11.25.08

Faust things first

Posted in Chaucer, Middle English, Shakespeare, assorted weird crap, humor, style at 6:34 am by Bill Brohaugh

I get bedazzled by online gadgets for their industry, their creativity, their fun, and their potential for wisecrackery. Mostly for the first three items but also for the fourth is my interest in ofaust.com (with a nod to one of the commenters at Language Log for the alert). Submit a bit of writing through the site’s interface, and O’Faust reports whose classic writing the text most closely resembles.

Fearing for the mockery such evaluations would send my way, I first tested O’Faust on the “Late for the Sky” blog perpetrated by my friend and fellow radio comedy writer JohnnyB (his song parodies are superb). JohnnyB’s “Come Fly With Me” installment was gauged to be most like Frank Baum, with 24% similarity. His “I Love LA” entry was gauged, with less confidence at 14%, to be most like Edgar Rice Burroughs. (Note to JohnnyB: my evaluation that you exist in your own fantasy world has been independently confirmed.) Oh, and a song parody. JohnnyB’s “Country (First) Rogue”—political parody of John Wasilla’s . . . um, John Denver’s “Take Me Home Country Roads”—gets a nicely complimentary 65% similarity to Oscar Wilde.

Feeling then safe to apply the test to my own writing in this blog, I submitted “Chile is not chilly, chili is not chilly, and never the twain shall meet,” and was given a 23% nod to Edgar Allen Poe. Chills indeed. (As an aside, for the radio show JohnnyB and I wrote for, I composed an ode to an NFL game in which the Baltimore Ravens dominated the Cincinnati Bengals: “Quoth the Ravens, never score”). My “Slurry up and wait” nudged up to 25%, and pointed to Mark Twain. My “Rerenaming names” slipped again to 23% and named—oh, shit—Frank Baum.

Deciding to conduct the ultimate test, I then submitted:

09.28.08

Þe Sunneday Funnye Papyres

Posted in Chaucer, Middle English, Old English, language change at 8:35 am by Bill Brohaugh

In another bizarre confluence of the wordie and the foodie in me (and, as it turns out, the Blondie in me, as well), I’ll note that one of my prized possessions, hanging in my kitchen, is the original artwork of the May 27 1961 Blondie daily newspaper comic daily panel. This installment has early ’60s kitchen kitch splashed all over it, with Blondie wearing heels, and an apron over a flowing dress, and son Alexander coming home from school with a dress shirt whose sleeves are rolled up nearly to the point where he might tuck a cigarette pack in them. James Dean, he ain’t. Alexander is trotting a jar of peanut butter and a loaf of unsliced bread to one of those kitchen tables with a silverware drawer on one side.

The ’60s were so long ago. By that I mean the 1360s, the time of Chaucer (and no, the topic has not veered from Blondie). Wordie, meet Blondie . . . in the form of the Japes for Owre Tymes blog. That’s not modern misspelling; that’s Middle English. Japes for Owre Tymes is a delightfully arcane blog that each day translates a modern cartoon into Middle English. I wonder what the Middle English translation of “thought balloon” is?

Check out (yes) Blondie in Middle English here.

Including Blondie in this Middle-English-a-Day endeavor is appropriate, because the strip has been around since 1930—and in comic strip terms, 1930 is the equivalent of Middle English.

Now, let’s take cartoons back to the origins of English: Old English. And we don’t even have to translate. Here’s an installment of The Captain and the Kids (more commonly known as The Katzenjammer Kids):


On the right, look at those words obviously derived from the Germanic speech of the violent, primitive tribes who spoke the very first versions of English—the Angles and the Saxons. On the left, look at those glyphs from some ancient predecessor of English’s great-grandpappy, Proto-Indo-European. Oh, a language lesson unto itself, all in the guise of Turn of That Century comic child intimidation.

Well, maybe not precisely. Anyway, back to Japes for Owre Tymes. Check out the most recent installment for an interesting lesson on the disconnect between language and reality in the form of The Family Circus (and check out Comics Curmudgeon for additional insight on the very same topic).

(By the way, in the early 1360s, Chaucer would have been in his late teens. I wonder if he rolled his sleeves up for his packs of death sticks?)

05.31.08

Easy as A-Bee-C

Posted in Chaucer, Middle English, Shakespeare, spelling at 7:00 am by Bill Brohaugh

Lafayette Indiana’s Sameer Mishra, just 13 years old, won the 2008 Scripps National Spelling Bee in D.C. on Friday, May 30, by spelling guerdon. Which is mostly the correct spelling. The word–meaning “reward, compensation,” primarily in a poetic sense these days–for most of its lifetime has used guerdon as the accepted spelling. Chaucer used it thusly; Shakespeare, as well.

Here’s Chaucer from “The Sompnour’s Tale”:

We have this worlde’s lust all in despight
Lazar and Dives lived diversely,
And diverse guerdon hadde they thereby.

Note: lust means “pleasure” here, and despight–despite its spelling, young Mr. Mishra–means “contempt,” and isn’t it a cool word? (A sompnour, by the further way, is a summoner.)

Of course, guerdon isn’t the only “official” spelling, as official as spelling can be over the history of English. Other recorded forms, my trusty OED.com tells me, include (in alphabetical order) gardon, gardoun, gardwyne, gerdon, gerdonne, gerdoun, geurdone, guardon, guardone, guerdoun, gwerddoun, gwerdon, gwerdone, not to mention the comely Scottish variation, gwairdoun.

I think the time has come for Xtreme Spelling Bee. To win, you must orthograph not only the current spelling, but also every variant spelling over the history of the language.

Well, never mind. The contest is already Xtreme. Here are the other words Mishra spelled correctly on the orthopath to winning: demitasse, quadrat, diener, hyssop, macédoine, basenji, numnah, chorion, nacarat, sinicize, hyphaeresis, taleggio, esclandre.

And what was Sameer Mishra’s guerdon guerdon? $35,000 in cash, a $2,500 U.S. savings bond, and reference books galore, perhaps three of which actually containing the word guerdon.

Shameless Plug Alert: For some personal thoughts on spelling bees and why I suck at them, read this sample from my recently published book, in odd coincidence titled Everything You Know About English Is Wrong. End Shameless Plug Alert.