Bertrand Russell Lists His 20 Favorite Words in 1958 (and What Are Some of Yours?)

in English Language, Literature, Philosophy, Poetry, Writing | June 13th, 2016

Russell_in_1938

Image via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

Is it pos­si­ble to ful­ly sep­a­rate a word’s sound from its meaning—to val­ue words sole­ly for their music? Some poets come close: Wal­lace Stevens, Sylvia Plath, John Ash­bery. Rare pho­net­ic meta­physi­cians. Sure­ly we all do this when we hear words in a lan­guage we do not know. When I first encoun­tered the Span­ish word entonces, I thought it was the most beau­ti­ful three syl­la­bles I’d ever heard.

I still thought so, despite some dis­ap­point­ment, when I learned it was a com­mon­place adverb mean­ing “then,” not the rar­i­fied name of some mag­i­cal being. My rev­er­ence for entonces will not impress a native Span­ish speak­er. Since I do not think in Span­ish and strug­gle to find the right words when I speak it—always translating—the sound and sense of the lan­guage run on two dif­fer­ent tracks in my mind.

An exam­ple from my native tongue: the word obdu­rate, which I adore, became an instant favorite for its sound the first time I said it aloud, before I’d ever used it in a sen­tence or parsed its mean­ing. It’s not a com­mon Eng­lish word, how­ev­er, and maybe that makes it spe­cial. A word like always, which has a pret­ty sound, rarely strikes me as musi­cal or inter­est­ing, though non-Eng­lish speak­ers may find it so.

Every writer has favorite words. Some of those words are ordi­nary, some of them not so much. David Fos­ter Wallace’s lists of favorite words con­sist of obscu­ri­ties and archaisms unlike­ly to ever fea­ture in the aver­age con­ver­sa­tion. “James Joyce thought cus­pi­dor the most beau­ti­ful word in the Eng­lish lan­guage,” writes the blog Futil­i­ty Clos­et,” Arnold Ben­net chose pave­ment. J.R.R. Tolkien felt the phrase cel­lar door had an espe­cial­ly beau­ti­ful sound.”

Who’s to say how much these authors could sep­a­rate sound from sense? Futil­i­ty Clos­et illus­trates the prob­lem with a humor­ous anec­dote about Max Beer­bohm, and brings us the list below of philoso­pher Bertrand Russell’s 20 favorite words, offered in response to a reader’s ques­tion in 1958. Though Rus­sell him­self had a fas­ci­nat­ing the­o­ry about how we make words mean things, he sup­pos­ed­ly made this list with­out regard for these words’ mean­ings.

  1. wind
  2. heath
  3. gold­en
  4. begrime
  5. pil­grim
  6. quag­mire
  7. dia­pa­son
  8. alabaster
  9. chryso­prase
  10. astro­labe
  11. apoc­a­lyp­tic
  12. ineluctable
  13. ter­raque­ous
  14. inspis­sat­ed
  15. incar­na­dine
  16. sub­lu­nary
  17. choras­mean
  18. alem­bic
  19. ful­mi­nate
  20. ecsta­sy

So, what about you, read­er? What are some of your favorite words in English—or what­ev­er your native lan­guage hap­pens to be? And do you, can you, choose them for their sound alone? Please let us know in the com­ments below.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

David Fos­ter Wal­lace Cre­ates Lists of His Favorite Words: “Mau­gre,” “Taran­tism,” “Ruck,” “Prima­para” & More

“Tsun­doku,” the Japan­ese Word for the New Books That Pile Up on Our Shelves, Should Enter the Eng­lish Lan­guage

5 Won­der­ful­ly Long Lit­er­ary Sen­tences by Samuel Beck­ett, Vir­ginia Woolf, F. Scott Fitzger­ald & Oth­er Mas­ters of the Run-On

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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How to Spot Bullshit: A Primer by Princeton Philosopher Harry Frankfurt

in English Language, Life, Media, Philosophy, Politics | May 30th, 2016

We live in an age of truthi­ness. Come­di­an Stephen Col­bert coined the word to describe the Bush administration’s ten­den­cy to fudge the facts in its favor.

