From: owner-fegmaniax-digest@smoe.org (fegmaniax-digest) To: fegmaniax-digest@smoe.org Subject: fegmaniax-digest V11 #244 Reply-To: fegmaniax@smoe.org Sender: owner-fegmaniax-digest@smoe.org Errors-To: owner-fegmaniax-digest@smoe.org Precedence: bulk fegmaniax-digest Monday, July 29 2002 Volume 11 : Number 244 Today's Subjects: ----------------- Squid/Kristin/Wire ["Rex.Broome" ] Right-wing proggie villainy! ["JH3" ] it's a rich man's world ["drew" ] Re: Right-wing proggie villainy! [Michael R Godwin ] reign of blows ["drew" ] Re: Squid/Kristin/Wire ["Mike Wells" ] tenser, said the tensor ["Natalie Jane" ] Dirty acronyms, awful movies, irritating word usages ["Rex.Broome" ] Re: C'mon you apes! You wanna live forever? ["Jonathan Fetter" ] Re: Avant-felgercarb-athon [Jeffrey with 2 Fs Jeffrey ] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon, 29 Jul 2002 10:20:28 -0700 From: "Rex.Broome" Subject: Squid/Kristin/Wire From Michael: >>You know, for my money you just can't have enough 'giant squid with human-like eyeballs washing up by the thousand on populated beaches' news stories. Hope you caught this one... squids with giant wings and tentacles that make a right angle!!! http://www.npr.org/programs/atc/features/2001/dec/squid/011220.squid.html ibid.: >>Exile Follies Featuring: Grant Lee Phillips + Kristin Hersch (sic) + John Doe Poor Kristin gets both parts of her name misspelled more frequently than any other artist I can think of. This tour should be great. I've seen her with John Doe before, alternating tunes, which is something she's also done with Vic Chesnutt. I'll definitely be at the LA show. And the Wire show, too... they were great on the last go-around. Rex "I Just Got Back from West Virgininia and Boy Is My Genetic Structure Tired" Broome ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 29 Jul 2002 12:10:32 -0500 From: "JH3" Subject: Right-wing proggie villainy! > > I *hated* _Starship Troopers_, though it was one of the > > worst movies I've ever seen... > The book is worse. The film satirizes the fascism to some > degree; some people have even argued that it's supposed to > be an anti-war flick, but I don't buy that. The book is just > unbelievable. Hey, if I had kids, I wouldn't even let them listen to the song "Starship Troopers" from Yes's Fragile LP. (Wait a minute, I guess I wouldn't let them listen to ANY Yes material, regardless of the content...) > I don't believe in censorship, but that's one book I wouldn't > feel comfortable having my children read. Is that a grammatical > sentence? The sentence about not feeling comfortable was, but not the one asking about that sentence. You should have said "Is that sentence grammatically correct?" or something like that. But I'm sure nobody really minds... John "don't confuse me with that fascist Anderson guy" Hedges ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 29 Jul 2002 10:30:36 -0700 (PDT) From: "drew" Subject: it's a rich man's world > From: Jeffrey with 2 Fs Jeffrey > (I read a boneheaded critic locally who, in an article about a guy who > was a producer in the '70s, claimed that probably there wasn't much of a > market for such producers these days because "anybody can just buy > ProTools." Uh-huh...have you looked at the price of ProTools, Mr. > Journalist? I did: the lowest end product offered by the fine folks at > Digidesign is about $1,000 - and ProTools proper is (in its bargain > incarnation) $8,000 if I remember right. Not just "anybody" can afford > that.) Not just "anybody" can afford to hire a producer, either, right? Presumably if you can afford to hire a producer you can afford to buy ProTools, whether $1000 or $8000, and ProTools you can use for the next album too, and the one after that. Personally, I'd prefer to collaborate with a human, but I wouldn't call the alternative "boneheaded." Drew ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 29 Jul 2002 18:43:57 +0100 (BST) From: Michael R Godwin Subject: Re: Right-wing proggie villainy! On Mon, 29 Jul 2002, JH3 wrote: > Hey, if I had kids, I wouldn't even let them listen to the song > "Starship Troopers" from Yes's Fragile LP. Can I tempt you with a copy of "I fell in love with a starship trooper" by Sarah Brightman and Hot Gossip? No? - - MRG ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 29 Jul 2002 10:44:18 -0700 (PDT) From: "drew" Subject: reign of blows > From: R Edward Poole > > saw 'powerpuff girls' (major event > movie - highly recommended) I can only sit through certain episodes of the TV show. Would I like the movie a lot better? > saw MIBII (3 laughs, many more groans) I think my girlfriend and I are the only humans who liked this movie. But we did. > refuse to see 'goldmember' (leave off the dead horse, ok?) I can't wait, personally. > oh, and every second that matthew > mcconaughey is on screen is a pure joy This is ontologically impossible. I think I actually like David ArQUETTE better