nous faut  la Sainte Eglise

Murphy Calls In a Specialist

 [Kindle] [Nook]

*

Note for anglophones:

Boîte literally means ‘box’;  improbably enough, the words are actually cognate, both going back to Latin buxus (the wood of a certain evergreen).  A yet loftier cognate is the Greek word that gave us pyx -- an holy object of hatred to the satanists.  Its use in the slogan «J'aime ma boîte» puzzled me, since it is many years since I have lived in France, and I have not kept up with popular culture.   It surely is making no allusion to the pyx (which in any case is in French ciboire).   But in English, there is a slang meaning to the word box, one quite common in my youth, though of late  neglected.  (One of the very first jokes I heard, as a young child -- ca. 1956 -- was:  “What’s black, one-eyed, wears a mezuzah, and comes in a white box?”  I dutifully memorized the joke -- children treat them very solemnly, you know, while learning the ropes -- while understanding it not at all.   By the time I did understand it, it was no longer remotely salonfähig.   The answer I dare not supply here  other than by initials:  S…. D… J…. .)  And this alternate, louche sense, being purely geometrico-anatomical, translates into any language.  One really wonders whether there might not be some sous-entendu allusion to the autogynophillic fétiche of that celebrated artiste nipponne who … well, read about it yourself.

*

Travaillant au noir,

le détective  se trouve aux prises

avec le Saint-Esprit

C’est quoi, le péché irrémissible???

*

[Update]  Just found a different image, from an earlier article in the same newspaper:

http://www.lefigaro.fr/societes/2014/09/13/20005-20140913ARTFIG00027-les-femmes-patrons-sont-elles-toutes-sadomaso.php

This one is uncropped, yet curiously distorted, bloated and somehow even sicker:

What is going on in that country?

(Hand it to Le Figaro, though:  no other media outlet has dared touch this story, so far as I can tell.)

Aux armes, chrétiens! 

Une politique travestie

~

Pour le palmarès complet  de nos causeries hexagonales, ceci:

   http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/search/label/France

[Mise à jour, 21 sept 2014] Mais --

trêve de grogneries  genre  Caton l'Ancien,

et saluons l’arrivée de l’équinoxe

sur des ailes dorées !

~

[ Mise à  jour  23 sept 14]   Emplois disponibles !

Pour celles qui aimeraient bien brandir la cravache, et l’appliquer avec rigueur et justesse  à la chair  coupable et fondante,

il y a maintenant, chez Daech, des boulots-rêve pour vous!

Even before the emergence of Islamic State, small numbers of women — mostly Europeans — began arriving in parts of Syria as wives of foreign fighters, which "encouraged the original image of Syria being a five-star jihad".

One online poster, Umm Ubaydah, claims to have traveled alone to Syria to take care of her husband and fellow Islamic State fighters. Three days after American reporter Steven Sotloff was executed, one person asked on her Tumblr page, where she occasionally writes in Swedish, what she thought of his execution. "I wish I did it," she answered simply.

The recruitment of women defies the conservative Muslim belief that a woman needs permission from her male guardian to travel or marry. Recruiters insist that the obligation to live in the caliphate trumps the requirement for permission.

Women formed the Khansa Militia, an armed morality squad whose job one anti-Islamic State activist summed up as "detaining and whipping."

During one raid, the militia detained several high school students and teachers for such transgressions as wearing niqabs that were too transparent, having visible eyebrows or wearing a hair clip under the hijab. Each one was whipped 30 times.

http://www.latimes.com/world/middleeast/la-fg-isis-female-recruits-20140920-story.html#navtype=outfit

O, mais c’est à en devenir m-m-m-m-mmmmmoite …..