Ten years after the Amer­i­can Dialect Soci­ety named it Word of the Year, for­mer pres­i­dent Bush’s cal­en­dar is packed with such leisure activ­i­ties as golf and paint­ing por­traits of world lead­ers, but “truthi­ness” remains on active duty.

It’s par­tic­u­lar­ly ger­mane in this elec­tion year, though politi­cians are far from its only prac­ti­tion­ers.

Take glob­al warm­ing. NASA makes a pret­ty rock sol­id case for both its exis­tence and our role in it:

97 per­cent or more of active­ly pub­lish­ing cli­mate sci­en­tists agree: Cli­mate-warm­ing trends over the past cen­tu­ry are extreme­ly like­ly due to human activ­i­ties. In addi­tion, most of the lead­ing sci­en­tif­ic orga­ni­za­tions world­wide have issued pub­lic state­ments endors­ing this posi­tion.

In view of such num­bers, its under­stand­able that a sub­ur­ban Joe with a freez­er full of fac­to­ry-farmed beef and mul­ti­ple SUVs in his garage would cling to the posi­tion that glob­al warm­ing is a lie. It’s his last resort, real­ly.

But such self-ratio­nal­iza­tions are not truth. They are truthi­ness.

Or to use the old-fash­ioned word favored by philoso­pher Har­ry Frank­furt, above: bull­shit!

Frank­furt–a philoso­pher at Prince­ton and the author of On Bull­shit–allows that bull­shit artists are often charm­ing, or at their very least, col­or­ful. They have to be. Achiev­ing their ends involves engag­ing oth­ers long enough to per­suade them that they know what they’re talk­ing about, when in fact, that’s the oppo­site of the truth.

Speak­ing of oppo­sites, Frank­furt main­tains that bull­shit is a dif­fer­ent beast from an out-and-out lie. The liar makes a spe­cif­ic attempt to con­ceal the truth by swap­ping it out for a lie.

The bull­shit artist’s approach is far more vague. It’s about cre­at­ing a gen­er­al impres­sion.

There are times when I admit to wel­com­ing this sort of manure. As a mak­er of low bud­get the­ater, your hon­est opin­ion of any show I have Lit­tle Red Hen’ed into exis­tence is the last thing I want to hear upon emerg­ing from the cramped dress­ing room, unless you tru­ly loved it.

I’d also encour­age you to choose your words care­ful­ly when dash­ing a child’s dreams.

But when it comes to mat­ters of pub­lic pol­i­cy, and the pub­lic good, yes, trans­paren­cy is best.

It’s inter­est­ing to me that film­mak­ers James Nee and Chris­t­ian Brit­ten trans­formed a por­tion of their learned subject’s thoughts into voiceover nar­ra­tion for a light­ning fast stock footage mon­tage. It’s divert­ing and fun­ny, fea­tur­ing such omi­nous char­ac­ters as Nos­fer­atu, Bill Clin­ton, Char­lie Chaplin’s Great Dic­ta­tor, and Don­ald Trump, but isn’t it also the sort of mis­di­rec­tion sleight of hand at which true bull­shit­ters excel?

Frank­furt expands upon his thoughts on bull­shit in his apt­ly titled best­selling book, On Bull­shit and its fol­lowup On Truth.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Noam Chom­sky Schools 9/11 Truther; Explains the Sci­ence of Mak­ing Cred­i­ble Claims

Young T.S. Eliot Writes “The Tri­umph of Bullsh*t” and Gives the Eng­lish Lan­guage a New Exple­tive (1910)

Stephen Col­bert Explains How The Col­bert Report Is Made in a New Pod­cast

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday

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The “Brain Dictionary”: Beautiful 3D Map Shows How Different Brain Areas Respond to Hearing Different Words

in English Language, Science | April 28th, 2016

We’ve all had those moments of strug­gle to come up with le mot juste, in our native lan­guage or a for­eign one. But when we look for a par­tic­u­lar word, where exact­ly do we go to find it? Neu­ro­sci­en­tists at Berke­ley have made a fas­ci­nat­ing start on answer­ing that ques­tion by going in the oth­er direc­tion, map­ping out which parts of the brain respond to the sound of cer­tain words, using func­tion­al mag­net­ic res­o­nance imag­ing (fMRI) to watch the action on the cere­bral cor­tices of peo­ple lis­ten­ing to The Moth Radio Hour — a pop­u­lar sto­ry­telling pod­cast you your­self may have spent some time with, albeit under some­what dif­fer­ent cir­cum­stances.