than Matthew McConaughey. Ugh ugh ugh. I loved Lilo and Stitch, by the way. Best non-Pixar Disney film in years. Finally saw Hedwig and the Angry Inch. It was more entertaining than I'd expected, but not particularly meaningful, which isn't surprising considering its origin as an experimental drag show. I thought the music was okay but I hated "The Origin of Love." Maybe if I'd seen it when I was 15 it would have become a classic for me, but now that I'm 27 it seems a bit ho-hum. I went on my big SF buying spree yesterday, picking up lotsa paperbacks for 2 and 3 bucks each. I didn't find many of the things I really wanted, but I did get the first Earthsea book, _Midnight at the Well of Souls_, _Day of the Triffids_, and _The Midwich Cuckoo_, as well as a bunch of other titles I forget. Drew ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 29 Jul 2002 12:49:06 -0500 From: "Mike Wells" Subject: Re: Squid/Kristin/Wire Rex correctly observes: > Poor Kristin gets both parts of her name misspelled more frequently than any > other artist I can think of. I caught that one after sending. I also said onlist that Kate Winslet should be worked over with a "firehouse" which, despite possibly being even more fun than the "firehose" I intended, was still wrong. Hell, I'd work her over with a syntactical dispute if I thought I could get away with it. > This tour should be great. I've seen her with > John Doe before, alternating tunes, which is something she's also done with > Vic Chesnutt. How was that? I'm quite curious about that aspect of the tour, as I know what to expect from GLP. It's a 7pm early show (which is unusual for a venue where they usually start at 9 or 10pm), so it's pretty clear a fair amount of time is being set aside. Must remember extra batteries. > Rex "I Just Got Back from West Virgininia and Boy Is My Genetic Structure > Tired" Broome You know, poor Virginia gets misspelled more often then any other state I know... Michael "profreaading iss fo the berds" Wells ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 29 Jul 2002 11:11:07 -0700 From: "Natalie Jane" Subject: tenser, said the tensor >I find myself reacting much more to a female >Canadian friend's rather libertine use of the word "twat." I never use "twat" because... err, I don't know how to pronounce it. I've heard it used so rarely that I've never figured it out. > > Then there's Alfred Bester. > >Read a couple of his books recently. I wish they'd had some real >women in them, but I guess those were the times. I think Bester's women are unusually well-drawn, for the times. The accidental telepath in "The Stars My Destination" (a black woman, no less), the hysterical murdered man's daughter in "The Demolished Man"... Of course, they're all adjuncts to the male heroes, but thems were the times. >As for the giant bugs: I think it's interesting that the movie's >writers >(and maybe Heinlein for all I know - he pisses me off too...) >made them so >blindly and single-mindedly evil, with no sort of >motivating purpose etc., >thereby allowing you to simply cheer. Oh yeah, that is SOOOOO boring. Let's just kill 'em! They're EVIL! There's an old SF story called "Arena" where some omnipotent aliens pit Our Hero against a member of an evil aggressor race... who is TOTALLY EEEEEVIL so Our Hero just KILLS IT and EMERGES TRIUMPHANT!!! Ugh... yawn. A throwback to the time when characterization was an afterthought. I've only seen bits of "Starship Troopers." I cheered every time one of the fresh-faced young heroes got spitted, burned or smashed. I'm sorry the bugs didn't win. My memory of the book is hazy, but still nauseating. I haven't read any Heinlein apart from that and "Stranger in a Strange Land" (which I actually liked a lot, at least when I was sixteen). I just read "Church and State," one of the "Cerebus" "phonebooks." I had no idea what was going on so I just had to guess. The best part was when a drug-addled twosome obviously meant to be Mick n' Keef shows up. The only sign of Sim's trademark misogyny was a nasty rape scene after which the woman sighs, "Be still my beating heart." Yeah, women love to get raped. bleh, n. _________________________________________________________________ Send and receive Hotmail on your mobile device: http://mobile.msn.com ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 29 Jul 2002 11:23:43 -0700 From: "Rex.Broome" Subject: Dirty acronyms, awful movies, irritating word usages Ross posits: >> felonius unlawful carnal knowledge There are endless variation on the acronym theory. Also "For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge" (see Van Halen, or better yet don't), "Flogged for Unlawful Carnal Knowledge" (allegedly a note in a ship's log indicating a randy crewmember was punished for gettin' busy with livestock in transit), and "Fornication Under Consent of the King" (feudal lords get first crack at any virgin about to get married in their