I was reading Sarah Wildman’s moving NY Times account (archived) of her daughter’s struggle with liver cancer when I was struck by the following passage:
It is not the first time we have been in what rabbis call the meitzar, the biblical narrow place — a place of compression. The meitzar is an expression of all the things that can make life impossibly hard. It appears in Psalm 118: From the narrow place I called to God, the psalm says; I was answered, it continues, from expansiveness. We are constantly seeking moments of that expansiveness, to take a deeper breath.
I thought “From the narrow place I called to God” is powerful and memorable; why don’t I remember it?” Turns out that’s because the major English translations render the line very differently: the King James has “I called upon the LORD in distress,” and most others follow it, either using “distress” or synonyms like “out of trouble” or “out of affliction” (or, in the pathetic-sounding Contemporary English Version, “When I was really hurting”). The Russian Synodal Translation, however, has “Из тесноты” [from narrowness/tightness]. I decided to see if I could find scholarly discussion of the line, and Google Books turned up Harry S. May’s “Psalm 118: The Song of the Citadel,” in Jacob Neusner (ed.), Religions in Antiquity: Essays in Memory of Erwin Ramsdell Goodenough (Wipf & Stock, 2004), pp. 97 ff., which says:
Traditionally, Verse 5 has been translated with slight variations as follows:
“From the Depth I call unto Thee, Oh Lord.
The Lord answered me and set me free.”The Septuagint, finds as an equivalent to “metsar”, ’ek tlīpseos έκ θλιψεως – מֵצַר, to mean “out of anguish.” Plato and Strabo use the phrase syntlibo or tlipsis (συνθλιβω – θλιψις) as pressing together.¹) This explains why Luther and later German commentators interpret metsar as Angst, Bedrückung or Drangsal.²) A further poetic version then suggests “innere Tiefe,” the depth of man’s heart or agony.³) Because of this chain of subtle changes from one language to the next and the implied psychological inferences that pressure and pain, Angst and Bedrückung, are identical with metsar, some remarkable interpretations of the message of the Psalm have been presented […].
However, the Hebraic OT material reveals that metsar comes from the language of actual warfare, suggesting a siege, a fortification, a citadel. Etymologically, the old Semitic root tsar takes on the meaning of narrow or hard, like a stone flint. The verb “tsarar” takes on the meaning of restricted, cramped. As a noun it is used for rivalry.¹) From this physical expression of matter to a higher psychological plain may be only one step, as we see in the various translations of the exegetes. But originally the term tsar is bound to a strictly physical description of a situation, and I maintain that the psychological translation and transformations are not justified.
(I note with amusement the rendering of Greek θ as “t” rather than “th,” presumably a relic of Teutonic origin.) Now, I like my poetic images to be based in the physical world, and thus greatly prefer “from the narrow place” to “in distress” or the like, but I am not remotely competent to judge which is a better equivalent of the Hebrew, so I turn (as usual) to the assembled Hatters. Thoughts?
i don’t think i’ve ever encountered “meitzar” before, but מצרים “mitsraym/mitsraim” is what’s conventionally translated as “egypt” in the hagadda (and often glossed as “the narrow place”* in contemporary progessive versions) and צרה is “trouble, distress, affliction” in yiddish (better known in plural: “tsores/tsuris”. so i took a look in Jastrow to see what the traditional view of the relationship is, and found more interesting things than i expected – here’s a summary:
– described as from צרר [surround, wrap, tie up], and ultimately, via צר [narrow; anguish, trouble; opponent, adversary], from צור [tie, wrap; form, shape; besiege]:
מצר – to twist, make a rope.
מצר – to define the boundaries.
מצר, מיצר – narrows, pass; distress; narrow path marking the boundary between fields, balk, ridge; boundary.
מצרא, מצר – a rope (made out of rushes), or by extension an enslaved person; the rope of a rope-bridge.
– no etymology given:
מצריא, מצרי, מצרא, מצראה – egyptian; an egyptian.
מצרים – egypt
all of which looks interestingly entangled to me! i could see a connection between rope and the nile valley, depending on how the “made from rushes” part is visible in the texts, and on whether it was seen regionally as a source of enslaved labor (or as notably committed to slavery)**. and it’s always been hard for me not to hear “masr / misr” (cairo, by extension egypt) in “mitsraim”.
.
* explained either as metaphor (the place of captivity) or as a reference to the geography of the nile river valley.
** which would tempt me to start glossing “mitsraim” as “slavonia”.
Supposedly miṣr comes from the Akkadian word for ‘frontier’.
And from it comes Misirlou ‘the Egyptian’, and surf music.
In a tight spot I called upon the Lord seems to offer both interpretations in English.
I’m surprised to learn Mitzraim and Arabic Masry might not be cognates, something I’d assumed when I ran into al Masry al Youm during the revolution.
The fertile area of Egypt is certainly narrow. I’d be more tempted to interpret it as the twin narrows rather than the twin ropes. (It’s a dual, isn’t it.)
Twin frontiers doesn’t seem apt to me from an Akkadian perspective, or any levantine perspective really. But maybe the root had already crystallized to mean Egypt, and then as Asiatics (is it only dual in Hebrew?) became aware of upper and lower Egypt, or a divided then reunited kingdom, the dual came in.
If you want to somewhat reproduce the ambiguity in English, how about “from a tight spot”?
Biblical ṣar and its derivatives are a large and entangled thicket of meanings. Here’s a good review (missing its first page).
how about “from a tight spot”?
To my English ear, that has a feel of Bertie Wooster. ‘A spot of bother’. Not the Psalmist’s “affliction”/ anguish-of-the-soul.
From a tight spot seems forced to me. In a tight spot feels vernacular to me. I find a song and a movie with that title.
Dire straits. As suggested in translations such as this, from the linked material:
Yes, “straits” is good, if the Hebrew is similarly bleached. That’s what I’m trying to figure out. If the original psalmist had in mind an actual narrow place, then that’s how it should be translated.
the sunken place in Get Out
To my non–2500 y.o. eye, מֵצַר mēṣar reads in this context about fifty-fifty ‘narrow place’/’anguish’ (or ‘misery’!) making for a very clear pun. English “straits” is maybe 75% ‘anguish’, 25% ‘narrow place’, the pun not becoming obvious until one has read to the end of the verse.
“Enlargement” is awful. Makes me think of prostate or heart diseases. The word מֶרְחָב merḥāḇ, something like ‘opening, open space’, as in רָחָב rāḥāḇ ‘wide’, is used very similarly in 2Sam 22:20, using the same metaphor of being pulled out of a narrow place into the open.
It’s not “narrow place” that should be translated but the pair “narrow place – wide/open place”. “Straits” suggest sailing to me, so… “From dire straits I called upon the Lord. The Lord answered my call and took me out into clear waters.”
I don’t understand why Luther’s Drangsal is dismissed as an extension of the metaphorical sense. It’s doing a pretty good job evoking both physical and metaphorical meanings (or at least Norw. trengsel is). “I trengsel ropte jeg på Herren.” But I’m struggling with the antonym.
But all that is moot by another consideration. Psalm 118:5 is a summary of Psalm 18, which is clearly metaphorical.
Edit: Forgot to reload again. What Y said, except not knowing what I talk about.
Wiktionary etymology connecting more deeply (and less mere-punningly) anguish, strait, narrow, difficult, etc.:
Recall also angustifolia, angina, angostura (Wikipedia: “Angostura is Spanish for ‘narrowing’, the town of Angostura having been at the first narrowing of the Orinoco River.”), and so on. Greek and PIE are in the picture also (of course).
(Off topic, though only in the narrowest of senses: Princeton UP is having a 75% off sale. I just filled my cart with 5kg of classical scholarship for a hundred bucks with shipping.)
Noetica (Wiktionary): […] from Latin angustia (“narrowness, scarcity, difficulty, distress”), from angustus (“narrow, difficult”), from angere (“to press together, cause pain, distress”). See angst, the Germanic cognate, and anger.
Of course, what this shows is that the metaphor is justified and ancient. It could have spread beteen languages by calque, e.g. in bible translation, but I think it’s more likely that it keeps being reinvented.
In an English translation, however, both the physical and the metaphorical meaning is lacking in the Anglo-Norman word. The psychological meaning is all there is.
Noetica (in person): Greek and PIE are in the picture also (of course).
Even my surname is in the picture. But that’s the physical meaning.
“5kg” seems a most unclassical amount of weight. Shurely TR means (approximately) XV librae?
The mental-distress sense may be a regional thing rather than a universally natural metaphor.
As far as I can make out, no Oti-Volta language uses a word for “narrow” in any mental-distress sense.
FWIW, the Kusaal Bible translation of Psalm 118 just has sʋnsa’aŋ “heart-spoiling”, i.e. “sorrow”, and the Mooré has the same, sũ-sãaŋa. (Both are probably in fact really translated from the more recent English and French versions rather than Hebrew, anyhow.) But no metaphorical senses of “narrow” appear in any of the dictionaries I’ve got.
It is interesting that many English translations do have the second half of the narrow/wide contrast, e.g. the KJV’s
“I called upon the Lord in distress: the Lord answered me, and set me in a large place.” Other versions have “spacious place” or “broad place” or “wide open place,” all of which contrast with the “narrow/tight” place that’s not coming through in the translation. Indeed, the LXX contrasts non-literal θλῖψις (“affliction”) with more literal πλατυσμόν (“widening”), which Brenton Englishes as “a wide place.”
I’m sure we all await enlightenment as to how the translators into Kusaal have handled this particular verse.
EDITED TO ADD: The Vulgate has the same mismatch, contrasting non-literal “tribulatione” with more literal “latidudine.”
Yes, it looks like the Euroversions missed the parallelism in the Hebrew right from the start.
In an English translation, however, both the physical and the metaphorical meaning is lacking in the Anglo-Norman word. The psychological meaning is all there is.
English ‘pinch’/’pinched’? Offers a balance of physical and metaphorical “From mid-14c. as “to pain, torment.”” [etymonline]; “thin or drawn-looking, as from grief, lack of food, etc” [dictionary.com] ‘in/at a pinch’ ” alludes to straitened circumstances.”
(If a n’umble n’atheist might interject — I have nothing to add.)
This is the sort of subtle textual inquiry I love. There’s nobody trying to put ‘side’ on it/make the interpretation fulfill some pre-judiced historical objective — such as that the Bible-as-myth records ‘actual’ history.
@antC
You will like my interpretation, viz. that the narrow/wide contrast is inspired or informed by female reproductive anatomy. There is a (to me) rather amusing reading of a story by Thomas Hardy in a novel by Howard Jacobson along similar lines. Compare also Islamic as-Sirat.
Haydn’s “Nelson” Mass was called by him “Missa in angustiis”, usually rendered as “Mass in troubled times” or “in time of fear”, but I’ve often thought that “Mass in dire straits” would be a better English version.
@David E., not sure it’s fair or useful to call the LXX, in particular, a “Euroversion.” Ptolemaic Egypt may have been (in some places, in some social strata) culturally Hellenized, but I’m not sure that sufficed to transform it into a European enclave. Unless by “Euro-” you just meant “IE”? Not sure if there are comparatively early translations of the Psalms into non-IE languages (e.g. Aramaic/Syriac or Georgian) that weren’t mediated through the LXX, but I suppose checking on how they render the passage could be interesting.
Note FWIW how the vintage Miles Coverdale translation of the Psalter (1535, still in use in circles that think the KJV too new-fangled when it comes to the Psalms) renders both halves of the contrast non-literally: “I called upon the LORD in trouble; and the LORD heard me at large.”
Have you tried “tight” or “squeezed”…?
“At large” is much closer to literal (“the suspect is at large”), even before you remember what large means in French.
I don’t want to be unmannerly, but I worry that
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2017/mar/19/get-out-review-jordan-peele-racism-america
may be unfamiliar to this audience. It seems to me that its `sunken place’ corresponds uncannily to the Psalm’s evocation of the despair of the `narrow place’.
The usual stock-metaphor senses in English of “at large” seem a bit odd for descriptions of how the LORD heard your cry unto him, unless the point is the LORD’s geographical ubiquity. Although one online lexicographic source says that there’s a now-archaic old sense of “at large” meaning “in full, fully” and that may be the sense intended in the Psalm translation.
I don’t want to be unmannerly, but I worry that [Get Out] may be unfamiliar to this audience.
