Cultish Bossbabe

Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism (2021) Amanda Montell [R by Bigpurplehatguy] whom we've met "Wordslut" before. Like, most recently, other Blobs about words, their use and derivation, Cultish gets deep in the weeds of etymology. For Montell, 'cults' cover a wide spectrum towards extremes of malignant narcissism, Jonestown, Guyana and Reichsparteitag Nürnburg. Der Triumph des Kults is partly achieved by repeating a subset of the lexicon together. If you say something often enough it becomes, if not truth, at least the default. Thus, many objectively successful people believe in [their own] Meritocracy [prev Michael "Harvard Philosophy" Sandel]. In the pubs and clubs adjacent to Silicon Valley, it is a very easy flip to conclude that those at Grade 5 and below have failed through lack of merit and deserve their fate among the drones of late-stage capitalism.

I used to be quite smug about never being a member of anything "I was never a boy-scout". Then I signed up to MetaFilter . . . for the likes [✓] and the LoLs, like.  Dau.I maintains that The Blob is effectively a sub-site of MeFi.

Cultish is available on Borrowbox - I just returned it. It is read by actor Ann Marie Gideon, slow enough that you can crank up the speed to 1.25x and get through it in <10hrs without losing sense. 

Something said too much in specific contexts is a rough definition of jargon. The [over] use of specific words and phrases [evolution, clade, proteomics] is one way in which members can achieve solidarity. Montell introduced me to a new concept which also helps limit dissent [and smooth over cognitive dissonance] among the ranks: thought-terminating cliché TTC. This ante-dates Montell by about 50 years, and gets it's own entry in Wikipedia but it was new to me. Joan Didion characterised TTC as "It is a way of talking that tends to preclude further discussion, which may well be its intention."   If you can't achieve whatever goal in your fitness class, allowing the instructor to say "It's just karma, dude" allows t'bugger to let themself off their obligation of remediating your defects of fitness. Six-pack abs but lazy-arse upstairs!

One example of TTC "here we go again" gave me a little frisson of recognition. Our family devoted a year of our lives - and an elephantine carbon footprint - attending monthly meetings in Greystone to create the Home Education Network HEN. Gaaahd it was slow. One of our founders advised that we should devote the next N meetings, not to drafting a constitution or raising funds, but to sorting out our interpersonal relations through Consensus decision-making. The other professional Dad and I rolled our eyes and put a stop to that (nonsense). But we might well have been better off learning a different way of dealing with difference.

Difference? We could all do a little introspection on the theme of You are in a Cult whereas I am a member of a club. Too damned easy to dismiss The Other.

Harmless drudges

I was in Kilkenny's spanking new library filling in time before a visit to the dentist. It is, as all public libraries, richer in 400s "Language" than 500s "Science & Math". But I snagged (423.0922) The Dictionary People: The Unsung Heroes Who Created the Oxford English Dictionary (2023) by Sarah Ogilvie. And I was rewarded in the snagging - it's great. 
The famous post-box [L cropped under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 from the work of Kaihsu Tai] outside 78 Banbury Road, Oxford where James Murray and 3000 others built the OED. We only know about the 3000 [!] because, in her last week as an Oxford lexicographer, Ogilvie opened a random box in the archive to reveal James Murray's address book. "It was one of those moments when things go into slow motion": as well it might for an archivist to discover The Archive.

She set out on an academic research project to track down and bring to life some of the ace, biased, crazy, dogged, eccentric contributors to the cause of describing the English language as it is used. OED has always been, thus, descriptivist rather than proscriptive = telling people to speak proper. It was an early example of crowd-sourcing. Biased? The English speaking world from America to Zanzibar was asked to read what they liked and thence choose illustrative usage quotes attached to words each reader thought needed that treatment. Thus, a District Officer in India might write 'slips' on khan, pagoda, puggaree, turban; while an ardent suffragette submitted emancipatress, womanist and hungerstruck. Or a doctor might abstract a lot of long words from an anatomy textbook and Editor Murray would feel obliged to include them even as they slipped from  normal usage. And if no wannabee amateur lexicographer turned up from Britain's African colonies? Then loan-words from Hausa and Swahili are invisible to the OED. The slips for Interesting contributors and editors have been shuffled and dealt by Ogilvie into 26 chapters from 'A for Archaeologist' to 'Z for Zealot'. 

