You may not have known his name, but you certainly remember his face. Red-haired, fat, aggressively ugly, John Quade generally played villains during his Hollywood career. Remember the leader of the Comancheros in “The Outlaw Josey Wales?” Remember the motorcycle gang leader in “Any Which Way But Loose?” Remember Sheriff Biggs in “Roots?” That was John Quade. He has died, I’ve just learned.

He was also a Christian convert who involved himself in somewhat radical antigovernment movements, according to his Wikipedia article.

The photo is from the live performances of Ben Hur, in stadiums, with chariot races.

Sunday was the biennial (I just realized I’ve finally figured out when to use “biennial” and when to use “semiannual.” Unless, of course, I’m mistaken) Walker Family Reunion.

This year’s big innovation was a family worship service, in the Old Stone Church which I’ve written about before here. In a way this wasn’t entirely appropriate, since the Walkers moved to Kenyon after the new building in town had been built, so we never worshiped in the O.S.C. But I was happy to cooperate anyway, because I just love doing anything in that historic pioneer building.

My brother and a cousin of my dad’s, both pastors, did the sermons. My job was to lead the service. It was a bit of a “dog’s breakfast,” as the English say, because I didn’t have the opportunity to coordinate beforehand with the people doing the music (guitar, harp and violin. The violin would have scandalized the people who built the church. To them, the fiddle was “the devil’s tool”). But we got through it, and everyone seemed to have enjoyed it. Continue reading Weekend report, pan-Scandinavian edition →

My link concerning idioms earlier today set me thinking about the evolution of language. I read, years back, a marvelous essay by C. S. Lewis’ friend Owen Barfield, in which he demonstrated the process (he was bold enough to call it “incarnation”) by which words which originally had concrete, mundane meanings gradually changed to express more abstract ideas.

For instance, a search of my etymological dictionary tells me that our word “hope” goes back to an old Germanic word which we’ve preserved in English—“hop.” One hops in order to elevate one’s body. We might hop in order reach an apple that hangs on a branch a little out of our reach. We might also hop to get a look at someone coming down a road, to see if they’re the person we’re expecting. In either case we might say, “I desire this so much that I’m hopping up and down in expectation.” Gradually, “hop” developed the auxiliary meaning of “looking forward to.” It was distinguished from the old word by adding an “e,” and we now had a very useful word for a state of mind.

One that’s always amused me was “villain.” I suspect that for most of us, the first picture we get when we hear, “villain,” is of a black-garbed, oily type with a handlebar mustache and a top hat. Snidely Whiplash, the cliché bad guy from a melodrama.

But the English word actually goes back to the Middle French villein, which means “someone who lives in a country village.”

How did it come to mean a person of evil character?

I hate to agree with Marx on anything, but it goes back to class.

In the Middle Ages, it was taken for granted that people of the upper classes were morally superior to the lower classes. Think how many of our positive descriptions come out of this system—“noble,” “gentleman,” “chivalrous.” All those words originally meant “someone of the upper classes.”

None of these people lived in villages. Villages were where peasants and serfs lived. Peasants weren’t “our kind of people.” They were shiftless, they stole things, and they lied about it when caught. So when the baron said to the esquire, “You, sir, are a villein!” he was insulting him.

As time passed and our social views became more enlightened, the class meaning of the word was lost, but the moral meaning persisted.

Just think of a modern liberal describing somebody who lives in the Midwest. You get the idea.

I may be trying to seize the moon by the teeth, but I’m not hanging noodles on your ears when I say that language idioms are more important than anybody ever thought.

This article from The Guardian discusses what is being learned about idiomatic expressions (like “kicked the bucket,” or “pulling your leg”), and how language scholars are being forced to reevaluate their assumptions on the basis of idiom studies.

Chomsky’s view of language evolution, based on his word-centric, rule-driven generative grammar model of language can’t explain some of the observable properties of idiom use. The specifics get quite technical (it is all about compositionality, what is held in memory and how sentences are constructed). However they aren’t too important, the main point is that idioms and other stock expressions aren’t peripheral language oddities – they are central to how we communicate.

Well, we never miss a chance to rag on (“ragging on” is another idiom) Noam Chomsky whenever we can.

But really, when you think of it, isn’t most of language essentially idiomatic? Except for words like “splash” or “thud,” which sound like the things they describe, most words in every language are pretty arbitrary, it seems to me. So idioms are just ordinary language, dressed up in a clown suit.

Tip: Mirabilis.

It was, honestly, one of the best birthdays I can recall.

Like so many aging people, I’ve become less and less enthusiastic about birthdays as the novelty of the first one has faded. It gets worse as you approach the big decade mileposts, and I’m within a year of another one of those now.

It’s become my custom to spend my birthdays in a self-pitying funk, contemplating the wasteland that is my personal life, and meditating on the fact that my birthday isn’t (at best) very important to many people who are still alive.

But Friday I had nice greetings in the Comments here. And even more on Facebook. There were cards. And in the morning I had a call from my brother, who arranged to meet me “halfway,” in the town of Owatonna, for dinner.

I was also contacted, entirely out of the blue, by two people who only know me through comments threads on other people’s blogs, but who are interested in my books.

It was all so nice that I realized God was trying to tell me something.

I’m trying to listen. I really am trying.

(Picture credit, Corbis.)

The BBC reports that a historian has announced that she has located an English recipe for haggis that dates to 1616. The earliest reference to the delicacy (which I’ve described in this space as “liverwurst-flavored oatmeal”) in Scotland comes from 1747. Thus, haggis was probably borrowed by the Scots from the English, she argues.

Read for yourself.

The question now is–is this good news or bad news for Scotland?

Tip: Cronaca.

And now for something completely different: an advertisement for creative critique services.

Being nice, in some circumstances, can cause more harm than good. 🙂

Today is my birthday, and I’ll be driving down to a point in southern Minnesota after work, to have dinner with my brother. So probably no posting tonight.

Dalrymple on the rights of health care, the role of government, and what tax-funded health care has done in the U.K.:

. . . the right to grant is also the right to deny. And in times of economic stringency, when the first call on public expenditure is the payment of the salaries and pensions of health-care staff, we can rely with absolute confidence on the capacity of government sophists to find good reasons for doing bad things.

. . . After 60 years of universal health care, free at the point of usage and funded by taxation, inequalities between the richest and poorest sections of the population have not been reduced. But Britain does have the dirtiest, most broken-down hospitals in Europe.

(via Frank Wilson)