You are in fact being somewhat unmannerly. Do you really assume that because no one responded, no one knew what you were talking about? It is one of my favorite movies of recent years, and I appreciated your comparison but didn’t feel it necessary to say “+1” or anything.
OK my bad, sorry, sincerely.
No problem, I don’t know why I got so salty about it. No harm, no foul.
When feathers are ruffled, you often see more colors.
Sure, there wants fire where there are no lively sparks of roughness.
I guess BBQ grills had no lid back then.
“Yet man is born unto trouble, as the sparks fly upward.”
– Job 5:7, on BBQs and the bitters of Angostura.
@J.W. Brewer: “YHWH at Large” sounds like it would make a good name for a satirical Web series, in the vein of other wits’ hypothetical “Messiah, P. I.” and “Crime Pope.”
Do you really assume that because no one responded, no one knew what you were talking about?
I certainly didn’t; I had never heard of the movie, and “the sunken place in get out” isn’t much of a clue. So I read the Graun review without getting a real idea of whether it’s a hatchet job or not; I am under the impression it is, but I’m willing to be corrected. I went looking for another review, and found this:
To which my reaction is that in the possible world (it is possible) in which Gale and I had a white daughter, I would make very sure she never did such a thing, and her mother would have made doubly and trebly damned sure, having been in a car driven by her quondam boyfriend (white) when he was stopped on the New Jersey Turnpike for driving while wearing sandals (in actual fact, for having long hair). In this world, I explained to Dorian some years back why he wasn’t going to get a toy gun by showing him the Tamir Rice video. In any case, I don’t see the point in watching horror movies — there are plenty of documentaries to be had already.
@ John Cowan : I don’t see the point in watching horror movies — there are plenty of documentaries to be had already.
I agree completely; horror movies sicken me. Maybe what I was trying to say, and should have been more explicit about, is that `Get Out’ is arguably (and intentionally) more than a horror movie, and that the distinction between the narrow place and the sunken place (which somehow maybe concerns desperation, lack of agency and powerlessness) is worth thinking about.
Apologies to all, blessed be…
FWIW the same “narrow place” Hebrew lemma appears in two other places in Hebrew Scripture (another Psalm and an early verse in Lamentations), so you can review your favorite translation(s), whether into English or some other language, of those other two instances to see how it’s handled there. https://biblehub.com/hebrew/4712.htm
Well, as the Sumerians said, “lu₂ daŋal-la kur-ra la-ba-an-šu₂-šu₂”* (Even the widest man cannot encompass the netherworld).
*Sumerians loved to say this, it shows up in proverb texts, Gilgamesh stories, and a group of short compositions conventionally titled “Nothing is of value.” But translators don’t agree on the exact meaning. The verb (šu₂) is what the sun does when it sets, but it also means to smother or cover a flame. Kur can either mean mountain or netherworld. Sometimes it’s translated as “encompass the netherworld,” “go (down) to the netherworld,” or “cover the mountains.” Usually, the verb for going to the netherworld is e₁₁ (it’s the verb Inanna used to get to the netherworld in her famous descent), so the cover or smother sense seems more likely.
It’s not clear to me how any human could be “wide” or “broad” enough to do any of these things, though, unless it’s a reference to the metaphor of having wide ears (ŋeštug daŋal, being wise), in which case it means that no one is wise enough to do something to the netherworld. Maybe being wide prevents god from sticking you in a narrow place…
To which my reaction is that in the possible world (it is possible) in which Gale and I had a white daughter, I would make very sure she never did such a thing
I’m not sure whether this is meant as some kind of commentary on the movie or as a completely separate and irrelevant statement sparked off by the review, but in case it’s the former: everything in the movie makes sense and is brilliantly worked out, but you don’t realize that until you’ve seen the whole thing. If you don’t like horror, you don’t like horror, but don’t let your private sentiments cause you to depreciate an entire genre. Also, as jack morava says, it is very far from being “just” a horror movie. It is one of the best American movies I’ve seen in years.
@Jack M I don’t want to be unmannerly, but I worry that [Get Out] may be unfamiliar to this audience.
It’s unfamiliar to me[**]. But — as @Hat points out — ‘null answers not required’. How would it progress the conversation to say so? [***]
[**] I don’t watch horror (I found Silence of the Lambs unwatchable, and I don’t ever want to become inured to that sort of stuff). I don’t watch (recent) American movies. I don’t watch TV. It’s possible I saw the promo/reviews at the time it was circulating — in which case, I’d have decided after half a paragraph of that Guardian review this wasn’t for me. From wp
A black maid in C21st? You cannot be serious/I wouldn’t be able to suspend belief.
Give me Merchant/Ivory every time: I prefer my fiction to not stretch credibility to such extremes.
[***] The conversation is already going past too fast. I can’t keep up (in between bouts of guffaws).
I’m not sure whether this is meant as some kind of commentary on the movie or as a completely separate and irrelevant statement sparked off by the review,
Well, technically it’s not a commentary on the movie, since I haven’t seen the movie. But assuming that the review I quoted is correct in saying that the young white woman calls the cop an asshole, I was expressing my shock at the idea of anyone, white and female or not and who is not actively suicidal, doing this during a traffic stop.
When a U.S. cop tells you to do something that will not cause your immediate death, you do it, and contest it in court afterwards if at all, just as you would if you were the victim of an armed robbery and told to empty your pockets, and for exactly the same reason. Nothing in those pockets, and no amount of political points, are worth your life, not to mention your boyfriend’s life. I don’t of course blame people who don’t know this or can’t comply for one or another reason, internal or external; blame rests solely with the perpetrator(s). But I question such people’s judgment and their parents’ judgment very strongly.
I mean, I know that such incidents do happen, but … well, my disbelief (I’m not sure why AntC says belief — was that a thinko?) would have to be not so much suspended (per Tolkien) as hanged, drawn, and quartered. In short, I’m with the young man, and if I were in his shoes I would have been telling her to shut the hell up, now, before things get worse than she could possibly imagine (even if she can imagine quite a bit).
But of course there are black maids in the U.S. in the present century. The woman who cleans my apartment weekly is not African American, but she is certainly a person of color.
don’t let your private sentiments cause you to depreciate an entire genre
Whyever not? You couldn’t pay me to watch horror of any type. Been there, done that, suffered the pangs of visceral, empathic loathing. Of course I don’t mind if you watch it and/or enjoy it, any more than I mind if other people eat spicy food — but I make sure to keep it away from my mucous membranes. It hurts. And whether it is prepared by the finest chef using the finest ingredients or not is 100% irrelevant.
I’m not sure why AntC says belief — was that a thinko?
No. My belief was exhausted at the mise-en-scene/didn’t get as far as the incident with the cop.
per Tolkien
So preposterous I threw The Hobbit at the wall/couldn’t face the thick books/couldn’t muster that much suspension.
But of course there are black maids in the U.S. in the present century.
You’re only confirming my already strongly-held belief that the U.S. is ghastly — along with all your perfectly sensible advice that U.S. police are ghastly. I have no intention of ever visiting to find out. (I would never use anything other than polite language to NZ police — although I carry no fear of them shooting me.)
The woman who cleans my apartment weekly …
I’ve never employed anyone to ‘clean my apartment’/don’t know anyone who employs a cleaner merely for an apartment/that seems to be a different world. Unless you mean for the very elderly and infirm/Social Services-provided ‘Home Help’ — not what I would call a “maid/housekeeper”.
@Hat depreciate an entire genre
We’re getting off the point — in an unhelpful way: I’m not going to watch the movie, neither is JC by the sound of it. Then any parallels to the topic at hand are moot. Let’s move on.
my disbelief (I’m not sure why AntC says belief — was that a thinko?) would have to be not so much suspended …
Ha! I might have been overthink(o)ing my above response.
“suspend disbelief” is a thing. I don’t think I’ve ever used that.
“suspend belief” seems to be the same thing. It’s what I use. Like ‘flammable’ and ‘inflammable’.
Since Tolkien was mentioned, ‘Secondary belief’ seems to be in the same semantic space.
Either way, ’employing’ a live-in maid/housekeeper in this day and age seems wholly alien to me. The still in the Guardian review shows her pouring drinks. I don’t believe it. Or is this some horror schlock? (I wouldn’t know.)
You’re only confirming my already strongly-held belief that the U.S. is ghastly
Is there some reason why people whose profession it is to make order where other people live have to be white?
I’ve never employed anyone to ‘clean my apartment’/don’t know anyone who employs a cleaner merely for an apartment/that seems to be a different world.
After a certain age and degree of disability (which you, perhaps, have not yet reached in your life’s trajectory), we found the continuing physical labor involved too difficult, while we were not yet aged or disabled enough to qualify for government assistance. Since we could afford it, and since we found (after working our way through various semi-competent persons) that Lymari was both competent and delightful, we entered into a de facto long-term employment contract which has now gone on for more than 20 years. Since Gale’s death I have of course continued this, I hope for many years to come; I am now asking her to do some things which Gale used to do, so I have raised her salary. When she goes on vacation (once a year for a month) we have had to either struggle along ourselves (and it is a struggle), or else deal with a cleaning agency and their current crop of semi-competent employees. I don’t know yet what I’ll do this year.
Update: Lymari doesn’t live in, she comes here once a week for a few hours. She pours her own drinks and so do I.
To go back to something linguistic: I remembered that the heaviest casualties at the infamously bloody and one-sided Battle of Fredericksburg occurred in a narrow cut between two of the hilltops that comprised Marye’s Heights. The road that ran through the ravine was officially named Telegraph Road, but ever since the battle, it has been known as The Sunken Road.
1550 Danish Bible (commissioned by Christian III):
To a modern reader, it’s something like “I called upon the Lord in fear, and the Lord heard my prayer and consoled me”. I cannot rule out that contemporary readers would perceive overtones of ‘narrowness’ in angist, as per etymology; modern versions use trængsel. trøste was more like ‘help’ and ‘strengthen’; it’s a cognate of E trust with reversed valency.
(In modern orthography it would be Jeg kaldte på Herren i angst / og Herren bønhørde mig / og trøstede mig, i.e., no material changes. But you basically have to look up all the content words to see if the semantics have changed. All the fun stuff in written Danish happened before 1500. I have no clue what the pronunciation was, though).
Whyever not? You couldn’t pay me to watch horror of any type.
Perhaps you misunderstood what I was saying. I was making no comment on whether you should watch it or not — that’s entirely up to you. I was saying that whether you prefer to watch it or not has no bearing on whether it’s any good. I don’t care for ballet, but that doesn’t make me think ballet is a lesser art form or condescend to those who enjoy it; it’s just not for me.
the heaviest casualties … occurred in a narrow cut between two of the hilltops
In Ireland such a “Gap of Danger” is proverbial — “Bearna Baoil” is the only Irish words in the Soldier’s Song
In the much-more-enlightened 20th-century, many/most (which does not mean all) cleaning ladies in the NYC metro area are Hispanic* immigrants. This may in part be because it’s a good niche for those with limited English skills whereas by contrast female black immigrants from the formerly-British West Indies are more likely to cluster instead in the nanny/child-care profession, where English competence (with whatever accent – they have come to replace a previously Irish-accented immigrant labor force in that niche) is more valuable.
*I think back in the Nineties we had one who hailed from Brazil – Brazilian immigrants usually but not always fall outside fuzzy boundaries of the “Hispanic” box depending on who is administering it in a given context.
In the much-more-enlightened 20th-century, many/most (which does not mean all) cleaning ladies in the NYC metro area are Hispanic* immigrants.
Yet another victim of the Y2K bug…
Alas! Failed to notice the glitch until my 15 minutes of time-to-fix had expired.
Hat: You seem to believe that I have:
a) attacked the horror genre as inherently inartistic;
b) attacked one of your favorite movies.
But what I believe I have done is:
a) expressed in strong terms my feelings about my watching movies of this genre;
b) strongly attacked the plausibility of a single scene in the movie, which I grant is out of context for me and will remain so.
A little investigation has not given me an etymology for Lymari; the usual semi-worthless sites tell me that it is a rare name in the U.S. except in Puerto Rico (i.e. not common in the diaspora). She is in fact from the Dominican Republic. Does anyone know the etymology?