fiefdom, or some such)... etc. etc. IIRC it's really an old English word with Germanic roots. ______ Jeffrey says: >>I *hated* _Starship Troopers_, though it was one of the worst movies I've ever seen. Yeah, it sucked; I'm constantly amazed that anyone liked it. It was just massively irritating that, as mindlessly evil as the bugs were, the humans were no better and kind of a fascist hive-mind in their own right. It seemed to me that, given the bone-headed simplicity of the setup, the narrative demanded that the humans would have to transcend their own bug-like xenophobia in order to earn the "moral" victory... but the filmmakers were too incompetent to evn get that that right, so here comes Doogie Himmler to save the day. Quail saith: >>This is not "Ender's Game." The Bugs do not get a P.O.V., they are to be >>mercilessly stamped out and slaughtered. Right, but all the satire is *really* tossed off, and rather sloppily in my opinion. But not only do the bugs not get a POV a la "Ender", their m.o. doesn't make sense either. They somehow get wind of an inhabited planet light years away, don't like it, and therefore start farting asteroids towards it across thousands of light years? Plus it had Denise Richards in it. ___ Kay: >>>I dont know why this bothers me, but somewhere in the last 10 years people have started to golf. What's worse is that they have also started to "dialogue" with each other. And there always seems to be a "disconnect" between one thing and another. That give me no end of irritate. Rex ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 29 Jul 2002 13:25:42 -0500 (CDT) From: Jeffrey with 2 Fs Jeffrey Subject: Re: C'mon you apes! You wanna live forever? On Mon, 29 Jul 2002, The Great Quail wrote: > Well...yes! It was, on many levels, a satire -- as most of Verhoeven's films > are. That's part of the reason I like it so much -- Verhoeven took an > un-ironic look at Heinlein's book, and filmed it in the rah-rah > unquestioning style of a Fifties war movie. The result is, in my opinion, a > very clever and sharp satire in the trappings of a genuine action film. > > I think, however, two other things are also at work in "Starship Troopers" > that tend to complicate the film for many viewers. First, for some, > Verhoeven's sense of satire is drown out by his obvious love for thrills and > mayhem. While I don't have a problem with a genre film subverting itself > while still delivering the goods (a la "Natural Born Killers"), I can > certainly see how it works to simultaneously undermine the message. I can see the possibility of reading the movie satirically - actually, its overall lameness all but encourages that approach - but it just didn't feel that way to me, quite possibly for the reasons your second paragraph describes. > Secondly, I think that "Starship Troopers" also poses an interesting but > queasy question: Can a civilization defend itself from such an invasion > without resorting to such monolithic (read: fascist) patterns? But that's just it: there's never "such an invasion." Barring a literal invasion of gigantic alien killer space bugs, real enemies always have points of view of their own, and your side (whatever it may be) never has a monopoly on right and justice. And even when it seems that the other side has almost no ethical leg to stand upon (say, that group that we can't mention because doing so is inevitably the end of any discussion, but they were led by a guy who stole Charlie Chaplin's mustache), how the war is actually conducted is still open to questioning. So ST presents a false problem: no real battle situation could ever require such a blind and ruthless regard of "the enemy" (though propaganda *always* attempts to render enemies thus). And actually, here's your satire: the *humans'* actions towards the bugs are every bit as single-mindedly deadly and brutal as those of the bugs toward the humans. > some very real critiques of democracy and liberalism in the film, and while > I think Verhoeven ultimately rejects a fascist alternative, I do believe > that he gives serious consideration to some of Heinlein's more right-wing > ideas. I do distinguish between "right-wing" and "fascistic" (even though I'm one of them there lefties)...and while I disagree, generally, w/right-wing thinking, it doesn't usually strike me as either fascistic or completely bankrupt ethically. ST did. - --Jeffrey with 2 Fs Jeffrey J e f f r e y N o r m a n The Architectural Dance Society www.uwm.edu/~jenor/ADS.html ::No man is an island. ::But if you take a bunch of dead guys and tie 'em together, ::they make a pretty good raft. __Max Cannon__ np: Velvet Underground _Peel Slowly and See_ disc4 ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 29 Jul 2002 13:30:03 -0500 (CDT) From: Jeffrey with 2 Fs Jeffrey Subject: Re: it's a rich man's world On Mon, 29 Jul 2002, drew wrote: > > From: Jeffrey with 2 Fs Jeffrey > > > (I read a boneheaded critic