I’ve often wondered what was counter about counterpane—whether it was somehow the opposite of pane (e.g. “a pane of glass”).
Turns out: no. In fact, says the AHD, Old French countrepointe is an eggcorn for coultepointe, derived from Medieval Latin culcita puncta, “stitched quilt”.
English pane, on the other hand is derived from Latin pannus “piece of cloth”; likewise English panel. They’re cognate with English vane, derived from OE fana “flag/banner”.
There has been no point to this entry, only a counterpoint.
screenshot of Jane Curtin and Dan Ackroyd in the old “Point/Counterpoint” sketch from SNL
Fredric Brown was one of the best writers of sf at shorter lengths–especially very short lengths. His story “Knock” was so short he had to write a longer story to embed it in. His “Puppet Show” brilliantly mocked the Campbellian idea of human supremacy (and, by implication, white supremacy). He could do bone-chilling horror (e.g. “The Geezenstacks” or “Nightmare in Blue”), light comedy (e.g. “Star Mouse” or “Placet is a Crazy Place”), space adventure (e.g. the classic “Arena”, a great story made into an even greater Star Trek episode, in case you thought I’d forgotten that Everything Is Star Trek!™): you name it, he did it.
left: a b&w photo of Fredric Brown I stole from someone who didn’t own it; right: the title card from the Star Trek episode based on Brown’s “Arena”
He was also a fairly mediocre writer of sf at shorter lengths. When you’re writing at a penny or two per word and trying to live on what you write, I guess you write a lot of dreck. (I went into some of the details a few years ago here, reviewing the NESFA collection of his short sf for Black Gate.) Not all of his sf is worth rereading and rereading. Well, so what? He still scored a lot better than Sturgeon’s Law would suggest.
Someone once said to me (I forget who) that Brown’s mystery work was even better than his sf stuff. I hope I was at least polite, but I didn’t believe this for a second.
Exhibit A for the Defense of Fredric Brown: Madball, a crime novel from 1953. (I read the e-book from Black Gat books, which retained Griffith Foxley’s wonderfully pulpy cover art from the original Dell paperback.)
It’s hard to know how to describe Madball. It’s about a murder and its aftermath, which includes several other murders. There’s some mystery, but it is not a murder mystery because the book bluntly explains to you early on who the murderer is. The mystery is really about what happened to the money which was the motive for the first murder—where it came from and where it went to and who’s going to get it in the end. But there’s no detective in this mystery. We follow some of the characters around through the story, whose least loose end is carefully, not to say brutally, tied off before the book’s close. When they’re done, it’s done.
The murders occur at a carnival, and most of the characters in the book are carneys of various descriptions. “Madball” is carney slang for the crystal ball used by a guy running a soothsayer act. The carnival’s soothsayer, Dr. Magus, is the closest thing the novel has to a main character. He’s interested in the first murder that occurred primarily because the murdered man was the sole survivor of a bank heist, whose proceeds seem to be hidden at the carnival or near one of the sites it’s visited in the past few months. Doc is a lazy bastard who doesn’t expect much out of life, but he’s a smart bastard who wants that money so that he can get more than he’s been expecting.
Sometimes we see the story from his point of view; sometimes we see events from the viewpoint of Sammy, a developmentally disabled teenager who’s been taken up as a punk (in the technical sense current in the first half of the 20th century) by the guy who runs one of the carnival games; sometimes we see through the eyes of the murderer; sometimes we see through the eyes of the murderer’s future victims.
Brown shows us entertainers, con artists, sex workers, people engaged in same-sex and other-sex relations, killers, thieves, all without judgement. Brown, invisible as Shakespeare, puts them on the stage and lets them work out their destinies without editorial comment. He never tells us all the tricks waiting in the narrative wings, until it’s time to reveal them for maximum impact, but he is careful to let us know more than the characters, so that there’s an ironic tension between us and them.
The characters belong to a subculture that few are familiar with, but they’re as ordinary and unremarkable as a cheese sandwich. Still Brown’s carefully constructed plot, a tragedy of fulfilled wishes, invests them with dignity and their fates fall like lightning bolts. This is a book to read and reread.
It’s not science fiction… and yet, it sort of is. Doc Magus is a liar and a con man who uses cold reading to get people to reveal their secrets to him, even as they think he’s revealing their secrets to them. But the irony that shapes his fate is: he does have a kind of clairvoyance. It doesn’t affect the plot so much as unify it. I hesitate to say more, for fear of spoiling the story’s effects.
Go ahead and read it, if you haven’t. I don’t think you’ll be mad at me for recommending it.
I was turning for comfort and relief to Seneca, as I often do, when he turned around and stabbed me in the eyeball with this triple-forked slam. He’s writing about his contemporaries who have screwed-up priorities. His contemporaries, but maybe also ours.
Quis est istorum qui non malit rem publicam turbari quam comam suam? qui non sollicitior sit de capitis sui decore quam de salute? qui non comptior esse malit quam honestior?
—Seneca, De Brevitate Vitae 12.3
“Who among these creeps wouldn’t prefer that the republic be in disarray, rather than his hair? Who of them wouldn’t be more concerned about how his scalp appears than about his health? Who of them wouldn’t prefer to be more well-groomed than more honest?”
As Fate or Chaos would have it, the LoA collection of Jimmy Breslin arrived on my doorstep this week, so that on the evening when Trump’s guilty verdict was announced in Manhattan, I got to read Breslin’s verdict on Trump from 34 years earlier.
My blanket praise of New Yorkers should not be construed to include the New York Times–then and now, A Part of the Problem!™ I was interested to read Breslin’s take on Trump “The Master of the Steal”, a column that appeared in Newsday back in 1990.
Trump was going through one of his periodic stages of bankruptcy and financial disaster at the time, but Breslin, though contemptuous of Trump, was confident that he would find more people to give him money. “Trump survives by Corum’s Law,” said Breslin.
What is Corum’s Law, and who was Corum? Not the Michael Moorcock character, unfortunately. Bill Corum was a sometime journalist who was hired to run the Kentucky Derby at a time of crisis: “Newspapers all over the world claimed Louisville was a place where Derby visitors were robbed.”
Corum took the job, but he insisted that the problem was not a problem.
“If a guy from North Dakota goes home from here after the race and has to be met because he doesn’t even have cab fare, that guy is going to say to himself, ‘Wow, I must have had a hell of a time. I can’t wait for next year.’ But if that same guy goes home and still has half his money, he is going to say, ‘I guess I didn’t have such a great time after all.’
“Because, gentlemen, this is the rule. A sucker has to get screwed.”
—Bill Corum, quoted in Breslin’s “The Master of the Steal”
Breslin explains Trump’s otherwise inexplicable success with banks and other suckers (like the NYT) by applying Corum’s Law.
It goes a long way to explaining Trump’s television and political career. Suckers have to get screwed, and they flock to his banner. He’s the Sunk Cost Fallacy in (approximately) human form.
So I got an Apple Pencil to use with my iPad. Like everything else produced by Apple it’s a Guaranteed Game-Changer™ that is guaranteed to change your life, or at least your GAME. (I’m been a Mac-user since the early 90s, and in that time I’ve found that the only thing more boring than a Windows/Android evangelist is an Apple evangelist.)
I didn’t figure that the thing would magnify my already remarkable gift for the visual arts. (See below for some evidence of this.) Still, I had some hope for the Scribble function. The idea is, you write with the Apple Pencil, and it converts what you’re writing into etext.
In olden days, because I hated the sound of a typewriter, I would do all my early drafts in a notebook and then laboriously transcribe them into a legible final draft via a typewriter. When I got my first computer I gave up notebooks and started writing first drafts in a word processor.
But my brain and hand have not forgotten their decades-long habit of using notebooks; I kind of miss the messy scribal freedom of handwriting. I’m too lazy to go back to the old practice of transcribing the notebook, though. Plus: no backups! What if you lose the notebook?
Hence the Apple Pencil. In some ways, it’s the ultimate Apple device, because it has no controls or buttons at all. It’s supposed to Just Work.
Well, it didn’t—not straight out of the box. It paired with my iPad when I connected them magnetically, but every time I removed the pen from the iPad it would disconnect. I consulted the interwebs about this problem, which a bunch of people apparently have. The answers were uniformly unhelpful: “turn the machine off and then on” sort of stuff, along which a lot of foamy “You’ll never look back!” recycled ad copy.
I left the pencil sitting on the iPad to charge to 100%, and that was what did the trick. Below is my first effort.
So it’s pretty good for doodling–not quite as good as a chalkboard, but okay. The words were written doing the Scribble function, which takes some getting used to. It took me about four or five times as long to write those words via Scribble as it would have if I had just typed them. The program has real trouble decoding my handwriting–not the first or last entity to have that trouble, I guess. I had to edit nearly every word to make it say what I intended, and they ended up scattered over the page in a confusing fashion. Plus, if you pause for a microsecond while handwriting, Scribble thinks you’re done and tries to make a word fragment into a word.
