Syzygy

Recently heard the word Syzygy referred to in the context of the close approach of Earth's moon, or 'Perigee Syzygy'. The only other time I'd come across this word (No, I don't follow the X-Files) was in Joe Haldeman's 'All my sins remembered', so I did a little digging.

Here are the main definitions;

1. (astronomy) A kind of unity, namely an alignment of three celestial bodies (for example, the Sun, Earth, and Moon) such that one body is directly between the other two, such as occurs at an eclipse
2. (psychology) An archetypal pairing of contrasexual opposites, symbolizing the communication of the conscious and unconscious minds
3. (mathematics) A relation between generators of a module
4. (medicine) The fusion of some or all of the organs
5. (zoology) The association of two protozoa end-to-end or laterally for the purpose of asexual exchange of genetic material
6. (zoology) The pairing of chromosomes in meiosis
7. (Literature) In ancient prosody, a group or combination of two feet. Ancient metricians varied in their use of this term. Some use it regularly for a dipody or (dipodic) measure. Others call a tautopody, or double foot, a dipody, but a combination of two different feet a syzygy. Some, accordingly, giving the name syzygy to tetrasyllabic feet (regarded by them as composed of two dissyllabic feet), speak of an iambic or a trochaic line as measured by dipodies, but an Ionic line as measured by syzygies—that is, by single Ionics considered as combinations of trochees and pyrrhics. A peculiar use is the restriction of the term syzygy to compound feet of five or six syllables.

Yes, it's a good ten dollar word, but not one I'd care to use.

Discussion topics

“It does not take a majority to prevail ... but rather an irate, tireless minority, keen on setting brushfires of freedom in the minds of men.”

Samuel Adams

“If ye love wealth greater than liberty, the tranquility of servitude greater than the animating contest for freedom, go home from us in peace. We seek not your counsel, nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you; and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen.”

This Samuel Adams, not this one, although I am quite partial to the odd bottle.

Back later. Talk amongst yourselves.

Bloggers soliloquy

To blog, or not to blog, that is the question;
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous falsehoods,
Or to take up words, and by opposing, defy them.
To stop, and speak no more, and by a waking silence to end
The headache, and the myriad WTF!'s That mind is heir to.
'Tis a consummation most devoutly to be wished.
To write, perchance make sense : ay, there's the phrase,
For in that slough of words what thoughts may come
When we have shuffled off some blogrolls end,
Must give us pause. There's some respect
That makes calamity of online life.
For who would bear the ignorance and slurs of Trolls,
The lamestream's wrong, politician's contempt,
The pangs of unrequited links, the law's encroach,
The silence of little traffic, and spurning
That patient merit of his unworthy site,
Where writing might his quietus make
Without a keystroke? Who would trolls bear,
To grunt and swear upon unread prose,
But that the dread of no longer having blog,
Dumping irksome thoughts, puzzles the will,
And makes us tolerate those faults we have
Than try out new ones we know nothing of?
This conscience does make cowards of us all,
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprise of great pitch and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry
And lose the name of action. -- Soft you now,
My unquiet mind! -- Thought, in thy orisons
Be all my sins remembered.

Bill Sticker, with many abject apologies to another poor scrivener known as William.

Them that's fightin words

The following rebuttal is mine alone. I do not speak for my husband, for my friends, for my children, but solely for myself.

I am tired of being told to sit down and shut up.

I am tired of being told what I can and can not say.

What is “acceptable”, while my ideas and values are mocked and trampled.

Wow. That's one pissed off military mother. The lady's plain, no-nonsense eloquence is quite frankly startling.

H/T Celestial Junk

There's nothing new, philosophically speaking

Today I have been reminding myself of the work of poets and authors two millennia gone. How apposite their meaning is even now.

I itch to depart for the West and the limitless sea,
Each time green pretenders to wisdom and virtue
Who live in falsehood, dare spout of 'denial'.

The opening lines of Juvenal's second Satire. Paraphrased and bowdlerised to extinction by me.

For anyone vaguely interested, the actual opening reads like this;

Vltra Sauromatas fugere hinc libet et glacialem Oceanum,
Quotiens aliquid de moribus audent
Qui Curios simulant et Bacchanalia uiuunt

Yet the railing against hypocrisy and falsehood remains the same.

For there is little I find, outside technology, that is truly new.
If ancient poets were now reincarnated, they would be bloggers of a Libertarian hue.

Led up the garden path

There is a phrase my maternal Grandfather taught me when I was very small. I'd been trying to play with some of the cats he kept as mousers in the barn and gotten royally spagged for my trouble. Tearfully nursing the injury as small boys do, I explained when challenged that I had not been pulling the cats tail. At this point Grandad guffawed and said; "You're leading me up the garden path!" In other words, 'You're pulling my leg'.

