boustrophedon (n.): a system of writing in which successive lines read in opposite directions, as left-to-right alternating with right-to-left.  (also adj., adv.)

“Boustrophedon” isn’t a word that gets a ton of play these days, as you might imagine.  It comes directly from the Greek boustrophedon, meaning “turning like an ox in plowing,” from bous, meaning ox or cow (the same root as in “bovine”) and strephein, meaning to turn (the root of “catastrophe,” i.e. to overturn, and “apostrophe,” i.e. to turn away).  Many ancient languages were written boustrophedon, including Egyptian hieroglyphics and pre-Hellenic period Greek.  Boustrophedon has become a rarity in modern times, but it does crop up occasionally, as in Brian Chippendale’s spastic comic book Ninja, which my brother received for Hannukah this year.  Anyway, the next time you’re leaving a note for someone, take our old friend boustrophedon out for a spin — I’m sure you’ll be glad you did.

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kayfabe (n.): the portrayal of events in professional wrestling as “real,” including the efforts expended to present match outcomes as not predetermined and to show non-wrestling plot points such as interviews and backstage encounters as unstaged.

Howdy!  Long time no talk.  How’ve you been?  Obama, woo.

My friend Jeremy and I were watching professional wrestling at one point over this past weekend, ’cause it’s good to know what America is up to while we New Yorkers marry gay dogs and sing communist anthems.  I hadn’t seen the WWE since it was called the WWF, when I was in high school, and as if to hammer that point home, this particular slamstravaganza was being broadcast from my hometown of Baltimore, Md.

What’s changed about wrestling since then?  Basically nothing.  But it did remind me of this splendid word “kayfabe,” which I had learned a few months prior and meant to write about before getting distracted by something shiny.

The origins of “kayfabe” are murky, and the fact that it doesn’t appear in any of the dictionaries I have access to (or that this good fellow has access to, which list is much more thorough than mine) only makes its past that much more mysterious.  The seemingly agreed-upon truths are these: the word comes from wrestling’s origins in the world of carnivals, used as a code to describe the obligation of wrestlers to remain in character at all times when in public and never to sell out the fact that wrestling matches were cooperative and predetermined.

Wikipedia offers a few different theories as to the word’s etymology: that broke carnies would call home collect and refer to themselves as “Kay Fabian” to assure their families they were okay without incurring charges; that “kayfabe” is a garbled Pig Latin version of either “fake,” “be fake” “fabricate,” “bake-off,” “beefcake,” “ache pay,” “steak boy,” “babe lake,” “bay bay bay bay bay fakey faker fake fake fake,” or “Waffle House”; or that it’s some kind of mashup of “character fabrication.”  Of these, I prefer the explanation “a carnie who got kicked in the head too many times made up some random ass shit that managed to survive to the Vince McMahon era.”

The act of kayfabe has clearly gotten much more difficult and requires much more suspension of disbelief than it did in the carnie era, but I remember being much more convinced by the spectacle as a kid than now, when the fallacy is patently obvious.  I was drawn to wonder, watching WWE “champion” Jeff Hardy, a man I cannot seem to describe in words other than “emo wigger,” get his (relatively) scrawny ass handed to him by red menace Vladimir Kozlov — a beating aided, at one point by Kozlov’s friend Edge and eventually stopped by the intervention of an angry Triple H — does anyone actually believe this is legit?  And I was further drawn to wonder, as I watched Triple H grab a sledgehammer from a convenient storage unit underneath the ring and threaten Kozlov with it: why is there a referee for a sport in which there are clearly no rules?

Still, though, there’s a soft spot in my heart for wrestling on the merits of its vocabulary.  In addition to “kayfabe,” pro wrestling uses a number of other splendid and thoroughly antiquated slang terms from Depression-era roadshows.  Wrestlers are divided along purely Manichaean lines into “faces” (short for “babyfaces”; the heroes) and “heels” (an insult whose peak was in the ’30s; the villains) and when a wrestler does a “heel turn” the phrase refers not to a pivot to dodge a blow but rather to a good guy converting to bad.  A “screwjob” is a conspiracy to change the ending of a wrestling match on a participant without his knowledge.  Heels can have “stooges,” and wrestlers’ female companions are referred to as “valets.”  But perhaps the clincher is that a wrestling fan who believes the goings-on are real is still, to this day, called a “mark.”