Three of the top four contributors were banged up in Lunatic Asylums, while the 4th was an official in such an institution. One of them, William Douglas, submitted 150,000 slips over 22 years which works out at 2 slips an hour for two decades assuming a 60hr working week. Then again, he didn't have a day job. There were also 3 murderers 'on the books' only one of whom was convicted and in Broadmoor. 

Despite his protestations that all of English, [genital] warts and all, should be recorded in his OED, Murray baulked at including several common taboo words. Apart from the Obscene Publications Act of 1857, it was the 1890s: Victorian respectability was a powerful determinative force. In 1877, a bibliography of obscene literature was published by "Pisanus Fraxi" a clever-clogs pseudonym for compiler Henry Ashbee [it's an anagram of Fraxinus ash & Apis bee] who had accumulated the world's largest library of naughty books. He also submitted A Lot of slips from these works pour épater le bourgeois Murray and make him blush.

Ogilvie herself is recording a change in English usage: p.9 Where they lived, what they did with their lives, who they loved, the books they read. Bob: Surely that who should be whom? Scribens agrees: all the other grammar checkers, which are legion, don’t give a damn. I guess whom is on the way out. 
And "Harmless drudge"? That would be a lexicographer.

My PrecISSSS

It was a rather special weekend because The Boy, our firstborn Sun & Air, carved time from his busy working / parenting schedule to come on his ownio to visit his agéd parents. We didn't have a fatted calf about the places but I did buy some rasherses and sausinges and we had breakfast for lunch à trois on Sunday. Nothing like reddit/r/FryUp, mind! Either side of our Bunter Blowfest, we planted out 3 pot-bound exotic trees . . . for posterity, like. 

In normal chat and catchup, nobody is directing the convo and quite random things pop up. Turns out we've both been spending too much time on reddit/r/Ireland and had noticed a post about the International Space Station ISS making a pass across the Irish sky at 2100hrs. That was wrong in the detail by about an hour. so we missed the event. But, in any case The Event would have been a nothing-burger because it was 10/10th cloud cover. Being reddit, some wag offered "damn it if we had prep time we could have made a huge sign that reads: if you can read this please airdrop us some Taytos " The Boy was disappointed because he'd never knowingly seen the ISS. I have - 2018 and 2013: it's not rare like an eclipse. You just have to consult an almanac and hope for clear skies.

I took The Boy to the Dublin train at teatime on Monday. Later that evening, I checked the internet for Tonight's ISS show: 

Oooo, I had 40 minutes in hand. I also checked the sky which had a half moon and romantically scudding clouds. Just before 21:00 a faint satellite coursed across the sky in the same direction as the ISS was expected. But from my previous sightings, I was not fooled by this dullard. And then thar she blowes!

I coulda shoulda just watched with gob agape, because the ISS is bright and zippy; and rather wonderful even after all these years. But I pointed my device in the right direction and logged a tuthree snaps of The Event. Amazin' !! The crap-pic above doesn't capture the ghost-story clouds. I believe the other obvs star must be Altair = α-Aquilae while γ-Aql aka Tarazed is barely visible at 1 o'clock from Altair. ISS? would do again.

Isn't Alan clever?

The Vagabond and The Princess: Paddy Leigh Fermor in Romania (2017) by Alan Ogden

• Q. Can I walk?
• I can!
• Q. Have I walked?
• I have!
• Q. Have I gone on and On and ON about my walks?

But I am The Page to Wenceslas when compared to Laurie Lee, Eric Newby, Peter Fleming or Patrick Leigh Fermor and their earlier long-distance treks. I had indeed read all their walkie-books before I ever put one foot in front of the other.