The saying is a phrase with interesting provenance, as I regularly point out in various blog comments. When taken in full this little axiom appears in a more sinister cast. "You're leading me up the garden path to have my throat slit." Is the full version. It refers to the smallholder pig slaughtering practice, a yearly event that occurred in rural England (and France & Germany) well into the 1940's. The practice was a family affair, as these things often were. The womenfolk stood by to rapidly process everything but the squeal onto useful provender, and the menfolk and children did the slaughtering and butchering. The pig was led on a leash with many treats up the garden, usually up close to the kitchen door over a low stout piece of garden furniture called a 'Pig bench', a long low rough hewn piece of timber with four legs. The slaughterer would sit on the pigs back, effectively pinning it in place on the bench. Then with a sharp knife or cheesewire, make a large incision in the pigs throat, holding the struggling squealing animal down while it's life blood drained into a relay of basins held by the children, which were then tipped into buckets ready for making into the delicacy known as 'Black pudding'. When freshly dead, the pig was butchered on the bench and converted into sausages, bacon, and all the carnivorous delights therefrom.

Nowadays the practice is unknown because we in the west have mostly become divorced from our rural roots, yet the phrase persists. Why? Because the meaning is so often apposite when dealing with the entrenched political elite. Particularly when Mrs / Mrs / Ms / Whatever Voter is promised all sorts of nice things at election times, only to find their fiscal life blood drained ever faster by a hungry state.

Like the pig, voters are gulled into acquiescence until the horrifying truth becomes apparent. All the nice things promised by the political establishment turn out to be little more than a trail of goodies to the taxation slaughtering bench. The benefits of taxation so often go to someone else, and rarely the intended.

As those who voted the current US administration / for the EU in are rapidly finding out; big government = big taxes. They are finding out how far up the garden path they have been led.

New word in my lexicon

I was pootling around a local bookshop yesterday, waiting for Mrs S to finish work, and saw a copy of a particular book on sale. On an impulse I made the purchase. Upon reading, my chortle glands were stimulated, and a veil ripped from my inner eye. Subsequently a new word has been added to my vocabulary. Not a new occurrence, but, I feel, an important one I'd like to share with whoever drops by my little pile of semi literate ravings. That word is 'Fark'. Sounds a bit Douglas Adamsish doesn't it? You know, as in a "Holy Zarquon, singing fish!" or "Farking Zarquon!" kind of way. It has the monosyllabic pithiness of a swear word, and just the right amount of pejorativeness without being overtly offensive.

According to Wiktionary, it is prosaically just another way of vouchsafing a common swear word. On the other hand, Drew Curtis and friends use it as a different kind of adjective to describe a spuriously inaccurate and even misleading news 'story' used as mere column inch filler which so many bloggers often spend huge amount of time exposing as fraudulent by the practice of 'Fisking'. It is within this context I wish to indulge my mental meanderings.

For example; let's consider types of news story as 'Fark'. Usually thought of as the more bizarre and outlandish stuff. However, a perusal of the news media, or TV or radio news brings the message home with a vengeance. For example; attributed quotes from public figures which they never uttered, or quotations so far out of context that they are accelerating over the dishonesty event horizon. Statements derived from scientific reports misinterpreted and subsequently sensationalised beyond all recognition. Opinion pieces masquerading as news. Lazy cut and paste from activists' press releases. Are they often spurious? - Yes. Inaccurate? - Very possibly. Misleading? - Most certainly. You could be justified in thinking that all the spurious and bizarre stories were in the National Enquirer and Sunday Sport; E.G. 'Elvis sighted on Lunar Holiday', 'God seen fishing on unidentified friend's luxury yacht'. There's something honest about those kind of stories because their veracity is so obviously, and humorously questionable. They don't masquerade as factual like real 'Fark'.

Therefore I would posit that 'Fark' is 'news' which misleads and misinforms. It is media spin and misdirection. Linguistic smoke and mirrors. As an adjective 'Fark' can be used as shorthand for unworthy of belief, as in "What utter Fark", or "That's a load of Fark isn't it?"

Ladies and gentlemen; I present you with the world of 'Fark'. It's remarkable how much there is of it about.

A timely reminder

One of the problems with being an ex-pat, although some might not see it as a problem, is a partial divorce from my English language roots. I love English as a written and spoken language. As a lingua franca it has few peers, and when spoken correctly has a cadence and music all of its own. It is the language built and catalogued by Chaucer, Shakespeare and Johnson, of truly great works of literature and poetry. Yet it is still being hammered, white hot, into new shapes on the anvil of common parlance.

For my part I like to remember how the language is best spoken, and to remind myself of the differences in pronunciation for when my spoken 't' turns into a lazy North American 'd' and my flattened 'o' turns into a 'u'. This rhyme comes in handy sometimes.

