Shunt with care

[cosmolinguist]

So when I went to York, I took this picture.

One of the things I liked about York was the way it jumbled together its history and its modernness. Even with the tourism. I guess I'm just used to a country where, as Eddie Izzard says, "you tear your history down, man! 'Thirty years old—let's smash it to the floor and put a car park here.' " In England history persists without anyone needing to make a big deal about it, so you have arrow slits that peek out on to yellow lines painted on a road.

After that we went to Japan.

Or maybe just to the railway museum, which included a car from the "bullet train," Shinkansen. It looked like most of the trains—or even planes—I've been on: a big boxy room full of chairs. But I did like the sign, so I took a picture of that.

Nearly all the pictures I took at the railway museum were of words, actually. I am no good at being a tourist. I found a freight car that said BANANA in huge letters, which I had to photograph just because I was around setharoo. I saw this on another one, and loved it.

I don't know what shunt means. I don't know if I would like this as much as I do if I did know.

I noticed an Extraneous Apostrophe on one of the signs. Shocked, of course, that a vaguely respectable-seeming British institution could allow such a thing, I pointed and shouted to call Seth's attention to this. Then he called my attention to the fact that I wasn't the first person to notice this:

Warmed me little grammar-nerd heart, that did.

Comments

[cieo.livejournal.com]

Whoever modified that last sign is my hero.

[comradexavier.livejournal.com]

Shunting a train usually refers to splitting it up and/or putting it or parts of it on a side track out of the way.

The term is also used in electronics for a connection that diverts part or all of the current that would normally flow through a circuit.

[angel-thane.livejournal.com]

It can really be used for any alternate course for anything (or to put something on an alternate course, if used as a verb)

[comradexavier.livejournal.com]

I suppose that's true. Those are just the contexts in which I've heard it used.

[emyjo.livejournal.com]

There are a million things to love about this post. But one of my favorites is that you're listening to "Mermaid." I frickin' love that song.

That sign correction has given me the courage to do the same. I now want to travel about with a red sharpie for just such occasions. I think I may put one in my bag right now!

I liked York.

I like the word shunt. I don't care about its proper use - I am going to use it as a name-calling device.

I can see that you're filling the Andrew Void with LJ activities, like making complicated posts and revamping the look. Cheers!

Oh, and I've been putting off telling you this, but here goes: I started reading Lake Wobegon Days, and I'm about 1/3 through. And I don't like it. I'm sorry. I should give it another shot - maybe on my flight back to MN. But at this point, I'm feeling very un-Minnesotan.

[cosmolinguist]

My LJ's new look is only possible because soltice bought me a paid account so I could do that silly poll a couple days ago. But I do tink it's pretty now.

And I actually think Lake Woebegon Days is not a very good book, either. It has its moments, but he's certainly written far better stuff.

And I loved York, too. Unreasonably so, for how little I really know and saw of the place.

And I love the idea of shunt as a name to call people; that's what I think it should be, too. It just sounds slightly rude, I suppose because of its similarity to actual rude words.

[hephaestos.livejournal.com]

I was on the UT campus a few years back and saw a sign on a bulletin board advertising a proofreading job.

I didn't apply for the job. I did mark up the sign though.

[riddley-walker.livejournal.com]

you a grammer nerd?
ohmang, my posts must make yr hairs stand on end like you are made of chiken skin.

i'm loving on yr new icon BTW.
that's some shit i'd think was funny if i saw it too.

[cosmolinguist]

I am a grammar nerd, but I do play nice with others. Mostly. And if anything in your journal makes my hairs stand on end, it's only in the nice way.

The icon is blatantly stolen from setharoo, who actually took the picture and made it into an icon, but it's of a sign quite near to my/Andrew's place, so I figure I'm entitled to it as well. And it seemed fitting for this subject matter.

[riddley-walker.livejournal.com]

it reminds me of the drawing of the snake that ate an elephant from The Little Prince.
my friend Micah has that tattooed on the back of his lower neck and it's one of the cutest tattoos EVAR.
it looks like a birthmark.

when i was younger i remember going to an art museum with my dad and seeing an exhibit by an artist named robert cumming. i loved his work, i must have been maybe 10 or 11, it made a lasting impression on me.
among other things he had made a motorized comma that spun in a circle with it's locus being the dot part of the comma. it became a whirling saw blade. it was accompanied by a text describing a mosquito landing on a page that had been outfitted with such a comma, and how the mosquitoes leg was cut to bits.
this is my understanding of punctuation.
heh.
my understanding of spelling comes from the fact that to spell a word and cast a spell use the same spelling of "spell".
...did you know that "weird" originally meant having the ability to change fate? it also has a loose connection with the word "word".

