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on the brink of eloquence
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| the most plausible explanation |
[May. 18th, 2010|07:30 am] |
"Daniel had a gift for eliciting undignified behavior from women. She had never seen his appeal herself. She accepted the fact of his attractiveness as she accepted the existence of gravity -- it was the most plausible explanation for various phenomena that would otherwise have remained mysterious -- but by her own judgment, Daniel was a most unimpressive specimen."
zoe heller ~ the believers |
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| (no subject) |
[Apr. 28th, 2010|07:42 am] |
"Embarrassing the prejudices of your countrymen was never quite as gratifying as you thought it would be; the countrymen somehow never embarrassed enough. It was safer, on the whole, to enjoy your moral victory in silence and leave the bastards guessing."
zoe heller ~ the believers |
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| (no subject) |
[Mar. 17th, 2010|09:43 am] |
"Where's Mr. Sonnenberg?" said Kovistky. There was no response.
So he said it again, this time in an amazing baritone that nailed every syllable into the back wall and startled all newcomers to the courtroom of Judge Myron Kovitsky: "WHERE IS MIS-TER SON-NEN-BERG!"
Except for two little boys and a little girl, who were running between the benches and playing tag, the spectators froze. One by one they congratulated themselves. No matter how miserable their fates, at least they had not so fallen so low as to be Mr. Sonnenberg, that miserable insect, whoever he was.
---
tom wolfe ~ bonfire of the vanities |
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| computer, the expletive |
[Feb. 21st, 2010|09:42 am] |
"An older example of this process is the French word for computer, ordinateur. It was a creation of IBM France, which in 1954 found it had a problem with the word computer in French. Said with a French accent, the syllables of computer sound like a combination of the two worst possible insults in the French language: con (cunt) and pute (whore). A professor of Latin at the Sorbonne, Jacques Perret, proposed the term ordinateur, a religious term referring to God as the one who imposed order on the universe. IBM trademarked it, but the word caught on and became a generic term."
nadeua and barlow ~ the story of french |
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| femme, meuf, feum |
[Feb. 1st, 2010|08:15 pm] |
"The language used in les cités is an important source of new vocabulary. The main form of jargon is a word-crunching system called verlan, whose origins date back to the seventeenth century. Verlan has been popular in France's suburbs since the 1970s. It consists of reversing syllables and writing them phonetically; the term itself is verlan for á l'envers (in reverse). It has produced one of the most interesting expressions of the political landscape in France: les beurs, verlan for rab, the Arabic term for Arabs, referring to French of North African descent.
The jargon of the cités is evolving constantly and regularly entering mainstream usage, often through publicity. Suburban kids don't speak of français but rather céfran. The beurs who make it to the middle class are now calles les beurgois. A femme (woman) is meuf, a flic (cop) is keuf, mère (mother) is reum, père (father) is reup and a prof (teacher) is a frop. Verlan goes as far as reverlanizing its terms, so that Arabs, first beurs, have become rebeus, and femmes, first meufs, have become feums. Comma ça (like that) was first verlanized as comme aç, then as askeum, and then as asmeuk."
~
nadeau, barlow: the story of french |
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| (no subject) |
[Jan. 20th, 2010|08:23 pm] |
"You see, I've never had a group of people lie to me about my dead father so that I'd hang around. I mean, I think it's great."
10 Items or Less |
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| new website |
[Jan. 18th, 2010|07:43 pm] |
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As a small weekend project, I just put together a new personal wiki: jon.appspot.com. This replaces the old infogami site I used to use now that they have closed shop. |
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| (no subject) |
[Jan. 7th, 2010|07:52 am] |
well you know there ain't no doubt
when the feeling finds you out
you know you can try to run
i tell you it still will come
when you feel your body shake
trip and fall you can't walk straight
baby then you know it's done
you can feel your heart is stung
you're the one that i saw
you're the one that i want
--
sleater kinney ~ dance song '97 |
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| off to a good start |
[Jan. 7th, 2010|07:14 am] |
The snippet from this book's opening pages has piqued my interest. Looking forward to the rest of it...
"Counterinsurgencies have been called learning competitions."
the us army, marine corps ~ counterinsurgency field manual |
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dr_nuk's journal
