FANUTE, OR GLORIFYING IGNORANCE.

The NY Times Magazine has gotten even fluffier over the years, and I spend less time over it than I used to, but somehow I wound up reading Willy Staley's piece (titled "What is the Real Meaning of 'Fanute'?" in the physical paper and "Lady Mondegreen and the Miracle of Misheard Song Lyrics" online) and now I have to vent about it. This falls into two common genres at once, "How Can It Be that Other People Have Access to and Dare to Praise the Special Thing that Was Mine, All Mine?" (which is silly but eternal and understandable) and "Ignorance is Better than Knowledge," which is the heresy I am here to smite. (Nobody expects the Hattic Inquisition!) After explaining the mondegreen phenomenon, Staley segues into his favorite example from rap music, a line from French Montana that sounds to many people like "fanute the coupe to that Ghost, dog." Staley deigns to explain that the line is actually "from the hoopty coupe to that Ghost, dog" (though he doesn't deign to explain what "hoopty" means, presumably so as to preserve at least a shred of your treasured ignorance; I, more cruel, will deprive you of it by quoting Urban Dictionary: "In reference to cars: a vehicle in poor condition, often large, boatlike, and aided by duct tape or bungee cords"). He then proceeds to mock a site called Rap Genius ("a hip-hop Wikipedia") that does such explaining on a large scale, saying "The perhaps fallacious assumption at the Web site’s heart is that every rap lyric has a meaning and that the meaning of every rap lyric should be unearthed," and another called RapMETRICS that has the gall to analyze rap lyrics. And listen to the way he talks about it:

Both approaches belie an attitude that ultimately creates distance between the listener and the music: rap lyrics are data; rap lyrics are graphs. Rap lyrics are poetry to be read in your smoking jacket with a glass of Cognac (E. & J., sir? I recommend you fanute to the Louis XIII?). [...] It at least suggests a nascent anxiety: that to appreciate the music in a direct and visceral or even emotional way would be untoward for the effete, urbane listener. [...] More to the point, however, is that this rigorous organization of rap lyrics into structured and unstructured data sets, into problems to be solved, exists in direct opposition to accidental mondegreens like “fanute,” which can arise only from actually listening to the music, rather than fussing over it as if it were your homework. The Internet is a powerful research tool, and apparently we’ve decided to use it to enable crowdsourced pedantry of the most obnoxious sort. Anyone with a laptop can be as authoritative as Springfield’s Comic Book Guy now, and apparently that’s something to be celebrated.

It's a foolish crusade, of course. Knowledge will out; you can't make sites like Rap Genius and RapMETRICS go away by mocking them, nor can you make people stop wanting to know what rappers are saying by comparing them to Comic Book Guy. And I'm here to tell you that knowledge is better than ignorance, no matter how you dress the latter up by calling it "mondegreens," and the drive to suppress it is to be deprecated whether it manifests itself in a Times Magazine essay or a campaign against climate science or evolution. Magna est veritas: The truth is great, and shall prevail.

A RIDICULOUS NAME.

I've long been a fan of Adam Gopnik's, and I greatly enjoyed his A Point of View: The curse of a ridiculous name, in which he laments his surname and worries about its effect on his afterlife:

Are there any big modern writers who have really funny names? Only Kipling, I think, and that is an accident of the participle.

More to the point, are there good writers who are now forgotten, as I am pretty sure I shall be, because their names are so funny?

Yes, I have to say with dread, there are - for instance, the 20th Century American poet WD Snodgrass. Snodgrass was a truly great poet, the originator, if anyone was, of the style we now call "confessional poetry", a hero to Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath and the rest. But he had that funny Pickwickian name, and he knew it. He used to make fun of his own name: "Snodgrass is walking through the universe!" one poem reads (I, too, make fun of my surname, in the hopes of keeping off the name-demons).

A gopnik in Russian, and in Russia, is now a drunken hooligan, a small-time lout, a criminal without even the sinister glamour of courage. When Russian people hear my last name, they can barely conceal a snigger of distaste and disgusted laughter. Those thugs who clashed with Polish fans at Euro 2012? All gopniks - small G. And I'm told that it derives from an acronym for public housing, rather than from our family's Jewish roots, but no difference.

THE BOTTOM OF THE SACK.

This is another in the occasional LH series Annoying Errors I Feel the Need to Correct Publicly. I'm still reading, and enjoying, Benson Bobrick's East of the Sun: The Epic Conquest and Tragic History of Siberia (see here and here); it's an excellent overview of the region's history, with lots of piquant details and mini-biographies. But on p. 286, he says:

Thus did a quite limited idea of Siberia become fixed in the public mind. One Victorian writer called the colony "the cesspool of the Tsars," and if the judgment seems harsh, the prevailing view was perhaps fairly epitomized by Count Nesselrode's emphatic pronouncement that Siberia was "the bottom of the sack."

Imperial Visions: Nationalist Imagination and Geographical Expansion in the Russian Far East, 1840-1865

Nesselrode explained that up to this time distant Siberia had represented a “deep net” into which Russia could discard its social sins and scum (podonki) in the form of convicts and exiles. With the annexation of the Amur, however, “the bottom of this net will be untied, and our convicts would be presented with a broad field for escape down the Amur to the Pacific.”

TOM SWIFT AND HIS TASER.

