Kitty Empire’s “MJ Lenderman review – a shooting star from the American south” begins:
A pedal steel guitar is weeping in one corner of the stage, comforted by a keyboard countermelody coming from the opposite end. Centre stage is up-and-coming guitarist of the moment MJ Lenderman, a study in slackerish nonc muels freewheels by his side, flinging lots of hair around.
I cannot for the life of me figure out what is intended by “nonc muels,” or what it might be a typo for. Mind you, it’s the Grauniad, so anything’s possible; I welcome all suggestions. (Thanks, Trevor!)
A kind of shoe? Mules?
Is “freewheels” a noun or verb here? Is “muels”?
Maybe: slacks and mules [mules are a kind of shoe].
Nunc brand mules.
Seems that “slacker” is a current fashion in attitude. Urban dictionary: “An underachiever or irritatingly laid-back character.” I’ve run across the word before – like “Gen Z”, “yuppie”, “millenial”, “coconut” and so on, it’s another one of those irritatingly vague notions that give people something to talk about who have nothing to say for themselves.
Note “slacker guitar hero” in the header. This is live documentary, not deprecation.
Others* have wondered too.
My 2¢ guess would be “nonchalance”. It kind of fits with what someone would write in this context. However I can’t see how that got garbled, by either human or robot.
* This on Bluesky, which is similar to Txitter but (so far) without the technical inconveniences and especially, without the slime.
Nunc brand mules.
Ding ding ding!
The Hattery comes through again! So it should read “Nunc mules”; it’s still unclear how the sentence works (to quote mollymooly: Is “freewheels” a noun or verb here?), but the main puzzle is resolved.
A further confusion is that Lenderman himself doesn’t appear to really have quite enough hair to actually fling around (less than the writer; less than me), suggesting to me that perhaps the “study in [whatever]” who may be the subject of “freewheels” taken as a verb is not Lenderman himself, but the more long-haired guitarist (toward the left side of the second photo, so on Lenderman’s stage-right side) who is named in one of the photo captions as Jon Samuels.* A semicolon following “Lenderman” might have been helpful if that’s the correct parse.
*Maybe the same “Jon Samuels” who has put out some solo work as “JR Samuels,” but I’m not entirely sure of that.
Not that I’m sure of what “freewheels” as a verb applied to a guitarist would mean in this context. Back when Bob Dylan was Freewheelin’, he had to my eye pretty short hair,* although maybe it was a bit shaggy by the standards of 1963 just before Those Lovable Moptops from Liverpool had revolutionized American attitudes toward male hair length. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Freewheelin%27_Bob_Dylan#/media/File:Bob_Dylan_-_The_Freewheelin'_Bob_Dylan.jpg
I think the comma after Lenderman could just as well have been a full stop. There are four roles (for lack of a better word) in the band. First it’s the weeping steel guitar. Then it’s the keyboard. The third is the guitar playing frontman, who is the only one with a name. Finally, and probably close to the guitarist, is the freewheeling slacker. I’d think it was the drummer if it weren’t such an unusual position for that.
That, or something got lost between “muels” and “freewheels”
Since the phrase “Nunc mules” is unknown to Google (except for one OCR error), and since none of the shoes shown on the site Stu linked seem to be mules, and since mules don’t seem like great footwear for rocking out, I’m not convinced that’s the solution.
mules don’t seem like great footwear for rocking out
It should not be necessary here to point out that true cool is a matter, not of footwear, but of headwear.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7b/Garibaldi_%281866%29.jpg
@David Eddyshaw: Mole had a bust of Garibaldi. I wonder if it was wearing that cap.
In this clip from the next tour date, I think it’s Jon Samuels [stage left] flinging hair and Landon George [standing stage right of Lenderman and behind] wearing mules.
In the picture I linked to, Lenderman is wearing mules, and they got a side strap like in the Nunc page Stu posted, though with a snap button instead of velcro or whatever.
(The picture is from this article. The image is clipped, so you need to open it in a separate page.)
I would respectfully direct Keith Ivey to Sugar Pie DeSanto’s 1964 classic “Slip-In Mules,” which was an “answer song” to the previous year’s “Hi-Heel Sneakers.” And for something heavier from the following decade there’s of course https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mule_(song), especially in the extended (some would say overextended) live versions.