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epizootic (adj.): affecting many animals of one kind at the same time. compare EPIDEMIC

Doesn’t this word sound made up? I saw it for the first time ever in this week’s New Yorker, in a Talk of the Town piece by John Cassidy, in which he described the recent rash of Wall Street calamities as an “epizootic in the financial markets.” I assumed he was making some kind of perverse pun, implying that the world of finance is a “zoo,” when in reality he was using a real word with the Latinate root “zo” to metaphorically imply that the world of finance is full of sick animals. This came to light along with the unfortunate realization that the word is not pronounced “ep-ə-’zoo-tik” but rather “ep-ə-zə-’wa-tik.” Of course, as was the case with the word “meatus,” I don’t expect the truth to have much bearing on how I will be pronouncing the word in the future.

Tags: orthography
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GrouSu (n.): group suicide

New York City likes to call itself a “City of Neighborhoods,” and it’s certainly true that between the ethnic enclaves, specialized commercial districts, and salient manmade geographical features, the city is broken into pieces that have clear character and distinctive attributes — a walk from the West Village across town to Chinatown makes that much abundantly clear. But neighborhoods often have malleable borders. Sure, some neighborhoods have one firm line, often specified in the name (everyone knows what SoHo is south of), but very rarely are the absolute borders of a neighborhood completely delineated on all sides.

This openness to interpretation means that neighborhood definitions have become the province of real estate brokers, who are forever trying to redraw the borders of desirable neighborhoods to encompass more and more blocks. This is especially true in Brooklyn, where neighborhoods like Prospect Heights, Park Slope, Clinton Hill, and Williamsburg steadily creep east, west and south, east, and east and south, respectively, gobbling up swaths of less desirable areas whose names have unsavory associations (e.g. Crown Heights, Bed-Stuy, Bushwick).

For the areas that they can’t reasonably fold into Park Slope, realtors invent new names that they hope will be fashionable and sticky. These names are often ridiculous and unnecessary — no one realistically refers to Hell’s Kitchen as “Clinton,” and no matter how much they try to tell me I live in “Greenwood Heights,” well, I don’t, ’cause that place doesn’t really exist. The worst offenders by far, though, are the ones that try to extend the naming model of SoHo and TriBeCa to new zones. And so it happened in conversation Friday night that confirmed bestie Liz coined GrouSu, as in, “So you couldn’t afford anything in BoCoCa, SpaHa, or SoBro? Have you and your roommates considered GrouSu?”

Tags: coinages
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mundane (adj.): characterized by human affairs, concerns, and activities that are often practical, immediate, transitory, and ordinary.  From Old French mondain, from Latin mundus, world

I’ve been told that everyone dreams, every night, without fail, and that the sensation of dreamless sleep is merely the dreamer not remembering any of his or her dreams upon awakening.  Maybe this is true, but I don’t know if I buy it — how does some egghead know what I do or don’t conjure up in my sleep if I have no recollection of it?  I can only vouch for what I perceive on this front, which is this: I rarely dream, and if I do, said dreams are either highly dramatic (very uncommon) or totally boring (the norm).

Take last night, for instance.  I had a dream that I went out to the street to take my car somewhere, and the whole row of cars along the sidewalk had parking tickets on them.  However, my car was nowhere to be seen.  Yes, ladies and gentlemen, the most excitement my subconscious has had in weeks: I dreamed that my car had been towed.  I spent the next twenty minutes of dream time trying to figure out where my car had been towed to, how I was going to get there, and how I was going to get it out of the impound lot in time to load the band’s gear out of the practice space.  Then I realized, in a state of anxiety and distress, that this was all a dream, and I could forget about the stupid car.  And thus ends my dream for the month.  Pathetic.

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touchtype (v.): to type without needing to look at the keys

I’m writing this blog post from my iPhone, because I’m watching tv and I’m too lazy to go all the way to my bedroom to get the laptop. Shut up. I’m sick.

I type very fast — like 100 words per minute — and being reduced to a two-thumbed hunt-and-peck is somewhat frustrating. The “keys” are laid out in a qwerty arrangement but I barely type faster than I did with the T9 predictive text on my Razr. I’ve also become much more aware of the inordinate number of hyphens I use in my prose, since that’s one of the few punctuation marks that doesn’t send you back to the keyboard after you type it.

It’s not all bad, of course — since I can’t copy and paste, I don’t have to think about putting in any of those annoying links that are ruining a perfectly good Internet. Plus it’s very easy to put in funky characters, š?ê?

The simulated qwerty keyboard sort of calls into question what typing is, though. Touchtyping by definition has to do with the sense of touch, the bumps on the home row, that careful division of space that allows one to know if he’s typing rightly or wrongly without even seeing the screen. I’m sure practiced iPhone users can get to the point where they can input words very very quickly, but to me, this will never be like typing — this is just fancy texting.

