You have become dangerously fluent in Frogspawnian (aka Frogs♙ian), the world's most useless and cryptic dialect. Just think -- if you'd put th@ energy and time into the language of business, then you'd be rich beyond imagining. If you'd learned a sm@tering of the language of politics, you could be president of Europe. But no: you became fluent in Zapkinder-Frogs♙ian instead, which is usually only spoken by princes and princesses who've been turned into frogs by spells, drugs, and hexes (ie, literature, chess, and the media).

Plus: I, like mack & Jess & Bill et al, began with English (in its Anglo, Canadian, American or Irish versions) -- while you started with Dutch. And then English. Quite an <achieve>ment, if that's what you ment.

Poetry and music are also useless, of course, according to Gradgrindian Utilitarianism. And Pl@o had no place for poetry or play or games (except for target practice games which help you to smite enemies of the st@e).

Ampers&able

Ampers&able, for An& & Gelf& to play gr&ly & not delight us.

Ampers&able, for a plain little froggy to take a Queen's h& in marriage.

& four brown toads will never st& in for four s&y p&as, such is fiddle dee dee of course &

Ampers&able.

But the world is full of h&some fools who don't believe in r&om rules & won't dem& what sensible people say.

& because these daft & r&y dopes keep dem&ing impossible hopes, ampers&able things are not as underst&able every day.

Recently I started
an upward motion
and aim and plan
to keep building on that

Further developing
Frogs♙ian skills
surely would not be th@ bad?

It adds to my enjoyment
but does not provide employment
Who knows what will future us bring

As long as we challenge
and maintain some balance
We all have good songs to sing

----

P.S. Reminds me of the words by Sammy Davis after Frank Sinatra just finished one hell of a performance: "Keep singin' 'till you get it right, baby!"

Gonna get some shut-eye now.

You could also, maybe, argue that <is> = <equals> = <=> (the technical term is, ah, 'copula'), so Disney becomes D=ney ... & another syllable ("of recorded time") enters the fray.

The pen= mightier than the word?
Everything not m&@ory = 4bidden.

Um, haven't all these possibilities been explored before, in Leet, Emoticonnish, Volapuk, and other forms of text-language? Feel like I'm reinventing the wheel here, and haven't hit on 'round' yet.

But you can be my <spokesman> anyhow... just show me a hub, Bub.

<L'etat, c'est moi> = L'&@, c'= moi.

An irony: the two most common (diacritical) accents in French are <é & è>. In English, these are called 'acute' and 'grave'. But in French 'grave' *means* 'acute' (in medical terms).

In Irish the acute is called a 'fada', meaning 'long'. It's *short* for 'sineadh fada' (pronounced 'sheena fodda') meaning something like 'long line' ... cue bad jokes, <In the Name of the Fada> and <Like Fada, Like Son> and even "Sheena Fodda is a Punk Rocker" ...

... 'Sineadh' has no connection at all to the name 'Sinead' (as in Sinead O'Connor), pronounced 'Shin-Aid'.

... Sin é ('Shin Ay') means "that's it" or "yes". Irish doesn't have a real word for 'yes' -- another way round the gap is to respond "is ea" or 'sea" (shah) meaning "it is", or "ni hea" (knee hah!) meaning "it is not".

This phenomenon leaves traces in Hiberno, the variety of English spoken in Ireland. Of course people know the words 'yes' and 'no', but they fit less naturally into the speech patterns. So they use locutions that seem natural, especially in response to a direct question. These include:

Responding with a statement; repeating the question, inverted; saying something seemingly long-winded "when a simple yes or no would suffice" ; or answering with another question...

- Are you Dom?

Myself, well, I would be, now.
I am Dom.
It is Dom that I am.
That's a fact.
Why do you want to know?
Who's asking?
Is it the Daniel Dom you're after?
Who would Dom be?
And who might you be?
Dom? I might be, now, indeed.
I'd be Dom all right.
Sure, who isn't around here?

[the 'provisional tense' is particularly common in Northern Ireland: it avoids all statements and renders all utterances highly conditional... some say that it evolved in response to interrogation.]

- Do you play chess?
"I would, aye. I would be a Grandmaster, and my rating would be 2700 and a bit. I would have been playing in Mexico last week, now."

- Well, yes, I suppose we all *would* have played in Mexico, if we were good enough.