A correspondent sent me a link to Mark Forsyth's The Inky Fool post on the etymology of taser, remarking that it was news to him. It's news to me, too, and I quote Mark's post, which tells the story well:

The taser was invented by a NASA scientist called Jack Cover who worked on it between 1969 and 1974. He had been inspired by a series of children's books about a hero called Tom Swift. Tom Swift is an adventuring sort of chap who goes around having adventures, sometimes in darkest, deepest Africa and sometimes on the Moon. There have been over a hundred Tom Swift books published since 1910 and they still seem to be going strong, there was even a Tom Swift board game once. However, the one that interests us is the tenth in the series which was published in 1911: Tom Swift and his Electric Rifle. In this one Tom Swift goes elephant hunting when he discovers that some of his friends have been taken hostage by a tribe of red pygmies. Luckily for the hero (but unluckily for the red pygmies) Tom has with him his brand new invention: a rifle that uses electricity rather than bullets. It can therefore be set to different ranges and different levels of lethality, so he can stun elephants, kill pygmies etc.

It was this invention that Jack Cover was attempting to imitate, and he even decided to call it Tom Swift's Electric Rifle, or TSER. However, as that didn't make a catchy acronym he decided to add a gratuitous initial and make it Thomas A. Swift's Electric Rifle, or TASER.

SOLAR PLEXUS.

I was reading one of gilliland's wonderful posts, Jul. 11th, 2012 (in exhilarating Russian, like all of them), where after discovering the phrase таёжный богатырь 'mighty warrior of the taiga' (anybody know the original source? Google tells me it's applied to Yakuts, Russians, and bears) I came to grief on "на уровне солнечного сплетения" 'on the level of the sunny... interlacing?' I got a good laugh on looking it up and discovering that солнечное сплетение [sólnechnoye spleténie] means, and is the literal equivalent of, 'solar plexus,' plexus being the past participle of Latin plectere 'to plait, twine, interweave.' But this led to another question: why the devil is the solar plexus called that? The dictionaries say it's so named because of its radiating nerve fibers, but I'd be curious to know the history of the term. (It's properly called the celiac plexus, celiac meaning 'of the cavity'; I hadn't known that either.)

SPECIAL INSTRUCTIONS TO PLAYERS.

I ran across a link to this remarkable document some years ago and was charmed and amused, but figured it was probably a fake. But apparently it's been authenticated by none other than Keith Olbermann, so as a lover of both baseball and filthy language I can't resist passing it along. Here's the introduction from Letters of Note, to set the scene:

This incredible memo, purportedly issued to all Major League Baseball teams in 1898 as part of a documented campaign — spearheaded by John Brush — to rid the sport of filthy language, was discovered in 2007 amongst the belongings of the late baseball historian Al Kermish, also a respected collector of memorabilia. Essentially an on-field code of conduct, most amusing is that the memo was in fact so expletive-laden and obscene as to be "unmailable" to its intended audience via the postal service, and so was delivered by hand to each of the League's 12 clubs and their foul-mouthed players.

THE CULPRITS OF SOUND CHANGE.

Mark Rosenfelder has another gem at zompist.com (which I really should visit more often): Sound change: Who are the culprits? He starts off:

I just finished William Labov’s Principles of Linguistic Change: Social Factors, which is a detective story. No, really. You don’t expect a linguistic tome to have the literary quality of suspense, but this book does. It’s organized around the central puzzler of historical linguistics: why does language change? Why do people bother with sound changes, especially when everyone agrees that they’re destructive if not positively evil? It takes the whole book to create a framework to answer the question.

◘ The leaders of sound change are almost always women; they’re often a generation ahead of the men.
◘ Women keep advancing a sound change in a linear fashion; men’s advance is stepwise. The obvious interpretation is that men don’t pick up the change from their contemporaries, but from their mothers.
◘ There’s a typical curvilinear function of class: neither the lower class nor the upper class are in the forefront of change, but those in the middle– even more specifically, the upper working class.
◘ Nonstandard variants often peak in adolescence. So older speakers may retreat from a change.
◘ There’s only a very small contribution from ethnicity or neighborhood (except to the degree that these correlate with class).
◘ A phoneme doesn’t change all at once; some words are leaders, some laggards. For some reason, the tensing of short a in Philadelphia strongly affected the word planet, while Janet remained lax. (This is reminiscent of the effect of Trojan horse words in gender change.)

MORE FROM BOBRICK.

In hopes of enticing slawkenbergius to share more of his hard-won knowledge, herewith a couple more language-related anecdotes from Benson Bobrick (see yesterday's post). First, on the Treaty of Nerchinsk of 1689:

The talks got under way on August 12, and were conducted through interpreters in Latin, with the Chinese relying on two Jesuit missionaries, Fathers Francis Gerbillon and Thomas Pereyra (both long resident in Peking), and the Russians (for form's sake) on Andrei Belobotskii, a university-educated Pole, although Golovin was fluent in Latin himself.

Atlasov brought him to Anadyrsk, from where he was conveyed under escort to Moscow in 1701 and presented to Peter the Great. Peter made him the nucleus of a Japanese language school in the capital, but despite a promise to the contrary, never allowed him to return home. Eventually, he was baptized under the name of Gabriel, but lived out his days in profound melancholy in St. Petersburg — the first casualty of Russia's chronically troubled relations with Japan.