The defense and the illustration of the English Language.

Posted on February 4, 2014 by The Old Wolf

Not 1549, but 2014.

I previously wrote two articles, here and here, about the efforts of France (and Québec, since we’re on the subject) to keep their language unspotted. Many Gallic purists will point at the magna carta of La Pléiade, “Défense et illustration de la langue française,” as reason enough to fight against the encroachment of other, less worthy tongues into the only true language; in view of the recent flap over English as the language of America the Beautiful, really nothing more than a tempest in a teapot promulgated by the intellectually challenged and those devoid of any sense of humanism, I present here a dictionary of terms which must be avoided and their acceptable English alternatives.

The ~~Xenophobe’s Dictionary~~ List of Words for Folks who Don’t Like Outlanders.

Ketchup (from k’ē chap, Chinese for “tomato sauce”): Tomato paste with vinegar and onions and other stuff what makes it a vegetable for school lunches.

Kangaroo (from Australian aboriginal): Big Jumping Rat that makes fine eating.

Cola (from West African languages (Temne kola, Mandinka kolo): That brown drink what goes good with rum.

Coca-Cola (From from Quechua cuca and “cola” above): Something from that liberal-ass un-American company what right-thinking ‘Murcans won’t touch with a 10-foot pole. Even “Big K” has better stuff.

Jukebox (possibly from Wolof and Bambara dzug through Gullah + box): Record-player thingy what you put quarters in.

Candy (from Arabic قندي qandī, sugared): Dayum, you mean mah lemon-heads wuz invented by the A-rabs? Sumbitch, I’ll just have to switch to chawin’ terbacky. Say, Clem, gimme a chaw.

Tobacco (From Taino, a Caribbean language. Said to refer either to a roll of tobacco leaves or to the tabago, a kind of Y-shaped pipe for sniffing tobacco smoke also known as snuff, with the leaves themselves being referred to as cohiba): Stuff you roll up and stick in your mouth and then set on fire. ^[1]

…..

Well, you get the idea. In fact, purging our English language of all foreign influence would be an exercise in futility, for even Old English was liberally infused with Latin as the result of a 400-year Roman occupation, as well as being a combination of dialects prevalent in the area, including the languages of the Celts, the Angles, the Saxons, and the Jutes. There is no “pure English,” and if you tried to take away all the foreign influences our language has not only survived but reveled in over two thousand years, we’d be reduced to speaking in grunts and belches. Oh wait, a lot of people haven’t got much farther than that anyway.

The Old Wolf has spoken.

[1] Thanx and a tip of the hat ^[2] to Bob Newhart
[2] Thanx and a tip of the hat to Bill Holman

America: Beautiful in any language

Posted on February 4, 2014 by The Old Wolf

I recently posted about my experience watching two of my friends become American citizens. Now comes the Superbowl with its spate of commercials, one of which has generated some sentiment that absolutely should not exist in this country.

It’s a simple concept. People of various nationalities singing “America the Beautiful” in their own language. But for sheer ignorance, have a look at some of the Twitter comments recently posted about this commercial:

The Coca-Cola Co. Should apologize for the ridiculous #SuperBowl commercial #AmericaTheBeautiful should ONLY be in one language #English
Heres List Of ALL #Coke Products-BOYCOTT! Our Language Is #English Not Turkish! http://www.coca-colacompany.com/brands/all/ #SuperBowl #Broncos #SeaHawks #sports
Really glad I drink @Pepsi and not @CocaCola because that commercial was just AWFUL next time #ENGLISH please! #SB48 #SuperBowl
If you want to come to this country fine we welcome you BUT your going to sing America The Beautiful in #ENGLISH & drink #PEPSI #SUPERBOWL
I don’t think a commercial that sings in other than #English is a good idea #SuperBowl am not gonna buy ur product anymore
WTF? @CocaCola has America the Beautiful being sung in different languages in a #SuperBowl commercial? We speak ENGLISH here, IDIOTS.”

The xenophobia and ignorant racist vitriol being spewed out onto the Internet breaks my heart. Yet these people seem to have no problem driving down Via Verde Avenue in their Prius to go eat Pizza with their Swedish girlfriend… the intellectual and spiritual disconnect is very difficult for me to get my head around.

Some statistics would probably not be amiss here. The 2010 census reports:

Americans	308,745,538	100.0 %
White	223,553,265	72.4 %
African American	38,929,319	12.6 %
Asian American	14,674,252	4.8 %
Native Americans or Alaska Native	2,932,248	0.9 %
Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander	540,013	0.2 %
Some other race	19,107,368	6.2 %
Two or more races	9,009,073	2.9 %

Of that total, 16.4% are of hispanic or latino ancestry. That’s close to two out of every 10. Moreover, have a look at the 15 largest ancestries of these oh-s0-proud Americans:

It wouldn’t be surprising if the real names of some of these uneducated and small-spirited bloggers were Jorgensen, DeSalvo, O’Shaunessy, Kang, or Graumann. If they’re taking pride in being called Jones, they may well have forgotten their Welsh ancestry.