locally who, in an article about a guy who > > was a producer in the '70s, claimed that probably there wasn't much of a > > market for such producers these days because "anybody can just buy > > ProTools." Uh-huh...have you looked at the price of ProTools, Mr. > > Journalist? I did: the lowest end product offered by the fine folks at > > Digidesign is about $1,000 - and ProTools proper is (in its bargain > > incarnation) $8,000 if I remember right. Not just "anybody" can afford > > that.) > > Not just "anybody" can afford to hire a producer, either, > right? Presumably if you can afford to hire a producer > you can afford to buy ProTools, whether $1000 or $8000, > and ProTools you can use for the next album too, and the > one after that. > > Personally, I'd prefer to collaborate with a human, but > I wouldn't call the alternative "boneheaded." Working with ProTools is not boneheaded - assuming that "anybody" can do so is. And yeah, a full-fledged qualified producer is going to cost money, probably - dmw? on rates? - but depending on the kind of music you're doing, I suspect you'll get more for your dollar...particularly if you're not an experienced sound-recorder. What I objected to in the article I quoted was the simplistic notion that mechanical devices make everything cheap and easy: they're not cheap, and (probably) learning to use them *well* is not easy. You know, just like anyone can learn to play the blues badly. ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 29 Jul 2002 11:40:03 -0700 From: glen uber Subject: Re: Dirty acronyms, awful movies, irritating word usages Rex.Broome earnestly scribbled: >Ross posits: >>> felonius unlawful carnal knowledge > >There are endless variation on the acronym theory. Also "For Unlawful >Carnal Knowledge" (see Van Halen, or better yet don't), "Flogged for >Unlawful Carnal Knowledge" (allegedly a note in a ship's log indicating a >randy crewmember was punished for gettin' busy with livestock in transit), >and "Fornication Under Consent of the King" (feudal lords get first crack at >any virgin about to get married in their fiefdom, or some such)... etc. etc. >IIRC it's really an old English word with Germanic roots. My favorite dirty acronym: Can't Understand Normal Thinking. - -- Cheers! - -g- "The reason the mainstream is thought of as a stream is because it's so shallow." - -- George Carlin glen uber =+= blint (at) mac dot com ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 29 Jul 2002 13:40:28 -0500 (CDT) From: Jeffrey with 2 Fs Jeffrey Subject: Re: Dirty acronyms, awful movies, irritating word usages On Mon, 29 Jul 2002, Rex.Broome wrote: > Kay: > >>>I dont know why this bothers me, but somewhere in the last 10 years > people > have started to golf. I really don't think this is "somewhere in the last 10 years." I think "golf" has pretty much always been a verb. And if it isn't, I suppose we'll have to get rid of "golfer" and "golfing" as well, since they're derived from the verb form. I suspect that the word's being one syllable helps - harder to say "footballing" or "decathloning." > What's worse is that they have also started to "dialogue" with each other. > And there always seems to be a "disconnect" between one thing and another. > That give me no end of irritate. I don't like these examples because they seem to serve no purpose: what's the difference between "dialoguing" and, uh, "conversing"? And I have no clue what's the dif between a "disconnect" and a "disconnection." That said, English has been verbing nouns for centuries: its lack of inflection allows that, and what happens, of course, is that the words that serve a purpose, that fulfill a linguistic need, are the ones that survive, while the trendy neologisms just...dustbin. Lightbulb that, O ye feggies. - --Jeffrey with 2 Fs Jeffrey, whose irritate has been known to be embiggened J e f f r e y N o r m a n The Architectural Dance Society www.uwm.edu/~jenor/ADS.html ::Drive ten thousand miles across America and you will know more about ::the country than all the institutes of sociology and political science ::put together. __Jean Baudrillard__ ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 29 Jul 2002 14:47:17 -0400 From: Ken Weingold Subject: Re: Dirty acronyms, awful movies, irritating word usages On Mon, Jul 29, 2002, Jeffrey with 2 Fs Jeffrey wrote: > > Kay: > > >>>I dont know why this bothers me, but somewhere in the last 10 years > > people > > have started to golf. > > I really don't think this is "somewhere in the last 10 years." I think > "golf" has pretty much always been a verb. And if it isn't, I suppose > we'll have to get rid of "golfer" and "golfing" as well, since they're > derived from the verb form. I looked it up and golf is indeed also defined as a verb. It had this quote from Kipling: "Last mystery of all, he learned to golf." > > What's worse is that they have also started to "dialogue" with each other. > > And