This is what I associate with “The Mule.” (I have the original magazine version; in fact, I have the entire run of Astounding from 1944 and 1945.)
https://youtube.com/watch?v=brVbfzTHods&t=10s&pp=2AEKkAIB
The Mule plot was really Azimov doing the “but wait, there’s a plot twist”! for the sake of plot twists.
OK, I withdraw at least the last part of my comment, but those look like Birkenstocks and nothing like anything on the Nunc site linked. I don’t have an alternative theory for what “nonc” could be an error for though.
Deep Purple apparently borrowed the title of their “The Mule” from Asimov, but Asimov AFAIK never tried to interpolate a six-minute drum solo into his version(s).
Maybe they’re the sort of shoes your Cajun uncle wears (probably not)? And I think Trond is right about there being some words missing between “muels” and “freewheels”.
To quote BlöödHag (from Asimov, natch):
I’ve never seen them in person, just saw once a documentary about them. They are bigger dorks than all of us put together will ever be.
@V: On the contrary, I think Asimov realized that he had run out of good ideas for stories following the original Foundation formula. “Dead Hand” is longer and less interesting than any of the other Seldon Crisis stories. It made sense to shake things up once the original idea was getting stale.
There is a Brit slang word:
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=nonc
Urban Dictionary also offers “to muel” as being from Special Prosecutor / former FBI Dir. Mueller – to investigate for years.
Can’t really make the semantics work, though, even as a bad joke.
Looked in a different window, and google is now offering me ads for mules. Hopefully they won’t use my search for the term nonc in their ad placement algorithms.
I think Y and the Bluesky comments are on the right track: it was supposed to be “… MJ Lenderman, a study in slackerish nonchalance. Jon Samuels freewheels by his side…”, then somebody was making some trivial change when their hand slipped and cut out more characters than they intended. Happens to me all the time.
That brand NUNC seems to only make women’s shoes?
There’s Nunn Bush, who does make men’s shoes, and mules,
but that’s even further from nonc.
My first thought seeing “nonc” between ”slackerish” and “freewheels” is some kind of clipping of nonchalant.
But no one says that.
I’m going to have to muel this one over.
Oh, shoulda clicked through on Y’s link.
I now think it’s supposed to be
“a study in slackerish nonc[halance, guitarist Jon Sa]muels freewheels by his side, flinging lots of hair around.”
Yes, mule-style shoes, specifically Birkenstocks, were popular with the original slacker subculture of the 90s, which has become fashionable again thanks to the usual 20-year nostalgia cycle, but I’ve solved enough mysteries around here to know better than to fixate on the obvious red herrings.
Brett: I guess it’s more that I didn’t like the _kind_ of plot twist. Psionics was en vogue back then, I know, but it really didn’t fit with the vibe I was getting from the setting before that. It didn’t register to me how much psionics was a thing in that period before I read Null-A. And it can be done well, like in The Demolished Man.
Sounds st00pid (in German).
I think Dusty’s got it.
Yup, the mules seem to have been a shiny distraction.
Now we await the mildly abashed correction from the Graun.
Note that AFAIK “Muel[s]” is absent sheer typesetting/editing error not a known/extant clipping of “Samuel[s],” unlike the way that e.g. “Andrew” can become “Drew” as well as “Andy” or “Christopher” can become “Topher” as well as “Chris.” (Or Beth/Betty/Betsy/etc. from Elizabeth.) Not sure if there’s a phonological obstacle to clipping the front rather than the back of the full form, or it’s just that Samuel never achieved quite the level of prominence that created a felt need for an alternative to the usual Sam[my] clipping to assist in disambiguation etc.
I think Dusty’s got it.
Yeah – but it’s still weird for a sequence of words to vanish like that.
Anyway, I was grudgingly impressed by the Nunc “shoes” shown – I who have not the slightest interest in shoes, whether practical or snazzy, whether for men, women or the non-binary rest. They must look great on women who know what’s what. Towards the bottom of the page there is a photo of (the bottom half of) a (looks like, but you never know and it doesn’t matter) woman wearing some white contraptions. The bend in those legs is just right, the shoes are right ! Fashion !!
