Mangled meaning: why it infuriates me!

It's the kind of word you don't usually say, or even hear, but it shows up in print journalism a lot, and (plenty) in books.

It's a word that is so consistently defined incorrectly,  no one seems to know what it means at all any more.  When that happens, when the tide of popular opinion is strong enough, slowly, surely, relentlessly, even ruthlessly, the (completely erroneous) "new" meaning of the word will drill and squeak its way into the dictionary and become "correct".

This means that the wrong definition, no matter how egregious, will suddenly be right. Orwell would recognize the irony.

Nonplussed. It's an odd sort of word that people pull out and use when they want to look or sound educated or highfalutin' (another interesting word). Almost always, it's used something like this:

"She was nonplussed when her boyfriend dumped her for a more attractive woman, for after all, he was a wretched shithead and she was about to dump him anyway."

"When the police raided her apartment, found 500 pounds of cocaine and slapped her in handcuffs, she was nonplussed: not only was the chief of police her best customer, he also had a taste for the white stuff."

In other words, in the public view, in almost everyone's view, nonplussed is supposed to mean nonchalant, cool, unruffled, unworried, unbothered, calm, composed, and all those things. "Nonplussed!" You know what I mean!


No, no, noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!

Here is what the word nonplussed means. (By the way, this matches every other online dictionary definition I was able to find.)

non·plus(nn-pls)

tr.v. non·plussed also non·plused, non·plus·sing also non·plus·ing, non·plus·ses also non·plus·es

To put at a loss as to what to think, say, or do; bewilder.

n. A state of perplexity, confusion, or bewilderment

In other words, the exact opposite of the popular definition, the one everyone seems to have voted on in a secret ballot a few years ago.

Do you know what happens in cases like this? A writer will use the word nonplussed CORRECTLY in an article or (God help us) a non-fiction book or a novel, and an editor will take a big red pencil, cross the whole sentence out and write, "Wrong useage!" or "Get a dictionary!" or some-such comment in the margins. If not with a pencil, then electronically. The writer will be penalized and scolded for committing the unpardonable sin of wrong definition/useage, for what could be worse for a wordsmith than that?

Don't ask your editor to please please please look it up. They will be deeply offended by the very suggestion that they don't know their business, that in fact you know better than they do (unheard-of!), and the fragile bond between you will be frazzled, if not severed outright.

This is nasty stuff. Even if somehow-or-other your editor finds out you were right all along, he or she might say something along the lines of, "But people don't KNOW it means perplexity, confusion, or bewilderment. They think it means cool-headedness and detachment. If you use it this way you'll look like you're making a mistake and it will make us look bad." (That last part I added; they never say it out loud.)

How could people end up getting it so wrong, flipping the meaning around to its opposite? They see the prefix "non" and they think it means "not". "Plussed" somehow registers in their minds as "upset": but why? It has nothing to do with such things.

The expression comes from the Latin non plus, which literally means "no more".  (And I'd be happy to see no more of this casual mangling of the English language.) No more is kind of neutral and a little hard to define, but if something is "non -" (-fat, -white, -sense), it obviously means "NOT".  But if you're "not plussed", what are you? Not upset? Why does plussed mean upset? Doesn't "plus" just mean "more"? Yes. The more you look at it, the less sense it makes.

Why does this happen? How on earth can the meaning of a word flip over into its opposite? More to the point: why does this bother me so much?  Because people do not think or question. They do what everyone else is doing: tribal mentality, so a sabre-tooth tiger won't eat them in the parking lot.

I can't get into all the other examples of mangled meaning because it's Monday morning and I'm already getting tired, but there's another one that irritates me so much that I must mention it here. As it turns out, it has not two but three parts, a trifecta of verbal carelessness.

I am continually hearing statements along the lines of, "The statistics on this subject simply do not jive with the facts."  Yes, you heard me right.

So what does jive mean? It's a pretty cool word that refers to swing music, or the dance performed to such music (I've done it before, and it has nothing to do with statistics). Hey man, let's jive!

Jibe means to match up or line up or equal or be congruent with, which is where people get confused. Similar things do not dance together, though the image may be absurdly funny. But then there is another word that can jump into the confusing mix: gibe, meaning a nasty comment or a taunt.   

So are we supposed to constantly stop what we're doing and look up words we're not sure about in an online dictionary? YES. If there is any doubt at all, DO IT. If your editor says "no, that's wrong," and you KNOW it is right, insist that he or she go to the dictionary and look it up.

