Googling in the theater.

Remember when Pee Wee Herman got arrested for masturbating in a movie theater? That was long ago. It must have been before home video, because why go to a theater to masturbate? Exposure? The thrill of potential discovery? A need for just the right degree of intimacy with others? Because once pornography is subject only to boring disapproval from bland people, one must look for another way to feel that you're doing something titillatingly wrong?

But today, the transgression is Googling in the theater. Googling, long ago, could have been a slang term for masturbating. (Are you googling again?!) But those days are past. Googling is research, and research in the theater is a subversive activity.

From Professor Meltsner's essay about the play "Arguendo," discussed in the previous post:

[The play] is replete with jargon and enough insider's free expression law that even many lawyers in the audience were grabbing smart phones to do some instant Googling.

Do they Google during the performance or wait until intermission? It happens that I was using my iPhone during intermissions at a play last night. We saw "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead" at the American Players Theatre, and since we hadn't taken the opportunity the theatre offers this summer to freshen up our knowledge of "Hamlet," there were passages of "Hamlet" I wanted to read to go along with "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern," which is a play that has 2 minor characters from "Hamlet" dealing with their situation in that larger story that they witness only in fragments.

While others went off to pee or to sip a glass of wine, I stayed put and read. (To be honest, I wasn't doing research on the internet. Reception was bad where we were in the woods, and I have a Shakespeare app on my iPhone.)

More from Meltsner's essay:

What did I expect from a play based not so much on the story of an important law case but on the particularized verbal event that is a Court argument in such a case? Plainly the Company wasn't interested in turning out teaching materials for those like me who train advocates but, then, Collins was advised by all-star legal journalist Emily Bazelon and law professor and Broadway producer Nicholas Rosenkranz...

There's a name: Rosenkranz. Pure coincidence that I should trip over that this morning. No meaning.

I'm Googling and searching in the text of "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern," looking for "meaning." Literally. I'm searching on the word "meaning" to get some snappy way to bring this post in for a landing.

Aha! Guildenstern is talking about "the meaning of order" and how if we "happened to discover, or even suspect, that our spontaneity was part of their order, we'd know we be lost." He refers to the Chinese philosopher who "dreamed he was a butterfly, and from that moment he was never quite sure that he was not a butterfly dreaming it was a Chinese philosopher." There's a pause and then Rosencrantz jumps up and shouts "Fire!"

Well, that's convenient for bringing this post in for a landing — a joke about a Supreme Court text about shouting fire in a crowded theater. Here, let me Google that for you.

Guildenstern says "Where?" and Rosencrantz says: "It's all right — I'm demonstrating the misuse of free speech. To prove it exists." He looks at us, the audience, and obviously we are sitting there, unreacting, the suspension of disbelief having secured our disbelief in the possibility of a fire. Rosencrantz says: "Not a move. They should burn to death in their shoes."

"A century of complaints about business jargon."

At the beginning of the 20th century, people complained about “stop in,” “deliver the goods,” “win out,” “the straight dope,” “make good,” “get away with it,” “put one over,” “show down,” “come across,” “get wise,” “on the level,” “bawl him out,” “got his number,” “get his goat,” “get warm around the collar,” “hit the ceiling,” “fall for it,” and “get busy.”

All that seems so disconnected from business these days as we carp about "impactful," "going forward," "low-hanging fruit," and "at the end of the day."

Why blame business people? Maybe because we just don't like them too much anyway.

"It's not that I think everyone to 'the left' of me is a posing emo-prog and everyone to 'the right' of me is a posing o-bot."

Reading that, I see I need to catch up on lefty lingo.

Crooked numbers and frozen rope.

Terms from the glossary of baseball. I found this (huge) list fun to quiz Meade on during a long car trip the other day.

"We've got Johnny Depp with a taxidermied crow on top of his head and painted to the nth degree... and he looks like a gothic freak."

"There's no way you can look at this and not say it's odd, unusual, strange, arresting, startling... It's a major setback for the Native American image in the world because that's how millions of people will think American Indians are now."

ADDED: The link above goes to an NPR item — "Does Disney's Tonto Reinforce Stereotypes Or Overcome Them?" — and after posting, I decided to check out the reviews for "The Lone Ranger." They're terrible.

How/why/wherefore did it turn out this way? The evidence suggests a combination of hubris, errant revisionism, a misguided and perverse degree of violence, and a script that never worked in the first place.

