Kara Jean

ACT II, SCENE II

Enter KING CLAUDIUS, QUEEN GERTRUDE, ROSENCRANTZ, GUILDENSTERN, HALL, OATES, and Attendants.

KING CLAUDIUS

Welcome, gentlemen; our urgent need did provoke
Our hasty sending.

ROSENCRANTZ

Both your majesties
Might, by the sovereign power you have of us,
Put your dread pleasures more into command
Than to entreaty.

GUILDENSTERN

But we four obey,
And here give up ourselves to be commanded.

HALL

You’ve got to know
What my head overlooks
The senses will show to my heart;
When it’s watching for lies
You can’t escape my
Private Eyes.

OATES
(silent)

(long pause)

KING CLAUDIUS
(clears throat)

That will be all.

QUEEN GERTRUDE

Ay, amen!

Exeunt CLAUDIUS, ROSENCRANTZ, GUILDENSTERN, and Attendants.

QUEEN GERTRUDE
(places her hand on HALL’s chest)

Stay, you lion-maned pair, tell me
Of your distant City of Brotherly Love,
That we may, as they say, get to know
The heft and measure of each other’s thoughts.

HALL

I can’t go for that.

OATES

No can do.

HALL

I can’t go for that, can’t go for that, can’t go for that.

Enter SAXOPHONIST; QUEEN GERTRUDE flees.

ACT II, SCENE III

Enter HAMLET, ROSENCRANTZ, GUILDENSTERN, HALL and OATES.

HAMLET

My excellent good friends! How do ye four?

ROSENCRANTZ

As the indifferent children of the earth.

GUILDENSTERN

Happy, in that we are not over-happy;
On fortune’s cap we are not the very button.

HALL

Mmmm, yeah. Mmmm, yeah, hey.

OATES
(silent)

HAMLET

There is a kind of confession in your looks
Which your modesties have not craft enough to colour:
I know the good king and queen have sent for you.

HALL

Don’t you know
That it’s wrong to take
What he’s giving you;
You can get along
If you try to be strong
But you’ll never be strong.

HAMLET
(long pause)

I… sure.
Now, make haste to the king’s chamber,
To his chamber, go!

Exeunt ROSENCRANTZ, GUILDENSTERN and HALL.

HAMLET (CONT.)

Stay, dusky Oates, for your silence doth seem
The still surface of the deepest waters, and I lack gall
To make oppression bitter for this tyrant,
This remorseless, treacherous, lecherous, kindless villain!
O, vengeance!

OATES

Vengeance, whoa-oh.

HAMLET

Prompted to my revenge by heaven and hell,
I fall a-cursing, like a very drab, a scullion!

OATES

A scullion, woo, scullion, whoa-oh.

HAMLET

Abuse me to damn me, but I’ll have grounds
More relative than this: the play’s the thing
Wherein I’ll catch the conscience—

OATES

Conscience, whoa, conscience, whoa-oh.

OATES vamps for eight more minutes; HAMLET waits awkwardly.

ACT III, SCENE II

Danish march. A flourish. Enter HAMLET, KING CLAUDIUS, QUEEN GERTRUDE, POLONIUS, ROSENCRANTZ, GUILDENSTERN, HALL, OATES, and others.

HAMLET

They are coming to the play; I must be idle:
Get you a place. Where be Ophelia? My own person,
Like the sun, doth daily rise to greet her.

HALL

I wouldn’t if I were you,
I know what she can do,
She’s deadly, man, she could really rip your world apart.
Mind over matter, ooh, the beauty is there,
But a beast is in the heart.

OATES
(silent)

HAMLET
(clears throat)

Go, bid the players make ready.

ROSENCRANTZ AND GUILDENSTERN

We will, my lord.

Exeunt ROSENCRANTZ and GUILDENSTERN. Enter OPHELIA.

OATES

Whoa-oh, here she comes.

HALL

Watch out boy, she’ll chew you up.

OATES

Whoa-oh, here she comes.

HALL

She’s a maneater.

HAMLET

Let the show begin!