there always seems to be a "disconnect" between one thing and another. > > That give me no end of irritate. > > I don't like these examples because they seem to serve no purpose: what's > the difference between "dialoguing" and, uh, "conversing"? And I have no > clue what's the dif between a "disconnect" and a "disconnection." Dialogue is also defined as a noun and verb. Btw, it was winding pretty bad last night. Almost blew a tree over. - -Ken ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 29 Jul 2002 12:59:18 -0700 From: "Rex.Broome" Subject: Avant-felgercarb-athon From Jonathan: >>If you like modern "hard" sci-fi that has a classic feel, I'd recommend >>Greg Bear, specifically "Moving Mars," "The Forge of God" and >>definitely "Eon." Hmmm, I was just at my childhood home and looking for something to read on the plane back, and noticed that I had hardcovers of two of those books on my shelf and wondered if they were any good (I think they came from the SF Book Club subscription I had as a young'un and I don't remember ever reading them). Instead I bought "Atonement" at the airport, and damned if it didn't revolve around a certain dirty word that's been much-discussed hereabouts while I was away. I seem to swing the opposite way from the majority in my tastes in summer lit-- I read heavier, more literary stuff in the summer, and lighter genre stuff in the bleak midwinter. Dunno why. _______ Natalie: >>That said, made-up cuss-words are pretty distracting. Yeah, this is a real pet-peeve of mine. "Frak" and "felgercarb", anyone? Also "poodoo", which is always translated as "fodder" but has recently clearly started to mean "shit". The whole phenomenon is seriously one of the reasons I never really embraced "Red Dwarf"-- not only did they make up a cuss word, they ran it into the ground. Was it Niven who used "expletive" or "obscenity" or something like that? That at least carried a satirical edge about future censorship. Really, there are two ways to use "phony" words in SF. In "future-based" SF you're extrapolating current linguistic conventions and how they might change. Otherwise you're assuming a completely alien culture in which everything you read/hear is presumably being "translated" into English for our convenience. If that's the case, why translate everything but the cuss words? ____ From Brian: >>- -athon : eg Runathon (running a long way for charity), Marathon (spoiling lots of things). Another linguistic irritation: the suffix "-athon" to mean "a lot of" or "an extended sequence of one thing". A "marathon" is not "a lot of mar", it's just the name of a Greek city after which a long endurance race was named. I know the usage has been around for a while but I blame basic cable networks with thin programming schedules for making it inescapable... Sharkathon, Trekathon, Powerpuffathon, etc. A few others unique to music criticism are the suffix "-core" (cf. "sadcore", "foxcore", etc.) and perhaps most heinous, the prefix "avant(e)-", used to mean "weird version of", as in "avant-funk" etc. Of course it comes from "avant garde", a term that's used way too liberally to descibe "artsy" stuff anyway, but when you start putting the French word for "before" in front of a genre, God knows what you're really trying to say. ___ Listening to a live set by the Chameleons-- er, I mean Interpol. Could someone please tell me if this kind of thing is cool or not? I can't tell anymore. Rex ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 29 Jul 2002 16:17:24 -0400 (EDT) From: "Jonathan Fetter" Subject: Re: C'mon you apes! You wanna live forever? > But that's just it: there's never "such an invasion." Barring a literal > invasion of gigantic alien killer space bugs, real enemies always have > points of view of their own, and your side (whatever it may be) never has > a monopoly on right and justice. And even when it seems that the other > side has almost no ethical leg to stand upon (say, that group that we > can't mention because doing so is inevitably the end of any discussion, > but they were led by a guy who stole Charlie Chaplin's mustache), how the > war is actually conducted is still open to questioning. > > So ST presents a false problem: no real battle situation could ever > require such a blind and ruthless regard of "the enemy" (though propaganda > *always* attempts to render enemies thus). > > And actually, here's your satire: the *humans'* actions towards the bugs > are every bit as single-mindedly deadly and brutal as those of the bugs > toward the humans. > > > some very real critiques of democracy and liberalism in the film, and while > > I think Verhoeven ultimately rejects a fascist alternative, I do believe > > that he gives serious consideration to some of Heinlein's more right-wing > > ideas. > I read the book a long time ago without giving it too much attention, but I seem to remember that all attempts at diplomacy with the bugs had been completely