Have you heard about Ammon Shea, the man who’d read all twenty volumes of the Oxford English Dictionary and then written a memoir about it? When I’d heard about him I became jealous. Ever since I can remember I’ve wanted to read an entire dictionary. I’ve never done it though. I have, however, read some style and grammar guides from cover like Strunk and White’s The Element of Style (a few times–who hasn’t?), Karen Elizabeth Gordon’s The New Well-Tempered Sentence and The Deluxe Transitive Vampire (both excellent and fun to read), and, most recently, the technical manual Grammar Desk Reference by Gary Lutz and Diane Stevenson. Besides a number of dictionaries, I often thumb through the Chicago Manual of Style and Garner’s Modern American Usage.  Which reminds me: check out this article on the so-called usage wars by David Foster Wallace.

So what about you? What grammar, usage, and style guides do you prefer?

This question seems so obvious and simple as to be undeserving of any scholarly attention. “Copyright” has a long history, tracing back to the early 18th century in Britain –- which includes the variants “copy right” and “copy-right” — so the term is not new. Yet this question is important to ask and answer for several reasons.

First, copyright no longer is a backwater discipline relegated to the inspection of nerdy specialists. Instead, it is now central to the everyday activities of most American citizens.

Second, many people –- lawyers and lay persons alike -– often conflate copyright and “intellectual property.”

Third, there are some important theoretical and political considerations that influence definitions of copyright. While these considerations are advanced issues we are more likely to address over on Copycense than here, they are important these days because of the rhetoric and framing that is being used to position copyright law and policy in one direction or another. I will summarize copyright law’s main theories in a future post, and we will devote extensive coverage to the theory of copyright in upcoming articles on Copycense.

Dictionary Definitions of Copyright

With this said, let us look at some definitions of copyright. In a prior post, I put forth an interim definition of copyright as “a legal system or program that governs the use of original, recorded works.” Compare my interim definition to the definitions of copyright from the following sources:

Black’s Law Dictionary: The right of literary property as recognized and sanctioned by positive law. An intangible, incorporeal right granted by statute to the author or originator of certain literary or artistic productions, whereby he is invested, for a specific period, with the sole and exclusive privilege of multiplying copies of the same and publishing and selling them.

Barron’s Law Dictionary: The protection of the works of artists and authors giving them the exclusive right to publish their works or determine who may so publish.

Nolo: A bundle of exclusive rights granted to the author of a creative work such as book, movie, song, painting, photograph, design, computer software, or architecture. These rights include the right to make copies, authorize others to make copies, make derivative works, sell and market the work, and perform the work.

Oxford English Dictionary: The exclusive legal right, given to an originator or an assignee, to print, publish, perform, film, or record literary, artistic, or musical material, and to authorize others to do the same.

U.S. Copyright Office: [.pdf] Copyright is a form of protection provided by the laws of the United States (title 17, U. S. Code) to the authors of “original works of authorship,” including literary, dramatic, musical, artistic, and certain other intellectual works. This protection is available to both published and unpublished works.

When I read the five definitions above, a handful of issues occurs to me. First, all these definitions ostensibly focus on two issues: rights and protection of rights. Of course, copyright law has a sextet of rights, and another pair of rights that may be relevant when considering specific types of works.

Yet, I find it interesting that none of these definitions mentions the limitations on copyright rights that exist within the statute. If one considers that the limitations copyright law grants to the public are as important a part of the statute as the exclusive rights copyright law grants to authors, then it seems odd to me that basic definitions of copyright fail to mention limitations (or even compulsory licenses, for that matter).

Second, the definition in Black’s Law Dictionary puts forth a subtle, but important focus on property. This emphasis on property is important because courts and scholars regard Black’s as the definitive dictionary of American law (based upon legal citation frequency), and also because there has been an increasingly ferocious debate among legal scholars about whether copyrighted works qualify as (or retain characteristics similar to) property in the same way as we consider land or personal possessions to be property. (This debate is beyond Core Copyright’s scope, and something we will address separately on Copycense. The emphasis of Black’s on property, however, has important policy and legislative ramifications.

(And lest one think that the analogy of copyright with tangible property is one made only by copyright owners or their lobbyists, Lawrence Lessig refers to copyrighted works as property in his book Free Culture. He qualifies this by saying copyright is a special form of property, but he clearly refers to copyright as property.)

Third, the Black’s, OED, and Copyright Office definitions are quite technical and require some level of legal knowledge and training to understand fully. Neither the Barron’s or Nolo definitions suffer these problems, but, again, they retain what I consider a value-laden allusion to rights, protection of those rights, and the absence of any mention to limitations, or even the public domain.

Scholarly Definitions of Copyright

Several scholars have attempted to define copyright. Once again, I think it is instructive to survey these descriptions as well:

Paul Goldstein: In his book Copyright’s Highway, Goldstein defines copyright as one’s right to make copies of a given work (and to keep others from making copies of that work), and also as “the law of authorship.”

Niva Elkin-Koren: Elkin-Koren, an Israeli copyright scholar, defines copyright as “a property rule defined in legislative bodies of territorial states and applied by their enforcement systems” in a 2001 journal article.

William Patry: Patry, the author of the book Moral Panics and the Copyright Wars and the scholarly treatise Patry on Copyright, defines copyright as a social program that is a means to an end.

Jessica Litman: In a 1990 article entitled “The Public Domain,” the law professor defined copyright as “a legal scheme, prescribed in the Constitution and put in place by Congress, to encourage the enterprise of authorship.”

Again, it is interesting to note the emphasis on property or property protection, as they appear in Elkin-Koren’s and Goldstein’s definitions. Patry’s definition, while emphasizing the role government plays in granting copyright protection to authors, does not identify what means are being used and what ends are the objectives.

Ultimately, I believe Litman’s definition is the best because people can understand it on its face regardless with familiarity with the U.S. legal system. It also is the definition from either category that does the best job of eliminating or limiting personal and theoretical values, judgments, or assessments. This will be the operative definition we use going forward in Core Copyright.

(Editor’s Note: Portions of this writing have been taken from the author’s forthcoming study on copyright law and the frame of “piracy.”)

© Copyright 2009, Core Copyright

Last week, I addressed a common problem in which lawyers and non-lawyers conflate copyright and intellectual property (IP). In this post, I address another common confusion — the conflation of copyright (or copyright infringement) and plagiarism — and rationalize why I think being the subject of plagiarism allegations is much more damaging.

In order to distinguish copyright and plagiarism, it would be helpful to establish operative definitions for both concepts. I assiduously have avoided defining copyright thus far — I did not define copyright in the post on intellectual property — because I believe the term (and its defining parameters) should be defined carefully, particularly given the contemporary use of rhetoric and framing in this area of the law. Therefore, readers should consider as temporary the copyright definition I provide in this post, a placeholder I am using to complete this comparison. I will update this post later to reference the operative definition of copyright that we will be using throughout this publication.

[Interim] Definition of Copyright

With that, I am temporarily defining copyright as a legal system or program that governs the use of original, recorded works. There are several sets of guidelines within this system that define the system’s boundaries: one set of guidelines establishes how one’s work becomes eligible for copyright protection; one set of guidelines establishes how long that protection will last. Another set of guidelines outlines uses, control over those uses, several instances the detail exceptions to that control.

Perhaps most importantly, there are guidelines that define illegal or dishonest behavior within the system, and a set of penalties a wrongdoer can expect to incur if a neutral party determines that his use of an original, recorded work goes beyond a control or use exception and becomes illegal or dishonest. This part of the copyright system is very important, especially as it relates to comparisons between copyright and plagiarism.

Defining Plagiarism

In contrast, the Oxford English Dictionary (aka the OED) defines plagiarism as the practice of taking someone else’s work or ideas and passing them off as one’s own. Several things are important in this definition. First, it mentions a “practice” of taking someone else’s work or ideas: in other words, OED suggests plagiarism is something that is customary, habitual, or repeated. It seems reasonable that custom, repetition or habit is part of plagiarism: with few things original under the sun (at least according to Ecclesiastes 1:9), it is rather easy to use or references others’ ideas without explicit attribution or credit. Despite the increasing tendency — especially in legal scholarship — to cite every single sentence, neither life nor work should require such an extreme approach to crediting someone else (particularly since they probably got it from yet another person).

