One Word That Makes Me Shun Any Video, Blog Post, etc. (When it's the First Word in the Title.)

"How..."

Especially when the word doesn't really apply and it's just an attemptedly cute appeal to self-improvement. ("How C.S. Lewis changed my life", that kind of thing.)

Exceptionally Exciting-- a Repeat

(This blog post is less than a year old, but I'm repeating it because its topic has been much on my mind today. Hey, it's blog, I can do that.)

As I've mentioned before, I browse the website TV Tropes a lot. A lotta lot. It might be my favourite way of relaxing, decompressing, kicking back, and so forth. And it has been for at least a decade.

Today, I came across this sentence on TV Tropes: "A San Francisco youth made national news when saw the movie Rocky eighty-one times (and possibly more) during its first-run release in 1976 and 1977. After the twenty-seventh viewing, the theatre started letting him in for free."

I don't know why, but this sort of thing makes the Christmas tree of my imagination light up, flash, and play holiday tunes.

What sort of thing do I mean? Well, anything to do with an exception, an irregular situation, a freebie, an informal arrangement, or an anomaly.

For instance: I once read that the Abbey National Building Society, having a branch very close to the (only ever fictional) address of 221B Baker Street, employed a full-time secretary to answer Sherlock Holmes's mail. And this is true!

For instance: one year in secondary school, when I was about sixteen, a quirk of the timetable meant that we had an English class sandwiched between two physical education classes. So the teacher let us stay in our gym clothes for that class.

For instance: I once went to a takeaway and bought some garlic sauce. Just that. The guy behind the counter threw in a good amount of chips, free of charge and unasked.

For instance: on Liechtenstein's national day, all the citizens are invited to a party in the Prince's castle.

For instance: once, when I was a kid, my school organised a treasure hunt. I remember me and my brothers going into the vegetable shop in the shopping centre to ask about a particular clue. The shopkeeper gave us a mysterious, knowing look, reached under the counter, and handed us an envelope. This completely floored me.

For instance: in the film Wayne's World 2, the protagonist says: "Everybody in the world has Frampton Comes Alive. If you lived in the suburbs, you were issued with it. It came in the mail with samples of Tide."

Please note, the appeal I'm talking about doesn't just apply to freebies or special privileges. It can go the opposite way, too. It pleases me when someone has a special power or obligation.

I've just discovered, from a quick internet search, that barmen don't really have the right to confiscate someone's car keys. But apparently, businesses did once have the right to cut up your declined credit card. Both ideas appeal to me.

When I was a kid, and I went a long time between haircuts (as I always did), I'd regularly get this taunt from other kids: "The barber has a warrant for your arrest." The idea always charmed me.

In 2003, Coke was banned from being sold in UCD Student's Union shops because of controversies about their operations in Colombia. That was lifted more recently, but now it's banned because the sugar content is too high. It's a bummer that you can't get a Coke in UCD when you want one, but I enjoy the anomaly.

Speaking of Coke, for many years it was forbidden to use the name Pepsi in their corporate headquarters in Atlanta. You had to say "the imitator" instead. (For real. Look it up, if you don't believe me.)

In New Jersey, you can't operate petrol pump yourself-- you have to get a petrol station attendant to do it.

And then there are the anomalies of convention. If children were to knock on your door and demand sweets on 364 days of the year, you'd send them packing. But on Halloween night, it's almost mandatory to indulge them. (Or, as the carol puts it about another season, "Once in a year it is not thought amiss to visit our neighbours and sing out like this...")

Then there are some interesting rules and arrangements in the history of cinema, often done as publicity stunts. For instance, Alfred Hitchcock's rule that nobody would be admitted into Psycho after the film had begun. (Back then, films played on a loop.)

Then there are William Castle's various gimmicks, such as "fright insurance" for the audience.

In the 1967 film Wait Until Dark, the gimmick was that cinemas turned off all their lights (except the EXIT signs) in the final scene, which is set in complete darkness.

Anyway, you either get what I mean now, or you don't. Does anyone share this fascination, or this pleasure? I'd be interested to know that.

Obviously, this goes a long way towards explaining this blog post!

Do you think this is a stupid blog post? It might be, but I bet there's none other like it out there...

Why Do Words Fall Out of Use?

