EthicalDative

‘Crypto Casino’ and ‘Derp’

Posted on July 18, 2022 by JMN

The way I see it, crypto evolved into a sort of postmodern pyramid scheme. The industry lured investors in with a combination of technobabble and libertarian derp; it used some of that cash flow to buy the illusion of respectability, which brought in even more investors. And for a while, even as the risks multiplied, it became, in effect, too big to regulate… [This may be] a moment in which effective regulation has become politically possible… before crypto stops being a mere casino and becomes a threat to financial stability [All bolding mine — JMN].
(Paul Krugman, “Crypto Is Crashing. Where Were the Regulators?” NYTimes, 7-11-22)

I would suggest investors are “lured” and not “lured in,” but that’s a matter of style. The ‘in’ does add realized force to the bait-taking. Krugman’s good at dropping nuggets of the patois du jour in his columns. Hello, derp: “speech or action that’s foolish or stupid.” There’s ever a fresh word for stale states. Poaching the gaming term ‘casino’ for application to finance registers a tick on the rhetoric scale.

Crypto currency seems more of an attitude than a substance, something like an arcane, dark matter floating in the blockchain nebula. Language-wise, the term ‘crypto’ is magnetized for me because of its connection to ‘cryptic.’ The discovery of ‘cryptic coloration’ in high school biology, and of ‘lapidary’ somewhere else (Baudelaire?), gave me two favored words at an early stage in the quest for crypto literacy.

Posted in Commentary, Quotations | Tagged dialect, language, lexicon, personal | Leave a comment

‘Your Cheatin’ Heart Will Tell on You’

Posted on July 17, 2022 by JMN

From Rae Armantrout — https://ethicaldative.com/2022/04/12/how-poetry-feels-about-itself/

… Is the best song ever written. It makes a start, goes somewhere you can follow, and has a wind-up. Hank Williams tells a story every man jack of us can relate to. This song and a few beers will see you through hard times. Your modern tunes don’t hold a candle to it. I wish they’d make music great again.

Hank teaches us in this song how a woman can hurt a man, make him play the fool, break his spirit and his heart with one kick. In theory a man can cheat, too. But men don’t cry, and there’s cryin’ all the way through this song. Besides, it ain’t “heart” that makes a man what he is, is it?

Let’s face facts. Women are what’s called mononuclear by nature. They’re meant to stand by their man, so it hurts more when they cheat. On the other side of the coin, a redblooded man is built to follow his instink, to get his hoggin’s — you know what I mean. Boys will be boys. When there’s a bull in the pasture, the heifers come a-callin’!

You want real poetry? Listen to it:

Your cheatin’ heart will pine someday
And crave the love you threw away…

Your friends,
Brett K. and the Boys

Brevity is the soul of it
(c) 2022 JMN — EthicalDative. All rights reserved

Posted in Anthology | Tagged Branded Figments, language, poetry | Leave a comment

‘Blown Up’ by Gunfire

Posted on July 16, 2022 by JMN

An obstetrician who happened to be at the parade that day described the Highland Park massacre of July 4, 2022:

The people killed were “blown up by that gunfire,” he said, “blown up. The horrific scene of some of the bodies is unspeakable for the average person.”

A battle rifle is a soldier’s rod and staff in the valley of the shadow of combat — a tool to survive and prevail. The soldier doesn’t have to shoot with high accuracy to inflict “unspeakable” injury on the enemy, a crucial advantage in the hell of war.

To carry out a mass shooting, a person in the U.S. will choose a battle rifle over a handgun whenever possible. To a disturbed mind, it’s simply the best tool for the job.

Writing in 2018, a radiologist in Florida described the tracks that bullets leave through a human liver. A typical 9mm handgun’s is a thin gray line roughly the size of the projectile. An AR-15 bullet simply pulps the organ; it “passes through the body like a cigarette boat traveling at maximum speed through a tiny canal… Exit wounds can be the size of an orange.” The handgun victim might reach a trauma center alive and be saved; the rifle victim usually hasn’t a prayer.

It doesn’t seem controversial to say that someone who murders even a single fellow human is not coming from a good place in his head, unless the Devil made us. Solutions that involve improved mental health services for identifying and treating potential perpetrators of mass shootings have not come to the fore yet. Neither have solutions that substantially diminish the likelihood that they will obtain rifles and ammunition.

As Uncle Walter (Cronkite) used to say in signing off the CBS nightly news: “And that’s the way it is, Saturday, July 16, 2022.”