Enter a dozen SAXOPHONISTS.

KING CLAUDIUS

Gods, no! Give me some light: away!

Exeunt all.

ACT IV, SCENE VII

HALL and OATES stand graveside. Enter LAERTES.

LAERTES

What news? Hast seen Ophelia this day?

HALL

Everybody’s high on consolation,
Everybody’s trying to tell me what’s right for me, yeah,
My daddy tried to bore me with a sermon,
But it’s plain to see that they can’t comfort me.

LAERTES

Come, what news, knave? Out with it!

HALL

Sorry, Charlie, for the imposition,
I think I’ve got it, got it, I’ve got the strength to carry on, yeah.
I need a drink and a quick decision,
Now it’s up to me, ooh, what will be.

LAERTES

Come, you devils! Out, out with it!

HALL

She’s gone.

OATES

She’s gone.

HALL

Oh, I, oh, I,
I’d better learn how to face it.
She’s gone.

OATES

She’s gone.

HALL

Oh, I, oh, I,
I pay the devil to replace her.
She’s gone.

Enter SAXOPHONIST, playing.

HALL

She’s gone.

OATES

She’s gone.

HALL, OATES and SAXOPHONIST continue thusly for sixteen minutes; LAERTES waits awkwardly.

ACT V, SCENE II

Enter FORTINBRAS, HORATIO, ENGLISH AMBASSADORS, and others.

PRINCE FORTINBRAS

This quarry cries on havoc. O proud death,
What feast is toward in thine eternal cell,
That thou so many princes at a shot
So bloodily hast struck?

FIRST AMBASSADOR

The sight is dismal;
And our affairs from England come too late:
The ears are senseless that should give us hearing,
To tell him his commandment is fulfill’d,
That Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and Hall and Oates are dead:
Where should we have our thanks?

HORATIO
(distraught)

Not from his mouth,
Had it the ability of life to thank you:
He never gave commandment for their death.

FIRST AMBASSADOR

The saxophonists, too, are rightly hanged.

HORATIO

Rejoice! Prepare the table for feasting!

A heavy blues-soul march. Exeunt, bearing the dead bodies.

CURTAIN.

Barbara Scholz died exactly two years ago today. Had she lived, I would have been drawing her attention to Newt Gingrich's latest YouTube video "We're Really Puzzled". Not because she would have liked this latest Gingrichian piece of Republican-oriented self-promotion (she would have hated it), but because he appears to be flirting with what she used to call strong or global or metaphysical Whorfianism, in a naive lexical variant form. (You can read Barbara's discussion of strong and weak Whorfian theses in this section of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy's article on philosophy of linguistics.) Holding up a smartphone, Gingrich says:

We're really puzzled here at Gingrich Productions. We've spent weeks trying to figure out: What do you call this? I know, you probably think it's a cell phone . . . But if it's taking pictures, it's not a cell phone."

Now, this may at first sound ridiculous; but in fact I do have an inkling of what moved Gingrich to embark on his piece of burbling.

I only recently abandoned my old cell phone (an ancient castoff from my brother, who still likes dumbphones) and acquired my first full-function smartphone. And indeed, phone doesn't seem quite the right root, not even with the smart- prefix. There is no way this thing is a telephone. It is a text-sending web-surfing FM radio alarm clock calculator calendar camera chronometer database e-reader task-manager music-player photo-editor navigator newspaper notepad stopwatch video-player voice-recorder phone. And that's really very different.

I have often tried here on Language Log, in playful or polemical ways, to critique naive lexical strong Whorfianism, which seems to take up most of the discussion of language that you find among the general public. And Gingrich's point is really grist to my mill.

Naive lexical global Whorfianism comes in two flavors. One, the world-to-word flavor, says that when a nation or tribe becomes enormously interested in some new activity or concept they feel impelled to make a new word to denote it. The other, the word-to-world flavor, says that we can't form a concept if we don't have a word to serve as the name for it. For real enthusiasts of the word-to-world flavor, the world as we perceive it is just a patchwork of concepts created by the network of words that we have.

