Cole Porter — is he the 20th century's most under-rated poet? His entertaining eclecticism, verbal acrobatics and focus on romantic comedy tempt us to dismiss him as a dazzling lightweight. But they're all techniques Shakespeare used to devastating effect on the Elizabethan stage.
I'm biased to rate Porter highly, because beneath the fun is a keen appreciation of the mechanics of romantic illusion. In Anything Goes the restrained English peer, Lord Evelyne Oakley, fantasises in "The Gypsy in Me" about how finding his true love will reveal the repressed side of his character:
When I'm there in that dream
with the one in the world I worship
passionately
In the moment supreme
will be shown the unknown
gypsy in me!
As Robertson Davies wrote, We love the people who make us whole. Or, as the Theory of Romance more prosaically puts it, we fall in love with people who seem to have access to the life we don't know how to live.
Chocolate Valentines Day in Japan was 14 February, as here. Women give their men chocolates, and Miki gave me a box of Pierre Marcolini's Saveurs du Monde single-origin chocolate squares. By tradition, men respond with white chocolate the following month. In this case Duc D’O white chocolate truffles got around Miki's usual distaste for the stuff.
Why can't Google find the Duc D'O website even when you ask for it by name? Several site design decisions stop it. While its front page is loaded with helpful metatag keywords, its HTML body contains nothing but images, most without text alternatives. This splash page uses JavaScript to pop up a further window, so there are no hyperlinks for Google to follow. The relationship between the HTML body and the site's content has been completely broken. This site might as well have been designed to be invisible to Google. In contrast, Yahoo finds it first when you search for Duc D'O. Small consolation these days, when google has become a verb. Put those graphic designers on a leash!
Down to the Gate Club in Notting Hill last night to celebrate Lucy Johnson's 30th birthday. Many happy returns, Lucy. I had far more fun in my thirties than in my twenties, and so will you.
Your twenties are when you're no longer a child, but no one treats you like an adult.
For the first time since I returned to London, a bartender mixed me a Soda, Lime & Bitters without a question. (Of course, he turned out to be Australian.)
Helping Miki prepare for her next exhibition, went shopping for frames at Ikea, for which she treated me to dinner in their restaurant. People complain Swedish cooks smother everything in cream sauce, but kötbullar med gräddsås och lingonsylt (meatballs with cream sauce and lingonberry jam) is pure nostalgia for me. Miki has conceived a passion for gräddsås, so the kitchen is stocked with little blue-and-yellow packets.
Dear Brady
I have long supposed it an error to use ‘hopefully’ where I mean ‘I hope’. Sadly I can find no evidence to support this. Happily I have you to ask. Hopefully I'll get an answer from you soon.
Above, the usage of hopefully is widely deprecated as a sloppy error. But sadly and happily, as similarly (ab?)used, receive no such opprobrium. The late Auberon Waugh, then editor of the Literary Review, not often accused of sloppy writing, wrote to me: Sadly, your subscription has expired. What rule accuses hopefully and excuses sadly?
5mb replies:
You'd like an opinion on this popular bugbear (popular with language columnists, anyway).
'Hopefully' is an adverb. Its primary meaning is 'in a hopeful way.' The secondary meaning, more and more common, is 'I/we hope.'
Take this sentence:
Hopefully the weather will clear.
This is patently silly: weather, though at times animated, is inanimate, and cannot clear in a hopeful manner, or an angry one ("Angrily the weather will clear"), though it may sometimes seem like it.
Or this:
Hopefully we will go to Heaven.
It means that, having died, one will knock on the Pearly Gates hoping for something — cheese doodles, or pillow mints.
However, what most people think they're saying/writing is:
I sure hope we go to heaven.
I'm sure they do, as I am that God will understand. But he'll order the cheese doodles anyway.
However, given that most people know what you mean, you can use it, but try to limit it to informal speaking/writing.
Quotable Quotes, Hopefully
William Safire
The word 'hopefully' has become the litmus test to determine whether one is a language snob or a language slob.
