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A Serious Look at Language, with a Great Deal of Inadvertent Giggling and Smirking, Not to Mention a Hidden Agenda

July 1, 2025
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A Serious Look at Language, with a Great Deal of Inadvertent Giggling and Smirking, etc.

The popular Scrabble-esque game Words With Friends

Permits many F-words,

But will not allow at least one.

Now, DILDO is obviously sexually connotative

But Words with Friends, as demonstrated above,

Allows its use.

I confess I blushed as I used it,

The more so since my opponent had a female name,

And I doubt if I have ever met or talked to her

In real life.

I have a real-life female friend

With whom I play WWF on a daily basis,

And sometimes our use of sexual words,

Though always strategic and never gratuitous,

Seems downright flirty.

The current President of the United States,

After having dropped bombs on faraway Iran

Without Congressional approval,

Dropped an F-Bomb while knowingly in view

Of recording devices, including video,

Because two countries were not doing

What he wanted them to do.

This may result in an increased proliferation

Of F-bombs amongst schoolchildren

For whom POTUS is, if not a role model, an excuse.

There is a book that permits me to call him

And his “Big, Beautiful Bill”

A thief

And his satchel of burglar tools.

The book is my Dictionary.

blink blank blunk

December 20, 2024
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in school learning our language /we were given series of verbs arrayed/so that the first word was the verb’s present tense the second its past tense and the third the past participle

drink drank drunk swim swam swum  jump jumped jumped

because unlike mathematics with consistent rules, language is also an echo of historical impacts like conquests and fads and new inventions

.

in my dim remembrance of latin class at glendale high school taught by the brilliant and petitely beautiful maegene nelson up drifts the word for “this” which was “hic”

and in latin the nouns come in masculine feminine and neuter forms

and they also come in cases and we were taught five those being nominative genitive dative accusative and ablative

so for hic nominative case, the masculine was hic, the feminine hæc and the neuter hoc

in the genitive or “belonging to or derived from” case all three are hujus

this, students just starting to learn latin have for hundreds of years learned by rite by chanting repeatedly “hick, hike, hoke/hooyuss hooyuss hooyuss”

and if you o reader have that in your head too after fifty years/you are in your way my sister or brother or sibling

for our bond is a weird singsong jingle/and without it we would not quite be who we are

scalewing scalawag

September 25, 2024
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the dust of a moth’s or butterfly’s wing/when you look closely/is from overlapping scales/a sheddable part of the wing integument/that slightly improves wing aerodynamics

this is why moths and butterflies/are grouped under the order lepidoptera/which is greek for ‘scalewing’

now let’s jump-cut to the 1840s and the murky origin of the word ‘scalawag’

it may have been invented by some farmer in the american south/who needed a word for one of his unproductive animals

but in little time it was used to describe/disreputable men worthy of scorn

and over time took on a flavor of mischief/probably because the last syllable ‘wag’/means not only the motion of a dog’s tale/but a jokester

thus it is with language as it takes the flight of years buffeted by whim and chance

and the meanings of words flutter around/like a butterfly/with one dustless wing

fix

August 27, 2024
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fix is fuzzy fix is funny fix mix definition/a junkie’s dose a quick repair your target in position/and prefix suffix affix transfix mix the fixes more/o postfix infix crucifix a fixture with a corps

it lends itself to oxymoron try this on and check it

the finest way to fix a bad guy’s wagon is to wreck it

imageless obbligato

December 28, 2023
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Friends, I have not posted to “One with Clay, Image and Text” in December yet, and it is December 28th, and plenty has happened, including clay sculpting and poetry performance and the deaths of friends and causes for alarm and for celebration, but my storage of image is at its 30-gigabyte limit, and after months of chivvying with compressed-image switching and such the technical difficulty has become overwhelming, and I haven’t carved out a chunk of disposable time to put a real fix into place, so this will be an imageless post. It is not the first such, but I really do lean on image, so it feels imposterish, but I’ll get over it.

Here is a poem that refers to my latest efforts of working with metal leaf. The slash marks are line breaks.

leaf // some metal alloys are made into sheets / of such thinness that they can be adhered / to a surface of a working of art for decorative enhancement. this sheet-form / is known as metal leaf and it has been used / with art objects from illuminated manuscripts / to canvases to sculpture to murals / for centuries. // the paper pages of a book / may be referred to as leaves as well / though such usage may be considered archaic / but the inertia of language / has kept the phrase “turn over a new leaf” active nonetheless. // i sometimes wonder / how misunderstood walt whitman’s book title leaves of grass is nowadays. // (what a delightful archaism “nowadays” is! alas that “thenadays” and “hence-a-days” / never came to be!) // lately i have been enhancing / my ceramic birds / with metal leaf that looks like gold / but is far less costly. i have turned over / many a new leaf doing so / and hope to upgrade someday / with a solo art exhibit / called “leaves of gold.” // an archaic way to say “just as soon” is “just as lief” / but for the sake of a punchline ending / i’d just as lief leave “just as lief” alone.