Just a guess — I believe -mari is productive in Puerto Rican naming as a shortened Maria, joined to the custom of imported English names. So Lymari may be Leigh Maria in new clothes. My instinct is to put the accent on the y.
strongly attacked the plausibility of a single scene in the movie, which I grant is out of context for me and will remain so.
All I can say is that you have a surprisingly limited awareness of the entitled behavior of well-off white people in America.
for context:
[you’ll want to skip this if you’re not interested in the details of u.s. white supremacy and its legal sanctification]
like agricultural work, domestic work is exempt* from most twentieth-century u.s. labor law – in large part because they were industries reliant on non-white workforces** when the NLRA/Wagner Act passed – which ensures that both remain centered on the workers with the fewest available options (which means workers of color, immigrants in particular, and women).
at the state level, new york legally recognized domestic workers as “employees” under the state Human Rights Law only as of 2022, after becoming the first state to mandate an 8-hour day, overtime pay, one weekly day off, and a few other scanty labor protections in 2010. only a few states have decided to follow suit, and there is no sign that the federal government will do any such thing in the foreseeable future.
.
* thanks to the explicitly white supremacist leadership of the AFL and the soon-to-be-mccarthyite leadership of the CIO*** (even a milquetoast commitment to racial justice being but a hairsbreadth away from Raving Red Radicalism).
** you can track european immigrant groups’ transition from not-quite-white to fully white by their departure from domestic work. in nyc, for the last few decades, white domestic workers have been largely eastern european (a mix of post-soviet jewish immigrants and post-yugoslav-war balkan immigrants, with a scattering of poles) – the least fully white europeans around (especially when not christian (and orthodox adherents barely count as christian in this country, where “christian” is often used to mean “biblical literalist protestant”)).
*** not to say that the reuthers and their gang were any less committed to white supremacy – they were just quieter about it while relying on communist organizers in the 1930s. the gloves came off after WWII, as general baker and other black rank-and-file militants of the detroit Revolutionary Union Movement groups pointed out in the 1960s.
To be fair, tippable employees in the United States are not entitled to the usual minimum wage, and impressionistically, plenty of them are White.
@ryan, jc
Lía Maria is a thing, also in PR. So maybe by double a drop you get Lymari.
rozele: At least in Linz, I randomly stumbled upon a Kazakh who was doing stuff with GTP — the avatars were generating plausible Kazach sentences; at the bar she worked at — as in making an art installation; and her boss was from Northern Macedonia.
My grandmother, at age 97 with very limited mobility, has had a number of in-home caregivers, spending increasing amounts of time helping her over the last ten years. The younger ones tend to be non-European; the two I met were both Mongolian. The one she prefers, probably because they have more in common (having grown children and grandchildren) is a Hungarian woman in her sixties.
There are in the U.S. a variety of carve-outs from the minimum-wage laws, each of which has its own history and its own industry-lobbying group to defend the cost-saving status quo. One of them happens to be working as a summer-camp counselor, as my oldest child discovered (I had warned her …) the summer she was 16, once she actually toward the end of the summer divided the impressive-sounding-to-her lump sum of dollars she’d been promised for the summer by the number of hours she’d worked.* At least for summer camps (both sleepaway and day) serving the affluent suburban-kid demographic, counselors tend to come from the same demographic, not least because it seems like more of a “fun” job than working fast food or what have you. It’s a group of actual/potential employees that is marginal and politically weak for reasons other than class and ethnicity (e.g. the transient nature of the employment and the transient marginality of youth).
*The following summer she leveraged one of the skills she’d gotten in connection with that job — being a lifeguard at the camp pool — to get another job dependent on that skill but not falling within any carveout to the minimum-wage laws.
My instinct is to put the accent on the y.
Lymari stresses her name on the penult (that is, it is written without an accent mark, and Dr. Google thinks this to be standard).
All I can say is that you have a surprisingly limited awareness of the entitled behavior of well-off white people in America.
Thank heavens! I have lived my whole life, it seems, in a bubble of what is now called wokeness.
oon-to-be-mccarthyite leadership of the CIO
Lewis was no more a McCarthyite than FDR was a Stalinist or Paasikivi a Nazi. He expelled the leftists from the UMWA for purely internal reasons.
tipped workers are a rather different issue – they’re legally considered employees, and so are nominally covered by most other labor laws (the 8-hour day, days off, anti-discrimination protections, etc.), from which domestic and field workers are excluded.
and for sure, lewis was certainly much more interested in weakening rank-and-file opposition to his developing partnership with the mine operators than he was in fighting ‘subversion’. but i find it hard to care much about people’s varied rationales for participation in the red scare (which i apologize for using [not-actually-]shorthand for, since it implies that one senator was the driving force behind it, which was far from true), except as a source of insight into how they arrived at the same practical actions.
@JCThank heavens! I have lived my whole life, it seems, in a bubble of what is now called wokeness.
I may be missing whole layers of context here (both Am.E. vs Br.E. and Am.class system vs Br./NZ class system). And I’m not sure how long we go on treating JC with kid gloves in his current narrow place — at least JC does not seem to be acknowledging that …
I took @Hat’s comment to be pointing out that JC’s behaviour/comments is that of the entitled well-off in America. (I don’t know if JC identifies as white.) IOW it’s exhibiting a complete absence of wokeness — not even the simulacrum trotted out by privileged white ‘liberals’.
Then is JC’s comment intended sarcastically? That was lost on me.
This went past in the maelstrom:
@JC After a certain age and degree of disability (which you [AntC], perhaps, have not yet reached in your life’s trajectory), we found the continuing physical labor involved too difficult, while we were not yet aged or disabled enough to qualify for government assistance. Since we could afford it, … gone on for more than 20 years.
I do not believe 20 years ago you were too infirm to clean your own house. (The usual response is to downsize your accommodation — also releasing capital for a more manageable lifestyle.) No surprise you weren’t “disabled enough” to qualify for assistance. I call bollocks! I call entitled behaviour of the well-off in America! (In NZ we do not have such extremes of wealth/we do have labour legislation covering paid housework/protecting workers in the informal economy. My State pension wouldn’t remotely cover such outlay.)
(OTOH: the movie is depicting a live-in maid/housekeeper. That’s a whole n’other degree of privilege. Is that still credible in C21st?)
It helps to have seen the movie.
Have you tried “tight” or “squeezed”…?
Yes, I had a prowl round the semantic field, at least in the languages I’m most familiar with. There aren’t any underived adjectives with meanings like that (there are only a limited number of primary adjectives altogether in these languages) and verbs like “press” and “squeeze” seem rarely to be used metaphorically at all, let alone in psych meanings, although you can “press” someone to do something, for example.
I think the whole set of psych metaphors to just too different from SAE for this to work (although they are relatively typical for West Africa.) For example, “I’m happy” in Kusaal is literally “my heart’s cool”, and “I’m angry” is “my heart”s gone white.” (Because, why not?) Also, the gall bladder is the metaphorical seat of reason (though that one does have parallels in Greek, at any rate.)
AntC, do you go to restaurants? Then welcome to the world of “privilege.”
I don’t really see the difference between periodically having someone mop and run a vacuum and having a cook and staff prepare meals for you and then clean the dishes afterwards. We all use service for some aspects of life. There’s no privilege involved. For some, the cooks and staff are at McDonald’s. It’s just the division of labor.
Now if you take advantage of aspects of their status to pay them crap and treat them like crap, that’s different. We continued to pay our every-second-week cleaning lady for a year and a half during the pandemic, without asking her to actually come clean, to be honest more out of deference to her age and vulnerability than our own relative security. Just today, I believe I saved her $1,500/year by reading her mortgage documents and realizing she shouldn’t be paying mortgage insurance when she has more than 50% equity. It might tell you something about the potential status of people in such jobs that she does indeed have a mortgage on a nice house..
None of you know me IRL, so I don’t feel that weird presenting my personal story, though it is in a sense boasting. Without it, my point couldn’t be made as dramatically. — that how you treat someone is more important than whether the work they do for you happens to be cleaning.
But I do feel privileged in my relationship with her. She is one of the witnesses/victims in a case relating to the Guatemalan Civil War that some of you may have read about in a recent NY Review of Books, or elsewhere. Alas, the presiding judge was recently chased into exile, and the case is in disarray. I feel privileged to know her.
It helps to have seen the movie.
The movie (apparently) wants me to sit through the shock of a collision with a deer. (That appeared in the trailer: I stopped the trailer at that point. Quite possibly would have walked out of the movie — not that I’d have gone into the movie in the first place.)
Then expects me to believe this of the beyond-my-belief live-in maid/housekeeper in C21st:
No, I don’t do movies involving people occupying others’ bodies. (There’s also another character involving that.)
I would also find the little-rich-kid’s treatment of the police officer hard to believe.
Not having seen the movie, I don’t know at what point in the plot the live-in maid is introduced, but I suspect I would have walked out of the movie multiple times before we got there.
So I think what you mean is: it helps to have stomached the movie [**]. I wouldn’t/couldn’t. My bullshit detectors are just too strong. (That’s why I only went to one of the Tolkiens. Also why I walked out of ‘A Cock and Bull Story’: I couldn’t stand one of my most favourite and entirely credible novels being turned into shite. Have not forgiven Steve Coogan since. Cannot believe Gillian Anderson would have allowed her name to be dragged in to it.)
[**] In case you think I’m some sort of grouch who goes to only bland movies: I have waxed fulsome (in agreement with our host) about ‘Death of Stalin’ — indeed went to see it twice. Everything it asked me to believe was entirely credible — even if it wasn’t true — not that ‘truth’ is a concept applying to that period of Soviet history.
AntC, do you go to restaurants?
Yep, funded my way through college by working my summer hols at a) an Indian restaurant in the evening; b) a factory canteen during the day.
Then welcome to the world of “privilege.”
I also eat as a customer at restaurants these days. Don’t follow why that’s “privilege”. I’m a competent cook, but don’t stretch to every style and culture of cuisine. Indeed the division of labour means the form of my contribution to the economy is not these days in the catering trade.
periodically having someone mop and run a vacuum
You mean without you going to their place and running a mop/vaccie in return? I’ve done that for friends/family when they’re temporarily incapacitated.
When you’re still physically capable of domestic chores? I see a big difference. It’s the intimacy of cleaning up someone else’s piss and shit in their private place. Let alone a live-in maid — which means owning property enough to accommodate them; whilst not getting that wealth taxed to the blazes. That is “privilege”.
how you treat someone is more important than whether the work they do for you happens to be cleaning
Indeed, and full credit to you for supporting her pro bono publico. That doesn’t negate the amount of privilege you’re enjoying. (Neither does it exclude you could be exploiting her or at least that she’s in such a vulnerable place she’d rather be exploited by you than other options: I’d be interested in her take — not that you’d get that honestly. ‘Better than continuing oppression in Guatemala’?)
Having live-in full-time domestic employees of course remains common among the elites in objectively poor countries (because labor costs are so cheap). In the U.S. the percentage of households that do that sort of thing for a cleaning-lady/maid (or cook, for that matter) is much smaller than the percentage of households that pay someone to come and clean for a few hours a week (or a few hours every other week), meaning that the lady in question is earning her living in the aggregate from a dozen or twenty different households each using a smallish percentage of her total time and effort. Obviously, we’re still not talking about median American households here, but some sort of demographic slice of the most affluent 10 or 15 or 20 % of households using such help rather than 0.1%. During the period of my childhood when we lived in Japan (in the Seventies) we had a full-time “live-in” (in a cubicle down in the apartment-building-for-foreigners’ basement) maid, because that was part of the basic compensation package for corporate ex-pat types like my dad, although I expect that very few of the American-etc. ex-pats had had that sort of arrangement back in the States. But things may not be like that in Tokyo anymore, a half-century later.
Domestic employees providing child-care are somewhat different because that can more easily be a full-time job just for the one household. The “au pair” model assumes that room and board are being provided as part of the compensation package, but other models assume that the full-time nanny will live elsewhere, in a presumably cheaper neighborhood not too far away in commuting-time terms. It is as best as I can tell the case that “servant’s quarters” stopped being a standard feature of construction/design for high-end residential building (outside some small number of very high-end and custom projects) in the U.S. after World War II.
I do not believe 20 years ago you were too infirm to clean your own house.
I wish I knew what I have done to offend you that you think entitles you to treat me with such contempt, accusing me of lying on no evidence whatsoever. The fact is, you know nothing about the state of my health at that time, or at this time, or at any other time. Nor do you know whether the size of my accommodation was and is, such that I was or was not in a position to downsize it. Are you incapable of being even minimally civil? It seems so, not only here but when we interacted elsewhere.
