Cut The Deck

President Trump said Thursday that he had seen evidence to prove that the coronavirus pandemic had spread from a laboratory in Wuhan, China, but he declined to detail what that evidence was.
“I’m not allowed to tell you that,” he said . . . .*

Let’s consider this for a bit. Trump says he’s “not allowed to tell” us. Well, why is he not allowed to tell? Who is stopping him? Way back early in his administration he declassified secret information; as president, he had the right to do so. Just a year ago last May, for example, he gave the Attorney General broad power to declassify documents.** He had no one above him to say no, to disallow the release of such information. 

Trump’s refusal to divulge his (apparent) evidence immediately reminded me of this scene in the W. C. Fields/Mae West film “My Little Chickadee.”

Clearly, Trump (no gentleman) was pulling a fake “Gentleman’s Game” ploy before our eyes. To quote Gertrude Stein, as far as Trump’s privileged information went, there was “no there there.” 

Trump has been pulling the fake card trick for years now. His most used fakery phrase is “many people.” A recent variant was "very good experts”—who supposedly predicted that the coronavirus outbreak "would never affect the United States.”*** 

When next he tries to pull that stunt, I am waiting for someone to pop up and demand: “Name one!”

***

*   https://news.yahoo.com/trump-says-he-has-evidence-coronavirus-came-from-a-chinese-lab-but-he-cant-reveal-it-232946854.html

**  https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/23/us/politics/trump-barr-intelligence.html

***  https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-very-good-experts-said-coronavirus-would-never-affect-us-2020-4

Corny/Grainy

In the previous post I ventured to put forth the greatest pun I ever invented, which climaxed with the line from Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale”: “Ruth amid the alien corn,” which you all knew from your expensive educations—or looked up in Google.

Now, all you North Americans out there—unlike the Brits—might have been wondering if that line was another of Keats’ historical whoppers—you know, like writing that Cortez discovered the Pacific Ocean.* How could a Biblical personage be anywhere near corn, when corn was native to a continent which was not to be discovered for more than a millennium in the future?

In this case Keats did not create another historical whopper. “Corn” is a native English word for “grain,” which happens to be a borrowed word, borrowed from Middle French. For residents of the New World, “corn” is applied to the native American plant maize, while “grain” has been delegated to denoting other plants, such as wheat and rye. Across the Atlantic, “corn” still equals “grain.”

From a language point of view the words “corn” and “grain” are classified as "doublets"—that is, words co-existing in a language or dialect from the same original source, but have come into that language or dialect via different routes. 

English is a part of the Germanic family of languages, which spun off from Western Indo-European (probably 3,000 to 4,500 years ago) and “corn” has been along for the ride. “Grain,” which we noted above, was borrowed from French (and was originally a Latin word**). 

Jacob Grimm (one of the fairy tale Grimm brothers) codified the consonant changes from Western Indo-European to Germanic, one of which was the change from a hard G sound to K sound. Over time some Latinate G words borrowed by English became a soft G (e.g, “genuflect,” which you do with your native English word “knee,” the initial consonant sound disappearing about half a millennium ago).

Now, another thing that’s interesting about “corn“/“grain” is the transposition of the vowel sound and the “r” sound. Transposition of sounds in a word (not only with the “r” sound) is known as “metathesis.” It has happened to other familiar English words, such as “grass,” “ask,” and “burn.”***

*

Note that not all “corn” words in English are native. Take “cornucopia.” That’s a borrowed word—from Latin—the “cornu” part is Latin for “horn,” a native English word. Think of the musical instrument the cornet—a horn. Here we have another of the sound changes of Grimm’s Law: Western Indo-European K (which Latin didn’t change) into Germanic H (initially). (There’s “casa”/“house” as another example.) We don’t have an English cognate for “copia,” but we have borrowed the root for “copious.” “Cornucopia,” is rendered in English as “horn of plenty”—a phrase that is half native and half borrowed.The Latin root of “plenty” we also find in “plenary” and other words. For a pure Latin example think of “Ave Maria plena gratia”—“full of grace.” “Plena”/full” is another example of Grimm’s Law****—Western IE P becomes Germanic F. Other examples; “pisces”/“fish,” “pedestrian”/“foot.”

Let’s end with a simple test: What can we say about “Gratia”/“Grace”?

You’re right. A native English word cognate with “gratia” would have to start with a K sound. So, “grace’ is a borrowed word.

