Underpants Gnomes

I’ve been working my way through a Cambridge textbook, Lexical Semantics by D.A. Cruse. It’s really difficult reading, because new terms are introduced at the rate of about three per page, and most of them are coinages suggested by the author rather than any agreed-upon linguistic standard—there is no dictionary available to help you the author isn’t clear. He keeps saying things like “these terms should be obvious” when they might be to a hardcore linguist, but for a rookie, well . . .

The modes of analysis suggested by the book seem quite useful, if I can just figure them out. I keep finding types of analysis that may be really helpful in certain parts of my research. But they’re kind of piling up to the point that I’m confusing myself. Watching an old South Park episode tonight, things became a lot clearer. My research plan has been the same as the business plan of the underpants gnomes:

1. Gather Underpants

2. ?

3. Make Profit

I’m oddly comforted by this.

Academic Angst

For some reason, I thought of some of the academy bashing from a while back when I recently saw a prototypical Betty Boop cartoon from 1931, Betty Co-ed. The lyrics of the hit by Rudy Vallee that provide the backdrop (complete with bouncing ball) are a wonder:

Flirtation is an art with Betty Co-ed
Her station quite depends upon her charms
She gets the men in rushes
By well developed blushes
And she’s happy with a fellow on each arm

Betty Co-ed has lips of red for Harvard
Betty Co-ed has eyes of Yale’s deep blue
Betty Co-ed’s a golden head for Princeton
Her dress, I guess, is black for old Purdue . . .

After the ball has finished bouncing, there is a lovely scene of rather naked-looking mice marching into one side of the college and marching out the other side fully clothed, diplomas in hand. However, the animators didn’t stop there. They also had to comment on post-graduate education. A post-graduate education makes you a fully qualified street sweeper. Somehow, the current complaining hardly seems news.

Oh, and on a slightly related note, Mike Golby Rocks!

One of the major purposes of the university is to help shape a mind that can be supple and flexible and comfortable with itself under any circumstance.

G. Robert Ross, former Chancellor of the University of Arkansas at Little Rock

I’ve become obsessed with a plaque at the entrance of Ross Hall, one of the campus buildings. For some reason, I read this quote every Wednesday night and think of a kitchen utensil I bought recently.

It’s just gravy (or not).

I was tired and hungry. As usual, there was nothing in the house.

A quick inventory of the refrigerator revealed some mushrooms in need of use. There were some potatoes on the top of the microwave. That’s it, I thought: mashed potatoes and mushroom gravy. That would work.

I started to sauté the mushrooms. Gravity increased. I really didn’t want to peel potatoes. I could just eat gravy.

Perhaps I’m just too linguistically bound. There’s just something not right about that. No one eats just gravy. Gravy implies a surfeit. A person has too many things— so the rest are just gravy.

It’s an addition, a side-dish, a garnish— not a meal.

My legs were nagging. I needed something simple, and the mushrooms were nearly browned.

Suddenly, in a flash of inspiration, my gravy became soup. Soup is okay— cream of mushroom soup, that’s it! A little pepper, some flour, some onion . . . Soup is the catch-all cleaning the refrigerator type meal.

It couldn’t be gravy!

Cleaning

Because the semester is starting in another ten days or so, I decided I had better do something about the compost heap in the floor. This is always a problem, and I’ve been putting off sorting out the articles and such that I really need to file— I noticed today that there were several essays on Chaucer. I haven’t studied Chaucer in at least four years. I suppose that goes to the sheer resistance I have to cleaning.

It isn’t unsanitary mind you, it’s just paper after all. No stale pizzas have surfaced, or unidentifiable sticky things, just paper. If I had a fireplace, I suppose I could bale it and keep myself warm for the winter.

Which reminds me of a story . . . There was a mailman in the foothills of the Sierra Mountains in California, who serviced the outlying areas of a town named Caliente. The town was oddly named, because it wasn’t really hot there, but I digress . . .

The winters were severe in Caliente, and one of the contract mail delivery route drivers who serviced the outlying areas came up with a plan. He saved everyone’s junk mail— failing to deliver it— and rolled it up into fireplace logs. He was saved from the jail term for this horrendous federal offense because the residents stepped forward to say that they really didn’t want that mail anyway.

