Looking for New Blends

I was reading a marvelous essay yesterday evening by the former Editor in Chief of the now-defunct Portfolio magazine, Joanne Lipman, on challenges to women in the workplace in the last ten years, largely after 9/11. Well, long story short: she brought up references to Hillary's "cankles." And it got me wondering about the cultural and historical conditions necessarily to facilitate blending. It's really a counter-intuitive process, really, and I can't help but wonder if there's some reason why there are so many blended terms showing up here and there.

The classic blend, of course, is "smog"--from "smoke" and "fog." And there's a nice logic to the equation. The two source words are both monosyllabic, both ending in a velar stop consonant. So they seem like a marriage made in, well, Los Angeles.

But what about "cankles." How logic defying? "Calf"--a monosyllable--meetd up with "ankle"--an unattractive double syllable--and somehow gives birth to "cankle," a word as displeasing as the supposed intersection of the two structures on one's lower extremity.

So are there new rules for blends? I'd love to come up with a catalog of these (in my copious spare time, of course) and see if the combinatory conditions that facilitate a blend have changed somehow in the last twenty years. Intuitively, I say "Yes." Of course, I've also learned that anecdotal evidence is the worst, so I'm looking for something testable here.

Has it been eight months?

It's so startling to think that it's been nearly eight months, by my poor mathematical reckoning, since I've written a blog post. Of course, such gaps call into question the necessity for the existence of the blog itself. So, in that spirit (and because I've been teaching about morphology), I've decided to write about the word 'blog.'

The well-known explanation of 'blog' that it represents a clipped form of the compound 'weblog.' In its original form, computer logs were simply collections of log-in data: who accessed files and when. When discussion boards went into web-based form, html recorded discussions started taking this log form, and then it spiraled out of control. Of course, this is seriously simplified version of the history of the 'blog.' A well-researched and documented explanation appears on a blog about blogs (which reminds me that I need to write about 'meta' as a verb form) provides a much longer and fuller picture of their history.

But my question is really about these personal blogs: public diaries that gain an audience. The blog has called into question the nature of new media (is unfiltered, unedited content truly authoritative--and should we long for authority anymore anyway) as well as the nature of privacy. Even if blogs really seem to be read by niche groups (one's Facebook friends and the like), what does it mean when we write something incendiary? If we don't intend harm, but harm happens anyway, what responsibility does the blogger have?

Now, I find it unlikely, as a comparatively private person who values the effect of the well-told narrative, that I would ever disclose such things. But what is my responsibility as a reader of blogs? If a blogger reveals too much, should I pretend the text doesn't exist, in the same way I ignore the existence of Twilight or bad Harlequin romance novels? Obviously, my attempt to ignore them has failed, since I can still name them. But perhaps their insertion into this discussion reveals something significant, from a psychoanalytic perspective. Perhaps one problem of the blog emerges from its original compound: as a "log," does a weblog create expectations of a particular kind in its readers.

Consider the OED definition for log, n 1, 7d: "Any record in which facts about the progress or performance of something are entered in the order in which they become known; e.g. (a) a record of what is found, or how some property varies, at successive depths in drilling a well; a graph or chart displaying this information; (b) a record kept by a lorry driver in which details of journeys are noted; (c) a record kept of what is broadcast by a radio or television station from moment to moment."

A log, as is clear from this definition, records objectively verifiable information. It tells, in an empirical sense, the truth.

But no matter our faith in a narrator, readers never expect a story about oneself to be entirely and completely true. As Bakhtin says, every hero is his own ideologue: he expresses his own truth, damn all the others. So perhaps the word 'blog,' having been clipped so unceremoniously from its original compound, has taken on a fictive connotation. The 'blog' is a new genre: extemporaneous, perhaps, but with a profoundly individualized subjectivity inseparable from the writer.

Startled to discover it's almost March

March always sneaks up on me. I've never really known if it was because February slips by so quickly, or whether March has some nefarious magic that makes it arrive more aggressively than all the other months of the year. While "April is the cruelest month" (my nod to T.S. Eliot) by far, March reminds us that all things pass and fade away.

March's name alone suggests the militaristic push forward, descended as it is from the Roman god Mars; but its homophony with the kind of march one is forced upon also strikes me as particularly cruel. When March first arrives, we're reminded that we're likely to be trampled under the feet of midterm examinations and papers, and that MLA submission deadlines are not far behind. We're also reminded that winter closes away and we need to begin preparations for our summer. For academics, this usually means that we have to figure out how we're supporting ourselves over the summer, since we're usually only paid 10 months of the year.