Thanks for being gracious enough to read this.

*** 

* “On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer”—a superfluous footnote for some of you, I hope.

** The phrase “take it with a grain of salt” is a loan-translation of Latin’s “cum grano salis.”

*** Cf. German “brennen.” English “burn” and German “brennen” are "cognates"—words in different languages or dialects that stem from the same earlier word. Are you upset when someone says, "I'll aks him"? That's metathesis at work, and has been since Old English, whose texts alternated between ks and sk.

**** And another example of metathesis.

Note: The second greatest pun I ever invented came during a college class in Romantic Poetry. A fellow student who thought he was the world’s greatest Freudian was babbling on about “Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey.” The professor, exasperated, finally exclaimed, “Look at the words, Mr. Schleimer. Look at the words!” 

Whereupon I turned to my neighbor and said, “But what are the words worth?”

Puns

Puns are great—except when they’re not great. And, unfortunately, most of the puns we come across in our daily lives—like those concocted by newspaper or magazine sub-editors, are tripe.

The truly great puns go down in history and are related over and over again. For example, there’s this classic of Dorothy Parker’s:

Challenged by one of her verbal sparring partners to use the word “horticulture” in a sentence, Parker came up with

You can lead a whore to culture, but you can’t make her think.

Perhaps the most brilliant pun of all—because it needed only one word—was the classic (oops, pun there) message attributed to Sir Charles Napier* supposedly sent to London in 1843 after his capture of the Indian province of Sind:

Peccavi.

(Non-Latinists are encouraged to Google this word.)

*

During a few of the many idle moments that we all have now, I have come up with—what I think is—an exquisitely subtle pun (so exquisitely subtle that I believe resorting to Google will be necessary, the pun touching on vastly different areas of knowledge). If, because of social distancing, no one will come up and pat me on the back for the pun, at least everyone else will be out of rotten-tomato-throwing range.

At one point in the 1920s, during the baseball off-season, the leading batsman—nicknamed The Sultan of Swat—was hired to do a turn on the vaudeville stage. He enlightened the rapt audiences with demonstrations of his batting stance and his magnificent swing.

Unfortunately, his act was preceded by a pair of Irishmen who blarneyed their way through a series of moldy tales about the Auld Sod, and was followed by a couple of kilted Scots telling haggis jokes and singing (after a fashion) Robbie Burns songs.

The whole thing may be summed up as a case of Ruth amid the alien corn. 

***

* Research has shown that the pun was apparently coined by A. N. Other.

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Charles-James-Napier

The Greenhouse Effect

During our COVID-19 lockdown we have been offered tons of advice on how to survive our isolation. Lists have been offered of books, TV shows and movies, exercise regimens, and music to fill our time indoors. The offerings of advice that I most welcome—seeing that I have books, music, and movies overflowing the living room (notice I didn’t say anything about exercise)—are the lists of recipes to be attacked in my kitchen. 

The other day the ever-helpful New York Times offered up an article entitled, 

A Mediterranean-Inspired Menu to Keep You Going All Day
Savory spiced oats, chicken salad pita and spicy meatballs: These recipes offer a trip abroad, via your pantry.

I don’t know about those oats, but I love chicken salad and meatballs, and so I dug into the article, especially enticed by the author’s talk about finding the ingredients in my pantry (i.e., kitchen shelves, for us peasants) during the self-isolation.

Anyway, since I have a box of oatmeal lying around I did take a look at the recipe. To the oats, the author, David Tanis, adds “a fried egg, a bit of roasted pepper, a generous sprinkling of za’atar . . . .” Wait a minute; I’m supposed to have za’atar hidden away in my pantry behind the sardines and Oreos? I don’t even know what the hell za’atar is—a Persian god, perhaps? a Viennese musical instrument? 

Well, forget the oats.

On to the meatballs—“Spicy Meatballs With Chickpeas.” Turns out the meat in the meatballs is ground lamb, which I imagine I could harvest from one of the furry creatures munching on the grass outside my New Jersey window. I do have a can or two of chickpeas, but Mr. Tanis advises,

If you have the time, cook your chickpeas from scratch.

I wouldn’t know what a scratch chickpea looks like, and even if I did find a stray one hunkered down in my (ahem) pantry, I don’t have the temperament to “soak them for a few hours or overnight.” Cooking is now or never with me. Generously, Tanis allows us, if we prefer, to “serve the meatballs with couscous.” Right! substitute non-available couscous for the missing chickpeas.