"Well, I would have been after playing for real. I would be Grischuk over there, like, but here I would be Sean Og O Grisciuc here at home like. Do you play poker at all, at all?"

<<L'etat, c'est moi> = L'&@, c'= moi.> offers us a ch&ce to effortlessly switch to the Dutch equi-volente (Deo, in excelsis):

"De Sta@, d@ b& ik."

Looks f&cy in ur p&tsy, yes?

(You'll notice I've taken some liberties by inserting the Dutch "en" = &, phonetically, into a sentence, domin@ed by 'English' words.)

I could take it even further, bur refrain from doing so, as I have an important job-interview to prepare for this afternoon.. It's @ a f&cy law firm (with an insane name) called:

Lauwere Ruijgrok & Fijn v. Draat advocaten

(OMG -- but I'm gonna earn me lots and lotsa money there- finally!)

Ah. It's 'Ruijgrok'. Oops. I called the Armageddon hotline precipitately. But I played somebody of that name in a chess tournament once (Ruijgrok, that is, not Armageddon). Maybe these legal beagles are chess nuts in disguise?

Thomas Pynchon creates some brilliant law firm names in his books. There's the classic:

Nash, De Poore, Salitieri, Brutus & Short.

And the jazzy and mysterious:

Warpe, Wistfull, Kubitschek & McMingus.

While in Ireland -- where else? -- there really *was* a firm of lawyers named <Argew & Phibbs>.

Or is it like "Prier ne pas deranger" -- Pray, Do Not Derange ... ? One of those <faux amis> -- the French put them in the language on purpose, as linguistic tripwires, so they can laugh at everyone else who tries to speak French.

A friend of mine once asked her very proper bourgeois French mother-in-law if she was "confortable" -- intending to say, nice and politely, "are you sitting comfortably?" but *really* asking "are you comfortable to sit upon?"

Which pales into nothing compared to the hideous sociosexual solecism I committed in Paris once, with an innocent comment, I thought, about a female cat. You know you've hit a nerve when everyone goes rigid with shock before they start laughing.

yrs,
the Retard.
('Reti' for short)

Wise old Erse saying: "Never say 'ni hea' to a grasshopper -- it might be one of the little people in grasshopper drag."

Up yours "Twice" Truly,
Maggie Th@shire

Stonehenge will confirm.. I hope...

BTW I didn't know the boulevard was derived from Dutch.. There goes my etymology.

But ... <boulevard> is actually both French *and* Dutch. A bit like Belgium, I guess.

The original word was Middle Dutch 'bollewerc' -- also the direct source of the English 'bulwark' (a rampart or fortification; a breakwater or sea-wall; a means of defence or security). It's pronounced 'bull-erk', btw. Given the Dutch habit of keeping the sea out with walls, 'bollewerc' is a more direct source for the English word than is the equivalent German noun 'Bollwerk'.

<*Mandatory Chess Reference*>: a bulwark is a Defence, like the French. I rest my case.

Inevitably, the French got in on the act, and turned bollewerc/bollwerk/bulwark into boulevard -- meaning a road built on demolished town fortifications...

"Zut alors! You are leet-ull feeshes! I flatt-ain your town, I build a French 'ighway on your bool-vardes! Try again, when you are bigg-air feesh, like me! Buf!"

In Canada, where things are done differently, a 'boulevard' was the strip down the middle of a highway -- a median or centre strip.

- Hey kids, eh, go play on the boulevard...

And then we got <boulevardier> -- a stroller on promenades, a man-about-town...

"Walked along the boulevard
The boulevard of friends,
All those mild-mannered friends I got
They're careless and they fall down
All over town..."

- John Cale, 'Leaving it Up to You'

Spinnaker is an exception -- it's a recent coinage from around 1870, which is recent for a sailing word. It may be a blend of 'spin' (or 'sphinx') and 'moniker'.

Not your normal historical fiction -- Stephenson throws in Isaac Newton, William of Orange, Leibniz, Halley, Pepys, Hooke, Christopher Wren, Huygens, James II of England, Peter the Great Tsar of All the Russias, Electress Sophie of Hanover & her idiot progeny George I, George II usw, The Spanish Viceroy of Mexico and the gang of Vagabonds & riff-raff who steal his alchemical gold, Capt Van Hoek of Holland (who hates pirates so much he cuts off his own hand to prove it), Jack Shaftoe, king of the vagabonds, who becomes a slave in Algiers and a king in India, Louis XIV of France (plus their soldiers, financiers, sailors, mistresses, spies, cryptographers, scientists, boyfriends, girlfriends, mathematicians ... and so on.