Tags: iphone
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ambiance (n.): a surrounding or pervading atmosphere; environment; milieu

How does one go about lighting a room?  I’ve lived in this apartment for over two years and my bedroom is lit only by one profoundly crappy IKEA torchiere and two desk lamps, one on my desk, one on my nightstand, each of which currently holds a compact fluorescent bulb.  Combined with the fact that my window is at an oblique angle to a brick wall and only gets sun between 2:15 and 3:15PM every day, this gives my sleep-and-work space the feel of a debtor’s prison as metaphorically expressed in an artsy indie movie.

An added constraint to all this is that I have a tendency to stack piles of shit on top of all of my surfaces, precluding much in the way of table-based lamps.  Wall-mounted sconces are also out, considering I have the handyman abilities of an Ivy League-educated Jew.  (My one experiment with home repair involved replacing a door through which, in a pubescent fit of pique, I threw a three-pound pencil sharpener.  I used a flat-head screwdriver to gouge out mortises for the hinges, and when I screwed the thing into the jamb it sat comically, Pee-Wee’s-Playhousely crooked in the doorway.)

There is a ceiling lamp in my room, though it was a fairly depressing fixture when I got here, and has only become more so since the night I returned home at 3AM to discover that the frosted glass shade had, of its own accord, fallen and shattered into a kajillion pieces on the floor.  Furthermore, the bulb has since died and the (cheap) fixture doesn’t want to let go of it, so now it’s both exposed and non-functional.  (Yes, yes, that’s what she said.)

So what to do?  I’ve begun to consider the possibility of carrying a burning stick wherever I go, like a tribe of primitives who no longer know how to light a fire.  This would solve my lighting dilemma and also reduce my heating bills for this winter, but would force me to confront the unique problem of disposing of the ash heap in my Brooklyn apartment.  No matter — I’m sure there are grants available for this kind of thing.

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brand (n.): a class of goods identified by name as the product of a single firm or manufacturer. also, a mark made by burning with a hot iron to attest manufacture or quality or to designate ownership

That’s right! I had never put two and two together and associated modern-day “branding” using logos and publicists with Wild West-era “branding” using a red-hot hunk of metal and a cow’s ass, but there it is, right there in front of our faces. Fortunately, modern day branding is only a little bit more painful than the classical kind. Behold, a survey of some of the silliest, stupidest, and cringe-worthiest brand names of the New Millenium.

del.icio.us

Del.icio.us is a nerd pun based on the fact that there exists a domain suffix .us, every bit as real and legitimate as .com and .org, but easier to work into a dorky name. The principle of del.icio.us — tagged online bookmarking — is brilliant, but as a URL it’s unusual, it’s annoying to say out loud, and it doesn’t always get automatically hyperlinked when typed into an email or some such. Plus it bears an unseemly resemblance to the moniker of Black Eyed Peas frontman will.i.am. As a result, del.icio.us came to their senses and moved the whole enterprise to delicious.com when they redesigned the site and more or less ruined it.

Gnutella

Gnutella is one of the top filesharing networks that has arisen in the post-Napster era. It’s the operating network behind such applications as BearShare, Limewire, and Morpheus. The name Gnutella is a portmanteau of GNU (a freeware operating system; the acronym is recursive, and stands for “GNU’s Not Unix,” which I’m willing to count as another strike against Gnutella) and Nutella, the scrumptious hazelnut spread that should never have been dragged into this. Granted, Gnutella is a free, open protocol, and so it was named by programmers rather than by marketing guys, but is this really the best they could do? What about Gnudity? Gnuroscience? Gnuremberg?

Flickr

Flickr is one of the largest photo-sharing sites online and the one generally preferred by serious photographers. Flickr isn’t the worst name in the world in and of itself, but like Pearl Jam spawning Creed, Flickr can be blamed for the rash of horrific vowel-dropping brands that followed, including Delivr, Tumblr, Colr, and Shittr. Flickr hasn’t been at the cutting edge of web technology for a long time, since it was bought by Yahoo!, at least, but it is such a totemic presence on the Web2.0 netscape (ding!) that its name continues to influence new enterprises to this day — and in fact, entrepreneurs continue to try to push the envelope, in such cases as…

Perspctv

God, really? Perspctv is a political news aggregator that pulls in blog posts, mainstream media articles, and Twitter posts (or “tweets”) and displays data sets gleaned from them (and from other sources) in friendly charts. Perspctv is also arguably the dumbest fancy-pants abbreviation I’ve ever seen, considering it’s hard to remember, hard to type, and easy to parse as PerSpc TV. Even one more E, to make the site Perspectv, would go a long way in making it a more salient brand name, but apparently the allure of XTRM TXT MSSG-SPK was too tempting to pass up. Hey, Perspctv? There’s this new thing called an iPhone/Blackberry/Treo/Sidekick which has rendered such crucial abbreviations as “rpblcn prty” and “ambdxtrs” obsolete.

