Pet Names

On a completely different topic, here’s an interesting bit from the OED:

Dog

I.1.a.

Old English–

A domesticated carnivorous mammal, Canis familiaris (or C. lupus familiaris), which typically has a long snout, an acute sense of smell, non-retractile claws, and a barking, howling, or whining voice*, widely kept as a pet or for hunting, herding livestock, guarding, or other utilitarian purposes.

Etymology: Origin unknown.

The word belongs to a set of words of uncertain or phonologically problematic etymology with a stem-final geminated g in Old English which is not due to West Germanic consonant gemination and therefore does not undergo assibilation. These words form both a morphological and a semantic group, as they are usually Old English weak masculine nouns and denote animals; compare FROG n.1, HOG n.1, PIG n.1, STAG n.1, Old English sugga (see HAYSUGGE n.), Old English wicga (see EARWIG n.), and perhaps TEG n.1 It has been suggested that these words show expressive gemination, perhaps due to their being originally hypocoristic forms. (For discussion see R. M. Hogg†‘Two Geminate Consonants in Old English’ in J. Anderson Lang. Form & Ling. Variation (1982) 187–202.) For some of the words, substratal influence has also been considered (compare PIG n.1). Because attestation of these words in Old English is generally rare and confined to glossaries and onomastic evidence (as in the case of DOG n.1), if they are attested at all, and also because there is often a better-attested synonym (in this case, HOUND n.1), it seems likely that the words were stylistically marked in Old English, i.e. considered non-literary or informal.

It never occurred to me that the origin of "dog" could be a mystery; furthermore, that it might be part of a morphological and semantic group with frog, hog, pig, stag, haysugge (hedge-sparrow), earwig and teg (second year sheep) among who knows how many others. Are these other -g ending critters in the same category?: bug, slug, nag  

The commonality seems to hinge on the non-literary or informal quality they share -- they appear to be less well attested than their counterparts "Hound", "Boar", "Buck", etc.  The terminal "g" that they have in common has a tendency to double in length (geminate) in other forms.  As the evidence for the origin of  words in this class is either scant or associated with proper names in the literature,  the suggestion is that the final g may have been a way of forming informal or pet names for the commonly encountered animals (hypocoristic means having to do with pet names).   If I'm understanding it correctly, the animal may have been a hound, but fondness for it inspired proto-English speakers to dispense with formalities and call it a "doggie" which we inherited as the common English name for it, right?  How cute!

What does it mean?  I don’t know, but it’s interesting, isn't it?  Mind blown for the day.  

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* "... whining voice..." Rather subjective, is it not?  Cat people, am I right?

† No pun intended?

Quibbles

Francis Bacon

The other day, out of curiosity, I was googling "2024 Vote Regret" and I found 2 vote regretters.  Both of them regretted their votes ...  for Kamala Harris!   To be fair one of the regretters was that jackass on ESPN Stephen A Smith I think his name is and he was basically being a contrary dick on Bill Maher.  The other was Charlamagne Tha God and he was retroactively regretting endorsing Kamala Harris as VP in 2020.  But my point is, there is really no satisfaction to be gotten from seeking regret from anyone who didn’t vote for Harris, because they don’t seem to exist.  There are a few Trump regretters by now to be sure.  But trying to get people to admit that had Harris won we would not be in the position we're in is something like saying the moon would be green if it had grass growing on it.  My conclusion—and I’m not talking about dyed in the wool democrats or dupes but about smart people whose primary goal was avoiding what we’ve got now—we’ll never get the credit we deserve or any gratification for having tried to make the worst outcome of the 2024 election not happen, no matter how hard we seek.  (The silver lining: the whole fucking shithole of a country appears about to be ready to come crashing down around us now.  And I hope it does.  And when we wrest the charred remains from the bloated motherfuckers who are engaged in destroying it for their own superfluous gain right now, let's do it right next time-- for all of us.)  (And Fuck Them!)

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Black Pill by Elle Reeve presents up close journalism about the sorts of internet denizens that our government's (hence our) violator Elon Musk fancies himself to be-- the edgy troll.  Insightful and adventuresome-- I'll miss reading it when I'm done with it.  Specifically, it concludes things about free speech absolutism that have been on my mind quite a bit lately—namely that it mostly serves nazis and racists who laugh behind the backs of useful idiot free speech advocates on the left.  I don’t know what to do about it, and Elle Reeve hasn’t yet said what to do about it if she has an opinion about that.  It’s sort of a black pilled predicament that the ones whose odious speech is most tenderly catered to are the ones basically advocating for surrender to the racist and misogynist and fascist notions that already hold sway in why things suck.  Meanwhile speech and thought of the left is actively and openly being banned by those aggressively pushing the freedom to be fascist.  Speech has consequences.  It gets people killed.  It undoes centuries of struggle.  Discuss.

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Talking to a friend in my age range who was laid off a couple of years ago and who, after a futile two year search for someone-- anyone-- willing to take a chance on hiring a 60-something job candidate in his field, is cresting on adopting a stance that he is now permanently involuntarily unemployed, I am definitely of the opinion that even a “good job” is taken out of necessity, not desire.  The work I’m trying to force myself to get back to (yet writing this instead)-- I wouldn’t do it if I wasn't afraid of starving myself and my family.  My friend is not happy about the lack of agency he feels he has in his economic life, but it does not escape either of our attention that he and I are both the age that people not too long ago used to retire at anyway and in spite of everything in this stingy culture that is sending him the contradictory message that his unemployability makes him less than human, being outside the proletariat truly has its perks.  I think my friend, being no longer an exploited value producer is in the natural state.  We’re trained to feel that the natural state is wrong.  But the natural state is the right state to be in if you can get there.  It’s just that the voices that encourage it are few and far between.  Society is set up to thwart the natural state.  Like almost everything about capitalism, the attitude of society to the natural state -- fear!-- is expressed as a lie.  We can’t bring ourselves to say we fear people living in a natural state because that way lies the end of capitalism.  Instead we say the natural state is deficient. Capitalism is deficient.

