TriumphAnt

Follow-ups and mail

With reference to a recent update where I ventured a suggestion that Julia Roberts had perhaps intended to associate her male newborn twin (Phinnaeus) with the hero of “Around the World in Eighty Days”, friend and “Tonstant Weader” pointed out to me that Verne’s 115,200-minute circumnavigator was actually named Phileas and not, as I had said, Phineas.

Let’s see: Google “Phineas Fogg”: 5,090 hits, including an early one just begging to be further explored: Rear Admiral Phineas Fogg-Bottom;

Google “Phileas Fogg”: 88,400 hits

I sit corrected. (And thank you, TW).

All of which of course makes Julia’s selection of “Phinnaeus” as Hazel’s twin even more perplexing, with no populist link whatsoever except for the wave of imitators now lying in maternity wards all across the length and breadth of Fayetteville, Arkansas, presently delivering new Phinnaeusses (Phinnaei?) into the world. All will be duly sent forward about two decades’ hence to seek their fame and fortune but, alas, will find only offers of therapy when they fail to cope with the outright laughter that greets their cheery, “Hey y’all, my name’s Phinnaeus. What’s yours?” in the world beyond their gravelled driveways.

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And in my previous note about the collective noun used to name a group of strip club owners, I had proposed borrowing from the geese, “gaggle”, with a strong emphasis on the first syllable. Well, I think friend Ian has me beat with a recent message in which he suggested, “the collective noun appropriate to strip club owners is a ’pornucopia’.”

Perfect, that.

2. CIDA and Christmas Update

Recalling a recent rail of mine about the absence of a Christian cross from a Christmas advertisement that included the symbols of Judaism and Islam, I went an extra step and politely conveyed that concern to the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA). Just recently, I received this most satisfying and equally polite response:

“Thank you for your note expressing your view about the poster announcing the Holiday Season Reception for CIDA employees.

We appreciate your concern about the fact that Christmas was not represented by a cross on the poster.

We are pleased to inform you that the poster was modified, in response to your e-mail, and a cross was added to the design on Tuesday, December 7.

We thank you for bringing this matter to our attention and we wish you a very merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.”

Well right back atcha, CIDA!

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Did this headline and sub-headline even need an article after it? (From The Globe and Mail online edition December 15.)

Headline: “Trendy party-goers quaff date-rape drug”
Sub-headline: “Upside: No hangover and no calories. Downside: 'You can pass out and die' ”

Oooooo-kay. But I do find it interesting that a new synonym for “unimaginably stupid” appears to be “trendy”.

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And even more from the home mailbox.

Here is the sum total of a message I received recently, printed on a thin postcard from the Columbia School of Journalism, home of CJR (The Columbia Journalism Review, a really fine bi-monthly* review of the process of news coverage, especially its abuses):

“WE ARE SORRY THAT YOU HAVE DECIDED NOT TO CONTINUE YOUR SUBSCRIPTION TO COLUMBIA JOURNALISM REVIEW MAGAZINE. BECAUSE LABELS ARE PRINTED IN ADVANCE, ONE OR MORE COPIES MAY HAVE BEEN MAILED. ANY ISSUES YOU HAVE RECEIVED ARE YOURS TO KEEP. CUSTOMER SERVICE.”

There’s a bit of a story here. I really enjoy reading the CJR and, last Spring, sent them an International Money Order (IMO) for a two-year subscription. After receiving one issue, the very next piece of mail I got was a demand for payment, or my subscription – I was told – would be cancelled. (Since they could only have got my address from the same letter that included my payment in full, I ignored it.) On and off over the past year, I have received, I think, a grand total of about three issues (of what should have been six), plus an equal number of demands for payment.

So I sent them a letter recently telling them thanks but no thanks and suggesting they might want to clean up their mailing / subscriber list handling procedures. Which earned me the above postcard.

I actually had a thoroughly good laugh over this, because “Customer Service” is obviously the dregs of an entire marketing team. In fact, in the bowels of the Columbia University Administration Building, there probably is a whole roomful of “Customer Service” people who are exactly like Douglas Adams’s telephone sanitizers and PR consultants, and who were assigned to the University’s customer service staff simply because Humankind doesn’t yet have the technology to bundle them all up and shoot them off, en masse, one-way into deep space.

I can just imagine the long discussions over what to say to subscribers whose frustration finally triggers cancellation: “Let’s see… Oh I know, let’s appeal to the environmentalist in them – are you a tree hugger? Well we’ve already massacred a hectare of old growth spruce just to print the mailing labels only for you, yes YOU! And just to be on the safe side, let’s also be altruistic: Hey, if we managed to accidentally send you an issue, then you may be surprised to hear that even though the present US administration views objective news analysis on par with a toxic nerve agent released into a city’s water supply, we are not, in fact, going to send Homelands Security Forces up your way to beat you about the head and shoulders until you excavate it from your pile of Inbox paper and return it to us. What’s that you say? YOU’VE ALREADY READ IT??!!!” (*** whack *** whack *** whack ***)

* I can’t remember how many times I’ve had the “Does ‘bi-(time)’ mean twice every (time) or every second (time)?” discussion. I swear it’s what led the English to invent the word “fortnightly” simply to avoid any confusion that “bi-weekly” could possibly mean “every second week”. But according to most dictionaries, that’s exactly what it means. A bi-weekly event, most assert, means twice per month.

Clarity wasn’t helped at all when the US loudly celebrated its “Bicentennial” in 1976 at the 200-year mark (no doubt at parties crowded with 50-year old bicentenarians).

