1.
American colloquialisms, regional slang…what the doodinkus am I going on about? In Kansas, we call a carbonated sugared beverage Pop, AKA Soda and Coke in other regions. I still exclaim “For crying out loud” quite often, especially to Missouri automobiles “Driving like a bat out of hell!”
A colloquialism or colloquial language is the linguistic style used for casual communication. It is the most common functional style of speech, the idiom normally employed in conversation and other informal contexts.
“Well, I’ll be go to hell,” says this son of Kansas.
DARE, centered at the University of Wisconsin, is celebrating its 50th year of studying our country's regional words and expressions. With field interviews in the early years and more recently through written materials spanning the history of the U.S. their dictionary has produced a multivolume reference work and continues to report on regionalisms through its website. They even have a Word of the Month archive. Check it out!
2.
Do you know that more than 33,796km of roads in India are plastic roads, according to a World Economic Forum report. Rajagopalan Vasudevan of the Thiagarajar College of Engineering, a chemistry professor in India, has found an innovative way of dealing with plastic pollution, by turning them into roads, which are tougher than regular asphalt roads. The plastic-bitumen road-laying technique covered under a patent held by Thiagarajar College has since made it free to use for the greater good.
Jessica Ramtahal of the Borgen Project reports that Plastic waste in India has collectively reached 8.3 billion tons throughout the past 70 years. This is inclusive of plastic bags, plastic bottles, packaging, straws, spoons and forks and much more. To picture how much 8.3 billion tons would look like, compare it to 1 billion elephants or 822,000 Eiffel Towers.
She says, “There are various benefits to using recycled plastics over regular plastics, especially in terms of constructing roads. By using recycled plastic, one can save approximately 1 ton of asphalt. In addition, cost wise, it provides approximately 8 percent profit. Furthermore, addressing the influx of plastic waste in India paves way for new jobs for many unemployed citizens.”
It appears that there are some inroads in the United States to make use of our plastic waste and employing people. Texas, of all places, has something going on. And a company called MacRebur (pictured above), is dedicated to plastic roadways and can be reached out of Vista, California.
If any Tucson readers want to make a query in this regard, start here:
Michael Graham - Transportation Public Information Officer
Michael.Graham@tucsonaz.gov
520-400-7108
Erica Frazelle - Transportation Public Information Officer
Erica.Frazelle@tucsonaz.gov
520-429-9646
3.
There are many people, places, and incidents left out of the history books in our country. History in America has been seemingly written by white men, leaving out most minorities and women. For example, I was never made aware in high school of the Tulsa Race Massacre, Juneteenth, the Three-Fifths Compromise, Bleeding Kansas, nor the Internment of Japanese Americans. Did you know that over the last 100 years, women have had significant, high-level roles in breaking secret codes – from Nazi ciphers to the secret messages of Al Capone’s gang? More on all of these further down the road.
Today, if you will, check out these 5 Japanese-American women activists left out of U.S. history books, brought to my attention by my former University of Kansas photography professor, Pok Chi Lau. Nina Wallace, the author of the linked article, states that, “As an antidote to this historical stifling of strong female voices, here’s a little herstory lesson about five women whose World War II incarceration inspired them to fight back. And no, they don’t care if they’re hurting your stereotypes about quiet, submissive Asian women.”
4.
Just a quick update on the Arizona vs Supreme Court kerfuffle I talked about on Wednesday…Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan dismantled Michael Carvin (representing the Republicans of Arizona) a bit by running hypotheticals by him, and his catcher’s mitt wasn’t working so great.
KAGAN: Okay. How about -- how about this one? A state has long had two weeks of early voting, and then the state decides that it's going to get rid of Sunday voting on those two weeks, leave everything else in place. That -- black voters vote on Sunday 10 times more than white voters. Is -- is that system equally open?
CARVIN: I would think it would be because, let's think about it, Sunday is the day that we traditionally close government offices.
KAGAN: It's a -- you know, it's an exception --to have government workers come in on a Saturday too. That's not -- that's not a real problem.
KAGAN: Can we go -- just go on to another one? The state says we're placing all our polling places at country clubs. And that decision means that black voters have to drive 10 times as long to the polls and have to go into places which, you know, are traditionally hostile to them.
CARVIN: Again, these are all hypotheticals that have never existed in the real world because --
KAGAN: You know, this doesn't seem so fanciful to me.
Charles Pierce of Esquire sets the table here.
5.
And lastly, once again Bandcamp is waiving their revenue share today, Friday, March 5, on all stream and CD download purchases. The beauty is that you can purchase individual tracks from the various CDs offered.
What reminded me of this was perusing an article today in the New York Times Sunday Magazine on one of my favorite authors, Kazuo Ishiguro. I had read his “An Artist of the Floating World” in 2015 which inspired my song Hesitation Bridge (1st track of Dreams Are Strange, 2016). You can read my lyrics here.
From the book: ‘If on a sunny day you climb the steep path leading up from the little wooden bridge still referred to around here as "the Bridge of Hesitation", you will not have to walk far before the roof of my house becomes visible between the tops of two gingko trees. Even if it did not occupy such a commanding position on the hill, the house would still stand out from all others nearby, so that as you come up the path, you may find yourself wondering what sort of wealthy man owns it.’
The gist is that Ono, the wealthy man mentioned above, has to cross the bridge to get home physically, while emotionally he is hesitant, torn between his memories and his future, his ego and the truth. Men, he tells us, hesitated before either going home or crossing the bridge to the city's pleasure district. Therefore, we understand that the bridge is both a site of Ono's own attachment to that old district, and a lost communal symbol of that district, part of the vocabulary of a now-nonexistent subculture.
As an aside, as soon as I started working on this post, a Master Class ad for Japanese cooking popped up in my email. Hmmmm. For the record, Ishiguro is British (born in Japan but moved to England at five years).
_______________________________________________________________
And now for your just deserts, another colloquialism. ‘Desert’ uses a pronunciation similar to ‘dessert’ and comes from an entirely different root. This use, as in, "He got what was coming to him — his just deserts," comes from the Latin deservire through the French. This sense of the term is analogous to the word "deserve," which originates from the same root. The pronunciation makes much more sense when the word "deserve" is considered.
All them colloquials just knock the pee-wadden outta me