%%%

Privatization is not just an idea about how to reform the manner in which government provides service to its citizens.  It is the looting of our common treasury without our permission.  It is looting that makes the looting that Fox News is eager to warn us about when well-felt anger manifests itself among the people of the city after the latest outrage of indignity perpetrated on them by the constabulary look like mutual aid.  The object of privatization is to make the purview of government not the provision of a common good from the pool of our collective tribute, but rather to afford scoundrels who by hook or by crook find themselves "elected" to higher office  the opportunity to entitle their already bloated capitalistic patrons and cronies who got and keep them there to abscond with our treasury for their own profit, leaving them to see fit how poorly or even whether the once public now private service they have been gifted dominion over is delivered.  The beneficiaries of privatization are thieves twice over, for they steal not only our treasury-- the money that we who are not the beneficiaries of the wealth protection industry are coerced to supply for it for nothing in return-- but also the money that they then charge us for whatever it is our tax dollars have been granted them to retail or to rent to us. In spite of the clever sounding justifications that think tanks have been bribed to come up with, privatization is not "a cool thing to try", it is a crime committed by both the privatizers and the recipients of these corrupt officials' largesse with our money that should uniquely be punishable by public execution of both the privatizers and their profiteers.  Even murderers can be reformed.   Privatizers and their profiteers are irredeemable.  But seeing that they get their desserts (and we ours) is up to us.

Look closely- It's not an ad for an pickle.  It's dead-scalp Elon Musk.

Non-Alignment Pact

 Happy Valentine's Day from Pere Ubu!

Miss Universe

I know a panic is coming, but right now, today, what I am experiencing as I face the barrage of apocalyptic news coming out of Washington is a rather uneasy calm.  It's not as if I haven't had moments of rage of the kind that makes an elderly couch potato hope that it's not exceptional, but a milder form of what someone who actually does stuff might be feeling.  But maybe thanks to the clean conscience of one of the not nearly enough who actually voted to try to prevent the chaos we're experiencing, I am finding it easy to return to a state of composure about what we're facing. Perhaps it's a parasympathetic response-- the nervous system is shutting off pain to permit my psyche to assimilate and address the trauma.  I have no doubt that what we're witnessing is a coup-- the president has essentially greenlit a raid of the Federal government by his largest donor who happens to be the world's wealthiest person and an invasive citizen from South Africa by way of Canada, who also happens to have attracted through his business practices the unwanted attention of several of the Federal Agencies he and his teenaged minions have been given carte-blanche access to.  The question is why?  Why did the guy who just made a political comeback unleash the forces of his nation's destruction coming right out of the gate?  I can think of several possibilities.

First, Donald Trump is not a terribly well-formed individual.  He has average intelligence and capabilities but has been the beneficiary of outsized advantages and the sort of egregious parenting that fosters at least the outward appearance of baseless, limitless self-regard.  It's an entertaining show that has contributed enormously to his popular appeal.  How else do you explain how someone as fatally flawed, proudly uncurious, and intellectually and behaviorally stunted as he could again be entrusted with the reins of the most perilously consequential office on the planet  especially after he was roundly rejected after his first term?   Even if you believe (as I do) that a good portion of the explanation has to do with corruption, cheating, theft and malfeasance (to say nothing of an electorate under-concerned with the threat of exactly what we're seeing thanks to whatever sleight of hand distracted them on the day their votes were cast), you have to admit that whatever he has going for him has granted him the plausible appearance of legitimate incumbency.  I am saying that it would be reasonable to expect a normal person faced with the responsibility bestowed (a second time!) on this motherfucker would have some concern about the appearance of stewardship and care with the institutions of our shared democracy.  In short, this is happening because Donald Trump is a freak-- a sociopathic monster of privilege and ego who has no regard for history or for the feelings of others.

Second, and this follows from the first, is the question of what motivates a president who clearly gives not a single fuck about the government or the people he is president of.  My sense (and this is not entirely my original idea but I don't recall where I first heard hints of it), is that Donald Trump already got what he wanted.   After losing rather handily to Joe Biden in 2020 thanks in large part to his predictably poor handling of the COVID crisis that came out of nowhere and changed everything that election year,  Trump got what he wanted in November.  He won the election by popular vote.  Trump just wanted the title.  Miss Universe. 

All the more remarkable considering what a disastrous campaign he ran-- not a liability when the competition was the visibly deteriorating and unpopular Joe Biden but a real feat when Biden was replaced at the 11th hour by the eventual runner-up, Kamala Harris.   True, to make it work, Trump had to suppress some of the promises he made to the forces that kept his campaign funded.   He knew Project 2025 was not a winner with voters and so he feigned ignorance of it.  As a gift to Trump, instead of selling herself as a break from the present doldrums of both Biden and Trump, Harris opted to complete Biden's campaign as she found it and assert her intention for her administration to be what the people clearly did not want-- a continuation.  

Having sailed past the concerns of the majority of the voters of that day, Trump is now happy to let Elon be president-- make that happy to let Elon do the work.  What does he care what happens to the government or the people?  He doesn’t have to run again unless he feels like it.   He’s perfectly content handing his credentials, access and “responsibilities” to others as long as he gets to keep the crown.

And not go to jail.  

And maybe actually be a real billionaire.

How convenient for the agenda of the suddenly blossoming Nazism of the invasive South African and his adoptive party.  For the rest of us-- including the electorate that made it possible, absolved though they are for the poor quality of their choice by the political malpractice of the campaign of the opposition-- maybe not so much.