What's the Word?: June 2009 Archives

Fraud in Fact

June 17, 2009

Actual deceit; concealing something or making a false representation with an evil intent to cause injury to another

Something I heard on the radio yesterday has lingered in my mind.

A call-in discussion about printers prompted a college professor to call in and say that she requires her students to have printers in their dorm rooms -- as opposed to using a printer at the school's computing center or at a copy shop.

A printer (and more significantly its expensive and over-packaged cartridges) was described by an on-air guest as an unnecessary expense for college students, but the college prof. called to disagree. She said that her students' quality of writing and scholarship improved dramatically when they proof-read and edited documents by taking pen to paper versus editing on screen. You only think you are editing on a screen, she said, and you are not really writing as well as you think you are.

I think about these things a lot, that these cheap plastic keyboards and the digital output they produce are insignificant tools of the craft that establish little connection between the mind and the product.

Another radio commentator last year dismissed Internet blogger death-threats against him as "hyperventilating at the keys", a phrase that could have been applied to the earliest BBS malcontents as easily as today's drive-by insulters who routinely litter comment boards with disembodied anger.

Is it fraud, though? Does lack of depth in public discourse rise to the level of fraud? Does the culture of digital-only content -- an environment whose anger is typically vanquished by in-person debates on the same subjects -- does this digital-only culture constitute intellectual fraud? What about bogus research scooped up as fact by thousands? Is it fraud to seed public web sites with seemingly harmless nonsense and watch as that nonsense travels?

Fraud in Fact definitions

Sozzle

June 16, 2009

A sluttish woman, or one that spills water and other liquids carelessly.

I remember Diana.

A college cutie of mixed heritage, she claimed not to know all the nations and cultures represented in her DNA. She knew she had Cherokee, Japanese, and Mediterranean in her bloods, but other nationalities were mostly speculation. There was talk of a British ancestor who married an Egyptian, and through that a purported connection to old, old, old money. There was also known to be Eskimo blood in the lineage but details were sketchy.

That was her story. It was her only story. She repeated it faithfully, with faith to who I do not know. She never embellished by adding other exotic nationalities or peoples. I suppose embellishments were unnecessary but to me it seemed like an inevitable temptation to lie. One must keep their lies in order, though, and I do not think Diana had the self-referential complexity for maintaining a swarm of lies.

She was beautiful, though, and at that age beauty still influenced my infatuations. In her litanies which outlined her heritage I tried to dig deeper, to find more, I listened for fresh nuance and distraction which would allow me to change the subject, to take another path. The farthest afield I got was her dreams. but her dreams were routine, the stuff of textbooks, dreams which expressed common anxieties and everyday concerns.

One night I felt a breakthrough. She stood and walked to the kitchen sink. She turned on the water. When she turned on the water it leaked from the faucet, down the length of the fixture to the Hot and Cold dials. From there the water crawled along a crack in the countertop and it somehow leaped to a table, where it splayed into a veined lightning-bolt formation, dispersing itself in several directions and eventually slowing and stopping its growth.

It did not grow wisteria-like but the water's spontaneous sprawl was the spark of romance for which I hungered. To me it expressed Diana's character, or the character I longed for. She let the water leak in this way, I thought, as a tacit signal of deep meaning, as a wordless representation of her winsome character. Words, I decided, were inferior tools for her.

Sozzle definitions

Tummals

June 15, 2009

A great quantity or heap.

I questioned excess as a child.

A newspaper advertisement from a car dealership listed several vehicles for sale, with specifications for each. 4-wheel drive was one feature. AM/FM/Cassette was another.

But one feature stuck in my mind as being excessive. That feature was "Ice Cold Air". At 13 years old I thought to myself "Who needs 'Ice Cold Air?' We, as a people, do not need 'Ice Cold Air' in our vehicles."

I imagined myself standing up for this cause, embodying the common-sense antidote to this particular excesses of marketing and American language.

Ice cold air, I would explain to a grade school auditorium occupied by my 3 followers, is too much. Icicles form on the windows, obstructing your view of the road. Your breath is smoky-looking vapor. To simply drive to the grocery store on a hot day you need a winter coat and thermal underwear. And are our vehicles designed for 100-degree weather on the outside and 30-degree temperatures inside?

