White Flight Online
Via Andrew Sullivan:
MySpace is no longer cool. As a matter of fact, its number of users is now one-half the size of rival Facebook. Is this because MySpace is too black for the rest of America? Teenage Internet users may hold the answer. High-schoolers report their use of the social-networking giants along racial lines—MySpace is seen as “black,” while Facebook is “white.” And even within the networks, black kids befriend other black kids, Latinos mix with Latinos, and the self-segregation often practiced in real life is rampant online. Danah Boyd, a social media researcher at Microsoft and a fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, compares this dash from MySpace to Facebook to “white flight” from inner cities.
James Joyce for Ordinary Blokes?
Steven G. Kellman has an interesting review of Declan Kiberd’s Ulysses and Us: The Art of Everyday Life in Joyce’s Masterpiece in the Chronicle of Higher Education:
Ulysses is indeed a triumph of what Northrop Frye called “the low mimetic mode”; it elevates plebeian characters and banal actions to artistic consideration and, celebrating them, performs what Kiberd, in an aptly Catholic metaphor, calls “the sacrament of everyday life.” But his exhortation that “it is time to reconnect Ulysses to the everyday lives of real people” is not in itself enough to overcome the paradox that the novel is read not by “real people,” but only by students and scholars. Real men may or may not eat quiche, but the “real people” Kiberd seems to have in mind rarely, according to surveys by the National Endowment for the Arts, read any books, and when they do, the authors are more likely to be Stephen King, James Patterson, or Danielle Steel than James Joyce.
And:
…despite the admirable lucidity of his own style, devoid of preening jargon and turgid syntax, Kiberd’s erudite book—though issued by a trade publisher, W.W. Norton, and not a university press—is not likely to be read by the “real people” he sentimentalizes and patronizes.
Snap!
And later:
Disguised as praise, books that offer practical uses for literary classics are in fact acts of iconoclastic arrogance. Proclaiming their fealty to the ordinary, they are driven by impatience with—even contempt for—the actual experience of reading extraordinary works.
Exactly.
Didion on Investigative Journalism
Joan Didion, in her preface to Slouching Towards Bethlehem, her first collection of essays (highly recommended).
My only advantage as a reporter is that I am so physically small, so tempermentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests. And it always does. That is one last thing to remember: writers are always selling somebody out.
Lunch break reading
In the new issue of The Atlantic, a fascinating piece on the hardest job in football:
…spend a weekend with a network production crew, and you’ll discover what it really takes to turn the on-field action into televised entertainment—intense preparation, frantic effort, brilliant improvisation, and an artistic genius named “Fish.”
[...] By the time Fish moved from news to sports in the mid‑’70s, the union was complete. Since then, broadcast dollars have helped turn players into multimillionaires and owners into billionaires. The medium has infiltrated the game itself, from TV time-outs, when players mingle aimlessly on the field waiting for commercials to end, to coaches’ challenges that rely on footage from network cameras to revisit questionable referee decisions. On the sidelines, coaches and players scrutinize shots from overhead cameras to study tactics and plot countermoves. Viewers watching at home see virtual bands drawn across the field denoting the lines of scrimmage and the first-down marker, and they can refer anytime to a floating graphic in an upper corner of the screen that displays the score, time remaining, and down and distance.
A Whole Nother Way to Search
I’m a big fan of Google books, for lots of reasons. Here’s one of them.
From the NY Times:
Ben Zimmer, executive producer of a Web site and software package called the Visual Thesaurus, was seeking the earliest use of the phrase “you’re not the boss of me.” Using a newspaper database, he had found a reference from 1953.
But while using Google’s book search recently, he found the phrase in a short story contained in “The Church,” a periodical published in 1883 and scanned from the Bodleian Library at Oxford.
You know what other phrase works well? A whole nother.
Some readers will recall that I spent most of 2005 and 2006 enamored with this phrase. Until recently, I thought this phrase originated as a regionalism during the mid-twentieth century, and exploded into the mainstream with a Marlboro ad campaign for “a whole nother smoke” (a cigarette/cigar crossbreed, if you’re interested).
I was wrong. (Astonishing, I know.)