Travel books are more, and better, than journals or diaries; because travel broadens the mind walking transforms the soul. The Buddhists of school of Plum Village practice walking meditation where they try [not tooo hard, mind] to become one with their breath . . . foot on the earth . . . other foot . . . breathe. But I'm not on that page. This here Page walks day after day until the blisters stop coming and peace settles on the shoulders. Fermor walked from Hoek van Holland to Constantinople in the mid-1930s, made friends, lost his cherry, encountered The Other and was never again at home in England. He kept a diary but lost it and relied on his memory to write up his journey 40 years afterwards. It is nostalgic, colourful, and exotic. It is not a journal but it does document a time and place which was swept into the dustbin of history by WWII and Yalta.

Aaaand 40 years after the publication of A Time of Gifts, a jobbing author with some knowledge of Romania (and the SOE in which Fermor served with success and panache during WWII) decided to write an in the footsteps of book about Fermor's Transylvanian adventures. Which could be wonderful and I got it out of the library on foot of being a Fermor Fanboi. There is some interesting info about the multi-lingual melting-pot aspects of Central Europe in the before times. I like the inclusive practice of using Romanian place-names but also tagging their Magyar and Deutsch identities, at least in the first instance. Thus Cluj (Hungarian: Kolozsvár, German: Klausenburg). We've encountered this before in Breßlau /Wrocław. But Author Ogden has a really annoying tendency to nit-pick about the failures of Fermor's memory:

Ogden 1 : Fermor 0!
on the prev page ' . . . slotted by embrasures, with a circular bastion at each corner'.  The bastions are not circular but polygonal and Paddy makes no mention of the prominent ravelins at each corner of the rectangular plan.
Ogden 2: Fermor 0!!
Fermor died in 2011 so he can't fight back. Slow triumphal hand-clap.

I learned a bit more about MittelEurop's ethnicities from the book but also from follow-ups on Wikipedia: 

• Székely maybe related to Attila's huns, they achieved a level of autonomy within the various empires into which they were subsumed and continued to speak a variety of Hungarian / Magyar. Ceded to Romania by the 1920 carve-up Treaty of Trianon, they were returned to Axis Hungary in WWII and then back to Romania. I have no idea whether they were sufficientlly endogamous to retain DNA distinction through 1,000 years in Transylvania surrounded by attractive Roma, Saxons and 
• Aromanians aka Vlachs are from further South into the Balkans but they speak a vulgar-Latin derived Eastern Romance Language not unlike the regular Romanian of Romania.
• Saxons are Germans, mainly from the low-countries encouraged East with various Ostsiedlung East-settlement schemes their lingo is like Luxembourgish. Saxony = Freistaat Sachsen is the Southernmost division of the DDR = East Germany. The Anglo-Saxons? they come from a non-contiguous part of Germania called Niedersachsen = Lower Saxony: a Land wedged up against the Northsea convenient for jumping to the first substantial island off the coast of NE Europe.

Diversity rocks! 

WOFFAL!

For months and months, I've had a book lurk unread in my Borrowbox reading list. Finally, a week ago, I brought 21st Century Yokel [2017] by Tom "never 'eard of 'im" Cox into play and it was a treat. He was born in the same year as Caitlin Moran [prev] and had a similar early career trajectory: working-class kid from Up North with a good ear and zeitgeist taste gets job as mainstream music journalist in London. They've branched out on different paths since then, but are both still writing and still lol funny. Tom Cox has a good dozen books out and about.

Cox [as R on a Devon cliff] found the pace and prices of late 20thC London a bit much and went upstakes to the country, first in Norfolk and then to Devon. He reflects in one chapter about the richness and variety of landscape to be found in such a small island as "Great" Britain. It ranks 9th after Honshu, ahead of Ellesmere. The coast of Devon and Cornwall is all cliffs, storms and sandy bays [much like Costa na Déise] while East Anglia is is a pancake haunted by fogs, and getting eaten away through erosion [bloboprev].