Cleaning and creative thought don’t go together, and that is adding to the quiet around here. This should be obvious, given my complete lack of anything interesting to say.

Cereal Killers

I was standing in the kitchen and I couldn’t stop reading. Of course, the selection was limited. Looking at the back of a cereal box, I noticed this:

Kraft: Real Help in Real Time — Postcereals.com

Real time help for dealing with cereal? Okay, I’ve just got to look. I saw no evidence of a help screen, let alone online help. I tried the search box:

Now that is downright irritating. People all over the world are looking for help, and yet no recipe contains it. I was finishing up writing my time-wasting blog post about the whole deal, and I decided I’d better comb the web page again more carefully, just to make sure. The closest thing to help I found on the page was A message from our lawyers:

Okay, now I’ve done it. I’m liable to get scary e-mails. I really do wonder though about the viability of preventing people from modifying publicly posted recipes. I’m sure that there are lots of cereal killers out there.

The Straight Dope

It was a trip which began with many wrong turns. I avoided civilization completely, due to the holiday traffic, but it turned dark too soon. I kept turning down the wrong highway in the middle of nowhere. Within a couple of hundred feet, I knew I was going the wrong way. I’d double back and try again. When I got to Hackett, I looked at the bank thermometer and saw that it was 32 degrees— or zero, depending on your scale. It’s always a matter of scale, isn’t it?

I read more Hegel before I slept, but the nightmare didn’t start till the following morning. It began innocently enough. I walked outside to stare at a clear and crisp blue sky with remnants of the moon. I read Barthes and then an essay written by my cousin Wendy about growing up. My mom complained— “that may be the way Wendy remembers it, but I don’t remember it that way”— maybe it’s more a matter of perspective.

It was a fun read though, because of the scene where my brother Steve came up with the idea of painting her sister Julie’s fingernails with Tabasco sauce while she slept to help cure her from chewing on them. That sounded right to me. The trouble usually begins right when Steve gets involved. I haven’t played family mediator for a while, but those skills came back just before dinner when Steve arrived. My mom made a dry comment about Steve not caring about family history when I brought up the story. Steve got insulted and walked outside. I brought the story outside to him and tried to calm things down. I thought it was pretty funny. Wendy calls herself the “flower” of the family — “the blooming idiot.” This is the role I think I usually play in my branch of the clan.

After he read the story, his first comment was “I don’t remember things quite that way.” Wendy had made a big deal about how pious Julie was. “Uh, Julie was the first person to ever show me a Playboy magazine!” Steve said. It blew him away that a girl would read Playboy, let alone share it with him. Needless to say, he was impressed. After we all had a good laugh over the story, things smoothed out. It was a happy Thanksgiving.

The road back was smooth, other than some occasional dips. The temperature on the Hackett bank sign was of a higher caliber tonight— it read 45. Passing through Harmony, Arkansas, I looked at the display board of a church. It read: “The road to Heaven is in front of you— stay straight and keep to the right.” I followed those directions and made it home. I didn’t make any more wrong turns. However, instead of taking me to Heaven, it just took me home.

There was something I’d been meaning to research, and I looked it up tonight— the history of the word dope. It didn’t surprise me that it was stolen from the Dutch— from doop (dipping, sauce, etc.) and doopen— to dip. The oldest usage seems to date to 1851, as a synonym for simpleton. Given the etymology, dipshit also makes more sense now. In 1872, it refers to a preparation, a mixture— and not much later, an unspecified drug. This helps explain the dual usage for preparations like thread dope and pipe dope as well as intoxicating substances. It doesn’t really explain to the latest rap twist on the word as being good though. Surely they’ve been following the public service announcements.

At least now I have an answer for the old anti-drug commercial: “Why do you think they call it dope?”— Because you either dip into it, or dip things in it? Or, perhaps because it is a way of getting sauced?

Yes, I confess. I am easily amused. I’m all for Luke’s movie idea. Lest anyone cares, I’m a straight dope these days.