ALSO: From the sidebar at NPR's "Tonto" article, from just a few days ago, "Can 'Devious Maids' Really Break Stereotypes About Latinas?" ("Thankfully, the maids themselves aren't stereotypes. But there are no Latina bosses here.") From yesterday: "How A Minority Biking Group Raises The Profile Of Cycling." ("It was very powerful to have a group, like 60 or 70 riders who were all black rolling through a predominately black community on a bike.") And, also from yesterday: "The Secret History Of The Word 'Cracker.'" ("For many Southern whites, though, cracker has remained uncomplicated, a source of cultural pride.")

NPR means well, I'm pretty sure, as it talks and talks about race from an upper-middle-class white perspective. That's how it looks to me, anyway. 

Rachel Jeantel made it sound like Travon Martin profiled George Zimmerman... or... what is a "creepy ass cracker"?

TalkLeft describes "a train wreck" witness:

She said (on direct exam no less by the prosecutor) that shortly after first spotting Zimmerman, Martin described Zimmerman to her as a "Creepy-a*s Cracker" and later, described Zimmerman a few times as "this ni*ga" (as in this ni*ga following him.) The two minute clip above is of Rachel and the prosecutor repeating creepy a*s cracker over and over as the court reporter struggles to make out what she's saying, Rachel explaining that creepy as* cracker means a white person, then and expressing concern the creepy guy might be a rapist.

So "cracker" is a way of saying white guy, but "ni*ga" is apparently just a way to say guy? I can understand that, but I'd like to ask a few questions — out of curiosity. I'm not saying the defense lawyer should ask this on cross-examination. (Which should make for some interesting TV today.) I'd like to know whether perhaps Trayvon Martin perceived Zimmerman as a person of color and not a white man at all. You assume that there's no way he'd say "cracker" if he didn't see him as white? But he didn't say "cracker." He said "creepy ass cracker." I understand the use of "ass" as an intensifier connected to the adjective "creepy." Creepy-ass cracker, as in very creepy cracker.

But "ass" could go with "cracker" — "ass-cracker." The conversation continued, according to Jeantel: "So... he told me the man was looking at him, so I had to think it might have been a rapist."

Why rapist? A man raping a man? How common is that as a fear? But it was the first thing Jeantel thought to say after he said creepy-ass cracker/creepy ass-cracker. The term "ass cracker" could easily mean a man who rapes a man, especially one who goes after a teenaged boy.

Urban Dictionary has some definitions of "ass cracker" that predate this trial:

1. ass cracker...
One who not knowing the code or combination to a particular slice of ass is nonetheless able to get inside the ass...

2. Ass Cracker...
One who engages in anal sex.
That wanker is an ass cracker.

3. Ass Cracker...
A term used to describe a man with a large enough penis, to brake the anus of the woman or man he is having anal intercourse with.
"Damn, his's cock is so big, he is definatly an ass cracker!"

The word "creepy" makes special sense if you reinterpret the "ass" to go with "cracker." Martin said a man was following him, looking at him. He might have thought Zimmerman was a man out looking for sex and was watching him for that reason. What conversations had Martin had in the past with Jeantel about worries of this kind. She "had to think it might have been a rapist."

TalkLeft says:

She describes how Martin was "right by his father's house" after he lost Zimmerman, and refused to run home. I think he had plenty of time to go home, he obviously chose not to....

Why didn't Martin take Jeantel's advice and run home? The rapist/ass-cracker theory makes sense of Martin's decision to go after Zimmerman. If he saw Zimmerman as a sexual predator, he might think confrontation was a good idea or even an important step: These creeps in the neighborhood need to know that I'm not their prey. It's not enough to run inside daddy's house. My manhood must be established here and now or I can't walk free around here anymore.

"Speak English" rhetoric that you'd better not try unless you're a Democrat.

1. NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg: "I’ve said this a thousand times, if you don’t speak good grammar – English with good grammar – you’re not going to get the kinds of jobs that you want.... If there’s a lot of jargon, double negatives, and things like that, they hurt your career prospects... People think its cute to jive, and it may be for entertainment, but ya just still have to have great command of the english language."

2. U.S. President Barack Obama: "This bill would provide a pathway to earned citizenship for the 11 million individuals who are already in this country illegally--a pathway that includes passing a background check, learning English, paying taxes and a penalty, and then going to the back of the line behind everyone who's playing by the rules and trying to come here legally."

3. Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich: "We should replace bilingual education with immersion in English so people learn the common language of the country and so they learn the language of prosperity, not the language of living in a ghetto... Second … we should establish that citizenship requires passing a test on American history in English."

4. Former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney: "And Reagan would have never offended Hispanics as Gingrich did when he said Spanish is the language of the ghetto."

For the birds.

The phrase "for the birds" — originally, "strictly for the birds" (I guess the strictures broke down over time) — is defined by the (unlinkable) Oxford English Dictionary to mean "trivial, worthless; appealing only to gullible people." This isn't such an old expression, according to the OED, which finds its first print appearance in  J. D. Salinger's "Catcher in the Rye," published in 1951: "‘Since 1888 we have been moulding boys into splendid, clear-thinking young men.’ Strictly for the birds."

But the 1957 book "American Speech" tells us about its use in speech, which goes back to 1942:

In 1942, when I entered the U.S. Army..the disparaging term that's for the birds was in common use among officers and enlisted men... The metaphor alludes to birds eating droppings from horses and cattle.

So "for the birds" is a way of saying "shit"!

This is especially amazing to me this morning as I'm pursuing a bird theme this morning, but I'd gone off-theme in the previous post to talk about Maureen Dowd's column and encountered the expression "sad sack" and learned for the first time that it's a short version of the WWII military slang "sad sack of shit."

How many more common expressions have a hidden shit theme dating back to World War II? If I encounter another one this morning by accident, it's going to feel cosmic. And don't tell me "cosmic" WWII slang for Coincidence Of Shit Metaphors In Combat.

People who live in the city are apparently so frazzled...

... that there need to be articles explaining the information that it's relaxing to take a walk in the park. 

A walk in the park is a cliché that signifies an extremely easy activity. If you don't know a walk in the park is relaxing, how on earth do these city people survive in the hectic, harried environment I keep reading about?

In other cliché-based advice to frazzled city folk, let me suggest a picnic and a piece of cake. But remember: You can't eat your cake and have it. (Which is often, confusingly, put in reverse chronological order as You can't have your cake and eat it, or as we coddled Baby Boomers like to think: "You can have your cake and eat it too.")

Which is the oldest of those 4 clichés? It's You can't eat your cake and have it, going all the way back to 1562, according to the (unlinkable) OED:

1562   J. Heywood Prov. & Epigr. (1867) 79   What man, I trow ye raue, Wolde ye bothe eate your cake, and haue your cake?

A walk in the park is traced back to 1937:

1937   Amer. Speech 12 155/2   A walk in the park is their [sc. golf caddies'] facetious way of referring to a nine-hole round.

A piece of cake goes back to 1936:

1936   O. Nash Primrose Path 172   Her picture's in the papers now, And life's a piece of cake.

Picnic, in the colloquial figurative sense, is a little older:

1870   J. J. McCloskey Across Continent in America's Lost Plays (1940) 81   Oh, wouldn't that fellow be a picnic for me!

The $495 million art auction — "a new era in the art market."

"The sale included works by Jackson Pollock, Roy Lichtenstein and Jean-Michel Basquiat. The sale established 16 new world auction records, with nine works selling for more than $10m (£6.6m) and 23 for more than $5m (£3.2m)."

These works really are valuable, because they are the last great works in the history of painting — if we are to understand the history of painting as the era when people paid attention to and cared about what painters were painting.

Here's the NYT 1988 obituary for Basquiat:

Michel Basquiat, a Brooklyn-born artist whose brief career leaped from graffiti scrawled on SoHo foundations to one-man shows in galleries around the world, died Friday at his home in the East Village. He was 27 years old....

His paintings sold for $25,000 to $50,000....

Who knows what his work would sell for if he hadn't died young, but his "Dustheads" just sold for $48.8 million. Dust to dust.

Ah! I just had a flashback to the 1970s when — at least in some quarters of NYC — "dust" was slang for money. Urban Dictionary fails to show this meaning. (The favored definition is: "pcp," and that's what the painting title "Dustheads" invites us to assume is the meaning, but maybe the artist hoped we'd see layers of meaning (like layers of paint).)  Here's a nice long list of money-related slang and it includes "dust," but it doesn't mean money. It means lack of money:

Dust -- As in "nothing but." Let me borrow 5 bucks. I got dust.

