Today’s Forgotten English is “bag of nails,” meaning:
American thieves’ cant. Confusion; topsy-turveydom; from “bacchanals.”
Yet today was remarkably unremarkable. Not a bag of nails to be seen.
For want of a bag of nails, the kingdom was lost.
language
A whole new year
A brand new year means a brand new “Forgotten English” desk calendar, and the delightfully archaic word for today is “scurryfunge,” which reportedly means:
A hasty tidying of the house between the time you see a neighbor and the time she knocks on the door.
Overall, today was enough like yesterday, and many of the other days before it, frankly, to make me think this whole “new year” thing is perhaps just some kind of arbitrary social construction. Last night, I had dinner out with my parents, then spent some time watching the Mystery Science Theater 3000 episode The Final Sacrifice. I don’t know that it actually is, as they claimed, “the worst thing to ever come out of Canada,” but it was a terrible, terrible movie. Yet they were in fine form riffing on it, and it’s easily one of the funniest episodes of the show I’ve seen. Canada takes a lot of good-natured ribbing throughout — “Bobo ate a bad can of Canadian bacon and he came down with hockey hair…” — but in the DVD extras, Zap Rowsdower himself, Bruce J. Mitchell, comes across as a really likable guy with no hard feelings towards Mike and the bots.
Today, I spent a little time writing and a little time reading — not as much as I’d have liked to of either, but enough to get hopefully get me back into the swing of things. I did precious little of either — of anything, now that I think about it — over this two-week vacation.
And then this evening, I watched the 1985 horror movie Fright Night, which I guess was okay. I think if I’d seen it in the ’80s or shortly thereafter, when I was younger (and effects were not perhaps significantly better), I might have liked it more. Roddy MacDowall’s quite good in it, though, and it has its moments.
And that was Saturday. Tomorrow’s the last day of my vacation before I head back to work. Yay?
Fanciful insects
It was just as cold again today, but luckily I thought ahead and wore a warmer coat. (Or rather, the same coat, but this time with the heavier lining put back into it.) Also luckily, my train was on time today, not at all canceled, and only rather crowded instead of ridiculously so.
And since that lack of excitement was probably the most exciting thing that happened to day, I share with you today’s bit of Forgotten English:
People, after they have been fou, feel as they are returning to their wits again, a buzzing and singin’ in the head, which are called bees o’ the brain. Also, when they are getting intoxicated they feel these fanciful insects.
Thursday various
- Maybe I’ve been living under a rock, but is “it’s on like Donkey Kong” actually such a popular phrase? I’m going to try to popularize the phrase “This is gonna hurt like Q*bert!”
- I didn’t love what I saw of the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear, and it seemed a little like a well-intentioned but disjointed mess. But I’m perfectly willing to accept Jon Stewart’s argument (expressed in this long and compelling interview with Rachel Maddow) that those intentions were entirely apolitical on their part. That they were just trying to put on a comedy show, and whatever “message” the rally had, it was not the same message that so many of his viewers, so many of the left-leaning progressives who attended the rally and are bemoaning its outcome, clearly wanted it to be. I’m perfectly willing to let Stewart pass for falling short of what I hoped the rally would be — a call to arms, groundbreaking satire, something, anything other than a singalong with Kid Rock and Sheryl Crow. I’m willing to let Stewart pass on this, the same way I’m not willing to let Obama pass for falling short on his own call to arms, because when you get right down to it, I buy Stewart’s contention that he’s just a comedian. A comedian with a political bent and sometimes important insight, but one following in pretty well-established treads and with pretty well-established boundaries. It can seem like a cop-out, and I think Stewart acknowledges that, but I think he also does a good job of explaining why it’s not, why his job isn’t drumming up progressive activism (on the left or right) but instead making people laugh.
I think you can argue that the rally wasn’t entirely successful on that front either, but I think it’s important to weigh expectations against intentions.
- On a less serious note, Harry Potter as space opera [via]
- Uwe Boll: he just might make you root for the Nazis.
- And finally, building the perfect zombie safe house.
First Saturday
Because I had the day off, today felt an awful lot like Saturday. So I’m pleasantly…well, not quite surprised, of course, but nonetheless pleased to “discover” that tomorrow is Saturday, “too.”
The Forgotten English word for today is “dollydaw,” meaning “one foolishly indulged,” which seems altogether apt.
It was a quiet day all told, and aside from a quick trip to the supermarket to pick up some cold cuts for lunch and milk for later, I spent it mostly just hanging around the house. I helped my father replace a light bulb on the stairs, then put the screens back on the kitchen windows. Exciting stuff.
I also did a little reading, finishing Ninni Holmqvist’s The Unit, which I can’t say I really loved. There’s a strong dystopian idea at the heart of the novel, and it has a lot of promise, but ultimately the world that Holmqvist creates felt very thinly sketched and unconvincing. I didn’t find the characters particularly compelling or believable, and I was much more intrigued by the idea of the book than its execution. I feel like Holmqvist kind of gets at the problem herself near the end of the novel:
My new writing project had remained more or less untouched over the past few months. The only thing I had done was to read through what I had already written: thirty pages or so, a good start — though I say so myself. But a good start doesn’t go far, not if you no longer have any idea how you want the narrative to proceed, and particularly if you can no longer remember what you wanted to achieve with the story. It was as if the train had left, the train carrying the theme and my motivation.
I think there’s an intriguing novel to be built from the idea of rendering certain segments of the population “dispensable” — even segments that, conspicuously, mirror the author’s own biography — but this just wasn’t it for me. Maybe it was the translation, maybe it was having read it so soon after Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale — by which this suffers considerably in comparison. Whatever the reason, despite its modest triumphs and moments, the book just ultimately felt underdeveloped and unconvincing.