Spelling in the news

Here’s an article from USA Today concerning a mural created for a public library in California. The artist, who was paid $40,000 for her work, misspelled eleven of the 175 names in the mural. Among the misspellings: “Eistein,” “Michaelangelo,” and “Shakespere.” Another $6,000 will now fly her in to make corrections.

New Gilgamesh translation

3009 students: You can click here to read an excerpt from a new translation by Stephen Mitchell, whom we’ll see later this semester in a PBS series on Genesis.

A Casablanca trivia bit corrected?

From Anthony Lane’s long essay on Ronald Reagan’s film career, in the October 18 issue of the New Yorker:

The one Reagan story that I always found impossible to accept was the “Casablanca” myth—the rumor that he and Ann Sheridan were slated to appear as Rick and Ilsa. Really? Reagan as Rick, eyes brimming with contempt for his own romantic obsessions? . . . Then, at the back of Edmund Morris’s “Dutch,” I found a footnote explaining that the role supposedly waiting for Reagan was that of Victor Laszlo.

[Silent disbelief as I type that sentence.]

Orson Welles sells

If you want to hear the sad and sorry excerpts from one of Orson Welles’ voiceover sessions for television commercials, you can find them at the 365 Days Project, a year-long anthology of improbable and strange recordings.

Commas and colons, chickens and caulk

Looking at the first lines of the Odyssey in Greek, a student (I’ll call him “Joe”) asked a great question in class: Are there really commas in Greek?

There are four marks of punctuation in Greek:

the comma,
the period,
a point above the line, equivalent to the semicolon and
     colon, and
the question mark, which looks like our semicolon.

So are there really commas in Greek;

Yes, there are· that is my final answer.

I got curious though about what a comma is anyway. The word comes from the Greek, komma, which means “stamp, coinage, clause” and which itself comes from koptein, “to cut off, stamp.” Before comma denoted a mark of punctuation, it denoted “a short phrase or word group smaller than a colon.”

Aha. So I looked up colon, which comes from the Greek kōlon, which means “limb, part of a strophe, clause of a sentence.” Before colon denoted a mark of punctuation, it denoted “a division of an utterance by sense or rhythm that is smaller and less independent than the sentence and less dependent than the phrase.”

I couldn’t leave period a mystery. It too goes back to the Greek, to periodos, which means “way around, circuit, period of time, rhetorical period.” Periodos comes from the Greek peri (to pass through) and hodos (journey). You can see peri- in such words as perimeter and periscope, where it means “all around.” Before the period was the dot in “dot-com,” the word denoted “an utterance from one full stop to another,” in other words, a sentence.

So a sentence is, in a way, a journey. Maybe that’s why Gertrude Stein in How to Write said “A sentence is an interval in which there is a finally forward and back.”

Etymologically, comma and colon have odd relations: koptein also gives us capon, “a castrated male chicken [or] rabbit,” and kōlon gives us calk and caulk.

[My knowledge of Greek punctuation comes from Schoder and Horrigan’s Reading Course in Homeric Greek. All etymologies and definitions are derived from Webster’s Third New International, my trusty unabridged dictionary.]

What it’s all about

From a column in today's Daily Eastern News on behalf of the “Hit-Mix”:

Radio is not about music.

That about sums it up, doesn’t it?

Thank you for not smoking

I smoked my last cigarette on this day in 1989, after fourteen years of smoking. Pall Malls, Camels, Lucky Strikes, Drum cigarette tobacco, Old Holborn cigarette tobacco . . .

What was I thinking?!

A suggestion for any young smoker reading this blog: quit now. You’ll want to do so at some point, and it’ll be easier now than later on. It took me four tries (and many sticks of Wrigley’s Extra peppermint gum) before I could quit.

Fifteen years later, I’m never even tempted to smoke. In fact, I can’t stand the smell. But I still dream at least two or three times a year about cigarettes. I’m usually holding and opening a pack of Camels or Lucky Strikes. But even in my dreams, I’ve never smoked again.

Hit and Miss

Here is the text of a guest column I have written concerning WEIU-FM.

*

The link has long since expired. But here’s what I wrote:

Reasons to oppose the "Hit-Mix" format are at least as numerous as the varieties of musical expression now missing from WEIU-FM's broadcasting day.

