theology&geometry

On the heels of a recent conversation about Southernisms and colloquialisms spurred by my usage of “gullywasher”…

Manfred: I heard something like “gullywarsher” the other day: “Frog strangler.”

Me: Oh yeah? Ha! That must be like a toad choker. Frog strangler, toad choker, gullywasher.

Manfred: I have never heard of any of those.

Me: What are some colloquialisms from where you’re from? I’m sure there are Jersey phrases we don’t use here.

Manfred: I can’t think of any that mean it’s raining. We just say, “It’s FUCKING POURING.”

Aunt B brought this to my attention just now: Philadelphia-based writer Tara Murtha pleads for some sense in the “rape” vs. “had sex with” debate.

Here’s what I said on the same topic a little while back. Pay attention and I promise you will see this unfortunate semantic switcheroo a lot. It needs to stop.

We all do battle sometimes.

The Hangover was funny. Zach Galifianakis should be a household name and I want to shrink him and put him in my pocket and pull him out and pet him and have him make me laugh. I want to keep Bradley Cooper full size and keep him tied up in my closet. I want Ed Helms to be my BFF. I want Heather Graham to tell me how she got to be so hot yet so unhateable.

Angels And Demons became completely absurd within the first half hour and so we skedaddled just to spare the people around us the annoyance of our constant Mike/Joel/bots-like commentary. This gives me the perfect opening to gush about Language Log’s ongoing dissection of Dan Brown’s prose. If you haven’t read any of their criticism, you must. Start here and work your way down that list of links.

[Project 365]

I saw Monsters vs. Aliens tonight, because I am a sucker for overpriced kids’ movies in 3-D.

And while, like Watchmen, it was gorgeous to behold but had a stupid, not very engaging story (*ducks to avoid nerd pummeling*), there was one snippet of dialogue that immediately lodged into my brain like a verbal splinter.

There’s this giant lady monster, see, and she’s being introduced to her new monster home, tended by a wacky military general.

Giant lady: How long will I be here?

Wacky general: Inevitably.

WHAT?!

I feel like that exchange right there is indicative of why Dreamworks animation pictures tend to fall just short of Pixar’s brilliance, again and again. It’s the writing, stupid. Get it right: Indefinitely.

Anyway, it’s a cute movie, take your kids, blah blah blah. They’ll be mesmerized by the blob thing especially. And Seth Rogen’s laugh.

Technically, no.

At least that was the argument a feisty* co-worker and I put forth last night when we got the first-edition edition papers and were looking through them for errors.

“Unwitting suicide bombers” — that’s the phrase that keeps popping up in all the reports. It may seem completely stupid for me to quibble with semantics in the face of such a horrific act as strapping explosives to mentally disabled women and blowing them up in crowded markets to murder as many people as possible, but I don’t ever think that accuracy is a bad thing. And I happen to feel like it underscores just how horrific the extremist mindset is when we have to think of completely new phrases and concepts to describe the type of violence they are employing.

I know “unwitting suicide bomber” was chosen by reporters or editors because it so closely describes the scenario in as few words as possible. You take a familiar template — the suicide bomber with explosives strapped to his/her chest — and inject “unwitting” in there in the hopes that people understand that it means that the people getting blown up weren’t hip to the plan.

Except that when you don’t know you’re doing to die, you’re not doing it intentionally, it’s not technically suicide. You take the intent out of it and we’ve got something altogether different.

I’d like to see the Language Log guys‘ opinions on this.

*Hee hee, she’ll punch me for saying that.