Dusty, you should consider a career in papyrology.
The mule was a red herring, which turned to a canard.
BlöödHag Sounds st00pid (in German).
Any worse than Blue Öyster Cult, or Motörhead?
(Anyway, being ridiculous was kind of the idea. And promoting literacy, apparently.)
@Y
Blöd= stupid, Blööd = very stupid
Blöd = very stupid, blööd = very st00pid indeed…
Somebody hit Shift and up, down, Home or End, and then typed a letter or hit Backspace or Delete… in short, a typo.
See also: cdesign proponentsists…
Note that AFAIK “Muel[s]” is absent sheer typesetting/editing error not a known/extant clipping of “Samuel[s],” unlike the way that e.g. “Andrew” can become “Drew” as well as “Andy” or “Christopher” can become “Topher” as well as “Chris.” (Or Beth/Betty/Betsy/etc. from Elizabeth.)
This guy says his nickname among close friends and family is “Muel”. His name is Spanish but the page is in English.
In English, not everyone would want a nickname that sounds like “mule”.
In English, not everyone would want a nickname that sounds like “mule”.
Any resemblance to Nika Mühl is a ticky-tack foul
@Jerry F.: I should have avoided phrasing my claim in such a sweeping way that it could be falsified by a single counterexample. Consider it amended with some appropriately weaselly adverb that makes it an “almost never” claim rather than a “never ever not even once” claim. Although it looks to me as if the counterexample you offer may be a fictional character?
OTOH here’s an inevitably-incomplete list of real-life notable-enough-for-wikipedia personages with the nickname “Mule,” none of whom look to have derived it from Samuel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mule_(nickname)
@J.W. Brewer: Not surprisingly, the people on that list are overwhelmingly athletes.
Anyone looking for a band name should grab The Nonc Muels before someone else does.
To me, Topher is a New rather than an Established hypocoristic. The first I noticed was Topher Grace (b.1978) in the 1990s, who addressed the unusualness of his name. Google Books antedates the name to Mark Rothko’s son (b. 1963) and a skiier at Sugarloaf, Maine (b. c. 1960).
OTOH Miah is an Established Irish hypocoristic of Jeremiah; much less common than Jerry, but a useful variant option in the days when Jeremiah was a common Englishing of Diarmaid.
@mollymooly: I knew a few American kids my own age growing up who went by Topher (I’m two years younger that Topher Rothko and thus considerably older than Topher Grace), but of course I may have been unaware that it was a very new thing because I had nothing I was comparing it to. It may well have been the case that I never heard anyone my age talking about e.g. their 1941-born Uncle Topher, but I wasn’t doing my fieldwork rigorously enough back then to notice that and draw the appropriate inference.
Wikipedia says that this 1955-born Filipino fellow was known as Topher: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Ricketts
I’ve never encountered Miah for Jeremiah, but this is the sort of thing where you needn’t assume that various different Anglophone societies will move in lockstep. Jerrys may have been extra-common in the Irish context since beyond Jeramiah-for-Diarmaid you would have a fair number (if Irish-American naming patterns are a good proxy, which of course they may not be) of Geralds and Gerards as well. I don’t know if Jerome is used with any frequency by Irish parents, but if so that’s yet another source. I was (free associating here) saddened earlier this month by the death of an old friend and law school classmate (Honduras-born, Chicago-raised) named Gerardo, whom one of our professors insisted on calling Geraldo. (He never went by Jerry or any other hypocoristic.)
There are a few Jeromes in Ireland, some of whom go by Jerry (I’ve never met a Rome or Romy). Gera[rl]ds are more common, but would usually become Gerry…
…or Ger, much commoner than
(a) Irish Jeremiah>Jer (reason if any unknown to me)
(b) US Gera[rl]d>[GJ]er (initial syllable stress)
@J.W.B.:
I thought you carefully worded your remark on “Muel” so that no number of counter-examples would refute it. I see that my suggestion was in a somewhat more problematic ontological category than I thought. Here’s a real example; for confirmation see the first Experience item here.
@mollymooly:
Over here, “Gerard” is accented on the second syllable but “Gerald” on the first, as far as I know. My full name is Gerald, and some people have a lot of trouble with the spelling of my nickname.
