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All contents herein (except the illustrations, which are in the public domain) are Copyright © 1995-2020 Evan Morris & Kathy Wollard. Reproduction without written permission is prohibited, with the exception that teachers in public schools may duplicate and distribute the material here for classroom use.

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November 2014

Semper Ubi Sub Ubi

readme:

Alrighty, then. At the risk of turning this site into Weird Cat Blog, I have two new CatCat phenomena to report. I hope such details will eventually enable investigators to piece together exactly what this critter is and how (and why) she arrived on our planet.

Number One: CatCat is not afraid of vacuum cleaners. At all. All of our cats are at least a little afraid of vacuums, and even the most placid among them will walk in a dignified manner to the nearest exit when one starts. Most of them run for their lives, even though they’ve never had an actual scary experience with one. But you can run a vacuum cleaner right up to CatCat’s front paws and she won’t blink. That ain’t normal.

 

Artist's conception of space cat

Number Two: liquids. CatCat drinks lots of water from her bowl, and will sit sedately on the edge of the sink while you run the tap. She appears to be familiar with liquids. But last week I took her a plate of canned cat food with a little can-juice (whatever) on the plate. It was one of her favorite flavors. When I set the plate down in front of her on the floor (which slants slightly, as does the whole house), the liquid flowed around the edge of the plate, seeking the low point.

This is Life on Earth, Chapter 1, right?

CatCat was terrified. Completely flipped out. She stared at the liquid as if it were alive, crouched in alarm and backed away, stared some more, tracking the slowly-moving fluid in wide-eyed horror, and then ran out of the room.

Um, wow. This is not a kitten. The vet estimated that she’s at least four or five years old. And she’s never seen this before? Riiight.

Tell me more, Earthling.

And then there’s the fact that she likes to look at herself in the mirror (unusual in a grown cat), but she does it very intensely, like she’s checking her costume. She’s also a very deep sleeper, and you can tell when she’s running in her dream because her legs move. Maybe she’s just a very small, very strange dog. From Mars.

Onward. Until a month or so ago, Netflix Streaming offered the first nine years of Law & Order, Original Recipe, Lennie Briscoe Edition, which I think is absolutely the best cop show ever produced (apart from The Wire, which was a very different kind of show). Unfortunately, Netflix pulled it from their lineup  before I made it to the end, but several basic cable channels are carrying reruns of the entire series, so there’s that. The fun of seeing Briscoe and Logan/Curtis/Green for me (apart from the plots “ripped from the headlines” and Jerry Orbach’s quips) is seeing Manhattan in the 1990s, when we lived there (having migrated from Brooklyn). In episodes centered on the Upper West Side (which is to say many of them), I got to revisit our old neighborhood and even caught a glimpse of the guys from Zingone’s, our favorite deli (@ 82nd & Columbus Avenue), standing on the sidewalk in the background of one long scene.

The Man.

Jerry Orbach’s Lennie Briscoe is a classic performance, of course, but judging from a few retired NYPD detectives I knew, still in the ballpark of realism, including the sardonic humor. I actually have a “Certificate of Appreciation” around here somewhere from the NYPD Detectives’ Endowment Association (essentially the detectives’ union), but I can’t for the life of me remember what I did to deserve it. I probably wrote something for their magazine.

The notable difference between L&O in the 90s and cop shows now is the prevalence of sadistic violence and gore in current shows. I’ve never been able to take any of the L&O spinoffs and copycats (SVU, CSU, NCIS, et al.) for that reason, and even L&O itself veered sharply in that direction after 1999: more lingering shots of slashed throats, mutilated models, etc., ad nauseam, not to mention the rise of the ludicrous mannequin-cop (both male and female). The whole supercop/serial killer/autopsy shtick, as Lennie might say. I gotta say that I don’t understand the popular mania for serial killers in movies and TV, and I really don’t understand how anyone can voluntarily watch this insanely repetitive and moronic — and usually intensely misogynistic — drivel week after week. I sat through a full episode of SVU while trapped in a waiting room last year and it made me want to leave the country.

What else. Oh yeah, I have chronic optic neuritis, pretty much standard issue with MS, which produces blurred vision, transitory blind spots, pain in the eyes and flashes of light. Even on a good day it’s like watching an old TV with lousy reception, and I often see little white lights running up the edge of my field of vision, as if a film had jumped its sprockets in a projector. Very weird. Last week we were sitting on the couch, watching House Hunters on HGTV, and I noticed that there were suddenly strings of tiny colored lights running across my field of vision. Quite festive, actually. I guess my visual cortex was in the holiday mood. Anyway, there have been quite a few days lately when I couldn’t read much of anything, so there may be more than the usual delay in processing subscriptions, etc.

As always, your subscriptions and contributions keep this rickety boat afloat.

And now, on with the show

Goat rodeo

No respect.

Dear Word Detective: I work as an ASL/English Interpreter and have been in the business of listening intently to language for closing on 13 years. These days, I am rarely challenged by anything new. I had the recent pleasure of coming across a new expression that neither I nor my colleague knew and that an internet search has yielded very little information to help illuminate the meaning of this expression. The phrase used was “goat rodeo” and was used in the sense that too many organizers of an event would lead to a “goat rodeo.” It seems to be another way of saying “too many cooks spoil the broth,” but I have no idea where this expression came from or how it came to be used in this way. Any insights to offer? — Andrea K Smith.