Dearest creature in creation,
Study English pronunciation.
I will teach you in my verse
Sounds like corpse, corps, horse, and worse.
I will keep you, Suzy, busy,
Make your head with heat grow dizzy.
Tear in eye, your dress will tear.
So shall I! Oh hear my prayer.
Just compare heart, beard, and heard,
Dies and diet, lord and word,
Sword and sward, retain and Britain.
(Mind the latter, how it's written.)
Now I surely will not plague you
With such words as plaque and ague.
But be careful how you speak:
Say break and steak, but bleak and streak;
Cloven, oven, how and low,
Script, receipt, show, poem, and toe.
Hear me say, devoid of trickery,
Daughter, laughter, and Terpsichore,
Typhoid, measles, topsails, aisles,
Exiles, similes, and reviles;
Scholar, vicar, and cigar,
Solar, mica, war and far;
One, anemone, Balmoral,
Kitchen, lichen, laundry, laurel;
Gertrude, German, wind and mind,
Scene, Melpomene, mankind.
Billet does not rhyme with ballet,
Bouquet, wallet, mallet, chalet.
Blood and flood are not like food,
Nor is mould like should and would.
Viscous, viscount, load and broad,
Toward, to forward, to reward.
And your pronunciation's OK
When you correctly say croquet,
Rounded, wounded, grieve and sieve,
Friend and fiend, alive and live.
Ivy, privy, famous; clamour
And enamour rhyme with hammer.
River, rival, tomb, bomb, comb,
Doll and roll and some and home.
Stranger does not rhyme with anger,
Neither does devour with clangour.
Souls but foul, haunt but aunt,
Font, front, wont, want, grand, and grant,
Shoes, goes, does. Now first say finger,
And then singer, ginger, linger,
Real, zeal, mauve, gauze, gouge and gauge,
Marriage, foliage, mirage, and age.
Query does not rhyme with very,
Nor does fury sound like bury.
Dost, lost, post and doth, cloth, loth.
Job, nob, bosom, transom, oath.
Though the differences seem little,
We say actual but victual.
Refer does not rhyme with deafer.
Foeffer does, and zephyr, heifer.
Mint, pint, senate and sedate;
Dull, bull, and George ate late.
Scenic, Arabic, Pacific,
Science, conscience, scientific.
Liberty, library, heave and heaven,
Rachel, ache, moustache, eleven.
We say hallowed, but allowed,
People, leopard, towed, but vowed.
Mark the differences, moreover,
Between mover, cover, clover;
Leeches, breeches, wise, precise,
Chalice, but police and lice;
Camel, constable, unstable,
Principle, disciple, label.
Petal, panel, and canal,
Wait, surprise, plait, promise, pal.
Worm and storm, chaise, chaos, chair,
Senator, spectator, mayor.
Tour, but our and succour, four.
Gas, alas, and Arkansas.
Sea, idea, Korea, area,
Psalm, Maria, but malaria.
Youth, south, southern, cleanse and clean.
Doctrine, turpentine, marine.
Compare alien with Italian,
Dandelion and battalion.
Sally with ally, yea, ye,
Eye, I, ay, aye, whey, and key.
Say aver, but ever, fever,
Neither, leisure, skein, deceiver.
Heron, granary, canary.
Crevice and device and aerie.
Face, but preface, not efface.
Phlegm, phlegmatic, ass, glass, bass.
Large, but target, gin, give, verging,
Ought, out, joust and scour, scourging.
Ear, but earn and wear and tear
Do not rhyme with here but ere.
Seven is right, but so is even,
Hyphen, roughen, nephew Stephen,
Monkey, donkey, Turk and jerk,
Ask, grasp, wasp, and cork and work.
Pronunciation (think of Psyche!)
Is a paling stout and spikey?
Won't it make you lose your wits,
Writing groats and saying grits?
It's a dark abyss or tunnel:
Strewn with stones, stowed, solace, gunwale,
Islington and Isle of Wight,
Housewife, verdict and indict.
Finally, which rhymes with enough,
Though, through, plough, or dough, or cough?
Hiccough has the sound of cup.
My advice is to give up!!!

(Wheeze, wheeze, gasp) H/T Theo Spark

Work in progress; Axiom 1

Been busy hitting the keyboard and digging up archives for the new project, and I came across this paragraph which I feel to be particularly true;

Having assumed the mantle of stepfather, you can survive relatively unscathed because of one simple axiom; yes there may be stepfathers and mothers who are cruel sociopaths and serial child abusers as seen on Oprah and other ‘reality’ TV shows, but they are the extreme minority. Yet for every heartless child abuser there are literally hundreds of thousands of good, honourable men and women who, when faced with the absolute worst emotional abuse their stepchildren can throw at them, simply bite their tongue and pick up the broken toys because they are strong of heart. This single thread of veracity cuts across every race, creed, and class.

I like it. Sod the Dickensian stereotypes.

To Redact;

A Redact or Redactor (Noun) person who edits or revises for publication.
To redact (Verb) the act of editing or revision, or formulate in a particular style or language
Redaction (Adjective) the act of revising or editing for publication

To simply black pen out huge tranches of information regarding MP’s expenses is not redaction in the classical sense, as that implies a certain delicacy or care with the written word prior to publication. There is an uglier word to describe what has been done to the MP’s expense sheets, a much cruder description with definite pejorative overtones; censorship.

The spinmeisters need to go back to school to learn the proper use of English.

Update: Addition to the sidebar for best hyphenation of the week; Anna Raccoon. 'Profli-gate' (Description of UK MP's expenses scandal).