Grand Funk Railroad

GRAND FUNK RAILROAD (AKA Grand Funk and GFR) is an American hard rock band popular during the 1970s. They were constantly touring and played many large arenas worldwide. They were very popular but didn't receive equivalent critical acclaim.

The band's name is a play on the Grand Trunk Western Railroad, which is a railroad line that runs through Flint, Michigan, the hometown of the band members.

Grand Funk Railroad was formed as a trio in 1969 by Mark Farner (guitar, keyboards, harmonica, vocals) and Don Brewer (drums, vocals), and Mel Schacher (bass). Brewer had been in the band Terry Knight and the Pack, and Knight became the band's manager and suggested the band's name.

They disbanded in the 1980s but were reformed with replacement members and had "The American Band Tour 2019 - Celebrating 50 Years of Funk" starting in January 2019.

       

walled gardens

There are literal walled gardens in the world. These gardens are surrounded by walls to keep out animals, unwanted human visitors and in some places, the walls shelter the garden from wind and frost. They can also be decorative and there may be smaller walls within the walled perimeter. 

A later development was the walled or gated community. One of the primary purposes of a gated community is to offer its residents safety. Some were built near areas that were considered unsafe. Besides having walls, a gated community increases safety by having membership, guards and by eliminating through traffic.

These days if you hear the term there is a good chance that it is a figurative walled garden that is a closed platform or closed technology ecosystem. Since we borrowed the term "ecosystem" from nature and have since created manmade ecosystems (or damaged others), it makes sense that we turn botanical garden ecosystems into technology ecosystems.

A good example of such an ecosystem is Apple’s hardware, software and services which work harmoniously together and do not work with other hardware, software and services. Apple users tend to remain, not always by choice, in their walled garden. This has also led to antitrust scrutiny (note the Epic vs. Apple case. Google, Facebook and others would like to keep you in their walled gardens.

Coleslaw

My wife made coleslaw this past weekend for a barbecue and I asked some guests why it is called coleslaw. No one knew. One person said it's cold slaw and it means cold salad. Wrong and right.

coleslaw Wikimedia CC BY 3.0, Link

Coleslaw is the correct spelling for the cabbage-based side salad often served alongside barbecue. It is sometimes mistaken as "cold slaw" as it is usually served cold. The word derives from the Dutch koolsla, with cole referring to cole crops such as cabbage.

purple cabbage slaw, Wikimedia CC BY 3.0, Link

Coleslaw's origin can be traced back as far as the ancient Romans, who served a dish of cabbage, vinegar, eggs and spices. The version Americans generally eat today comes from the Dutch who founded New York state. They grew cabbage around the Hudson River that they used in a shredded cabbage salad they called koosla. Kooll means cabbage and sla is salad

tsundoku, sudoku and otaku

A loanword (also loan word or loan-word) is a word adopted from one language (the donor language) and incorporated into another language without translation.

You can probably guess from the title of this article that I'm writing about three Japanese loanwords today. There are a good number of Japanese loanwords in English: karaoke, karate, tsunami, typhoon, teriyaki, sake, sushi, manga, anime, tofu, emoji, origami, shiatsu, ramen, and wasabi make up just a partial list.

Tsundoku is a new loanword for me. It's one of those words that has a larger meaning - almost a lifestyle. It is used to mean acquiring reading materials but letting them pile up in your home without reading them. Related words are tsunde-oku meaning to pile things up ready for later and then leave them, and dokusho which means reading books. Tsundoku also seems to refer to those books ready for reading later when they are on a bookshelf or nightstand. As currently written, the word combines the characters for "pile up" (積) and the character for "read" (読) - a "reading pile."

The word dates back to the Meiji era (1868-1912) and appeared when someone, perhaps jokingly, took out that oku from tsunde oku and substituted doku (to read). Tsunde doku would be difficult to pronounce, so it was compressed into tsundoku.

I initially confused tsundoku with Sudoku, that logic-based number-placement puzzle that my wife plays every morning as a kind of meditation. No connection between the two words other than some letters. These puzzles are quite old, but for Westerners, they became familiar in the 19th century, and then in the late 1970s when they first appeared for Americans in puzzle books. At that time they were known as Number Place puzzles. In 1986, the Japanese puzzle company Nikoli published them under the name Sudoku, meaning "single number."

Otaku literally means “house" but in English and Japanese, the word is used to describe someone who spends a lot of their free time at home. In the original Japanese usage that meant home playing video games, reading manga and watching anime. In either language, this person has little or no interest in more social or outdoor activities. It isn't always considered a bad word to have attached to you since fans of anime and manga use it to describe others with similar interests.

Why a fount but not a font of wisdom?

I saw someone post on a blog about a teacher who had been for him a "font of wisdom" in his high school days. "Font" looked wrong to me. Was it supposed to be a "fount of wisdom?" 

I had to look it up. 

A "font" these days is most commonly used to refer to a typeface, such as a serif, sans serif, or Helvetica or Times New Roman. That origin comes from the late 16th century from French fonte, from fondre "to melt" in reference to the process of casting or founding the actual pieces of type once used in printing. 

This didn't seem to play any role in the wisdom expression. 

Font can also mean a structure in a church that contains water for baptism ceremonies. The water in a baptismal font is still, but the water in a fountain spurts with abundance. So, fount (a fountain shortening similar to mount for mountain) is more symbolically fitting for the sense of someone or something putting forth an abundance of knowledge or wisdom.

A fount of knowledge is used to something, but more likely someone, who contains all the answers or information.  

