The Painful Nowning Process

. . . nowadays, at any rate, the Merriam-Webster powers-that-be keep an eye on the frequency and usage of new words that crop up over the years. Then:

“As soon as we see the word used without explanation or translation or gloss, we consider it a naturalized citizen of the English language,” said Peter Sokolowski, an editor-at-large for Merriam-Webster. “If somebody is using it to convey a specific idea and that idea is successfully conveyed in that word, it’s ready to go in the dictionary.”

The history of English dictionary-making goes back at least to Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary in 1755, which he labored away at single-handedly, leading him to write in the Preface:

Among these unhappy mortals is the writer of dictionaries; whom mankind have considered, not as the pupil, but the slave of science, the pionier of literature, doomed only to remove rubbish and clear obstructions from the paths of Learning and Genius . . . . Every other authour may aspire to praise; the lexicographer can only hope to escape reproach, and even this negative recompence has been yet granted to very few. . . .

When I took the first survey of my undertaking, I found our speech copious without order, and energetick without rules: wherever I turned my view, there was perplexity to be disentangled, and confusion to be regulated; choice was to be made out of boundless variety, without any established principle of selection; adulterations were to be detected, without a settled test of purity; and modes of expression to be rejected or received, without the suffrages of any writers of classical reputation or acknowledged authority.

Over a hundred years later, James A.H. Murray agreed with Oxford University Press to edit a “new dictionary” which eventually became the Oxford English Dictionary. He had numerous assistants researching word usages and etymologies in a “scriptorium” in his back yard, but it was a much larger job than Johnson’s, and he could not finish it in his lifetime, though he came close. His life story is quite fascinating, and has been told in Caught in the Web of Words: James Murray and the Oxford English Dictionary, by K.M. Elisabeth Murray. Recently, Simon Winchester’s somewhat sensationalized account of one of the more unusual contributors to the Dictionary brought renewed attention to Murray’s achievement with The Professor and the Madman.

My favorite among this year’s newly approved words: mondegreen: usually described as a misheard lyric. Its origin (because we dictionary people love etymologies), according to the largest collection of the things, is Sylvia Wright:

As a child she had heard the Scottish ballad “The Bonny Earl of Murray” and had believed that one stanza went like this:

Ye Highlands and Ye Lowlands
Oh where hae you been?
They hae sla[in] the Earl of Murray,
And Lady Mondegreen.

Poor Lady Mondegreen, thought Sylvia Wright. A tragic heroine dying with her liege; how poetic. When it turned out, some years later, that what they had actually done was slay the Earl of Murray and lay him on the green, Wright was so distraught by the sudden disappearance of her heroine that she memorialized her with a neologism.

You probably know or have committed some of the “mondegreens” listed yourself . . . but maybe you didn’t know there was a term for such things! Now you know.

Oh my. I’m definitely saving this for World Lit this fall (hope the link is still active by then): a flash animated tour of Dante’s Inferno.

I salute the artist, a friend of a friend of scholar and author Kim Paffenroth, who calls it “without a doubt, the most adorable rendering of the Inferno evah!” I must agree.

—get it? Oh, never mind. But I just had to note that even a relatively small conference like the third Slayage Conference on the Whedonverses doesn’t happen without a LOT of advance planning, hard work, and organization, chronicled here by philosophy professor Kevin Durand of Henderson State U. and his band of dedicated and reliable volunteers (apparently in some cases “volunteer” was a term to be applied loosely). Anyone thinking about hosting an academic conference can learn from him:

It’s unclear where Slayage 4 is going to be. At least two universities have made mention that they are interested. Here’s my advice to them (I’ve given it directly, but I offer it here as well). Make d*** sure that you have a large, capable, and dedicated team of people. You can do the conference with a team of 10-15 people that you can absolutely depend on. You can also do it with 100 folks who will flake on you. But, it’s better to have that dedicated cadre of people. We had that and because of that, Slayage 3 worked.

Durand then goes on to put our type of pop-culture scholarship in its philosophical context, ably defending against the usual suspects who decry the decline in academic standards:

[T]he PR folks at Henderson . . .had gotten a call from the newspaper in Chattanooga, Tennessee asking how many tax payer dollars had been used on the conference. As the answer to that question is a big, fat ZERO, it was kinda fun to nip that in the bud. But, geez, people. Get a life. Let me point out that Plato was fond of the theater [but he] wasn’t fond of those who interpreted plays and the like without systematic and analytic thoroughness.

Thanks again to Prof. Durand and all who helped make this conference happen, both behind the scenes and behind the lecterns, and behind the pies.

Check out Nikki Stafford’s conference blog-posts, starting here. Don’t miss her recaps of Rhonda Wilcox’s paper on B7.7 “Conversations with Dead People” in the post on “day two” and Jeanine Basinger’s keynote address—Nikki’s professional note-taking skill far outstrips mine!

OK, I’ll stop blathering on about Buffy after this—probably—and get back to supposedly more serious things like . . . well, I’ll let you know when I think of something.

It’s a little known fact that many “pop culture” scholars actually began their academic careers specializing in something “respectable” such as literature, history, philosophy, education, physics, or religious studies; many even maintain parallel careers. As one of the keynote speakers at this past weekend’s SC3 Conference, Matthew Pateman, noted, no one in the “real world” seems to care much when one of us publishes or presents our work in those fields. “Oh, another academic conference? Ho hum!” But a conference on something as wacky as Buffy gets us on CNN.

