If wood isn't liquid, then what is in those cans and tubes labelled Liquid Wood?
Sarah S lamented:
One that I've seen so often that I honestly don't know which is correct is iced tea/ice tea.
"Iced tea" is correct: tea which has been "iced", or (in this case) been combined with ice (either by adding the ice or pouring the tea over the ice). A near-equivalent would be "spiced wine", wine which has had spices added to it.
(Why, then, is it "ice water"? I'd guess that has a different derivation: "ice water" would originally be the water coming off melting ice, and, by extension, any water of the same temperature, usually achieved by adding ice to water. Or perhaps it should be "iced water", and lost the "d" rather longer ago than "ice tea". Had I an OED handy, I'd check.)
But then, it's "ice cream."
The way one phrase comes into being doesn't necessarily tell you anything about how a seemingly-equivalent phrase came into being. "Iced tea" is still liquid; "ice cream" is solid (in the same way that clay is solid), and you don't have separate "ice" and "cream" parts, as you do with "iced tea". Hence, it is cream that is ice, rather than cream that has been iced.
P J Evans: "Apostrophes are misplaced so often I've started wondering if they even get mentioned in school any more"
To say nothing of all the people who believe that quotation marks are used for emphasis: 'For sale: "new" washer' (temporarily using British quoting conventions).
Hyphens get their share of abuse, too, with people inserting them at whim these days. (As best I can tell, the current misuse began with computer types not understanding the difference between the act, "to back up a disk", and the result, "a tape back-up". The current rule seems to be, "when in doubt, insert a hyphen".)
But punctuation abuse probably deserves its own thread.
Ulrika's mention of "people offering 'rod iron furniture'" reminded me of a business my then-girlfriend and I passed every so often, which made and sold "rot iron".
"Misquote spray": I'm guessing that it's to kill those flying insects that suck blood and spread malaria: mis-quo-tes.
Falon inquired:
I've been wondering about section 6 of [the MySpace.com] TOS and its use of terms like "royalty-free, worldwide license". Because I was thinking of using my blog to post writing excerpts, but I'm not even going to do that if it means giving up rights to it.
As is traditional, IANAL, but I read this to say "we can do anything we like with anything you post, until such time as (1) you delete the post and (2) we get rid of our backup copy. In addition, we can sell all these rights to anyone else, too, who can then do anything they like with your post."
For example, it looks to me like they could take your posted work and include it in a "Best Writing from MySpace" book, and as long as they did so while the post was up, they'd be legally allowed to. (And that "we keep rights to the backup copies" clause probably allows them to keep publishing the book even if you delete what you've written.)
Me, I wouldn't go near it.
A. J. Luxton commented:
In many situations with wording like that, they just mean "we don't have to do anything special each time someone accesses your website on our servers." Can't say for the specific one. Haven't looked at it[.]
I doubt that that's what's going on here. MySpace explicltly lists far too many rights to be merely insuring that access to user-posted files on the server is legal. While having the right to copy the post might reasonably be needed, I can't imagine that having the right of public performance or of translation--which are specifically named in the terms of service--would be necessary for anything but ways that MySpace could make money off its users' work.
If we're getting into mangled spelling, a local chain of flower shops regularly advertises "bokays", at least on their store marquees.
murgatroyd opined:
Another thing that is disappearing fast is correctly formulating conditional tense -- if it were [to be]
English is losing syntax more basic than the conditional tense: Participles are vanishing. For instance: "carry handles", "shave cream", and "bake time". And, of course, "spell checkers".
Granted, English has a history of jettisoning the "complicated" parts, but it seems we're starting to lose some of the essential bits,
Tim Walters, commenting on his movie list, said:
I'm a computer guy; I start counting at zero.
Then why not start with zero? Or do you have some secret objection to Zero Effect?
Larry Brennan wrote:
California wisely outlawed overlays
If true, Verizon is breaking the law.