My AmEng eye is puzzled by “Gerry,” because on the one hand per the usual orthographic rules for distinguishing “hard g” from “soft g” it ought to be homophonous with “Jerry” (and not with “Gary”), but on the other hand its presumably deliberate visual differentiation from “Jerry” carries some implicature that maybe it’s more than a mere spelling variant and I thus shouldn’t be so confident I know what pronunciation is intended. But had I been raised in Ireland I would no doubt have encountered more instances of “Gerry” and thus presumably taken it all in stride.
To be fair, the stats show that “Gerald” is about 5-6x more common in the U.S. in my birth cohort than Gerard, and Gerard is I think more ethnoreligiously marked. (E.g., Gerard Friedman would be more than 5-6x more improbable than a Gerald Friedman, but it was unremarkable in a prior generation for the Quebecois-American Jean-Louis “Jack” Kerouac to have had a brother named Gerard.) Indeed, at one point coming on 40 years ago I spent a lot of time in cool-underground-rock-music circles where if you just said “Gerard” without further specification you were understood (at least given a pretty minimal bit of relevant context to prime the listener) to mean https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerard_Cosloy, which is obviously an easier thing to have happen with a rarer name.
The American tendency to want to pronounce “Gerry” with a soft < g > is pretty strong. Elbridge Gerry, the fifth vice president, pronounced his name with a hard / g /. However, gerrymandering, which is named after him, has soft / dʒ /.
@J.W.:
Your AmEng eye is very unusual. I assure you that when the choice is between “Jerry” and “Gerry”, the default assumption is that the first letter matches the first letter of the full name. In vain do I point to Jerry Ford, Jerry Springer, the Viscount St. George, and more—in vain, I tell you!
[Insert a rant here about “jerry-rigged”.]
But JWB is talking about “Gerry,” not “Jerry.” I’m pretty sure he’s not puzzled by the latter.
@languagehat: I think Jerry Friedman’s point is that some people have a hard time comprehending that his “Jerry” is short for “Gerald.”
@Jerry Friedman: Although jerry built is typically pejorative, the older jury rigged from which it (partially?) derives was originally not. It simply referred to a temporary rigging or mast repair on a sailing vessel, where limited materials might be available. The etymology is probably from French jour, “day,” indicating the temporary nature of the work.
It may have been helpful for me that I was alive-but-young during the administration of President Ford and still having my general sense of linguistic patterns being formed. And he was commonly referred to as both Jerry and Gerald R., depending on the register appropriate for the context, so the correspondence between the two was hammered home to me. By contrast, I was today years old when I learned that the late Jerry Springer was formally a Gerald rather than a Jerome or some other option. Presumably there have been fewer-to-no occasions when anyone referenced Springer in such a formal register that “Jerry” would have been inappropriate. OTOH, speaking of the Ford presidency, I don’t remember offhand w/o googling the legal name of his would-be assassin Squeaky Fromme even though it must have been in the news since criminal defendants are typically referred to in court filings by their full legal names.
ETA: And of course the presidency may have been a more formal-register thing back then than it may have become more recently. It was during the 1976 campaign that the camel’s nose entered the tent as Pres. Ford’s challenger was so committed to hypocoristic branding that his campaign lobbied the relevant electoral authorities around the country state-by-state to list him on the actual ballot as “Jimmy Carter” rather than e.g. “James E. Carter, Jr.” IIRC they succeeded almost everywhere but not quite literally everywhere.
French jour is just one of various unsupported guesses on “jury-rig”; the others are that it’s a clipping of “injury”, or from Old French ajurie ‘help’.
Wordorigins on jerry-built and jury-rig. (In case you’re wondering, “jerry-built” goes back to the mid-19th century, while “Jerry”=“German” originated in World War I.)
Wordhistories on the early history of “jerry-built” in 1830s Liverpool. The claim that it comes from a builder called Jerry Brothers “has on investigation not been confirmed”, said the OED in 1900.
@Hat: J.W. said that “Gerry” suggested a different pronunciation to him, so I tried to respond that in my experience the pronunciation is identical and people expect the spelling to do nothing more than reflect the spelling of the full name. That led me to the very important topic of “Jerry” as a nickname for names starting with “G”, as Brett mentioned.