“No sin­gle brain region holds one word or con­cept,” writes The Guardian’s Ian Sam­ple on the “brain dic­tio­nary” thus devel­oped by researcher Jack Gal­lant and his team. “A sin­gle brain spot is asso­ci­at­ed with a num­ber of relat­ed words. And each sin­gle word lights up many dif­fer­ent brain spots. Togeth­er they make up net­works that rep­re­sent the mean­ings of each word we use: life and love; death and tax­es; clouds, Flori­da and bra. All light up their own net­works.”

Sam­ple quotes Alexan­der Huth, the first author on the study: “It is pos­si­ble that this approach could be used to decode infor­ma­tion about what words a per­son is hear­ing, read­ing, or pos­si­bly even think­ing.” You can learn more about this promis­ing research in the short video from Nature above, which shows how the team mapped out how, dur­ing those Moth lis­ten­ing ses­sions, “dif­fer­ent bits of the brain respond­ed to dif­fer­ent kinds of words”: some regions lit up in response to those hav­ing to do with num­bers, for instance, oth­ers in response to “social words,” and oth­ers in response to those indi­cat­ing place.

You can also browse this brain dic­tio­nary your­self in 3D on the Gal­lant Lab’s web site, which lets you click on any part of the cor­tex and see a clus­ter of the words which gen­er­at­ed the most activ­i­ty there. The oth­er neu­ro­sci­en­tists quot­ed in the Guardian piece acknowl­edge both the thrilling (if slight­ly scary, in terms of thought-read­ing pos­si­bil­i­ties in the maybe-not-that-far-flung future) impli­ca­tions of the work as well as the huge amount of unknowns that remain. The response of the pod­cast­ing com­mu­ni­ty has so far gone unrecord­ed, but sure­ly they’d like to see the research extend­ed in the direc­tion of oth­er lin­guis­ti­cal­ly inten­sive shows — Marc Maron’s WTF, per­haps.

via The Guardian

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free Online Psy­chol­o­gy & Neu­ro­science Cours­es

Becom­ing Bilin­gual Can Give Your Brain a Boost: What Recent Research Has to Say

Steven Pinker Explains the Neu­ro­science of Swear­ing (NSFW)

This Is Your Brain on Jane Austen: The Neu­ro­science of Read­ing Great Lit­er­a­ture

Music in the Brain: Sci­en­tists Final­ly Reveal the Parts of Our Brain That Are Ded­i­cat­ed to Music

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Why Do People Talk Funny in Old Movies?, or The Origin of the Mid-Atlantic Accent

in English Language, Film, History | March 18th, 2016

“The first thing to notice about movies made in the clas­sic Hol­ly­wood stu­dio era,” writes New York­er film crit­ic Richard Brody, “from the twen­ties through the fifties, is the still­ness of the actors — not a sta­t­ic, micro­phone-bound stand-and-deliv­er the­atri­cal­i­ty but a lack of fid­geti­ness even while in motion, a self-mas­tery that pre­cludes uncon­trolled or inci­den­tal ges­tures,” an act­ing style reflec­tive of the fact, Brody sus­pects, that “Amer­i­can peo­ple of the era real­ly were more tight­ly con­trolled, more repressed by the gen­er­al expec­ta­tion of pub­lic deco­rum and expres­sive restraint.”

