Neology

A few weeks back, N introduced me to the catchy video remix "Captain Kirk is climbing a mountain; why is he climbing a mountain?"

It does a neat job of turning spoken intonation into quasi-melody (and adding music and video). As I wrote in an old column on intonation:

I'm fascinated by spoken-word recordings in which intonation almost provides a melody. There's a Scott Johnson recording which includes clips of someone saying, "Remember that guy, J-John somebody? He was a—he was sort of a jerk" over and over. It's not really a melody, but when repeated it begins almost to sound like one. Peter Berryman suggests elaborating on this notion by recording conversations and basing melodies on them. Jim Moskowitz adds that minimalist composer Steve Reich has used spoken-word techniques like this, most famously in a piece called "Different Trains," which uses recordings of people talking about 1940s US passenger trains and Nazi concentration-camp trains.

Turns out that Kirk is not the only subject of such remixes. Suddenly everyone seems to be talking about "They're taking the hobbits to Isengard!" and "Why is the rum gone?"

Who knew spoken words could provide such catchy melodies?

Title of entry, of course, refers to the three great traditions of the British Navy.

Y'all may have seen the Powerthirst video. (If you haven't, then the following probably won't make any sense.)

Well, now there's Powerlatin!!!

MORE PRONOUNS THAN YOUR MIND HAS ROOM FOR!!!

Recently was reading some discussion or other of creationism and came across the word "baramin."

Creationists use the word to refer to the "created kinds" of animals referred to in a couple places in the Bible.

Wikipedia says:

The word "baramin", which is a compound of the Hebrew words for created and kind, is unintelligible in Hebrew.

As reported by Womzilla, via Supergee on the cranky_editors LiveJournal community:

Several groups trying to re-ignite New England's faith are theologically conservative, such as the Southern Baptists [and others]. They say a reason for the region's hollowed-out faith is a pervasive theology that departs from traditional Biblical interpretation on issues such as the divinity of Jesus, the exclusivity of Christianity as a path to salvation and homosexuality.

—from an AP article, "Evangelists target spiritually cold New England," as published at Yahoo! News

I've written about gender-neutral pronouns before. Here's an article from a couple months ago about the origin of gender-neutral "he" along with a discussion of singular "they."

Noticed this line a couple months ago in the lyrics to "People Will Say We're in Love" (from Oklahoma):

Your eyes mustn't glow like mine

Has anyone done a horror filk version of the whole musical?

There was a good Frank Rich opinion piece in the New York Times a week ago on Sarah Palin.

But the reason I'm mentioning it here is not the topic or the quality but the clever reworkings of well-known phrases.

Which I'm now going to pick apart and over-explain, thereby killing their humor value, just 'cause I think they're particularly clever.

Specifically:

• The column's title, repeated in the body of the column: "The Pit Bull in the China Shop." Palin having referred to herself (essentially) as a pit bull, plus the idiom "bull in a china shop."
• "she will not stay in Wasilla now that she's seen 30 Rock": updating the old song lyric "How you gonna keep them down on the farm now that they've seen Paree?" with Palin's hometown and with the GE Building at 30 Rockefeller Plaza—which in turn is both (a) synecdoche for New York, the entertainment industry, and the national spotlight, and (b) a sly reference to Tina Fey, who played Palin on SNL and stars in the TV show 30 Rock.
• The third recombinant idiom that caught my attention isn't by Rich; it's a quote from a Matthew Continetti article about Palin: "You shall not crucify mankind upon the cross of Goldman Sachs," mixing the classic William Jennings Bryan "Cross of Gold speech" with today's financial travails.

Recently came across an interesting item in Wikipedia: List of names for the Biblical nameless, which "compiles names given in Jewish or Christian mythology for characters who are unnamed in the Bible itself."

For example, the apocryphal book of Jubilees gives Noah's wife's name as Emzara.

Some years back, I saw an employment ad for a major computer company in which all the text said "Lorem ipsum." Clearly someone was supposed to fill in actual copy, but had neglected to do so.

Something similar, though less extreme, happened in the San Diego Union-Tribune the other day, when their new automated pagination system made some mistakes:

A front-page story sends the reader to A10 to continue the story but you won't find the story title. Instead, you'll find the word "Slug"[...]. Below that, you'll find the phrase "Three lines of jumphed right in here, yuppers."

(And btw, I hadn't previously encountered the word "jumphed," but I like it. In case it's not clear, it refers to a "jump headline." See also the question of whether to use jump heds or jump words.)

My name is Shmuel, and I'll be your guest blogger. I'd like to thank Jed for inviting me to come and play. I'm flattered, and excited, and terribly uncertain of what I'll be writing about. But let's start with "salutations."

It occurred to me, as I was casting around for ideas, that the use of "salutations" as a salutation is a bit strange. "Hello" is a salutation. "Dear Sir or Madam" is a salutation. "Salutations" itself seems more like a placeholder, as if one were saying "[insert salutation here]." The same would seem to go for "greetings," for that matter.

(You may be thinking of E.B. White right now. In my experience, "Salutations!" is practically code for "I loved Charlotte's Web as a kid and I still love both language and whimsy." That's likely a skewed sample, however; the kind of people I hang out with tend to be those who love Charlotte's Web, language, and whimsy, no matter what greetings they choose.)

My first thought was that "salutations" might be functioning as a clipped form of a longer phrase, perhaps "I offer you salutations!" An initial check in the unabridged dictionaries I had onhand (notably Merriam-Webster's 2nd and 3rd ed., American Heritage 4th ed., Random House 2nd ed.) found no trace of "salutations" itself being used as a salutation. Furthermore, Random House was the only one to include "greetings" in anything like the sense at hand: "3. greetings, an expression of friendly or respectful regard: send my greetings to your family." This strikes me as not quite the same sense as "Greetings!" but it's in the right ballpark.

Ultimately, I pulled out the big guns: the Oxford English Dictionary. The OED confirmed my original thought, and showed that this construction goes back a long way. Definition 2 for "salutation" is "Elliptically for 'I offer salutation'," though this is flagged as being archaic. The earliest citation is from 1535: "Vnto Eszdras..peace and salutacion." The year 1600 brings a familiar form, almost: "Salutation and greeting to you all." In the singular form, found in these examples, the usage is indeed archaic. The plural form is not, but the OED doesn't mention that at all.

Two things strike me as interesting in all of this. The first is the elliptical form of "salutations" itself, which strikes me as unusual. After all, one doesn't say "Valedictions!" when leaving. Can you think of other examples of such a usage?

The second is that a usage as common as "Greetings!" or "Salutations!" can apparently be taken for granted to the extent that major dictionaries don't bother to note it at all. For that matter, even though the usage has changed from singular to plural—nobody these days would say "Greeting!" or "Salutation!"—only Random House includes the specifically plural form, and that only for "greetings." It's rare that I find a blind spot like this. And kind of cool.

I'm not sure all of this adds up to anything, but there you have it. Salutations!