Armageddon

The signals given by EU leaders thus far have been uncertain, putting the pressure on Greece to be bold in its domestic reforms. In the next two weeks, the EU commission and EU finance ministers (Ecofin) will decide whether the country is doing enough to avoid Armageddon.
   - Today's Guardian

Greece is 399 miles from Armageddon. Mainland Greece is 705 miles from Armageddon. Armageddon, literally the hill of Meggido, is just a place in Israel.

Here's what Armageddon actually looks like.

It seems rather tranquil, perhaps even dull. Nobody's quite certain why St John the Divine/God/Satan picked this spot for the final battle between good and evil. But he did.

For they are the spirits of devils, working miracles, which go forth unto the kings of the earth and of the whole world, to gather them to the battle of that great day of God Almighty. Behold I come as a thief. Blessed is he that watcheth, and keepeth his garments, lest he walk naked, and they see his shame. And he gathered them together in a place called in the Hebrew tongue Armageddon.
  - Revelations 16 v14-16

So keep your clothes on.

Swearing in The Wire

A recent immigrant to my Alamut for exhausted journalists has brought with her not only the suicidal plants I mentioned a few days ago, but a complete set of the Digital Versatile Discs of The Wire, which I have settled down to throughsuffer.

I was watching the fourth episode today, in which there is a reasonably long scene towards the end that uses only the word fuck and its cognates (by cognates I include the oedipal pejorative and the mysterious fuckin' A). It is a fascinating, if slightly obvious, linguistic exercise

Welcome to Hell

Most headlines, however unpleasant, I find amusing. I laugh at manslaughter (because it's man's laughter), I tut over tragic (unless it's Aristotelean), and I wonder how casual the casualties really were. But BROWN JOINS HAITI POETRY READING...

I cannot type. My eyes are filled with tears.

Complete With

Mr Beesley was granted permission to build a barn for agricultural use only but fitted it out as a luxury house complete with three bedrooms, a study, bathroom, lounge, reception area, storeroom and gym.
   - BBC News

A very common phrase, but it becomes odder and odder the more you think about it.

Well disguised

Pipe Dreams

Nato has a new plan in Afghanistan. We're going to pay the Afghans lots of money to stop shooting people and growing opium. However, the head of the National Conciliation for Dialogue with the Tribesmen of Afghanistan says that this plan is nothing more than a "pipe dream", which is appropriate as a pipe dream is the hallucination you get after smoking a pipe full of opium.

A busy day in the Nato Strategy Unit

Anti-sceptic

                                                                                                   

Reading CityAM on the train this morning, I was intrigued to learn about the Salt Cave, a London clinic where visitors can treat their colds or asthma by breathing in sodium chloride.

According to the owner of the clinic, salt has "anti-sceptic" properties - I can only think she meant antiseptic, unless she really was referring to the ability to overcome sceptical clients' doubts about the efficacy of the treatment.

The article also had a long sidebar on complimentary therapies.

Paralipsis and Occultatio

Paralipsis is the most common rhetorical device in domestic arguments. Last night I was walking a dog (not mine) when I passed a young lady haranguing her beau. She was pointing her finger into his face at close range, as though it were a gun, or perhaps as though she were conducting a tiny orchestra that was hidden in his mouth. This digital aggression was accompanied by vocals that went:

'I'm not going to bring up how you were late. Late. By half a [inaudible] hour. Or the time in the bath. I'm not bringing that up. Okay? Because... I don't need to bring all that [inaudible] up because...'

But I was wending my way down the road and didn't hear her reason.

The practice of bringing up the fact that you're not bringing something up is called paralipsis, and that's what this girl was doing. She was listing her boyfriend/husband's faults whilst pointing out how kind it was of her not to list them. She was having her cake and gobbling it up.

There's a bit in Chaucer's Knight's Tale where he spends forty-five lines describing exactly what it is about a funeral that he won't describe. This goes into some detail. He concludes:

I wol nat tellen eek how that they goon

Hoom til Atthenes, whan the pley is doon;

But shortly to the point thanne wol I wende

And maken of my longe tale an ende.

Chaucer's exercise in not-mentioning-what-he's-mentioning can seem even to a Chaucer-lover (like me) a rather pointless and prolix rhetorical exercise. But if you're a nosy, prurient eavesdropper (like me) you realise that that's how people really talk. Paralipsis is an essential part of our language, embalmed in the phrases "not to mention" or "I won't bore you with..."

Now, as somebody is bound to point this out there is a very, very technical distinction between paralipsis and occultatio. Occultatio is the literary, indifferent version of paralipsis where you're not trying to put anyone down, you're just doing it. So Chaucer was using occulatio. However, the two are so closely related that they are oftentimes confused or substitued for each other like the Neville twins.

"Not to mention" can be used for either paralipsis or occultatio. I won't bore you with examples, but needless to say the girl last night was definitely using paralipsis, not to mention her finger.

Eavesdropping made simple