Insights? A few. Actually, the best insight I have to offer came from just reading your question. It rang a distant bell in the dusty attic I call my memory, and I realized that I had answered a very similar question about six years ago.

The question I answered back then was from someone who had been examining the lines of code that make up a computer program, and had noticed that the original programmer had left a note in the code using the term “goatrope” in a clearly derogatory sense to mean something akin to “a complete mess.” In tracing the term, I found that it most often appeared either hyphenated (goat-rope) or as two separate words, and seemed to have appeared in the 1970s as military slang meaning “a complete mess, waste of time or very confused situation.” That would make “goat rope” equivalent to the more popular “snafu,” an acronym for “Situation Normal, All Fouled Up” (“fouled,” of course, being a sanitized form of the original “f word”). The only hint of an origin I found was an earlier form, “goat roper,” which was in civilian use by the late 1960s meaning “a country bumpkin” or, among country folk, “an incompetent person pretending to be a farmer.” The logic of “goat roper” is not immediately apparent; perhaps roping goats was thought to be the apex of pointless rural activity. If so, “goat rodeo” might follow naturally from “goat roper” and “goat rope.”

In checking up on whatever progress might have been made in the past few years on the mystery of “goat rope,” I discovered that there had been a discussion of “goat rodeo” earlier this year on ADS-L, the mailing list of the American Dialect Society. The occasion was the appearance of the phrase in an article on the plethora of candidates then lining up for the Republican primaries (The GOP’s Primary Calendar Chaos, Daily Beast (online), 2/17/12): “This goat rodeo is going to go on for a long time. Bet on it.”

In sifting through the various citations mentioned in the ADS-L discussion and elsewhere, it became clear that I had been taking the “rope/roper/rodeo” component of the term far too literally. “Goat roper/rope” and “goat rodeo,” as well as several other variants (“goat dance,” “goat screw”), are apparently all euphemistic forms of the original slang phrase, which involves the venerable “f word” and is close to another variant, “goat raper.” Interestingly, the earliest citation for this family of phrases in Jesse Sheidlower’s magisterial book “The F Word” is from Hunter S. Thompson in 1965: “Kentucky was a Wolfean nightmare and New York was a goatdance.” Now we know the phrase Hunter really meant, but the form “goat rodeo” has been used for so long at this point that I don’t see a problem with using it as freely as we describe a confused mess as a “snafu.”

Burglar

“Irrelevant, incompetent and immaterial” forever!

Dear Word Detective: In a 1961 episode, Perry Mason used “burglar” as a verb, specifically “the other houses that had been burglared.” Is this just a case of bad script editing, or was this at some time a legitimate use? — Charles Anderson.

Perry Mason! Paul Drake! Della Street! Lieutenant Tragg! District Attorney Hamilton Burger (a.k.a “Hamburger”)! Bestest lawyer show ever! We weren’t allowed to talk in our house — not a word — when it was on. They show “Perry Mason” reruns on one of the digital sub-channels we get, but it’s on at 4 am or something, right after “Sea Hunt,” so it’s slightly past my bedtime.

Speaking of burglary, living in the middle of nowhere is apparently no guarantee of immunity. We returned home about a month ago to discover that someone had kicked in our back door and stolen what little we had that was worth stealing. They carefully closed the door on the way out, which was weird, but it prevented the cats from wandering off.

“Burglar” is an interesting word. It first appeared in the 16th century, from the Anglo-French “burgesour,” which was derived from a tangle of Old French and Medieval Latin words. Ultimately the trail seems to lead back to the Latin “burgus,” meaning “fortress or castle,” which had, in Medieval Latin, produced the word “burgare,” meaning “to commit burglary.”

The original meaning of “burglar” in English was the same as its modern sense: “One who commits the crime of burglary.” The noun “burglary” also hasn’t changed much, meaning “the crime of breaking into a house with intent to commit a crime.” The original English and US laws apparently specified that the entry had to be made at night (“housebreaking” was the daytime crime), and that physical damage to the dwelling had to occur, but now illegal entry at any time by any means with criminal intent counts in most places as “burglary.”

The reason Perry’s use of “burglared” sounds odd to our ears is that today the most common verb form meaning “to commit an act of burglary” is “burgle” (“The bakery was burgled at 1:30pm today by the same man who burgled the shop on December 3,” Manawatu (New Zealand) Standard, 12/12/12). The verb “burgle” is more popular in the UK than in the US, where we prefer “burglarize,” a verb formed from the noun “burglar.” But “burglar” is also a perfectly good verb meaning “to commit burglary” (“A news agency … was burglared yesterday morning,” 1890). All three of these verbs, “burgle,” “burglarize” and “burglar,” appeared in the late 19th century. Interestingly, “burgle” was originally regarded as a colloquial or humorous invention, though, as we’ve seen, it seems to have become standard usage, at least in the UK.

So why, given the choice of three verb forms all meaning “to commit burglary on,” did the writers for Perry Mason choose “burglared”? My guess is that “burgled” at that point still struck many people in the US as a jocular usage and thus inappropriate for courtroom use, and that “burglarize” likewise seemed a bit trendy or flashy. “Burglared” was probably the choice of whatever legal consultants the show was using, and almost certainly didn’t sound as strange back in 1961 as it does today.