A few weeks ago, I found two published instances of whole nother from before 1900: Eighteen Stories for Girls, edited by R.N. Carey and published by Oxford (that’s nowhere near the American South), and The Story of A Spring Morning, and Other Tales, by Mary Ellen Edwards, and published in 1890! A snippet from the latter:
“Will the fog be gone by tomorrow morning?” said Patty, disconsolately. “I don’t know what we shall do if we have to be a whole ‘nother day in the house and in the dark.”
What does this mean? A whole nother is much older than I previously thought. If it appeared in a publication as early as 1894, then speakers must have been using it for decades before that.
Divine Recruits
The center of global Christianity is moving south to places like Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa. That’s not news to anyone who’s read Philip Jenkins or heard him speak on the topic.
And Christians in North America have been reminded so often now that instead of sending missionaries to Africa (you know, that culturally homogenous land of heathens), they’re now sending missionaries to North America.
But that’s not as simple as it sounds. From yesterday’s NY Times:
Father Oneko, 46, had never counseled parishioners like those he found here at St. Michael the Archangel Catholic Church. Many are active-duty or retired military families coping with debt, racial prejudice, multiple deployments to war zones and post-traumatic stress disorder. Nor did he have any idea how to lead the multimillion-dollar fund-raising campaign the parishioners had embarked on, hoping to build an octagonal church with a steeple to replace their red brick parish hall.
Cutting his sermons short was, in some ways, the least of Father Oneko’s worries when he arrived here in 2004. He did not understand the African-American experience. He had never dealt with lay people so involved in running their church. And yet, in the end, the families of his church would come to feel an affinity with their gentle new pastor, reaching out to him in his hour of need, just as he had tended to them in theirs.
You can’t be both a language prescriptivist and a historian
Prescriptivists make up meaningless rules about language, like don’t split your infinitives (“to boldly go where no one has gone before”), and other and baseless usage rules.
Jan Freeman explains why you can’t be both a language prescriptivist and a historian.
From the Boston Globe:
…I often turn to usage history to help put current complaints in perspective. There’s a wealth of material: During the past couple of centuries, when prescriptivism really got rolling, there was an English-language authority ready to pronounce on almost any usage point, no matter how small.
Some of my favorite examples:
Laundry. “Meaning a place where clothing is washed, this word cannot mean, also, clothing sent there to be washed.” (Ambrose Bierce, “Write it Right,” 1909)
Girl for daughter. “A father, on being requested by a rich and vulgar fellow for permission to marry ‘one of his girls,’ gave this rather crushing reply: ‘Certainly. Which one would you prefer – the waitress or the cook?’ ” (C.W. Bardeen, “Verbal Pitfalls,” 1883)
Sleuth “denotes the track of a living creature, in particular the track of a wild animal. . . . In a semi-humorous way the newspapers commonly mention a detective as a sleuth; their readers, not thinking of the humor, take sleuth to be a regular synonym of detective. The only meaning the word has in sober English is track or footprint.” (Joseph Fitzgerald, “Word and Phrase: True and False Usage in English,”1901)
Almighty Babe, Whose tender arms can force all foes to fly
From CCEL:
Let folly praise that, what fancy loves, I praise and love that Child
Whose heart no thought, Whose tongue no word, Whose hand no deed defiled.
I praise Him most, I love Him best, all praise and love is His;
While Him I love, in Him I live, and cannot live amiss.
Love’s sweetest mark, laud’s highest theme, man’s most desired light,
To love Him life, to leave Him death, to live in Him delight.
He mine by gift, I His by debt, thus each to other due,
First friend He was, best friend He is, all times will try Him true.
Though young, yet wise, though small, yet strong; though man, yet GOD He is;
As wise He knows, as strong He can, as GOD He loves to bliss.
His knowledge rules, His strength defends, His love doth cherish all;
His birth our joy, His life our light, His death our end of thrall.
Alas! He weeps, He sighs, He pants, yet do His angels sing;
Out of His tears, His sighs and throbs, doth bud a joyful spring.
Almighty Babe, Whose tender arms can force all foes to fly,
Correct my faults, protect my life, direct me when I die!
—Francis Turner Palgrave, Treasury of Sacred Song
[ht: CICW]