Xopher wrote:
Also, it was billed as LA but held in Anaheim, which is like advertising New York and holding the convention in Garden City.
Not to a resident. Different part of the country, different geographical thinking. More importantly, different transportational thinking. "LA" (which is different from both "the city of Los Angeles" and "Los Angeles County") isn't a place; it's a whole territory, whose bounds are "anywhere you can drive to from Los Angeles City Hall without seeing undeveloped land". And by that definition, Anaheim is "in LA".
The Anaheim Convention Center (at which the Worldcon was held) is next door to Disneyland. If you ask people where Disneyland is, you'll probably get a lot of people saying "in LA". Even though it's outside Los Angeles County. (If you told friends you were going to LA and visiting Disneyland, I doubt anyone would object "But Disneyland isn't in LA!") Are the people who place Disneyland "in LA" being deceitful?
I felt baited and switched once I found out.
It didn't occur to you to look at a map before you left? Or to do a little research? The Worldcon may have been pre-Google, but travel guides were certainly readily available.
But that club isn't going to trick me again
I get the impression that New Yorkers, on the whole, are willing to walk considerable distances to get where they're going. Los Angeles residents aren't. This post talks of New Yorkers walking to work during a blackout. A Los Angeles resident, faced with travelling the same distance on foot, without his car, simply wouldn't go. I've amazed my car mechanic by walking an hour to get to his shop. I've seen people get into their cars to go half a block. They'll circle parking lots endlessly to get a parking spot fifty feet closer to the mall. Walking just isn't done.
Now, if you were organizing an event in New York to which Los Angeles people were coming, you might describe the site as "within walking distance of many good restaurants". Would it occur to you to explain to the Los Angeles people what "within walking distance" meant to you? And would you think them unreasonable if they accused you of trickery for describing the restaurants as "within walking distance" when they were clearly (to the LA people) much too far away to walk to?
The con committee, being good LA residents, very probably just didn't think of people as being carless, because, as you discovered, being carless means being all but immobile. It's assumed that, if you don't bring your own car, you'll rent one, because a car is all but a necessity here. (While there is a public transportation system, it's far less convenient to use it than to just drive somewhere.)
I have no trouble believing that the con committee was excessively "LA-centric"; being "<your city here>-centric" is an easy trap to fall into. But I think to accuse them of outright "trickery" --of deliberate dishonesty--is going far overboard. It seems to me no more dishonest for them to assume you'd have a car than for you to assume (as you clearly did) that you wouldn't need one.
The Glendale/Pasadena (CA) library has decided that Neil Gaiman's Adventures in the Dream Trade is properly shelved in the (science) fiction section, despite the fiction content filling only a dozen or so pages at the end.
And this despite their own catalog including this quote from the dust jacket: "The majority of this book is a journal--a web log--covering Febrary to September 2001."
Our Host wrote:
We are reissuing Avram Davidson's Adventures in Unhistory
Might Tor consider also bringing Diana Wynne Jones' Tough Guide to Fantasyland back into print? I'd expect there'd be demand for it, since it's one of the books that aspiring authors are regularly pointed to.
Around here, there's a Valley Crest landscaping company. (Google reports that they're around elsewhere, too.)
nerdycellist spake:
I don't think mormon doctrine has anything against evolution. I was raised by devout mormon parents who saw no problem believing that God devised evolution Himself.
That doesn't necessarily mean that evolution is compatible with Mormon doctrine. Your parents might well have been quite devout, yet disagreed with the Mormon Church over that point. It wouldn't be the first time those pesky free-thinkers had ideas of their own.
A little Googling uncovered this and that, which indicate that the matter isn't anywhere near as clear-cut as one might like.
Somewhere in the family tree are Sidney Fly and his wife (whose name I forget). They decided to name their daughter Marietta.
bryan wrote (including occasional quotes from me):
"A story from Hitler's perspective would be one of triumph over great odds, followed by the defeat in spite of his best efforts."
well, it seems that you are doing the same thing that I am, asserting a hard and fast rule for how a story from someone's perspective must be.
