Talk Jargony to Me.

For some reason this morning I have been thinking about that time General David Petraeus got caught having an affair with his biographer and how that is one of the most narcissistic things I have ever heard of.

And that has gotten me wondering what that pillow talk was like, in the middle of a war zone, conceivably in a big field tent, with that desert wind howling on through the night outside. And that is when I realized that there are no good asymetrical warfare sexual innuendos! How can that be?! Our misadventures in Iraq and Afghanistan provided us with a plethora of fantastic new jargon (Green Zone, IED, Oh-dark-30, red-on-red) but try as I might (and I have been trying mightily), none of it is funny! I mean, “cockpit” and “foxhole” are barely even innuendo, but how do you find the humor in the term “non-sectarian violence”? I guess “the Surge” has some potential, as does “the Sunni Awakening”, but I think using that last one as some kind of sexual innuendo might be racist (???), most certainly it would be culturally insensitive, so maybe let’s nix that one, I guess.

“Bunker Buster” is funny, but that term has been around since the at least the 1990s. Probably there is some crude potential in “KC-10” (the McDonnell Douglas KC-10 aerial refuelling plane that has a long phallic refuelling “flying boom” sticking out its back end) but that is (figuratively) a bit of a stretch.

“GWOT” (Global War on Terrorism) is fun to say (try it right now! “G-WOT”!), and although it sounds a lot like “g-spot”, I can’t conceive of any situation in which “GWOT” would be an appropriate thing to say. And not for nothing, can I just say that it is the collective opinion of the editors here at Standardkink that we should all take g-spots very seriously and not be flippant at all on the topic.

“Axis of Evil” seems like it should be funny, right? But what would be its practical application? Maybe some sort of very specific group-sex activity? As in, “I was in an Axis of Evil last weekend”, but I just don’t think that is going to catch on.

Do you see what I am saying here? None of this is funny. That is very depressing to me because I so deeply love the potential of language. I guess it is true what they say, there is nothing funny about war.

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A Public Service Announcement about Words.

The editors here at standardkink wanted me to remind you that we are not just a website of writing and photos and poetry about whatever the hell it is that is wrong with me; we also provide the occasional public service. So here is some useful information for you to enjoy: Science Based Life

You know all those times when you have been driving to work and suddenly you have to stop your car right there in the middle of the freeway because there are a bunch of rhinoceroses just lounging around in the road? And so you roll down your window and shout at them, “Hey! Some of us have to get to work right now! We can’t all just lay around all day and let oxpeckers eat ticks off our skin!”

And then the rhinoceroses all turn their heads and look at you like you’re the jerk?

But then you eventually get to work, late, and you punch in, late, and your boss is there, eating a ham sandwich and looking at you all like Late again, huh? and you want to say, “Look, it isn’t my fault! There were rhinoceroses again!” but you don’t say any of that because you can’t because you do not know the proper term to describe a group of rhinoceroses? So you just slink off to your station on the assembly line, shoulders slumped and your face all tight with indignation about how small your vocabulary is.

Well the word you need in that situation, the word which will change your life on days such as that, is crash.

A group of rhinoceroses is called a crash.

You’re welcome.

Also possibly useful in your day-to-day life:

A group of monkeys is called a barrel (no joke).

A group of buzzards is called a wake (really, no joke).

A group of owls is called a parliament.

A group of cockroaches is called an intrusion.

A group of hyenas is called a cackle.

There are times when I find the English language to be needlessly frustrating and overly complex, and there are times when I bemoan its lack of the artfulness that produces in other languages things like simpatico or la petit mort or schadenfreude, but then there are times like this when I’m reminded that one of the great things about participating in such a complex living language is that we get ‘clank’ and ‘truthiness’ and we also get ‘bloat’ which is the way I feel after drinking too much dark beer and also what you call a group of hippopotamuses.

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Orwell’s Linguists.

Orwell’s Linguists

By james bezerra

In 1984, George Orwell created “Newspeak” which is a language designed to prevent its speakers from being able to think for themselves by depriving them of the mental vocabulary required for abstract thought. 

This would have required, at some point prior to the year 1984, teams of linguists working together to design a language which would make it impossible, at some point after the year 1984, to then design a language.

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Twang a Lute

That last poem was about a woman I was introduced to during my recent travels. Her name was not Marie but she actually was an organic horticulturalist and as soon as she said it I said that I was going to steal that for a poem. Those words just feel good in the mouth. Go ahead and say it out loud right now: organic horticulturalist.

It’s fun to say, right?!

This is one of those times when I would have to agree with William Burroughs in that the sound and the feel of the words is the source of our pleasure (as opposed to their meanings). I guess we should take that with a grain of salt though since Burroughs also once wrote the sentence, “Naked Mugwump twangs a lute.”

