Dr. Metablog

Dr. Metablog is the nom de blague of Vivian de St. Vrain, the pen name of a resident of the mountain west who writes about language, books, politics, or whatever else comes to mind. Under the name Otto Onions (Oh NIGH uns), Vivian de St. Vrain is the author of “The Big Book of False Etymologies” (Oxford, 1978) and, writing as Amber Feldhammer, is editor of the classic anthology of confessional poetry, “My Underwear” (Virago, 1997).

DR. METABLOG’S
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  • Bushlingo 1 — Malapropisms

    Bushlingo is rich in malapropisms. The simplest occurs when an intended word is displaced by one that is similar in sound or cadence, as in the wannabe-stirring pronouncement that "we cannot let terrorists and rogue nations hold this nation hostile." The word "hostile" is similar, kind of, to "hostage," but unfortunately it is opposite in meaning, so that the effect of the malapropism is to depict the United States not as a nation under attack but as an aggressor. In the Bushlingo sentence, "we are making steadfast progress," it would appear that the On-Message President meant to say "steady progress"; nevertheless, "steadfast progress" is not without meaning. Ludicrous in Bushlingo, the near-miss might even have had a touch of grandeur in a more able mouth, say that of Winston Churchill. There's less ambiguity in the assertion that "reading is the basics of all learning"; surely the Education President meant to say "basis," but perhaps his spongy brain had been infiltrated by the conservative slogan, "Back to Basics." Another example of simple malapropism occurs in the defiant "I don't have to accept their tenants," where the college-level word "tenets" proves to be beyond the The Uniter's linguistic competence; the substitute "tenants" inadvertently presents him not as an embattled orator but as a testy landlord.

    Bushlingo deploys malapropisms more excitingly when it replaces the anticipated word with a coinage, as in the piteous Bartlett's-quotation-quality wail, "don't misunderestimate me." "Misunderestimate" is a portmanteau comprised of the "mis" in "mistake" or "misjudge" and "underestimate" and seems to mean something like "don't underestimate me in a bad way." Perhaps, deep in his heart, the guy knows that it is impossible to underestimate him. There is less self-betrayal but equal novelty in the insight that "the United States and Russia are in the midst of a transformationed relationship," where "transform" and "formation" are packed into an overcrowded portmanteau. An even less less clever coinage appears in the Bushlingoid judgment that "this issue doesn't resignate with the people." "Resignate" and the intended "resonate" are near homophones;  so close in rapid speech that the difference between the two is obvious only to those who can read. A very similar example is contained in the proclamation "I want to reduce our nuclear capacities to the level commiserate with keeping the peace."  "Commensurate" is too hard a word for someone who's never seen it in print. 

    Coming soon: subject-verb agreement in Bushlingo.

  • The Black Sea; Lermontov

    In the Black Sea just off the Bulgarian coast lies Nessabar, an island (nowadays artificially an isthmus) that has been a trading center for several thousand years. Still standing in the old city are churches and fortifications that date from the 8th and 9th century. It's authentic and it's intriguing, but it's also one of the very few places in Bulgaria that's distinctly over-touristed, so it was a relief to hop the informal ferry (really no more than a glorified dinghy) from Nessebar back to the mainland. To be afloat on the fabled Black Sea felt–how else can I say it? — Romantic and a far cry from landlocked Colorado. It was that windy boat ride that pushed me into reading about the inhabitants of the Black Sea littoral and of the neighboring Caucasus. This is the land of the ancient Thracians, builders of tumuli, of the Scythians, who went to war with mares only, and also of the Sarmatians (of whom the sum of my knowledge had been the story of the ten virgins of Sarmatia deflowered in a single night by the Emperor Procopius — who was, according to Montaigne, a "master workman and famous in the task." It's a land that is presently the home to Abkhazians, Georgians, Circassians, Ossetians, Chechens.

    My ruminating eventually brought to mind that I've read a novel set in the Caucasus — Mikhail Lermontov's A Hero of our Time. The novel was written in the late 1830s (its author was killed in an idiotic duel in 1841 at the age of twenty-seven). A sickly but wealthy Muscovite, Lermontov had been sent to the frosty Caucasus several times in his childhood for the bracing air and the healing baths. Later, as a Russian officer, he participated in the displacement and genocide of the Caucasian peoples — a war that began in the days of Peter the Great and continues to this very moment. Of the novel itself I could recall only vaguely the deep romantic chasms and rushing mountain streams, the unlettered tribesmen, the gallant horsemanship. Re-reading was, as always, a revelation. The nominal hero, Pechorin, of whom I'm embarrassed to say I had not the least memory trace — but let's face it, forty years is a long time– is a hyperconscious but conscienceless cad. He's the underground man as cavalry officer.

    Here's a sample hunk of plot: at a wedding, lustful Pechorin is taken by the sight of a fair young Circassian girl named Bela. Bela is also sought by Kazbich, a swarthy Chechen fighter, the owner of a most remarkable horse. The horse is coveted by Bela's younger brother Azamat. Azamat and Pechorin conspire: Azamat will kidnap and deliver his sister to Pechorin if Pechorin will help him abscond with the horse. The intrigue succeeds and Pechorin takes the "wild girl" Bela as his concubine. She, of course, sickens. One day, while Pechorin is out hunting boar, Kazbich returns and attempts to re-abduct Bela. Pechorin, returning home, shoots at Kazbich and wounds him; Kazbich escapes but not before fatally stabbing Bela with his dagger — preferring, it's assumed, to kill rather than surrender her. 