At any rate, the devil with you; I’ll deal with you no longer.
If you periodically pump your own septic system, AntC, or do your own sewer rodding, things that I’m physically capable of but don’t do, then you have a consistent worldview. If not, you may be just another person of privilege. The tools can be rented and there’s helpful info at diy forums if you want to up your game.
Such things are fascinating. I definitely hung around unwanted, asked annoying questions and was delighted to see the video of the inside of our sewer line. The path it takes is quirky, and not recorded with the city as it might be in a younger community.
Someone in the recent past installed a clean-out in the wrong place, on a lateral line that only drains gutters, (well, “drained”, since we disconnected the downspouts and run them into a rain garden), leaving the rodder guy mystified for a time. The clean-out is 8 inches from the main line, but the angle of the Y leaves that pipe inaccessible except from upstream.
I’ve mapped it all for whoever owns the house next, along with a similar chart of hidden heat pipes traced with a thermal camera.
If you periodically pump your own septic system, AntC, or do your own sewer rodding, …
Sure: the sequence of earthquakes in Christchurch that ‘munted’ [**] my house forced me to learn a lot about its sewer connections and rainwater drains. The weird angles/unrecorded at the Land Registry you talk of sounds all very familiar. (Borrowed the rodding from a mate. Still don’t know how one rainwater line gets out to the street — suspect it crosses into the neighbour’s.)
Yeah those thermal camera images are fun!
But what’s your point? Whether or not I have the time or skills for that sort of task, I’m not talking about technical/specialist periodic maintenance and repairs. (That goes to your earlier ‘division of labour’.) Every able-bodied person can run a vaccie and clean their own toilet. (If that wasn’t the case for JC as at 20 years ago [***]; and yet no social services/health support provision would be provided; I can only sympathise with someone living in what seems to be simultaneously the most wealthy country and amongst the least civilised.)
@JWB During the period of my childhood when we lived in Japan (in the Seventies) we had a full-time “live-in” … basic compensation package for corporate ex-pat types
Yes that’s a familiar scenario from my time in a rented apartment in HK in the 1990’s. No “live-in” (I had no kids to look after), but the apartment management/my employers insisted our contract include the ‘optional extra’ (not!) of cleaning. We always got the apartment spotless before the cleaners’ scheduled day. And still I was acutely embarrassed.
I’m not defending that sort of privilege; but neither am I presuming to impose my cultural beliefs on — as you imply — an established practice of redistributing income to the very poor. Most of my HK-native co-workers also employed a “live-in” or live-at-the-end-of-the-street — typically Filipina — with both parents working and often grandparents (also possibly working) living with them. I suspect this has all changed a lot since the PRC takeover/certainly the expats I stayed in contact with have all ‘escaped’ (their words) back to Blighty precisely because of the loss of privileges.
[**] No I’m not a carpenter, so I (or rather my insurance) employed carpenters/plasterers/roofers to more or less strip the house to the framing and rebuild it. They also insisted on decorating it back to the status quo ante, even though I’m perfectly capable of painting/but was working full-time so couldn’t have redecorated the whole place in one go. Since the same applied for hundreds of thousands of homes around the city _and_ that’s exactly why I pay insurance premiums — not that I ever expected to call on that insurance — I don’t see that as privileged.
[***] John, I know of no reason I should treat you as differently privileged. I react only to the persona you present here/similar forums. If something about you is ‘common knowledge’ on this or other forums, it was perhaps revealed before I started taking part. I am sympathetic to your recent travails. If there’s something else you expect to deserve special treatment, you’ll have to be more explicit. There’s a lot of people with the same name as you. They might or might not be spatio-temporally contiguous with any person presenting your persona here. I don’t presume.
@DE:
do you find that the emotional/mental metaphors in the languages you work on (or more generally in west africa) tend to cluster in different sensory zones than in SAE?
not that i’m certain there’s a general european tendency, in any case. your example made me notice that in english colors seem to be used mainly (if not solely) for negative affect (seeing red; feeling blue; green with envy; a jaundiced eye; blanching), which i don’t think is true in slavic contexts where red = beautiful.
Me, way up: But all that is moot by another consideration. Psalm 118:5 is a summary of Psalm 18, which is clearly metaphorical.
I want to nuance that. The motive of the psalm is one thing, its composition another, and its presumably much later inclusion in the compiled text yet another. The psalm could refer to some specific story (or myth) important in the cult built around (the House of) king David, perhaps using an even older motive of descending to the underworld. As such it would have been meant to be taken literally, although out of the worldly domain. When the psalm was included in the canon, the metaphor was dominant. In between is allegory. At what point on this timeline the psalm was composed, or found its final form, I have no idea. (There’s probably centuries of scholarship to consult, but not now. Instead I’m trolling for those who know.)
do you find that the emotional/mental metaphors in the languages you work on (or more generally in west africa) tend to cluster in different sensory zones than in SAE?
I never really thought about it in those terms, having got no farther, really, than, “Oh, that’s interestingly different.”
FWIW, I don’t think so, particularly, but it’s hard even to frame the question in strictly parallel terms. There are only two basic sensory modalities, viz sight and Everything Else: for example, Kusaal wʋm, which means “hear” by default, also means “smell” and “feel” (physically), like its Hausa equivalent ji. And when it comes to basic colour terms, there are (again following the local standard) just three, black, white and red, which probably limits the scope for metaphorical extensions of meaning a bit.
I’m not at all clear on why angry people’s hearts go white. And although sunpɛɛn “heart-whiteness” is “anger”, pʋpielim “gut-whiteness” is actually “uprightness, virtue”, which seems less surprising: however, “white” does not overlap with “clean” in sense (you use nyain “bright” for “clean.”) It looks like it ought to be connected etymologically with the verb “wash”, but I think that’s an illusion: the tones are wrong for the words to actually be cognate. “Heart-coolness” for “joy” is comprehensible enough to anyone who’s lived in West Africa, though.
“Black” is transparently related etymologically to the word for “go dark” (as in “evening”), and doesn’t seem to have any sort of negative associations. The only metaphorical use of “red” that I can think of is nimmua “eye-redness”, which actually means “concentration, diligence.”
If there’s something else you expect to deserve special treatment, you’ll have to be more explicit.
The “special treatment” he expects is to be treated as a human being rather than a punching bag. You seem to have a serious problem in that regard; if anything someone says suggests that they do not subscribe to every element of your peculiar set of political/cultural values, you feel free to insult them. In short, you default far too easily to asshole mode, and I wish you’d cut it out. (You are also ignorant in your condemnation of the movie, but that’s just a movie; missing out on it is your loss, but it affects no one else and you can parade your self-awarded superiority in that respect to your own satisfaction.)
Oh, and of course my comment was not “pointing out that JC’s behaviour/comments is that of the entitled well-off in America” — what a bizarre reading! I was pointing out that JC was apparently unaware of the behavior of the entitled well-off in America, just as you seem to be unaware of the normal methods of interaction of civilized people. JC is by no means well-off, and I suspect you yourself are far more entitled than you think of yourself as being. (Perhaps you feel that membership in the Global South automatically makes you one of the oppressed of the earth.)
Also also, you seem to be ignorant of the existence of CGI. Do you actually think a deer was hit by a car in that sequence that so appalled you? (Did you also think people were killed onscreen in The Death of Stalin?) Or perhaps you’d rather not be reminded that deer get hit by cars.
It may be that this wonderful blog is not the best environment for film criticism, and I don’t want to be a contrarian, but I fancy Laurence Sterne might have quite liked Winterbottom’s
https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/tristram-shandy-a-cock-and-bull-story-2006 .
The book is a kind of punk deconstruction of the narrative conventions of a novel and the movie seems to me to do a good job of reconstruction its spirit in another medium; FWIW I came away with a serious crush on Jennie/Naomie Harris…
Oh. Let me just mention the individual variation in this – to me it would seem no different to cleaning my own toilet.
Or is that kind of imagery simply too disturbing even if you know it’s fake the whole time?
And yet all the blood and brutality in The Death of Stalin wasn’t disturbing?
The Slovene Standard Translation seems to handle the narrow place/open place contrast in Ps. 118:5 adroitly. For the first, the translators use “stiska”, which means “distress”, “crisis”, etc., but still vividly conveys the underlying metaphor of being “squeezed” (stisnjen). For the second, they chose “na planem”, “out in the open”, from the adjective “plan”, meaning “open, wide, not overgrown”: “Iz stiske sem klical Gospoda, Gospod me je uslišal na planem”.
It’s the intimacy of cleaning up someone else’s piss and shit in their private place
Everybody has their own hang-ups. I mentioned somewhere in these august halls that I feel infantilized by other people filling my grocery bags – every time I’m in a country where that’s the usual thing in supermarkets, I have to adjust to that again and withstand the urge to rip the bags out of the bagger’s hands and do it myself. But that’s just a hang-up, and the fact that you do something yourself although you can afford to pay others for doing it doesn’t make you less privileged – the privilege is that you can afford it. That you do it yourself doesn’t make you less privileged than the billionaire who doesn’t have a private jet because he doesn’t see the point, or mows his own lawn because he likes gardening and the exercise.
Do you actually think a deer was hit by a car in that sequence that so appalled you?
If I’m following the mise-en-scene, the plotline needed some pretext to put the little-rich-girl face to face with a cop/with the boyfriend looking on.
Then there’s a gazillion ways to achieve that. Killing the deer is gratuitous violence that you might be inured to in horror schlock, but for me it’s why I don’t go to such movies. It should not have been included in the trailer.
And yet all the blood and brutality in The Death of Stalin wasn’t disturbing?
Of course it was disturbing. (Particularly the actual on-screen shooting of Beria.) I already new the history. The violence wasn’t gratuitous.
Or perhaps you’d rather not be reminded that deer get hit by cars.
In New Zealand they don’t: farmed deer are behind fences. Wild deer are tens of kms from the highways. Occasionally cattle/sheep are herded along country roads, or lambs escape their fences. We all drive for those conditions. For an allegedly ‘civilised’ country, the U.S. seems to be so badly disorganised in many ways.
(No of course I don’t think an animal was harmed in the making of the movie. )
(Australia is different: cars barrel along the highways, and kill roos. Much harsher physical and cultural environment. Not New Zealand, not nearly New Zealand. )
(Perhaps you feel that membership in the Global South automatically makes you one of the oppressed of the earth.)
To the contrary: I feel enormously privileged to be so far from the U.S. and Europe, and yet comfortably close to Asia. I only wish we could wriggle further away from U.S. dominance. But shared language, global threats, better the devil you know, and all that …
your peculiar set of political/cultural values
It indeed seems a shared interest in language and literature, and the cultures that give them life, doesn’t seem to amount to much sharing of values.
I think you mean: my not being enamoured with U.S. cultural/economic dominance and presumptuousness. That’s not “peculiar” here — which is _why_ I’m here.
The only people I know who get help with housekeeping are elderly/infirm, and get a (at least partially) state-funded ‘home help’. If the reason they ‘can’t cope’ is that they’re rattling round in a large property that’s become beyond them to manage, they can either do as they wish without state funding, or Social Services/more likely their families will kindly but firmly intervene. I get it that the U.S. is allergic to this sort of ‘Socialism’. (Remotely beyond what Bernie Sanders would call ‘Socialism’. I call it Social/Liberal Democracy.) I don’t speak from a U.S. frame of reference.
Despite everybody’s providing cultural pointers here, I’m still finding employing a maid beyond anything I could believe in in a movie. Perhaps the horror genre is all about that sort of alienating the audience from the outset. (In very much not a Brechtian sense.)
New Zealand isn’t in the Global South tho??
Everybody has their own hang-ups.
Thanks Hans, but I fear what I said is getting adrift from its context: a commercial arrangement for providing something both so intimate, and that the employer is still capable of doing for themselves. I cited the P&S for dramatic effect.
I wasn’t ‘hung up’ about cleaning up my grandfather when he became incontinent in his late eighties. I readily ‘muck in’ cleaning the shared latrines in a backcountry hut. Or indeed ‘toilet roster’ at the kibbutz I stayed on.