So as you prepare to turn in (or grade) those midterm papers, or clean out your closet of all the clothes you've outgrown this winter, just remember to "Beware the Ides of March." March 15 falls on Sunday this year.

Wacky Wordle

Wordle clouds have gone up on doors all over my department in the last few months, and I've longed for time to stuff a bit of Beowulf into the engine and see what happens. I was amazed to see that the engine generated a beautiful tree, albeit composed of graffiti-like characters. But the output seemed appropriately Germanic.

Returning to school term stride

My last report suggested that I was struggling to get into the rhythm of the semester (of course, I struggle to spell rhythm correctly as well), but I've managed. Now that the regular ebb and flow of classes and meetings, grading and reading, has become accustomed again after its long summer absence, I'm once again contemplating the world in my peculiar lexicographical and philological way.

So "Little Miss Sunshine," as I like to call my oldest daughter, recently made a great leap forward in reading. She's gone from angrily protesting her mandated fifteen minutes of reading a day, to grudgingly enjoying alternating pages of reading with her mom, to, now, digesting whole non-fiction "chapter books" in the course of two days. Her favorites are the "Who was..." series: she zipped through the second half of Who Was Queen Elizabeth?, which we bought her at the Smithsonian, by herself (much to my disappointment, since I enjoyed reading it with her). Now she's onto Who Was King Tut?

Of course, I doubted that she was reading with sufficient comprehension without my over-the-shoulder guidance, so I gave her a little quiz when she got home yesterday: "So, Sunshine, what was the Rosetta Stone?" I fully expected the "Mom, it's an overly priced language learning software that you've refused to buy me. "

Instead, I got: "It's how they decoded hieroglypics. Do you want to see my name in hieroglypics? I wrote it during quiet time." (Astonished silence-- I examined the bookmark S decorated with her cartouche.) "The Rosetta stone had Hieroglypics, Greek, and Demonic."

So here was my quandary: should I correct her when her own explanation is so much funnier than the reality?

Well, of course I did, lest she come up with any kooky Sarah Palin-like explanations of the history of language. Even though "hieroglyphics" and "Demotic" weren't as pleasing to her, she integrated them into her later discussions of the book.

No posts recently

As many of my imagined readers have probably figured, I haven't been writing because I've been juggling the onset of the fall semester. Lots of new names, some successful associations with faces, and many new texts have been running through my mind at full speed.

Circumstances this semester dictate that I have to post recordings of my History of the English class on our course management system. Thus, I have entered the murky waters of "pod-casting." Immediately, therefore, I contemplate the absurdity of analogy as a lexical generator. "Broadcast" referred originally to the broad casting of seeds; broad functioned as an adverb on the verb cast. So the word "podcast" should suggest two things to us: the early radio stations cast broads about the countryside as they sent their radio waves singing about, or we're casting about pods ready to envelope their listeners. Either description makes me chuckle in my little lexicographical way.

New wastes of time

So I've been spending a lot of time on Ancestry.com, my newest diversion from everything else that I really should be doing. But I recognize that what I'm doing is as far from real genealogy as stickfigures are from Michaelangelo's Sistine Chapel. If anything, Ancestry.com allows me to piggy-back on the work that real genealogists and archivists have done over the years as well as that of all of the (I'm certain) underpaid librarians, library-assistance, summer interns, and well-meaning archive volunteers.

The sheer documentary volume is overwhelming. There are hundreds of years of census records, immigration records, and everything else that they advertise. What have I learned? Patterns tend to repeat over generations. My own family represents a virtual matriarchy. I can trace back mother's mother's mother's families back to 1049 (I'm not kidding!) but the father's lines all seem to dry up after one or two generations: all of them. Or, they have the most common names of their generations. Let us take for granted my great-great-grandfather on my mother's side, Samuel Maxwell. We've had these little daguerreotypes of two forlorn little girls in the family for years and never have known from whence they issued. Turns out, according to the 1870 that Ol' Sam was a daguerreotype artist (his listed profession). But of his origin? Nothin'.

Which brings us to the most significant mystery man (in my opinion) to be shaken out of the proverbial tree, Samuel Steele. As you might guess from the overall euphony of the name, there were quite a few Sam Steeles alive during the Civil War who fought on both sides. And I've got nothing but my grandfather's death certificate to say he existed: no marriage records, no death records (or at least none that I can assert are definitely my Sam Steele and not another's), nada, zilch. As if he did not exist. And this pattern recurs over and over again.

So what have I learned? Believe it or not, I've learned something sociolinguistic: can we look at paternal heritage as a reliable indicator of immigration effects? For whom does the founder effect matter? For men or women? Or have I just learned that I need a full genealogy for my husband to pass on to my daughters?