Thursday, May 12, 2005
As Maybelle Carter As My Witness
Among the many things that caught my ear during Tuesday’s PBS documentary The Carter Family (that’s country music forebears A.P., Sara, and Maybelle, not peanut farmers Jimmy and Rosalyn) was this use of “as” in an incomplete comparison:
Maybelle, Archival Film: Um, mercy, I never saw as much mail in my life, and everyday of the world we’d get mail from every state in the union and when we left and came home we had over 5,000 letters in a box that came in.
complete transcript
By rule, “as” cannot intensify independently; it must accompany another “as” to identify the point of reference (“I got as much mail as she did”). But what interested me was Maybelle’s use of “as” instead of “so,” which is used all the time in informal speech as an independent intensifier:
“I never saw so much mail.”
“That is so cool.”
Without ogling a corpus, there’s no way to know for sure how rare this choice of “as” was, but it may be notable.
Meanwhile, a stray stimulus caused me to search for the phrase as God as my witness—a misbegotten conflation of “as God is my witness” and “with God as my witness.” Google yields:
about 19,200 for “as God is my witness”
about 4,160 for “as God as my witness”
about 3,640 for “with God as my witness”
Groucho Marx and Ambiguous Abstraction in Compound Prepositions
One of the rotating quotes at the Calvin Library site is this one from Groucho Marx:
Outside of a dog, a book is Man’s best friend. Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read.
You could say Marx is playing on the ambiguity of whether the compound preposition “outside of” is abstract (describing a relationship of concepts) or concrete (describing a relationship of objects). I’m sure that’s how Marx saw it…
Bon Mots
Sports Illustrated’s Steve Rushin is a master of metaphor and simile. In this week’s column on veteran sportswriter Sid Hartman, he writes:
And Sid, whose Rolodex now resembles the paddle wheel of the Mississippi Queen, never forgot it. ...
And later:
... the moment of melancholy passes quickly: A hot dog disappears down Sid’s throat like a log down a water slide.
In an earlier column, Rushin wrote of “that human hamster wheel, the health-club treadmill.”
On Language 5/12: Teaching English in Hong Kong, Or Not
Hong Kong’s students left at a loss for words
Chicago Tribune, May 12, 2005
By Nathan Bierma
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Hong Kong’s linguistic situation is nearly as complex as its political situation. Hong Kong has partial independence as a “special administrative region” of China. Both English and Chinese are official languages of the territory, although English is, in practice, mostly restricted to politics and business, while Chinese is used in the home and in social settings.
To make matters more complicated, the Hong Kong government says it wants students to be “biliterate but trilingual.” That is, students should be able to write in both English and standard written Chinese, and they should be able to fluently speak English, Cantonese (a regional dialect of Chinese spoken in Hong Kong and parts of mainland China) and Putonghua (the spoken equivalent of standard written Chinese, which has its own distinct features).
Dan Lu provides more background by e-mail:
Tuesday, May 10, 2005
Praising God for Our Kidneys
Michael DeVries’ sermon at Eastern Avenue CRC on Sunday, “God the Knitter,” mentioned that the Hebrew word for “inward parts” in verse 13 (“For you formed my inward parts; you knitted me together in my mother’s womb”) means “kidneys.”
The Psalms volume of the interlinear Hebrew OT wasn’t on the shelf in the Calvin library, so I had to do some rummaging. Here’s what I found.
Thursday, May 05, 2005
On Language 5/5: A dictionary in the palm of your hand
Words easy to grasp with handy dictionary
Chicago Tribune, May 5, 2005
By Nathan Bierma
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Erin McKean’s job is not just to change the dictionary—daunting as that is—but also to change the idea of a dictionary, from a heavy book to a handy tool.
“I want to make a dictionary as easy to use as a pencil,” says McKean, Chicago resident and editor in chief of U.S. dictionaries for Oxford University Press. “Now I can look up something walking down the street. You can have full access to it whenever you want, without having to drag a heavy book down from the shelf. You can look up a word with two fingers.”
That’s because the second edition of the New Oxford American Dictionary (Oxford University Press, $60), which was recently released and produced under McKean’s supervision, can be downloaded onto a PDA or smartphone. It’s the largest dictionary ever to be accessible by hand-held technology.
“I checked five things during dinner last night,” McKean says. “If a question comes up, I have the answer in my pocket.”