Huh? What "hard and fast rule" are you talking about? I gave a one-sentence summary of Hitler's life. Unless your Hitler led a different life from the one I know about, there's not a whole lot of variation possible. And how else would you summarize the story of a failed painter who went on to rule his country, started a war, lost it, and died? Were the odds he initially triumphed over not particularly great, or was he quite the slacker in his final days?
my basis for making the assertion that Hitler's story would be grim and depressing was that of all the various books told from the perspectives of nazis by those selfsame nazis that I have encountered (not a large number admittedly, I can only think of Speer's offhand, but I have read several of an amazingly similar depressing vein), well, all those books were depressing.
And what made those books depressing? The sorry state of those Nazis now compared to what they were in their glory years? The glee they took in eating children raw? Or are Nazis just inherently depressing, so that merely sitting quietly next to one would make you suicidal? Since you don't say, I'm left to guess.
Interviews on people's experiences of the war years all seem grim and depressing as well.
Interviews are not stories. A good interview and a good story have very different purposes, and very different structures. They will emphasize different things, and create different moods, even if the same events are covered.
But I think the real reason is that I had the understanding that what was under discussion was the experience of the reader
That's certainly what I've been discussing. What else did you think was being discussed?
I suppose that if Hitler said something like "Today I ordered all the jews killed, then we had cakes and balloons and I told that funny joke about the farmer's daughter" that the reader would not be moved to thinking how funny that joke was or how much they too would like cake or balloons but would rather be somewhat grimly depressed about the whole humanity/inhumanity thing that naziism seems to inspire in people
What the reader would be moved to think on would depend very much on how the writer presented the event. A really good writer probably wouldn't put things so baldly. Far more likely, there would be many words spent on Hitler's thoughts leading up to that order, perhaps in the form of arguments between Hitler and his aides and advisors (or, in the hands of a lesser writer, in the form of an As-you-know-Bob). The writer's goal might well be to show that "it can happen here". The processes that brought Hitler to power aren't so very different from those that brought Bush to power. And in Bush, we have a president who mongers fear, who advocates torture, who regards himself as above the law. The reader might be more moved to think on "the whole humanity/inhumanity thing" by the writer managing to get the reader to accept, even if only for a second, that Hitler was justified in his actions.
Even if the event were to be written so bluntly, Hitler's goal wasn't killing Jews, it was eliminating the contamination of the Aryan race. What Hitler would said would have been more likely "Today, I took the first step in the restoration of Germany to Aryan purity, ...." which is a far more "happy fun" statement, and one far less likely to inspire loathing in the reader.
[I]he more Hitler tried to have his cake and balloons the more grimly depressed people would get, unless there were something seriously wrong with those people.
Why would they become ever more grim and depressed? You continue to simply assert that that's what would happen. For someone who professes a dislike of "absolutist" and "bald statements", you make a surprising number of them.
First of all I think the wicked witch, if I wrote the story, would do a bunch of things that were wicked.
Not if you're really writing from her point of view. She won't consider what she does to be "wicked".
I would think this is in keeping with OZ mythology.
In keeping with how Baum presented Oz, perhaps. But that's not the only way that Oz can be presented. Just as America looks different to different people, so would Oz.
Focusing on it in the most cheerful tones possible(which could of course seem very cheerful but would only work manic in the context of wickedness), but not hiding it as often is done in children's literature
In simplistic children's literature (the sort Disney is noted for), perhaps. But it's not the only choice possible, nor even the only one taken by authors of children's literature. (And I believe that "Wicked" is targeting adults anyway, so how children's literature is written doesn't seem particularly relevant.)
"you can't take the Witch's point of view without abandoning Baum's interpretation."
really? what do you base this particular absolutist statement on?