The editors here at Standardkink have been quietly muttering “the organic horticulturalist” to themselves since I wrote that last poem and they have also been composing a list of other professions which are similarly pleasurable to say out loud:

The desirable phlebotomist

The despondent urologist

The schizophrenic meteorologist

The syphilitic televangelist

The condescending dentist

The quadriplegic archaeologist

The incestious epedimiologist

The lovelorn mixologist

The flammable typist

The buoyant marine biologist

The forgetful hypnotist

The disoriented oncologist

The hearing impaired flutist

The vengeful zoologist

The moist philatelist

The inconsistent arsonist

The incarcerated organist

The debauched hydroclimatologist

The engorged pederast

The hypoglycemic pediadist

The agoraphobic aerialist

The carnivorous mammalogist

The cunning linguist

The cantankerous gastroenterologist

Spoiler alert, “The Moist Philatelist” is totally going to be the name of my band’s next album.

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At the Bar. Money on Dicks.

I’m sitting at a bar at Burbank Airport as I write this. I’m waiting to board a flight to JFK. Today some crazy man in Brooklyn gunned down two cops as they sat in their squad car near the “Tompkins House Public Development” in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood. Apparently online he said that today he was going to “put wings on pigs” which is actually a fairly complicated statement, from a semiotic point of view. It is actually kind of a cool statement down at the semiotic level. Here “put wings” means to kill, right? Which comes from this cartoon idea that when something dies its ghost soul leaves its body dressed as an angel, in a sort of neo-classical Roman toga and playing a harp. And clearly, “pigs” here just means cops. That is not a complicates association if it is one you already know. I just looked around on my phone for five minutes and couldn’t reliably figure out how it is derived, so like all of language, it makes perfect sense once you no longer have to think about it. Anyway, I like to try to write-off crazy, violence-obsessed, gun-loving, douchebags (of every sort and regardless of which side of the badge they stand on) as plainly and simply stupid, but as an English major I am saddened by this “put wings on pigs” thing because it is actually a pretty successful turn of phrase. I have always contended that a really good phrase is one that we feel like we already know. I feel like I already know this one (really good songs are this way too, I think that is what makes them stick in your brain: they stick in your brain because they lock into empty slots that have always just been waiting there. This is how proteins work too.). I really hope that it does not end up on t-shirts.

The last thing we need is more people being dicks to one another.

I am, by the way, in favor of using vocabulary like “being a dick” or “acting like a douche-bag” in intelligent conversation when it is used to point out that someone is objectively no longer participating in a larger dialogue, but rather just being pedantic, reactionary, stupid, or simply whoring for ratings.

In this way, FOX NEWS is usually just behaving like “a bunch of moist douchebags”. Similarly, the Reverend Al Sharpton is generally “just being a big’ol dick all the time”. I keep trying to explain to my professors that I feel it is perfectly acceptable to write my research papers this way. Quite often though they respond by being “douchey dicks” about my grade.

It is completely true that all this cop-on-not-a-cop violence needs to stop, just as it is as completely true that all this crazy-person-on-cop violence needs to stop. But how much do you want to make a bet that over the next couple of weeks we aren’t actually going to be talking about any of that?  How much do you want to make a bet that we’re all just going to be “dicks” to each other?

My money is on dicks.

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Stephen Fry is a Badass.

Stephen Fry talks about language.

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Language Ambiguity.

I heard on the radio today that an animal rights group has lodged a complaint against the Los Angeles County Department of Animal Care and Control, accusing them of euthanizing healthy animals too quickly.

In my brain I immediately thought: “Those sick twisted animal rights bastards! What? Do they want these poor, sad, homeless animals to be killed more slowly? Starved? Left exposed on mountainsides?” I realize now that what they meant was that the the Los Angeles County Department of Animal Care and Control should wait longer before euthanizing them.

Language ambiguity is fun!

Also, please remember to have your pets spayed and neutered.

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Svengali.

I have also been watching a lot of “Psych” on Hulu (because, as lives go, I would enjoy living that one) and one guy just said to another guy, “Don’t be a rabid porcupine about it.”

Also there was this: “I am a detective, not a svengali. I think I would know if I were a svengali.”

Also this:

SHAWN: I’m not Rainman.

GUS: You sing like Rainman.

I am going to start talking like that to people. Just try and stop me.

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Hacktackerine.

Hacktackerine

by james bezerra

I think it would now be fair

if you want to compare

my poetry to that of Shakespeare.

You see, I have learned the age old secret

known by Homer, Pound and Elliott.

If ever you get stuck,

just make stuff up!

See “up” and “stuck” don’t even rhyme!

But do each have that nice “uuuh” sound.

This solution I have found

has worked very well for me!

And if ever that doesn’t work, go to Plan B;

which is to say, just make up new words constantly!

Shakespeare invented the word “submarine”

which I will now rhyme with my new word “hacktackerine”!