 Saying font for fount might also be considered a mondegreen - that's the topic another post.

Mondegreens

 

A mondegreen is a mishearing or misinterpretation of a phrase in a way that gives it a new meaning. They most often are created when listening to a poem or a song. If the listener mishears a word or phrase and substitutes words that sound similar and make some kind of sense, a mondegreen is created.

The word's origin goes back to 195a4 and was coined by American writer Sylvia Wright. She said that when she based it on a childhood incident. Her mother was reading her a poem called "The Bonny Earl of Murray."  she had misheard the lyric "" in as "Lady Mondegreen".[4]

Ye Highlands and ye Lowlands,
Oh, where hae ye been?
They hae slain the Earl o' Moray,
and layd him on the green.

Sylvia heard "and layd him on the green" as "and Lady Mondegreen."

The thing is that with a good mondegreen the misheard words should make a kind of sense in the context, if not a bit out of place. Sylvia's mishearing does make sense as "They have slain the Earl of Moray and Lady Mondegreen."

She didn't know a word to describe the situation so she created one. "Mondegreen" was included in the 2000 edition of the Random House Webster's College Dictionary, and in the Oxford English Dictionary in 2002. Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary added the word in 2008.

I only heard the word recently, but I've been hearing examples of mondegreens my entire life. They are particularly common in song lyrics. 

A website full of misheard lyrics is kissthisguy.com (also a book -see bottom of post). If that sounds like an odd name for the website, here's the explanation. It seems that more than a few people have misheard a line in the song "Purple Haze" by The Jimi Hendrix Experience. "'Scuse me while I kiss the sky" became "Scuse me while I kiss this guy." Jimi's psychedelic line becomes one making him bisexual.

Some others:

• From the first line of the national anthem of the United States - "O say can you see, by the dawn's early light" becomes "Jose, can you see, by the dawn's early light."
• "Bad Moon Rising" by Creedence Clearwater Revival - "There's a bathroom on the right" is actually "There's a bad moon on the rise."
• From the Beatles song "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" someone seems to have misheard "The girl with kaleidoscope eyes" as "The girl with colitis goes by."
• "The ants are my friends / They're blowin' in the wind" instead of Bob Dylan's "The answer my friend/Is blowing' in the wind." 
• "Sweet dreams are made of cheese" is the misheard in the Eurythmics "Sweet dreams are made of this." 
• Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit" has in its garbled lyrics the line "here we are now, entertain us" which has been misheard as "here we are now, in containers", "here we are now, hot potatoes" and other things.
• Two mondegreens that my mother created: She misheard Barry Manilow's title/lyric "Looks like we made it" as "Looks like tomatoes."  She also heard on the radio in my car Paul Young's "Every Time You Go Away" and told me it was a stupid song because she heard the chorus not as "Every time you go away you take a piece of me with you," but as "Every time you go away you take a piece of meat with you." She was right. That is stupid.

Some examples really don't make much sense, but one that does comes from "Blinded by the Light" by Bruce Springsteen. He has the line "cut loose like a deuce" was misheard and recorded by Manfred Mann's Earth Band as "revved up like a deuce." Both the proper lyric and the mondegreen make sense as references to a deuce coupé, the 1932 Ford coupé that was popular with hot rodders. But there are more than 30 other mishearings from that song recorded on that website.

Mondegreens are not only in poems and songs. The book A Monk Swimming by Malachy McCourt got its title from a childhood mishearing of a phrase from the Catholic rosary prayer, the "Hail Mary."  From "Blessed art thou among women" is the misheard and slightly logical "a monk swimmin'"

Another book title taken from a mondegreen is Olive, the Other Reindeer, a children's book by Vivian Walsh. The title is a mondegreen of the line, "all of the other reindeer" in the song "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer." 

The film The Santa Clause plays with the idea of a misheard line. A child hearing the poem "A Visit from St. Nicholas ("Twas the Night Before Christmas") hears the line "Out by the roof there arose such a clatter" as "Out by the roof there's a Rose Suchak ladder" which doesn't any sense. But in the film, Santa uses a ladder to climb to a chimney and it has the label Rose Suchak Ladders. That means the mondegreen is the lyric we think is the right one since the child's version is actually correct. 

Ampersand

The ampersand or &  is a curious thing in our language that dates back to the 1st century A.D.

Originally, it was a ligature of the letters E and T. What's a ligature? In writing and typography, a ligature occurs where two or more graphemes are joined as a single glyph. Ligatures usually replace consecutive characters sharing common components.

Suffice it to say, the ampersand is the most common one we use in English.

"Et" is Latin for "and" - as in et cetera - which is such a mouthful that we feel the need to shorten it to etc. It can actually be further shortened as &c. We are no language lazy.

I suppose if you look closely at the modern ampersand, you might still see the E and T hiding in there depending on the font. 

It is so commonly used that it is now considered more of a logogram than a ligature.

Is it a letter? No.

The dollar sign $ is another possible ligature/logogram. One theory is that it came from a ligature used for "pesos" and the Spanish peseta, but that's confiremed.

The word ampersand itself is a conflation of the phrase "and per se and." I have seen that explained as meaning "and [the symbol which] by itself [is] and" which makes no sense to me. 

The ampersand is something I have never been able to make with a pen. Mine always looked like little pretzels. Start at the bottom right corner, make a line up and to the left or reverse a 3 with a dash through it, from top to bottom twice. 

I just hit Shift-7. 

All this pondering on ampersands came from a curious little book by a wonderfully odd author, Craig Conley, which is logically titled Ampersand.