I explained that in the sentences following that claim. Since you're asking even so, it would seem you didn't bother to read them. Here they are again:
To Baum, Dorothy and the rest are the "good guys", and the Witchs of the East and West are the "bad guys". But the Witch of the West isn't going to think of herself that way. To her , the "bad guys" are Dorothy and Co. The way Baum sees things and the way the Witch sees things are incompatible
I, for one, can't see how to tell the Witch's story from her perspective (the one in which she's the "good guy") and still cast her as Baum does, as the "bad guy". Please enlighten me as to how to reconcile these seemingly contradictory requirements.
[I]f Baum mapped the world of OZ, and the witch lives in that world, then there will be a large number of things in which the Witch and Baum should be in agreement.
Trivially true, and irrelevant. It is precisely those things which Baum and the Witch are not in agreement about that make the stories differ.
Now of course your theory is that the witch thinks the munchkins are evil and Baum thinks otherwise,
I'd appreciate it if you responded to what I actually wrote, rather than putting words into my mouth just so you can object to them. Please reread my last post; nowhere will you find any mention of what the Witch thinks of munchkins (or any other characters), except that she would regard Dorothy and Co. as the "bad guys".
but if the witch argues truthfully for the evil of munchkins
Why would she make such arguments? The munchkins oppose her efforts, which makes them "enemies", not "evil". Being "enemies" is enough reason for her to do what she does toward them. I doubt very much whether she'd spend any time worrying about their morality.
then there might not be that big a difference between that which Baum described and that which she describes, if the reader sees the character as going after a bunch of basically harmless little things
To her, they wouldn't be "harmless little things". If they were, the Witch would have overwhelmed them before Dorothy even got to the Emerald City. She didn't. "Harmless little things" are unlikely to have had that sort of success.
If the witch and Baum share the same reality then I guess she spends a good deal of her time:
1. cackling and making threats at her enemies.
2. disciplining her flying monkey lackeys.
3. watching flying monkey lackeys perform military drills.
4. walking around a castle that edgar allen poe would have described as a damn cheerful place
You seem to be claiming that the Witch does nothing that Baum doesn't explicitly describe her as doing. I think it more likely that Baum was following ordinary authorial convention, and including only those things which actively advance the story or contribute to character development. The activities Baum leaves out might well take up the greater part of her time. (As to the castle, Baum doesn't appear to describe it at all. The place that "edgar allen poe would have described as ... damn cheerful" is the invention of the set designer. If you grant him the authority to determine what is "official Oz", then how can you deny Gregory Maguire the same authority?)
Moreover, these are exactly the sorts of things that the Witch would report differently from Baum.
(ever notice how the descriptions of environments in a story can sometimes create a 'mood', the witch's living conditions, if not outright lied about might create such a 'mood')
First putting words into my mouth, now being patronizing. You certainly know how to conduct an argument.
Do tell me where this shit might lead to a little bit of depression at least.
You're the one arguing that grimness and depression are inevitable, not me. Until I understand what it is about the story that makes grimness and depression overwhelming inevitable, I cannot in good faith say that the story would lead there.
"But the Witch of the West isn't going to think of herself that way. To her, the "bad guys" are Dorothy and Co"
I am aware of the common wisdom that nobody has ever thought of themself as the bad guy, however I would like something more than a bald statement of its truth for proof.
I fear you're in for a disappointment, then. I see no reason to provide that "proof"; it is common wisdom after all, and you've offered no reason to suspect it doesn't apply here. Moreover, you're wanting me to prove something I didn't claim: that no one has ever thought of himself as "the bad guy". I don't doubt in the slightest that some people so regard themselves. But what reason is there to believe the Witch is one of those people? If you take into account the slantedness of Baum's descriptions, the Witch's actions aren't even particularly irrational. (Arrogant, yes, but last I heard, arrogance wasn't considered a mental illness.) Lacking evidence of irrationality, why assume that the Witch is one of the minority who take pleasure from thinking themselves "bad"?
