Posts by dyan campbell
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It's "past tense", not "passed tense". :)
See? You may not be able to pronouce the letter "r", but dang, you are observant. And good spellers.
Except Brent and Jermaine's parents.
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Er, surely Bret is in fact missing one letter "t"?
Damn, you NZers are observant.
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OK, but here's the etymology of some words you used in your post:
Guess originally meant to estimate/appraise, as in value. You've used it as a qualifier to water down what you're about to follow up with, and the meaning you've applied to it is "think".
Kill originally meant "to strike, hit, beat, knock", and didn't become associated with "depriving of life" for a century or so later.
Similarly, real originally meant "relating to things" (hence "real estate"), and didn't become associated with "genuine" for a couple of hundred years.
Battle means a physical battle between soldiers, and yet you've used it with a meaning of some sort of verbal/written battle about ideas.
It starts to get silly, but people complaining about the changing nature of meaning of words, using words which have all changed meaning... 'correct' and 'incorrect' are only relative terms from where you're standing in history.
Kyle, you have confused etymology which means derivation or the origin of the word itself with original usage , meaning how the word was originally used in its first state - whether that is Latin, Greek, Middle English, Old English, Scandinavian, Polynesian etc.
The etymology of the word "munted" for instance, is - (speculatively, because no one seems to know for sure) - Westie New Zealand, and is (guessing again) from a contraction of the two words "mangled' and "cunt". The original usage __of "munted" is as a verb, passed tense, meaning "fucked up beyond any practical use".
This is also the contemporary meaning of "munted", but there are other words that start off meaning one thing but eventually come to mean another thing, so let me try again.
In Westie English, the term "wasted" means "stoned and drunk to the point of incoherence" but both Middle English and Modern English the meaning of the word "wasted" would be the passed tense of "waste" meaning "to squander".
So while the etymology or derivation of the Westie word "wasted" is Middle English, and meant the passed tense of "squander", the Westie English word "wasted" refers to the state of a person's sobriety. So "original usage" of "wasted" would refer to different definitions in Westie English than it would in Old, Middle or Modern English.
So it is correct to assert that words that once meant one thing sometimes come to mean quite another thing entirely, but that still doesn't mean you can use words interchangably.
By the way, slightly off topic but distantly related - I noticed that Flight of the Conchords fellows Brent and Jermaine are each lacking the letter "r" in their names. I gather this is because NZers, unable to pronounce the letter "r" when it is a medial consonant, and ususally pretend it is silent, and in the case of the FOTC fellows, they are young enough that the silent "r" in each name has been dropped entirely out of the spelling. I also discovered that they invented Rap Music, in 1989, at a BBQ in Wellington, which is not relevant here exactly, but is an interesting piece of trivia as well. It is fortunate for the world that NZers only have trouble with "r" as a __medial consonant, or it would simply have been Ap Music.
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Dyan,
Good comment, but "adoo"? Do you mean "ado"?Yes, I do thank you 1310, I had the spelling of ado mixed up with igloo and skidoo (the old Canadian name for snowmobile).
Groundhog Day was indeed a very good movie, but again, it somehow hijacks the True Meaning of Groundhog Day.
Like Valentine's Day and Halloween you didn't get the day off but they were each days in which everything at school was fun. No work would be done - in the morning you'd paint pictures or make models of groundhogs - which don't exist on the westcoast, so everyone would be looking them up in the encyclopedias at the back of the classroom and asking the teacher "what does a groundhog look like?"
In the afternoon there would be a class party - sometimes with a chocolate cake in the shape of a mound of dirt, where presumably a groundhog was about to burst forth. We'd play records, dance and have party snacks. Canadian schools use any excuse for a party, and silliness is hugely encouraged. My cousin - when teaching 8 year olds - turned up for class on Halloween dressed as a cat, complete with ears, whiskers and a tail. When the kids said "nice costume" she said "what costume?" and continued teaching. This is so peculiarly Canadian, like the time in 1967 when the Queen visited Canada and our then PM Pierre Trudeau turned a perfectly-executed and extremely fruity pirouette behind her back while the tv cameras were rolling. Silly, unserious and a little weird. Not that the Queen minded - women liked anything Trudeau did in those days.
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A word that has been used incorrectly for a long time is "quantum"
It is often used to mean something large ("a quantum leap" "a quantum change") when in fact means means the smallest possible thing.
No, quantum doesn't mean small, it means portion or particle. The use the word quantum in physics came about when Newton's physics no longer described the world physicists were able to describe at the atomic level.
The term "quantum leap" in physics, refers to the tiny but explosive jump a particle makes in moving from one place to another. And that's only a tiny leap because the particle is tiny, if the particle were the size of an elephant, it would be one pretty big leap.
And while I'm on this quest to correct people and define terms: niggardly is from the same root as niggle, which I believe is Norse or Scandinavian in origin and nigger is from the Romance languages. It comes from the word "negre" which is French, which means "negro" and is pronounced "ne-grey" which is still in use in the deep south of the USA when really old people want to be polite and not say the contraction "nigger" - they say ni-gra, which is closer to the French word and - many years ago - was more polite.
Similarly the term "Metis" is a bastardisation of the French word "moite" meaning half, but it is not only perfectly polite but Metis are recognised as a distinct ethnic group in Canada.