Kris Kristofferson has Swedish ancestry. The Governator is from Austria. Rocky Marciano was Italian. Bruce Willis was born in Idar-Oberstein, West Germany. Walter Cronkite had Dutch ancestry. Robert Zemeckis had Lithuanian ancestors. Gene Simmons was born in Israel. My own grandparents came from Tuscany and Calabria. America the beautiful, the open, the welcoming, the free – it has always been and will always be a melting pot of cultures, races, languages and ideologies. We must never forget the words of Emma Lazarus:

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

“The New Colossus,” 1883

As our nation grows in population and we deal with issues of unemployment and the social well-being of our citizens, the issue of immigration must of necessity be dealt with in a rational and humane way, giving priority to those who enter our country through legal and approved channels – but we must never become a nation where ugly and brutal nationalism is allowed to become a vehicle for the demonization of any race, creed or culture. Our national language is English, and those immigrants who have been most successful are the ones who have assimilated rapidly, learned the language and the culture of their adopted home, and mainstreamed themselves and their children. But remembering and honoring their cultural heritage is also a big part of who they are, and how they interact with and contribute to the nation.

If you’re going to insist on English only, you must by rights exclude yourself from ever eating at Acquerello in San Francisco (in fact, you must refer to it as Saint Francis, and no one will know what the hqiz you are talking about) or Piccolo Angolo in New York; you are prohibited from ever driving a Porsche or a Mercedes-Benz; you may never refer to a shiatsu massage or a reiki treatment; you can’t drink vodka; taboo is taboo; you can never again use ketchup; and heaven help you if you want to eat fondue.

For the love of whatever you hold sacred, fight racism, exclusionism, nationalism and xenophobia with every fiber of your being. Every American citizen in this country is entitled to the same respect and status – remember, in the end, – with the exception of Native Americans who were here long before the Mayflower – we all got here on a boat one way or another.

The Old Wolf has spoken.

An Especially Devious Spam Comment.

Posted on January 30, 2014 by The Old Wolf

People can be so bloody dishonest it makes my brains hurt. This comment showed up on my post regarding combating elder fraud:

I don’t know if it’s just me or if everybody else encountering problems with your blog.

It looks like some of the text on your content are running off the screen.
Can someone else please provide feedback and let me know if
this iis happening to them too? This may be a issue with my
browser because I’ve had this happen previously. Manyy thanks

Looks legitimate and reasonable, except for the lousy spelling, but I know a lot of bad spellers and bad typists.

What was the dead giveaway was the user name: “Miracle Dr. Oz garcinia cambogia dosage,” and the link to a spammy review website promoting this worthless garbage, which then links to an even spammier order page. Dr. Oz should be ashamed of himself; he’s the health world’s “Mr. Popiel,” hawking anything and everything to the drooling viewers of late-night cable stations and internet infomercials.

As for this comment… into the spam can it goes. I won’t be increasing your SEO rankings, thank you, and what I would like to say to people who do this sort of thing – not to mention those who hawk worthless snake oil to the gullible masses – is not fit for a family-friendly blog.

The Old Wolf has spoken.

Look Magazine: The first mass-produced 3D Picture

Posted on January 26, 2014 by The Old Wolf

The magazines LIFE and LOOK were regular guests in our home, along with the New Yorker, the Saturday Evening Post, and a few other esoteric offerings. At one point in the 1960s, LOOK began including small postcard-sized attachments in the back of their magazine – mass produced parallax panoramagrams, or 3D pictures; the one you see below was the first.

The principle was very similar to the “wiggle pictures” one still occasionally sees today on toys and games – I remember being delighted with the little ones I found in Cracker Jack boxes in the 50s (before their prizes went to hell in a handbasket); the idea is to present a different image to the eyes as the ridged surface is rotated and refracts the underlying picture differently. In this case, however, the image is engineered to present a slightly different parallax to each eye at the same time.

TIME magazine had the following writeup about this innovation:

“A LOOK FIRST: 3-D PHOTO,” proclaimed the message on the cover. The Parallax Panoramagram “may mark the beginning of a new era in graphic-arts,” said the press release. As it turned out, Look’sfirst ran almost last in the magazine. On page 105, just short of the back cover, persevering readers found a stiff, postcard-size appendage, attached in the manner of a subscription renewal card. On the card was a black and white picture that showed a bust of Thomas Alva Edison surround ed by some half-dozen of his inventions. What made most readers stop and look twice was the picture’s distinct illusion of depth.

