Implied nudity

Florida's Palm Beach Post publishes a Washington Post-distributed feature, "Should Your Kids See It?". It's a series of movie reviews that addresses all the objectionable elements of movies--whether they have foul language, violence, drug use, etc.; I suppose, so that a parent can make an informed choice about the level of trauma to inflict on his child. The movie reviews often mention "implied nudity" or even just "implied toplessness." Doesn't clothing necessarily imply nudity? I guess the answer is that you can't be nude (in a woman's case anyway) unless there's a nipple; in Vermont, for instance, you are a criminal voyeur only when you get a look at "any portion of the female breast below the top of the areola" (13 Vt. Stat. § 2605).

Exigible

Spanish and English share much vocabulary--necesario, requirir, demandar present no obstacle to the English speaker, and English words of Latin extraction have their Spanish parallels.

A wrinkle in the Latin fabric of our languages: I noticed in the past week or so a that a Mexican businessman, writing in English, described certain items as "exigible"; and a film-music composer described Pedro Almodóvar as a "very exigent director." An exigible item is one an English speaker would describe as, according to the Random House Dictionary of the English Language, 2d., "liable to be exacted; requirable"*--but my point is that an English speaker probably wouldn't. "Exigible" is just not used by modern English speakers. The same goes for describing a person as "exigent"--we'd just say "demanding," but a Spanish-speaker would still describe his boss as exigente. (I think English speakers would still say a situation is exigent.)

I still remember "El Exigente," by the way.


*Sic; not "requireable?"

Terrible poetry

I was very disappointed a week or two ago reading Carl Sandburg's Chicago Poems ("City of the big shoulders," "Hog butcher of the world"). Perhaps this is the worst of them (courtesy of Bartleby.com):

Happiness

I asked the professors who teach the meaning of life to tell me what is happiness.
And I went to famous executives who boss the work of thousands of men.
They all shook their heads and gave me a smile as though I was trying to fool with them.
And then one Sunday afternoon I wandered out along the Desplaines river
And I saw a crowd of Hungarians under the trees with their women and children and a keg of beer and an accordion.

Yuck. Starting with the least-awful objectionable aspect, it's in this careless, not quite rhythmic free verse. And the way the Hungarians example is set off from the rest with a different rhythm makes everything so nice and pat. I don't like the lame, obvious contrast, either.

Finally, I had to laugh; part of that, I think, is that the Hungarians are an ill-chosen group of poor people. It's one of those words that sounds too funny in English to take seriously. Just remember: "In 1970, the British empire lay in ruins; foreigners filled the streets, many of them Hungarian (not the streets, the foreign nationals) . . ."

"Nelly Furtado Gives Gadhafi Money"

The elevators of the office building I work in contain screens run by the distastefully named "Captivate Network" (not because it's captivating, but because you are a captive in the elevator for twenty seconds; the name probably appealed to marketing geeks who have internalized their science). It's not all ads, and does feature news and sports scores, but I think it's most fascinating for the abuse the news headlines inflict on English. Tonight I saw "Nelly Furtado Gives Gadhafi Money"--by which they meant that she gave money from Qaddafi away to a charity; but it was pretty shocking to read. (If you don't see why, test the effect of the word order with the sentence "N. gives me money.")

The same little screen told me yesterday something like "77% of employees go to restaurants recommended by their work spouse." By work spouse, they mean what I would call a work-wife (a friend of either sex at work whom you regularly commiserate with), and some women call a work-husband. "Work-wife" is a joke; I don't think anyone is entitled to regularize it along the lines of wife-husband-spouse.

Good night, Irene: Cyclones, hurricanes and typhoons

Trapped inside by Hurricane Irene, I've had time to find you the National Hurricane Center's web page detailing the first names given to storms. Different sets of names are available to be given to a "tropical cyclone," depending on which region of the world's oceans the cyclone originates in. I've been in hurricanes here on the east coast, and I've been in a typhoon in Hong Kong.*

There's a whole taxonomy of big, rotating storms, which you can derive from the glossaries of the National Hurricane Center and the National Weather Service and from various dictionaries.  I don't whether cyclones, tornadoes and whirlwinds can be grouped together based on their natural characteristics; I am just trying to organize the terminology.

• Cyclones
• Anticyclones (meh--just a cyclone rotating in reverse)
• Extratropical cyclones
• Tropical cyclones (subcategorized according to windspeed, in order of ascending speed:)
• Tropical depressions
• Tropical storms
• Hurricanes; in the western Pacific, called typhoons
• "Willy-willy" is an Australian (native?) term for a tropical cyclone
•  Tornadoes (called "cyclones" in the U.S. midwest: Webster's Third)
• Waterspouts
• Whirlwinds
• Dust devils or dust whirls (here's a video of a dust devil on Mars)
• According to the unabridged Random House Dictionary and Webster's Third, a "violent squall or whirlwind of small extent," apparently on the west coast of Africa, is a "tornado."

A storm in India can be called a "typhoon" also (Random House); and storms archaically were called "tornadoes" (Webster's Third).  If you can suggest other terms for this taxonomy, please do!

* I was in a shopping mall bargaining to get the price down (as one does in that part of the world) on a pair of binoculars.  As he and I reached an impasse, the proprietor of the shop said I had to decide quickly because the shop was closing in 5 minutes.  I looked at him incredulously and asked why, and he said, "Typhoon!"  I didn't know how to respond to such a silly tactic and walked away.  A few hours later I was standing soaked in the typhoon that really did materialize.

Apropos of "apropos"

I polled several dictionaries and style guides on the proper use of "apropos" (/A-pro-POH/), which I've only ever seen in phrases like "apropos of nothing" (= "this isn't related to the current topic, but …"), and the general "apropos of x" (= "since we've been discussing it"; as in "apropos of breakfast, I like eggs").

"Apropos" is from the French à propos, "to the point" or "to the purpose," and it can be used with or without a preposition as an adjective or an adverb. It describes something or an action as timely or appropriate. "Apropos" can also be used as a preposition, with or without "of" or "to," and means "with respect to" or "regarding" (Webster's Third cites "'apropos the return of young Americans to lyricism'" and "'his remark to Emerson apropos of diplomas'").

When using the preposition, English-speakers generally use "apropos of." Additionally, there are a number of 20th-century citations with "apropos" and no appended preposition; but there are many fewer citations for "apropos to." (See Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage.) "Apropos of" sounds most correct to me, and Henry Fowler and Merriam-Webster seem to prefer "apropos of." Fowler favors "apropos of" on (in part) the shaky grounds that it translates a cliché that must once have been well known: à propos de bottes (bottes = boots). À propos de bottes was used to switch to an entirely new subject.

"Malapropos" is available to English-speakers too. It's probably only an adjective or adverb, meaning "inappropriate, inopportune," and takes no appended preposition.

Watch your "which"

Here's an irresistible sentence from the Metropolitan Museum of Art's description of a Louis Comfort Tiffany chair:

This chair is one of a pair closely related to a suite of furniture from the music room of the H. O. Havemeyer house, which Tiffany designed with Samuel Colman in 1891-92.

Now "which" of the bolded nouns did Tiffany and Colman design? We can almost definitely rule out "this chair"; but that still leaves four possible antecedents for that put-upon relative pronoun.