This has made it tough for film­mak­ers (in the case of Brody’s piece, Paul Thomas Ander­son mak­ing The Mas­ter, who pulled it off more con­vinc­ing­ly than any­one else in recent mem­o­ry) who want to do prop­er peri­od pieces set in those days: “even if styl­ists man­age to get the cloth­ing right, actors today — peo­ple today — have been raised by and large to let their emo­tions gov­ern their behav­ior,” and cur­rent actors “can hard­ly rep­re­sent the past with­out invest­ing it with the atti­tudes of our own day, which is why most new peri­od pieces seem either thin or unin­ten­tion­al­ly iron­ic.”

They’d have an espe­cial­ly for­mi­da­ble task set out for them in speak­ing, with­out any appar­ent irony, in the mid-atlantic accent, just as much a fix­ture of clas­sic Hol­ly­wood act­ing as that phys­i­cal self-mas­tery. Even if you haven’t heard its name, you’ve heard the accent, which gets exam­ined in the How­Stuff­Works video at the top of the post “Why Do Peo­ple in Old Movies Talk Weird?” The “old-timey voice” you hear in news­reels from movies like His Girl Fri­day (watch it online here) and fig­ures like Katharine Hep­burn, Franklin D. Roo­sevelt, George Plimp­ton, and William F. Buck­ley, his­tor­i­cal­ly “the hall­mark of aris­to­crat­ic Amer­i­ca,” acquired, usu­al­ly in New Eng­land board­ing schools, as “an inter­na­tion­al norm for com­mu­ni­ca­tion.”

The video points out its sig­nal qual­i­ties, from its “qua­si-British ele­ments” like a soft­en­ing of Rs to its “empha­sis on clipped, sharped Ts,” result­ing in a speech pat­tern that “isn’t com­plete­ly British, not com­plete­ly Amer­i­can” — one we can only place, in oth­er words, some­where in the mid-Atlantic ocean. The accent emerged as an opti­mal man­ner of speak­ing in “the ear­ly days of radio” when speak­ers could­n’t repro­duce bass vary well, and it van­ished not long after the Sec­ond World War, when teach­ers stopped pass­ing it along to their stu­dents. Has the time has come for the true iro­nists among us to bring it back?

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Speech Accent Archive: The Eng­lish Accents of Peo­ple Who Speak 341 Dif­fer­ent Lan­guages

The Lin­guis­tics Behind Kevin Spacey’s South­ern Accent in House of Cards: A Quick Primer

Watch Meryl Streep Have Fun with Accents: Bronx, Pol­ish, Irish, Aus­tralian, Yid­dish & More

A Brief Tour of British Accents: 14 Ways to Speak Eng­lish in 84 Sec­onds

Peter Sell­ers Presents The Com­plete Guide To Accents of The British Isles

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

 

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What “Orwellian” Really Means: An Animated Lesson About the Use & Abuse of the Term

in English Language, Literature | October 5th, 2015

In all of our minds, the word “Orwellian” con­jures up a cer­tain kind of set­ting: a vast, fixed bureau­cra­cy; a dead-eyed pub­lic forced into gray, uni­form liv­ing con­di­tions; the very words we use man­gled in order to bet­ter serve the inter­ests of pow­er. We think, on the whole, of the kind of bleak­ness with which George Orwell sat­u­rat­ed the future Eng­land that pro­vides the set­ting for his famous nov­el Nine­teen Eighty-Four. Almost sev­en­ty years after that book’s pub­li­ca­tion, we now use “Orwellian” to describe the views of the polit­i­cal par­ty oppo­site us, the Depart­ment of Motor Vehi­cles — any­thing, in short, that strikes us as brutish, mono­lith­ic, implaca­ble, delib­er­ate­ly stripped of mean­ing, or in any way author­i­tar­i­an.