I would wait for a response from the audience. There would be none. I would thrash in my mental cud, unable to fit it in my mouth for clearer articulation but never backing down from my conviction that car dealers advertising "Ice Cold Air" promote decadence and

As a child I had fantasies of myself as a politician or self-appointed activist hunting for micro-issues, starved for unique problems to solve. Matters of excess seemed particularly easy prey for me, and I find that today I still see conspicuous wealth and concentrated abundance as targets of derision.

The fantasies endure, though -- fantasies of educating the public about how tummals of Ice Cold Air in your vehicle will suffocate you with its wastefulness.

Today I imagine summoning the articulata to describe the fringes of waste that litter every human dealing, every social and mental transaction. Everything generates waste. Every thought, every gesture, every deflection of memory.

Tummals definitions

Dissilience

June 12, 2009

The act of leaping or starting asunder.

When I lived in Florida I drove long, long miles, directionless and free, with limited regard to the time spent or the destination. I never memorized the roads, just as I have never (in 19 years ofliving in New York) memorized Central Park or even the seemingly obvious numbered street names of midtown Manhattan. I do not like to know where I am, not to a level of detail that today's geo-coded urban anthropologists assume is normal.

My mind wandered far and deep on some of those long drives. Among the smells of cow shit and polecat I remember certain structural elements of the Interstate that seemed exciting or evocative to me. These were new developments, new roads, new styles of open Interstate designed to accommodate the future of the Tampa Bay area's ever-growing automobile traffic. I heard stories of traffic solutions (proposed and implemented) from big cities of the world and I imagined Tampa with triple-decker Interstate passages and underground tunnels connecting Bayshore Boulevard to Lutz.

There was one road division I found poetic. I can not remember where it was but it was miles-long stretch of Interstate somewhere near Tampa. For several miles the a 2-lane road became 3-lanes, and then split into 2, like a hydra. The second 3-lane road was called the same as the one from which it split. Its destination was the same, and even the exits were shared. It was, nevertheless, a completely separate piece of road, a passage used by those ghostly companions of the highway whose lights in your rear view mirror guarantee something -- what that something is I never could tell -- and whose travels are still the same as yours though they use the newer road.

Dissilience definitions

Coak

June 11, 2009

To unite, as timbers, by means of tenons or dowels in the edges or faces.

I do not own a desk. I type these words sitting at a table which I sometimes refer to as a desk, but which is in fact a large table made of wood. It was sold to me by a friend who also helped me assemble it. He called it a "work table", a name which could mean a lot of things. I work at this table with the throwaway plastic tools of the digital crafstman but by appearance this table seems better suited to a basement or garage filled with chain saws and sandpaper.

The table is flimsy. I warn visitors not to pound or lean heavily on this table. Despite its appearance of strength I suspect that these 2 hands (and those 2 hands of he who sold it to me) assembled this platform in such haste as to make it a perilous platter.

As with most of my affairs I would probably need to build this thing at least twice before I got it right.

The expression "built with my own two hands" has always rung hollow to me. I may have first been introduced to the expression at summer camp in 1978. After a rabble-rousing series of song-singing and foot-stomping in the cafeteria the camp's Director diplomatically delivered a speech in which he praised the enthusiasm of us campers and the counselors who so energetically sang Native American tribal songs and chants, but he suggested we be careful about how much abuse we gave to the building. "I built this cafeteria with my own two hands," he said, suggesting with self-deprecation that this should not give us any particular confidence in the integrity of the structure. "I don't know if these walls are designed to withstand the kind of energy you men showed last night."

Indeed, it was an exceptional outburst. The walls and floor and roof of the cafeteria shook as each group of camers took its turns singing its song.

There were four groups of campers, each named for an Indian tribe, and each group had a theme song that invoked its name. The tribes were (in order of the members' ages) Chickasaw, Cherokee, Catawba, and Tuscarora.

My favorite song was the Catawba. The words, usually accompanied by hand-clapping and foot-pounding, were:

MMM, mmm-gawa, Catawba got the power! Sing

Repeat ad lib. At the cue of the camp counselor the song ends with:

PEACE!

For some of the chants a camp counselor would lead the singing -- in the style of a miltary drill sergeant who sends out the first line of a song as the members of his platoon respond with the next lines.