Tags: marketing
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hubris (n.): overweening pride or self-confidence; arrogance. from Gr. hybris, wantonness, arrogance, insolence.

I don’t think there has ever been a more literal demonstration of the proverb “pride goeth before a fall” (video). (From AP drummer and douche-beating connoisseur Amit Wehle.)

Tags: video
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convention (n.): an established technique, practice, or device

The Democratic National Convention convenes in Denver today, and I have good news for all of you: I won’t be live-blogging it.  In fact, I’m only really interested to see Obama’s acceptance of the nomination (natch) and Action Joe Biden’s speech, which I’m excited about for the following reasons:

1.  I like Joe Biden and am glad that Obama picked him.  Yeah, he’s an insider, but he’s a true straight-talking, no bullshit kind of guy, and Obama, whose reputation as a straight-talking, no bullshit kind of guy has started to become tarnished by closer examination of his rise to power and quavering support among old-guard black leadership, could use a smart guy who isn’t afraid to speak his mind.
2. Joe Biden is a loose cannon.  He’s said some profoundly tone-deaf shit about Indian immigrants and 7-11s, he bragged about his state having been a slave state in a perverse attempt to appeal to southerners, and he referred to Barack Obama as “the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy”. You can tell he always has the best intentions — he meant “clean” as “without skeletons in his closet,” and he was trying to insinuate that Indians are hard-working and entreprenurial — but his apparent inability to form a thought before it emerges from his mouth (or at least to assess his words for political boneheadedness before uttering them) ought to lead to some delightful high jinks, if not at the (highly scripted) convention, then over the next few months.
3. Joe Biden once accosted my friend Pete in the coat check of a restaurant.  “I’m Senator Joe Biden,” said Senator Joe Biden.  “Will you come with me a second?”  Taken aback, Pete followed the senator back to his table, where Biden proceeded to remark at length to his dinner companions about how much Pete looked like his nephew, Bloody Social guitarist Jamie Biden, before thanking him and letting him go.

But political conventions themselves are relics of a bygone era in American politics.  Specifically, I’m talking about the era when political conventions were effectual gatherings of party operatives that created platforms and chose candidates. 

American politics used to be a tightly controlled, oligarchic enterprise, and it evolved that way because the Constitution suggested it be so.  When the United States was founded, only the House of Representatives was constitutionally decreed to be elected directly by the people.  The Senate was to be selected, two by two, by each state’s legislature — a practice that only ended with the Seventeenth Amendment in 1913.  Electors in the Electoral College were appointed by state legislatures rather than elected by popular vote in a number of states up until 1832 (and by South Carolina right up until they decided freedom wasn’t for them, in 1860).

So it should come as no surprise that political parties followed similarly undemocratic lines throughout the gloriously corrupt 19th century.  The presidential primary didn’t exist until the Progressive Era — prior to that, candidates were selected by party bosses and their various lackeys in proverbial smoke-filled rooms.  This made conventions interesting and worthwhile, even if it did render the entire concept of democracy a little bit farcical.  As Boss Tweed said, “I don’t care who does the electing as long as I get to do the nominating.”

Today, therefore, the parties’ nominating conventions are four-day publicity stunts that get free television coverage.  Which begs the question: why are they so lame?  If the convention serves no practical purpose, why isn’t it wholly given over to bread and circuses, nationally televised exhibitions to thrill and delight (and build brand awareness in) the American populace.  The current format resembles nothing more than the world’s worst Friar’s Club roast.  If I were Howard Dean, the DNC would have much more in common with the Olympic opening ceremonies.  Or Cirque du Soleil.  Or for fuck’s sake, anything to make people tune in.  Put Bill Richardson, Hillary Clinton, Evan Bayh, Nancy Pelosi and Dennis Kucinich in a funhouse with hidden cameras and see how long it takes them to kill and eat one another.  This is spectacle, people – you’ve got to do a thing.

Tags: politics, spectacle
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