Look’s stunt, the result of 13 years’ research, constitutes the latest effort to translate the real world of three dimensions into the picture world of two. Artists have employed trompe I’oeil three-dimensional techniques for centuries. But true success for photographers awaited the invention of the stereopticon camera in the 19th century, which took two pictures of the same subject through lenses that were separated like a pair of human eyes. When the viewer saw each picture separately, through separate lenses, his brain automatically supplied the missing dimension of depth.

The Look process is almost identical. A specially designed camera takes pictures through a transparent screen that is serrated to break up the image into hair-thin vertical slices. The camera is then moved slightly to the right or left, as other, sliced-up pictures are taken on the same negative.

The process is laborious, costly and slow, and not yet adaptable to highspeed printing. Merely to pose the static picture in last week’s Look took two full days of work with a one-ton, cubical camera as complicated as an electronic computer. Five additional weeks were required to engrave the photograph, print it some 7,000,000 times on a sheet-fed offset press and then pour on and properly shape the clear plastic film that covers the picture with what amounts to a collection of lenses. The plastic lenses are so arranged that the viewer’s left eye sees one of the serrated pictures, the right eye sees the other (see diagram).

Look and its partners in the enterprise, Eastman Kodak Co. and Harris-Intertype Corp., which built the equipment that adds the plastic lens coat, have high hopes of commercial success. Cowles Magazines & Broadcasting, Inc., Look’s parent company, plans to establish a separate corporation, to be called Visual Panographics Inc., to sell its 3-D process to greeting-card manufacturers, display-art companies and anyone else willing to pay the price in money and time for an unspectacled illusion of depth. TIME Magazine

A much more detailed treatment of these images can be found over at Tattered and Lost.

An interesting bit of history, this was. It was impressive enough to me that I’ve had it in my files for over half a century.

The Old Wolf has spoken.

Africa: Seen through dialects, not colonial borders.

Posted on January 23, 2014 by The Old Wolf

Each shade is a language; each color is a group of languages. Click the image for a larger version.

The Old Wolf has spoken. (For what it’s worth, I speak all African languages equally well.)

Not Dead Yet – The Celtic languages hold on for dear life.

Posted on January 23, 2014 by The Old Wolf

From Maps on the Web:

A brief history of the Gaelic languages: Middle Irish spread into Scotland and the Isle of Man about 1000 years ago and has since developed into Scottish Gaelic, Manx and Modern Irish, though all are somewhat mutually intelligible (like Spanish and Catalan).

In the Republic of Ireland, Irish is a compulsory subject for 14 year’s of education up until college/university. While 41% of Irish people ticked Yesto the question Can you speak Irish? on the 2011 census, the reality is that only 4.4% use it outside the education system on a regular basis. This 41% figure is a reflection of Irish people’s aspirations for the language rather than ability. I would guess that no more than 10% of the population could actually hold a conversation in Irish, if even.

The situation in Scotland is worrying as they don’t have the huge popular and political backing like Irish does. And Manx died out as a native language 40 years ago but it’s seeing a recent revival with Manx-medium education.

Although the map states that 41% of Irish people surveyed claim they can speak Irish, the number of those who speak it fluently and daily is much smaller, with most of that 41% remembering not more than “cúpla focail” (a few words) of the torment they were required to endure in secondary school. But there is still a fierce pride around the language in some circles, even among the diaspora, which is true of the other Gaelic languages as well – witness the ongoing “Deireadh Seachtaine Gaeilge” (Irish Weekend) held yearly in San Francisco, and the ongoing work by Foras na Gaeilge, among others.

Even Cornish, which died “officially” in 1676 with the death of Chesten Marchant, has witnessed a revival, and Agan Tavas exists as a support organization for language learners; Breton continues to live, and its percentage of pupils in bilingual education has been growing. albeit slowly.

The map above does not address Welsh, (a Brythonic cousin to the Goidelic family) which has historically maintained the strongest foothold within the English-speaking world, but even this bastion of individuality is weakening somewhat:

The above map shows the changing percentage of those who claim to speak Welsh over the period of 10 years.

Throughout the Celtic world, street signs are one of the places where local languages are most visible:

And naturally, if you want to place a new sign, you need the text translated. But woe to the government worker who orders a sign without knowing what the hqiz they are doing:

The Welsh text on the sign above reads, “I am not in the office at the moment. Please send any work to be translated.” This was obviously an auto-response by a translator on vacation, but the ragskull handling the matter spoke no Welsh, and assumed that this was the desired translation. Oops.