One more recipe to go, and maybe for that one I can just pull stuff off the shelves.

Sorry, no. It’s for “Grilled Chicken Pita With Yogurt Sauce and Arugula.” Now, I sometimes have some leftover chicken cowering in the fridge, and if I’m careful I might be able to separate the yogurt from the fruit on the bottom in my breakfast yogurt cups, but arugula? Who has arugula? I could come up with some wilted lettuce leaves. Would that do?

*

A number of years ago, while I was at my car dealer’s waiting for an oil change one morning, I glanced over to the TV set where a chef was cutting something up with a big knife, with a fairly attractive woman observing him. After a commercial break, the chef had disappeared into the ether, and the woman was outside a house with an expanse of lawn behind her. She gestured with her arm and said, 

I like to have two greenhouses, one for something-or-other and another for this-and-that.

(Please excuse me for not implanting the real words in my brain.) By a leap of intuition I said to myself, “That must be Martha Stewart.” (I had heard about her, but didn’t know her.) I was right. 

Martha Stewart extolling the joys of having two greenhouses, and I didn’t have even one!

Now that I think about it, maybe I could get Martha to rummage in the something-or-other or the this-and-that greenhouse and fetch me some arugula.

The White Roller

Woody Allen was a screamingly funny stand-up comedian. His shtick was that of an unaffected loner who shrugged off the bullshit of the world around him.

As the years went on he became a successful filmmaker. And one wondered about his Garbo-esque vanting to be alone and free from celebrity scrutiny. As New York magazine once noted, how did that stance mesh with driving around New York City in a white Rolls-Royce? Or, as I observed to myself, with occupying a humongously-priced courtside seat at New York Knicks basketball games?

It became clear over the years—at least to me(1)—that he was far from unaffected and certainly a bullshitter. And he admits this in his new book:

“I have no insights, no lofty thoughts, no understanding of most poems that do not begin, ‘Roses are red, violets are blue,’” he writes. “What I do have, however, is a pair of black-rimmed glasses, and I propose that it is these specs, combined with a flair for appropriating snippets from erudite sources too deep for me to grasp but which can be utilized in my work to give the deceptive impression of knowing more than I do that keeps this fairy tale afloat.”(2)

That is something that I had always suspected; underneath the intellectual pose was no substance. What he was able to do was to attract an audience of similar poseurs, who pronounced shibboleth correctly and so were safe in the bosom of the church of Woody Allen.

*

Since the autobiography was unceremoniously slipped into the bookworld last week, there have been few reviews out so far (you could count them on one hand, less a finger or two). Talya Zax in the Forward is very astute in her review (for which clearsightedness, she gets blasted by Allenistas in the comments):

He’s the sole star of his own sympathies, describing his friends, family and enemies exclusively by how their actions and feelings impact him, and never trying to understand or empathize with them.(3)

I guess I appreciate her review because she echoes my observations in the previous blog post about Allen’s solipsistic self-centeredness.

*

Some other points I have gleaned from the reviews:

Allen engages in a screw-and-tell session, listing actresses and others he has bedded. The shlemiel as superstud seems to be the theme.Women are objectified, as Dwight Garner notes in the Times review:

Nearly every time a woman is mentioned, there’s a gratuitous pronouncement on her looks. Early on, he chases “delectable bohemian little kumquats” in New York City. While in London filming “Casino Royale” (1967), a James Bond spoof, he writes, “one could stroll on the Kings Road and pick up the most adorable birds in their miniskirts.” Birds? I kept waiting for him to sail to Australia to scoop up a basket of “Sheilas.”

Then there are the Mia-wars. I won’t attempt to place myself in the attic in Connecticut, where something or nothing happened between Allen and seven-year-old Dylan Farrow. However, Allen’s dealing with the Mia issues comes across as crazed as the hinged ravings of internet conspiracists. Again Garner:

[Allen] broaches the idea that Farrow may have slept with a state judge and a state attorney in order to try and influence their opinions during a custody battle. . . . Allen suggests that [their son] Ronan was groomed by Farrow to despise him. He alleges that Farrow had Ronan undergo cosmetic surgery to add a few inches to his height, which required the breaking and rebreaking of his legs.