And on blogosphere. Somebody wonders whether analyzing TV stops you from enjoying it? In the case of BtVS (and I’d say, any really good work of art)–No. Another writer notes Buffy’s philosophical credentials. And synchronicitously, bloggers engage in some of the same debates BtVS scholar/fans do: favorite episodes (your list may vary), and Joss Whedon’s brilliant but agonizing willingness to follow Faulkner’s advice to writers: “kill your darlings.”

OK, this one was posted last month, but I’m noting it now, so we can plan the refreshments for next time: BtVS themed party, with decorations, favors, and recipes.

We’ve just concluded the second day of the third Slayage Conference on the works of Joss Whedon, which include TV shows Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, Firefly, the film Serenity, scripts for other movies, and comics. This year, it’s in Arkadelphia, Arkansas, and the group was too large for the room designated for the first keynote session, so this morning’s presentation was moved to a larger auditorium.

Why are academic types from all over the USA, Canada, Britain, and elsewhere still talking about Buffy, a show that’s been in reruns since 2003?

“It has staying power,” [conference organizer] Durand said. “It’s like I tell my students in philosophy a lot of times: We’re not so much about necessarily finding all the answers as wanting to ask better questions. `Buffy,’ I think, does that. `Buffy’ never really leaves you with nice, pat answers. You have even more questions than when you started.”

So far, almost all of the papers I’ve heard have been thought-provoking and often entertaining as well. It’s also been great to meet friends from past conferences again. Several of us had the pleasure this evening of dining with guest of honor Jeanine Basinger, who is perfectly charming, and reminds me of my favorite author, the late Dorothy Dunnett. (I got into “Buffy studies” when I presented a paper on Dunnett’s historical fiction at PCA, where I discovered other academics taking BtVS seriously.)

The last event tonight was a workshop analyzing one of the key episodes, season 4’s dream finale, “Restless,” led by Rhonda Wilcox. I’ve seen it three or four times, at least, and I still found new insights.

More tomorrow. Conference website.

Who’s your hero? Of course, the “right” answer is “my mother!” or “my father!” or some historical figure, or a saint. But if you grew up reading books and/or watching movies and television, fictional heroes may have inspired you as much or more. And why not? Sir Philip Sidney famously argued in The Defense of Poesy that imaginative literature could be superior to both philosophy and history at teaching virtue:

Now therein of all sciences—I speak still of human, and according to the human conceit—is our poet the monarch. For he doth not only show the way, but giveth so sweet a prospect into the way as will entice any man to enter into it. Nay, he doth, as if your journey should lie through a fair vineyard, at the very first give you a cluster of grapes, that full of that taste you may long to pass further. He beginneth not with obscure definitions, which must blur the margent with interpretations, and load the memory with doubtfulness. But he cometh to you with words set in delightful proportion, either accompanied with, or prepared for, the well-enchanting skill of music; and with a tale, forsooth, he cometh unto you, with a tale which holdeth children from play, and old men from the chimney-corner, and, pretending no more, doth intend the winning of the mind from wickedness to virtue

Put that in 21st century language by checking out NPR’s In Character series and its

profiles of some influential but imaginary characters — fictional figures who have had a deep and lasting impact on Americans’ lives.

Among the characters: The Lone Ranger, Charlie Brown, Holden Caulfield, Nancy Drew, Virgil Tibbs (the detective played by Sidney Poitier in In the Heat of the Night), and today, my own fictional hero, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, who helped a journalist keep things together while she was reporting from Iraq.

More stories of how BtVS influenced various people–some more than others–are archived here.

But I think this movie Son of Rambow (yes, that’s the spelling) might be worthwhile:

Here are some reviews. You’ll probably have to look hard to find it locally, so might have to wait for the DVD.

That is, write stuff people might actually want to read, as opposed to that highfalutin lit’rary stuff and po’try that nobody can understand, not even you. Okay, I’m sort of kidding about that, but you can make a living writing. Unfortunately, the days when Alexander Pope could live very comfortably off the proceeds of his best-selling translations of the Iliad and Odyssey are long gone. Instead, you might have to try writing without inspiration.

Does this mean you’ll never be inspired? No. Inspiration will still come, but the problem with inspiration is … none of us can predict when it will hit. So cherish inspiration, but instead of waiting for it to produce writing, strive to produce without being inspired.

I’m not negating inspiration; I’m simply trying to guide you around it. You’ll still need inspiration to complete good writing. And it can come from a variety of places.

This is good advice for anyone who has to write, whether you hope to earn a living at it or simply produce a paper for a grade.

You can also write popular fiction. English majors galore have taken this road-more-traveled and proven that popular doesn’t have to mean trashy or poorly-written. English majors seem to enjoy reading mystery novels, and some have become very well-known as mystery novelists, including: Dorothy L. Sayers, Thomas Perry. Robert B. Parker. Amanda Cross (Carolyn G. Heilbrun), and James Lee Burke. Charles Ardai writes neo-noir “hardboiled” mysteries under the pen-name Richard Aleas, drawing on his background as a literature major. Then he and a partner launched a publishing enterprise devoted to “pulp fiction,” Hard Case Crime. Oh, and before that, Ardai was the founder and CEO of Juno.

However, if you really want to make money in the pop-fiction world, romance is the game.

We’re wrapping up our semester and the seniors will be commencing out into the dreaded Real World. I turned my calendar over to May and found these words of advice for those entering new cultures (such as high school, college, or full-time employment) from Buffy’s sister Dawn:

People may say something to you you don’t understand. Just don’t be afraid to keep your mouth shut and pretend like you know what they’re saying. . . . People may say something like “My protein window closes in an hour.” Just smile and nod. Mm-hmm. (”Selfless” BtVS 7.5)

As a Third Culture Kid, I must say that this approach has brought me success in many, many situations. Sometimes, of course, you do have to ask questions.