An Elephant of One's Own

Another poetical masterpiece. Gorgeous harmonies, set off by Astaire's unparalleled gift for making you not need a lyrics page (well, there's Sinatra of course, but I never liked Sinatra, too bland by half). I'm hoping that if I play this enough times it will start to rain. Never know.

I think it was Christmas 1980. Might have been 81 or 82 but I'm going for 1980. I was a painfully shy, painfully thin bearded Modern Languages student who smelled of Old Holborn rollies and peered at the world through a pair of habitually dusty National Health spectacles. It was the holidays so I needed a job. Through a stroke of good fortune I landed a stint as Lift Attendant at the Café Royal in London, which was about the easiest job going: you simply turned up, slipped into your uniform (jacket with copious braid and epaulettes and gold buttons, white gloves which had to be draped over shoulder), then spent the evening accompanying people up and down in the lift and doing the flunkey thing: "your floor, sir", "your floor, madam" and I forget the rest of the spiel. I knocked off around midnight, or a bit later, depending. Since at that hour there were no buses back to High Wycombe (my mum's house, where I didn't actually have a room but could kip on...

I feel the presence of three hundred and sixty US dollars. I don't know where that money is. It is everywhere and nowhere. If I am in the bottom of a deep well, it peers over the rim, high above, punctuating the circle of sky. If I am hiding in a car park, it laughs at me from the branches of a nearby tree. When I was 15, chord fingerings superimposed themselves daily on the face of a Lady Verney's girl on the bus. The girl had curly black hair and a face like a hymn book. I never found out what she was like. Perhaps she was an Ancient Egyptian wall painting and only pretended to have three dimensions. Lots of people pretend to only pretend to have depth. Had he persisted, Sir John Mandeville would have discovered and documented the twin islands of Lols and Lulz, inhabited by blind tree-people with bony, accusing fingers literally shaking from the seismic cycles of ague drawn up through their roots. The winds on these islands can tumble a drunken ha...

"Lightly sung, her song is the latch on the morning's door" Match that, suckers.

Full disclosure: I think "hate speech" laws are unnecessary, illiberal and arguably counter-productive (see below). If you support such laws, you may want to speculate that I am a covert Nazi sympathizer who probably tortures kittens in his spare time, and read what follows with this possibility firmly in mind. Why this post? Very simple. As a linguist I am forced to be aware of polysemy and of semantically diffuse terms, and as an armchair philosopher I often find myself wondering to what extent our individual and collective thought is constrained by verbal imprecision, which may be built into the language we use. The lexis of emotion, for example, is puzzlingly inadequate: many everyday mental states are impossible to reference in English without recourse to circuitous figurative language and symbolism, or to Eliot's Objective Correlative. Well, it strikes me that "hate" is an obvious example of a word whose meaning is seldom, if ever, precisely and adequatel...

In the old Spanish blog, one of my most popular posts was an interview I did with an unusually articulate grey-cheeked parakeet, in which the bird in question patiently explained what he saw as the flaws in human social organization, and recommended a social outlook more like his own, on the basis that widespread adoption, by humans, of this alternative system and philosophy (in which communal nest-building played a prominent part) would dramatically reduce intraspecific conflict, as well as freeing up valuable time and energy for more productive and interesting pursuits, such as chirping, or looking sleek and dapper. For this blog I no longer have a parakeet, so I will instead go for a Pre-Columbian Granite-faced Person (PCGFP). We have them here in Ecuador, you see, so it's convenient. ME: Making big stone faces on Easter Island wasn't a great idea, was it? PCGFP: On reflection, no. I think we got a bit carried away there. It was like one day someone said "Hey, ...