Rampaging Waves, and Glass Puddles

On a blustery day some years ago, when he was quite small, my youngest son looked out the window at the lake and said: "Look at that rampage of waves!" And that's, of course, exactly what the waves were doing, rampaging. Others might call it whitecaps, but let's keep language accurate, shall we? They was a rampage of waves again the other day, see:

A Rampage of Waves

The other thing is that I did some baking the other day - of clay, that is. Here's one of the pieces:

Squash Pot, 7.5", stoneware.

That puddle in the bottom, that's molten glass. Shards from a smashed-up vodka bottle, to be precise, which I had chiefly bought for the lovely cobalt blue of the container. Well, I needed it to make vanilla extract (two vanilla beans in 3/4 c. vodka, steep for two weeks, use); but the clear glass bottle would have been cheaper. You know you're addicted to blue glass when you buy booze according to the colour of the bottle. The glass crackled most satisfactorily once it cooled.

Glass Puddle In Squash Pot, 3", glass.

Life, the Universe, Rampaging Waves and Glass Puddles. The dish is for sale, the waves are not.

More Words

POLONIUS: What do you read, my Lord?
HAMLET: Words, words, words.

POLONIUS: Though this be madness, yet there is method in't.
(Hamlet, II. ii. 191-192, 205-206)

Life, the Universe, and ... Words. Don't be scared, it's only language.

Words

I was watching "Mamma Mia" the other day. Yes, that movie with Meryl Streep and Colin Firth and a host of others doing song-and-dance numbers to ABBA tunes. And it got me thinking. (And that's how much of an overthinker I am - a musical based on ABBA songs makes me think. Sad, but true.)

What got me going, in this particular instance, was the movie rating. It's labelled PG; and apparently it got the "P" for "nudity" (that would be the guy wearing a thong with tattoos on his butt cheeks) and "language [that] may offend". Uh-huh, okay. Fine. No problem. (I guess the guidance that parents are supposed to provide to their eight-year-olds goes somewhere along the lines of "Now, darling, having a pair of eyes tattooed on your butt cheeks is in bad taste, you shouldn't be doing it.") Never mind the fact that throughout the film, there are some very suggestive dance scenes, one of them between a 50-something woman and a 20-ish young man who is openly panting after her (and gets the brush-off, quite hilariously, to the tune "Does Your Mother Know You're Out"). Never mind that Meryl Streep's character Donna has a conversation with her girlfriends which starts with the question "Are you getting any?" and progresses from there through some fairly heavy innuendo; and that the whole storyline of the musical revolves around the fact that Donna does not know who her daughter's father is - yes, for exactly the reason you would suppose. But all those things are not deemed to be worthy of parental guidance - it's "nudity" and "language" that does it.

Which brings me to my other point, "The King's Speech" - yet another Colin Firth film which took movie audiences by storm, and rightfully so. It was rated R. Restricted. And why? Because Colin Firth's character, King George VI, receives speech therapy for his debilitating stammer, and in the course of the therapy he says "fuck". That's it. That's all. That one word insured that children, even 17-year-old young adults, could not see this movie without an "adult" in attendance. Okay, fine - the word is repeated multiple times at high volumes, and it might even be accompanied by "damn" and "bugger"; I can't exactly remember. But the thing is that in the scene in the movie, there is a point to the therapist's making the King say this - he needs to get over his crippling inhibitions. And that's all he does, say it (or shout it, out the open window, as it were), and it, along with all the rest of the therapy, does its job. "The King's Speech" is a story of the triumph of the human spirit over fear and shame. But it was "restricted" from being shown freely because of a word.

The only conclusion I can draw from this is that Americans are afraid of words. Not of images, of sounds, or of actions - just of words. I wonder what has the movie ratings people in such a flap about it. Perhaps, when they were young, they were taught that "Sticks and Stones may break my bones / but words may never hurt me," and then they found out that that's nothing but a big fat lie. So now they're mortally afraid of words, and ban them from being heard by young audiences in movie theaters. Or can you think of another reason?

Incidentally, don't get me wrong - this is not meant to be bashing "Mamma Mia". I enjoyed myself watching it the other day, and will probably watch it again soon. It's an engaging, feel-good piece of fluff with gorgeous visuals, toe-tapping tunes, and marvellous actors strutting their stuff. Great fun for a dreary afternoon. I just wish that the movie raters would get off their obsession with "language", and start thinking about content for a change. The ratings would perhaps, then, start meaning something again.

Life, the Universe, and Words. Don't be afraid of Language.

Hyperbole and Oxymoron

This is highly symbolic (sim-BOL-lick).

My son brought home a poetry exercise, and he had to give an example of hyperbole. Now, I know what hyperbole is, pretty much - but what I don't know is how to pronounce it. Is it HIGH-per-bowl, or high-PURR-bolly?

Well, thank goodness for Google; it has the power to prevent the unspeakable embarrassment of mispronounced literary terminology. And that, just now, was hyperbole, the "unspeakable embarrassment" part. High-PURR-bolly, as it turns out - go figure.

You really need a pronunciation guide for those things; there's no way you can guess whether the individual terms are pronounced the way you think, or put the emPHAsis on the wrong sylLABle. I was doing the fancy pronunciation on "oxymoron" - called it ox-IMMER-on; it sounded so much more literary that way - until someone looked at me funny for it and said "Is that how you pronounce that?" Seeing as she was an English BA who had actually gone to a brick-and-mortar university for her degree, unlike me who got hers from a distance ed school and learned all these words from books instead of live people, I thought she might have a point, so I looked it up. And to my great chagrin is turns out to be an OXy-MOR-on - you know, as in "bovine draft animal of low intelligence". It's from the Greek words for  "sharp" and "dull", so an oxymoron is a sharpdull - a contradiction in terms. And a moron, it appears, is a dullard, i.e. not the sharpest knife in the drawer (and that, in turn, is a metaphor. MET-a-for, not met-TAF-er. Sigh.).

