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Is there a name for the phenomenon of one language being identified but another being transcribed? For example: "'You are going to kill him?' she cried in German." (From The Man Who Couldn't Sleep by Arthur Stringer.) And: "[Men speaking Spanish] Last night I had an ugly nightmare."
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"Figs and filberts": a new expression via Jonathan Caws-Elwitt. For example: "Let's get down to figs and filberts." "I don't know my figs from my filberts." "It's time to separate the figs from the filberts." "Don't make a fig out of a filbert." |
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On the magical quality of philosophical phrases: "They have something, a sort of magic — I don't know what — that makes like rich and exciting to me. . . . I think we're thrilled by the weight of history that lies behind each one of these phrases. It isn't just the world itself, or just its immediate meaning. It's a long, trailing margin of human sensations, life by life, century by century, that gives us this peculiar thrill. . . . I know they're absurd, these phrases . . . Words like 'pluralism' and 'dualism' and 'monism.' But what they make me think of is just a particular class of vague, delicious, physical sensations! And it's the idea of there having been feelings like these, in far-off, long-buried human nerves, that pleases. . . . It makes life seem so thick and rich and complicated." — John Cowper Powys, Wolf Solent
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Pronounced not unlike the quacking of a duck, gwork is a wonderful word handed down from the language of the Cewri (the "giants" of Welsh folklore). In a nutshell, it means "struggling to the last." It implies "to enjoy fighting, and to be fond too of what you're fighting for, or of what you're fighting against. . . . [I]t means enjoying life to the end or at least fighting to enjoy life to the end." It seems to declare in one breath "that you were glad to have lived and that you'd struggle to the last to feel you were glad, in fact fight to the last to feel it; to feel, I mean, that weak as you might be, that defeated as you might be, that humiliated as you might be, that feeble and ridiculous as you might be, and as much like a wounded insect as you might be, you still refused to curse life. . . . It means using the soul in us to fight and enjoy the universe at the same time. And to achieve this trick we've got to feel the soul in us as if it were in some sort of way independent of the body, although not necessarily . . . capable of surviving the death of the body. We've got to feel it as if it were an unconquerable generator of energy within us, as if it were a self-quickening pulse of power and force, like a bodiless living creature, a creature of an airy rather than of a fluid or fiery essence, but a creature we can feel . . . in our two hands, our two legs, our sex organs and all our senses" ( John Cowper Powys, Porius, pp. 569-70). |
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Mike shares the latest ridiculousness from the National Weather Service: "Tide levels are expected to reach about one to one and a half feet above predicted levels." People are being paid to come up with this ludicrousness, and they don't even work for The Onion. Meanwhile, our challenge stands for any meteorologist to concoct a more accurate weather report than our controversial Arcane Weathervane. |
Page 54 of 73
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Original Content Copyright © 2025 by Craig Conley. All rights reserved.
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