Either way, it is alleged, you can tell what interests the members of a culture simply by examining the dictionary of their language. Nonlinguists are just entranced by this idea, as you can learn from magazine articles just about every week. Here's an absolutely typical recent example: a page devoted to a map of 19 emotions that English allegedly has no words for.

Let's take the tired old example of Schadenfreude. The idea is either (world to word) that (i) the feeling of experiencing joy at the misfortune of another person is so important for Germans that they made sure they developed a special word to name it, or (word to world) that (ii) German speakers only see Schadenfreude because they have that word, and English speakers in exactly the same contexts don't see it because they don't have the word for it (unless they manage to borrow the word Schadenfreude for it, of course, which seems to drive a coach and horses through the notion we're talking about; but set that aside for now).

Well, we English speakers have never had a word for a text-sending web-surfing FM radio alarm clock calculator calendar camera chronometer database e-reader task-manager music-player photo-editor navigator newspaper notepad stopwatch video-player voice-recorder phone. The concept was almost unimaginable as recently as about 1990. Yet the developers of these devices formed the concept quite easily, and invented products such as the iPhone.

Moreover, we all latched onto the idea of these devices quite easily without having a word to name them with. We had absolutely no noun that was remotely appropriate as the name for a text-sending web-surfing FM radio alarm clock calculator calendar camera chronometer database e-reader task-manager music-player photo-editor navigator newspaper notepad stopwatch video-player voice-recorder phone, and yet we have proved capable of learning about them, buying them, and using them everywhere all the time.

To refer to them we simply made use of a word we already had: phone. We used that as a lexical workaround for the magic things. Not that it mattered: we could have called them navigators, or web-searchers, or palm-browsers, or nanocomputers, or (borrowing from Star Trek) tricorders . . .

It doesn't matter that you don't have a word to name a certain concept (which is why Gingrich's appeal to his viewers to think one up is unnecessary). You get by. You cope.

Naive lexical global Whorfianism, in either flavor, is bunk.

Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for May 12, 2013 is:

sesquipedalian • \sess-kwuh-puh-DAIL-yun\  • adjective
1 : having many syllables : long 2 : using long words

Examples:
Jacob's editor advised him to do away with much of the sesquipedalian prose he favored and opt for simpler words that would reach readers of all ages and backgrounds.

"'You just don't see that many sesquipedalian writers like William F. Buckley Jr. in the media anymore,' said a colleague to whom I mentioned this topic." — From an article by Mary Schmich in the Chicago Tribune, December 5, 2012

Did you know?
Horace, the Roman poet known for his satire, was merely being gently ironic when he cautioned young poets against using "sesquipedalia verba"—"words a foot and a half long"—in his book Ars poetica, a collection of maxims about writing. But in the 17th century, English literary critics decided the word "sesquipedalian" could be very useful for lambasting writers using unnecessarily long words. Robert Southey used it to make two jibes at once when he wrote "the verses of [16th-century English poet] Stephen Hawes are as full of barbarous sesquipedalian Latinisms, as the prose of [the 18th-century periodical] the Rambler." The Latin prefix "sesqui-" is used in modern English to mean "one and a half times," as in "sesquicentennial" (a 150th anniversary).

fantagraphics: The Complete Crumb Comics Vol. 5, freshly reprinted: http://www.fantagraphics.com/completecrumb5

A chain of Osaka cafes sells a crazy parfait, topped with a ginormous piece of cake:

On a recent day out in Osaka, our reporter stopped by a café and ordered a truly hard-core parfait. It wasn’t that the parfait was so big, and no, it didn’t contain any shocking ingredients. What blew our minds about this parfait was its topping.

It was a slice of cake, and it was so big it wasn’t even trying to fit into the glass. Our reporter had this sweet-tasting tag-team at the Semba branch of Osaka-based café MIOR.

Who Needs a Cherry on Top? Osaka Café Crowns its Parfaits with Cake [Casey Baseel/RocketNews24]

(via Super Punch)

popebenedope:

henrytheworst: Working out

Does anyone want to hire me to make a video game?

grottu: