Logomacy
Between logomachy and logomancy . . .

The Professor and the Madman was certainly an interesting story. If you haven’t heard of it, it’s about one of the most valuable (prolific and thorough) volunteer contributors to the Oxford English Dictionary, who happened to have been an inmate at an insane asylum where he had been committed for murder. While I enjoyed it thoroughly, I thought it was marred a bit by punching up the story with pointless armchair psychoanalysis of poor C.W. Minor. An example was the passage that I quoted in the “Guess the Source” post, which was part of an entirely lame attempt to set a background for Minor’s later sexual obsessions. So while I actually wish the book were dryer, the stuff that irritated me about it may well have been what made it into a national bestseller.

I love songs that playfully quote other languages. “Plus Je T’Embrasse“, as performed by Blossom Dearie is one such, containing the lovely line that’s the headline of this post and the only English in the song. Short phrases are what tickle me the most. Something like the Beatles’s “Michelle, Ma Belle” are somehow too earnest to really strike my fancy. Or maybe it’s just overexposure to the Beatles.
Anime theme-songs are a fruitful source of this sort of thing. Probably J-Pop songs in general are, and I’m just not familiar enough to say for sure. But there definitely seems to be an unwritten law of Anime lyrics that the song contain at least one phrase of English—not counting loan words like gaarufurendo or purezento. Or I think not counting them; modern Japanese is such a avid borrower from English that it’s hard for me to tell what’s been adopted and what’s just quoted for hipness. In general, I tend to assume that words that have been adapted to the Japanese phonetic system are mostly assimilated, and words where an effort is made to preserve the English pronunciation are intended to sound exotic, but I’m sure it’s not as straightforward as that for native speakers—particularly the younger generations. For instance, the original Japanese theme for Sailor Moon “Moonlight Densetsu”[1.- something like Moonlight Legend, or Legendary Moonlight] includes moonlight, midnight, weekend, happy-end, all with (pretty much) English pronunciation–as opposed to “miracle romance”, which is adapted to the more native sounding mirakuru romansu.

Websnark asks what do you even call the opposite of selling out. The obvious answer is “buying in”, but somehow that doesn’t seem quite right.

And there are the girls—young, chocolate-skinned, ever-giggling naked girls with sleek wet bodies, rosebud nipples, long hair, coltish legs, and scarlet and purple petals folded behind their ears—who play in the white Indian Ocean surf and who run, quite without shame, along the cool wet sands on their way back home.

answer down below, ’cause I can’t seem to do extended entries in wordpress…

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