To be clearer, “Gerry” just confuses me. Who cares about the underlying spelling of the full name? We have “Tom” from “Thomas” and “Tony” from “Anthony,” with “Thom” as a quite rare variant and “Thony” being something I can’t recall seeing although I’m not claiming there are zero instances of it. And “Stephen” goes to “Steve,” etc. etc.
Because reflecting-spelling-of-underlying-name doesn’t strike me as an adequate motivation for “Gerry,”* I am left wondering what other distinction from “Jerry” is intended.
*The simplest solution, of course, may be that actual users of “Gerry” do find that an adequate motivation because they weigh things differently than I do. But I do impressionistically think “Gerry” is proportionately rarer in the U.S. than in Ireland and perhaps the UK. My impression could be wrong, of course, although it’s difficult to be more rigorous because it’s usually harder to get hard statistical data on nicknames than on formal given names.
@J.W. Brewer: Jerry Springer, like Jerry Ford, was a politician. I think he mostly went by the nickname even when he was mayor of Cincinnati, although there must have been formal contexts in which his full name was used. I don’t know what name was printed on the personal check he later got caught using to pay a prostitute.
@Brett: I think “jury-rig” and “jerry-rig” are often somewhat pejorative, It might almost be interesting to compare the valence, I think it’s called, of uses of “jury-rig” and “jerry-rig”. I suspect the latter is more pejorative because of the influence of “jerry-built”.
When I rule the Anglosphere, you can expect “jerry-rig” to disappear before “jerry-build” because “jerry-build” is probably etymologically correct.
@j.W. Brewer: Here are some ngram results confirming your impressions on these nicknames in the U.S. and Great Britain (not Ireland). I didn’t check “Gez” or “Jez”.
Tom and Gary: Follow Your Heart.
@Jerry Friedman: I agree that jury rig can be sonewhat pejorative in current usage. It would be interesting to trace the connotations of jury rigged, jerry built, and jerry rigged over time.
“jerry-build” is probably etymologically correct
Nobody knows that. In fact, one theory (mentioned by Brett and in the Wordhistories post that I linked) is that “jerry-built” is itself derived from “jury-rigged”, considering that “jury-rigged” is nautical in origin, and “jerry-built” comes from the maritime city of Liverpool.
I do impressionistically think “Gerry” is proportionately rarer in the U.S. than in Ireland and perhaps the UK.
I have the same impression; the first Gerry I ever heard of was Gerry Rafferty, who was born in Scotland to an Irish-born father. (That’s how I know the pronunciation, and I’m a little surprised the same wasn’t true for JWB.)
According to Wikipedia, the name Gerald “was in regular use during the Middle Ages but declined after 1300 in England. It remained a common name in Ireland, where it was a common name among the powerful FitzGerald dynasty. The name was revived in the Anglosphere in the 19th century by writers of historical novels…”
A commenter at Wordhistories guesses that “Jerry” was thought of as an Irish name by the English in the 1830s, and thus “jerry-built” came from anti-Irish attitudes.
thus “jerry-built” came from anti-Irish attitudes
I assume the builder was called Jeremiah rather than Gerald, partly from the spelling but most as Gerald was less common that Jeremiah/Diarmuid among the labouring classes.
Jerrycan comes from Jerry as a nickname for a German soldier. I, being Irish, naturally would have called the soldier Gerry.
just dropping in to mention samuel r. delany’s anagrammatic muels aranlyde, who appears (onstage or off) in one form in Empire Star, another in Babel-17, and a possibly overlapping other in The Mad Man.
@JWB: i, at least, only know lynette fromme’s non-nick name from my abidling love for sondheim’s Assassins. now that she and john hinckley jr. are both out of jail, i live in hope of the two recording “Unworthy of Your Love” (i fear, however, that hinckley’s aims for his musical career may diverge meaningfully from mine).
@rozele: So you’re telling me I read and reread Empire Star without noticing that “Muels Aranlyde” was an anagram? Hmph. Maybe I should read Babel-17, though.