We use the word so much, in fact, that it can’t help but have come detached from its orig­i­nal mean­ing. “I can tell you that we live in Orwellian times,” writes the Guardian’s Sam Jordi­son. Or that “Amer­i­ca is wag­ing Orwellian wars, that TV is Orwellian, that the police are Orwellian, that Ama­zon is Orwellian, that pub­lish­ers are Orwellian too, that Ama­zon with­drew copies of Nine­teen Eighty-Four, which was Orwellian (although Orwell wouldn’t like it), that Vladimir Putin, George W. Bush, David Cameron, Ed Mil­liband, Kim Jong-un and all his rel­a­tives are Orwellian, that the TV pro­gramme Big Broth­er is both Orwellian and not as Orwellian as it claims to be, that Oba­ma engages in Oba­ma­think, that cli­mate-change deniers and cli­mate change sci­en­tists are Orwellian, that neo­clas­si­cal eco­nom­ics employs Orwellian lan­guage. That, in fact, every­thing is Orwellian,” Jordi­son con­tin­ues.

Here to restore sense to our usage of the most com­mon word derived from the name of a writer, we have the Ted-Ed video at the top of the post. In it, and in the asso­ci­at­ed les­son on Ted-Ed’s site, Noah Tavlin breaks down the ter­m’s mean­ing, its ori­gin, the fail­ings of our mod­ern inter­pre­ta­tion of it, and how tru­ly Orwellian phe­nom­e­na con­tin­ue to invade our dai­ly life with­out our even real­iz­ing it. “The next time you hear some­one say ‘Orwellian,’ ” says Tavlin, “pay close atten­tion. If they’re talk­ing about the decep­tive and manip­u­la­tive use of lan­guage, they’re on the right track. If they’re talk­ing about mass sur­veil­lance and intru­sive gov­ern­ment, they’re describ­ing some­thing author­i­tar­i­an, but not nec­es­sar­i­ly Orwellian. And if they use it as an all-pur­pose word for any ideas they dis­like, it’s pos­si­ble that their state­ments are more Orwellian than what­ev­er it is they’re crit­i­ciz­ing” — an out­come Orwell him­self might well have fore­seen.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

George Orwell Explains in a Reveal­ing 1944 Let­ter Why He’d Write 1984

Hux­ley to Orwell: My Hell­ish Vision of the Future is Bet­ter Than Yours (1949)

George Orwell and Dou­glas Adams Explain How to Make a Prop­er Cup of Tea

For 95 Min­utes, the BBC Brings George Orwell to Life

George Orwell’s Five Great­est Essays (as Select­ed by Pulitzer-Prize Win­ning Colum­nist Michael Hiltzik)

Col­in Mar­shall writes else­where on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, and the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future? Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Hear What Hamlet, Richard III & King Lear Sounded Like in Shakespeare’s Original Pronunciation

in English Language, Literature, Theatre | August 13th, 2015

As we high­light­ed a few days ago, recent find­ings by South African sci­en­tists sug­gest that William Shake­speare may have smoked pot, pos­si­bly com­pos­ing some of his cel­e­brat­ed plays while under the influ­ence. Their research is sure to spark con­tro­ver­sy among Shake­speare schol­ars and his­to­ri­ans alike, but it’s cer­tain­ly a more inter­est­ing con­tro­ver­sy than the tired debate about whether Shake­speare wrote his plays at all. Per­haps even more inter­est­ing than Shake­speare’s drug of choice for lovers of his lan­guage are debates about what Shake­speare’s plays might have sound­ed like to his orig­i­nal audi­ences. In oth­er words, high or not, what might Shake­speare, his actors, and his audi­ence have sound­ed like when they spoke the lan­guage we call Eng­lish.

Of course they called the lan­guage Eng­lish as well, but we might not rec­og­nize some words as such when hear­ing Shake­speare’s accent aloud. On the oth­er hand, it might be sur­pris­ing just how much the Bard’s orig­i­nal pro­nun­ci­a­tion sounds like so many oth­er kinds of Eng­lish we know today.

In a post two years ago, we quot­ed Shake­speare­an actor, direc­tor, and writer Ben Crys­tal on Shake­speare’s orig­i­nal pro­nun­ci­a­tion, which, he says, “has flecks of near­ly every region­al U.K. Eng­lish accent, and indeed Amer­i­can and in fact Aus­tralian, too.” Hear­ing Shake­speare’s Eng­lish spo­ken aloud, Crys­tal remarks, is hear­ing a sound that “reminds peo­ple of the accent of their home.” You can test this the­o­ry, and hear for your­self the sound of Shake­speare’s Eng­lish with the video and audio high­light­ed here, show­cas­ing Crys­tal’s per­for­mance of the plays in orig­i­nal pro­nun­ci­a­tion (OP).