Bother. Care. Take the time. Go out of your way. We're not living in caves any more and we won't be eaten if we don't follow the herd like cattle. Protest the casual mangling of language, even if you risk being criticized for getting it wrong (which you will). Words should not mean what we want them to mean. They mean what they mean. Am I a purist? About this? Fuck, yes! 

I don't want to somehow get transported into the future and hear an unintelligible garble that used to pass for language. Yes, we somehow had to evolve from Chaucer to today's standard English, but I don't think people back then were casually crossing out meanings and changing them according to whim (or, more likely, popular opinion). In other words, for something as crucial and beautiful and powerful as language, there should be a standard, or how on earth are we ever going to communicate in a world that seems to be hurtling along at a billion miles an hour?

If a word means one thing to one person, and its exact opposite to the next person, what might that mean to detente?

And no, that doesn't mean "detention" in French. Go look it up.

 

Dear Sir or Madam, will you read my book

    It took me years to write, will you take a look

Order The Glass Character from:

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Barnes & Noble

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Thistledown Press

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Chapters/Indigo
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MAD MEN RETURNS (a tribute to the most beautiful man on earth)

Who’s the advertisin' genius that's happenin' in Manhattan town
Tearin' up the chicks with the message that he lays down

Who is the coolest guy that turns us all on
Fast talkin', slow walkin', good lookin' Draper (Don)

Chicks are makin' reservations for his lovin' so fine
Screamin' and a-faintin', he has got 'em all waitin' in line

Who is the cat whose lovin’ just goes on and on
Fast talkin', slow walkin', good lookin' Draper (Don!)

Chicks are makin' reservations for his lovin' so fine
Screamin' and faintin', he has got 'em all waitin' in line

Who is the coolest guy (he turns me on)
Fast talkin', slow walkin', good lookin' Hamm: that’s Jon

Chicks are makin' reservations for his lovin' so fine

Screamin' and faintin', he's got 'em all waitin' in line

Who is the coolest guy that is what am
Fast talkin', slow walkin', good lookin' Jon (that’s Hamm)

Fast talkin', slow walkin', good lookin' Jon (that’s Hamm)

Fast talkin', slow walkin', good lookin' Jon (that’s Hamm)

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.com/2012/01/synopsis-glass-character-novel-by.html

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Black bird walking

I don't know what to do with this. It somehow relates to the last couple of posts, even if it's a stretch. I've been writing about odd memories being jogged loose, with the result that old songs leap forth as if they were compressed like a jack-in-the-box.

This time it's a cartoon, with music attached. Not Ah Poor Bird, not Frere Jacques or even Mahler's Third Symphony. I had some dim memory of a cartoon or cartoons that featured a sombre-looking black bird, not flying but walking with deliberate pace, occasionally (and inexplicably) hopping up in the air.

I somehow conflated this with a Popeye cartoon in which Wimpy chased a duck around with a meat grinder, but it wasn't the same one. It seemed more like one of those old Warner Brothers cartoons, with snappy patter and non-stop action. But where, when, how? It must have been a long way back, and I could not for the life of me remember anything else about it.

I tried to find it on YouTube, using terms like "black bird walking" or "Warner Brothers cartoon with black bird". Came up empty. But one thing I did remember was the musical accompaniment to all this walking and hopping.  Though I didn't know the name of it back then, it somehow got recorded deep in my brain.

I don't know how many years or decades went by before I was able to recognize it: Hey, that's the piece in the bird cartoon!  It's called Fingal's Cave, part of the Hebrides Overture by Mendelssohn.

When I searched under "cartoon Fingal's Cave", it magically popped up, even though those words were nowhere in the description. And lo: it was one of those old things from the '40s, now deemed too racist to show. Maybe that's why this cartoon was silenced, probably around 1960 or '61.

The character is called Inki, a little African kid who hunts game with disastrous results. He's a little too much like Little Black Sambo for comfort, though on YouTube pages people always rant about political correctness and about how THEY are little African kids who hunt game, too, and love the cartoon and think it's swell.

Inki, as it turns out, was featured in a whole series of cartoons, all with the black bird walking solemnly along to that low-key, almost eerie string version of Fingal's Cave. He would make a cameo appearance in a number of other cartoons, which tells me that he must've been popular for some reason, if only for his oddness.

So it actually happened, these cartoons are real. I'm not sure of the connection with Ah Poor Bird and Mahler and all that: maybe just birds and classical music? It's an unlikely combination, after all. But there it is.