Can you name even one moderately prominent historical figure who did regard him- or herself as "evil"? (By any standard, the Witch would qualify as a prominent Oz-historical figure, so limiting consideration to real-world historical figures seems not unreasonable.)
Me, I'd like something more than bald statements that the story would inevitably lead to grimness and depression.
"One more time: why is it necessarily grim and depressing?"
to stress:
" or at least very far removed from the opinions of normal Oz society"
I don't know, just as my limited experiences with the memoirs of nazis have prepared me, falsely it would seem, to expect grim and depressing narratives from nazis
Can you make your case at all without misrepresenting what I'm saying? I see no other purpose possible in writing that "falsely it would seem"? Who has claimed that you expect "falsely"? Not you, certainly; to do so would undermine your whole argument. As it is my posts you're responding to, and you've named no other source for the claim, the obvious conclusion is therefore that I must have made it. Yet I did not, and cannot have made that claim: your last post--the one this is a response to--is the first time those memoirs, and your expectations about them, were not so much as mentioned.
I have likewise been prepared from reading case histories, stories, interviews with and about people in situations of extreme social isolation and antisociability to expect narratives about people in such situations to be grim and depressing.
And how does all that relate to the story of the Witch of the West? Even supposing that Nazi memoirs are the pit of sorrow you present them as (they may be, for all I know), how does that support the claim that the story of the Witch of the West would be as bad?
This expectation has unfortunately become so hardened in me that it is now basically a statement of belief that they will be of such a nature, I look forward to the many lovely stories of social outcasts to disprove my feeling on this matter.
Again, what does this have to do with the discussion? The only point I see here is "I see everything as grim and depressing because I expect everything to be grim and depressing". If that's not what you're trying to say, you might try making things more plain and less rhetorical, and so less prone to misinterpretation.
"and prevents you from telling it as, perhaps, a Greek tragedy."
Sophocles, your name is silly good times for all!
You lost me. Are you saying that the Witch's life couldn't be done as a Greek tragedy? Or what?
"From the Witch's perspective, the tale is one of ambition thwarted, of increasing power and eventual mastery undone by events she couldn't predict."
359 pages of cake and ice cream, 20 pages of grim depression at the end. That's a good mix. Basically a book that is going to end on a note of grim depression needs to have at least a strong thread of grim depression running through a good deal of the narrative.
Whence come these repeated claims of "grim depression"? I keep asking you to explain what makes things "grim and depressing", and you keep responding "because they're grim and depressing".
And can't a story be anything other than "cake and ice cream" or "grim and depressing"? The stories I read aren't nearly so patently one or the other.
Another one of these little prejudices I am somewhat confirmed in. So in essence I think your view is somewhat paradoxical, or at least leading to poor constructions of narratives. If the story is a happy fun time narrative and the last 20 pages is grim depression we need to spread that grim depression through the whole narrative to make it work and not be as jarring,
What prevents a story in which the last 20 pages are grim and depressing from working as a story? Even if those last twenty pages take the reader completely by surprise (that is, the author has done no foreshadowing at all), that surprise doesn't necessarily make the overall work a failure. Sometimes, "jarring" is exactly the effect the author intends.
at which point having achieved a more pleasing aesthetic context the story is no longer happy fun time, it is grim depression.
So in a 360-page book, 20 pages of "grim and depressing" material overwhelms the other 340 pages of "happy fun" material, even if spread evenly throughout the book? I find this hard to believe.
"ambition thwarted, of increasing power"
although it is certainly not true of all such histories a good number do lend themselves to feelings of grim depression a propos humanity; you seem to feel otherwise.
Again with the words in my mouth. I've said nothing at all about the relative proportions of "depressing" vs. "happy" stories, merely that "depressing" is not the inevitable result you claim it to be.