I'll limit myself to four:

1. A college radio station should not attempt to duplicate and compete with the offerings of commercial stations. WEIU-FM's "Hit-Mix," its claim to be "Charleston's radio station," and its countless spots for local "sponsors" threaten to blur the line between commercial and public broadcasting. (Anyone who's listened to WILL-AM or -FM can tell the difference between genuine underwriting and these revved-up mini-commercials.)

2. A college radio station should offer its listeners an alternative to what is available on the commercial airwaves. And it should do so in the name of culture -- whether the alternative is classical music, jazz, folk music, world music, indie rock or hip-hop. It seems necessary to point out, again and again, that WEIU-FM's new format sets it utterly apart from other college radio stations across the state (and, I dare say, across the nation).

3. A college radio station should present an appropriate public face. That face need not be somber and scholarly. But the musical dreck that is the "Hit-Mix" gives us a public presence that is laughable and embarrassing. Can you imagine hearing "My Heart Will Go On" on WILL-FM? Or on the University of Chicago station? Or, for that matter, on any college radio station? Yet I recently heard it on WEIU-FM. Consider what people passing through on I-57 might think when they happen to tune to 88.9. Would they ever guess that it's a university station? And when they find out, will they be able to believe it?

4. A college radio station should serve to challenge students and broaden their horizons. In the olden days, working at WEIU-FM was a genuine learning experience. Students worked out their own playlists and maintained solid relationships with record companies by phone and mail. The wide range of programming required students to get beyond their comfort zones and learn about musical traditions that were new to them. Students announcing classical music had to (and in fact did) develop passable pronunciation of names and words in French, German and Italian. Students playing African pop gained an awareness that "Africa" means a myriad of languages and musical styles. The new WEIU-FM, with music pumped in by satellite (as has been the case for several years), makes the student into little more than the pusher of a very occasional button. It's not even necessary for someone to be at "the board" -- the operation of the station is automated.

For me, the changes at WEIU-FM represent a profound loss. I did a weekly two-hour jazz show for five years (1986-1991), during which time I came to know many of the students who worked at the station. Their energy and range of artistic and musical interests represented everything that is great about college radio. My wife, Elaine Fine, was classical musical director until the first effort to reorganize WEIU-FM (with morning "chapel service" and obituary reading). In recent years, a continued reliance on satellite programming began an ongoing decline.

Which reminds me -- if the "Hit-Mix" is to continue, WEIU-FM can at least do the university community a final kindness by donating the contents of its music library to Booth Library (as Elaine Fine first suggested several years ago), so that people who want to hear other possibilities in music can benefit.

Another WEIU-FM post
WEIU-FM, r.i.p.

“Intercollegiate,” at last

The signs along Fourth Street for the women's rugby field have reappeared with proper spelling. A small thing, sure, but getting the details right is important in countless ways.

“Kchaou!”

In Odyssey 17, Penelope voices her hope for vengeance against the suitors, and her son immediately sneezes. Telemachus’ sneeze is an omen foretelling Odysseus’ triumph over the suitors. (Why? As Ralph Hexter explains in his commentary on Robert Fitzgerald’s translation of the Odyssey, the Greeks thought that because a sneeze cannot be produced at will or suppressed, it must be from the gods. Makes sense, right?)

How do the major American translators of Homer bring the sneeze into our language?

Richmond Lattimore:

She spoke, and Telemachos sneezed amain, and
     around him the palace
re-echoed terribly to the sound.

Amain? Re-echoed? Terribly? Lattimore here seems pretty stilted.

Robert Fitzgerald:

                                               The great hall below
at this point rang with a tremendous sneeze--
“kchaou!” from Telémakhos--like an acclamation.

An almost cartoon-like exclamation: Pow! Bam! Boof! But with a Greek look too--ahchoo would look merely silly here. The Greek verb eptaren is onomatopoetic, as Hexter points out, so Fitzgerald’s humor has a solid basis in the original.

Robert Fagles:

At her last words Telemachus shook with a
     lusty sneeze
and the sudden outburst echoed up and down the
     halls.

Shook? Lusty? Five of the twenty words are clichéd: sudden outburst, up and down. And do sneezes really echo?

Stanley Lombardo:

Just as she finished, Telemachus sneezed,
A loud sneeze that rang through the halls.

Clarity itself, but I miss “kchaou!”

[Postscript: I just noticed that Lombardo’s lines make the sneeze ring by following sneezed with sneeze.]