(Charles M. Blow, “Show the Carnage,” NYTimes, 7-6-22)
(Christina Prignano and Ryan Huddle, “There have been at least 314 mass shootings so far in 2022. There have been only 186 days,” bostonglobe.com, 7-5-22)

Still small voice
(c) 2022 JMN — EthicalDative. All rights reserved

Posted in Commentary, Quotations | Tagged miscellaneous | 2 Comments

Horns UP! The Ides of Texas Are Upon You

Posted on July 15, 2022 by JMN

Also the eyes. All the live long day. You can not get away. God help us.

Still small voice.
(c) 2022 JMN — EthicalDative. All rights reserved

Posted in Commentary | Tagged language, Texas | 1 Comment

The F-Word Is Spawning

Posted on July 14, 2022 by JMN

https://ethicaldative.com/2021/12/16/never-send-to-know-for-whom-the-tales-told/

When words turn flammable we call them “f-words.” They’re too hot to utter.

F***. — The granddaddy of f-words. All f-words trace their ancestry to this one. It’s unsafe for print and held flammable by stare decisis until Alito. In the formerly-United-K, striving-to-again-be-Great Britain, it’s a staple of effing and blinding.

Fascist. — British radio presenter James O’Brien says “f-word,” when he means “fascist,” referring to policies proposed and enacted by the Tory government. The Tories hate the word. He doesn’t give a fig, does he? He knows it’s flammable and flaunts it in their faces.

Filibuster. — Laws are plucked and spatchcocked with the Senate filibuster. They bleed out because they need 60 votes to pass. It lets the few ride herd on the many. Formerly a fiddle and a fudge, “filibuster” is a McF-word now in the Speaker’s honor.

Fifth. — The ex-brass looked like a man with his cahooties in a vise. Fifth! he croaked, when asked if he believed in the peaceful transition of government. A pettifogger manhandles the plea into: My client prefers to keep his innocence to himself. “Fifth” leaves a skidmark on the polity’s underpants. It’s an f-word now, except when used for bourbon.

Posted in Anthology, Commentary | Tagged Branded Figments, language | Leave a comment

Robert Colescott: ‘Oh Wow… Oh [Expletive]!’

Posted on July 12, 2022 by JMN

“The Wreckage of the Medusa,” 1978. Credit… The Robert H. Colescott Separate Property Trust/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

My weakness for parody has emerged at easel in attempts to paint pictures that convey a profound disquiet over gun culture. I read (present tense) the paintings of Robert Colescott (1925 – 2009) with profound amazement, and Roberta Smith’s comments, as always, with interest. She calls Colescott’s work “relentlessly provocative.”

It reveals a man who was eventually able to meld his own private demons about race with his country’s public ones, creating one of the most compelling, simultaneously personal and socially relevant bodies of work in 20th century American painting.

“Eat Dem Taters,” 1975. Credit… The Robert H. Colescott Separate Property Trust/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

… He trafficked in stereotypes and caricature of both Blacks and whites, often reformulating Western masterpieces with nonwhite subjects. They were antic and savagely satirical… Colescott’s paintings continue to make people nervous, especially in the art world’s coastal enclaves.

Robert Colescott, “Beauty is in the Eye of the Beholder,” 1979. A parodist, he appropriated well-known themes from Western art history (in this case, from Matisse). Credit… The Robert H. Colescott Separate Property Trust/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

His points were pushed forward by his searing palette (hot pink, magenta and a vibrant cerulean blue) and vigorous brushwork, at once masterly and sloppy. In 1990, he wrote of making “big sensuous paintings. It’s the first impact that people get. They walk in and say, ‘Oh wow!’ And then, ‘Oh [expletive]’ when they see what they have to deal with in subject matter. It’s an integrated ‘one-two’ punch; it gets them every time.”

“Knowledge of the Past Is the Key to the Future: Matthew Henson and the Quest for the North Pole,” 1986. Credit… The Robert H. Colescott Separate Property Trust/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

(Roberta Smith, “Robert Colescott Throws Down the Gauntlet,” NYTimes, 7-7-22)

Posted in Commentary, Quotations | Tagged language, painting, style | 2 Comments

July Fourth Is All Year Long

Posted on July 11, 2022 by JMN

His mother graced me with this son on a fine Spring day. I salute him now, a Navy nurse coming off 5 years of service abroad to this land, his and yours and mine.

Welcome home, Lieutenant!

Posted in Commentary | Tagged family, hope, Navy, personal, service, unity | 2 Comments

Start with the ‘Z’s?