***

"'Ashes to ashes, dust to dust,' a phrase from the Anglican burial service, used sometimes to denote total finality. It is based on scriptural texts such as 'Dust thou art, and unto dust thou shalt return' (Genesis 3:19), and 'I will bring thee to ashes upon the earth in the sight of all them that behold thee' (Ezekiel 28:18)."

If this were a Republican administration with this much scandal hitting...

... the lefty bloggers would be using the word "frog-marched."

Taking the high road.

"It is ridiculous and not really funny at all. I’d appreciate you taking the high road and not resorting to something childish like this that’s been blogged about 1,000 times."

ADDED: The linked article prompted me to research the history of the term "to go commando." The Oxford English Dictionary traces it to 1974:

slang (orig. U.S.). to go commando  : to wear no underpants (beneath one's clothing).

The origin of this use is obscure; the allusion appears to be to commandos' reputation for action, toughness, or resourcefulness rather than to any specific practice.

1974   Current U.N.C. Slang (Univ. N. Carolina, Chapel Hill) (typescript) Spring,   Go commando, to be without underwear.
1985   Chicago Tribune (Nexis) 22 Jan. c,   Colored briefs are ‘sleazy’ and going without underwear (‘going commando’, as they say on campus) is simply gross.
2001   Guardian 7 June ii. 8/2   Thank goodness he wasn't wearing a pair of sagging Y-fronts or, much worse, a thong. Thank goodness he wasn't going commando.
2004   J. Evanovich Ten Big Ones 186   Unless Ranger kept his underwear in his safe, it appeared that he went commando.

"Boehner defends Senate 'ass' jibe."

Politico front-page headline leads to: "Boehner on 'ass' comment: 'I speak English.'"

(He said the Senate needs to "get off their asses.")

ADDED: I've heard of the hand jibe.



Trying to picture the ass jibe.

AND: I do know the song is "jive," not "jibe," but I'm moved to check out the origins of the 2 words in the Oxford English Dictionary (which I can't link to).

"Jibe," originally spelled "iybe," goes back to 1573, and spelled "gibe," appears prominently in Shakespeare, in Hamlet's speech to the skull of the dead jester Yoricke: "Where be your gibes now?" It's a word "Of obscure origin: perhaps < Old French giber... as meaning to shake... ‘to handle roughly in sport’, ‘to use horseplay.’"

"Jive" is a much more recent word, going back only to 1928. It's U.S. slang, "Origin unknown." It means "Talk or conversation; spec. talk that is misleading, untrue, empty, or pretentious; hence, anything false, worthless, or unpleasant; vaguely, ‘stuff’; = jazz n. 2a."

1928   R. Fisher Walls of Jericho 301   Jive, pursuit in love or any device thereof. Usually flattery with intent to win.

It's also "Lively and uninhibited dancing to dance-music or jazz; spec. ‘jitterbugging,'" which is pretty clearly the meaning in the song.

1943   Dancing Times Dec. 117/1   The rhythm of the Jive is not an entirely new one.
1957   C. MacInnes City of Spades i. iv. 24   I'll teach you..bop steps, and jive, and all.

"Ass jive" would be a much more disparaging way to refer to Boehner's remark.

"Got to write my paper, going to head over to the coffee shop so I'll stop procrastinating "

Coffee Shop Productivity = today's Urban Dictionary Word of the Day.

BBC tries to get its mind around the way it seems to be okay in the United States to say...

... kick ass.

Nowhere is this better demonstrated than in Kentucky, where a high-profile campaign has been launched to change the state's official slogan from "Unbridled Spirit" to "Kentucky Kicks Ass."...

According to Griffin VanMeter, one of the marketing professionals behind the rebranding push, the slogan was chosen to encapsulate the area's unpretentious dynamism.

"What it means to us is that instead of physically kicking someone's ass, it's evolved into a rallying cry that people can get behind," he says. "It's also a little risque which makes it that much better."

You know you're really old...

... when the Urban Dictionary "Urban Word of the Day" distinguishes 2 definitions, one for young hip folk and one for old businessmen and you've never even noticed the old-businessman one. The word — phrase, actually, but it's the height of oldness to be pedantic about that — is "out of pocket."