English is not the easiest language to learn to speak by reading it. I got laughed at once, when I hadn't been in Canada all that long, for calling an executive (ex-ECK-you-tiff) an exe-CUE-tiff. Well, excuse me, they execute power, don't they? They don't ex-ECK-ute it, they exe-CUTE it. Cute, I know. I was making the mistake of applying logic to the English language. Hah. Silly me.

Life, the YOU-ni-vurs, high-PURR-bollies and OXy-MOR-ons. When in doubt, look it up.

Slough

I learned to speak Prairie on the weekend. Oh yes. As I already mentioned, there was the lesson that tall round steel containers on the prairies are called "granaries", not "silos" (silos are for animal feed, not people feed). There was also the spelling lesson I got on how to write it; when I told another prairie-born friend how our Saskatchewan friend had been so emphatic about the right word, I spelled it "graineries", and she wrote back nonchalantly talking about "granaries". Aha, another thing learned.

And then, furthermore, there is "coulee", a dry ditch on the prairie. (No, not a native Asian worker who is employed to carry heavy burdens for ridiculously low wages. Those are coolies.) And there is "butte" - take off the "e", and imagine one sticking out of the flat of the prairie. That's sort of what it looks like. But it's pronounced "bute", like the first syllable in "butane", not like, well, the body part.

But then, there's "slough". And that's a really funny word, because of its pronunciation. A slough on the prairie is a lake, often without an outlet, so it can become almost salty (or so I hear). And that kind of slough, it's pronounced "slew". Like flew, and grew, and sew. (Oh, wait...) But then, another friend of mine comes from the land where they pronounce things correctly (well, you have to admit that England has a certain claim to being the arbiter of how English should be pronounced. I mean, it's not called Americanish, or Canadianish, or Australianish, is it?). He says that there, the word "slough" is pronounced to rhyme with bow, and row, and sow. Uh... I mean, as in: "After the sow had a row with the cow about who got to drink from the slough, she took a bow and walked off in a huff." NOT as in "The farmer liked to sow his row of wheat so that it would go in a bow around the slough." You know?

That's what really confused me about J. K. Rowling - I used to pronounce her name like "Roland" with "ing" on the end. Then I read somewhere that she said the "Row" part was pronounced like the row people have with each other; and that just confirmed it for me. I learned that word from books, you see, and had never heard it said out loud, so in my mind I was always pronouncing it like the activity people engage in with paddles and oars. (But, oh dear, I suppose you could have the argumentative "row" with paddles and oars, too - it would get a little violent, that, as Dr. Seuss so aptly describes in the "Tweedle Beetle Battle with Paddles in a Puddle" from Fox in Socks. No, no, I mean the rowing you do with paddles and oars on the water. In boats. Phew, this is involved...). It took some watching of Brits movies to figure out that an argumentative row, the kind that J. K. Rowling means, rhymes with "cow" and "now". As does the slough, the watery kind, in England. But not on the prairies.

Now, I also have this vague idea that there is a kind of "slough" that's pronounced differently yet, namely when it's a verb. To slough, i.e. to shed skin - sloughing off - isn't that pronounced to rhyme with "tough"? Sort of like, well, tuff? And huff? Sluff?

I think I'm giving up. English is just weird. Suffice to say, the prairie slough is something that ducks can swim on, and it gives greater value to a piece of land. And the sun turns it into a molten gold when it glints off it in one of those spectacular prairie sunsets one hears so much about.

Life, the Universe, Coulee and Slough. I speak Prairie - how about you?

I swear

No, really, I do. Or maybe "cuss" is the better word- the cutesy-but-appropriate word, because I don't really "curse", but prefer the euphemistic terms, generally. You know, "sheesh" and "flippin'" and "blinkin'". But I do like my expletives. They have to have some good sibilants or plosives to make them work. Try hissing out that "shshshshss!" at the beginning and end of "sheesh" when you're really frustrated, and you'll know what I mean. It's a much more satisfying sound than, say, "mommmm". Cracking out a "p" or "k" sound, like in "crap!" works too. Well, I suppose that one already crosses the line into "hard core swearing", which, I'll admit, I've been known to do, too, in moments of extreme provocation.

The funny thing is, though, that for my personal expletive satisfaction the word doesn't even have to mean anything, per se. I don't need shock value, just a good sound combination. My favourite word for the purpose is the Swabian "Heideneinomal!" which means nothing-at-all (no, it doesn't mean "nothing-at-all", it means nothing. At all.). Although I'm sure it had its origin in some profanity, probably something to do with "heilig" (holy), but that's not why I use it. It just sounds kind of neat- try it, "high deny no mall!" and sort of slur it together, and then huff it out in one go. Works, doesn't it? The ultimate expression of exasperation.

That picture up there, that's my tray of butterhead lettuce and onion seedlings, about half an hour ago. I carried it to the sink, gave it a good soaking, and when I took it back to the seedling shelf, it buckled in the middle. SPLAT! That rated a good, long, very loud "AyayayayayayayayaYAI!" If they had been more impressive seedlings, something a little stronger in the expletives line might have been warranted. As is, some of them were saved, so we'll see if they still turn into anything. On the upside, some of the dirt splattered about six feet away from where the tray hit. That has got be some kind of record, doesn't it? Olympic Seedling-Dirt Splattering. The heats are immediately after the Creative-Swearing ones, on Tuesday afternoon.

AtDollarPercentAmpersandNumberSymbol, I say!