At the top, see Crys­tal recite an excerpt of Ham­let’s “to be or not to be” speech in a video pro­mo­tion for a 2011 Kick­starter cam­paign to fund a film ver­sion of Ham­let in OP. And above, we have two audio clips of Richard III and King Lear, respec­tive­ly, both from an OP Shake­speare CD Crys­tal record­ed with sev­er­al oth­er actors. Crys­tal came by his ver­sion of orig­i­nal pro­nun­ci­a­tion hon­est­ly, and from a very rep­utable source, who also hap­pens to be his father, David. The elder Crys­tal is per­haps the most high­ly-regard­ed lin­guist and schol­ar of the Eng­lish lan­guage alive today, and in addi­tion to pub­lish­ing sev­er­al books both schol­ar­ly and pop­u­lar, he has worked with the Globe The­atre on pro­duc­ing plays in OP since 1994. Learn more about Crys­tal’s process at our pre­vi­ous post on his work. Below, in an excerpt from a much longer talk, see Ben Crys­tal describe and demon­strate the dif­fer­ences between “Received Pronunciation”—the “prop­er,” gener­ic form of British English—and Shake­speare’s pro­nun­ci­a­tion. He then dis­cuss­es with his audi­ence the ways Shake­speare’s Eng­lish seems to roam all over the map, hew­ing to no par­tic­u­lar British region or class.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

What Shake­speare Sound­ed Like to Shake­speare: Recon­struct­ing the Bard’s Orig­i­nal Pro­nun­ci­a­tion

Dis­cov­er What Shakespeare’s Hand­writ­ing Looked Like, and How It Solved a Mys­tery of Author­ship

A 68 Hour Playlist of Shakespeare’s Plays Being Per­formed by Great Actors: Giel­gud, McK­ellen & More

Free Online Shake­speare Cours­es: Primers on the Bard from Oxford, Har­vard, Berke­ley & More

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Sarcasm Can Boost Creativity According to Research From Harvard & Columbia Business Schools

in Biology, Comedy, Creativity, English Language | August 10th, 2015

bill murray sarcasm

Under­ly­ing image by Gage Skid­more.

Echo­ing Bill Mur­ray, the Urban Dic­tio­nary defines sar­casm as “your body’s nat­ur­al defense against stu­pid,” not­ing that it’s “the high­est form of wit” in coun­tries like the UK, but the low­est in Amer­i­ca, owing to the population’s inabil­i­ty to detect whether or not one is being sar­cas­tic.

Exam­ple:
Idiot: I beat up a ten-year-old today.

You: (with a hint of sar­casm) That’s impres­sive!

Idiot: I know, right!

A new study by Francesca Gino, Adam Galin­sky, and Li Huang, of Har­vard, Colum­bia and INSEAD busi­ness schools, respec­tive­ly, sug­gests that the use of sar­casm pro­motes cre­ativ­i­ty for those on the giv­ing and receiv­ing end of sar­cas­tic exchanges.

Gino told the Har­vard Gazette, “To cre­ate or decode sar­casm, both the expressers and recip­i­ents of sar­casm need to over­come the con­tra­dic­tion (i.e., psy­cho­log­i­cal dis­tance) between the lit­er­al and actu­al mean­ings of the sar­cas­tic expres­sions. This is a process that acti­vates and is facil­i­tat­ed by abstrac­tion, which in turn pro­motes cre­ative think­ing.”

Galin­sky added, the givers and receivers in sar­cas­tic exchanges “sub­se­quent­ly per­formed bet­ter on cre­ativ­i­ty tasks than those in the sin­cere con­di­tions or the con­trol con­di­tion. This sug­gests that sar­casm has the poten­tial to cat­alyze cre­ativ­i­ty in every­one.” “That being said, although not the focus of our research, it is pos­si­ble that nat­u­ral­ly cre­ative peo­ple are also more like­ly to use sar­casm, mak­ing it an out­come instead of [a] cause in this rela­tion­ship.”