Below is an unedited sample. I handwrote, “So here I am writing with my Apple Pencil,” which it turned into the gibberish you see, and then “Happy days are here again!” which it turned into “Happy days where again!” Which is a whole mood, I guess, but well off the intended target.
There are no failed experiments, only failed experimenters. I guess this was worth trying. But it looks like I’m going to have to forego handwriting my drafts or accept the extra work that goes with them.
Posted inGadgetry, writing|Comments Off on Happy Days Are Where, Again?
For one thing, it erases the repetitions in the original. For another, references to drinking have been prissily expunged. To translate “we’ll take a cup of kindness yet” the translator writes manūs iungāmus “we’ll join hands”.
I get that not everything has to be about drinking. I especially get it today, since someone spent a chunk of the early morning hours blowing chunks into the yard of the house next door to the fortress of Engitude. I listened with a mixture of sympathy for the sufferer and relief that I don’t do that to myself anymore.
But a drink doesn’t have to be alcoholic, and I strongly feel that you should translate a text accurately or leave it alone.
Today it occurred to me that you could render the first stanza and refrain of the song (which is all that anyone ever sings) this way:
I think that’s fairly singable, if you ignore elisions and vowel quantities (which is usually the case with sung neo-Latin).
Obviously, this occurred to me a month too late, as it’s already (as I write) after sunset on January 1st. But I prefer to think of it as eleven months early.
In the course of an ultimately frustrating and pointless conversation online today, I found myself thinking of the multiple meanings of fair in English–at once, “light-skinned/light-haired”, “beautiful”, and “just, even-handed”.
The meanings are so different that I wondered if they actually had distinct etymological sources that ended up in homophones/homographs. But it seems not: anyway the AHD and OED derive them all from Old English fæger; Orel (Handbook of Germanic Etymology) derives fæger from Proto-Germanic *fagraz. The online OED goes as far as to connect the Germanic form to PIE *peh₂ḱ– “join, connect, agree”, making it cognate with Latin pax (loaned into English by way of French as peace), also page, pale (as in “stake”), the –pinge in impinge, and pagan.
It makes sense that things that fit together would be considered beautiful, and that fairness is a way for people to fit together. But I didn’t find an etymological explanation for how fair means “pale”, as well as “beautiful” and “moral character”; the three things don’t obviously go together. (Except in the minds of racists.) I wonder if the well-attested association between femaleness and paleness in the classical world might be part of the process. I’m not sure I have a resolution to this question; I’m still walking around the ideas and kicking their tires.
Greek has a similar deal with καλός which means both “beautiful”, and “morally good; noble”. And people still tend to map goodness (along with intelligence and other irrelevant qualities) on beauty, and evil (along with stupidity, etc.) on ugliness.
The other English fair (“festival”) comes into English (via French) from Latin feriae (“holidays”) and seems to be unrelated to the word meaning “just, even-handed”. If you’ve ever been cheated at a fair, now you know why. They’re not supposed to be fair.
Mary Brown, “Carnival of the Animals” (after Saint-Saens)
I’m reading Ǫrvar Odds saga at odd moments when I should be working, lately. I was looking up útnes which C&V (un)helpfully gloss as “an outer ness”. The AHD more helpfully told me that a ness is a cape or headland, and also that the word comes from PIE *nas- “nose”, which I thought was kind of funny.
The AHD’s etymological entry for *nas- also mentioned nark “informer”, which floored me. I always thought that nark was an abbreviation of narcotics, as an undercover cop trying to infiltrate the drug trade. But apparently nark is older than that (attested in 1846 according to the OED). It may, as AHD suggests, derive from Romani nak “nose”. English nose as “police informer” is attested in the late 18th century and is probably older still.
The OED throws some shade on the idea that nark derives from Romani, pointing its nose toward knark (roughly: “a jerk”), attested 1851. But there’s no reason to prefer knark over nak as the source of nark, particularly as knark does not appear earlier and the OED doesn’t know the source of knark either.
Eric Partridge suggested French narquois as a source, which means “cunning, deceitful; crook” as early as the 1600s. But I think I incline towards Romani nak “nose”, if only because it’s funnier.
Seneca’s line is almost a baseball conditional. Although, since I don’t keep track of baseball, my favorite examples aren’t from sportswriters.
For instance, in Kornbluth and Pohl’s Gladiator-at-Law (a minor work of midcentury satire, but nonetheless on my “always reread” list). In it a minor character tells the main character, “You mess with the big boys, they punish you.”
John Berkey provided the art for the 1960s Ballantine edition of Gladiator-at-Law. If you’re going to read the book, avoid the 1980s reprint which was mutilated by Pohl’s rewriting.