On the whole, I get only one thing out of all this: the words "grim and depressing" appear to have a special meaning for you that they don't have for other people. They seem to be the only words you have available to describe whatever it is you're describing, you seem to use them in contexts in which other people would use weaker words, and you don't seem to be able to explain what makes something "grim and depressing". Since those words are at the heart of this, further discussion is pointless unless agreement can be reached on what "grim and depressing" means.
bryan wrote:
[A]ny story told from [the Witch of the West's] perspective should present her story from her perspective. I suppose any story told from Hitler's perspective would be full of his attempts to show how his enemies had misrepresented him but would still in the end be grim and depressing.
Which doesn't answer the question, why would it inevitably be grim and depressing? A story from Hitler's perspective would be one of triumph over great odds, followed by the defeat in spite of his best efforts. The defeat itself would induce sadness ("alas! despite everything, he was crushed, his grand plans thrown into disarray!"), but the moment of triumph before that would be exhilarating, not depressing. Wagner could have done great things with Hitler. (From a non-Hitlerian perspective, the triumph would be depressing, true, but that's a different story.)
Furthermore, let us grant that the Wizard usurps power and is a tyrant, the fun Oz is set in a worldview in which the wizard is a good guy, the view that he is a tyrant is antagonistic to fun oz, it may be correct but anyone set out on that path would not be having marvelous fun.
Anyone setting out? Even the Witch? And doesn't it all depend on what one considers "fun"? For the Witch, the "unfun" part would be getting defeated, which doesn't happen until the end of the story. Until that point, from her perspective, everything is great.
Besides, a tyrannical Wizard isn't necessarily "unfun". He might be just what the majority wanted. (Hitler came to power, after all, by popular vote.) The Witch might be opposed to him because she sees the hidden costs imposed by his tyranny, the grinding-down of the underclasses and the eventual stagnation caused by his rule.
I should note that I have not read Wicked,
Nor have I.
I am just of the opinion that to remain true to Oz the proper representation is that the wicked witch was wicked
And what is "the proper representation"? Assuming you mean "Oz as Baum presented it", you can't take the Witch's point of view without abandoning Baum's interpretation. To Baum, Dorothy and the rest are the "good guys", and the Witchs of the East and West are the "bad guys". But the Witch of the West isn't going to think of herself that way. To her, the "bad guys" are Dorothy and Co. The way Baum sees things and the way the Witch sees things are incompatible; to tell her story from her perspective, you have to give up Baum's perspective.
But once you adopt the Witch's point of view, or at least very far removed from the opinions of normal Oz society, and any story from her perspective would be grim and depressing.
One more time: why is it necessarily grim and depressing? You keep stating "it would be grim and depressing", but you haven't once explained what it is about the Witch's story that makes her story necessarily "grim and depressing", and prevents you from telling it as, perhaps, a Greek tragedy. From the Witch's perspective, the tale is one of ambition thwarted, of increasing power and eventual mastery undone by events she couldn't predict. That's grim and depressing only if you're one of the Witch's enemies. If you're one of her friends, that's just more and more good news right up to the end, when Dorothy appears out of nowhere and screws everything up.
Chris wrote:
proclaiming that PATRIOT and the NSAs actions are somehow new is intellectually dishonest.
Who's been "proclaiming" that those are without precedent, that such things have never been attempted in the past? Or does the fact that such things have been attempted in the past require that people abandon outrage over the current incarnations? Failure to list precedents is not remotely the same as claiming that there were no precedents.
And how is it any less intellectually dishonest to pretend that the doings of the current administration are merely "business as usual", something that anyone in power would do, no more reprehensible or significant than the actions of any randomly-chosen past administration? Adams and the Federalists at least gave lip service to "consent of the governed". Bush isn't even bothering with that. No, Bush & Co. didn't invent corruption and power grabs. I don't think anyone is claiming that they did. But the sheer baldness of Bush's efforts--and the remarkable unwillingness of the American citizenry to acknowledge those efforts as what they are--put them in a class by themselves. That certainly seems to make current events "somehow new".
| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2006 | 30 |
| 2005 | 8 |
| 2004 | 4 |
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