This question-and-answer format gave the Chickasaw chant a distinct character. A 20-something year old camp counselor would, with his deep basso voice, shout out "WE ARE CHICKASAW!" and in response a chorus of 10-year-olds with squeaky, pre-pubescent voices shouted "WE ARE CHICKASAW!" The deep-voiced leader would next say "MIIIIIGHTY MIIGHTY CHICKASAW!" and the youngsters joyfully and high-pitchedly responded with "MIIIIGHTY MIIGHTY CHICKASAW!"

Coak definitions

Lactescent

June 10, 2009

Abounding with a thick colored juice.

The Astoria Diving Pool is one of the nastiest holes in the ground you will find in New York City. Maintained by NYC Parks this huge toilet is terminally filled with thick, viscous sludge.

The diving pool appears to be abandoned, though it conspicuously abuts the wildly popular Astoria Pool at Astoria Park.

The filth of the diving pool sits in blunt contrast to the adjacent and immaculately maintained Astoria Pool. While one can assume that the city at least bombs this diving hole for West Nile Virus, mosquitos and other disease-transmitting pests I find it amazing that such an apparent disease-pit is allowed to fester so openly, so hideously, and in such close proximity to a public pool.

The diving pool could have been slated for renovation had New York been awarded the 2012 Summer Olympic Games. We did not get those Olympics, and after brief flurries of attention the city returned this diving pool to its place as a rotting footnote.

The Astoria diving pool does not seem to represent an income opportunity or a revenue stream for the city. Because of this I fear that something bad will have to happen before action would be taken to remove this standing water. A drug-fueled loner might have to break in to this lightly-secured area and dive from the platforms into the muck -- crushing their head and causing severe injury -- before attention would be turned to this obvious health and safety hazard. While none among us wish for such calamities to occur we do, nevertheless, see eyesores like the Astoria Diving Pool as a virtual invitation to such misfortunes.

Lactescent definitions

Peen

June 9, 2009

The part of a hammerhead opposite the flat striking surface (may have various shapes).

I do not handle tools very often.

I recently dug up a small screwdriver, which I used to pry slides out of metal wrappers trapped inside Argus and Airequipt slide magazines. Normally those slides come out easily but sometimes they do not. Rather than use my precious bare hands to force the slide out (a gesture which can cause slides to bend or become otherwise damaged, not to mention cut my hands) I found a tiny flathead screwdriver that has served little other purpose in its 15 or so years under my rule.

Are Tools such as screwdrivers under their user's rule? Computers and other devices are sometimes called tools but I generally feel those "tools" guide and even control the jobs their marketers say they help us accomplish.

Computers and software environments frame and even caricaturize much of the work produced on them -- and they deliver myriad distractions in the meantime.

One with even cursory experience in certain softwares can tell at a glance what software was used to produce a document or a web site -- and this without the residual "Sent From" taglines and "Powered By" follow-ons that litter so much digital communication.

Hammers and screwdrivers, on the other hand, are more anonymously utilitarian, and their reputation or name would rarely assert itself into a finished product.

As I rarely handle tools I usually find it distracting or even nerve-wracking at first to pick one up. My hands tremble as I try to place a screwdriver into a tiny screw. Removing the back of a computer a few months ago I thought at first I would never get the screws out because I could not get the screwdriver to settle in to the first of 4 or 5 screws. I quickly got used to the environment, though, and by the 4th screw I was hoping for more. I had confidence after a rocky start. That is, in a nutshell, my relationship with tools and even with much of life. Nervous at first, my confidence increases as I build a rapport with objects and living things, but for the most part I feel owned by these things. My confidence increases not so much in myself as in my understanding of the tools' capacities and their designs.

Peen definitions

Metaphrastic

June 8, 2009

Close or literal in translation.

I became a fan of Ben Katchor’s Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer the day I discovered it in 1990. I landed in New York in October of that year and quickly discovered the New York Press, a free weekly newspaper that carried Katchor's Knipl cartoons. If you have never seen them then you are missing something not just beautiful but which exquisitely captures the sadness which some of us understand saturates the world.

Ben Katchor is, as far as I know, the only comic artist to receive a MacArthur Genius Grant.