The evi­dence cer­tain­ly seems sol­id in the hands of mas­ter prac­ti­tion­ers such as Louis CK, Sarah Sil­ver­man, and the staff of The Onion, not to men­tion new­com­er Shirley Jester, an ani­mat­ed Sar­cas­tic Foul-Mouthed Teenage Come­di­an Girl from the Renais­sance.

Things get a bit murki­er when ama­teurs attempt to adopt their idols’ caus­tic pos­es. Tone and intent are eas­i­ly mis­con­strued. Feel­ings get hurt.

Is sar­casm best left to the pro­fes­sion­als?

Not nec­es­sar­i­ly. Gino and Galinksy found that the degree of trust between express­er and recip­i­ent deter­mines how sar­casm is received. In oth­er words, know your audi­ence.

Even at its mean­est, sarcasm—from the Greek and Latin for “to tear flesh”—involves abstrac­tion, a hall­mark of cre­ative think­ing.

Mean­while, you can review Clin­i­cal Psy­chol­o­gist Chris Ful­ton’s “Try that again method,” below, one of many strate­gies for han­dling “sar­cas­tic and sassy teenagers.” Cre­ativ­i­ty be squelched.

Cue a mil­lion teenage eye rolls, and check out Gino and Galinksy’s find­ings here.

via the Har­vard Gazette

Relat­ed Con­tent:

John Cleese’s Phi­los­o­phy of Cre­ativ­i­ty: Cre­at­ing Oases for Child­like Play

The Psy­chol­o­gy of Messi­ness & Cre­ativ­i­ty: Research Shows How a Messy Desk and Cre­ative Work Go Hand in Hand

The Most “Intel­lec­tu­al Jokes”: Our Favorite Open Cul­ture Read­er Sub­mis­sions

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The Two Gentlemen of Lebowski: What If The Bard Wrote The Big Lebowski?

in Comedy, English Language, Literature | July 29th, 2015

We live in an age of mash ups. A few years ago some mal­con­tent came up with Pride and Prej­u­dice and Zom­bies. Our cities are teem­ing with food trucks hawk­ing Kore­an tacos and ramen burg­ers. And chess box­ing is appar­ent­ly a thing. So per­haps it isn’t sur­pris­ing that some evil genius would merge the most quotable movie of the past 20 years, The Big Lebows­ki, with William Shake­speare.

The result­ing book, writ­ten by Adam Bertoc­ci, is called Two Gen­tle­men of Lebows­ki, and it does a sur­pris­ing­ly good job of cap­tur­ing the lan­guage of the Bard while stay­ing true to the orig­i­nal movie. The author report­ed­ly wrote the first draft of the book in a sin­gle sleep­less week­end. An impres­sive feat that the author dis­miss­es in an inter­view with CNN that you can see above.

“Any­body could, giv­en the lack of a social life,” dead­pans Bertoc­ci, “take a week­end with a movie they admired and an author that they knew well and make a sim­i­lar­ly lengthy mash up of it.”

In Bertocci’s fevered rework­ing (read the first 3 scenes for free here), the Dude is recast as The Knave. His bel­liger­ent best friend is Sir Wal­ter of Poland. The hap­less Don­nie is Sir Don­ald of Greece. Knox Har­ring­ton, Mauve’s grat­ing­ly gig­gly con­cep­tu­al artist friend, is in this ver­sion a tapes­try artist. And of course, Da Fino, the PI, who shad­ows the Dude in the movie, is list­ed sim­ply as Broth­er Sea­mus.

But where Bertoc­ci real­ly shines is in his clever appro­pri­a­tion of Shake­speare­an lan­guage. The film’s copi­ous pro­fan­i­ty has been replaced with more Bard-wor­thy epi­thets like “rash egg” or “var­let.” The word “ver­i­ly” pep­pers the Knave’s dia­logue as the word “like” pep­pers the Dude’s. And when Wal­ter wax­es poet­ic about the rules of bowl­ing, he does so in iambic pen­tame­ter.

