February 2024
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It's humiliating for me to confess that until a few weeks ago I had never heard of the Piacenza Liver, which is a life-size bronze Etruscan replica of the liver of a sheep, and unquestionably European civilization's most heralded metal liver. How could I not have known? The PL was unearthed in 1877 and dates…
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Although The Magnificent Ambersons was first published in 1918, it was still admired and almost canonical in the 1950s when I was coming to awareness. It was the sort of unchallenging social realism novel in the Sinclair Lewis or John Marquand tradition that was then school-and-societyy approved. Did I read it then? I can't say…
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I have just finished reading Sybille Haynes comprehensive study, Etruscan Civilization, A Cultural History (2000). It's not only a window into a remarkable extinct world, but also a trove of exciting words new to me. And as readers of this blague are well aware, vocabulary excites Dr. Metablog. For example: a skyphos is a two-handled cup…
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A dvandva compound is a formation in which two individual nouns are joined to form a new word. Wik offers the example "singer-songwriter." I think that "barber-surgeon" is therefore a dvandva, although I am confident that I am the first person ever to denominate it as such. Anaptyxis is a term in linguistics for the…
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Autobiographers from Brooklyn divide, on the whole, into two camps. There are the discontented, who yearned from day one to get the hell out of the neighborhood as quickly as possible; and then there are the nostalgics, perpetually romanticizing those great days of spaldeens, stickball, and chocolate egg creams. Martin Levinson's privately-published memoir Brooklyn Boomer,…