When I re-read my EthicalDative posts at a later date they often seem overly arch or frivolous — less trenchant and cleansing than they felt at the moment of posting. “Stale” is the word to describe them, I suppose, with its meaning of “horse urine.”
Elizabeth Kolbert, who writes cogently about the environment, says:
Being a journalist is a bit like being a magpie. You’re always on the lookout for something shiny — a phrase, a fact, an insight — and you never know where you’re going to find it.
(“Please Don’t Ask Elizabeth Kolbert How She Organizes Her Books,” NYTimes, 2-4-21)
In Kolbert’s statement, substitute “journalist” with “blogger who asserts an interest in language” and I swim into view.
I resonated likewise to columnist Farhad Manjoo’s recent confession to being left in the viral dust:
… I was far from alone in finding the GameStop saga compelling. By the time I was set to write my column this week, the story had already gone supernova, lighting up seemingly every corner of digital media… I was chagrined to find that every hot take I could think of had already been heatedly taken.
(Farhad Manjoo, “Can We Please Stop Talking About Stocks, Please?” NYTimes, 2-3-21)
Manjoo’s viewpoints are often congruent with mine or easily adoptable. They’re lent force by a perspicacious echoing of trendy lingo.
My burden is to hang ten on the passing shiny-and-hot with a semblance of nervy verve that doesn’t pall by end of day.
(c) 2021 JMN
EthicalDative 
Ether, Either, Eater
I’ve had a unique opportunity to parley with a friend over how the intervocalic “d” sounds in Spanish word endings such as “-ado,” “-edo,” “-ido,” “-odo,” and “-udo.”
English-speaking students of Spanish will tend to say such endings with the English “d” sound. It’s the sound Americans commonly produce when saying such words as “letter,” “butter” and “eater” — phonetically described as a voiced alveolar flap.
The sound required by the Spanish endings is a voiced dental fricative, similar to the sound of the “th” in words such as “bother,” “leather” and “dither.”
It arose in our discussion that my friend had trouble recognizing the difference between the unvoiced dental fricative sound of English words such as “ethical,” “method” and “lethargic” versus the voiced variant in the “bother-leather-dither” trio.
The phonetic symbol for the unvoiced variant is the Greek letter “theta”; the symbol for the voiced variant is the Old English and Icelandic letter “eth.”
When the Spanish word endings mentioned above are pronounced with the English flap “d” sound, a word such as Spanish “todo” (“all”) may be misunderstood as “toro” (“bull”).
A similar instance is furnished by Selena’s song transcribed as “Bidi Bidi Bom Bom,” where she was probably singing what Spanish would write as “biri biri bam bam.”
I’ve devised a fun game for my friend. There are 3 camps: the Ether camp, the Either camp, and the Eater camp.
Which of the following English words belong in each camp?
matter, pithy, father, mythical, feather, otter, nothing, rather, frothy, other, monolithic, utter, northern, north, southern, south, fodder, Etheridge, fritter, Carthage, nether, oath, later, thistle, wither. (Hint: The Ether camp has 11. The Either camp has 8. The Eater camp has 6.)
Which of the following Spanish words belong in each camp? (Translations provided merely to satisfy curiosity.)
lodo (“mud”), moro (“Moor”), pero (“but”), vampiro (“vampire”), nudo (“knot”), estampido (“bang”), loro (“parrot”), módulo (“module”), matador (bullfighter), lirio (“lily”), nítido (clear-cut). (Hint: The Ether camp has 0. The Either camp has 6. The Eater camp has 5)
Note: In the Castilian dialect spoken in much of Spain, the Ether camp would be populated with words such as enlace (“link”), pozo (“well”), and raza (“race”). For my friend and me, that’s a discussion for another day.
(c) 2021 JMN