If you’ve read all the way through this post, Friends, you have my sincere gratitude. I hope 2024 is your best year ever!

the bicameral brain

September 16, 2023
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funny: our brains / are these stacked piles of fatty mush / subdivided from the bottom up / into medulla oblongata / cerebellum / and cerebrum

and the cerebrum / is neatly cleft longitudinally / with a switchboard operator in the cleft / called the corpus callosum

since most poetry readers are language fans / here are some fun translations from the latin: / medulla oblongata = elongated marrow / cerebellum = little brain / cerebrum = brain = thinking organ / corpus callosum = calloused body

as for bicameral / the fatty meat of this roller-coaster ride / it means “two chambers” / and that brings us to julian jaynes

who in 1976 had published “the origin of consciousness in the breakdown of the bicameral mind” / in which he suggests that we’ve only been introspective / for the last four thousand years or so

before which we got our notions / via auditory hallucinations / sent from one half of the brain / to the other

and lately most of us have learned / to handle a brain simulcast / and not be scolded or how-about-thatted / by a spooky mysterious voice

but much more lately and thanks to an explosion / of sensory input and distractive seduction / our attention spans are going down the tubes / so let’s quote an ultradense passage from Wikipedia to sum bicamerality up:

“Bicameral mentality is non-conscious in its inability to reason and articulate about mental contents through meta-reflection, reacting without explicitly realizing and without the meta-reflective ability to give an account of why one did so.”

and then there’s ambrose bierce who said something like “man doesn’t think, he only thinks he does” which is pithily paradoxical

so i’ll leave on bierce’s sour/sweet note / hoping i have given you / something to think / and/or non-think about.

It Is What It Is? –What ISN’T??!

November 14, 2013
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Ayn Rand must be turning over in her grave. A long time ago, she proclaimed that A equals A. Now people everywhere are saying “It is what it is,” and not giving Ayn any credit. (Nor, to my knowledge, did John Prine tip his hat to Rand when he put “You are what you are, and you ain’t what you ain’t” in his lyrics to “Dear Abby.”)

“It is what it is” is a semantically empty phrase that usually (in this neck of the woods, anyway) connotes that something not-great but unchangeable exists. As Robert Heinlein was wont to say, “You can’t argue with the weather.”

So why use it for an acrostic? Well, ten years from now it will remind me of the way people were talking ten years ago. (Fifty years ago, kids my age were calling Cool stuff Boss. Cool survived; Boss died.) Also, the end-letters work out fairly well for acrosticization, and enabled a reference to Rikki-Tikki-Tavi, heroic mongoose of the Kipling oeuvre, as well as the Robert Mondavi vineyards, which I was privileged to visit in the mid-80s, enjoying their five-course meal accompanied by five different wines.

Here are the words to the triple acrostic:

It pays a Cobra to BEWARE of Rikki-Tikki-Tavi
The savage Truth would humble the most cock-eyed optimist
It’s like an alcoholic at a vineyard of Mondavi
So many vampires want to taste the blood of whom they kiss

The Half Of It/The Rest Of It/Who Gives A Chit

March 10, 2013
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Words, words, words:

The vagaries of language take a hand in giving flow
Here: some might point out Shiloh’s proven neither shi nor loh
Edition alley: pretty Grecian letters in a rho
Here: H, & it’s r e s e r v e d–it’s north of I & south of G
And other language comes in handy also, Boga ti
LORENZO was to Renaissance as Stephen is to Liv
Forefatherhood’s a metaphor to sever or to sieve
Or, more directly, strength of arms is found in FORTINBRAS
Felafel’s awful waffle-doffin’ dolphins off. The shwa
Is insignificant, yet VITAL; dealing with Old Scratch
It well behooves a farrier to bring along a batch
The senselessness of fate is vast. If words would serve to match it
The trick’s to make this mystery and then to not unlatch it

Out of respect for the last line, there will be no notes associated with this page. However, I will do my best to answer queries fully and honestly.

Vorticular Topography

February 17, 2013
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Here are the words, which are not only snaky but go behind objects:

VelociRapture’s easier to mock than to accept
Or so it seems to one who’s stunned from go go go go go
Recursion’s that divertissement that takes unextra step
To plow through tweaked [infinity] where Tiny makes it so
Inconsequentiality’s what gives the grave its sting
Conversely, knowing that they MATTERED helps most folks feel Super
Understanding Truth it pays to linger on the lingua
Leaving an Escape Clause should you need to fly the coop
A relative positioning will get us low or high
Remaining are unfathomed depths that boil down to Why

This is yet another excursion into Vorticularity. I keep coming back to the subject…inexorably…as if drawn into it…

The truth is, the stuff we’re made of exerts a force on everything else, everywhere. It’s in the equations both Newtonian and Einsteinian. Even a paper clip influences the farthest star.

My own private vortex-maker is my pencil, which is also my ambassador, my spokesmodel, and my toy. I will never be so poor as not to be able to scare up a pencil stub and an illustration substrate. If I were desperate, I’d sneak onto the nearest golf course and lift a scorecard and a pencil from the rack by the clubhouse. They’re complimentary, which is one modest earmark of Civilized Intercourse (that was an awful pun, folks).

I have posted this on a Facebook 30-day artist’s challenge, and a friend of mine commented “Wheeeee!” I’m glad she enjoyed the ride. I hope you do too.