Posted on July 9, 2022 by JMN

“I think some of you might decide that this place isn’t for you, and that self-selection is OK with me… Realistically, there are probably a bunch of people at the company who shouldn’t be here.”
(Meta CEO Zuckerberg’s message to 77,800 workers)

Zuckerberg’s passive-aggressive comment is uninteresting, but listen to his chief product officer Chris Cox:

“We need to execute flawlessly… We must prioritize more ruthlessly, be thoughtful about measuring and understanding what drives impact, invest in developer efficiency and velocity inside the company, and operate leaner, meaner, better executing teams.”
(Meta CPO Chris Cox’s memo to employees)

Spare a thought for Anne Boleyn. The rank of Henry VIII’s second wife entitled her to beheading by a topnotch swordsman. Her execution must be flawless.

For the student of rhetoric, Cox’s rancid corporate cant has a dotcom-busty, pre-Y2K feel to it. I was drawing a paycheck at Compaq when Compaq swallowed Digital Equipment. Compaq itself was soon swallowed by Hewlett-Packard. Each fish was eaten and excreted by a bigger fish. I had been given my walking papers by then, “made redundant” in the pungent British phrase.

Tinpot motivators peopled legions of conference calls and marketing huddle-ups that I sat through during that period. Cox’s peroration sounds cribbed from their homiletics, lifted from one of a zillion antique PowerPoint decks. It forecasts for Meta a busy HR department, executing severance packages, confiscating company badges, and escorting casualties from the campus.

(Mike Isaac and Sheera Frenkel, “Mark Zuckerberg Prepares Meta Employees for a Tougher 2022,” NYTimes, 7-1-22)

Posted in Commentary, Quotations | Tagged language, personal, rhetoric | Leave a comment

Rabid Robed Revanchism

Posted on July 7, 2022 by JMN

Branded Figments is an informal journal of disgusted make-believe ™. Track it down when you’re shopping for Conwavian “facts.” https://ethicaldative.com/2021/12/16/never-send-to-know-for-whom-the-tales-told/

BROKEN NEWS: CONSTITUTION HELD CONTRARY TO CONTRACEPTION

The collective of putative originalists of the Chambered Bastion holds supreme and solely licit the celebration of procreative congress in the conventional way, minus obstruction of semen, at sanctioned intervals, between gender-pairs held suitable for biblical knowledge since the Book of Genesis, and using the genitals assigned by God implicitly in the Constitution.
Dictamen of the Dark Robes of the Alitonian Persuasion

Hew to the Straight and Narrow, decree the Robes. All hail the right of states. Expose your kids to priestly guidance, southern baptistic or catholic. Inculcate wholesome discipline. Say to them:

Don’t be Satan’s playmate. Shun frivolous coitus. Say “No!” to onanism and wet dreams. Stay off PornHub. Keep your seed and eggs in the self storage of abstinence. Sublimate base urges into clean outdoor fun and recreational gunfire. Legally mate with a legitimate opposite number. In due time husbandry and wifery for propagation of the race will call you up for righteous duty in the missionary position. You will be blessed with fruits of the womb and tender mercies of states’ rights from the bronze age of Silent Cal.

The Robes’ will be done now, henceforth, with anterior effect, time out of mind, forever and ever, world without end (maybe), amen.

Posted in Anthology, Commentary | Tagged Branded Figments, language | Leave a comment

‘Little Fat, Lazy, Old Woman’

Posted on July 5, 2022 by JMN

I have a cartoon figure on each shoulder; one whispers “you aren’t” in my ear and the other whispers “you’re not” in my ear. I don’t know which is the devil. If you aren’t swayed by this contrived tease, you’re not likely to read further.

***

The prefaces to Wright’s Grammar of the Arabic Language are dated 1874 and 1896, which situates it in time. I want to give you a flavor of this monument in its English aspect. I hope you’ll savor Wright’s majestic pedantry (still helpful to the student), and marvel with me at how weirdly granular and specific it is for a language to have (or have had) a word for “fat, lazy, old woman,” in the first place, plus a way to make it diminutive.

***

The Arabic word for quince (the fruit)

turns into this

when it’s made diminutive (little quince). It illustrates the rule for forming the diminutive of quinqueliterals:

“When the noun contains five letters, of which the fourth is strong, or more than five, the diminutive [fuƸaiƸil-un] is commonly formed from the first four, and the rest are rejected.”
(Wright, p. 168)

**[fuƸaiƸil-un]** — template for the diminutive of qinqueliterals.

But exceptions to the rule include the term for a fat, lazy, old woman:

A little fat, lazy, old woman can be either this:

or this:

Wright states that the diminutive is used “not merely in its literal sense,… but also to express endearment… or contempt…, and even enhancement….”

Posted in Anthology, Commentary | Tagged Arabic, grammar, language, lexicon, linguistics, semantics, translation | Leave a comment