fruitless, and the war had come down to total annihilation of the losing side. Something about two expansionist civilizations not being able to coexist. I seem to remember Heinlein lamenting that after all the dreams of humanity meeting intelligent extraterrestrial life, we had to end up meeting these bugs. So I didn't have any trouble with the depiction of the bugs as single-minded or with human callousness towards the bugs. I was upset by the kids stepping on the Madagascan hissing cockroaches, but that's just the entomologist in me. ST is definitely one of my guilty pleasures. That superstation channel shows it at least once a month, and I always end up watching part of it. Jon ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 29 Jul 2002 20:20:28 +0000 From: "Silver Leaf" Subject: Grumping Rex: >What's worse is that they have also started to "dialogue" with each >other.And there always seems to be a "disconnect" between one thing >and >another. That give me no end of irritate. The first time I heard the "disconnect" thing I thought the speaker was going into a disassociated state. Which irratated my annoy to no end. Why is it some word play is word play, and some is a cliche even before you've heard it? JeFF: >I really don't think this is "somewhere in the last 10 years." I think >"golf" has pretty much always been a verb. And if it isn't, I suppose we'll >have to get rid of "golfer" and "golfing" as well, since they're derived >from the verb form. Never heard "golfing" till about 10 years ago either. And Ken, even with Kipling agaisnt me, I still say it just sounds ugly and goes against the basic logic -behind- the words. Kay the grumping grumpy grump _________________________________________________________________ MSN Photos is the easiest way to share and print your photos: http://photos.msn.com/support/worldwide.aspx ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 29 Jul 2002 15:25:55 -0500 (CDT) From: Jeffrey with 2 Fs Jeffrey Subject: Re: Avant-felgercarb-athon On Mon, 29 Jul 2002, Rex.Broome wrote: > Another linguistic irritation: the suffix "-athon" to mean "a lot of" or > "an extended sequence of one thing". A "marathon" is not "a lot of mar", > it's just the name of a Greek city after which a long endurance race was > named. I know the usage has been around for a while but I blame basic cable > networks with thin programming schedules for making it inescapable... > Sharkathon, Trekathon, Powerpuffathon, etc. > > A few others unique to music criticism are the suffix "-core" (cf. > "sadcore", "foxcore", etc.) and perhaps most heinous, the prefix > "avant(e)-", used to mean "weird version of", as in "avant-funk" etc. Of > course it comes from "avant garde", a term that's used way too liberally to > descibe "artsy" stuff anyway, but when you start putting the French word for > "before" in front of a genre, God knows what you're really trying to say. Well, God may or may not - but "avant-folk" is pretty clear to me, at least in concept. The problem here is that you're assuming people coining such phrases are bothering to look up the etymology (same w/whoever was complaining about "morphing"), whereas what they're actually doing is taking the key element of the *word*, truncating it w/out regard for whether the truncation has its own meaning, and affixing it to other words. So the reason "-athon" has come to mean "a lot of" has nothing to do with its etymology, it has to w/the fact that a marathon is a lot of running. And even though I think the "-core" suffix is completely lame, the same idea is at work there. "Sadcore" and "foxcore" are awful because they either simplistically or ridiculously represent the music they're meant to describe. And "avant" was a metaphor to begin with in "avant garde" (no "e" in "avant" please); and "before" in the sense of "leading; ahead of" makes perfect sense as a prefix, if you assume it means something like "ahead of the rest of the [folk] practitioners" (and also assume that folk is the sort of thing that values being ahead of). More simply, you can just read it as short for "avant-garde folk." See, I get a bit irked at these sorts of threads - because they assume a character of language as static and literal, anti-metaphoric, when it's anything but. No one has the least difficulty understanding "it was an all-night bore-a-thon as the Dave Matthews Band and Phish competed to see who could play the longer set"; or "Beefheart's avant-folk/blues stylings" (even though I hate the word "stylings," while we're at it). Such adaptations and recontextualizations are, quite simply, the way language works. yours anti-Safirically, - --Jeffrey with 2 Fs Jeffrey J e f f r e y N o r m a n The Architectural Dance Society www.uwm.edu/~jenor/ADS.html ::crumple zones:::::harmful or fatal if swallowed:::::small-craft warning:: ------------------------------ End of fegmaniax-digest V11 #244 ********************************