 

Dear Sir or Madam, will you read my book

    It took me years to write, will you take a look

Order The Glass Character from:

Amazon
http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B001K7NGDA

Barnes & Noble

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-glass-character-margaret-gunning/1117863913?ean=9781927068885

Thistledown Press

http://www.thistledownpress.com/html/search/genre/Fiction/the_glass_character_p580.cfm

Chapters/Indigo
http://www.chapters.indigo.ca/books/the-glass-character/9781927068885-item.html?ikwid=the%

Beethoven on acid: the roots of music

It surprises me how often things are joined together, even chained, or branch ever outwards yet back into each other. Or is it like one of those plants that puts down new roots along its runners, like a spider plant or a banyan, thus recreating a baby plant complete in all its parts?

Whatever. It's Sunday, I made a few discoveries that I found intriguing, and I want to capture them before they melt away like a Creamsicle on a hot sidewalk in August.  As I wrote in my last post, my little lovebird Jasper got sick and nearly died, until he suddenly popped back into vibrant health. This brought to mind the old Elizabethan round, Ah Poor Bird, which I had not thought about in. . . oops, half a century. Jesus, I'm getting old.

Then I remembered something my brother Walt said about Mahler: that a melody in one of his symphonies was actually Frere Jacques in a minor key. Bing-bing-bing: I realized that Ah Poor Bird (or something like it) may have been the original source.

Try it. Hum or sing Frere Jacques (and I don't know for sure if Americans even know it, but to Canadian children it's more familiar than O Canada). Then try Ah Poor Bird, as in the last post with the three singers. Compare and contrast.

Then we have the Mahler, conducted by Leonard Bernstein who is worthy of a post on his own. But he makes me sad, and he makes me sad because he had everything a person could ever want, including worldwide fame, and yet he was. . . sad.

He died of cancer at 70, I think, but it's a miracle he lived that long, smoking obsessively, drinking with ever-escalating ruthlessness and popping pills like candy. In his later years he seemed like a blurred version of himself. It affected his conducting. I heard a very late version of Beethoven's 9th that he conducted when the Berlin Wall fell: it lumbered, it galumphed, it didn't move along swiftly the way Beethoven desperately needs to to prevent it from sounding like Brahms on a bad day.

Beethoven has a heavy and profound and even dense and solid aspect, to be sure, but (being a paradoxical genius) there was also a mercurial quality,  quicksilver and fire, and he was unpredictable. He did things that shouldn't have worked, and wouldn't have worked for anyone else. He was definitely the father of Mahler, as twisty and bizarre as Mahler can be. Mahler is the bad son, like Beethoven on acid.

Speaking of dying too young, Mahler keeled over dead from heart disease at 50. A sad loss for the music world, though much of his stuff was too impenetrable for me to enjoy. Simply unlistenable. I don't expect Readers Digest compilations of Strauss waltzes, but I must be able to find a point of entry somewhere. When music repeatedly pushes me away, I can no longer stay in its presence.

OK then! Bernstein, Mahler, and oh, who was that other guy.  . . I mentioned Alban Berg, and he's a good example of being pushed away. His opera Lulu, which has nothing to do with To Sir with Love, is a lulu all right. It's a mess, a theoretical exercise that does not work in actuality. Not for me, anyway.

But it's interesting how much he resembled Stephen Fry. Almost no one resembles Stephen Fry. His face is like something you'd find on Easter Island, craggy and monumental. Kind of like. . . Beethoven?


http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.com/2012/01/synopsis-glass-character-novel-by.html

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Sick birds and Mahler symphonies

I vaguely remembered this song from my childhood: though we weren't exactly the Von Trapps, we were given to singing in harmony, even in round, and I may  have taken the soprano part (though I doubt it). Then the whole thing was tossed to the back of my brain, to the point that I began to think I had imagined it. For decades, it just didn't come up.

What shook it loose? Uhhhh. . . my bird got sick. That's right. I was ridiculed on someone else's blog  just for having a bird, and a large picture of me was posted with Jasper on my shoulder: anyone who has birds must be nuts, some crackpot old lady half out of her mind.

I'm not. But to get back to the original point, we did some painting upstairs (in my office, in fact: it's now a lovely soft blue with a touch of dove-grey) and my bird got sick. We tried everything to keep him away from possible fumes. It may not have been the paint at all. He has something wrong with the toe on his left foot, and has partially lost his grip. Did he take a fall? For whatever reason, he was puffed up, ruffly and almost unresponsive, and we feared the worst.