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A Minor Alteration I would like to Make to the English Language.

I find it unfortunate that “palindrome” spelled backwards is “emordnilap” and not something cool, like say, “palindrome”. I suggest that we start using the work “racecar” in place of “palindrome” and start using the word “palindrome” in place of “racecar”.



I think this would be more appropriate. And anyway, a “palindrome” sounds kinda like it could be a kind of racecar anyway.



Also, if it is not too much to ask, I think that “an exercise in pedanticism” should hence forth be called “pedanticise”!

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Val Kilmer is My Muse.

The other night I caught the second half of a movie called “Spartan” on TV. It is many years old and was written and directed by David Mamet and starred Val Kilmer with William H. Macy and Kristen Bell.

Mamet is of course known for his dialogue and it is certainly on display in the movie (which I had seen before) but rather than being crackling or snappy, it is just incredibly weird.

In addition to possessing a verbal tick of some kind that forces him to call everyone “baby”, Val Kilmer’s character is some sort of shadowy government operator. Sometimes assassin and sometimes hero, he does all that dirty stuff that governments sometimes need done. In addition to creating a very alpha-male, I’m-a-man-see-look-at-this-giant-gun-I-have! kind of movie, this allows Mamet to craft his own lexicon of espionage slang. When Kilmer needs to get fake identification papers, he demands “a new suit of clothes” and when he goes rouge and plans his own operation, his associates remind him “You’re a shooter, not a thinker”.

Say what you will about the arrogance and misogyny of Mamet’s writing, but the man does very interesting things with words and it was a lot of fun to listen to him build his own secret slang.

Another movie that’s a lot of fun for this very same reason is “Things to do in Denver When You’re Dead”. It is probably 15 years old now, but if you have never seen this thing I insist that you go find it right now. Right now! I will wait …

Okay, so you watched it?

Not the greatest movie in the world, right? But it had a lot to like, yes?
Young Andy Garcia playing it cool. Gabrielle Anwar before she got all crazy-buff and extra-strength-anorexic-skinny. Christopher Lloyd playing someone other than Doc Brown. Steve Buscemi as the terrifying hit man! And of course, the one and the only Christopher Walken as a wheelchair-bound paraplegic mob boss. Not to mention Josh Charles for a couple of scenes and Faruza Balk when she was at the absolute apex of her freaky weirdness.

This is an underworld crime movie. Andy Garcia as the charming criminal that everybody knows and likes and who washed out of seminary because he just loved the ladies too much. The Walken gets Andy Gacria to kidnap his child-molesting son’s ex-girlfirend’s current boyfriend in order to scare him off so that the ex-girlfriend will get back with the child-molesting son. All very complicated. In the process Andy Garcia is trying to woo Gabrielle Anwar when he isn’t hanging out with Faruza Balk's feral cat of a prostitute.

More than for its seediness, this movie is interesting because the whole underworld is imagined through its language. When Andy Garcia meets Anwar in a bar, he describes her as a woman “who glides” and then he proceeds to explain (and this is either incredibly corny or incredibly cool, I’ve never been able to decide) that women “who glide need guys who make them thump”.

The whole movie is like this!

They all talk like this!

The criminals say to each other, “boat drinks.” It means that at the end of a long and bad life, we all hope to end up on a boat in Florida drinking with our friends.
The movie was also important to me personally because it was the first time that I ever heard “whatever” uttered in all of its glorious, all-purpose, dismissive glibness. It was this movie that established the word as the always-appropriate, good-for-every-situation reply, no matter what the question or the circumstance. It was this movie that minted the word as a whole attitude that if you were to translate its psychic meaning would be, “Yeah, I think that that is complete crap but really I don’t actually care and am too busy and important to really think about this anymore anyway and, by the way, you’re probably kinda dumb.”

I say, “whatever” all the time!

And, since this is – apparently – now a blog post about movies with their own languages, I should give a nod here to the absolutely fantastic “Brick” which is basically a noir detective story transplanted to a Southern California high school. This is a movie so thick with its own language that half the time it is virtually impossible to figure out what the hell anybody is saying to anybody else. Written and directed by a guy named Rian Johnson, it is a very smart script and the movie stars (and is largely credited with resurrecting the career of) world-renowned bad-ass Joseph Gordon Levitt. This is also a kind of underworld movie, it has drugs and double crosses and murder and it is all about the seedy underbelly of everything. This, BTW, is a far better movie than either of the other two I have talked about. But really, what makes the movie is the language. Cops are “bulls”, the drug kingpin is “the Pin”. When Joseph Gordon Levitt goes looking for trouble he is “shaking the trees”. There is so much like that that it would take me the running time of the movie to enumerate it all. Just go watch it, you will not be disappointed. Though, if you have never seen it before, a word of advice, turn on the subtitles. The slang and jargon is so fast and thick that I watched it twice. Once for the movie and a second time just to absorb the words.