And, no, the old businessman meaning is not paid for with one's own money, like "out of pocket expenses." The new old meaning is unreachable by the normal means of communication (which, I suppose, is the coverage of a cell phone network).

The supposedly hip and young newer meaning seems to be just another way to say out of control.

What's the "word of the year"?

According to the American Dialect Society. Phrases get to be words in this competition. Guess: YOLO, #hashtag, Gangnam style, fiscal cliff, 47 percent?

"EPIC!! #uwmadison #snowday #snowfight #Draco #Madison #Wisconsin #bascom."

"All my residents came back from the Bascom Hill snowball bruised, battered, & bleeding. #HoFoProblems Good thing it was a #lakeshorevictory"

Collected tweets — with pics — of the latest classic Madison snowball fight.

What are #HoFoProblems? I don't know, and that tweet seems to be the only tweet on Twitter with that hashtag. Urban Dictionary suggests that "Hofo" is short for "homophobic" or — less likely — a combination of "ho" and "mofo."

IN THE COMMENTS: James said: "HoFo is a House Fellow." HaHa.

"Cornball brother."

There's a current controversy about some ESPN commentator musing over whether RG3 is a "cornball brother."

"My question, which is just a straight honest question: is he a brother, or is he a cornball brother?" [Rob] Parker asked... "Well... he's black, he kind of does his thing, but he's not really down with the cause, he's not one of us. He's kind of black, but he's not really the guy you'd really want to hang out with, because he's off to do something else.... I want to find out about him.... I don't know because I keep hearing these things. We all know he has a white fiancee. Then there was all this talk about he's a Republican...."

All right. I just want to talk about the word "cornball," which strikes me as a very old fashioned word. I mean, I thought it was weird hearing Marlon Brando use the word in his 1953 movie "The Wild One":

Kathie Bleeker: Well, what d'ya do? I mean, do you just ride around or do you go on some sort of a picnic or something?

Johnny: A picnic? Man, you are too square. I'm... I... I'll have to straighten you out. Now, listen, you don't go any one special place. That's cornball style. You just go.

Brando's Johnny was the leader of a motorcycle gang that rode into a small town and scared people like Kathie Bleeker. I saw that movie when I was in college, circa 1970, and we thought it was very funny that Brando said "cornball." For years, perhaps decades, we amused ourselves by saying "That's cornball style," Brando-style, usually with an added, "Man, you are too square."

But maybe "cornball" has made a comeback, maybe specifically in the context of "cornball brother." I check Urban Dictionary, and (unsurprisingly) it's got a couple of completely new entries inspired by the RG3 flap: "A classy, intelligent African-American athlete. The kind of guy who dominates his enemies and doesn't fall in line with the opinion of douchebags — a freethinker and warrior." Fine, but not responsive to my inquiry. "Cornball" was the April 13, 2005 Urban Word of the Day with the definition: "Of a cheesy, corny, and otherwise over-the-top feelgood nature. Virtually any inspirational quote that makes you shudder." (The example given is of George Bush saying something deemed "cornball.") There's another entry — with more down than up votes — from 2005:

Its that dumbass motherfucker that says stupid ass shit and acts like a moron... STOP DOIN THAT! U AINT GOT NO FRIENDS GO HOME!

Okay, so... let's look at the Oxford English Dictionary, where if we skip past the references to "a sweetmeat made of popped corn or maize" — "Nanny remained near the dutch oven to keep us supplied with red-hot pones, or corn-balls" 1843 — we get to the metaphorical use of "a 'corny' person," with the first appearance being a mere 1 year before "The Wild One":

1952   R. C. Ruark in H. Wentworth & S. B. Flexner Dict. Amer. Slang (1960) 124/2   Eisenhower on no account can be called a cornball.

Now, the use of "corny" to refer to a kind of person goes back to 1932, according to the OED. The derivation is obvious as the word means "Of such a type as appeals to country-folk; rustic or unsophisticated; tiresomely or ridiculously old-fashioned or sentimental; hackneyed, trite; inferior."

1932   Melody Maker June 511/1   The ‘bounce’ of the brass section... has degenerated into a definitely ‘corny’ and staccato style of playing.
1935   Peabody (Mass.) Bull. Dec. 42/2   Corny—Derived from cornfed, meaning [music] played in country style, out of date, hill-billy, or in a style of pre-1925....

That's as much light as I can shed right now on the word cornball, which — you get my point — seems to be a word that is itself cornball.