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THE WORDLAB WORDLETTER Episode 1
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Monday, February 22, 1999 http://www.wordlab.com
Welcome to the first edition of the new quasi-regular
WordLab WordLetter, our FREE subscriber-only email report.
Thank you all for signing-up. These occasional reports
will give us a chance to answer some of your questions,
fill you in about new developments on WordLab, and conduct
research and development experiments in linguistic
silliness.
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WordLab named Yahoo Pick of the Week for the week of
February 15-21, 1999. Hello to all of you who have
discovered us through Yahoo.
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Check out the two new Feature categories we have just
added to WordLab: "Military Operations" and "Translations."
The Pentagon may have come up with the name "Operation
Desert Storm," but we're banking on future military and
home-security leaders coming to us to name their Ops.
"Translations" salutes the poetry that emerges when a
statement in a foreign language gets translated incorrectly
into broken English. Excuse me, Ma'am, but my lion has
fondled your memory.
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A new "WORD LINKS" links page has just been added. Let us
know if you have any suggestions for other great word and
language Sites you would like to see us link to.
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Ok, let's answer a couple viewer questions.
Q: Do you know who the author of "All, as they say, that
glitters is not gold"?
WordLab: Let's see, this is a tricky one. If our failing
memory serves us at all anymore, what we may have on our
hands is a veritable toss-up.
Like most things, Aristotle began all this trouble, when
he casually remarked, "Yellow-colored objects appear to
be gold." (Elenchi, bk.I,chI) This was then translated
by those poetic debauched Romans as, "Non teneas aurum
totum quod splendet ut aurum," or in good -ol 'Merican,
"All that glitters is not gold."
Merry old sod that he was, Chaucer was turned-on by
this turn of phrase, and in The House of Fame [1375-1385,
bk. I, l. 272] wrote, "Hyt is not al gold that glareth,"
as only Chaucer could. Unable to leave well enough alone,
he expounded in The Canterbury Tales [c.1387; The Canon's
Yeoman's Tale, l. 962]
But al thyng which shineth as the gold
Nis nat gold, as that I have herd it told.
A few more mild trifling versions bonked about the
centuries, our crusty memory dim on the details, until
glorious Spenser etched this gem into literary conscious-
ness in his Faerie Queene, bk. II [1590], canto 8, st. 14:
Gold all is not that doth golden seem.
Get the picture? Well, for anyone left in the cinquecento
English-speaking universe still clueless about how, really,
you know, not all yellow stuff is as valuable, as, for
instance, gold is, they were fortunate to have their own
version of the "...for Dummies" books, William Shakespeare,
to state the obvious once more for posterity:
All that glisters is not gold -
Often have you heard that told.
- Merchant of Venice [1596-97], act II, sc. vii, l. 65
In that pre-technological era, it took 18 years for words
to travel the relatively short distance from merry old
England to hot and heavy Spain, where our hero, all golden
and glistening and yet sometimes not golden, snatches fair
Dulcinea's dulcimer and croons,
All is not gold that glisters.
- Cervantes, Don Quixote, pt. II, [1615], bk. III, ch. 33
Now our friend must have hitched a ride, 'cause he's back in
England lickety-split:
All is not gold that glisteneth.
- Middleton, A Fair Quarrel [1617], act V, sc. i
And finally we arrive at the pot of glistering golden non-gold
at the end or the colorful not-necessarily rainbowesque rainbow,
our dear friend John Dryden, who seems to have taken the words
right out of this question:
All, as they say, that glitters is not gold.
- Dryden, The Hind and the Panther [1687], l.215
And finally a murmur from the modern world:
Shiny as shit, but is it gold? Nah...
- Nesbitt Pierce, Eating Backwards in the Rain [1992],
ch. 12, Digging, p. 341
* Special thanks to Bartlett's Familiar Quotations for
helping to refresh our soggy memory. *
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Dear WordLab,
I am writing an article on the use of color terms in
language in reference to emotions etc.
For example: How can one feel green with envy?
Why is good white, and evil black?
Why are cowards yellow?
Why is melancholia associated with the color blue?
Hope you can offer some assistance.
WordLab : While we don't have a specific answer, we would
like to paraphrase a funny story John Cage tells in one or
more of his books:
A blind man asks his friend, "Please explain what the color
white is." His friend says, "It is the color of swans." The
blind man asks "What are swans?" The helpful friend explains
that swans are birds that fly high in the sky. "Thank you,"
says the blind man, "now I understand what white is."
Skirts the issue (one of our favorite pastimes), but at
least it's funny. Color is both subjective and relative,
and one man's white is another man's beige. If anybody
wants to add to this subject, there is a thread for the
above entry on the WordBoard: "Color use in terms of
language," 08-Nov-98. To see it be sure to scroll the
Age of threads to "365 days" and click "Show Threads."
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Inverting the English Language
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