(Yeah I have the same reaction with supermarket bag-fillers. )
the privilege is that you can afford it
(But everybody at a supermarket is liable to get their bag filled — whether they’re buying baked beans or Veuve Clicquot. Indeed when staff are putting through their own shopping, co-workers will fill their bags for them. Seems to cause much merriment.)
I disagree about the ‘cash nexus’ bit: I feel embarrassed at getting menial tasks done for me when I’m perfectly capable, nothing to do with whether I can afford it.
mows his own lawn because he likes gardening and the exercise.
The street I live in was where a former Prime Minister used to live (in the ’60’s, at the time he was an ordinary MP). Very average suburban townhouses. People still remember him mowing his own lawn. In that era everybody knew everybody’s salary level. If he could afford a gardener there would immediately be ‘talk’ he had undisclosed income. Politicians were expect to be full-time Politicians, not with outside interests/’consultancies’/emoluments.
To this day, NZ MPs are expected to make full disclosure of all income. I am appalled at the recent (since Thatcher) sense of entitlement and ‘blind trusts’/concealment in Westminster.
@jack It may be that this wonderful blog is not the best environment for film criticism …
This blog in general is a wonderful place for film criticism. Whether this particular thread at this particular time is, I’m not so sure …
I fancy Laurence Sterne might have quite liked Winterbottom’s …
That is exactly the movie I’ve already linked to above. I was not remotely complimentary. Have you not read the book? How can you possibly think the movie is any sort of realisation of Sterne’s glittering, chaotic yet perfectly credible world?
deconstruction of the narrative conventions of a novel
Yes, that is entirely thanks to Sterne — and only to the extent Coogan didn’t embarrassingly (to himself) ham it all up.
the movie seems to me to do a good job
No there is absolutely nothing of any good about the movie. Eminently walk-outable-of. See my comments above. The review you link to says “Since the book is probably unfilmable, …” — which seems to be oft-repeated. I can only presume this is some sort of pre-emptive strike from the producer for such an abject failure to even make an attempt.
I wasn’t ‘hung up’ about cleaning up my grandfather when he became incontinent in his late eighties. I readily ‘muck in’ cleaning the shared latrines in a backcountry hut. Or indeed ‘toilet roster’ at the kibbutz I stayed on.
So you didn’t understand what I said.
I disagree about the ‘cash nexus’ bit: I feel embarrassed at getting menial tasks done for me when I’m perfectly capable, nothing to do with whether I can afford it.
See, this is the hang-up I’m talking about. If you can afford it, but do it yourself because you feel embarrassed if others do it for you, that’s a hang-up. Other people get hung up about other things; don’t judge them because they’re okay with paying others for a specific thing they don’t like to do just because you think having others doing that for you is embarrassing.
Lord Finchley tried to mend the Electric Light
Himself. It struck him dead: And serve him right!
It is the business of the wealthy man
To give employment to the artisan.
In New Zealand …. Wild deer are tens of kms from the highways.
On the Atlantic coast of the US wild deer have become suburban residents, thanks to abundant gardens to munch on and the loss of predators, such as coyotes and bears. In northern Virginia, where I lived until recently, bears and coyotes show up occasionally, but not enough to put a dent in the deer population. A handful of people die each year in car-deer collisions.
I don’t know what you think the uncivilized US could do to reduce the deer population or keep them away from populated areas. There have been culls and attempt to sterilize the animals, but such efforts have had little impact.
As for employing gardeners and maids — lots of people do that, and not just the 1%. You have families where both people work and there are children to be shuttled around. A couple I know in N Va had a cleaner come in once a week. She came from Central America — legally or not, I don’t know. But after a few years she built up a house-cleaning business and now employs other hispanic immigrants. It’s the American way!
Møøse are a danger in Sweden, I think the human-in-car fatalities are much higher per capita there. In Denmark, it is a cultural understanding that there is wildlife in the woods, and either you take a detour or you take the risk. (Freeways are usually separated from woods by 500m or more, but there are still places where deer will attempt to cross between two habitats. There will be warning signs or even lower speed limits).
My wife and I took a short detour throgh Värmland last summer, and we were very close to hitting a large moose in 70 km/h. Luckily it came out of the woods from the left, and the moose and I saw eachother just in time for both to adjust the course — not by much, but enough to miss by a couple of inches. I saw in the rear mirror that the moose had stumbled on the road, but it came on its feet and returned quickly to the side it came from, shaken but not physically injured.
Just like us. I slowed down after that.
@DE witty doggerel to illustrate @Hans’s point
It is the business of the wealthy man
To give employment to the artisan.
I’m all for making employment. By all means redistribute from the wealthy. (Not currently happening: I believe Warren Buffett’s marginal rate of tax is _less_ than that of his lowest-paid employee. Remember Trump’s “I’m smart; I don’t pay any tax.” gag? That — the second part of it — appears to be true.)
You can both donate to supporting the less-wealthy of dubious immigration status; and still wash your own dishes. (I for example paid a ~40% rate of tax most of my career. And happy to do so providing the wealthier than me are paying at least as much.)
I’d rather redistributions from the wealthy were put to employing artisans to improve the infrastructure/livability of their own (run-down) communities.
Perhaps put to erecting deer fences alongside/green corridors over highways?
She came from Central America
And with an education and a career and skills there? (Probably yes, for those who’ve earned enough to get to the U.S. whether or not legally.) And is the U.S. economy wasting talent by using skilled artisans to clean houses?
@DE:
thanks! that’s very interesting – seems like for colors there’s a much wider affective range than in english (which, y’know, n=1 so not a Big Conclusion). and now i’m wondering whether that correlates with having fewer primary color-terms, or for that matter with having fewer primary sensory terms. which is a dissertation (or three) that i won’t be writing but hope someone has.
@[moose & highways]:
the person i know who is/was on vermont’s on-call roadkill-moose-butcher list* (where is that genius of the vivid phrase when you need it!) was always very clear: the “moose crossing” signs are there to protect people as much as moose, because grown moose are exactly the right height to land in your lap if your car hits their rather spindly legs. i’m glad you avoided that, TE!
.
* exactly what it sounds like; they get to keep some of the meat in exchange, but i can’t remember where most of it goes.
Other people get hung up about other things; don’t judge them because they’re okay with paying others for a specific thing they don’t like to do just because you think having others doing that for you is embarrassing.
An ESL person would have a hell of a time parsing that sentence, although it’s a breeze when as a native English speaker you zip right through it. Some non-German speakers complain about long German sentences – well, some sentences are hard to understand if you can’t go with the flow. It’s not German, dear, it’s *you* that’s the problem [for some values of “you”].
I happen to be rereading Michael Kohlhaas at the moment. What fabulous, not-really-that-intricate prose ! Who cares whether English-speaking horses balk at the obstacles.
@AntC: Oh well, I get it. The things you’re ready to pay other people for are okay, because you’re always right and righteous; people paying others to do stuff that in your opinion they should do themselves makes them privileged snobs. Why your personal preferences should be the benchmark for everybody else I don’t know, but perhaps I just should bow to your superior insight.
Oh, to be in the socially conscious equity paradise of NZ, where “skills-based” immigration law, a tightly restricted number of refugee admissions and thousands of miles of ocean mean that poor people from elsewhere never actually make it there. Where Australia, the UK and white South Africa remained the primary sources of immigrants as recently as 2019 (the last year for which I found numbers.)
How much more of this insulting fictional trolling do you intend, AntC? JFC.
Also:
>We’re so humane and concerned about wildlife that we don’t allow any wild lands at all anywhere near any of our roadways.
Gimme a minute. I need to pick up my eyeballs. The involuntary eyeroll this caused was so violent that they fell right out of my skull. And did you forget that your restrictive immigration policy means you have a population density only 1/4 of the US?
>And with an education and a career and skills there? (Probably yes, for those who’ve earned enough to get to the U.S. whether or not legally.)
You know exactly as much about this as you know about JC’s health. You shouldn’t speak about things you’re utterly and completely ignorant of. I’m done. This conversation is actively making everyone in it dumber.
@rozele: I’m quite relieved myself. It’s half a ton of fresh meat bursting through the windscreen. Or not, as it were.
In Norway the roadside moosebutchering is done by members of the local viltnemnd, perhaps best translated as “hunting board”. The meat is considered public property and is given to the local nursing home. Or used to be — there may be rules preventing the use of meat of undocumented provenance these days.
Selbstherrlichkeit, in brief.
Too much χολή in this thread already, but I’m curious what specifically DE was referring to with this?
Also, the gall bladder is the metaphorical seat of reason (though that one does have parallels in Greek, at any rate.)
A tidbit that caught my eye recently reading a book about the Nuer was that apparently they believe (or believed 30 years ago) that “shit money” – money earned from cleaning latrines – cannot be used to buy cows (or, therefore, to get married). If you buy a cow with it, it will die or fail to reproduce. It’s not just rich Westerners who have hangups about this sort of thing…
New Zealand is really a remarkably poor country by all economic indicia, at least compared to the other nations it would presumably deign (on cultural/historical grounds) to consider its peers. And historically technologically backwards (no color tv until the mid-Seventies – “new” cars on the road in the Eighties that were knockoffs of dowdy British models of 20 years earlier). I’m not quite sure of all the reasons it consistently underperforms Australia; perhaps these days it only underperforms the Republic of Ireland because the Irish were very clever about how to turn their EU membership into a cash generator by various schemes and shenanigans. Admittedly N.Z. does have some of the cultural indicia of an advanced country, like motorcycle gangs and some quite good rock bands. The emphasis on rugby, however, has resulted in a decided lack of soccer hooligans (which admittedly the U.S. lacks as well).
I will say that the history of the N.Z. “deer farming” industry, making money by taming/confining a hitherto problem-causing invasive species, is an impressive one. Not that there are no wild deer left, but deer that are someone’s livestock are obviously more likely to be fenced off from trouble.
Too much χολή in this thread already, but I’m curious what specifically DE was referring to with this?
Also, the gall bladder…
Thank you, TR. Very elegant diplomacy there.
they get to keep some of the meat in exchange, but i can’t remember where most of it goes.
If the butchers get to it fast enough, it’s donated to a local soup kitchen; otherwise, it’s treated like any other biological waste.
Also, the gall bladder is the metaphorical seat of reason (though that one does have parallels in Greek, at any rate.)
A curious organ.
# The gallbladder’s decisiveness helps the heart to control the mind. #
The heart has its reasons, which reason does not know.
AntC wrote:“” She came from Central America”
And with an education and a career and skills there? (Probably yes, for those who’ve earned enough to get to the U.S. whether or not legally.)”
While this is possible, I consider it unlikely. I write this as a son of an immigrant woman from Latin America who was a cleaning lady.
AntC, if you have any questions about the secret life of Hispanic cleaning ladies in California, I may be able to help a little bit.
i’m curious what specifically DE was referring to with this?
Very nonspecific, I’m afraid. I was conflating gall bladders and Homeric midriffs. My knowledge of anatomy gets vague south of the first cervical vertebra nowadays. (To think I actually passed exams in it forty years ago …)
On the theme of gall bladders and colours, the Western Oti-Volta words for “liver” really look as if they share a root with “black” – except that the tones are wrong. Again. Pity. It would have made sense. Kinda.
I used to have three cystic arteries, myself, which makes me Very Special, and indeed probably a portent of some kind. However, now I haven’t got any cystic arteries at all. Sic transit …
On the theme of gall bladders and colours, the Western Oti-Volta words for “liver” really look as if they share a root with “black” – except that the tones are wrong.
Interesting. Is it absolutely impossible to relate these two and account for the tonal difference, as by lost derivational material?
In Turkish, ciğer means both ‘liver’ and ‘lung’. In my experience, however, if one says ciğer, one immediately thinks ‘liver’, since liver shish kebab is sold everywhere on the street and in little kabob shops, especially in eastern Turkey. If it is necessary to distinguish liver from lung, you can say karaciğer ‘black ciğer’ for liver, and akciğer ‘white ciğer’ for lung. (The corresponding Azeri words are qaraciyər and ağciyər.)
(Ciğer is a borrowing of Persian جگر jigar ‘liver’ (cf. Latin iecur, Greek ἧπαρ, Luwian ikkuwar, etc.).The echt Turkic term for ‘liver’ can be seen in Chuvash пĕвер, Old Uygur bagır, Sakha быар; Uzbek bagʻir; Tatar бавыр; etc. (but Turkish bağır ‘bosom, breast; middle section’); the term for ‘lung’ in Old Uygur öpkä, Uzbek oʻpka, Tatar үпкә (loanword of Kipchak origin in Chuvash ӳпке?), but Turkish öfke ‘anger’).)
