Random notes from a rainy day coffee shop

[larryhammer]

Sitting at the table next to me is a man with a white beard and sweats working on problems out of a calculus textbook. Go him.

The Penguin Book of Restoration Verse reminds me once again that while Dryden's generations did much to improve the conversational registers of poetry, their love poetry makes me want to stagger off to a volume of Cavalier poets for an antidote.

Reading Yotsuba to! volume 1 in the original will, once I get the hang of it, do wonders for my grasp of Japanese colloquialisms. And of Kansai dialect. Until then, I shall have to stumble a lot. (I have to say, though, Koiwai and Jumbo are Such Guys. I mean, in translation, they come across as men who've been friends for a long time and so know exactly how to friendly insult each other. In Japanese, it's ore and omae all over the place, and when Koiwai doesn't end a sentence with naa it's zo instead.)

    Without these storm clouds,
the moutains seem to rise up
    like a flat backdrop.
Drifts of rain and fog highlight
the folds of ridge and canyon.

There's Ooo!, and then there's Oooooo ...

(More of Sakurajima)

The concept of the invisible translator is as pernicious a myth as that of transparent prose: discuss.

---L.

ETA from an anonymous ballad:

Till twelve or till one he will never come home,
And then he's so drunk he that he lies like a Mome

"Mome"?

Comments

[1crowdedhour.livejournal.com]

Related to Momus?

[larryhammer]

Brewer's thinks so, via French meanings, but that is in a different sense of a carping, fault-finding person. Mirriam-Webster and Webster gives the origin of this Tudor slang (fool, blockhead, dull-and-silent person) as unknown.

---L.

[bullysays.livejournal.com]

Fantagraphics publishes a quarterly anthology of comics titled Mome, and they use that same definition in their description: "Mome (mõm), n. Archaic, a fool; blockhead."

[larryhammer]

Coolness. I'm always in favor of antiquarian revivals.

---L.

[stevendj.livejournal.com]

A portmanteau word for a mopey gnome?

[larryhammer]

Yer straining there.

---L.

[negothick.livejournal.com]

Shakespeare, Comedy of Errors 3.1 Dromio of Syracuse berates the porter with "Mome, malt-horse, capon, coxcomb, idiot, patch!"
Glossed as "dolt, blockhead: not used elsewhere by Shakespeare." Many etymologies suggested, none convincing.

[larryhammer]

Websters cites Spencer and claims a first written use of 1553, but offers no convincing etymologies either.

---L.