A golden shoe, a golden ball, and some not so golden pens

Whether the World Cup is “a mass quadrennial migration” ("Around South Africa, the Good, the Bad and Biltong" NYT 7/4) or rather a quadrennial mass migration, there is no doubt that the last four weeks were pretty intense. A true soccer fan may very well have forgotten all about time and become lost in tenses.
When after the semifinal the NYT considered Germany “A Global Force” (7/4), its sports writer tried to step into a pair of Argentinean cleats and imagine how “Messi will awake in the night and see those Germans closing in. More than anyone, he will see Schweinsteiger muscling in. And when even Messi became demoralized by the German strength, Schweinsteiger had a tick or two of his own.” Although the Argentinean as well as the German team had to discover how quickly visions of a golden future turn into miscalculations of the past, even in soccer-land the past happens long before the future begins. According to conventional logic then, Messi will awake at night because Schweinsteiger played on when Messi already was demoralized.
Between the past and the future lies the present as a transition between these two time periods. Transitions ensure that the change from one condition to another doesn’t occur abruptly. Whatever memorable experiences may be connected with the cup at the Cape, not “the abrupt transitions have been most indelible” but rather the abrupt changes between “watching a herd of 30 or more elephants in the sunshine a few hours before watching Luis Suárez score twice for Uruguay in the rain; watching youngsters play in the surf in the morning in Durban, then dodging hailstones in a winter jacket in Cape Town that night” (Reporter's Notebook, NYT 7/3).
Definitely indelible would be if indeed “Joachim Löw ...wore a periwinkle sweater to Maradona’s creased and shiny suit” ("Germany Routs Argentina" NYT 7/4). The two coaches may have exchanged some friendly - or not so friendly - glances; that they swapped clothes is, however, improbable.
Some commentators had trouble distinguishing Spain (singular) and the Spaniards (plural). UEFA.com claims that “Victorious Spain receive rapturous reception,” BBC reports that “Spain return to rapturous welcome,” and Reuters adds that “Spaniards turns out to welcome home heroes.” Back home, the Spanish team probably doesn't care about subject/verb agreements. The only thing that counts for the players is that their “hard-working team ethic enabled Spain to lift the FIFA World Cup ” (UEFA.com). They obviously lifted the golden cup onto a bus since Reuters declares that the fans came to “see Spain's World Cup heroes pass by with the trophy on an open-topped bus” (Reuters). While the Spaniards may have watched their heros with the trophy passing by on a bus, how this bus can be open and topped at the same time remains a riddle.
Another riddle is how Paul the Octopus could have foreseen all this, but his “antics have been ... adding yet another light-hearted and quirky twist to the great celebration of humanity that is the World Cup in South Africa” (Huffington Post 7/8). What a rapturous welcome for the cephalopod species into the species of homo sapiens.

A regular venti with room, please

Ruth Walker muses about the "real regular" and the "new normal" and how the word regular, which “means, fundamentally, following a rule,” has changed to “the deli-counter equivalent of … ‘default setting.’" According to Walker, “normal is another word to describe a 'default setting,' although it has just a whiff of the clinical about it (‘Is that really normal?’).” She goes on to explain the origin of the word regular as “rooted in the carpenter's rule” and normal derived from norma, "the Latin word for a carpenter's square.”
Regular and normal, both denoting that something is done according to a rule or a norm, seem rather exchangeable then. However, there is also the term "normal school," which originated from the French école normale, a model school with model classrooms in which student teachers could learn teaching practices. This idea of normal as a model rather than simply a rule corresponds with The Online Etymological Dictionary's suggestion that normal may be related to the Greek word gnomon, meaning one who knows.
Nothing clinical about that. Instead, it gives something normal quite an advantage over something regular. Every knucklehead can follow a rule and do a regular job. Doing a normal or model job, on the other hand, requires knowledge of how it’s done best. Maybe that’s why any barista at Starbucks emits a draught of boredom whenever I order a regular coffee instead of one of their normal “handcrafted beverages.”

Ubiquitous tautology

"In one of the more unforgettable moments [Could there be anything less unforgettable?], a … fresh language for the 21st-century dress popped up [Oh, those eloquent dresses!] and defined what being a woman is or can be: an android, a sex kitten, a dynamo, a robot, a flower of pleasure, an angel in the morning, a warrior, a nun, a Lolita, a Bond girl, a multi-ethnic poppy, a surrealist Puritan Mexican-American, a gay-retro variant of a French coquette.” As if this weren’t close enough to a linguistic atlas, the list (NYT 3/14/10) ends with “a butched-up Emma Peel,” which is – for anybody who remembers The Avengers – sort of a tautology - but still nothing compared to the “need to work out a common consensus” (NYT 5/9/10).
Saying the same thing twice is not exactly sparkling, but how about saying the same twelve times on the back of a roughly 5x8 Annie's Grahams box?

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