Quintilla: Migrant
Popsicles? Damn, It’s Gonna Be a Long, Hot Summer
I’m a woman. A man had to explain these “rules” to me. I think they’re silly, but according to recent headlines, they’re a real thing. Most of the women I know would be satisfied with cleanliness and kindness. But the one about milkshakes? Deadly serious, guys – leave all the chocolate malts to us women!
The straw is pink, guys. Can’t touch this.
One is Never Enough
First Things First
Words matter. Words have meaning. And although, sure, “language evolves,” that doesn’t mean you get to change the accepted definitions of dictionary words to mean whatever you want them to mean today. You don’t get to wake up one morning and decide that “86” means something more and different than “nix” (see “Cockney rhyming slang”) or “remove” (as it is commonly understood in the restaurant biz) or “throw the bum out” (as anyone who’s been 86’d from a bar can tell you – because most of them are alive to tell you this). You can certainly invent new words. You could, over time and bit by bit, change their meaning to be more in line with modern day needs. We still use “carriage” today, even though the original understanding of “carriage” rarely applies. And there’s a reason criminals devise their own terms for things, but most adults don’t adopt those outside of novels and Hollywood thrillers.
Read Ask George: Where Does the Term “86’d” Come From? | St. Louis Magazine.
But some folks want you to believe that “86” means to “kill” or “assassinate” someone, and that when paired with a number that’s routinely associated with a person, somehow constitutes an incitement to do just that. You could use the words “end,” or “terminate,” or “off,” or “ice” or any of these slang terms to mean the same thing – but that doesn’t change their more commonly understood, dictionary defined meanings. At least I hope not – considering corporate America routinely terminates employees it wants to 86 – I mean, get rid of. And when I say, “Turn off that dim bulb,” I mean end the flickering from the almost-burnt-out light bulb. What else could you possibly think I mean? The flickering’s giving me a massive headache, as is this whole debacle.
In What Does ‘Eighty-Six’ Mean? | Merriam-Webster, Merriam-Webster acknowledges that,
Among the most recent senses adopted is a logical extension of the previous ones, with the meaning of “to kill.” We do not enter this sense, due to its relative recency and sparseness of use.
“I hate to see the guys always getting eighty-sixed,” she said, using military jargon for killed in action. “Not fair.”
— John Kifner, The New York Times, 3 Feb. 1991The most common meaning of eighty-six encountered today is the one that is closer to its service industry roots (“to refuse to serve a customer”). Given how many meanings the term has picked up in less than a century of use, however, it’s anyone’s guess as to what meanings it will pick up in the decades to come.
You don’t get to call it “incitement” to “kill” or “assassinate” someone, just because you need a little more drama and attention in your life. Just because you want to distract people from the fact that you are actively advocating for things that will do them real harm. In 10 years, maybe we’ll use “86” to mean “spurious propaganda meaning whatever the hell the party in power wants it to mean at the moment.” But for now, it should be clear that the most common usage harkens back to its restaurant and bar service days.
Investigating every instance of what is and ought to be a fairly mild expression of political protest as if it were an act of terrorism is an absolute waste of taxpayer dollars. But if you insist, then at least investigate every Republican who followed “86” with “46” – or all the times their leaders have called on the people to kill, shoot, or otherwise assassinate those they dislike. See, for example: violent rhetoric | PBS News Don’t be hypocrites about it.
This Administration Wants to 86 The Following Words
Forget George Carlin’s brilliant monologue on the 7 Dirty Words You Can’t Say on Television. There is now a list of three hundred and sixty one words the current administration is trying to expunge from our vocabularies. How dare they, these people who whine about freedom of speech at every turn and imagine themselves victims of “cancel culture”!? You will find the words the feel attacked by, here, and I exhort you to use them liberally (which, in case you didn’t know, means “generously” and “munificently” and “freely” no matter what certain political types would have you think). For a surprising and wonderful take on this, read Here are all the words Trump wants banned — in one article – Baptist News Global – an article from Rodney W. Kennedy, a pastor and writer in New York state, using every one of them. God bless the man.
I did write a poem a while back, using a much shorter list of words – I think they’ve added about 200 since then! – see Poetry from Banned Words | Holly Jahangiri. But one is never enough and now, we have a larger vocabulary to work with, and I encourage you to get creative. Feel free to share your poems or flash fiction here, or send me a link to your longer works (if it’s a spammy link or comment, it will be 86’d so fast it’ll make your head spin, but I promise you’ll live).