I always found the name of strip's main character to be a little awkward. It provokes titters, no matter how deliberately I enunciate the K in ”Knipl". I find myself saying "kuh-nipple" or "ka-nipe-ul" in efforts to avoid saying anything that sounds remotely like "nipple" but, like any written correspondence which refers to the New York Public Library as "NYPL" it is simply unavoidable that lingering adolescence will intrude.

Just recently, in fact, I attempted to introduce Katchor's Julius Knipl to an older man at the Old Town Bar near Union Square. Our conversation -- which came about because of a comics convention happening in the city that day -- had seemed seasoned and adult enough until I tried to pronounce "Knipl", falling once again in to the nipple trap. The old man looked at me, cock-eyed, asking if I had just said what he thought I said. I attempted to spell the word but he was unimpressed, and moved his genteel attentions to the drunk woman sitting to his right.

Knowing the thoroughness of poetry which infuses Katchor's work I guess I should not have been surprised to learn that “Knipl” actually means something. “Knipl” is, according to a reviewer, an untranslatable Yiddish word meaning “the handful of change or small bills required to get by or just get home from some unforeseeable urban adventure.” Since discovering that definition I stash my knipl in a pocket when my wayward wanderings lead me away from this spot.

Metaphrastic definitions

Adumbration

June 5, 2009

A faint sketch; an imperfect representation of a thing.

HUMAN MEMORY IS NOT SEARCHABLE

Adumbration definitions

Hornswoggle

June 4, 2009

Deprive of by deceit.

I have been thinking about the history of the universe, the history of our planet, and the histories of all interdependent globes (planetary and earthly) whose revolutions rely on those of others.

How, I want to know, does history treat the floatation of human memory, flirtations of recall adroitly omitted from routine accounts of our selves, gently edited out of our attempts to structure our own reputation?

Is it the responsibility of the memory-holder, of the individual in charge of these units of record, to make these ephemera indexable, searchable, inheritable? Connectable.

These flashes of memory float in the oceans of time, lingering with material stubbornness and inaccessibility, depriving other lost memories the chance to connect, the opportunity to resolve mysteries unknown to each other.

This infinite matter passed through the morning jumble of my mind, during my wake-up conversation-with-self in which I imagine myself closing the open ends of a puzzling line of questions, in which I imagine myself sealing a discussion roiled with inexplicable vagaries and residual blossoming conspiracies. I, in my continuation of the dream state, felt that spark of genius which connects the unconnectable, only to wake up completely and rediscover how the genius of the dream state is often nothing but a dull thud of wit to the wakened mind.

It reminded me of a Czeslaw Milosz poem, "A Treatise on Poetry", from 1957, which contains these verses which impressed me to golly. This is from Part III, which is called "The Spirit of History", and it depicts history itself traveling through the infinite ephemera and un-recorded experiences and events of our planet.

— "King of the centuries, ungraspable Movement,
You who fill the grottoes of the ocean
With a roiling silence, who dwell in the blood
Of the gored shark devoured by other sharks,
In the whistle of a half-bird, half-fish,
In the thundering sea, in the iron gurgling
Of the rocks when archipelagoes surge up.

"The churning of your surf casts up bracelets,
Pearls not eyes, bones from which the salt
Has eaten crowns and dresses of brocade.
You without beginning, you always between
A form and a form, O stream, bright spark,
Antithesis that ripens toward a thesis,
Now we have become equal to the gods,
Knowing, in you, that we do not exist.

"You, in whom cause is married to effect,
Drew us from the depth as you draw a wave,
For one instant, limitless, of transformation.
You have shown us the agony of this age
So that we could ascend to those heights
Where your hand commands the instruments.
Spare us, do not punish us. Our offense
Was grave: we forgot the power of your law.
Save us from ignorance. Accept now our devotion."

Milosz next refers to undocumented history as "the possessions of time" and captures what I, for one, feel is the ceaseless, continuous escape of experience into the limitlessness of time.

Hornswoggle definitions

Opprobrium

June 3, 2009

Reproach mingled with contempt or disdain.

When I started scanning my grade school essays and writing assignments I was surprised at how cutting and how incisive still were the comments written in red ink by my English and Creative Writing teachers. Decades later the fresh pain of a teacher's disdainful, lecturous comments scrawled across my stories still stings. I have a sense of humor about it now but at first glance I see these papers and remember the disillusion I felt at writing what I thought was a great story only to have it dismissed on technicalities.