[stealthmunchkin.livejournal.com]

Also 'grimoire', the word for spellbook, has the same root as 'grammar'. For a long time the idea of naming things had magical connotations - if you came up with the word for something, you were in a very real sense creating that thing. Which in a sense is true - by naming a thing, by giving it a word, you are affecting how people think of it. Everyone essentially lives in a world of metaphor, created in their own brain, and people who speak different languages are living in different worlds.
"A rose by any other name would smell as sweet"
"Not if they called it a stinkblossom"

i'm so glad no one calls me stinkblossom

[riddley-walker.livejournal.com]

i didn't know that about grimore!
i'm interested in the power of naming and defining. very much so.
i'm also kinda facinated by the idea that words get their definition from everything they are not, much more than from what they are. concepts seem to work like that too.
that's a good point about languages having their own worlds. i grew up speaking more than one dialect and i code switch alot, even now, so i'm a little more aware of that stuff than some Americans are.
in general we tend to be very ignorant of the relativity of language and issues of translation.
ah the privledge of only needing to know one language that (post)imperialism conveys.
hum, i dunno if you'd find this interesting, but ive been facinated by how words are used by our current li'l emperor and his cronies here.
they tend to use heavily charged words with vauge definition when they want to sway large masses of people to their direction. words like "freedom", "democracy" and "spirituality" seem to have the ability to create a kind of cohesion among people who's actual concepts of what those words mean are often very different.
i'm convinced now that society is actually held together by plattatudes, aphorisms, and generalizations. without them we'd all fall into a chaos of hyperindividuated inxpressable experience! i think there is a reason that monks and scientists live in relative solatude away from the middling crowd.
their language becomes to personal and precise after a while.

heh. unlock the secrets of fachist language technology for fun and profit.

Re: i'm so glad no one calls me stinkblossom

[stealthmunchkin.livejournal.com]

You should read Illuminatus! by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson at some point, if you haven't already. Great little novel that in large part deals with those kind of issues.
Just had a look at your userinfo - good to see people appreciating Alan Lomax, incidentally - who on earth is Dave Hickey? Just wondering because my surname's Hickey, and I don't know of any famous Dave Hickeys...

Re: i'm so glad no one calls me stinkblossom

[riddley-walker.livejournal.com]

i read some of the Illuminatus a loooong time ago. not all of it though, i think yr right i should read it.
my reading list right now has been mutated by a combination of atomic energy and ectoplasmic radiation into a giant kaiju monster that is currently glowering over me threatening to wreck havok on my fair city if i don't get to reading.

Re: i'm so glad no one calls me stinkblossom

[classytart.livejournal.com]

languages having their own worlds
French does not have a word for home.

Re: i'm so glad no one calls me stinkblossom

[riddley-walker.livejournal.com]

really?!
i know so little about french.
do they express anything close to the english word home?
or, i guess i'm asking, what does "home" usually get translated into in french?

Re: i'm so glad no one calls me stinkblossom

[classytart.livejournal.com]

To "the house of". So you can go to your house, but in French you literally can never go home.

That's one of my favourite language facts, you know.

[cosmolinguist]

I don't know any French, but there are a couple of things I like about it. One I stole from Tom Robbins, who told me that the French don't say "sweet dreams" as we do, they say "make fine dreams," which is cooler (he says) because it attributes agency to the dreamer--they are not just having dreams, but making them--and also because a "fine" dream encompasses a lot more than a "sweet" one. That always makes me smile.

[cosmolinguist]

This comment is why I love you (in that way that I love lots of people on LJ; nothing to be too scared of), because it's full of many and varied things, all of which I find interesting.

It never would've occurred to me that the "hump" on the sign looked like the snake/elephant/hat. I liked the sign and the drawing anyway, but I like them more now because they're connected to each other.

And mosquito-leg-amputating punctuation! My mind boggles.

And I did not know about "weird," either. Again, new connections between previously-disparate things just add to my delight.

[sablin1975.livejournal.com]

If I remember rightly,some of the York's Roman sewerage system is still in use.They don't make sewers like they used to.

[srk1.livejournal.com]

I guess I'm just used to a country where, as Eddie Izzard says, "you tear your history down, man! 'Thirty years old—let's smash it to the floor and put a car park here.' " In England history persists without anyone needing to make a big deal about it, so you have arrow slits that peek out on to yellow lines painted on a road.

I actually think that kind of thing is quite distinctive to York and a handful of other places. Elsewhere the 'let's put a car park here' mentality prevails, if the history wasn't already demolished by the Luftwaffe.

[classytart.livejournal.com]

There are quite a few of them: York, Edinburgh, Durham, Lincoln... and that's just cities I've been in in the last week. But it's certainly not all, you're right. The non-industrial (less industrial) older Northern cities tend to be quite well speckled with history. But even the most bulldozer-happy of British cities do tend to have more old stuff lying around than conservation-friendly American cities (Victorian pillar boxes are everywhere if you look out for them, for example). Probably because we still use our city centres in a way that most of the USA does not, and we've been here so long that old stuff that's standing is unremarkable.

I like it, too, Holly. That's a lovely picture.

[guysterrules.livejournal.com]

Great observational photos.

It's good to know Americans aren't the only ones capable of egregious grammar.

[cosmolinguist]

I had a similar thought, actually; I hear so much to the contrary that it's nice to be reminded sometimes that Britishes can be fallible too. :-) I did also wonder, though, if such an error has the same likelihood of being so noticably corrected on a USian sign...