December 27, 2004

• I’m not nice, but I used to be.

  No, that’s not precisely what I meant to say.  “Nice” used to mean
  something closer to what I am than it does now.  That’s closer to
  what I mean.

  I don’t care much for the word, “nice”.   Henry here, Jane Austen’s character, expresses my view nicely:

  “I am sure,” cried Catherine, “I did
  not mean to say anything wrong; but it is a nice book, and why should I
  not call it so?” “Very true,” said Henry, “and this is a very nice day,
  and we are taking a very nice walk; and you are two very nice young
  ladies. Oh! It is a very nice word indeed! It does for everything.”
  [Jane Austen, "Northanger Abbey"]

  Once, someone said I’m not very nice (it could have been I myself who
  said it) and Greyfox informed me that by the “original” meaning of the
  word — and I think he was referring to the sense in which Will
  Shakespeare used it — I was quite nice.  He said that originally
  it meant precise and correct in speech.

  It was not until recently that I looked it up and discovered that
  although he was correct about Shakespeare’s sense of the word, the word
  had by that time already shifted distinctly away from its “original” or
  first recorded meaning.

  Here is what I found at the Online Etymology Dictionary (which is also where I found the Jane Austen quote above):

  c.1290, “foolish, stupid, senseless,”
  from O.Fr. nice “silly, foolish,” from L. nescius “ignorant,” lit.
  “not-knowing,” from ne- “not” (see un-) + stem of scire “to know.”
  “The sense development has been extraordinary, even for an adj.”
  [Weekley] — from “timid” (pre-1300); to “fussy, fastidious” (c.1380);
  to “dainty, delicate” (c.1405); to “precise, careful” (1500s, preserved
  in such terms as a nice distinction and nice and early); to “agreeable,
  delightful” (1769); to “kind, thoughtful” (1830).
  In 16c.-17c. it is often difficult to determine exactly what is meant
  when a writer uses this word. By 1926, it was pronounced “too great a
  favorite with the ladies, who have charmed out of it all its
  individuality and converted it into a mere diffuser of vague and mild
  agreeableness.” [Fowler]

  Since I am not even mildly or vaguely agreeable and have no wish to
  agree with most ladies (and I don’t mean women), perhaps I should just leave the word to them.

  Another word that has been giving me a tough time lately is,
  “sentimentality.”  A long time ago, Greyfox quoted me a quote
  saying that, “sentimentality means loving something more than God
  does.”  I like that definition.  It seems fitting to the
  maudlin propensity I see among my supposed peers (the “ladies”) to go
  all choked-up and sad over things that to me seem either natural and
  inevitable (and thus cry out for acceptance and not for sadness) and
  other things that are outrageous and unnatural and thus require active
  resistance and change, rather than self-defeating sadness that changes
  nothing and hurts only the one who indulges in it.

  I wanted to write about that, but first I wanted to find out who said it.  My old fart, Greyfox,
  is a great rememberer and quoter of quotations, but not so good at
  remembering who said it.  As for myself, the “nice” one in the
  family, I feel stupid quoting someone and saying, “someone
  said…”  It is important not only to my erudite image, but to the
  satisfaction of my curiosity, that I know whom I’m quoting if I’m
  putting quotation marks around a statement.

  I put the quote in a Google search box, and although it did return a
  few results it did not satisfy my need.  It created a new
  dilemma.  According to the wondrous web, the origin of that
  statement was either J.D. Salinger, or the “haiku poet”
  R.H.Blythe.   The former name, I recognized.  The
  latter, I did not.  So I searched again.

  Now I have a new dilemma:  was Blythe actually a poet, or did he
  only translate and interpret haiku?  I know he was a translator
  and interpreter, but I have only the one source, the one that quoted
  him on sentimentality, saying he’s a poet.  Can I safely dismiss
  that source as unreliable and attribute the quote to Salinger?  I
  don’t know.

  So, here I go….  Someone once said that sentimentality is loving
  something more than God does.  I agree.  If any of my readers
  here can cite for me the work in which Salinger or Blythe or anyone
  else said that, I’d appreciate it.

  ---

  The Old Fart had a couple of news stories today he shared with me and
  thought I might want to share with you.  He was correct.

  
  Jaye Ulak and Jimmy Walker of Scammon Bay are teenage Alaska Native
  rappers who were separately “discovered” by a village social worker
  after they’d attempted suicide.  She has raised money and flown
  them out to behavioral health conferences in Anchorage and
  Seattle.  The young men call their duo “Blood Family”, and they
  rap about village life, addiction, suicide and elders being
  disrespected.  About their message, Walker said, “It’s getting
  through, even to the adults.”

  

  Stacia Backensto is a doctoral candidate studying ravens in the oil fields on the North Slope of the Brooks Range.

  “They’re savvy creatures, and sometimes for me it was a question of
  who’s going to be studied today,” she said. “Are they studying me or I
  studying them? Who’s in charge of this situation?”

  Backensto disguises herself with borrowed coveralls and hard
  hat, but they still sometimes pick out her facial features and
  recognize her as the enemy.

  The same cleverness that makes ravens hard to study helps them thrive in the coldest region of America’s coldest state.

  “There was one that was a very aggressive raven in Kuparuk,” Backensto
  said. “The male — and we didn’t even trap the male, we trapped his
  mate, and put a radio transmitter on her — chased us off the pad for a
  mile.”

  “To understand their behavior and try to observe their behavior and not
  be a part of changing their behavior is very tricky,” she said. “It’s
  like hide-and-seek.”

  ---

  In less that 3 hours, Doug starts
  his next fanfic writing tournament.  This means I will have less
  competition for the PS2 and more competition for the computer for the
  next week or two.  In stark and gory contrast to the character he
  represented in the last tournament, Bam Margera, this time he will be
  Kyojiro Kagenuma from the game, Way of the Samurai II.  She is a
  bloodthirsty and sadistic yakuza.who apparently even scares her
  confederates.  Doug has been immersing himself in feudal Japanese
  culture in preparation, watching Rashomon and reading the Tomoe Gozen
  series of books.  I sorta wish that as a writer he was less of a
  method actor.  He has been a bit “short” with me lately, but at
  least he’s not swinging his sword in here.
  

  • 6:31 pm
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