For some incomprehensible reason, Wikipedia has no “list of writers who have put anagrams of their names in their writing”.
i only know myself because i was told (i can’t remember by who, but probably in the introduction to some reissue or other). i quite like Babel-17, as i know i’ve said here a few times before – enjoy!
and that list would be excellent to have!
Babel-17 is one of those books that it feels like I should like more than I do. It is a weird mixture. I started rereading it a few months ago, and while it’s still open on my phone, I stopped at the point where Delany makes clear he doesn’t know physics.
Brett: you keep saying that “Delany does not know physics”. In Nova he has the crew crash into a spiral nebula _out of a FTL jump_. In the ’60 it was known spiral nebulae were galaxies. And, arguably, FTL does not work.
I wonder if SF would be a bit more sober today if nebula had been translated – as fog.
The star cruiser had taken a wrong turn on the Milky Way and now was lost in the Andromeda Fog.
I think that for me, Delaney is a lot like van Vogt. I can enjoy one their books once, but if I try to reread it, the silliness of the science obtrudes too much. (Maybe this means there is one book by Delaney that I can reread, like The Voyage of the Space Beagle, but I haven’t found it yet.)
If an author’s apparently not knowing physics stopped me from reading sf, I wouldn’t read much sf.
My problem with Van Vogt is that everything is silly (though I haven’t read The Voyage of the Space Beagle).
List of writers who use anagrams of their names:
Vladimir Nabokov (Vivian Darkbloom/Bloodmark, Adam von Librikov)
Robert A. Heinlein (Neil O’Heret Brain and anagrams for his pseudonyms)
Samuel R. Delany (Muels Aranlyde)
Neil Gaiman (Ilen, a Magian, in his afterword to one of Steven Brust’s Viscount of Adrilankha books)
I could add some from https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/SignificantAnagram/Literature
Edward Gorey might have the record.
Van Vogt is at his best when writing about aliens. When the weirdness is supplied by extraterrestrials, rather than a gross misunderstanding of what Cepheid variables are, it’s much less of a distraction.
List of writers who use anagrams of their names:
Johannes Kepler: Kleopas Herennius; Phalaris von Nee-sek; Helenor Kapuensis; Raspinus Enckeleo; Noe Alkuin, Praeses (Kanones Pueriles, ed. Frisch, Astronomi Opera Omnia 4, pp. 483, 485, 504)
Wow.
Edit: more wow. Lots of tiny linguistic gems in there.
None of those a true anagram, though.
All of them true anagrams of either IOANNES KEPLERVS or IOHANNES KEPLERVS.
They seem to be anagrams of Iohannes Keplerus. Edit: Gazumped by David Marjanović.
@Jerry Friedman: I don’t think that’s what that Britishism means.
@David M. @Jerry F.: Duh. I just counted letters.
But no, not quite all. Granting I=J and U=V, I get
Kleopas Herennius Iohannes Keplerus
Phalaris von Nee-sek Iohannes Keplaervs (?)
Helenor Kapuensis Iohannes Keplerus
Raspinus Enckeleo Iocannes Keplerus
Noe Alkuin, Praeses Ioannes Keplaerus
(Kanones Pueriles) (Ioannes Keplerus)
I wondered if there’s some typo in Raspinus Enckeleo.
Maybe Enkheleo (ἐγχελεών eel trap? ἐν χελείῳ in a tortoise shell?)
I did too, but my Greek wasn’t up to making suggestions.
All threads are one.
Encheleo would get us to Iohannes Ceplerus… which would be wrong as contemporary Latin, but still work if sent through Greek and back.
There’s a blog about the history of science by Thony C[hristie].
https://thonyc.wordpress.com/
Lots of detail, if you’re interested in Ioannes Keplerus and his predecessors and contemporaries and so on.
@Brett (a little late): I admit my use of “gazumped” was a bit time-reversed, but “gazumping” is making a better offer (better financially if not morally), and David’s answer was better than mine. Also, “ninja’d” isn’t exactly what ninjas supposedly do, either.
Speaking of Samuel Delany and various word games in his works: Ever since I started downloading academic published works, I have wondered if “jhup”, which is a swear word in “Empire Star”, is simply a reference to John Hopkins University Press.
Hm.
Johns Hopkins, himself named after some Mr. Johns.