new default category
In the newspaper business, we avoided using people’s names in a humorous way. But with these names popping up for local elections, I can’t help but wonder if these names are truth in advertisements.
A horseless carriage (1901 Kidder Steam Wagon by the Kidder Motor Vehicle Co. in New Haven, Conn.) from the New England Historical Society.
One thing I often say to visitors to the contemporary museum where I work is that when they look at something they don’t quite understand their brains will try to make meaning out of the new or strange thing by equating it to things they already know. That is, the experience of something new is filtered by the past: we are always moving forward with our eyes on history.
I recently heard or read something (maybe it was a podcast?) that said language works in a similar way: a new thing is named by its relationship to the past. Thus, we didn’t have “cars” at first, we had “horseless carriages.”
The podcasters were bringing this up in relationship to the clumsy name we now have for the latest vehicular technology: the self-driving vehicle. I have a name for it: automobile, which is a combination of the Greek for “self,” and the Latin for “movable.”
Yes, of course, I know people call their Priuses (Priuii?) and SUVs and Beamers “automobiles,” but I’d argue that the term has been wrong all long. None of those vehicles drove themselves. They all required an operator, or a driver, which is also an interesting word. And the act of driving, of course, is what makes a term “self-driving” necessary, because we understand “automobile” to mean a vehicle that is driven (though that isn’t literally what it means).
This kind of word repurposing is nothing new. The word “car” itself is quite old, from the fourteenth century, referring to vehicles with wheels in Latin (carrus), and also thought to be related to a similar word “carriage,” which just means to carry and is said to be from the twelfth century.
Anyway, this is just to say that it doesn’t seem unlikely that soon-ishly (maybe in twenty years) English speakers will finally be using the “automobile” correctly, in reference to self-driving vehicles.
We heard the screams from down the block during our evening walk. They could’ve been coming out of any of the homes in the neighborhood, sounds muffled with windows and doors closed up from the heat.
Then we turned a corner and saw this truck.
Maybe it was a birthday party inside. Kids were screaming. Now and then, a loud thump echoed out: feet stamping the floor? fits hitting the wall?
Imagine: being a kid and getting to walk across your lawn and being sealed up in a truck and getting to play video games with your friends, shielded away from your parents eyes?
Imagine: having a birthday party for a kid, and never having to have the cake and ice cream sticky finger video game playing kids in the house?
So is this the future?
Most popular infographics generalized via Flowing Data. onaissues:
Most popular infographics generalized via Flowing Data.
Something I saw while looking up something else, or how all your science fair solar systems are bad science:
In Sun Yuan and Peng Yu’s “Can’t Help Myself,” an industrial robot works away inside a glass box at the Guggenheim Museum.
What’s it made of? Kuka industrial robot, stainless steel and rubber, cellulose ether in colored water, lighting grid with Cognex visual-recognition sensors, and polycarbonate wall with aluminum frame.
Is it making art? Is it commenting on how art is made? As a robot uses a giant brush to push liquid around, are we watching a creative act or a programmed act? What determines these actions? Where does this leave viewers? In awe of a machine in motion?
Check out one of the Guggenheim’s newest additions to its collection:
Tr-mp in the final debate was bigly horrifying, should’ve been important, and yuge, but he was weak. Sad!
So if he loses, maybe he’ll disappear, but I truly fear that his biggest contribution will be to alter the English language. More and more people are adapting his braggadocious terminology in sarcastic ways — I’m sure you’ve heard it among friends, classmates, and colleagues, who are suddenly saying and/or writing “yuge” about the mundane things. A high school reunion was touted on FB as “it’s gonna be huge. It’s gonna be phenomenal. The other classes all wish they could have a reunion this great, actually.” This mock braggadocio *is* fun, but will it go away when Tr-mp is no longer on TV everyday? Or will it linger, and the sarcasm end, and it will become an embedded and accepted part of language, with its users in a few years forgetting its origins?
For book-lovers, one of the best things to come out of this endless campaign are the #TrumpBookReports on Twitter. Lots of people have written about To Kill a Mockingbird (“I could stand in the middle of 5th Ave & kill a mockingbird and not lose votes” from @LemonsandLaughs), Death of a Salesman (“I prefer the salesmen who DON’T die” by @dreamweasel), and Shakespeare plays (“Hamlet? Such a disaster. Can’t decide to be or not. Bigly indecisive. And Ophelia? Not my first choice.” by @KDanielGleason).
My favorites, though, deal with “Lord of the Rings,” because I could never see Tr-mp reading the books, many of the jokes are very insidery, and it proves Junot Diaz’s theory in his brilliant novel “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao” that one of the best lenses upon which to make sense of a dictator’s evil is “Lord of the Rings.” Considering how much has been written and said about Tr-mp as being not only a bully and a strongman wannabe, but also authoritarian, the connection seems apt for this period of the political campaign.
With that in mind, here is a curated selection of #TrumpBookReports featuring “Lord of the Rings.”
https://twitter.com/chelsealindsay/status/789238355653332992
https://twitter.com/CharlieAndyFitz/status/789114469351698432
https://twitter.com/JustinDVaughn/status/789254705931177984
https://twitter.com/mind_butter/status/789252426842906624
https://twitter.com/mrglenn/status/789242913397932032