I've just been reading a book from 1900, and it contains this sentence: "Vivid memories of those days survive, coloured by Bible stories, conned and repeated, and the prints and the chromos which were a part of the familiar apparatus."

Let's put aside the interesting word "chromo", which presumably means colour illustration. I'm interested in the phrase "conned and repeated".

You probably know the archaic meaning of 'con', in this context. It meant to learn by rote, to swot up on, to cram. But why has it ceased to be use in this sense? Why does any word or term cease to be used?

I mean, think about it. Hundreds of millions of people are speaking English every day, and using it to describe any number of ideas and activities and events. Shouldn't every possible resource be drawn upon repeatedly, in that great babble? Isn't that what you'd expect?

Was it perhaps the pejorative meaning of con, as in "to swindle, to trick", that made people back away from using it in the other sense?

But how does that explain all the other archaic terms that just disappear? (I think the one I lament the most might be "brown study": "I fell into a brown study", that is, a reverie.)

A little further on in the book, I came across another word that has fallen out of use: "collegian". There seems no earthly reason why that one should have disappeared, or all but disappeared.

Every time you open your mouth you are shaping the language. Think about that! (Unless, of course, you are opening it to put a doughnut inside, an operation of which I heartily approve.)

Look Thy Last

This stanza regularly intrudes itself upon my thoughts:

Look thy last on all things lovely,
Every hour. Let no night
Seal thy sense in deathly slumber
Till to delight
Thou have paid thy utmost blessing;
Since that all things thou wouldst praise
Beauty took from those who loved them
In other days.

For years, I've thought it was Thomas Hardy, but it's actually Walter de la Mare-- as I've just discovered.

More recently I've been thinking: why just "lovely"? Look thy last on all things seems better advice, and something I'm increasingly trying to do. Even though I have no reason not to expect two or three more decades on this earth, or perhaps even more.

Beidh Lá Eile ag an bPaorach

This is one of my favourite Irish proverbs. 

The literal translation is "Power will have another day". "Power" is an Irish surname, so it's basically an assertion that you're not finished yet, or that you'll bounce back.

God knows who the original Power was or what he was bouncing back from.

Poems I Like: The Fascination of What's Difficult by W.B. Yeats

I gave a library tour today and a student (actually a prospective student) asked me my favourite poet. Nobody ever asks me great questions like this. People ask me the same kind of questions they ask you, I'm sure: how long does it take you to get into work, what did you do at the weekend, do you have any holidays booked, etc? I hadn't even mentioned poetry. (Incidentally, the student told me his own favourite poet was Rudyard Kipling, a choice I wholeheartedly praised.)

Anyway, there is only one answer for me: W.B. YEATS.

Yeats seems to me to be so much the greatest English language poet that I wonder why everyone doesn't agree with me. Nearly everything he wrote was brilliant.

"The Fascination of What's Difficult" is one of his lesser poems, but it's still a great poem. Presumably we've all experienced this fascination; doing something the hard way rather than the easy way, just for the sake of it. And feeling no choice in the matter!

There's something about Yeats poems that I can best describe by the term "contour". I have this notion that you could replace the words of a Yeats poem with almost any other words, as long as you preserved the sentence structure and rhyme scheme, and you'd still have a good poem-- the "bones" are that strong. (I've even thought of doing this myself). Very often he had a long, sinuous, tentative line followed by a short, punchy line. But that's just one example in his box of tricks.

The Fascination of What's Difficult

The fascination of what's difficult
Has dried the sap out of my veins, and rent
Spontaneous joy and natural content
Out of my heart. There's something ails our colt
That must, as if it had not holy blood
Nor on Olympus leaped from cloud to cloud,
Shiver under the lash, strain, sweat and jolt
As though it dragged road metal. My curse on plays
That have to be set up in fifty ways,
On the day's war with every knave and dolt,
Theatre business, management of men.
I swear before the dawn comes round again
I'll find the stable and pull out the bolt.

"Give Me Just Sixty Seconds..."

Does someone believe that beginning a YouTube ad like this is really going to get me to listen? It makes me even likelier to skip them. (Oh, and telling me not to skip is guaranteeing that I will skip.)

Honestly, I don't see why ads can't evolve to get their essential message into five seconds.

And I wonder why they don't just have someone tell a joke. I'd probably stay for the punchline.

I'm sure they know their business, though.