Cox embraces the fractal nature of landscape, asserting that there is a life-times interest and engagement to be had in the square mile surrounding his home outside Totnes. Indeed any square-mile, if you live nearby and pay attention. It's like Louis Agassiz spending the Summer vacation working his way across his back yard. We don't need to go to Bali or Iguazu for The Amazing: head to the nearest hedgerow be small.

The interface between domestic and wild in Cox's world is his cats. He's written a tuthree whole books about them. One chapter of Yokel tells how one of his cats was savaged by an off-leash dog and needed two operations and days of veterinary care to survive. The [enormous] vet bills were mostly covered through a crowd-funder organised by his fan-base. "wollen sie ewig leben?", it's not for me to judge how folks spend their own money.

21stC Yokel was published by Unbound, a cunning publishing venture which laid off the risk by crowd-funding the books they accepted for publication. It worked extremely well for Cox, who had a) track record b) loyal and extensive fan base. And his next handful of books were published by the same venture. For other authors, not so much. Unbound went into administration in 2025, 14 years after launch, owing royalties to multiple dependent authors. One of the directors John "QI" Mitchinson [whom prev] acquired the assets of the bankruptcy to create Boundless. "Author Tom Cox, whose latest book Everything Will Swallow You was due to come out this Thursday, became suspicious after months of not having received payments he was owed." That's the thing with bankruptcy, incompetent or unlucky entrepreneurs get to cut their losses and walk away to start new ventures. Their suppliers, clients, customers just have to suck up the losses - counting themselves fortunate to get pennies in the pound of what they are owed. 

otoh!! Walter Scott's printing business went tits-up in 1825 owing £130,000. Scott undertook to write himself out of his debts and died doing it. But the creditors' investment was returned and we got Woodstock, The Fair Maid of Perth and Castle Dangerous.

Tom Cox has a Dad, Mick (not Michael) Cox whose antics make an excellent foil for some of the book's humor. His catch-phrase is “WATCH OUT FOR FUCKWITS AND LOONIES!" [WOFFAL] while his aphorisms, and peculiar certainties, are always delivered SHOUTING. Apparently, this ALL CAPS conceit was first used by John "Garp" Irving in A Prayer for Owen Meany [1989], which is the favorite book of Cox Sr. John Irving was making a lot of waves when we was living in New England in the early 1980s but I never got further than The World According to Garp [1978]. Owen Meany sounds like a rec to me and I've reserved a copy at the Library.

A Life in Pictures

Whoa! The damsons are in.  We have a single scraggy damson Prunus domestica tree on a ditch in the fields across the lane. Recently we make jam from the fruit. 03Sep24 picked 1.15kg; 07Sep25  picked 0.85kg. The shortfall was partly due to fruit-fall and bird-attack, I conclude that timing is important: the fruit are pucker-up sour in August but compost by mid-September. Blossoms appeared this May. On foot of a phone-call from Dau.II, I lugged the ladder across the lane on 04Sep26 and picked a record 2.5kg of fruit [top L]; discarding A Lot blighted by brown rot Monilinia fructigena. 

 In the Spring, our friend-and-neighbour La Torbellina delivered a tray of very miscellaneous tomato and squash seedlings; not more than two of any variety. I carefully trans-planted them all: outside and in the polytunnel in a hope for the best fashion. I also started a variety of beans. It's been one of those years when it hardly seems worth the effort; the beans came late and grew scraggy and had a very brief bearing season. I saved about 1kg, blanched and frozen for Christmas and ate the rest. The squash were also disappointing: two scrawny courgette (which are the only variety worth eating [fry in butter with black pepper and a sprink of salt]. And a handful of uglier larger squash of uncertain name. Including the monster [mid L] which shouts the sage advice: "never eat anything bigger than your head" . . . free to good home, lads.

Me, I take 'less perfick' beans which would be rejected by Bird's Eye (and most of my family) and cook t'buggers up in a cozido: fry chopped onion and/or other allium in olive oil [it's a Portuguese recipe]; cast thereto available chopped veggies (beans, toms, spuds, carrots, squash); tarragon if possible, parsley oregano thyme else; sliced chorizo if the vegetarians are off-site; a handful of lentils. Cook till cooked. Gob more olive oil into the bowl. Eat with bread. 

