Word of the day: iridescent

From Anu Garg’s A.Word.A.Day, it’s iridescent:

PRONUNCIATION:
(ir-i-DES-uhnt)

MEANING:
adjective: Displaying a rainbow of colors that change when seen from different angles.

ETYMOLOGY:
From Latin irido- (rainbow), from iris (rainbow, iris plant, diaphragm of the eye), from Greek iris. Iris was the goddess of rainbows in Greek mythology. Earliest documented use: 1794.

Iridescent brings to my mind two bits of poetry. One is the first lines of Stanley Lombardo’s translation of Sappho’s appeal to Aphrodite:

Shimmering,
          iridescent,
                   deathless Aphrodite

Note how iridescent echoes shimmering and deathless echoes iridescent. You can read the poem and an explanation of the translation at Jacket.

Iridescent for me also means a sentence in Marianne Moore’s “The Mind Is an Enchanting Thing”:

                It’s fire in the dove-neck’s

iridescence; in the
       inconsistencies
of Scarlatti.

Dove-neck’s, iridescence, in the inconsistencies, of (rhyming with dove), Scarlatti: ah! music. You can read the poem on the fly at Google Books.

A related post
Other words and works of lit (apoplexy, avatar, bandbox, heifer, sanguine, sempiternal)

September 11

[Thornton Dial, 9/11: Interrupting the Morning News. 2002. Pencil, charcoal, watercolor, and coffee stains on paper. 41 × 29 inches. Collection of the Souls Grown Deep Foundation.]

The Class of 9/11

Manhattan’s P.S. 150 stands eight blocks from where the World Trade Center stood. In Jacques Menasche’s short film The Class of 9/11, parents, teachers, staff, and the young people who were first-graders in the fall of 2001 talk about September 11, 2001 and its aftermath: The Class of 9/11 (Vimeo).

Sonny Rollins, Kennedy Center honoree

“They’re not here now, so I feel like I’m sort of representing all of them, all of the guys. Remember, I’m one of the last guys left, as I’m constantly being told”: Sonny Rollins is a 2011 Kennedy Center honoree, along with Barbara Cook, Neil Diamond, Yo-Yo Ma, and Meryl Streep. The awards were announced this past Wednesday, on Rollins’s eighty-first birthday.

Other Rollins posts
Sonny Rollins and golf
Sonny Rollins in Illinois
Sonny Rollins, J.D. Salinger, Robert Taylor
Sonny Rollins on paying the rent

Strunk and White parody

From Gary Klien’s The Elements of Press Release Style:

1. Omit needless words.

Vigorous writing is precise. A press release should contain no unnecessary words, for the same reason a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts.

BAD
“The company regrets its role in this major environmental catastrophe, and we are fully committed to making the community whole.”

BETTER
“This environmental catastrophe is regrettable.”

Related reading
All Strunk and White posts (via Pinboard)

From Garner’s Usage Tip of the Day

How many times did I hear, as an undergraduate, someone say “Man qua man” and mean it? Too many times. From Bryan Garner’s Usage Tip of the Day:

Qua (= in the capacity of; as; in the role of), is often misused and is little needed in English. “The real occasion for the use of qua,” wrote H.W. Fowler, “occurs when a person or thing spoken of can be regarded from more than one point of view or as the holder of various coexistent functions, and a statement about him (or it) is to be limited to him in one of these aspects” (Modern English Usage [1st ed.] at 477). Here is Fowler's example of a justifiable use: “Qua lover he must be condemned for doing what qua citizen he would be condemned for not doing.” But as would surely work better in that sentence; and in any event, this use of qua is especially rare in American English.

One is hard-pressed to divine any purpose but rhetorical ostentation or idiosyncrasy in the following examples:

“Such developments . . . do not explain why students qua students have played such an important role in stimulating protest.” Seymour Martin Lipset, “Why Youth Revolt,” N.Y. Times, 24 May 1989, at A31.

“The proposal that a physician qua physician (or a medical ethic as such) is the necessary or best authority for the existential decision of rational suicide misrepresents medical knowledge and skills.” Steven H. Miles, "Physician-Assisted Suicide and the Profession's Gyrocompass," Hastings Ctr. Rep., May 1995, at 17.

Bryan Garner, author of Garner’s Modern American Usage (Oxford University Press, 2009), offers a free Usage Tip of the Day. You can sign up at LawProse.org. Orange Crate Art is a Garner-friendly site.

Related posts
Singular they (and the patriarchal language of my undergrad education)
The word of the day: quaquaversal

Ben Folds on the tyranny of cool

From To the Best of Our Knowledge, Ben Folds on a cappella groups and the tyranny of cool:

I mean, look, if you looked up reality show singing contest a cappella cover artist that would pretty much be dork, you know? But they know that, and it’s like they’ve just broken the chains of that, which I really admire. I think that’s hard to do in an overly commercialized world of cool. Everyone can’t be cool. That’s so boring, and so old, and they’ve been doing that since I was a kid, and I thought it would stop one day, and it just keeps going. It’s creative bullying, is what it is. And so I like to take the side of these people.

Folds, whose music is popular among a cappella groups, is a judge for the NBC show The Sing-Off. Here’s one central-Illinois-centric example of Folds’s music, nearly a cappella (there’s some percussion): “Effington.”

[What I know of Ben Folds’s music I like, and I owe my acquaintance with it to my children.]

Eight syllables

How a bright college freshman might say it: “This legislation must be implemented with the utmost diligence.” Ponderous, ponderous.

How President Obama said it: “You should pass this bill right away.” (And variations thereupon.)

“It is a general truth that short words are not only handier to use, but more powerful in effect; extra syllables reduce, not increase, vigour”: H.W. Fowler, A Dictionary of Modern English Usage (1926).

And yes, they should pass this bill right away.

The easy and the difficult

This observation has been running through my head for several days:

What a technology makes easy to do will get done; what it hides, or makes difficult, may very well not get done.

Donald A. Norman, The Design of Everyday Things (New York: Basic Books, 2002). Originally published as The Psychology of Everyday Things (1988).

A word-processing app makes it easy to play with fonts and margins and spacing but more difficult to see a document as a whole so as to make useful revisions. Apple’s iTunes makes buying music easier than ever, but learning something about that music is not nearly as easy. I’m happy to have a files-only version of The Incomparable Ethel Waters (a 2003 CD, out of print). But when were these seventeen tracks recorded? Who’s playing on them? Who knows.

A related post
Don Norman on Google’s users

Google users

Don Norman on Google:

“Most people would say ‘we’re the users, and the product is advertising.’ But in fact the advertisers are the users and you are the product. They say their goal is to gather all the knowledge in the world in one place, but really their goal is to gather all of the people in the world and sell them.”

And now they’re buying Zagat.