To get a sense of the dif­fer­ences, com­pare the clip above from the movie with the Bard-ofied text of the same scene below.

THE KNAVE’s house. Enter THE KNAVE, car­ry­ing parcels, and BLANCHE and WOO. They fight.

BLANCHE
Whith­er the mon­ey, Lebows­ki? Faith, we are as ser­vants to Bon­nie;
promised by the lady good that thou in turn were good for’t.

WOO
Bound in hon­our, we must have our bond; cursed be our tribe
if we for­give thee.

BLANCHE
Let us soak him in the cham­ber-pot, so as to turn his head.

WOO
Aye, and see what vapouris­es; then he will see what is foul.

They insert his head into the cham­ber-pot.

BLANCHE
What dread­ful noise of waters in thine ears! Thou hast cool’d
thy head; think now upon dri­er mat­ters.

WOO
Speak now on ducats else again we’ll thee duck­est; whith­er the
mon­ey, Lebows­ki?

THE KNAVE
Faith, it awaits down there some­place; prithee let me glimpse
again.

WOO
What, thou rash egg! Thus will we drown thine excla­ma­tions.

They again insert his head into the cham­ber-pot.

BLANCHE
Tri­fle not with the fury of two des­per­ate men. Long has thy
wife sealed a bond with Jaques Tree­horn; as blood is to blood,
sure­ly thou owest to Jaques Tree­horn in rec­om­pense.

WOO
Rise, and speak wise­ly, man—but hark;
I see thy rug, as woven i’the Ori­ent,
A trea­sure from abroad. I like it not.
I’ll stain it thus; to dead­beats ever thus.

He stains the rug.

THE KNAVE
Sir, prithee nay!

BLANCHE
Now thou seest what hap­pens, Lebows­ki, when the agree­ments
of hon­ourable busi­ness stand com­pro­mised. If thou wouldst
treat mon­ey as water, flow­ing as the gen­tle rain from heav­en,
why, then thou know­est water begets water; it will be a watery
grave your rug, drown’d in the weep­ing brook. Pray remem­ber,
Lebows­ki.

THE KNAVE
Thou err’st; no man calls me Lebows­ki. Hear right­ly, man!—for
thou hast got the wrong man. I am the Knave, man; Knave in
nature as in name.

BLANCHE
Thy name is Lebows­ki. Thy wife is Bon­nie.

THE KNAVE
Zounds, man. Look at these unwor­thi­est hands; no gaudy gold
pro­fanes my lit­tle hand. I have no hon­our to con­tain the ring. I
am a bach­e­lor in a wilder­ness. Behold this place; are these the
tow­ers where one may glimpse Geof­frey, the mar­ried man? Is
this a court where mis­tress­es of com­mon sense are hid? Not for
me to hang my bugle in an invis­i­ble baldric, sir; I am loath to
take a wife, or she to take me until men be made of some oth­er
met­tle than earth. Hark, the lid of my cham­ber-pot be lift­ed!

Per­son­al­ly, I’m hop­ing that the Globe The­atre stages a ver­sion of this.

While you are wait­ing for that to hap­pen, you can see anoth­er scene from Two Gen­tle­men from Lebows­ki above where The Knave and Sir Wal­ter com­mis­er­ate about a rug, which was besmirched by a “most mis­er­able tide.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Big Lebows­ki Reimag­ined as a Clas­sic 8‑Bit Video Game

Watch the Coen Broth­ers’ TV Com­mer­cials: Swiss Cig­a­rettes, Gap Jeans, Tax­es & Clean Coal

Jonathan Crow is a Los Ange­les-based writer and film­mak­er whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hol­ly­wood Reporter, and oth­er pub­li­ca­tions. You can fol­low him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veep­to­pus, fea­tur­ing lots of pic­tures of vice pres­i­dents with octo­pus­es on their heads.  The Veep­to­pus store is here.

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