Saturday, June 13, 2020

Cant





No matter how thin you slice it, it's still baloney.

― Rube Goldberg

"We need to unpack that."

Whenever I hear anyone mouth those words, I want to unpack the trunk where I keep my souvenir shillelagh, so I can pummel him.

The meiotic use of "unpack"―what the speaker really means is, "That's ridiculous"is a prime example of cant.

Dictionaries define cant as "a stock phrase" or "the insincere use of pious words." 

The verb form means "to talk hypocritically" or "to speak in a singsong manner."

Etymologists believe cant derived from the Latin cantare, meaning “to chant.” 

In medieval cathedrals, the cantor directed the chants. That solemn duty required the cantor be ordained; but, with the Reformation, the requirement was dropped. Bach and Telemann, both Protestant laymen, were cantors.

Numerous claims notwithstanding, etymologists do not believe cant derived from Andrew Cant, a 17th century Scottish preacher known for his preposterous sermonizing. 

Cant
That rumor was started a century later by Bishop George Smalridge, who, worried about a wave of "ungentlemanly" canting in Britain's churches, wrote in The Spectator:

"'Cant' is, by some people, derived from one Andrew Cant, who, they say, was a Presbyterian minister in some illiterate part of Scotland, who by exercise and use had obtained the faculty, alias gift, of talking in the pulpit in such a dialect that it's said he was understood by none but his own congregation, and not by all of them."

You could simplify matters by saying cant means "baloney."

It's remarkable: we open our mouths and out flow words whose ancestries are unknown to us.

I can imagine, a century from now, etymologists insisting the word trump derived from a forgotten 21st century US president. 

Trump
They will cite as their primary source an obscure "blog" (blogs were a quaint form of self-publishing on the archaic jumble of plastic and wire known as the "Internet").

Dictionaries thenas they do nowwill define trump as "a card with the highest value in a game."

The verb form will mean "to beat someone" or "to be better, more important, or more powerful than another."

Twenty-second century dictionaries will also define trump as "one-upmanship" or "the art of outdoing a rival by claiming superiority, often insisting one is smarter, richer, and more popular."

Secondary definitions of trump will include "malignant narcissist," "white supremacist" and "TV star" (TV was the predominant form of entertainment before the invention in 2120 of the orgasmatron.)



Friday, June 12, 2020

White Like Me



So long as we condone injustice by a small but powerful group, we condone the destruction of all social stability.

― John Howard Griffin


As the president golfs before his Juneteenth rally in Tulsamy social media stream is ablaze with denial by his "color blind" followers there's an "elephant in the room," white privilege.

While I was a freshman in high school, the Jesuits had us read Black Like Me, a still-new nonfiction best-seller by a Catholic novelist named John Howard Griffin.

In the book, Griffin described a six-week exploit in the Deep South during which he traveled the byways of Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas, and Georgia disguised as an indigent black.

Though whites in the South insisted all blacks were "happy," Griffin's adventure from beginning to end proved a “personal nightmare.”

Griffin's travels were peppered with bullying and threats, venomous insults, and continual encounters with what he labeled the omnipresent "hate stare."

Over 10 million Americans read Black Like Me when it first appeared in bookstores in 1961; and millions more saw the 1964 motion picture

Griffin's story convinced many of them that blacks indeed were painfully, egregiously disadvantaged.

Sixty years later, blacks are still disadvantaged―though you'd never know it from the conservatives yakking on my social media stream.

From them you'd conclude all blacks are white―like me.

Thursday, June 11, 2020

Pedestals


Someday maybe I'll remember to forget.

— Bob Dylan


Three historical figures were knocked from their pedestals this week: the mariner Christopher Columbus, the British slave trader Edward Colston, and the Confederate president Jefferson Davis.

Many historical figures are on unsure footing right now. They'd better watch out: when the mighty fall, they fall fast and hard.

The word pedestal, meaning a "base supporting a statue," was borrowed in the 16th century from the French piédestal. The French in turn borrowed their word from the Italian piedistallo. 

Pied is Italian for "foot;" stallo, for "seat;" so pedestal literally means a "seat for the feet." When someone is "knocked from his pedestal," he's not having his feet knocked out from under him, but his ego taken down a notch—likely because he's fallen from favor.

When a prominent figure fell from favor in Ancient Rome, he sometimes really fell. Disgraced emperors like Caligula, Domitian, Nero and Geta were doled out a punishment worse than death: oblivion, a brutal sentence that centuries later came to be called damnatio memoriaethe "condemnation of memory."

For their crimes, every memory, every trace of the condemned was obliterated; they were literally erased from history. Statues of the condemned were destroyed; pictures of them, buried; coins bearing their images, melted; homes where they lived, razed; possessions they once held, burned; and inscriptions of their names on buildings, defaced.