A month ago, I started doing triage on the 000s of 'snap-shots' dating from ~1975 to ~2025. The collection / hoard cannot be dignified by describing them as Photographs. Photographs are composed, appropriately lit and in-focus. I am aware that Robert Capa and Henri Cartier Bresson loosed off a roll of film to cover one event / shoot . . . and left almost all of them on the cutting-room floor. That is probably appropriate now with digital cameras. But when each roll of film cost ready money while development and printing more than doubled that cost, it seems a ruinous expense to secure a couple of, like, Photographs. The stack of duff snaps [bot L] is 25cm tall and weighs 3.4kg. Their next and final move is to the dump; I will no longer schlep them, unviewed, from home to home over several decades. I have spoke! It's pathetic really, I look at images from 40 years ago and cannot recall the name of several of the friends thus captured. How much harder will it be for The Daus who weren't even born when the snap was snopped?

How do we know that Babe Ruth existed?

I am a fan of Sean "Mindscape" Carroll. He's a respected theoretical physicist, who has a chair in Philosophy at Johns Hopkins U. For his Mindscape Podcast he cast his net wide and pokes the expertise of his guest: chemistry, ecology, fashion, immunology, mathematics, medicine, oenology, philosophy, as well as physics. After an hour and a bit, I feel a bit better informed if not actually cleverer. Because clever is not about knowing stuff [Babe Ruth was 53 when he died; the Capital of Hungary is Budapest; Brobdingnagians are Big] it's about being able to process stuff. I know a lot - to wit decades of success in Table Quizzes. But there are limited areas [the chicken genome, Portuguese cats] where I know stuff because I've made it my business, through observation and research, to find things out from first principles. For everything else, I rely on trusted sources: hoping, assuming, trusting that someone else has done the deep digging. Because, for certain sure, we can't reinvent the wheel for everything we are certain sure about.

I bet you're convinced that the Earth is round like a ball, as is the sun, moon and planets. But what is the evidence for this hypothesis? Could you marshal that evidence for a crowd of skeptical fans of Terry Pratchett? I wrote some years ago about being wrong-footed on my belief in evolution. Research biologists, even biochemists, accept the theory of evolution by natural selection as fact. But only 1-in-20 of their serried ranks could articulate the evidence for this belief. But many of those same people are prepared to be rude to, and about, people from Tennessee who reckon nature's wonderful diversity and complex interactions are the creation of The Deity.

In August Carroll was chatting to his friend and colleague Stuart Firestein about how science lurches from blunder to error and drags the participants from ignorance to insight . . . and a well-cited paper, or tenure, or a Prize. At one point, the chat revealed that there is a [conspiracy] theory to the effect that there is no evidence that Babe Ruth even ever existed. This [un]hinges on the observation that there is only one moving image purporting to be Babe Ruth. There are loadsa copies in different contexts but it all boils down to this one movie clip. Given a) He died in 1948, decades after moving images became main-stream, b) His baseball stats are frankly incredible c) He is [therefore] probably the most well known baseball player who ever lived. The Theorists consequently experience a too-good-to-be-true meltdown of cognitive dissonance; which is resolved by concluding (and propagating) that Babe Ruth was a madey-uppy construct. Maybe as a conspiracy by Big Baseball to have an unattainable summit to inspire merely mortal players. Who knows with these crazies, huh? After all, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin never walked on the moon: the whole thing was staged at a studio in Houston.

Carroll and Firestein conclude that the adult response is not to cry "You're all kookaburra cray-cray" but "You know, it's an interesting question. How do we really know there was a Babe Ruth?" . . . "what do we take seriously? Who do we trust? What evidence do we have? How do we judge it?". Now more than ever we need to have a focused crap-detector when AI-bots can hallucinate, and then publish, plausible sounding facts that jest ain't true.