Roger O Green

The right words that sound wrong

I think that, unfortunately, “whom” is on the endangered species list.

I was listening to someone speaking on TV, and he had said, “I had drank some coffee.” It was an extemporaneous utterance, not a prepared speech, so I gave him a pass. I know it’s drink/drank/drunk, but the general public thinks of “drunk” only as being inebriated.

There are words that are correct that just sound incorrect. It’s swim/swam/swum, but seldom have I heard the word swum. Grammar Girl has, helpfully, described the the difference between lay/laid/laid and lie/lay/lain. Let’s face it: most people who use the word lain, even correctly, are looked at askance.

I think that, unfortunately, “whom” is on the endangered species list. It’s a perfectly good word, but to say, “With whom are you going?” sounds affected. “Who are you going with?” sounds natural. “Never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for ‘whom’.”

What other legitimate words are on the endangered list?

Irwin Corey is 100

Professor Irwin Corey regularly panhandles on the streets of NYC, not for himself, but for a cause.

Professor Irwin Corey, as I noted five years ago, is an in-law of an in-law of mine, who I’ve met on a few occasions. My maternal grandmother Gert, whose brother Ernie had married Charlotte, whose sister Fran had married Irwin, was SO excited when Irwin would show up on the talk shows hosted by Mike Douglas, Merv Griffin, and others. Not sure she understood what he was saying, and I’m fairly positive I didn’t always. But her attraction to this tenuous connection to celebrity was very strong. So we’d always watch when we read in the TV Guide, “Irwin’s going to be on!”

And I guess I’ve become my grandmother, keeping track of Irwin sightings:

Before I began blogging myself, I was reading the now frozen-in-time blog of my friend Fred Hembeck, who has a picture of him with some other creative folks. (2004)

Mark Evanier wishes him a happy 90th. (2004)

Evanier links to Irwin speaking at the Bowery Poetry Club in New York party in 2007 to commemorate the birth and life of Lord Buckley (1906-1960). Some content on the coarse side, and, unsurprisingly, unkind about George W. Bush. (Posted 2008)

An appreciation by Frozen Justice who makes an interesting connection to Sarah Palin (2009). Has a link to the Smothers Brothers show (c. 1966), which I almost certainly watched.

Professor Irwin Corey screwed up the Soupy Sales funeral! Which I can totally believe. And it wasn’t out of disrespect for Soupy. “[He] had to be removed from the podium after his eulogy turned into a diatribe about health-care reform…” (Althouse, 2009)

Evanier links to a 2010 interview on a cable access show.

Irwin regularly panhandles on the streets of NYC, not for himself, but for a cause. (New York Times, 2011)

Happy Birthday to the World’s Weirdest Comic: Professor Irwin Corey, the Gibberish Maven. (Huffington Post, 2012)

An Interview with the Professor Irwin Corey. (CLASSIC TELEVISION SHOWBIZ– Kliph Nesteroff, 2013)

A story about Gilbert Gottfried, featuring Irwin. (Lowbrow Reader, 2014)

C is for Candles

The Princess Diana version of Candle in the Wind is listed as the second best-selling single of all time,

When you are not very good at crafts, it’s nice to actually find a small niche in which you are not horrible. What I liked about candle making, which I did a few times when I was eight to ten years old, is that it was so relatively easy, even I couldn’t screw it up. Thank you, paraffin.

When I briefly attended a Unitarian church in a city near Albany, I left in part because they actually had a meeting/debate about whether or not to use candles. The argument against was that they were “papist”, too much in the Roman Catholic tradition, though I was a long-standing Protestant had lit plenty of church candles over the years.

One of the traditions of a lot of churches, including the last two, is to light candles and sing Silent Night by candlelight, before blowing them out, and singing Joy to the World as the lights come on. My previous church used to save all the used candles, and melt them down, to add to what became one massive candle. Last I saw it, it was well over a meter tall and weighed dozens of kilograms.

The Daughter loves lighting a candle when we have dinner, for no occasion at all.

Elton John performed a song called Candle in the Wind [LISTEN] in 1973, in honor of the late Marilyn Monroe, who had died a decade earlier. The tune appeared on the Goodbye Yellow Brick Road album. The song was reworked in 1997 to honor Diana, Princess of Wales.; that single reached No. 1 in many countries, listed as the second best-selling single of all time, after White Christmas. LISTEN to the performance at the funeral, a recording of which I own.

Finally, from the musical-turned-movie Rent, Light my candle [LISTEN]

ABC Wednesday, Round 15
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Copyright course

I’m doing a book review on Tuesday.

You know, I think I understand quite a bit about US copyright law. Still, I decided to take a four-week online course, Copyright for Educators and Librarians, run by Duke University. The instructors are Kevin Smith, M.L.S., J.D., Lisa A. Macklin, J.D., M.L.S., and Anne Gilliland, JD, MLS.

It has a hefty syllabus to read each week, plus a half dozen video lectures. The latter is rather interesting, but the former, much of it right out of the copyright law itself, is dry and occasionally self-contradictory. Work for hire, public domain, fair use – all complicated issues, and those were the ones I KNEW about. The rules regarding the term of copyright in the United States, based on various changes in the law, are mind-bending.

The week runs from Monday to Monday. There’s online class participation each week, and a 10-question test for the first three weeks, with a paper for the fourth.

Did OK the first week. But this coming period is complicated by a book review I’m doing on Tuesday, a wedding and another party I’m attending later in the week, plus a probable lengthy visit to the ortho guy, and quite possibly a vacation, though that is still in flux, after the expense of the recent car trouble. The bride at the wedding is named after me, no lie.

So I need to be terse here. I may not be commenting on your blogs or your Facebook pages; the former I’ll eventually get to; the latter, probably not, especially those FB quizzes. I may be slow approving your comments – but please make them anyway, especially re: yesterday’s post, because it’ll make The Daughter happy! – off and on, for the next three weeks, the duration of the course. It will not affect my blogging, in that I’ve now written a post for every day through August 14, seriously, and August 15 is started; but I’ll be slow to write on current events, significant deaths, and the like.

Know, however, my schadenfreude over the Happy Birthday song lawsuit is very great.

The Lydster, Part 124: the acrostics

Obsessive
Behavioral
Expectations for
You

This past year, for spelling, there was this predictable pattern for the homework of approximately 20 words.

Monday: put the words in alphabetical order. Sometimes tricky when you have six words starting with st
Tuesday and Wednesday: write ten sentences each night, using the spelling word. The sentences, more often than not, involved the cats; “Perhaps Stormy and Midnight will be friends.
Thursday: take one word and make an acrostic out of it. This is something I never had to do, but she got into it.

Curved,
Is
Round,
Cylinder,no
Lines,
Ends where it begins

Dating
With
A dwarf can be
Rough but
Fun

Always
Under
The
Umbrella at
Midnight in
New York
***
(Stormy my cat)

Hears everything
Ears perk up
Rapidly runs from room to room
Sometimes very quiet and cuddly
Eyes glow in the dark
Loves to be crazy
Fears Midnight

Horses jump
Over the fence
Running free
Satisfying the crowd
Eating hay
Saves the day

Obsessive
Behavioral
Expectations for
You

Delicious
Entree with a side of
Lettuce
It’s
Great.
Happy
Thanksgiving

Crayola presents all new colors:
Red
Aqua blue
Yellow
Orange and
Neon green

There are others, but those were the ones I could find easily.

S	M	T	W	T	F	S
			1	2	3	4
5	6	7	8	9	10	11
12	13	14	15	16	17	18
19	20	21	22	23	24	25
26	27	28	29	30