Bill — definitely in the first category — is the language maven for the Sunday NYT, a conservative columnist for the daily NYT and, as speechwriter during the Nixon Administration, the penner of such Spiro Agnewisms as, '. . . the nattering nabobs of negativism.' Bill likes his alliteration and Republicans, but does not like hopefully' used when one means 'I/we hope' and most any Democrat since Democritus first walked around a Greek beach with pebbles in his mouth trying to say 'nattering nabobs of negativism.' [1]
Another Safire Quote
Here she will be "Freestyling" her flavors with a mixture of elements spawning from Afro Latin, HipHop, Dance among others. The project will hopefully capture all the best of what Safire is all about. A past Latin HipHop icon introduced to a new generation.
This usage, by the band Safire, is wrong, but — hey — they're a band.
I hope that this has helped.
5mb
Notes
1 — Democritus — The Laughing Philosopher — was not the guy who did this. But this version makes a better story. Never let the facts get in the way.
Good things come from Basingstoke Tanita Tikaram, Dyalog APL (aka the Basingstoke Boys) and Elizabeth Hurley: hey, two out of three ain't bad.
After Madrid The attack in Madrid – or the impending atrocity in London that is predictable from its sucess – is likely to play differently here. I remember IRA bombs exploding in London in the 70s. Londoners were clear then that the attacks were intended to undermine support for a political process in Northern Ireland. They failed at that, though the IRA appears to be succeeding over the long term, as terrorists who can stay in business tend to do. (See Michael Vlahos: Terror's Mask and commentary.) The IRA bomb attacks failed because Londoners were clear what they were about and were not going to be cowed. That's how I think an al-Qaeda attack in London would play.
But nothing al-Qaeda might do will make our invasion of Iraq right in retrospect.
A separate question, which an attack might easily push aside, is how the war was sold to us. Whether you want/ed our troops in Iraq or not, you have to be concerned that the Prime Minister said on September 24th 2002:
His [Saddam's] WMD [weapons of mass destruction] programme is active, detailed and growing. The policy of containment is not working. The WMD programme is not shut down. It is up and running." He described the intelligence upon which his assertion was based as: "extensive, detailed and authoritative.
Saddam didn't have any weapons of mass destruction and the intelligence wasn't "authoritative". You have to be concerned about that, unless you think our invading Iraq more important (to us in the UK) than having a Prime Minister who is neither a knave nor a fool.
Our World Our Say is petitioning for an inquiry, not into the quality of the intelligence (another valid issue), but into whether it justified the case Blair made.
A fair wind from the North A large customer for software development, exasperated by the results of its internal developers, wants its IT people to look at our APL development team for clues to lifting productivity.
A happy weekend visiting Adrian & Gill Smith in Yorkshire, with some good muddy tramps and long talks on software round the Aga, then yesterday coaching PHP at Gill's firm.
A plug: left Inntravel with an armful of brochures to read on the train. Our kinda holidays, we thought.
P.J. O'Rourke must be the funniest writer on economics since J.K. Galbraith. But is his economics better?
To Dorset, to Dorset to get some fresh air. Tentless camping in the Walkers' Barn at Toms Field and the best suet-crust Steak & Kidney Pudding of my life (Andrea, are you listening?) at the Kings Arms in Langton Matravers. And for the first time in my life, visits to the Blue Pool and Durdle Door. Pix by Miki Yamanouchi on the Sony Ericsson T68i phone camera. We'll be back too, for Purbeck ice-cream, and Best Bitter from the Ringwood Brewery.
Miki spent half Saturday night rereading Conan Doyle’s The Sign of Four; I was immersed in Robert Bringhurst's The Elements of Typographic Style, discovering some of what I missed by choosing in 1975 not to study at the London College of Printing. I had no idea what a deep subject this. (Did you know, for example, that there are upper and lower cases for numbers as well as letters?)
I shall look into remapping my keyboard as he suggests. My fingers have learned mappings to enable me to type the powerful APL shorthand characters; they can certainly learn another mapping that will put all the European language characters at their — fingertips? Bringhurst is a poet as well as a typographer, and it shows up in this beautiful book, listed as Version 2.5. Some quotes.
Simplicity is good, but so is plurality. Typography’s principal function (not its only function) is communication, and the greatest threat to communication is not difference but sameness. Communication ceases when one being is no different from another: when there is no new information to exchange.
Originality is everywhere, but much originality is blocked if the way back to earlier discoveries is cut or overgrown.
The Furies Two days of furious coding. Arthur Whitney is right. Better to rewrite than edit. Complete rebuild of this site under PHP and MT in two long days in the zone. What a blast.