Similarly, the family of Sanskrit kālikā and kāleyam ‘liver’ (with its descendants in Indic languages like Hindi कलेजा kalejā ‘liver (of a human being)’, कलेजी kalejī ‘liver (of an animal)’, etc.) are evidently derivatives of kāla- ‘black’.
Is it absolutely impossible to relate these two and account for the tonal difference, as by lost derivational material?
The honest answer to this is, I don’t really know.
There are basically three tone patterns for words in Oti-Volta languages, two of which do interchange in derivation while the third doesn’t, at least, not in any regular derivational process. This distinction is clearly ancient, inasmuch as the two interchanging patterns both consistently correspond to initial high tones outside Oti-Volta (e.g. in proto-Bantu), whereas the pattern that stays invariant in derivation corresponds to initial low tone elsewhere.
However, there are sporadic cases of crossover between the sides in derivation. The real trouble is that I don’t so far know how the Oti-Volta three-tone system arose from what seems to be the proto-Volta-Congo two-tone system – if indeed it did, of course: for all I know the Bantu system may be simplified from proto-VC: much of the rest of proto-Bantu phonology seems to be.
However, there are four potential combinations of H and L in two-mora roots (the commonest kind in both Bantu and Oti-Volta), and all four occur in proto-Bantu; so there is ample scope for explaining the three tones of Oti-Volta roots via tone sandhi. Unfortunately although it’s easy to come up with plausible-seeming ideas for how it might have worked, there is a dearth of good comparisons available to check the hypotheses with. More research is needed …
Still, at least for now, I have a bad conscience about etymological equations in Oti-Volta which ignore the primary tone division, no matter how tempting they look otherwise.
Glad to hear from you, BTW. We were worrying …
Not knowing what the cystic arteries might be, I asked Dr. Google (who in this case is an M.D., though he is usually a Ph.D.) and came up with inter alia a 2007 article:
@Ryan
Although there’s a ‘>’ in front of that, suggesting you’re quoting, I can’t find anybody on the thread saying anything like that. Certainly not what I believe. I was talking specifically about animals bulky enough to cause traffic accidents; hence I also mentioned sheep/cattle, which are not “wildlife”.
I think you were rolling your eyeballs needlessly.
There is roadkill of possums — entirely a good thing; and pūkeko (‘swamp hens’) — not at all good. But neither of which occasions police involvement. Somewhere on the West Coast, they make possum pie from the roadkill.
BTW, wrt our immigration figures: there’s substantial numbers of Pacific Islanders here. I guess you’ll need to aggregate them, since no island nation’s numbers are alone comparable to U.K./S.A./etc. And typically P.I. people retain citizenship of their island despite living here for decades, so may not get counted as immigrants at all. They get rights to stay long-term without formal immigration application.
(Of course since 2019 all the figures have been completely messed up by COVID travel restrictions.)
@JWB New Zealand is really a remarkably poor country by all economic indicia, …
Yes it’s an entirely terrible place to live. Please stay away, for your own sakes. Full of rabid social levellers.
No colour TV in my house — indeed no TV at all.
I will say that the history of the N.Z. “deer farming” industry, making money by taming/confining a hitherto problem-causing invasive species, is an impressive one. Not that there are no wild deer left, but deer that are someone’s livestock are obviously more likely to be fenced off from trouble.
For those not up with the detail: deer are not native/never were. “The first deer were brought to the country from England and Scotland for sport in the mid to late 19th century, and released mainly in the Southern Alps and surrounding foothills. ” [wp] Where they promptly thrived — to the extent they’re counted as pests, with periodic culling.
The reason the wild deer are not trouble to traffic is that they’re in the mountains; the roads are in the valleys.
I didn’t realise deer in the States are trouble in the suburbs. Does that mean those are not mountain/highland-dwelling? Or are they so overpopulating the mountains, some are spilling out to the plains? I’m confused.
@AntC
I would suspect that the relevant division is not mountain/plain but “combination of grassland for grazing and nesting with nearby forest for foraging and for retreat from predators”/”other terrain”. This is also I think where you get wild boar in Europe (maybe also “hogs” in US?).
The particular kind of deer also matters. There are several species of venison North America, and it is generally only the white-tailed deer that have overrun suburbia. There are qualitatively similar overpopulation problems with mule deer and elk, but at nowhere near the same level.
You’ll find wild (roe) deer in Northern Germany, causing occasional traffic accidents, in totally flat country with not a mountain in sight for a hundred kilometers. They don’t even need big forests – small stands of trees interspersed in pastures and fields is enough.
Yeah, no one in the U.S. grows up thinking of “regular” (white-tailed) deer as mountain-dwellers. You would think of them as forest-dwelling (at any elevation, including quite close to sea level), but along the East Coast one thing that distinguishes suburbia from “urbia,” and also from rural areas where intensive farming means that you have several hundred contiguous acres under cultivation with nary a tree to be seen, is that housing is interspersed with wooded areas of varying sizes. The part of NYC that’s closest to my own suburban house is a public park (largest one in the five boroughs, 3x the acreage of Central Park) which has enough forest on it in addition to the golf courses and the beach etc. that deer sightings are reasonably common. But (unlike the occasional coyote) I don’t think deer ever make it over from the Bronx to Manhattan these days.
Don’t think I’ve ever seen a deer on my actual street, although it I saw one I one find it noteworthy rather than flabbergasting. The wild fauna we get in our own backyards (all AFAIK indigenous to this part of North America) is mostly squirrels, rabbits, and raccoons, plus field mice.
Should amend prior statement to include possibility that if you’d grown up elsewhere in U.S. you might associate deer with meadows or even prairies, but there was fairly little terrain near where I grew up (or near where I live now) that is “wild” but not wooded.
Specifically, white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus) are boundary animals: a deer hunter told me this when he asked me for permission to hunt on my upstate N.Y. land. They like to live where there are both trees and grassland easily accessible to them. U.S. suburbia meets this qualification pretty well. (I note that this is one of the seven species of deer that were introduced to N.Z.)
I asked him what he would do with the deer after he killed it. “Eat it”, he said. On that (standard) assurance, I was happy to grant permission.
I don’t think deer ever make it over from the Bronx to Manhattan.
The NYC government’s page on deer/human coexistence in the city. Deer have swum the Kill van Kull that separates Staten Island (the most suburban of the five boroughs) from New Jersey; it’s a tidal strait, but it’s only about 300m wide. There are also many deer on the eastern end of Long Island; they swam there (deer have been known to swim up to 10 miles) before European occupation. The western end is occupied by the NYC boroughs of Brooklyn and Queens, which apparently remain deer-free. Apparently the tides plus the distance are sufficient to keep deer out of Manhattan, though we do have parks that could support them.
In the temperate parts of Scandinavia (roughly from Stockholm and south) the roe deer is a suburban pest. Luckily they are small and solitary, but it only needs one roe to make sure the tulips won’t flower this spring.
Y: “the same metaphor of being pulled out of a narrow place into the open.”
Whatever its ultimate derivation, Sarah Wildman’s reading of the metaphor is so strong the conventional English versions look feeble by comparison. Maybe the ways we understand or represent feeling have changed now in a way that makes a more literal translation seem less unnatural?
Reading the post made me think of Celan’s poem ‘Engführung’ (https://poets.org/poem/stretto), which surely draws on this nightmare feeling of constriction as well as the compositional sense.
(And, less confidently, of Mandelstam’s Octets.)
Other kinds of narrowness:
Evelyn Waugh, ‘Brideshead Revisited’:
“It was as though a deed of conveyance of her narrow loins had been drawn and sealed. I was making my first entry as the freeholder of a property I would enjoy and develop at leisure.”
https://bridesheadcastle.tumblr.com/post/5972893707/narrow-loins
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Winnie-the-Pooh_%281961%29/Chapter_2
Last year, on the highway a few blocks from my house in Bloomington, Indiana (nowhere near a mountain), my daughter’s car was totaled by a deer bouncing off the grille of another car coming in the opposite direction. My daughter wasn’t injured. It was rutting season. To revert to the original point, this sort of thing is too common in America to have major shock value when simulated in a movie.
Last week, riding my bike, I swerved a bit because a rabbit ran across the street in front of me. I probably deviated a foot or less to the left, enough to make the driver behind me, already primed because he’d watched the rabbit too, change his course about the same distance. For both of us it was instinctive but unnecessary, since I wouldn’t have hit the rabbit nor he me at our speeds and trajectories.
He swerved just far enough that the dog chasing the rabbit, which neither of us had seen, slammed headfirst into his rear door, and I believe one paw went just under his rear tire. The dog limped to the sidewalk whining loudly. The driver got out and yelled at the owner, who will probably never again scofflaw the leash ordinance. I don’t think the dog’s paw was very badly injured. He wouldn’t walk on it, but held it normally, on the ground, when he stood still. He might have suffered a concussion.
@Rodger C: When I lived in Bloomington, my boss said that deer were are particular problem in his neighborhood, damaging several cars. Sure enough, the first time I was pulling out of his driveway, one ran in back of us, although I didn’t hit it. Hitting turkeys along Highway 37 south of town was also a significant risk.
Maybe the attitude to deer vs cars in Denmark is formed by the fact that the major populations are roe deer, maybe 50kg at the most and not very tall — some dogs are bigger. The deer loses to the car every time, unlike the Swedish moose. We do have fallow and red deer, but those are mainly managed populations and behind fencing. (I wouldn’t want to collide with a stag).
We do have fallow and red deer, but those are mainly managed populations and behind fencing.
In Germany, you’ll also find those in the wild, but only in more densely forested areas. While I have often seen roe deer – a good way to see them is to drive through rural areas near sunset, when they come out on open fields and pastures to feed – I’ve never seen any fallow or red deer in the wild, only in zoos and enclosures. A farmer near the village where I grew up used to breed fallow deer.
Roe and muntjac deer have been known to hang out in the quieter corners of my campus.
We’re in a pretty suburban spot, though, and right by a designated preservation area. I haven’t seen them get any closer to town.
…it’s more likely that it keeps being reinvented.
Here are some typologically parallel passages that I have quickly selected from the Rigveda and that use the s-stem noun áṃhas and the related u-stem aṃhú (see here, where it is transliterated aṉhu, bottom of the middle column, page 1; cf. the cognates listed in the Wiktionary here). Both áṃhas and aṃhú are consistently translated as narrow straits by Stephanie W. Jamison and Joel P. Brereton (2014) The Rigveda: The Earliest Religious Poetry of India. For example, you can see áṃhas and aṃhú contrasting with urú- ‘wide, broad, spacious’ and urucákri- ‘making wide (space)’ (urú- + cákri- ‘doing, effecting’, from the root √kṛ ‘do’) in a hymn to Brahmaṇaspati (RV 2.26.4):
Aṃhú and urú again in a hymn to Mitra and Varuṇa (5.65.4):
And aṃhu contrasting with várivas ‘free space, space for unhindered movement’ (root related to urú) in a hymn to víśve devā́ḥ ‘All Gods’ (1.107.1):
And the s-stem noun áṃhas from the same root, combined with martial imagery of the chariot, and the warrior god Indra at the head of the verse, in another hymn to All Gods (1.106.1):
As in the Hebrew, the use of áṃhas and aṃhú ‘narrow straits’ seems to tap into both the anxieties of a pastoral people in their pursuit of wide pastures, and the anxiousness of warriors hemmed in by enemies.
Here in southern lowland Norway roe deers are everywhere. As Lars says, they’re small — those I have seen must have been much lighter than 50 kg — and no danger to a car. Recent advice is to drive right on, since the fallout from the evasive maneuver is more dangerous (to the involved humans) than a hit from a roe deer.
There’s a growing invasive population of fallow deers east of the Oslo fjord. Wild boars too, We blame Swedish nobility.
The red deer is mainly a west coast animal, taking the place of the moose in the forests and the roe deer on the fields, but it’s been spreading rapidly in the last decades both inside and outside of its core region, probably because outfield grazing by domesticated stock has decreased. A red deer is about half the weight of a moose, so serious enough.