Languages and dialects die almost every day. The Celtic family continues to struggle, particularly given the onslaught of English, indisputably the most popular international language. But the pride of Celtic language speakers will ensure that the death of these beautiful and historically rich tongues will not come until a day far in the future.

Tá an Sean-Faolchú labharta.

Going on a phishing trip

Posted on January 20, 2014 by The Old Wolf

Scam Warning: Free Shipping Problem

This email appeared in my inbox overnight. It’s a scam, of course, but sadly many people will be taken in by it.

Why is this a scam?

First of all, I haven’t ordered anything from Walmart, ever.
Next, the mail was sent from “8020salestraining.com,” not “walmart.com.”
Third, notice the secondary text “Wallmart,” an obvious mis-spelling.
Fourth, notice the lousy English: “you must fill this form,” “you will be paid your money back.”
Lastly, if you happen to click the “this form” link, you are downloading a zip file called “WalmartForm_Richfield_84701.zip” – and if you unpack that, you get “WalmartForm_Richfield_84701.exe“

That last one is the biggest red flag of all: the first rule of safe computing is NEVER RUN ATTACHED EXE FILES. That’s a program, and it will either gather financial details and forward it to scammers, or install malware/adware/viruses/trojans on your system, or something else, or all of the above. Many people don’t enable the display of file extensions, so they would never know they’re opening a malicious program.

There are more scams out there than you can shake a stick at. Practice safe computing – never download or open attachments unless you are sure you know from whom they are coming. Be careful with your financial details. Never send banking or credit card information via email. Avoid sending money to anyone unknown via Western Union or Money Card. And never pay money to collect a prize, especially from a contest you have not entered.

Be careful out there.

The Old Wolf has spoken.

Le Robinson Resort from the air.

Posted on January 16, 2014 by The Old Wolf

Previously I wrote about Le Robinson, a resort in Patterson, NY just north of New York City. It was owned by my father’s first wife, Miriam, and her second husband, André Lavielle.

Recently I’ve been scanning a collection of slides and negatives that I inherited from my father, and encountered some shots of the resort taken from the air. My dad was an amateur pilot, among other things, and these are some pictures he took on one of his flights. They make an interesting addition to the history of the locale.

Le Robinson, showing the main house that burned, as well as the cottages. Visible are the tennis court and the bocce court to its right.

The beginning of the pond can be seen at right.

It’s too bad the career of Le Robinson was cut short by the fire, but time was moving on and the popularity of these resorts was waning. I’m just glad the land was preserved and serves a useful community function.

For your gratuitous enjoyment, here’s a shot of the plane that these pictures were taken from. According to Miriam’s son David, Joe had rented this plane at Danbury airport to fly around the farm. He was almost shot down by the previous owner of Le Robinson, who had been fined $1,000 (a princely sum in that day) for jacklighting deer using lights and salt. Apparently he thought my dad was the game warden and was going to shoot him down for revenge.

The Old Wolf has spoken.

Fraud by Deception – Labor Regulatory Compliance Office

Posted on January 16, 2014 by The Old Wolf

Executive Summary: Do not pay this company a dime. They are charging an outrageous fee for something any business can get for nothing, and using scare tactics to imply that you are at risk of fines up to $17,000 for being out of compliance.

You can click the thumbnails above for larger images. Note that the “invoice” is designed to intimidate and frighten; the disclaimers and additional information on the back side are printed in very light gray type, difficult to read (I’ve enhanced the contrast and gamma for readability.) Note that they admit you are under no obligation to pay for their services, and what are you getting? A poster. A very, very, very expensive poster, plus three years of their “monitoring service,” which is worth precisely zip. Zilch. Nada. Cypher. Nothing.

Federal Labor posters are available for free. Utah provides a complete list of posters and where to obtain them. Unless you’re a company that’s rolling in so much money that you feel like it’s worth three hundred Benjamins to save the hassle of gathering these individually, save your cash.

And, in the rare case that your business is audited and you fail to meet the standards, most inspectors will simply let you know what’s missing and give you a chance to post whatever is needed. They are not draconian inquisitors, and fines are usually levied only in case of willful non-compliance.

The Old Wolf has spoken.

Playing in the World Game

As One

Yearly Archives: 2014

An Especially Devious Spam Comment.

Look Magazine: The first mass-produced 3D Picture

Africa: Seen through dialects, not colonial borders.

Not Dead Yet – The Celtic languages hold on for dear life.

Going on a phishing trip

Scam Warning: Free Shipping Problem

Le Robinson Resort from the air.

Fraud by Deception – Labor Regulatory Compliance Office