AND, while were on a roll: pet peeve pronounciations. TV Newsreaders PLEASE TAKE NOTE:
Iroquois - as in helicopter - not "Er-qwoy" but "Ear-oh-quaw"
Debut - not "day-boo" but "de-bew"
Adoo - not "a-dew" as in goodbye in French, but "a-doo" as it is spelled.And three words used wrongly so long they're almost - but not entirely - acceptable:
quick - as in "the quick and the dead". It mean speedy but not in that context - in that context it refers to live as in opposite of dead, as in the old term for when a baby starts to kick in the womb, as "quickening".
mortified - now used to mean "scared" but it used to mean "embarrassed to the point of rigor mortis", as in "died of embarrassment".
gourmand used to mean "gourmet" but actually means "person who eats a helluva lot".
AND one last thing: "Groundhog Day" refers an actual day, celebrated all over Canada among small children (February 2) when - legend has it - groundhogs come out of their burrows to see if they can see their shadow. If they can't, spring is officially on its way early, if they can see their shadow, there's going to be a lot more winter. The American film"Groundhog Day" (based on Canadian Groundhog named "Bill Bailey" with Bill Murray and Andie McDowell seems to have come to mean repeating the same day over and over.
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OMG, I have a leaving-Timaru story.
It's good to see you are getting over your sensitivity about being from there Russell, and are now able to talk about your origins.
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I would also like to know what makes people fall in love, and then excise it with a scalpel and preserve it in jar filled with formalin
That is one great metaphor.
Metaphor? I saw it more in a Jack-the-Ripper kind of way - in line with the 19th century romanticism... But that'd be my 21st century steampunk/splatterpunk romaticism shining thru.
No, I mean I was being kind of flippant, but I mean it literally, like the famous neurobiologist Vilayanur Ramachandran means it, in his terrific book The Emerging Mind . Ramachandran talks about how "Many social scientists feel deflated when informed that beauty, charity, piety and love are all the result of the activity of neurons in the brain, but their disappointment is based on the false assumption that to explain a complex phenomenon in terms of its component parts is to explain it away".
He goes on to explain that activity in someone's hypothalamaic nuclei causes certain peptides to be released along with the affiliation hormone prolactin, and that as this is the biochemical pathway that makes us feel love. He argues that rather than deflate the notion of love, this confirms that love is real.
This is precisely the set of chemicals that are not being activiated during an emotionally uninvested sex act. And this mapping of the biochemistry and neurobiology of love is very romantic, in a Victorian kind of way.
And as for 19th century romantic novels, well, as Ramachandran also points out, while we may think of the Victorian age as backwards, neurotic and synonymous with repression, it was actually a time of great interest and advancements in science, medicine, natural history etc.
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This is the link to the article Dyan was referring to.
Thank you Deborah, I was struggling with that. I still don't know what you did... my links kept leading to that dreaded "404 not found" message.
Stephen Judd wrote:
That is an interesting article, but like a lot of evo-psych it seems to me that it assumes that the phenomenon described is innate and looks for an evolutionary explanation. I am highly, highly suspicious of such just-so-stories. Especially when so many measured male:female differences are quite small, much more like tendencies than absolute distinctions, and with plenty of people with the "wrong" behaviour. It could be the reporting, mind you. The press loves articles that say "women are like THIS, men are like THAT" and they like it even more if the story reinforces traditional sex roles.
Yes, I absolutely agree that evolutionary biologists and psychologists tend to seize on a phenomenon, assume it is innate and try to find an evolutionary explanation, and in many cases they're demonstrably wrong.
A few years ago researchers discovered London taxi drivers had greater neurological capacity for map reading, which must have surprised the evolutionary biologists who'd been convinced that the female brain had less capacity for spatial skills. They keep finding the brain is more plastic, and far later into life than we had first assumed.
Another thing that perplexes me is the search for the origins of language - they keep looking at explanations around tools, community building etc, when it seems pretty obvious that the only members of our species that could possibly have invented a language would be babies, with older siblings and parents as imitators and interpreters who eventually learn the skill. But anyone over 6 struggles to learn a language, it seems blindingly obvious to me that no one over 6 invented language.
Having said that, I'm fascinated by what we have in common with other mammals, what make us human, which differences between us are innate and which are learned, and why certain phenomena exists at all. Evolutionary biology and psychology certainly have something to contribute to our lives, and if a trait exists, there is a reason - usually (though not always) an evolutionary reason. If something can be known, then it is always good to know it. Ecologist Tom Reimchen's (UBC) work on the intricate relationship between bears, fish, flies, beetles, birds, waterways and their total dependence on each other is very beautiful, satisfying and symmetrical, not to mention indespensible to some of Canada's most valuable industries. As David Suzuki puts it "Reimchen's work eloquently demonstrates that forest and fish need each other, that they connect the air, the oceans and even the hemispheres in a single interdependant system".
I would also like to know what makes people fall in love, and then excise it with a scalpel and preserve it in jar filled with formalin, but I read a lot of 19th century novels and consequently have a terribly romantic streak.
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Ah, let me try that again:
The Seattle Times: Health: Women may respond to porn, but not in a ...
or
Carnal Looking at porn through a gender gap
and failing either of those links, just google Irv Blinik (McGill) and Stephen Pinker (Harvard) as they have quite a lot to say on the differences in responses to pornography between men and women, and possible reasons for these differences.
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The result? No matter what the pairing - whether male/female or female/female - the subjects had similar reactions to both, and according to Bailey this proves that women will respond to anything, regardless of their sexual orientation.
This study from McGill University may put Bailey's research in a different light.
url/link textThe Seattle Times: Health: Women may respond to porn, but not in a ...