*

Allen near the end of the book writes,

Not believing in a hereafter, I really can’t see any practical difference if people remember me as a film director or a pedophile or at all. All that I ask is my ashes be scattered close to a pharmacy.”

Not very funny(4)—as he once was as a stand-up comedian.

But then again, as his life has proven, he’s not a stand-up guy.

***

(1) I have written about Allen before: 

https://drnormalvision.blogspot.com/2018/02/the-church-of-woody-allen.html

(2) The first line of his autobiography reads in part, “Like Holden [Caulfield], I don’t feel like going into all that David Copperfield kind of crap. . . .” He can’t do better than to identify with a teenager? 

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/26/books/review-apropos-of-nothing-memoir-woody-allen.html?action=click&module=Well&pgtype=Homepage&section=Books

(3) https://forward.com/culture/books/442575/woody-allen-memoir-review-apropos-of-nothing/#article-comments

(4) I must admit that while early on I found Allen’s comedy act hilarious, I was disappointed with his writing, where he seemed believe that silly non sequiturs equaled funny.

The Anti-Christ

By some demonic trick, the Evangelical Christian movement became besotted with Donald Trump. Here were alleged followers of the principles of the Prince of Peace marching behind the banner of one of the greatest sinners of our time—one who has evidenced each of the seven deadly sins:

Anger—The list of his targets is too long to record here;

Gluttony—Hamburgers and Cokes, anyone?;

Sloth—How about mornings watching Fox TV?;

Envy—The green-eyed monster glaring at Putin’s dictatorial powers;

Greed—Need we detail the Trump family’s business practices?;

Lust—Multiple instances of adultery and fornication;

Pride—“Stable genius.” Do you need more examples?

*

President Donald Trump announced on Fox News on Tuesday that he's aiming to scale back social distancing guidelines to fight the coronavirus by Easter because he wants to see "packed churches all over our country." 
When asked by Fox News' Bill Hemmer why he chose April 12 as the day to reopen the economy, Trump said Easter is a "very special day for me." 
"Wouldn't it be great to have all of the churches full? You know the churches aren't allowed, essentially, to have much of a congregation there," Trump said. "You'll have packed churches all over our country. I think it would be a beautiful time.”*

What looks like a great gift to the Christians is in reality part of the demonic plan to eradicate the religion. Pack the churches with Christians during a pandemic of a highly contagious disease and . . . .

*

William Butler Yeats, imaging the Second Coming in his poem of the same name,** foresaw not a return of Christ, but a 

rough beast, its hour come round at last,   
Slouch[ing] towards Bethlehem to be born. 

Poets don’t always get things right; Yeats had his coordinates off. The “rocking cradle” of the poem turned out not to be in Bethlehem but in Queens, NY. 

***

• https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-wants-reopen-economy-on-easter-to-have-packed-churches-2020-3

       **The Second Coming 

           

           By William Butler Yeats

Turning and turning in the widening gyre   

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere   

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst   

Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.   

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out   

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert   

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,   

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,   

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it   

Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.   

The darkness drops again; but now I know   

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,   

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,   

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Soliloquy at the Taj Mahal

What the hell am I doing here?

Standing stiff as a board staring at a pile of old stones. Taj Mahal. MY Taj was better. Neon. With my name on it. Would make a nice golf clubhouse, though. Do they even have golf courses in this country? 

Standing stiff as a board with my back to the cameras. Whose idea was that? Is that a custom here?

Strange place. They invite the leader of  the greatest country in the whole world. Throw him a dinner and I look at my plate and it’s all covered in green. Grass. They served me grass. What am I a cow? 

Cows. They say they’re sacred here. That means no criticism. It wouldn’t be bad to be a sacred cow. No CNN or New York Times saying those mean things. 

Strange place. That Modi also has a problem with the Moslems. Told him to build a wall. He kept saying cashmere. I’m saying wall; he’s saying cashmere. What does fashion have to do with it? As if he knows about fashion. Dresses like a teenage girl. Miniskirt and leggings. 

Someone said something about a new germ going around. Coronado virus or something. Germophobic. I’ll get some else to deal with it. Pence. What the hell does he do all day? I’ll make him an emperor or czar of the virus. He’ll feel big. We’ll deduct his credit card for the mask.

Enough already! Standing with my back to the cameras.

My underwear is feeling tight.

I need to find a hamburger.