Tempest in a you tube

While Steve Koonin, president of Turner Entertainment Networks, sees "late night as the next land of opportunity," (“Conan O’Brien Flips Channels, Lands at TBS" WSJ 4/13), Google and YouTube see “the living room as strategically important terrain” ("YouTube Wants You to Sit and Stay Awhile [sic]" NYT 5/30). All this sounds almost reminiscent of colonial times when "They grabbed what they could get for the sake of what was to be got" (Heart of Darkness). But what is to be got? Younger viewers since, according to the Wall Street Journal, "TBS's pitch to Mr. O'Brien focused on its younger average audience than the broadcast networks," which should read, "TBS focused on its audience, on average younger than the broadcast networks' (audience)."
So far, the average user spends five hours daily in front of the tube. In comparison, YouTube looks like the pauper beside the prince with only 15 minutes per day. To change this, The New York Times reports, YouTube is “looking at how to push users into passive-consumptive mode” by offering “long-form content” such as movies, shows and webisodes (which must be the equivalent of a series, maybe How I Met Your Mother Online? ). However, Randall Stross of the NYT finds ”an embarrassingly visible portion [of the selection] to be of a type that fails to be even entertainingly bad.” Stross backs up his judgment with critic Joe Queenan of The Guardian who inventoried (meaning he took inventory of) YouTube’s offers and concluded that “All sounds great. But they are not great. Not, not, not.” If they are not great, then they cannot have failed to be entertainingly bad, can they? They obviously failed to be entertainingly good. But why should they? After all, “One of the insidious lessons about TV is the meta-lesson that you’re dumb. This is all you can do. This is easy, and you’re the sort of person who really just wants to sit in a chair and have it easy” (David Foster Wallace).

cool

Ben Zimmer, who “sets the record straight on the ubiquitous” slang word cool, explains that its modern sense, “that is, in the ‘stylish’ or ‘admirable’ meaning popularized by the cool cats and chicks of the postwar era and exemplified by the all-purpose expression of appreciation or approval, ‘That’s cool’” has nothing to do with the word’s usage by writers and speakers from Abraham Lincoln to Zora Neale Hurston. He ends his investigation saying that “From our current vantage point, it’s easy to read older examples of cool as variations on the now-entrenched colloquial use. But for lovers of linguistic verisimilitude, that’s just uncool.”
As I learned from my students, all freshmen and clearly on top of colloquial “latter-day expressions,” cool is meanwhile totally uncool. What’s stylish or admirable now is chill, and one doesn’t stay cool anymore but chills it. Cool is just so 20th century, man!

Bad Pencraft

Strange news have been washing ashore like tar balls since the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon rig. Tunku Varadarajan wrote in The Daily Beast that “The BP-engineered oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico has us all in a state of national, environmental meltdown. This catastrophe, this ‘oil-ocaust,’ has oozed massively into the national consciousness like some ungovernable evil emerged from the ocean depths.” A flowery description, but neither did BP “engineer” (= to arrange by skillful, secret planning) the spill nor is it an oil-ocaust. The word Holocaust means "entirely (holo) burnt or destroyed (kaustos)." An oil-o-caust, therefore, would denote burnt (or maybe entirely burnt if the "o" stands for "holo") oil – something everybody most likely would prefer to the continuing outpour of crude oil into the Atlantic.
The Huffington Post reported that “The catastrophic explosion that caused an oil spill from a BP offshore drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico has reached the shoreline early Friday morning.” An explosion does not ride the sea or walk the waters. The oil, however, will wash up on the shore as long as the leaking well continues to “pump more oil into the ocean indefinitely until the leak is plugged." Indefinitely or until the leak is plugged?
So far, it looks more like indefinitely since many attempts to plug the well have failed. Yet, Doug Suttles (!), BP's operating officer for exploration and production "wouldn’t say it has failed yet. What I would say is what we attempted to do last night didn’t work” ("New Setback in Containing Gulf Oil Spill," NYT 5/9). The difference between failing and not working may elude everybody else, but BP has a knack for subtleties. When in October 2009, after gas at a processing plant leaked, Representative Henry A. Waxman insisted that "'this incident could have caused an explosion.' Mr. Hayward [chief of BP] acknowledged that the gas leak could have been serious but insisted 'it wasn’t an incident'" ("Fast-Growing BP Also Has a Mounting List of Spills and Safety Lapses," NYT 5/9). Well, what was it then? An accident?
In the Gulf of Mexico, the situation might even get worse with the approaching hurricane season that, according to NPR “may encumber the oil spill.” Everything that has the potential of encumbering (= making it more difficult for something to develop) the spill would be great news indeed.
Right now, it seems pretty clear that this spill will “eclipse the worst oil spill in U.S. history — the 11 million gallons that leaked from the grounded tanker Exxon Valdez in Alaska's Prince William Sound in 1989 — in the three months it could take to drill a relief well and plug the gushing well 5,000 feet underwater on the sea floor. Ultimately, the spill could grow much larger than the Valdez because Gulf of Mexico wells typically hold many times more oil than a single tanker” (YahooNews). It’s not rocket science to figure out that only an event that grows much larger can eclipse another, preceding one. That the Deepwater Horizon spill has the potential to do so because a well holds more oil than a single tanker is another astounding observation. Not even BP is benighted enough to invest in an off-shore drilling enterprise that won’t yield more than one tanker load.