    It seems like a horribly racist tale — made worse by the fact that the Chechens are regularly characterized as thieves, the Ossetians as stupid, and so on. The equation of horse and woman is inherently offensive. But the story is redeemed from bigotry because blonde Pechorin is by far the nastiest character in the novel, and because the whole episode can be and perhaps should be interpreted as a rebuke to the brutality of Russian imperialism.

    It's obvious that the novel's themes are not specific to the Russian-Caucasian frontier. It's easy to imagine a translation of A Hero of Our Time into a film set in the American west where Chechens become Sioux, the Caucasus becomes the Rockies, Pechorin is played by James Stewart while Bela transmutes into Debra Paget in a buckskin skirt, and racial, imperialist and genocidal themes are enacted in a frontier that is more familiar but equally falsified and romanticized.

  • A Thanksgiving Conversation

    A:  Do you remember how we met?

    B:  We met at the August picnic. In 1969.  I insulted you.

    A:  You insulted me?  That's hard to believe. What did you say?

    B:  I don't remember.

    A:  If you don't remember, how do you know that you insulted me?

    B:   You told me so.

    A:   I told you? I don't remember that you insulted me, and I don't remember telling you that you did. 

    A:   You did tell me. About twenty years ago.

    B:   I've forgotten about that. What did I say you said?

    A:   I forget. 

  • The Clocks of Rome

    On the library's shelf of new books a few days ago there was a biography of Gaius Valerius Catullus (Aubrey Burl, Catullus, a Poet in the Rome of Julius Caesar, 2004). I’ve had a warm feeling for Catullus since translating, line by line as a schoolboy, the great erotic epithalamion written for the wedding of Junia Aurunculeia and Manlius Torquatus. An epithalamion is a song for the bedding of the bride, and Catullus’s poem overflows with a sexual urgency, an emotion unacknowledged in the public discourse of my younger days. While my teacher attended to such chilly questions as whether the meter was glyconic or pherecretean, I understood with my whole body that Manlius and Junia were warmer than Rock and Doris or Ozzie and Harriet.

    I borrowed the biography of the poet because I remembered being informed that a life of Catullus could never be written. Too little was known of him—only that he was raised far to the north of Rome, somewhere in the vicinity of Verona, that he was of half-Celtic stock, that he was very wealthy, and that he died at the age of thirty in 54 B.C. And sure enough, the new biography isn’t really a biography at all, but rather a gossipy account of political, military, and social doings in Rome during the years when Catullus flourished.

    Much was familiar, but an aspect of Roman reality that I should have remembered, yet didn’t, was that the ancients kept time differently than we do. They were, for example, weekless. Moreover, they allotted twelve hours to the period from sunrise to sunset and twelve hours from sunset to sunrise. But of course, days are longer in the summer and shorter in the winter, so an hour at the summer solstice would be about twenty-five per cent longer than an hour at the equinox, and an hour in midwinter about twenty-five per cent shorter. On any given day, the length of an hour would be slightly different than yesterday’s hour or tomorrow’s. It seems like a complicated system and I think that the modern method of keeping the hours constant in length regardless of the season is quite a sensible improvement. Rome was largely a world of sundials. Mechanical clocks, a late medieval invention, were almost a millennium and a half into the future, and the clepsydra, the ancient water-clock, was not so adjustable or so subtle an instrument that it could be altered slightly from day to day.

    The Roman system leads naturally to another question. When the Romans lengthened or shortened the hour, did they also vary the number of minutes – say, seventy-five minutes to an hour in summer, forty-five minutes to an hour in winter? Or did they keep the number of minutes constant at sixty, but allow the minutes to fluctuate in their duration? 

    And why does Roman horology put me in mind of James Thurber’s observation when he turned sixty– that if there were fifteen months in every year, he’d only be forty-eight?

  • Abkhazian Consonants

    Abkhazian has fifty-eight consonants. By contrast, English, a language which is not consonant-poor, has twenty-three: the ones for which there are the alphabetic letters such as b, d, f, etc. plus sh, ch, dz, ng, the occasional trilled r, and the two sounds that are indicated by th (voiced in 'soothe' and unvoiced in 'sooth').

    Twenty-three consonants can make an infinite number of words; fifty-eight consonants are even more of a mouthful. How can the human speech apparatus produce so many distinguishable sounds?  "By utilizing all points of articulation from the lips back to the larynx," says an Abhakazian linguist, and "by associating with plain consonants such secondary features as labialization, palatalisation, and pharyngalisation." More simply, everywhere that tongue, lips, teeth, palate, or throat can either stop the flow of air or allow air to pass through must be put into play. Moreover, If I understand correctly, a sound made by vibrating, for instance, the area of the uvular might occur in both labialized (i.e. rounded lips) and unlabialized variants.

    I'm guessing that Abkhazian would be formidably difficult to understand, especially for those who are acquainted only with Indo-European languages. 

    Abkhazian is one of the indigenous North West Caucasian languages, distantly related to Circassian and the now extinct Ubykh). It may be descended from Hattic, which may have been spoken in the empire of the Hittites. There are something like a million Abkhazian speakers, half in Abkhazia itself, a country that borders the Black Sea to the northwest of Georgia, and half in Turkey and other locations in the Abkhazian diaspora. Written language came only in the mid-nineteenth century to the wild Caucasus. Abkhazians have been described as 20% Muslim, 80% Christian, and 100% pagan, their religion "a peculiar mosaic of fragments of religious beliefs" in which "Christian ceremonies, Muslim rites, and pagan observances are so closely interwoven that it seems impossible to separate them."

    Though the Abkhazian consonant system is daunting, it's a relief to learn that the language uses only one vowel – ah – and also that both the extinct Ubykh and a still existing dialect of Abkhazian named Bzyp (pronunciation??) employed "a minimum of eighty consonants." Is eighty the record?

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