And then there’s the reindeer. Most are managed populations. The regions in colours are grazing districts in the traditional area where the herds are managed and owned by the Sami. Note how the Swedish districts (in green) to a much larger degree uphold the traditional seasonal migrations of the herds. Sami languages follow the same pattern,
The black contours outside the traditional area denote licence zones. Here the managed herds can have both Sami and local ethnically Norwegian owners. The rest of the mountain region is reserved for wild herds.
As in the Hebrew, the use of áṃhas and aṃhú ‘narrow straits’ seems to tap into both the anxieties of a pastoral people in their pursuit of wide pastures, and the anxiousness of warriors hemmed in by enemies.
A good summary and a very nice selection of passages — thanks, Xerîb!
I hesitate to ask because of absolute ignorance, but I wonder about the Hebrew term olam עוֹלָם and its possible opposition to the `narrow place’: I called to God, the psalm says; I was answered, it continues, from `expansiveness’.
[I have probably read more than my share of Harold Bloom, but as a topologist I think I should be told.]
Xerib: Here are some typologically parallel passages that I have quickly selected from the Rigveda
Quoted for awe.
The fprmulaic parallels between the Rigveda and the Psalms is the kind of thing comparative mythologists build dissertations on. But it goes to show that one ought to be careful in claiming them as linguistic inheritance. These are motives and formulas that travel well between languages. I’ll reformulate my speculation above to “The psalm could refer to some specific story (or myth) important in the cult built around (the House of) king David, perhaps using formulaic language from even older cults.”
and that use the s-stem noun áṃhas and the related u-stem aṃhú
It is suggestive that the metaphorical meanings do trace all the way back to PIE. And maybe a warning that a sufficiently natural extension could actually happen everywhere independently, especially if helped along by a travelling motive.
[I have probably read more than my share of Harold Bloom, but as a topologist I think I should be told.]
I don’t want to dash your hopes, but the subject here is actually typology. Whatever that is.
And then there’s tipology, a perennially contentious subject (I try to leave ~20%).
Same in Austria (as of over 20 years ago).
Well, I’m not really sure it’s recent here either. But I didn’t pick it up until recently.
But I will say that the decision to drive right on must be taken in a fraction of a second, well before your brain has caught up and can identify the moving object. There are animate objects in that weight class that aren’t roe deers.
jack morava: I am not sure what you mean. In Biblical Hebrew, ‘ôlām is used only in a temporal meaning, in ‘forever’, ‘since forever’, and such.
Dear Y, thanks!
[That’s what caught my eye. My impression is that HB’s interpretation suggests spatial openness, promised land etc, but when I tried to google the term I seemed to see mostly temporal references.]
Couple of things:
1) The association between “Mitzrayim/Egypt and metsar/strait, narrow place, therefore place of suffering, is the usual sort of false etymology that you find in Rabbinic literature. The Biblical name is a cognate for names found in other Semitic languages which use the root msr, mtzr for Egypt in texts predating not only the Bible but probably Hebrew itself – Ugaritic, Akkadian, and others. It’s also the word for Egypt in Arabic. There’s no reason to believe that pre-Hebraic languages and cultures would have conceived of Egypt as “the place of slavery.” Additionally, the -ayim suffix expresses the sense of a dual, so the word means “the two Egypts” – ie Upper and Lower. If the word meant “place of slavery” it would be senseless to use the dual. The Ugaritic name for Egypt (which pre-dates Biblical Hebrew by many hundreds of years) is similarly a dual.
2) Jack Morava and Y –
Without contradicting Y’s observation that olam having a spatial meaning is post-Biblical, I’d like to note that, in what I presume is a happy coincidence, there is a modern example of an opposition (more precisely a paradox) involving olam and tsar. The early Hasidic sage Nachman of Breslov (1772-1810), a Kabalist who famously taught using epigrams and allegories, left a collection of teachings which includes the sentence,
“And know, that each person must cross over a very, very narrow bridge, and the whole and the essence is to permit oneself no fear at all.”
.וְדַע, שֶׁהָאָדָם צָרִיך לַעֲבר עַל גֶּשֶׁר צַר מְאֹד מְאֹד וְהַכְּלָל וְהָעִקָּר שֶׁלּא יִתְפַּחֵד כְּלָל
Although Reb Nachman described the bridge we must cross as tsar – narrow – he dd not say explicitly what is being bridged. But at some point a variant of the saying became popular:
“The whole entire world is a very narrow bridge, and the essence is to fear not at all.”
כָּל הָעוֹלָם כֻּלוֹ גֶשֶׁר צַר מְּאֹד וְהָעִיקָר לֹא לְפַחֵד כְּלַל
In this version, olam – the entirety of the world or, if you’d prefer, the universe, or eternity, or creation, or existence – is itself no more than the narrowest of bridges – gesher tsar m’od.
The variant has in our time been set to music and is a popular hymn that’s sung in youth groups and at summer camps. It seems to me that an adolescent’s experience of the world is at once an enormity of possibility and a narrow and perilous crossing, and to have a sanctioned religious sage advise that one should enter into this world fearlessly is both reassuring and inspiring.
יִתְפַּחֵד is unusual; I would take it to be just a variant of יְפַחֵד and translate it in this context as “…to have no fear at all.”
BTW כֻּלוֹ should be כֻּלּוֹ, and מְּאֹד should be מְאֹד, and עִיקָר should be עִקָּר.
(Hat—I learned here an editors’ abbreviation for “should be”. What is it again?)
This is close reading is both fascinating and hard to keep up with …
@Bloix The association between “Mitzrayim/Egypt and metsar/strait, narrow place, therefore place of suffering, is the usual sort of false etymology that you find in Rabbinic literature.
Contrast
@Xerib As in the Hebrew, the use of áṃhas and aṃhú ‘narrow straits’ [in the Rigveda] seems to tap into both the anxieties of a pastoral people in their pursuit of wide pastures, and the anxiousness of warriors hemmed in by enemies.
(To which @Hat commented A good summary. And I agreed at the time.) But it seems “As in the Hebrew” was uncalled for(?)
Per @Xerib this seems to be a IE cultural universal; but per @Bloix not a pastoral people universal.
So the KJV not following the parallel doesn’t count as ‘translation fail'(?) Are the KJV translators likely to have known of this Rabbinical tendency for false etymologies?/was their translation choice of non-parallel deliberate or random?
@ Y, thanks: cf perhaps `As I crossed a bridge of dreams’ ?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarashina_Nikki
I’m very ignorant of Jewish mysticism. Did R. Nachman refer to the span of a person’s life from cradle to grave?
AntC I read Bloix as saying that Hebrew narrow place = place of suffering is fine but not the relationship of that word with the word for Egypt, which is cognate with the Egypt words in other and older Semitic languages with no reason to associate Egypt with hardship.
DE you’d earlier said that you couldn’t think of a relevant metaphorical extension in Kusaal. I’m wondering whether any of these similar turns of phrase work.
Times are tight.
In a tight spot
To feel squeezed.
Thin gruel
Exiguous meaning thin but also scant.
Restricted and constrained
Narrowing one’s eyes
The idea that thin narrow constricted have a negative metaphorical valence, that can also express a negative emotional space, contrasted with open expansive broad fat, is so pervasive to me that it’s hard to believe it’s an independent development specific to IE or a pastoral fear of hidden predators rather than a deeply human thing.
If you can find me an example I’ll be waiting here with open arms and an open heart.
מִן־הַמֵּצַר קָרָאתִי יָּהּ עָנָנִי בַמֶּרְחָב יָהּ׃
Min-hammēṣar qārāʾṯî yāh ʿānānî ḇammerḥāḇ yāh.
Out of my straits I called upon the LORD; He answered me with great enlargement. (Ps 118:5)
For an Arabic speaker, this is a really nice illustration of the original meaning of marḥab-an “welcome”. (A particularly ridiculous folk etymology circulating in Lebanon derives the word from Syriac or quasi-Syriac “mār ḥubbā”, “my Lord is Love”.)
Hat—I learned here an editors’ abbreviation for “should be”. What is it again?
I use s/b; I don’t know how widespread it is.
cf recte
Yeah, but that’s classicist jargon, not editorial.
I have just realized that my interest in this comes from curiosity about how to say `space-time continuum’ in biblical Hebrew/classical Greek/classical Chinese… or maybe PIE or Dogon for that matter – not that any of the answers would mean anything to me…
In Dogon it’s probably an ancient monosyllable.
How about πᾶν for space-time continuum in Greek ? It’s an ancient monosyllable that covers everything – space, time and rock-n-roll.
My eye was just caught by the constricted/broad contrast in Brenton’s translation (from the LXX) of Proverbs 1:20, which is one of today’s readings in the Byzantine (that word …) lectionary: “Wisdom sings aloud in passages, and in the broad places speaks boldly.” A representative recent translation from the MT (the ESV) has that as “Wisdom cries aloud in the street, in the markets she raises her voice.”
Selbstherrlichkeit, in brief.
Before looking this up, I thought it was the German word for ‘sovereign citizenship’, but that turns out to be Reichsbürgertum.
I use s/b; I don’t know how widespread it is.
I use the pattern “for X read Y”, which I think I first met in the errata to Ulysses (now incorporated into modern editions, along with other errata).
Herrlich means things like “wonderful” and “splendiferous”.
In Dogon it’s probably an ancient monosyllable.
Siriusly?
Lameen, what are the exact semantics of marḥab-an?
@Hans. “I mentioned somewhere in these august halls that I feel infantilized by other people filling my grocery bags – every time I’m in a country where that’s the usual thing in supermarkets, I have to adjust to that again and withstand the urge to rip the bags out of the bagger’s hands and do it myself.”
An elegant solution is to tell the cashier that you are buying for your neighbor too and therefore want to pack yourself in order to separate their purchases and yours. If you frequent the shop, the cashiers will eventually remember that you are a self-packer and not even start to pack for you.
Herrlich means things like “wonderful” and “splendiferous”.
And Selbstherrlichkeit is arrogance. The genuine full-dress kind, not the piss-ant mockdown that’s called eingebildet (stuck-up).
#
A Virginia politician is said to have silenced a heckler by saying, “I’m a big dog on a big hunt and I don’t have time for a piss-ant on a melon stalk”.[6]
#
This is not arrogance, but a rebuke.
There is more to Lady Bracknell than a willingness to slap down impudent puppies.
If you take your panniers off your bike and bring them in with you, they’re too surprised to figure out what to do, so packing for yourself becomes the norm. At least in my experience.
Banjo Brothers work well because they’re easy on and off.
“Was he the victim of a revolutionary outrage?”
Ryan, a backpack works for that too.
Thanks for the tips. I’m not going to lie to people to make them stop bagging, but the back pack method might work. In any case, I’m back in Germany since a couple of years now, where I’m in no danger of anyone trying to pamper grocery shoppers.
You’re probably partly tongue in cheek about pampered grocery shoppers. But I think the baggers in the US are often there to save the time of the higher-paid cashiers by clearing the landing area more quickly than the customer would get it done. If there’s no bagger present, as is frequently true, the cashier will do it if the groceries are still out when everything has been rung up, but there’s no real expectation that the customer won’t step over and start the process. Many customers don’t bother, but I can’t imagine that’s a setting in which you’d feel embarrassed doing it yourself.
A backpack definitely works. The panniers I use are open-topped and somewhat stiff-sided, making them easier to pack than a backpack. And faster, to get back to my original point, for the same reason that as groceries have transitioned from stiff-sided paper bags, they’ve created holders to make it easier to pack the floppy plastic bags.
But I think the baggers in the US are often there to save the time of the higher-paid cashiers by clearing the landing area more quickly than the customer would get it done
Oh you innocent soul… obviously, you never shopped in Germany. In the higher-end grocery stores like my local EDEKA, the cashiers will just wait until the shopper clears out the landing area, and the shopper will try to do it as fast as possible, because the next ones in line will glare at them reproachfully. There is no expectation for the cashier to do any clearing, except maybe if the shopper collapses at the check-out and is unable to do that. At the cheaper discounters like my local Penny market, the cashier will start to put the goods of the next in line on the landing area immediately after you pay, and devil take the hindmost; if stuff gets mixed up, you can sort it out with the other shopper.
Of course the trend in the US is toward self-service checkouts. Presumably this vastly increases theft and accidental undercharges, but the calculation is that having to pay fewer staff makes it worth it. It also means each person takes longer to check out, since the scanning is being done by inexperienced amateurs, but that can be compensated for by having more checkout stations. Any problems with checkout (“problems” including buying alcoholic beverages) require finding a staff person, who may or may not be standing nearby.
In the higher-end grocery stores like my local EDEKA, the cashiers will just wait until the shopper clears out the landing area, and the shopper will try to do it as fast as possible, because the next ones in line will glare at them reproachfully.
So it’s national ! I had vaguely imagined the cause to be bad workflow organisation at the Rewe outlet in Cologne where I buy groceries – the only one.
>the cashiers will just wait
In trying to refute my point, I think you’ve emphasized it.
I don’t remember how the German manned checkout stations look, but in Denmark the landing area always has a divider that can be switched from side to side and let the cashier register one customer’s items and put them on one side while the previous customer is packing theirs on the other, without any mixups.
But Danish Coop also has a mobile app that allows you to scan-and-pack while still inside the store and just pay online when on your way out. For bank reasons you need to validate your app with your digital ID (on your specific phone[s]), but that also means that all you get when buying spirits is a notification, no need to find a staff person.
(They do have spot checks where you have to go to the actual cashier who will ask you to show some of the items you scanned. There are probably legal reasons why they can’t ask you to empty the whole bag; I suppose they still have shop detectives to spot if you pocket a 200$ glass of truffles.
23 years ago they already had the same system at Waitrose in Wokingham, but they gave you [very nice] special bags to put in your trolley and pack the items in. I assume that gets around the privacy concerns because your personal stuff isn’t private if you put it in the shop’s bags before the checkout. A spot check meant unpacking all your items at a special checkout, but at least they helped you pack them again).
@Ryan: It’s all a question of cost calculation. Having the shopper doing the bagging, doing it quickly under the glare of the next ones in line, is more efficient in a country like Germany where people don’t expect service and even low-qualified workers are expensive. The American model is more efficient only because shoppers have been sufficiently pampered to expect service.
I don’t remember how the German manned checkout stations look, but in Denmark the landing area always has a divider that can be switched from side to side and let the cashier register one customer’s items and put them on one side while the previous customer is packing theirs on the other, without any mixups
Many shops in Germany have that, e.g. the DM drugstores I regularly use, but the grocery stores in the Bonn area that I know (that also includes REWE and ALDI stores) don’t.
The REWE store in the city center has self-checkout stations, but they’re fiddly and if you have more than two or three items, it’s usually faster to use the manned checkout.
In general, German buyers prioritize saving a couple of cents on their shopping over convenience, and Germany is normally slow with fancy digital innovation. Without COVID, contactless payment and card payment for amounts below 10 Euros still wouldn’t be a thing.
Hans, I think you’re relying on your stereotype of Americans. Consider what else you’ve learned, that increasingly, people here are expected to ring up AND bag their own. At places like Home Depot, you increasingly can’t get a cashier, and have to do it all, while some guy hovers, and eventually does something for you because the interface is confusing, and you become the bottleneck. It doesn’t make sense to say Americans are so pampered that they can’t bag, except that stores successfully make them ring up and bag.
Groceries have mostly dropped the “10 items or less” cashier lane these days, because customers are fast enough at bagging a small amount that it remains an efficient combination of space, time and staff.
The constraints for a grocery are floor space, the high wages of cashiers and the fact that good baggers and cashiers are much faster than customers. I go to groceries which at peak times have all lanes open, and still have lines. If you relied on people to check out and bag themselves, it would go much slower. A good bagger is serving two lines, freeing up that space far faster than a customer would do, and likely making minimum wage, vs.perhaps 3 times that for a cashier. So groceries hire baggers to avoid having to give up floor space to additional check-out lanes to keep it all moving.
It seems funny that in your latest comment, you admit that it’s faster in Germany to use the cashier line for even 4 items, but won’t concede that the baggers could have something to do with getting people through quickly.
Maybe the difference is not “Germanic efficiency” and “American laziness”, but just economics.
I’ve worked as cashier at both a small grocery store and at a very large (non-grocery) retail store and I don’t think I ever saw my duties as “pampering” shoppers.
There is such a thing as pride in one’s work, by the way, even as a lowly retail clerk.
The Edeka here has dividers, the cashiers are just blissfully unaware of them and literally never use them. I did it for them once.
It also has 4 self-checkout stations now.
It’s easily Europe-wide.
You really underestimate the pressure from the queue behind you. (There’s always a queue because there are never enough cash desks open; that’s deliberate, to force people to look at the overpriced trinkets next to each cash desk. Austrians will actually shout “Second cash desk!” when the queue gets too long, but that’s always ignored for a solid minute.)
It’s definitely economics – I’m sure hiring baggers would be too expensive over here.
It seems funny that in your latest comment, you admit that it’s faster in Germany to use the cashier line for even 4 items, but won’t concede that the baggers could have something to do with getting people through quickly
The problem with the self-checkout is not the bagging, it’s that the systems are fiddly. Things like putting stuff the wrong way on the weighing platform or wrong choices on the vegetables menu lead to the shopper either having to go through lengthy cancellation menus or having to ask for assistance. Bagging your own groceries is easy in comparison, especially as a many shoppers don’t put their stuff in bags, but just back into their shopping carts, in which they transport them to their cars.
Just judging on my personal experience, lines don’t move faster in the countries I’ve visited where they have bagging (mostly SE Asia, but also many supermarkets in Lebanon and some in Kazakhstan – during my vacations in the U.S., I didn’t go grocery shopping). As DM said, don’t underestimate the force of social pressure.
And well, I was a bit facetious with the whole “pampered” thing – us Germans just like to complain how bad service is here compared to other countries. And of course it’s all economics.
Here in Norway there are usually baggers at all check-out counters in high-end supermarkets in the days before Christmas, Easter and maybe a couple of other big days. Some even have one or two baggers on regular Saturdays I”m sure it speeds up the checkout by having the groceries bagged and back in the trolley by the time checkout is finished.
My impression is that all are school age kids having a side job, and they typically ask nicely if you want help with bagging. I say politely no since I want to pack myself. The baggers have no idea* which groceries go in which bag and in what order.
* Not completely true. There have been baggers who have sorted cold stuff in separate bags, but they are few and years between.
Our local baggers have a tendency to put the bananas in first.
That’s bananas.
In Ireland a plastic bag levy was introduced in 2001.
The German discounters Lidl and Aldi are noted for having the packing area separate from the cashier. At my local you put your basket on one side of the cashier, who scans and transfers each item to an identical basket on the other side; you pay and take the basket over to the packing area and transfer into your own “reusable” bag, backpack, or wheeled caddy.
Marks & Spencer sometimes had a local charity or youth groups doing bagging for a donation, which I suspect caused mutters and gritted teeth as an imposition much more than beams of content as a useful service.
This article says self-checkout is no benefit for customers or staff and possibly not for profit margins either.
Of the two supermarkets I use, one has no self-checkout (it’s a small place, only 4 stocked aisles and 1-2 cashiers); the other has many more aisles and self-checkout that goes bananas approximately every other time I scan something, requiring attention from an employee before I can do anything further. The result is that almost all checkout is done by the one human checkout clerk rather than the 8 robots.
@moolymooly, that Guardian article is very consistent with my experience of self-checkout “robots”. But Denmark is a high trust society, and there’s only one big chain using the kind with weight checks of each item. That really gets my goat, especially when the weights are coded wrong, but also because my instinct is to take one item in each hand and scan them before putting them on the output side, and then it just scolds me. (At least they give the “help person” a cashier’s chair to sit on).
Other places just have a counter with a touch screen and a scanner, but also enough manual check-out lines that I very rarely see people using those. Personally I use the phone app scanning thing when I’m in Coop stores, and it really does let me go through checkout in 30 seconds. (Of course it takes longer to scan things while shopping, but on the other hand I get a running total and I can check if the advertised discounts actually register, instead of having to check the receipt and complain. I like that, but lots of people think it’s too complicated and prefer to queue for 5 minutes every day instead of spending 15 minutes to learn the app. [I taught my mom of 86 to use it, it’s not really hard. But other stores are closer, so she never does]).
One positive side effect is that they have to actually put all the products into the system so the shelf-edge markers are updated. Under the old system, many prices were registered under “PLU codes” that the cashiers could look up and you had to go to a cashier if you wanted to know the price. (I guess that’s also an associated cost of having self-checkouts).
Interesting – Lidls here has a fairly ordinary scan it and push it on to the end setup, although they do have the clever divider to direct two separate lots of shopping to two different sections of the end, which I don’t remember seeing in any other UK supermarket.
In Ireland a plastic bag levy was introduced in 2001.
Same in Germany, so no free bags anymore at grocery stores.
In British Columbia, they also have a bag charge, and I’ve never seen bagging services in any grocery store I used there. But I don’t know whether bagging ever was a thing in Canada before they introduced the charge.
In Ireland a plastic bag levy was introduced in 2001.
We have that also in Germany, so no free bags anymore at grocery stores.
In British Columbia, they also have a bag charge, and I’ve never seen bagging services in any grocery store I used there. But I don’t know whether bagging ever was a thing in Canada before they introduced the charge.
In Denmark the levy is on any bag with carrying handles, paper or plastic. And businesses are not allowed to “eat” the cost as part of a big item, like a take-away dish. It has to appear on the customer receipt. (But when you preorder take-away you often can’t deselect the bag, even if you intend to bring your own, so it’s just a meaningless rule with no incentive force). It’s also an irritant to high street stores that would be happy to pay the levy and give the bags away, for the perceived PR value of customers carrying the bags. Now they have to ask the customers at checkout if they want a bag for 4DKK, and that sort of puts a snag in the desired smooth customer experience. (Run your card and don’t look at the register display…) Some of them actually ignore the rule (and pay the fine/non-compliance fee when caught, I assume. The state gets its levy when they buy the bags from the printer, so it’s not fraud).
(The “carrying handle” parts is because baker shops usually put each piece of sugar and butter leaking pastry in its own little paper bag so they don’t contaminate each other and the inside of your shopping bag. Also supermarket packing areas have rolls of flimsy plastic bags to put leak-prone items like trays of fresh meat in, for the same reason. Charging 4DKK for a .25DKK bag because the government would be suicide for the latter).
Once upon a time grocery-bagging was an honored trade/skill in the United States, and some grocery store trade association sponsored an annual national competition for the best baggers (invariably teenagers doing it as a short-term thing). The tv talk show host David Letterman, who had worked as a bagger in his own younger years, would on multiple occasions have the winner as a guest on his show. Here’s a clip of him with the 1995 national champion.
To return to the original subject of this post, would it make sense to render the biblical phrase as “from the self-checkout line, I called out to God, and the Lord answered me, and led me to a staffed checkout that had just opened up”?
LOL
Not in Germany 🙂
(Well, it could easily vary. At my local Lidl there’s almost no space to the cashier’s left.)
Not in Germany 🙂
(Well, it could easily vary. At my local Lidl there’s almost no space to the cashier’s left.)
I can also confirm that I never saw a system like mollymooly describes at any German supermarket. But the last time I was at a Lidl is years ago (I don’t have anything against that chain, their outlets in the area are just not at places where I usually go for shopping.)
to the cashier’s left: This implies that cashiers always sit to the left of the “aisle” where the shoppers pass, doesn’t it? In Danish stores, it’s random (or rather, in most cases based on constraints beyond the ken of mortals). It’s not uncommon here to have a wider floor area with one cashier on each side, only one of them staffed outside rush hour.
Oh, yes, it is random. It’s the left in that particular Lidl.
The etymology of anguish was touched on in a couple of comments above. Here’s Yiyun Li in the Oct. 30 New Yorker, on the months after her son’s death:
Huh. I read that essay and admired it, but I forgot we had discussed that very issue…
languagehat : “And yet all the blood and brutality in The Death of Stalin wasn’t disturbing?” : my original comment on The Death of Stalin on facebook, when it came out :
> Just saw The Death of Stalin, the film. First impressions: not a bad adaptation of the comic, but the depiction of the communists was too positive in my opinion. Beria was shown as the monster he was — unlike in the comic, but the rest of the politbureau were portrayed more positively than I expected. And the next-to-final scene with Svetlana and Khrushchov was weird, and she was shown as liking her father weirdly much. And Molotov was given a weirdly positive portrayal — again, that differed from his depiction in the graphic novel, in the opposite direction from Beria.