Friday, April 22, 2005
Random notes
One thing I've learned as I grow older: Scrooge's Theorem is emphatically true. Excess, ah, methane definitely generates interesting and well-plotted dreams.
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Back in the heyday of the USSR, Radio Moscow made a habit of switching to dark Russian classical music, uninterrupted by speech, when the ruling class was in turmoil from a death or internal coup. This didn't give the listener exact information about the nature of the trouble, but it did tell you that something was wrong. More recently, I've noticed the same 'Borodin Effect' in our own Party media. During the Clinton years, Nightline would sometimes go back 25 years to cover Nixon tapes; sure enough, the next day a new revelation of Clinton's perfidy would come out. It's nice to have such a predictable compass point, even if it doesn't give you direct information. (Of course, a Borodin indication is only useful when you have alternative sources of news; otherwise it alerts you that something is wrong, and that's as far as you can go!)
Thinking about this in connection with the Tom DeLay feeding frenzy, which looks like a pre-emptive Borodin for the new revelations about investigations of Clinton foreign fund-raising.
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Sometimes a parody will become so entrenched in common discourse that the original effectively disappears. Often quoted on this day of the year (Lenin's Birthday) is Pogo's statement "We have met the enemy, and he is us." The original was Admiral Perry's "We have met the enemy, and he is ours", which now sounds like a typo. Another is the old song "Hail, hail, the gang's all here; what the hell do we care?" I have no memory of the original!
Is there a literary name for this phenomenon? It's similar, but not quite the same, as a retronym (silent movie, acoustic guitar, Classic Coke, film camera) in which the new form becomes the default or unmarked noun, requiring a marker on the original.
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Good parody: Catholic World News shows us how the NYTimes would have reported a somewhat earlier choice of religious leader....
http://www.cwnews.com/offtherecord/offtherecord.cfm?task=singledisplay&recnum=2663 ¶ 11:35 AM
One thing I've learned as I grow older: Scrooge's Theorem is emphatically true. Excess, ah, methane definitely generates interesting and well-plotted dreams.
------
Back in the heyday of the USSR, Radio Moscow made a habit of switching to dark Russian classical music, uninterrupted by speech, when the ruling class was in turmoil from a death or internal coup. This didn't give the listener exact information about the nature of the trouble, but it did tell you that something was wrong. More recently, I've noticed the same 'Borodin Effect' in our own Party media. During the Clinton years, Nightline would sometimes go back 25 years to cover Nixon tapes; sure enough, the next day a new revelation of Clinton's perfidy would come out. It's nice to have such a predictable compass point, even if it doesn't give you direct information. (Of course, a Borodin indication is only useful when you have alternative sources of news; otherwise it alerts you that something is wrong, and that's as far as you can go!)
Thinking about this in connection with the Tom DeLay feeding frenzy, which looks like a pre-emptive Borodin for the new revelations about investigations of Clinton foreign fund-raising.
------
Sometimes a parody will become so entrenched in common discourse that the original effectively disappears. Often quoted on this day of the year (Lenin's Birthday) is Pogo's statement "We have met the enemy, and he is us." The original was Admiral Perry's "We have met the enemy, and he is ours", which now sounds like a typo. Another is the old song "Hail, hail, the gang's all here; what the hell do we care?" I have no memory of the original!
Is there a literary name for this phenomenon? It's similar, but not quite the same, as a retronym (silent movie, acoustic guitar, Classic Coke, film camera) in which the new form becomes the default or unmarked noun, requiring a marker on the original.
-----
Good parody: Catholic World News shows us how the NYTimes would have reported a somewhat earlier choice of religious leader....
http://www.cwnews.com/offtherecord/offtherecord.cfm?task=singledisplay&recnum=2663 ¶ 11:35 AM