So, the first thing you need to know about plagiarism is that one shouldn’t worry about the occasional missed citation. Give credit for others’ work where it’s due, and give credit to others where you have used others’ work as the basis of your own original idea or creation, particularly when you seek to promote, publish, or commercialize your idea or creation. But do not lose sleep over failing to attribute or cite every single sentence in a writing.

The second interesting thing about OED’s plagiarism definition is that it talks about taking someone else’s work or ideas. This part of the definition reminds me of the common (and commonly irritating) chatter I often hear about “plagiarizing oneself.” Let’s be clear: you cannot plagiarize yourself. You can fail to cite your own work, and by failing to cite your work, you will miss an opportunity to promote your work — always a bad thing. But your failure to cite your own work is not plagiarism.

Further, you can recycle your work and ideas (which, again, probably are not wholly yours in the first place) without citing that work, and you will not “plagiarize yourself.” Now, there are some twists here, both contractual and doctrinal. The contractual twist usually arises when you’ve submitted a work for publication and retain the copyright, or the copyright reverts back to you. Typically in these scenarios, the publisher will require in the contract that you note that the material has been published previously in XYZ magazine or newspaper. Therefore, you will see at the conclusion of this article that some of its parts were published previously in Information Today, a newspaper for whom I have written a column for several years.

The doctrinal twist usually arises in the area of scholarly publishing. Academic disciplines vary widely when it comes to scholarly publication, but as a general rule, academic publishers only accept work that was not previously published elsewhere. In this context, people frown on recycling your work; publishers generally want only the new and funky fresh (i.e. unpublished) stuff. (Of course, in an era of personal Web sites, blogs, bepress and SSRN, what constitutes “publication” these days? That’s another post entirely.) So in effect, your academic discipline may not allow you to recycle your work; it only may allow you to cite your work if it has been published previously.

Therefore, the second thing you need to know about plagiarism is that you cannot “plagiarize yourself” because plagiarism is defined as using someone else’s work as your own. (Of course, use all opportunities to cite yourself liberally where appropriate.)

The final thing we need to know about plagiarism, especially in the way it differs from copyright, is that a charge or finding of plagiarism has no legal authority. Unlike the copyright system, plagiarism has no civil or criminal penalties, nor is it even a legally cognizable claim under law. But as I analyze below, however, plagiarism’s lack of legal standards is not necessarily positive.

Biting

Finally, there is the issue of “biting.” Biting is a form of copying that usually is discussed within hip hop circles. To bite means that a person not only copies another’s words without attribution, but also routinely delivers those words using another person’s style. In many ways, biting is more concerned with style copying because in the performance arts, and particularly in hip hop, the way in which you present your art is as important as the art’s substance. (In many ways, the presentation cannot be separated as distinct from artistic content.)

Biting is a term that has been used mostly in hip hop, but it extends to performance art in general.

Biting typically does not arise as an issue in scholarly work as much as it is does performance art, partly because it is hard to cite a style. Further, one could distinguish between biting and plagiarism by noting the latter’s emphasis on words and ideas, and its absence of style considerations. Still, I would be remiss in discussing unattributed copying or use of another’s work without mentioning the impact of biting.

[Note: Article continues after the jump.]

The Convergence of Copyright & Plagiarism

While copyright and plagiarism usually are mutually exclusive concepts, they intersect occasionally. For example, an idea can be plagiarized, but an idea cannot be protected by copyright. (Remember, that ideas may be protected by other forms of IP.) But if an idea is recorded — written on paper or audio taped, for example — and original, then the original, recorded idea can be both plagiarized and infringed.

Let’s take this a step further by referring back to copyright’s guidelines. As I just mentioned, an original, recorded idea can be subject both to plagiarism and copyright infringement. Earlier in this article, though, I mentioned that the copyright system includes several sets of guidelines, one of which details the circumstances under which a copyrighted work may be used despite an owner’s control of that work.

In essence, this means that copyright has a mechanism for avoiding penalty, even if at first blush the use of a protected work seems to violate the copyright owner’s ability to exclusively control that work. Plagiarism, on the other hand, has no such exceptions, or “outs.”

Therefore, it is entirely possible that a person can use a work that is protected by copyright, avoid a legal penalty by qualifying for a copyright exception (or limitation, as these guidelines are called officially), yet still be in danger of committing plagiarism. In my view, this one reason why plagiarism allegations are more damaging than copyright infringement allegations. I spend the rest of this article explaining the others.

Why Plagiarism Allegations May Be More Harmful Than Copyright Infringement Allegations

Even though copyright violations can result in fines or even incarceration, I think plagiarism allegations are much more damaging to a person’s reputation than allegations of copyright infringement. I’ve already outlined part of the reason I think this is true: even if I run afoul of copyright’s use rules, I may be able to avoid a violation if I can find an applicable limit on that use rule. And there are many use rule limitations that are available to me in the copyright system. Fair use is one of the broadest (and the most commonly cited), but there are several others — including some others that may work better than fair use in a given context.

Additionally, the copyright system does not let owners charge users with violation without an owner providing some fundamental forms of proof, or without requiring the owner to follow a specific set of guidelines for presenting that proof to whomever decides whether or not a violation occurs. Despite a popular mythology that currently surrounds copyright infringement lawsuits, it is neither easy nor efficient for a copyright owner to sue an alleged violator successfully for a violation. In addition to complying with the copyright system, an owner also must comply with a separate system that governs filing the appropriate legal and alleging documents, and yet a third system for producing factual proof. Complying with these three systems simultaneously takes enormous resources, both for the owner and the alleged violator, but the systems provide essential institutional safeguards for both.

On the other hand, plagiarism allegations require no compliance with any recognized legal system, and have none of the same safeguards. Plagiarism allegations have no burdens of proof or technical requirements; such allegations do not even need to come from the owner or creator of the original work (who would be the injured party). In many cases, third parties identify and allege acts of plagiarism; those same third parties are not held to any standards in making those allegations, nor are they held to any responsibility or punishment if the allegation turns out to be false.

This is particularly important in situations where the accuser’s motives may be questionable. I’ll use an example from a few of years ago.

In 2006, The Wall Street Journal published a feature article that detailed allegations of a plagiarism scandal in Ohio University’s mechanical engineering department. (The Journal does not have a version of the article freely available on its Web site, but an Associated Press report published at the time in the Washington Post provides similar information.)

An alumnus of the school, which is the oldest public university in the state of Ohio, claimed more than 30 graduate students in the department had plagiarized substantial portions of their graduate theses. Based in part upon these allegations, the school’s administration ordered the students to address the allegations or risk having the school revoke their degrees.

But the Journal article also noted that the accuser, also a student in Ohio University’s mechanical engineering department, had difficulty getting his thesis topic approved. Under copyright’s procedural systems, the accuser’s potential bias would be vetted and determined to be, or not to be, an important influence on the veracity of his claims. At the time I wrote about the Ohio University problem, I did not find anything that would suggest the alleger’s own degree problems unduly influenced his claims against fellow doctoral students. Still, that is an issue any system that investigates wrongdoing should be equipped to handle. But plagiarism charges undergo no such systemic scrutiny. Instead, plagiarism accusations tend to stick, placing on the accused the burden to prove a negative (i.e. that he did not commit plagiarism).

Further, plagiarism allegations presume the person who is accused has a guilty mind, that he intentionally and knowingly copied and failed to attribute another person’s work. But there are several cases in which plagiarism allegations are not about intent to deceive or withhold credit, but instead sheer sloppiness. Such sloppiness should not be excused, but industrial sloppiness seems considerably less egregious than intending to cheat. Certainly, the former does not seem to warrant ongoing damage to the accused’s professional or scholarly reputation, which is what seems to happen in many cases of plagiarism where the person who is accused does not already have a significant, positive prior reputation.

(As an aside, an issue that seems to be lost within these discussions is the failure of educational institutions — domestic and international, at all levels — to train scholars properly for the rigors of high-level academic work, including technical writing and citation. I will leave that for others to analyze.)

The lack of standards in plagiarism cases make an accusation virtually impossible to defend, but the mere allegation of plagiarism can be an irreversible smudge against a person’s professional and personal values and ethics. This modern version of the scarlet letter points to one of the biggest problems with plagiarism: without any clear standard, no burden of proof, and virtually no defenses, mere accusations of plagiarism can crush reputations faster than any allegation of copyright infringement, which provides clear, standardized systems of proof.

The argument here is not that plagiarism ceases to exist or should not be punished. Instead, I argue that plagiarism allegations are too easy to make, not hard enough to prove, and potentially too damaging to reputation not to have workable and neutral systems in place to manage accusations and violations. In this regard, copyright’s reliance on several different systems for charges, punishment, and remedies is superior.

(Note: Portions of this article were published previously by in Computers in Libraries and Information Today.)

© Copyright 2009, Core Copyright

Our very first guest post! How exciting is that?

Shaun Bernstein is a fellow journalism student. He likes long drives next to a beach and has hair the colour of fire.

Enjoy!

Once upon a time, people used to have real life friends.

It’s true. You’d meet someone new at a party, exchange phone numbers, and make plans socially, maybe for dinner or a movie. Friendships would evolve into unique, complex relationships. Laughs were had, secrets were shared, roadtrips were remembered, and the best roadtrips barely remembered. And if a fight ensued, or a grudge was held, perhaps you didn’t speak for a while.

Of course, those days are long since over. Facebook has taken over whatever friendship means, or used to mean. Hellos have been replaced by pokes, and whatever was once said in a phonecall can now be chopped down to fit in a comment on a wall post. Writing a message is so much simpler than writing someone a letter. Really, when’s the last time anybody sent snail mail?

Facebook, to its credit, has a lot of advantages. Facebook is an INCREDIBLE contact management system that lets you keep tabs on your friends, and instantly praise their accomplishments. People love it when you take the time to wish them a happy birthday, or see that you “like” a status boasting something they’re proud of. Between cell phones, blackberries, and other PDAs, you have access to your friends wherever you go.

But when Facebook friendships go sour, it’s a whole other story. Just as easily as you can add a friend, you can now “unfriend” them, and wipe them out of your lives completely. With the click of the mouse you can not only not speak to them, but you can ensure that they never see you, hear about you, or have the ability to talk to you ever again.

Arguments can end, and friendships can mend. On Facebook, it can all be over with a fit of anger and the click of a button.

“Unfriend” was voted Oxford English Dictionary’s 2009 Word of the Year. I’m giving that a big fat “Dislike button.”

The reign of social media lives on as the New Oxford dictionary (“The world’s most trusted dictionary) named ‘unfriend’ the word of the year. Yes, as in: “Some whack-job keeps invited me to play Farmville so I unfriended his lame ass.” Another point for Facebook, and another hit to society’s overall intelligence. To ‘unfriend’ someone may be the ultimate diss on the interwebs, but in reality, Oxford is just verbing a noun.

To make matters worse, other finalists for the word of the year included: sexting, intexticated, tramp stamp and deleb. For those not as in the loop as the New Oxford word of the year panel, deleb is defined as a dead celebrity. I, for one, have never heard the word ‘deleb’ used in everyday conversation, but what do I know? I’m still over here thinking the correct term was to ‘defriend.’ Embarrassing.

While these words are culturally clever and all, I can guarantee word-enthusiasts all over the world are groaning right now. I’m just wondering how long it takes before ‘WTF,’ ‘LOL’ and ‘UR2GR82B4GOT10’ get their moment of glory. Also wondering how long it will take my spell check to realize ‘unfriend’ is legit now. Seriously, what is this proto-language and where do we come up with it?

Oh dear, I reluctantly retract my claim below. Bird-watcher and bird-watching (both, rather quaintly, hyphenated) are listed in the OED, but they are hidden away at the end of the entry for bird and the citations are separate from the definitions. In my defence I should state that the words don’t come up under “find word” unless you spell them with a hyphen.

As I suspected they both date back to the early 20th century and both were first used in book titles by E. Selous. Here are the citations:

1905 E. SELOUS (title) The *Bird Watcher in the Shetlands. 1930 J. S. HUXLEY Bird-Watching i. 13 From the bird-watcher pure and simple it is but a step to the bird-watcher naturalist.

1901 E. SELOUS (title) *Bird Watching. 1920 Edin. Rev. Jan. 63 Bird-Watching as a Hobby. 1930 J. S. HUXLEY Bird-Watching iii. 52 Accompanying Mr. Eliot Howard..on his bird-watching rounds. Ibid. iv. 64 A party of bird-watching friends.

I stand corrected, and have learnt a lot in the process. Here’s my original posting:

As a keen birdwatcher I was surprised to discover that the words birdwatcher and birdwatching are not in the vast, multi-volume Oxford English Dictionary. I find this extremely surprising as editors are constantly trawling for new words, and these two words are hardly the latest accretions to our mother tongue (I would guess they date back to the early 20th century or maybe late 19th century, but that’s what I was hoping to find out from the OED).

But although birdwatcher/-ing aren’t in, birding is in, with the same meaning, defined as: “colloq. The activity of bird-watching. Also attrib.” Which is a bit odd, since, as I say bird-watching (with or without the hyphen) isn’t listed.

The first recorded use of birding in the sense of birdwatching is delightful. It is from the Daily News, 1927, and reads: “Miss Fry plays the flute and joins in the arduous sport of ‘birding’. This consists in following across country any strange species of bird, and of playing the flute beneath the tree on which the melodious songster performs.” Well, this is a rather unusual approach to birding (or birdwatching) but I suppose it fits the bill.

The other examples are more conventional, and two are American, reflecting the fact that Americans are more likely (I think) to say “birding” than “birdwatching” (cf. American Birding Association). Actually more and more Brits are starting to say birding rather than birdwatching and to describe themselves as birders, and I’m not at all sure that this word should be regarded as “colloq.” these days. And the fact that the OED refers to birding as “colloq.” raises the question of what the literary or non-colloq equivalent is and why it isn’t listed.

Of course the word birding existed long before 1927, but in the sense of “The action or sport of bird-catching or fowling. arch.” The first usage of the word in this sense dates from 1569 (“An other exercise of Hunting, which is termed Fouling, or Birding.”).

Surprisingly, despite the lack of birdwatcher/-ing, twitcher and twitching, in the ornithological sense, are both in. The OED defines a twitcher as “A bird-watcher [sic] whose main aim is to collect sightings of rare birds.” Its earliest recorded use of the word is from Birds magazine (published by the RSPB), Summer 1973, and is again rather charming: “Twitchers are difficult to identify because they are polymorphic. Best clues are behavioural including carrying Zeiss binoculars and Where to Watch Birds… Known to have nested in Wandsworth and possess a sense of humour.” Of course nowadays they would carry Leica or Swarovski binoculars and a BlackBerry. The reference to Wandsworth eludes me.

The first use of twitching, defined as “The activity of a ‘twitcher’ (sense 4); obsessive or enthusiastic bird-watching for rarities”, is almost contemporaneous, dating to New Society, 17 November, 1977, and is attractively jargonish: “Sibe is twitching slang for a Siberian bird.” Sibe, incidentally, isn’t listed in the OED, and neither for that matter is jargonish (but jargonesque and jargonic are).

I should add that I found all this online at home, using my public library card. It’s a rather little known fact that the OED is available free of charge to anyone with a library card – go to your public library’s website and log in there with your library card number. A terrific free resource.

Word nerds of the world rejoice: the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary is here! After 44 years of work, 4,000 pages, and 800,000 meanings the first ever historical thesaurus is ready to answer everything you ever wanted to know about the history of our language. The book chronologically and thematically arranges all the words from the mother of all English dictionaries, the OED. What this means is that you can view the history and evolution of words from their Old English incarnations through their many linguical permutations and on up to their present day forms. So if you’ve been itching to affect the terminology of, say, a seventeenth century Pilgrim, or perhaps want to give a fresh shine of authenticity to your annual basement production of Beowulf, then the HTOED may be right up your alley. And for all the writers out there, this new tool should serve as the antidote to trite prose and muddled meanings. If you’ve ever tried to use a regular thesaurus (or the dreaded thesaurus function in your word processing program of choice), then you know that few so called synonyms are actually that. Most words have very subtle shadings of their own which can end up tweaking their meaning just enough to make them a tad unsuitable for expressing the exact idea that you’re trying to get across. And this is where the HTOED should prove to be vastly beneficial to word seekers, as each category is broken down again and again into multiple (and often humorously precise) sub-meanings, making it possible to get closer than ever before to exactly that word. But before you expire in a swoon of wordly delight, beware, the pricetag, like the thesaurus itself is as breathtaking as it is hefty. There are, however, plans to put the HTOED online to be used in conjunction with the online version of the OED. For more information on the history of the book and the daunting task of its creation, read this fascinating post from Good Magazine.

Since the beginning of the summer, I’ve been compiling a list of things that I absolutely hate. They are mostly social faux pas, but some do relate to Web writing. Here they are, for you reading pleasure:

• Conversate. According to Jesse Sheidlower, editor of the OED, it is a word. Much to my dismay. Using it, however, will not make you sound smart, it will only make you sound like a fool.

• Using the word literally too much or in the wrong context. This summer, my cousin and her Auburn Greek-life friends said the word no less than 87,000 times. Literally. If you hate it as much as I do, check out this blog that tracks the use of the word.

• When people type “prolly” instead of “probably” in their text messages and/or on Facebook.

• When people (girls are especially notorious for this) draw out the last letter of their words on Facebook. For example, “Pleaseeeee.” That is read as “please-y.” If you want to be whiny and annoying, pleeaase do it correctly.

• Air quotes.

• This is unrelated, but I can’t stand it when I’m driving and the person in front of me does the stop-and-turn. It enrages me.

For more, check out Toothpastefordinner.com

So that’s about it for now. More hateful ranting to come. If you have any questions or concerns, leave a comment and we can prolly conversate about it.

The meaning of everything: The story of the Oxford English dictionary
PE1617.O94 W558
423.09

Google books

Among the most famous of quotations attributed to Thomas Jefferson, is this one:

“If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issuance of their currency, first by inflation and then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around  them will deprive the people of all their property until their children will wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered.“

But did Thomas Jefferson really say that? That’s what I had thought, especially after hearing it repeated by so many people on so many different programs and web sites. Then, one day, I decided to verify it for myself, and was surprised by what I found.

Bartleby, famous for its books of quotations, states:

“Although Jefferson was opposed to paper money, this quotation is obviously spurious. Inflation was listed in Webster’s dictionary of 1864, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, but the OED gives 1920 as the earliest use of deflation.“

Another authoritative dictionary, Merriam-Webster, reports the first use of the word deflation, in any context, dating back to 1890 — 64 years after the death of Thomas Jefferson.

As Bartleby hints at, one shouldn’t throw the baby out with the bath water. Even if Jefferson didn’t say that, in whole or in part, it’s consistent with his beliefs and actions.

The full significance of this quotation will be addressed in several subsequent articles.

Oxford English Dictionary

A searchable online version of the Oxford English Dictionary. Includes the full text of the 20-volume Second Edition, 45,000 new and revised words resulting from the editorial revision programme and at least 2,500 additional new and revised words every 3 months

The Oxford English Dictionary is the accepted authority on the evolution of the English language over the last millennium. It is an unsurpassed guide to the meaning, history, and pronunciation of over half a million words, both present and past. It traces the usage of words through 2.5 million quotations from a wide range of international English language sources, from classic literature and specialist periodicals to film scripts and cookery books.

The OED covers words from across the English-speaking world, from North America to South Africa, from Australia and New Zealand to the Caribbean. It also offers the best in etymological analysis and in listing of variant spellings, and it shows pronunciation using the International Phonetic Alphabet.

As the OED is a historical dictionary, its entry structure is very different from that of a dictionary of current English, in which only present-day senses are covered, and in which the most common meanings or senses are described first. For each word in the OED, the various groupings of senses are dealt with in chronological order according to the quotation evidence, i.e. the senses with the earliest quotations appear first, and the senses which have developed more recently appear further down the entry. In a complex entry with many strands, the development over time can be seen in a structure with several ‘branches’.

The Second Edition of the OED is currently available as a 20-volume print edition, on CD-ROM, and now also online. Updated quarterly with between one and two thousand new and revised entries, OED Online offers unparalleled access to the ‘greatest continuing work of scholarship that this century has produced’ Newsweel.

This year the OED turns 80.

Remember, to access this online resource you need to either come into the library and use the APN computers, or login at home via the OPAC. If you have any difficulties, please don’t hesitate to ask the staff at your local branch.

Modern biblical criticism, “liberal” or “evangelical”, likes the historical understanding of Scripture.  We must read the text and see what it says to the original audience.  This will help us understand what it means.  The meaning of Scripture is thereby reduced to the original audience.  If the original speaker meant, “Smash babies heads on rocks,” then that’s all it means.  If the original speaker meant that a prophecy would be fulfilled in two days, it is unlikely to be fulfilled again in 2000 years.  If the original Hebrew says “young girl,” it doesn’t mean “virgin.”

This form of interpretation only takes us so far, however.  If all of Scripture is God-breathed and useful, as St. Paul contends, then we need a way of reading the Bible beyond the historical meaning.  One of the joys of reading old books and discovering Christians from other ages is to see how they dealt with problems facing them.  Thus, I have an idea how to deal with a verse from the BCP-appointed Psalm for today:

Let them be confounded and perish that are against my soul; let them be covered with shame and dishonour that seek to do me evil. (Ps. 71:13)

Our starting point is one of the good, readable books to come out of the Protestant paleo-orthodoxy and the Evangelical ressourcement, Christopher A. Hall’s Reading Scripture with the Church Fathers.  This book is a brief introduction to patristic thought that requires little specialised vocabulary and no Latin or Greek (thus, those who are neither clergy nor scholars can read it).  He deals with the use of Scripture by the four Doctors of the East and the four Doctors of the West, then he goes more specifically into “Alexandrian” and “Antiochene” schools of thought.

Alexandrians, typified by Origen, sought the allegorical meaning of Scripture, and the Antiochenes reacted against excessive allegorical readings, especially when considering Origen’s more heterodox teachings.*  The Antiochene method sought a spiritual meaning that was not divorced from the literal meaning of the text, as seen in Diodore of Tarsus.  Both schools of thought looked beyond the historical and literal meanings of Scripture, seeking higher spiritual knowledge revealed by the hard work of exegesis and the enlightenment of the Holy Spirit.

In our old friend John Cassian, we see that as we read Scripture, our contemplation is divided into the historical and the spiritual.  No doubt Cassian would agree with Diodore of Tarsus that we ought not to simply make up whatever allegories we please and that the spiritual understanding will not run counter to the historical (see Conf. 14.8).

The spiritual understanding of a text includes tropology, allegory, and anagogy (14.8.1). His definitions only make sense in the context of the example he uses, so to save time, here’s what the OED tells us:

tropology:

1. ‘A speaking by tropes’ (Blount, 1656); the use of metaphor in speech or writing; figurative discourse.

2. A moral discourse; a secondary sense or interpretation of Scripture relating to morals.

allegory:

1. Description of a subject under the guise of some other subject of aptly suggestive resemblance.

2. An instance of such description; a figurative sentence, discourse, or narrative, in which properties and circumstances attributed to the apparent subject really refer to the subject they are meant to suggest; an extended or continued metaphor.

3. An allegorical representation; an emblem.

anagogy:

1. Spiritual elevation or enlightenment, esp. to understand mysteries. Obs.

2. Mystical interpretation, hidden ‘spiritual’ sense of words.

The ancient and mediaeval interpreters of Scripture believed that the historical meaning of Scripture was true and useful.  However, it is not enough.  We must seek out deeper meanings that will speak to our spiritual lives, meanings that will help us grow as Christians.  The Spirit will enlighten our understanding; the classic Christian methodology runs counter to Enlightenment methodology that seeks to interpret Scripture by reason alone, believing that with reason even the heathen can unlock the mysteries of God.

To close, from John Cassian, Conf. 13.17.3:

Whoever believes that he can sound the depths of that immeasurable abyss [of God's wisdom] by human reason is trying to nullify the marvelous aspect of this knowledge, then, which struck the great teacher of the Gentiles.  For the person who is sure that he can conceive in his mind or discuss at length the designs whereby God works salvation in human beings is certainly resisting the truth of the Apostle’s words and declaring with impious audacity that the judgements of God are not inscrutable and that his ways are traceable. (Trans. Boniface Ramsey)

*See also “Antiochene θεωρία in John Chrysostom’s Exegesis,” by Bradley Nassif in Ancient & Postmodern Christianity, K. Tanner & C.A. Hall, eds.  Downers Grove: IVP, 2002.

We had our Fantasy Football Live Draft yesterday. Is there anything more stressful than the live draft in a Fantasy Football League? Maybe a thorough examination by an effeminate proctologist with Parkinson’s disease, but not much else.

According to the November 2005 issue of ESPN magazine, Fantasy football cost employers $200 million in lost productivity from its employees. According to the August 21, 2008 issue of amNY news daily, it was estimated that fantasy football cost companies $9.2 billion in lost productivity.

Despite some glitches with my Autopilot turning itself on at various times through no desire on my part, it went pretty well for me. I don’t why it does that, but when your Autopilot is on it automatically picks the next highest ranked player on the overall list regardless of whether you need or want that player on your roster. Much like a military draft. That’s how I wound up with Ronnie Brown of the Miami Dolphins as like my second pick. Could be worse though. If you’re not there for the live draft for instance, your entire team is picked with the Autopilot system. That’s how “Kell Hath No Fury” (one of the teams in my league) wound up with kicker Adam Vinatieri as a 6th Round Pick!  Good god. He’s so screwed. But who knows, there’s a lot of season ahead and plenty of chances for any team to Add/Drop its way to the Super Bowl.

Although the quote, “Heav’n has no Rage, like Love to Hatred turn’d / Nor Hell a Fury, like a Woman scorn’d”  is commonly thought to be from William Shakespeare, it is actually from William Congreve’s ‘The Mourning Bride’ (1697); spoken by Zara in Act 3, Scene 2.

My Team’s name is “This Year I’m Naming My Team T”. I wanted to name it “This Year I’m Naming My Team The…”. But the NFL web site limits the number of characters for a team name so that’s what happened. Now probably everyone thinks I’m a big fan of Mr. T or something.  I don’t know what I’d make of an incomprehensible team name like mine. It’s failed to even grasp the meta feel I was going for. Previously it was named “The Ingloryous Bas-turds” because I thought it was sufficiently funny enough to misspell everything even more than Quentin Tarantino misspelled his movie’s title. I had planned to change it later because I didn’t want everyone to think I was some sort of rabid fan of that movie. I just thought it would be momentarily funny til I changed it before our draft. But there we are. Or at least there I am.

When asked about the misspelled title, director Quentin Tarantino has said: “Here’s the thing. I’m never going to explain that. You do an artistic flourish like that, and to explain it would just take the piss out of it and invalidate the whole stroke in the first place.” Truth is, his title “Inglourious Basterds” was taken from ”The Inglorious Bastards”, the English title of a 1978 film “Quel maledetto treno blindato” by Enzo G. Castellari, which was also about a group of American soldiers fighting behind enemy lines. In Italian, Castellari’s film translates literally as “That Cursed Armored Train”.

But in looking everything over, I’m very happy with my team. I have Peyton Manning as my starting quarterback, looking for him to rebound with a big year, not that last year was disappointing for him but his stats were certainly less than we all had been used to seeing him achieve.

Peyton Manning’s record-setting quarterback season of 2004 included the following statistics:
Most touchdown passes in a season with 49. (Had one six-touchdown game, three five-TD games, two fours, three threes, and five twos. It took him to Week 15 to throw only one touchdown in a game.)
Most touchdown passes in a month (19 in November).
Most consecutive multiple-touchdown games in a season (13), bettering the 12 such games shared by Johnny Unitas in 1959, Don Meredith from 1965-66, Dan Marino from 1986-87, and Brett Favre from 1994-95.
Most consecutive games with at least four TD passes (five games from October 31-November 25).
Became the only player in NFL history to throw five touchdowns four times in a 12-month span.
Threw for 4,000 yards for the sixth consecutive season, the first player to do so.
Set the NFL record for highest passer rating in a season (121.1), topping Steve Young’s 112.8 in 1994.
And one near record: Reached 200 career TD passes in the second fewest games in history (106, behind Dan Marino’s 89).

And I couldn’t resist picking Brett Favre as my back-up QB. I just couldn’t NOT pick him. But I might Add-Drop him as the season goes on. Not even necessarily for another QB, but maybe for a 5th wide receiver. That’s the tricky thing this year. You start 3 receivers instead of two like we used to do a couple of years ago. So it’s smart to maybe have 5 of them to cope with the Bye weeks and the weeks when your opposition is strong defensively.  I only have 4 receivers, so I’ll wait to see who maybe has a break out season this year and try to grab him up.

Brett Favre holds the NFL record for most career passing Touchdowns with 464 (and counting). He has a bunch of other records including this one that he shares with Peyton Manning: Both are 3-time winners of the AP NFL MVP award.

My WRs are Marques Colston of the New Orleans Saints, Terrell Owens of the Buffalo Bills (got my fingers crossed with that pick. What was I thinking?), Steve Breaston (who?) of the Arizona Cardinals, and Devin Hester of the Chicago Bears. With Hester I’m hoping that they start utilizing him more as a receiver in addition to his kickoff and punt returning. The Bears had lousy quarterbacks before this season, so it was hard for them to exploit any of their receivers, but now that they have Jay Cutler who’s got a strong arm, I’m thinking now they can call more plays where Cutler can air it out and have the phenomenally speedy Hester streak downfield and run under the ball. We’ll see.

NFL wide receivers can use the numbers 10-19 and 80-89 on their jerseys.

My running backs are DeAngelo Williams of the Carolina Panthers, Ronnie Brown of the Dolphins, Thomas Jones of the New York Jets (who to my astonishment was still available by the 6th round!!), and then a chancy pick with Cadillac Williams of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.

The average career of a running back in the National Football League in the last two decades is 2.57 years.

I was happy to find that by not picking a Tight End until round 13, I was still able to snag a very respectable Visanthe Shiancoe of the Minnesota Vikings. Maybe the imminently 40-year-old arm of Brett Favre will be tired enough for him to have to throw short all the time to his Tight End.

In 2009, eDiets.com surveyed over 2,300 people to compare over 60 celebrities and then vote for who had the hottest butt. For best ass, previous winner singer/actress Jennifer Lopez, was beaten by actress and former model, Jessica Biel.

And I drafted Robbie Gould of the Chicago Bears as my kicker but am already awaiting the results of putting him on the Add/Drop list for kicker John Carney of the Saints.

The cancan dance first appeared in the working-class ballrooms of Montparnasse in Paris in around 1830, and originally it was groups of men, who caused the most shock dancing the can-can in public dance-halls.

I have two Defense/Special Teams: The New England Patriots and the Carolina Panthers. And I may Add-Drop the Panthers for some lucky WR who is just itching to join the mighty “This Year I’m Naming My Team T.”

We’ve got some other fun team names in the league. I like “Johnny Messypants”. A friend of mine named his team that. It’s named after a character I created called Johnny Messypants who would sort of talk in very blase, slow, lazy, weak voice and then I’d make a raspberry sound with my mouth like a fart sound and  Johnny Messypants would groan pathetically and say in an Elmer Fudd sort of voice, “I’m sorry…but sometimes…it’s hard for me to hold it in.”

We also have a team named “The One Cheek Squeaks”. My college roommate’s son owns that team. It’ll be a battle of the Scatalogical Teams when those two teams play each other. It’ll be “Johnny Messypants” versus “The One Cheek Squeaks” playing in the Toilet Bowl.

The sound that farts make are produced by vibrations of the anal opening. Sounds depend on the velocity of expulsion of the gas and the tightness of the sphincter muscles of the anus.

One year a few seasons ago, I named my team “The Johnsons.” I drafted only players with the surname Johnson. Amazingly I was able to fill every position with a Johnson except the Kicker and the Defense. Coming up with a team logo was fun too. You can imagine.

The Oxford English Dictionary says that “Johnson” is U.S. coarse slang for penis, originating from the surname, while Websters adds a first recorded usage date of 1863. Out of the many theories of origin, this date would appear to make the most likely one being related to British slang John Thomas, which was also slang for penis around 1863. The given date of 1863 shoots down two proposed theories for the origin because they come way after 1863:
1. R. G. Johnson made baseball bats in his Sebago Bat Company, burning ‘R. G. Johnson’ onto the bats which were referred to as “Johnsons.” However, the R G Johnson Company records show it was established in 1970.
2. President Lyndon Baines Johnson was supposedly a braggart about his organ, which then became gossiped about in popular culture. Obviously too late to be thought of as an origin of the slang.
There’s another notion of origin that could be possible due to the years involved. The “Johnson bar” is a long rod in old steam locomotives that the engineer would use to control the speed and forward/reverse direction of a train. It is called a “reverser” in Britain. Historians have not pinpointed why this reversing lever was called a “Johnson Bar” in American railway journals of the time, but it documents back to about 1842 in locomotive history.