One story was supposed to have been in booklet form, with construction paper front and back covers. I stapled the pages three times along the side and turned it in that way, earning the dismissive comment that my story was not in the assigned physical format. Space for the teacher's comments was limited so I got little feedback on the story itself, only its lack of construction paper binding and my poor handwriting.

I wrote way too much as a youngster. By high school I was churning out page after page of unread mental dross, and by senior year of high school the natural cynic in me had strong suspicions that large parts of my stories went unread by the teachers. I had no evidence to support this, but the last story I turned in to an English teacher was quickly returned with a crisply lettered "A" on top. The story was returned with such speed that it seemed impossible it could have been read in such a short time. There was no comment, no evidence that the words had been read, and nothing but my suspicions of the teacher's attitudes toward me at the time to suggest that he didn't care any more but appreciated the grandiloquent effort.

As a parting shot I littered the final issue of the school paper that year with a coded obscenity. No one in charge caught it, and I thought it was all in good fun, though I later learned that some kids at another school in town pulled a similar stunt and were expelled just days before graduation.

In college my suspicion that lengthy papers were not fully read by the professors was confirmed. At a few spots in a lengthy paper about sonata form I launched into incongruous obscenities and Tourette-like vulgarities. None of them were spotted by the professor, and I had to warn my mother about these lurchings when she read the paper. I got an A+, and while I actually do think the apper deserved a good grade I think the prof. just gave up on reading it and threw his highest award at it as a show of appreciation for the time spent.

Opprobrium definitions

Infumate

June 2, 2009

To dry by exposing to smoke; to expose to smoke.

I have never understood what attracts people in New York to outdoor dining. While sitting at a table on a sidewalk I find myself inhaling truck exhaust and bus fumes, and I must occasionally confront a particularly friendly and/or not-so-friendly self-invited guest.

When I lived on the West Side I vividly remember sitting at an outdoor place and being served a dinner of seafood and a salad, only to have a portion of the salad grabbed by a hungry passer-by who ran off.

Similar incidents have occurred indoors but the invitations that outdoor dining extend to a range of nuisances makes it seem like a phyrric enjoyment.

Outdoor dining extends the floorspace of an establishment. Often times when outdoor dining is offered the doors and windows of the café or restaurant are opened wide. Outdoor patrons smoke cigarettes. Whether or not, under the city's smoking ban, it is technically legal to smoke at outdoor tables I do not know, but it is a common occurance. With breezes and general air movement this has the effect of turning the indoor part of a place into a smoking establishment.

I recently came home with bloodshot eyes and a smelly shirt and it took me a while to realize that I had been indoors at a place where a half dozen people sitting 3 feet away were smoking like chimneys. It was not as bad as in years gone by, when a few moments spent inside a pub guaranteed that one's clothing would smell like an ashtray and one would be teary-eyed from the fumes.

Nevertheless, as a non-smoking barfly I find myself maneuvering around a place, looking for wind-tunnels of clean air, when the doors are open and outdoor patrons light up.

Infumate definitions

Oenology

June 1, 2009

Knowledge of wine, scientific or practical.

I got into a near-argument with a business owner about the cost of wine versus beer and other liquors. Like many people I know, I rarely buy wine at a bar or restaurant ebcause the cost markups are irrational. In some cases one could go to a store and buy 2 bottles of a wine for the cost of a single glass of that same wine at a wine bar. Beer, I was then informed, is usually marked up at comparable if not greater percentage when compared to store-bought products. To me the analogy does not connect, at least where draught beer is in play. Draught beer is generally a superior product to canned or bottled beer, and it is generally not available in homes (in-home kegs exist but they are not common). If one pays $10 for 4 cans of Guinness one would get, for the same price, 2 pints of said beer at a pub. That 100% markup (and I'm not including tips) is still far less than markups of 500% or higher that I tend to see in bottled wines. Bottled wine is, however, the exact same product you could get at a store, while draught beer is (arguably) a better product than what is available in most shops. That's my point of view. I may be full of it but if I am then so are a lot of other people.

Oenology definitions

June 2009 Archives

Recent Entries