So anyway, this turned out to be a blog post about movies.

Really all I had intended to say was: the other night I caught the second half of a movie called “Spartan” on TV and it made me miss how cool Val Kilmer used to be.
I guess I got off track. Sorry.

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Some Words and What I Remember About Them.

Some words I like and where I first encountered them.


Ensorcelled
To enchant or bewitch. I had never heard this word until it was used on The West Wing by Bradley Whitford’s character Josh Lyman. Of course, Aaron Sorkin wrote the wrote into Josh’s mouth and – as is his style – he used it like a diamond and then tossed it off, with nary a moment’s thought. That small, singular moment of glimmering is what language can do best. It only lasts for just the second, but that second can burn with the heat of a nova if the chemistry of words is in the right order. Anyway, I was bewitched by this word. Speaking of which . . .

Ephemeral
Lasting a very short time. This is one of those words that seems to come up every day when you’re an English mjor but which is never encountered out in the wide wilds of the world. While it is only meant to describe something as fleeting, I have always understood it to imply a grandness and a sadness all at once. As if in describing something this way, we are remarking on how saddened we are to see it go.

Cloying
My Ex, Violet, used this word in an email once and I had to rush to a dictionary. She was describing herself and her fear that she was being cloying, but simply by using the word, it made me love her more. That was back in the good old days.

Autodidact
A self-taught person. I first heard this word in Professor Martin Pousson’s class at CSU Northridge (Pousson is a phenomenon of nature in and of himself, both flamboyantly and badassedly gay all at once, he invents his own paradigm). He used this word to describe Jorge Luis Borges and when I heard it I felt like I had finallt been given a proper Christian name. I used to make the lame English Department joke that I was an autodidact but I had to go back to school to learn that word.

One-off
One of a kind or limited to a single time. One of my bosses at work has a habit of saying this when she is talking about something unique and since I had never heard it before this job, I had no fucking idea what the hell she was talking about. Unfortunately there is a part of my brain that thinks it would be rude to be all, “What the hell are you trying to say right now?” Apparently its derivation is wrapped up in English slang. Anyway, I use it all the time now.



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ROT FLAME-O!

So I was just texting with a friend of mine who we will call The Captain (because he's a former tug boat captain). He’s an English Department guy like me and we happened to agree that you should only use LOL if you actually laughed out loud and not just as text message filler to indicate good will.

Well this conversation went on to deteriorated the way that only people schooled in Deconstruction Theory can make a conversation deteriorate, until we decided that it is okay to use ROTFLMAO (Rolling On The Floor Laughing My Ass Off) in actual, face-to-face, verbal conversation as long as you mispronounce it as “Rot Flame-o!”

So the next time that someone says something really funny to you, if you’re not in the mood to actually roll on the floor and laugh your ass off, then you are allowed to scream “ROT FLAME-O!” at that person.

I think this is going to be the beginning of a meme. You heard it here first folks!

Oh, and you're welcome.

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My Grammar is bad. Apparently.

So I was at work today with my nose to the grindstone, just type-type-typing away at an email (I type the long ones in Word and then copy/paste them across. That’s just how I roll.) and all of the sudden Word was like SQUIGGLY GREEN LINE! And so I was all, “Uhg. What?”

Word wanted me to change “Please let me know if either of you have any additional questions” to “Please let me know if either of you any additional questions has”.

I know now why that squiggly green line is green; it is the color of Yoda.


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OMG! I Love Your Hair.

Dear woman who works in my building and says O-M-G unironically in casual conversation,

Please stop.


(Look, I’m not a language-Nazi or anything, in fact one of the things that I like about English is its changeability and the fact that it is still evolving, but whereas Blackberry Jam is funny and adds a little bit of playful cultural literacy to the discussion, saying “OMG, I love your hair” does not. In fact, I think that it is a regression, it is just laziness. But what do I know, I am just a guy with an English degree and a bunch of writing awards [that’s right, I went there. I have gad – I mean had – a little wine.])




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Oddly Enough.

One of my favorite places on the internet is the Oddly Enough section of the Reuters website. For months they were the only ones covering that mysterious story of a Chinese man who ran into a wall so hard that he killed himself. Then there was the story about Japanese smokers who got so stressed out about all the government-mandated smoking labels on cigarettes that they ended up smoking more. Why are these things not reported on elsewhere?

Here is a new one that only Oddly Enough seems to be concerned about:

About 16,000 words have succumbed to pressures of the Internet age and lost their hyphens in a new edition of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary.

That’s right! From now on this:

That cry-baby bumble-bee is on my water-bed! What a low-life!

Looks like this:

That crybaby bumblebee is on my water bed! What a lowlife!


So chew on that for a little while.

Or maybe you would rather read about a cat with prosthetic legs. It is up to you.



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