One of the more satisfying seasons was when I named my team The New Yorkers, and I drafted only New York Jets, New York Giants and in a pinch Buffalo Bills players.  It wasn’t my league; it was some other league I joined, and I remember some wiseass writing, “I’ll give $100 if The New Yorkers win even one single game.” Maybe he was mad that it seemed like I wasn’t taking it that seriously by drafting my team in such a goofy way. Which was true of course, but amazingly, that New Yorker team of mine not only won games, but it made the playoffs! Came just short of winning the Super Bowl! Hah! It was just the perfect storm of a season for my players, Eli Manning, Plaxico Burress, Tiki Barber, my Jets players. It was hilarious.

There are lots of fun ways to draft players and name your team if your heart isn’t set on winning very much. In one public league I was in, I called by team the Bills. You’re probably way ahead of me already, but I only drafted players named William or Bill.  So go ahead and be creative. Drop me a line and let me know your funniest strategy for drafting players and naming your team!  I’d love to mention them in future blogs! Rah rah, sis boom PDFFFFFTTT…oh dear…I’m sorry…but sometimes…it’s hard for me to hold it in.”

Wilfred Winkenbach, former part owner of the Oakland Raiders is said to have invented fantasy Football. The entry fee for the 2007 National Fantasy Football Championship was $1300, with the winner taking home $100,000. Fantasy Football players comprise 90% of the Fantasy Sports industry. In October 2006 alone, 9.6 million people visited Fantasy Sports sites. 30% of Fantasy Football players manage their teams while on their office computers. 73% of Fantasy Football players have attended college.

(Sources:  (ESPN magazine, November 2005; amNY news daily, August 21, 2008, page 11; imdb.com, SUICIDESPORTS.COM; 2004 Summary; February 7, 2005; and COLTS.COM; profootballreference.com. http://www.pro-football-reference.com/players/FavrBr00.htm; DatabaseFootball.com.  http://www.databasefootball.com/awards/award.htm?a=APMVP; wikipedia.org; BLOODY SUNDAYS: Inside the Dazzling, Rough-and-Tumble World of the N.F.L., by Mike Freeman; FACTS ON FARTS, by Brenda Lorenz, www.heptune.com; ©2003; “”Locomotive Dictionary, 1st edition, pg 209; http://www.answerbag.com/q_view/508763; ESPN magazine, July 30, 2007, Special Advertisement by Jeep Wrangler, pg. 57)

Here’s a startling fact:
The good folks at the Oxford English Dictionary tell us that 90% of all written communication uses only 7000 words.
Which leaves numerous, perfectly lovely words forgotten by the conversational wayside. The website, Save the Words, seeks to rectify this situation by encouraging everyone to adopt a word. You commit to using your neglected adjective, noun or adverb as often as you can in daily life.

Come now, let’s all rally round divinipotent, pigritude or lardlet!
My new adoptee is: mitescent an adjective meaning ‘growing mild’ therefore, I must tell you that while August was fearfully hot by times, I do hope September will be mitescent.

What’s your adoptee?

Photo by Cory Frye

Oh, you Wrazz. Ninety-one entries in and I still haven’t the foggiest as to who you are. I know I outlined a grand plan in my very first post last November, but let’s face it: neither of us have any interest in staying on course. Where’s the fun in that?

I was miserable after that limiting directive. It forced me to mutter through Twilight, for Edward’s sake, and struggle to hear past the bray of pheromones and preteen snivel only to be rewarded with a middling story about a synthetic emo brat and her asexual Nosferatu squeeze. To satisfy the “wr” in Wrazz, I made bleary-eyed plods through cyberpsace to hyperlink Chris Jericho’s WWE profile for the 600th time at 2 a.m. on a Tuesday so that wayfarers could descend upon my Raw report, stomp past the meddling text, and tug one to pictures of Kelly Kelly. I tried to be wrestling. I tried to be jazz. I tried to gobble pop music like the speed peddled under the counter at a derelict uncle’s bicycle shop. Instead, I lolled in all that lay between. Because I’m Cory Frye, and I was born to amble.

But then, I countered, a successful blog is the blog with a hook. People dig consistency. They’re especially wild about gimmicks. Julie Powell prepared dishes from Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking night after night for a year, and Amy Adams mowed those million-dollar tresses to portray her on the big screen. Slate editor David Plotz blogged the Bible and just signed a six-picture deal with Lionsgate to merge his resulting bestseller with the Saw franchise. Yesterday afternoon I was shopping and noticed a book by some dude who read the entire Oxford English Dictionary. These folks were inspired, of course, by Kevin Murphy’s daring A Year at the Movies, in which the erstwhile MST3K writer/puppeteer/voice actor warmed theater cushions all over the world, snarfing popcorn and a full Thanksgiving dinner while partaking of the 2000 cinematic season.

Ordinarily, I’d think that’s kind of cheating. It’s just long-form reactions to the creative toil of others. The hard work’s already been done. Which is more difficult: preparing a souffle according to a list of instructions, or coming up with and perfecting that souffle in the first place? And the dictionary? Come on.

But I’m told there’s big bucks in this kind of blogging. So I’ve spent all day, minus the six hours I wasted frantically searching for my mislaid cell phone (it was upside-down in the laundry basket, of all places), trying to find a year-long shtick with universal appeal.

My initial eureka was “I’ll travel the country, bowling in every town.” Then I realized it might not work. What made Powell and Plotz so captivating was that they approached their subjects as neophytes, whereas I have a history with bowling. Although I know little of the sport (the extent: Earl Anthony and Dick Weber weren’t too shabby), I’ve been around ten-pins since I was knee-high to a ball rack. My “aunt” Linda (my real aunt’s roommate) would babysit me between frames in alleys up and down Orange County back in the ’70s. So there’s always been something magical about that symphony of slow rumbles into pocket-clatter — and when it hits just right, the tone is unmistakable. Decisive, even.

Not only that, but because I was left-handed, Linda saw a bright future for me and my natural curve on the pro circuit. So the week I turned 11 I was down at the local center, signing up for the weekend junior league. I devoted two years of Sundays to aiming my thumb at the 1 on an imaginary clock as I sent ten-pound pearl after ten-pound pearl to its destiny. Today I bowl maybe once or twice a year, and while I have yet to break 200, I scoff at anything below 150.

So there’s no grab. All these years later, I remain average at best. Therefore, there’s no discernable arc as I evolve from hapless gutter-hugger to giant of the pine. There’s nothing to keep asses in seats as Seth Rogen, depicting me in the film adaptation, rolled to self-discovery. Besides, the greatest bowling movies have already been made: Kingpin and The Big Lebowski, both released in the late ’90s during the sport’s cultural plateau. Perhaps I could use bowling as a metaphor for America, crossing borders but never foul lines. I could document the cuisine, the Friday night flavor, the feel of a rented shoe in a foreign town. Actually, that does sound appealing. Maybe the PBA’ll offer to underwrite the whole socio-shebang, because God knows I can’t afford it.

What else could I do for a year? Send text messages to random strangers and see what relationships form from wrong numbers. Purchase the same six items at Target every day and keep track of cashier reactions. I could read all the status updates on Facebook. Feign an accent in public. Listen to the same awesome song 152 times a day and chronicle my growing disenchantment. There’s no limit to what I could do.

Or couldn’t do. That’s another possibility: deprivation. The trendy hot big now thing to do is to not do. For instance, every week at least one of my friends trumpets his/her triumphant Web exodus for an extended period so he/she can, I dunno, engage fellow bipeds in healthy social interaction or some such shit. Sadly, that would be impossible to blog in real time, so I must resort to more trivial refusals. I’ve always wanted to protest the excision of vowels in online discourse; it’d be neat to dump consonants for a while. Perhaps I’ll refuse to watch my favorite TV shows or order chili fries with my half-pound Del Taco burritos. What if I didn’t clean my whole apartment for a year? Whoops — already well into that experiment:

[PHOTO REMOVED BY WORDPRESS AT THE BEHEST OF A CIVILIZED PEOPLE.]