English Eccentrics and Eccentricities

A deliberate exaggeration like “My history teacher's so old, he lived through everything we've learned about ancient Greece” is a hyperbole. It is defined as being “used without the intent of literal persuasion” but of heightening effect or producing comic effect (A Handbook to Literature). Now, imagine a passenger on his way to meet his girlfriend but being stuck at an airport because of bad weather. He tweets his girlfriend that ‘Crap! Robin Hood Airport is closed. You’ve got a week and a bit to get your shit together otherwise I’m blowing the airport sky high!’ He is certainly guilty of using a hyperbole in its proper sense, i.e. without the intent of literally blowing up the airport. But what if law enforcement officials arrest the guy, question him for seven hours, confiscate his computers and mobile phone and fine him £1,000 because he was “sending a menacing message” ( tweetcrime )? Let's euphemistically call it a hyper-hyperbole.

Tailored to fit

The only man who behaves sensibly is my tailor; he takes measurements anew every time he sees me, while all the rest go on with their old measurements and expect me to fit them. George Bernard Shaw


Wearing a J. Peterman’s pale blue Sutton-Place-Dress is supposedly an outward expression of a woman’s regal behavior. “The clean lines. The crisp angles. The flowing steps. They bespeak a person who can run a neuroscience group or chair the library fund-raising committee.” To indicate is one meaning of to bespeak. According to the OED, the prefix be- , however, originally meant "about" as in behave (the ways one has about oneself). Thus, to bespeak something can also mean to talk about it, discuss it.
Its past participle, bespoke (=spoken about) is often used as an adjective, meaning custom made. Common in British English, it is recently used more frequently in the U.S. as well. There are BESPOKE CHOCOLATES and Bespoke Cycles. Silversea Cruiseline promises "Bespoke adventures off the beaten path," and visiting Paris, one should "[mill] about the 'Detox Corner' — the boutique — marveling at the bespoke all-natural products on sale" ("Going underground in a private Paris" NYT 3/28). If something is custom made, it is necessary for customer and manufacturer to have discussed the product's details and to have spoken about what is possible at which price. Hence a boutique where one can browse through bespoke products is a paradox. What is custom made cannot be off the shelf.
Even though a dress off the shelf may bespeak someone’s sophistication, a truly bespoke suit surely trumps it. Of course, it will cost more money as well as more time because "A client being fitted for a bespoke suit would have three or four fittings. We would take 20 to 25 direct measurements and we would look at their figuration" - unless the tailor is up to something else:

Chandler: Your tailor is a very bad man.
Joey: Frankie? What're you talking about?
Chandler: He took advantage of me.
Joey: No way! I've been going to that guy for 12 years.
Chandler: He said he was going to do my inseam and ran his hand up my leg, and then there was definite - cupping.
Joey: That's how they do pants. First they go up one side, they move it over, they go up the other side, they move it back, and then they do the rear. Isn't that how they measure pants?