When I picked him up (for he no longer had the energy to just hop into my hand as usual), he snuggled down in my palm as if in a nest and buried his head in my hand. Not normal behaviour, at all. It was then that the song began to play in my head. After more than 50 years, my sick birdie pushed "play".

Ah, poor bird. Take thy flight. For some reason I remembered my brother Arthur singing it. It was one of those songs that came from who-knows-where: nobody wrote it, apparently. It just "was". On doing a bit of digging, however, I discover that the roots of it may well be Elizabethan. No doubt it sounded different hundreds of years ago and there were/are many versions, but this is the one I kept finding on YouTube.

This was the only decent version I uncovered.  It's an amateur group, but they're definitely singers. It's touching, if not perfect: meaning, it's music. I like the way they sing it more than once, the way they work on it and discuss it and let it evolve. The process is everything (and I particularly like their obvious joy in singing).

Most of the videos I found were of Godawful children's choruses singing wildly off-key. It's a children's song, apparently, like Frere Jacques. . . but hey, do you hear a sort of similarity? Flip Frere Jacques into a minor key, and there you have it. With only a few changes, we have the original Ah Poor Bird, stolen by who-knows-who.

Way leads on to way. The next association was with Gustav Mahler and his - what, second symphony? We played Mahler recordings endlessly when I was a child (along with every other classical composer, up to and including Kurt Weill and Alban Berg). One day the slow movement of this symphony was playing, and my older brother Walt said, "Listen to this. It's Frere Jacques." "No it isn't." "Yes it is.  It's just in a minor key." "What's that?" "You know. The sad key." I was probably eight years old, but it somehow stuck.

I found a recording of the Mahler piece and will post it next, along with some revelations about the composer and Leonard Bernstein, then deemed the go-to guy for interpreting Mahler symphonies.  It's funny how finding one video, or remembering one bit of tune due to a sick bird, can open out memory telescopically, or rather, kaleidoscopically.

By the way, my bird suddenly recovered and is now hopping into my hand, devouring millet and humping his plastic toys with his usual elan.

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.com/2012/01/synopsis-glass-character-novel-by.html

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm

I can see the funny weeping willow (can't you?)

Evening is the time of day
I find nothing much to say

Don't know what to

do

but I come to

When it's early in the morning
Over by the window day is dawning
When I feel the air
I feel that life is very good to me, you know

In the sun, there’s so much yellow
Something in the early morning meadow

Tells me that today, you're on your way
And you'll be coming home, home to me

Night time isn't clear to me
I find nothing near to me

Don't know what to do but I come to

When it's early in the morning
Very, very early, without warning

I can feel a newly born vibration
Sneaking up on me again

There's a song bird on my pillow
I can see the funny weeping willow

I can see the sun, you're on your way
And you'll be coming home, home to me

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.com/2012/01/synopsis-glass-character-novel-by.html

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm

Crying for the sadness

This was a case of one of dem-dar songs that gets into your head, and won't quit playing.  I knew it was from the '60s, one of those moody, philosophical things we all loved to dissect ("what do the lyrics mean??"), sometimes over a joint or a forbidden glass of wine.  I mainly remembered the lines, "From a distance, from a distance/ You can hear a crying angel sing,/She's crying for the sadness tomorrow's sins may bring."

I haven't had time to research this song, to figure out who wrote it. There is at least one other song called From a Distance, more recent and more famous than this one, which is why it took me awhile to find the original recording. I don't really know who P. F. Sloan was either, though he may have been one of dem-dar one-hit wonders.

The song is still quite pretty to my ear today, though a bit sappy, as I feared it would be. It attempts to sing of faith, which was pretty rare in those days, more rare today.  I remember another moody, opaque song called Everyone's Gone to the Moon, much more dysphoric and even nihilistic. We discussed that one to death. This one is merely melancholy, and earnest.

Looking back, everything ended almost before it began, though we thought the ethos of the '60s would go on forever and change the world. It didn't. In fact it eventually became a laughingstock. Everything reverted to crassness. The bellbottoms were put away, to be replaced by the Mint Green Polyester Leisure Suit of our worst nightmares.

Kids wear '60s tshirts now: peace, love, and all that stuff that got left behind. Now it's just sort of an affectionate (maybe) sendup, or a way to recycle old logos. I see it all from a distance. I know, that's cringe-inducing, but it's really how it is. This song got recorded in my brain so long ago and was buried so deep I didn't even know it was there. Then, some random set of circumstances, or something someone said, or even just a turn of the sky, pushed "play".


http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.com/2012/01/synopsis-glass-character-novel-by.html

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