Anyone else have ideas? If not, I’ll be down at the alley, honing my natural curve.

Now that IE has so rudely, and abruptly, shut this window . . . what was I talking about? Aha. Yes. The newest development in my life, apart from me getting my hair cut (serious “hooray”), is that I have finally purchased the OED. Direct from the Urbana University Campus Library to my personal home library, I present . . . a 1933 Oxford English Dictionary.

It looks like awesome.

Now I don’t have to be at the library every time I get the impulse to look something up in the OED–which, I must say, happens a lot.

However, that wasn’t really why I came in here. Actually, I’m updating our New Variorum Coriolanus bibliography because the other assistant’s last day was this week. But it’s 23 pages long . . . well, I’ve got 19 left, but that’s hardly the point. I’ve just been simmering a couple of ideas lately and I thought I’d throw ‘em out there.

Recently I was playing with a friend and had to come up with another “empty book”–you know, a plot for a book that doesn’t exist? Unfortunately, I let myself get too detailed and now I’m hooked on this plot. (Does it sound familiar? It should. I’m writing The Glass Knife for the same reason.) Now, I am completely fascinated with this idea, and it’s the first love story I’ve ever tried my hand at. Unfortunately, all I have is a plot. I have no names, no settings, no title–and since these are usually the first things I come up with, it’s very difficult for me to function right now. I outlined the entire plot referring to the main character as “R3″ the entire time–guaranteeing that I wouldn’t just plug in a filler name that I would get too attached to to ever let go (cf. Black Reflection). (“R3″ is a reference to Richard III because I happen to like him/that play.)

The plot is that this fellow, “R3,” is a king who isn’t a very good king although he isn’t trying to be bad. He takes lots of bad advice. His primary bad advisor is his cousin, who has often assured him, “Our fathers were brothers, therefore we are brothers.” Unfortunately, the same cousin is plotting to take over. (Well, naturally. Anyone well-read would see this coming, but “R3″ is myopic to a Arthurian level.) So he and some conspirators come in and kill “R3″ Duncan-Macbeth style. I know what you’re thinking–short book, and pointless, no? Well, naturally “R3″ is not dead. One conspirator is overcome with guilt, pronounces him dead when he’s not, and gives him time to escape. “R3″ gets into the neighboring kingdom and scrapes along barely surviving. A fruit vendor takes pity on him and lets him sleep in her stand at night;  they form a friendship. Eventually though, the cousin becomes nervous and hires some contract killers to hunt “R3″ down and kill him, offering a bounty “on every piece of him they bring back.” Somehow, “R3″ finds out about this and runs, picking a fight with the fruit vendor he’s fallen in love with so she won’t try to come with him. In the second part of the book, there’s a merry chase of “R3″ being stalked by the hunters who are being stalked by the fruit vendor. There are changes of heart, romantic speeches, chases, escapes . . . etc. etc. Did I mention the one shortcoming being that I don’t have a setting or names for characters? I could scifi it up a bit, I guess, rather than delving into the cliche of medieval courtlyism. What do you think? A scifi Princess Bride? Actually, it doesn’t really resemble PB at all. Or maybe it does. I dunno. I know very little except that I’m hungry!

Well, signing off for now, anyway. I’ll catch you roundabout.

flap (n:  sense 6a): a state of excitement or agitation.

Merriam-Webster’s Online Dictionary

Linden Lab recently updated the Second Life Web site; and, in a scrolling Flash window, we get this little piece:

“Looking for counterculture? Second Life is also full of furries, ninjas, steampunk balls and an enormous virtual recreation of Burning Man. Thousands of vampires seek victims alongside wandering elves, marauding cyberpunks and club-going Goths. Come join the party.“

Hamlet Au noticed this as he was reviewing the new site — which site is an impressive piece of work, I’ll say, though I have a peeve about one part myself that I’ll touch in another article — and wrote about it in New World Notes.  This has kicked off a discussion in the article’s Comments section about the appropriateness of the word counterculture to describe the many subgroups that inhabit a goodly chunk of the Grid.  (Please read the article before weighing in yourself!)

The discussion has been reasonably peaceful so far, even with over 40 comments (at last check).  There was some kerfluffle in the early comments, with some of the usual snark to be found in such things, but the trend seems to have settled down to a search for an appropriate word to substitute.  The talk even includes Mark Kingdon, the Big M Linden himself, who stepped in to say that the Lab’s Web team is going to change the reference.  I offered my own observation here; in summary, I threw my vote (though not the original suggestion for it) behind subculture, as a division of culture within the overarching cultural group.  Another leading candidate, suggested by Ann Otoole:  diversity (or, perhaps more simply, “diverse cultures/cultural groups”).

The main objection is that counterculture sometimes carries a negative loading to it.  The word was coined in 1968, according to Merriam-Webster (Oxford cites a 1970 use) to describe the alternative-lifestyle movement of the hippies, and was freighted with a baggage that has not yet disappeared.  I took a day to look at the article and think about it, and I do have to agree that this was not the best choice of word for the Web team to make.  It looks like we should have something different up soon (no solid prediction when, and which I do not plan to cover when it happens); but it shows their writers that words should not be chosen blithely.

Words carry meaning, obviously; but they also carry loading, especially nouns, which are descriptive of people and events.  Sometimes you can get away with riffing blindly on the language, and that is actually one way in English in which words acquire new meanings and evolve.  Counterculture means, from the Book, “a culture with values and mores that run counter to those of established society.”  I don’t think you can really say that about the furries of Luskwood, can you?  After all, they simply enjoy dressing up like big animals.  The steampunks of Caledon and Steelhead, et al., are often better behaved in manners than most of us in RL!  Is that “counterculture,” or rather a hearkening to a more civilized time (albeit with certain technical additions)?

What do you think?

Supplemental, 10:00 a.m.: There is an ongoing Plurk discussion concerning this, mostly in rebuttal of the objections.  Log in to your Plurk account to add a comment, or join Plurk to participate.

I call him Jaswant ‘Dictionary’ Singh. With his ever vibrating voice and knack for English words, nobody knew they exist, he bugged everyone. The likes of Vinay Katiar and Narendra Modi ran for cover. How long anyone can bear the affront. The hatred against him is across the board.

Congress people are burning his book. Apart from the UK-US educated, elite, dynastical top brass none of the congress people could understand Jaswant Singh’s English.

The envy is cross border, Pakistan never wanted to host Jaswant for any talks. They preferred Atal Bihari Vajpayee over Jaswant. The poet prime minister uttered familiar words, most of the times similar words: his fifty one poems.

Empowered by years of dictionary rote Jaswant left Strobe Talbott, US Deputy Secretary of State in Clinton Administration, gasping during the NPT talks. It’s long overdue – Rajnath Singh, LK Advani, etc. – no one should be blamed for firing him: it was his own creation.

Suggestion: He should offer buyers of his book a complimentary copy of Oxford English Dictionary.

Article from the Daily Telegraph Aug 2009, by Stephen Adams

The world’s most complete thesaurus is to be published after 45 years of painstaking work.
The professor behind the ambitious project, the first thesaurus charting the historical development of the English language, has appealed to all contributors to attend a reunion when the book is published in October.
The Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary will contain almost every word in English, from Old English dating back to the fifth century, to the English of the present day.
It will contain nearly 800,000 meanings, organised along similar lines to Roget’s Thesaurus, into more than 236,000 categories and subcategories.
It is the first time such a thesaurus has been undertaken in any language.
Prof Christian Kaye, now 68, has dedicated almost her entire career to the venture, compiling the work of some 230 contributors into a gigantic database. Now she hopes to gather them together for the party to mark the book’s publication on Oct22.
Prof. Kay of Glasgow University’s English Language department, said: “One of the best things about the project was working with so many different people over the years. It would be great to see some of them again.”
Most of the contributors were students and academics who worked on a particular section, she said.
Prof Kay’s favourite words include “spangheu”, meaning ‘to cause a frog or toad to fly in the air’ – derived from a 19th century rural pastime – ‘clumperton’ (1534) and ‘loblolly’ (1604), both used to describe a lazy or stupid person.