In case you need ideas for where to use these marvelous words, try poetry, short stories, non-fiction articles, blogs, social media posts – anything that will be read, where people will be emboldened and made to understand that words are not scary things. They are the key to communicating – a very human thing. A very First Amendment-protected thing in the United States of America, with precious few exceptions (most largely ignored, these days, as they have to do with safety and truth in advertising, both of which seem to be quite passé). Contrary to what many seem to believe, freedom of political speech without fear of reprisal, not the freedom to cuss out your parents and neighbors, is the primary raison d’être for the First Amendment. Now go use it before we lose it.
Did you miss any of the earlier posts from this month or last?
New Poetry Form: The Scala Decima
Scala Decima
The Scala Decima poetry form was invented by Holly Jahangiri, who serves on the Boards of both Poets Northwest (in Houston, TX) and the Poetry Society of Texas.
The rules are as follows:
- 10 lines;
- 10 syllables per line (iambic pentameter if you can manage it);
- rhyme on syllable that corresponds to the line numer (i.e., first syllable sets the rhyme; second syllable of second line, third syllable of third line, fourth syllable of fourth line, and so on continue it);
- the rhyming syllable can occur anywhere within a word and need not be the whole word.
Singing Brook
An example of the Scala Decima poetry form.
Grown—like a child that’s free to play, to roam this stone-lined rivulet that gaily runs from known familiar sun-warmed waters. Old bone on bone remembers, lifts its voice— Soft old baritone, sings songs of distant summer’s youth; tries to own its fleeting joy once again, but knows it’s flown too far now— a bird that seeks the seed it’s sown, to rest among the leaves and feathers, windblown yet in seeking home, it will not die alone.
Your Turn!
Try your hand at writing a poem in the Scala Decima form. Feel free to post it in the comments or leave a comment with a link to where we can find your poem.
Knowledge
I need to understand why things don’t work. Not that it matters to anyone else, once the “fix” is applied. Break, fix. Break, fix. But why did the thing happen in the first place? Without that crucial piece of knowledge, it’s bound to break again.
Nine Levels of Nested Parentheses
Early in my career, I worked on a system that relied on Boolean expressions to select computer report pages to be printed and distributed to recipients. I was good at it. One time, I managed to craft an inordinately complex statement to capture all the varied pages for a single recipient. It was probably ten lines long. It was, I thought, a thing of beauty. Impeccable logic, all the quotation marks and parentheses were properly opened and closed, and yet…it wouldn’t run. Bombed every time. I had systems engineers and programmer/analysts check and double-check, and all agreed it was perfection. But still…no joy. The thing wouldn’t run. I glared at the mainframe. If I could craft it with my very limited computer science background, that damned machine – big as a small bus – ought to be able to understand it and run it. It just stood there, impassive. The experts all gave me the same completely unsatisfying, but ultimately effective, advice: “Break it into smaller statements.”
None of them could explain to me why. Not a single one of them knew, and they all admitted as much. If I weren’t on a deadline, I’d have beat my head bloody against the side of the mainframe in frustration. Instead, I fumed internally for a decade.
One day, back when I still smoked, I was outside in the break area telling a colleague about this past and useless frustration. If you smoke, you know the real value of standing in the outside break area. You run into colleagues from all parts of the company. You meet people you never would have met, otherwise. You learn more quickly what’s really happening throughout the organization.
An older man approached us, chuckling. “I didn’t mean to eavesdrop, but I couldn’t help overhearing you. I think I can tell you exactly what the problem was.”
“Really? Please! Tell me.”
“I used to work for IBM. That operating system only supported nine levels of nested parentheses. I’ll bet you went over the limit.”
“Of course I did. Thank you!”
That’s all I’d needed to hear for ten years. That’s it. Just one logical, accurate explanation. I wouldn’t have protested simplifying the selection statements had anyone told me the parameters in the first place. “I don’t know” is a great answer, an honest answer. But I knew there had to be a better one and surely somebody had to know what it was.
Annoying Line Breaks
My post, Increase Diversity, had a phantom line break. It’s not the first time this has happened on this blog. In the past, I’ve been able to futz around with the posts until the phantom line break was laid to rest for good, but not this time. I asked three WordPress experts and my favorite Support person at my web hosting company, and none of them knew. One finally did figure out a solution but they couldn’t explain to my satisfaction exactly why the solution was necessary since I had only made one teeny-tiny change to my CSS in the past month or more, and it should not have been what it was: a Divi cache issue. There is a very secret, very “advanced,” very hidden place to go to clear it – and that’s all it took. Still makes absolutely no sense to me how any minor change to the CSS, cached or not, could cause phantom line breaks in the middle of a line.
Start the clock on another decade of frustration!