Lenin after the collapse of the USSR
Although Rome disappeared, the practice of damnatio memoriae didn't.

In modern times, Benedict Arnold suffered damnatio memoriae. So did Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, Zhao Ziyang and Sassam Hussein.

Each of these figures lost not only his pedestal, but his pedigree, meaning an "individual's family history."

The word pedigree comes from the medieval French term pied de grue, meaning "foot of the crane." 

French genealogists of the day used a three-prong symbol on their charts to show the line of descent of a noble family. One day, a genealogist noticed the symbol resembled a crane's foot, so named it pied de grue

The English borrowed the term in the 15th century to mean "line of descent" or "family history," but soon corrupted it, and now we say pedigree.



Wednesday, June 10, 2020

Aggrieved


I saw my enemies, and they are worms.
— Adolph Hitler 

You have to wonder why a powerful world leader would waste his time settling grievances with celebrities.

Until you realize, it's déjà vu all over again.

Celebrity-obsessed, Adolph Hitler loved to pal with famous actors and filmmakers, often inviting them to the Old Chancellery to drink Cokes (his beverage of choice) and screen movies after dinner.

Even more than watching celebrities on the screen, Hitler loved watching Hitler, and after his appointment as chancellor in 1933 took quick steps to enshrine himself on celluloid, telling his minister of "public enlightenment," Josef Goebbels
an equally avid movie buff—to find him a qualified director.

Goebbels first invited "Metropolis" director Fritz Lang—Hitler's favorite filmmakerto try his hand. "Give us great Nazi films," Goebbels told him; but Lang, raised by a Jewish mother, politely declinedand boarded the night train for Paris.

So Goebbels turned to Leni Riefenstahl, who, borrowing heavily from "Metropolis," made "Triumph of the Will" the following year. 

Riefenstahl's film purported to be an inexpensive newsreel covering a party rally in Nuremberg; it was anything but. Hitler gave her an unlimited budget that allowed the director to stage and shoot multiple takes of lavish sequences, using sixteen camera crews and banks of aerial searchlights loaned by the Luftwaffe. Although the movie's big star was real, the crowds and parades—and even the buildingswere not.

"Triumph of the Will" was a smash, turning Hitler into a hero throughout the fatherland. (Thank goodness the technology was lacking for "Der Lehrling.")


But, sadly, overnight stardom and the adoration of millions didn't dampen Hitler's resentment of celebrities who crossed him, and the thin-skinned autocrat began keeping a personal blacklist of the hundreds of cultural "undesirables" he planned to liquidate.

On Hitler's blacklist were names familiar from stage and screen: Jack Benny, Myrna Loyd, Jack Warner, Charlie Chaplin, Victor Borge, Noel Coward, Bertolt Brecht, H.G. Wells, Virginia Woolf... and Moe, Larry and Curly.

Not the likeliest social critics, nonetheless in 1940 The Three Stooges starred in "You Nazty Spy!", the very first Hollywood film to satirize der Führer—and an act of defiance that marked them for "moider."

NOTE:"You Nazty Spy!" opens with the following disclaimer: "Any resemblance between the characters in this picture and any persons, living or dead, is a miracle." The same applies to this blog post.

Tuesday, June 9, 2020

Make 'Em Laugh


The Young Rembrandt as Democritus the Laughing Philosopher

Life without festival is like a long road without an inn.  

— Democritus

Ancient Greeks thought of anyone from the city of Abdera: he's a buffoon.

That bias lives on even today in the phrase Abderian laughter, which denotes the laughter of a fool—of a schmegeggy who'll laugh at anything.

The citizens of Abdera owed their reputation to a native son, Democritus, known throughout the Greek Empire as the “Laughing Philosopher.”

Democritus believed the goal of man was cheerfulness—called euthymia in the jottings he left behindand wrote, "They are the fools who live life without enjoyment of life."

Contemporaries said this "champion of cheerfulness" made a habit of staying merry by laughing at human foibles.

Laughter might seem foreign to us right now, as we steer through "these uncharted times" (a pet phrase of the peppy voiceover at my Safeway).

But laughter has always helped folks in distress, as just one example reminds us: an inmate of the "Hanoi Hilton"itself a wry nickname for the horrific prison campwrote on the wall in the POWs' shower stall, "Smile, You're on Candid Camera."

Success, wealth, independence and leisure sound good, until you count their cost in fear—fear of their loss.

But cheerfulness leads to fear's absence—to athambria, as the Laughing Philosopher called it.

You can't be fearful when you're cheerful.



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