And should you want to get all etymological about it, the confusion is only magnified. After all, doesn’t the “bi” prefix customarily mean “half” or “halve”, as in “bisect” and “bifurcate”? And of course having access to many dictionaries (reflecting the old saying: “A man with one watch always knows what time it is. A man with two watches is never sure.”) doesn’t help at all, because definitions of “bi” can be found identifying it BOTH as “a prefix meaning two” and “a prefix meaning ‘twice in’ ”. (If you want to drive people crazy, take the view that by defining a process of equal division, “bi” really means you are creating twice the original number of things you started with and thus, the prefix means to double something, rather than halve it.)

I’ve also worked where it was a rule to use “biannual” when you meant “every six months” – which some people contend should vanish entirely and be replaced with the unambiguous “semi-annual” – and “biennial” when you meant every second year.

So to remove all doubt, CJR is actually published every second month, which I guess means I shouldn’t have used “bi-monthly” because by my own logic (?) that means semi-monthly or… fortnightly.

But I digress. Big time.

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And my nomination for this week’s Painfully Worded Award comes from my very own Government of Canada department’s Employee Update (and I quote):

“Private room now available for new mothers
Female employees who have recently came back from maternity leave may occasionally need private space at work in order to continue to provide their baby with their milk.”

Eesh! So I guess “nurse” now joins the list of words that “have recently came” to be politically incorrect?

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The wisdom of the woodcutter

Often in children’s stories and Old World folk tales, a small but significant part will be played by a wise woodcutter whose sage and timely advice re-directs the hero or heroine back onto the path from which he or she had strayed, thus avoiding a fall under the spell of a geriatric crone or becoming lunch for a hungry wolf.

All I can say is that such a character could not possibly have been inspired by the tree cutters who work for the City of Ottawa.

On a recent walk into work, I happened to pass an enormous boom truck from which a City of Ottawa tree cutter had just emerged. (These big orange trucks, often pulling a wood-chipper trailer whose howling grinders reduce some pretty large tree branches to mulch in mere seconds, are staples on Ottawa’s streets. They are adorned with the company’s name, Asplundh, an especially ugly word that always looks to me like the sound you’d expect a large, flat rock to make when you drop it into a pond from about ten feet up, but I digress.) At the same time a co-commuter named Brian had just come down his driveway and, before we headed off to the bus stop, he stopped to chat with the worker.

The tree cutter had arrived to “thin” a tree on property belonging to one of Brian’s neighbours. It is an enormous old tree and its branches were still heavily laden with last week’s snowfall. Apparently some of them were at considerable risk of snapping off and falling onto the street – or worse, onto a passing pedestrian’s skull. Brian pointed to a massive tree on his own property, also close to the street, and asked the cutter if he would perform the same surgery on his tree.

“Did you phone it in?” asked the worker. “No,” replied Brian. “You gotta phone it in,” persisted the worker. “So’s I get a job sheet that tells me I gotta do the work.” Then, looking back at the tree whose “thinning” was on today’s job sheet, he determined the time was right to launch into his own sage and timely advice.

“Yep, y’know, you really gotta look after a tree. You can’t just plant it and forget it. I mean, well… it’s like a tree is like your girlfriend, or your wife. She goes off to the beauty parlour… what? Once a month or so? Spends about $50 on herself? Looks after herself? Well a tree is the same way. You gotta look after it.”

At this point, Brian patted his pocket and announced, “Whoops, forgot my bus pass,” and speedily headed right back up his driveway towards his front door. I also managed to grab the cue and said, “OK, well thanks for taking care of our trees,” to the City tree cutter and urban arboreal philosopher before heading off to the bus stop, from which point I pondered the miracle of how trees ever managed to grow at all for all those hundreds of thousands of years before City of Ottawa tree cutters came along to hack off and mulch countless numbers of their branches.

“No problem,” he had replied to my parting thanks.

Maybe. Maybe not.

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Finally – a winter snapshot

It is early morning and I am on my way to work. It is overcast and a light snow is falling. I am walking across a large space of white. It’s a parking lot (I live in an urban landscape and, in it, there are many) but on this morning I am the first one to cross it. The previous night’s snowfall has only added about four inches of new snow, and it’s still that fluffy consistency that barely slows each step of what I call my “tank boots” – heavy lace-up Sorels with a thick hardened sole and deep tread that puts a well-insulated barrier between my feet and the weather on even the coldest days and in which I feel I can tramp anywhere.

I reach the mid-point of the parking lot and, for a few brief seconds, experience a throwback to a childhood memory of open country winter hikes that I took as a young boy scout. It’s a sensation that combines the intellectual knowledge that you are walking – because your feet are doing that walking thing – with a distinct mental disconnect from the process, because you have absolutely no reference points immediately close to hand to indicate you are moving forward at your usual pace. I’m walking – I think – but for a few seconds, I don’t seem to be getting anywhere at all. Just me, churning along on my minuscule patch of the face of the globe.

Then suddenly I’m at the edge of the parking lot. And I do what kids do – I stop, turn around and look back at the trail I’ve made. It’s straight, but not perfectly straight. The path reveals that my feet, like my mind, obviously meandered occasionally and carried me just slightly off course. And maybe the minor physical deviations occurred at the same time as the mental ones.

That momentary disengagement from all the typical sensations of walking is something utterly unique to winter. Even stumbling ahead in the pitch black of a dark night doesn’t compare, because your steps then are infinitely more cautious. On a pristine white winter surface, your steps are solid and certain, perhaps even a little more vigorous than usual as your brain drives you toward a place where it can recover the points of reference it needs in order to know “normal” again.

But for a few fleeting seconds, rather than moving ahead, I am on God’s treadmill – spatially stationary, and pushing the entire planet Earth behind me with each step.