Nearly 3000 pages over three books, mixing historic figures with the ancestors (Shaftoe, Waterhouse, Enoch Root) of characters from his World War II proto-cyberpunk novel, Cryptonomicon.

In short: perhaps the best 'historic' fiction I've ever read (not blatantly archaic like John Barth, but not littered with anachronisms like Erica Jong either) -- despite stiff competition from Pynchon (Mason & Dixon), Gore Vidal (Burr, Lincoln, Julian), Barth (The Sot-weed Factor), Robert Graves (I, Claudius), Lawrence Norfolk (Lempriere's Dictionary, The Pope's Rhinoceros) and Malcolm Bradbury (To the Hermitage) plus many more.

You can infer that I like the 18th century best of all.

I'm not really a fan of historical fiction per se (though I certainly seem to have read a lot of it). Pynchon is wonderful due to his strange erudition and his way with words. Stephenson is superficially simpler -- he avoids literary tricksiness -- but his erudition is as great: he jumps from pirate battles to philosophical debates, his characters (between 1660 and 1715 A.D.) include alchemists running England's royal mint, Irish swordsmen in India, Dutch slaves in Algiers, Japanese Jesuit Samurai and fanatic French priests who want every last protestant in Europe burned in a giant auto-da-fe in Westminster. Not for ordinary heresy, but for capitalism -- the new religion of money, rising to power on the inventions of Newton, Huygens and Hooke, threatening to replace god with technology, disturbing the eternal system of Lords, Priests & Peasants, where everyone knew their place... ("Locke sank in a swoon, the garden died/ God took a spinning jenny out of his side"...)

Meanwhile, such events as the Tokugawa Shogunate, the Battle of the Boyne, The Glorious Revolution, the 'protestant wind' that sank the Spanish Armada and the 'papal wind' blowing at Cromwell's funeral, the 30 years war, the discovery that California was not an island, the calculus controversy, and the siege of Vienna form the backdrop...

Basta. Last time I did such an OTT book review was Dvoretsky's endgame book. If you like novels, or history, or science, or science fiction, or alchemy, or slavery, or geography, or high finance, or royalty, or republicanism, or religion, or atheism, or ... whatever, then read Stephenson.

'Quicksilver' is first in the Baroque Trilogy, although Cryptonomicon -- code-breaking in WW2 by descendants of the people in Quicksilver -- could also be read first.

Oddly, Stephenson's earlier novels aren't in the same class. 'Snow Crash' is OK, sub-Gibson pop-cyberpunk by numbers; 'The Diamond Age' has an interesting take on nanotechnology and neo-victorians. Zodiac 'the eco-thriller' is rubbish. I've never seen a writer with such a steep improvement curve... certainly not one who wrote his own books.

(Did Bulgakov write 'Quiet Flows the Don'? Did Naomi Campbell write 'Swan'? [hey, that rhymes!] ... Has she even *read* it? ... going, gone.)

Or the *Specter*. (Hi, Phil! Retrial? Cool, man... remember not to point Percy at anything that isn't porcelain, okay?)

I saw that Ernst Stavro Blofeld on TV the other night, in his Donald Pleasance incarnation.

Interesting material to absorp you presented there, <Dom>...

Funny enough I always wanted to name a possible son: Stephen

or Steven

<Dom and Niels and Stonehenge> that's clearly one of the funniest threads ever. heh many thanks for the laughs.

Er <Dom> no trying to trick me with <Ramones> allusions either.

I actually saw <Shin-Aid>, a <Geldoffian> concert put on to protest the fans who protested <Sinead> protesting the Pope at the <Bob Dylan Tribute concert>, or <Bob Fest>, as <Niel Young> put it in his delightfully drunken performance.

Actually I saw bits of it on TV.

Poor <Sinead>, maybe the best song never sung.

speekin a witch, check out this rare footage.

It's rather beautiful to see these gentlemen and hear them do a typical (meaning not pandering to audience expectations) live performance.

Lou and John, a few hints of Sterling but Moe is nowhere to be seen by the camera. A shame, she's cute as a button.

Enjoy!!

http://www.tv-links.co.uk/listings/...

the Clip I was describing is "Heroin".

So just click on that word on the page and the performance in question will pop up.

Some of the other stuff is worth a look as well.