OATH OF THE HORATII ? OR THE PLEDGE OF ALLEGIANCE OF THE HORATII ???
Jacques-Louis David (August 30, 1748 – December 29, 1825) The Oath of the Horatii   1784  Musée du Louvre at Paris

The myth that the straight-armed salute is an ancient Roman salute has been completely refuted.  http://rexcurry.net/bookchapter1a1e.html

The so-called “Roman” salute (Nazi salute) was the American salute and it was made in the USA. http://rexcurry.net/pledgesalute.html

The infamous straight-armed salute of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (Nazis) came from the USA’s military salute and from the original pledge of allegiance to the flag, and not from ancient Rome. See the Youtube video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NsZxRPdDQHo

The Roman salute myth was used (and still is used) to cover-up the fact that National Socialists in the USA inspired National Socialists in Germany (Nazis) in their salute and ideology.  The pledge of allegiance (and its original straight-arm salute) was created by Francis Bellamy, a self-proclaimed National Socialist in the USA.
http://members.ij.net/rex/pledge-allegiance-pledge-allegiance2.jpg

There is no evidence that the painting “The Oath of the Horatii” (Jacques-Louis David) inspired the original straight-armed salute in the pledge of allegiance to the U.S. flag.  http://rexcurry.net/oath_horatii_rexcurrydotnet.jpg

Jacques-Louis David never used the term Roman salute to describe his painting nor to describe anything.

No one else described Jacques-Louis David’s work as a “Roman salute.” That is because the term “Roman salute” developed in the late 1930’s. The Oxford English Dictionary supports Dr. Rex Curry in this regard. http://rexcurry.net/roman-salute-oxford-english-dictionary.html

The term “Roman salute” developed decades after Jacques-Louis David’s life. When the term “Roman salute” developed, the straight-arm salute was a decades-old ritual in government schools in the USA where the gesture was compelled with robotic chanting of the Pledge Of Allegiance. The gesture originated in the USA from the military salute extended outward in the early Pledge. http://rexcurry.net/book1a1contents-pledge.html

Even so, none of those sources of the modern term “Roman salute” said a thing about artwork by Jacques-Louis David.

The first time that Jacques-Louis David was concocted as an excuse for the “Roman salute” myth was circa 2006 on Wikipedia. It was done by a writer who was trying to cover-up work by the historian Dr. Rex Curry showing that  the gesture originated in the USA’s early Pledge Of Allegiance.  It is more revisionist history air brushed at wakipedia.

In the past, people would repeat the myth that the gesture was an “ancient Roman salute.”  Most modern writers now concede the discoveries of the noted historian Dr. Rex Curry, establishing that the gesture was not an ancient Roman salute. http://rexcurry.net/roman_salute_roman_salute_roman_salute.jpg Roman Salutes from ancient Rome are a myth.

Wikipedia has helped to spread the news about Dr. Curry’s news-making work. Recent articles at opinioneditorials.com report on the many references to Dr. Curry’s research and discoveries on Wikipedia. Dr. Curry’s work might be the most referenced historical research on Wikipedia. Even Wikipedia founder Jimmy “Jimbo” Wales  has publicly noted Dr. Curry’s influence on Wikipedia. Wikipedia writers have reviewed and verified the work. Some Wikipedia writers use Dr. Curry’s work without attribution in apparent attempts to bolster their own credibility.

After Dr. Curry’s discoveries became well known, some intellectually dishonest people took it upon themselves to concoct a new myth to cover-up for the socialist gesture. After Dr. Curry’s shocking discoveries about the salute’s origin with the Pledge of Allegiance, some writers deliberately looked for other explanations and then those writers misrepresented neoclassical art to fabricate an alternative explanation and to cover-up Professor Curry’s work. http://rexcurry.net/wikipedia-lies.html

Francis Bellamy (the author of the pledge of allegiance) and James Upham (with whom Bellamy worked) discussed the process of creating the original flag salute and the painting was not part of the process and it did not even arise in their discussion. http://rexcurry.net/pledgesalute.html Further, Bellamy and Upham explicitly rejected the idea of an “oath” and specifically chose to use the word “pledge.”

There is no evidence that the painting “The Oath of the Horatii” inspired the original straight-armed salute in the pledge of allegiance to the U.S. flag. One would have to wildly speculate that if the painting inspired the flag salute at all, then it was subliminally.

The Roman salute myth came after the Pledge of Allegiance and was inspired by the pledge, as shown by Dr. Rex Curry (author of “Pledge of Allegiance Secrets”). http://rexcurry.net/roman-salute-oxford-english-dictionary.html

The painting “The Oath of the Horatii” http://rexcurry.net/pledgehoratii.html might have inspired (or enlarged) the myth of the Roman salute, not only by modern writers who use it to deliberately cover-up the truth, but also among ignorant people who do not understand the actual origins.  The myth was also  inspired by early movies that showed fictional Roman scenes using a straight-arm salute.  Those movies were inspired by the original straight-arm salute of the pledge of allegiance to the U.S. flag (from 1892).

The “Roman salute” myth was reinforced when the salute was adopted as the “Olympic salute” used at Olympic games on or before 1924.

http://rexcurry.net/bookchapter1a1c.html and http://rexcurry.net/olympics.html

There is no speculation about the fact that Francis Bellamy was a National Socialist in the USA three decades before the National Socialists in Germany, and that the USA’s National Socialists promoted their dogma and their original straight-armed salute to the USA’s flag for three decades ahead of the similar dogma and behavior of National Socialists in Germany. http://members.ij.net/rex/swastika3swastika.jpg

The scene depicted in the painting “The Oath of the Horatii” was not actually an oath (other than in the artist’s title), nor a pledge, nor a salute at all.  The painting depicts a scene from a story in which a father exhorts his sons to fight.  The painting shows the sons reaching for their weapons (swords) as the father hands them over.

The painting by Jacques-Louis David (8/30/1748 – 12/29/1825) is famous in the history of French painting and is exhibited at the Louvre Museum.  The story was taken from Titus-Livy.  The painter David chose to imagine the start of the story, rather than the action that followed.  David chose the idea of the oath (the oath is not mentioned in the historical accounts).  David may have been the first person to “make up” a formal oath as part of the story.  In fact the very story depicted, even without the oath, may not have actually happened. The story was inspired by the wars between Rome and Alba, in 669 B.C.  The painting depicts the three Roman brothers of the Horatii family pledging allegiance and gesturing toward weapons held by their father who exhorts his sons to fight.

If the painting had served as inspiration for the pledge of allegiance, then the pledge of allegiance would probably have been a better pledge that more accurately describes the painting: “I pledge allegiance to my right to keep and bear arms, and to the liberty for which it stands, to defend my father, my family and myself.”

As the story is told, Rome was represented by the triplets Horatii, and Alba also by triplets from the family of Curatii. As a result of the combat only one (Horatius) survived and Rome was declared the victor.   There may be a relationship to the names “Horatio” or “Horace” (see Horace of the Horatian Ode), and “Horatius Cocles” a hero of ancient Roman Legend, celebrated for his defense of a bridge over the Tiber against the Etruscans.

The painting was inspired by the period of the wars between Rome and Alba, in 669 B.C.  It has been decided that the dispute between the two cities must be settled by an unusual form of combat to be fought by two groups of three champions each. The two groups are the three Horatii brothers and the three Curiatii brothers. The drama lay in the fact that one of the sisters of the Curiatii, Sabina, is married to one of the Horatii, while one of the sisters of the Horatii, Camilla, is betrothed to one of the Curiatii. Despite the ties between the two families, the Horatii’s father exhorts his sons to fight the Curiatii and they obey, despite the lamentations of the women.”

Shocking PLEDGE OF ALLEGIANCE PHOTOGRAPHS page 1 http://rexcurry.net/pledge2.html

http://rexcurry.net/roman-salute-ancient-roman-empire-forums-saluto-romano.html
http://rexcurry.net/roman-salute-anita-cohen-williams.html
http://rexcurry.net/roman-salute-benito-mussolini.html
http://rexcurry.net/roman-salute-carl-jung.html
http://rexcurry.net/roman-salute-francis-bellamy-pledge-of-allegiance.html
http://rexcurry.net/roman-salute-martin-winkler.html
http://rexcurry.net/roman-salute-metropolitan-museum-of-art.html
http://rexcurry.net/roman-salute-oxford-english-dictionary.html
http://rexcurry.net/rome-ancient-rome-myths.html
http://rexcurry.net/bookchapter1a1c.html
http://rexcurry.net/olympics.html