Adulthood

Today’s Scenes From a Multiverse:

 

In everyday dealings, we tend to judge the stages of life by physical and behavioral signs, and the categorization is somewhat fuzzy, but for legal and administrative purposes, crisp categorizations are necessary, and chronological age provides the basis for them — however irrational it might seem to label someone as a child one day and an adult the next.

In this case, Jon Rosenberg is remarking not only on that irrationality, but also (as his comments on the strip make clear) on the bizarreness of treating gay adults (however adult is defined) as unsafe or untrustworthy in a way that gay kids are not. (I note further that the onset of puberty comes well before the age of 18.)

 

Gay greens: the Big Two

In my Columbus OH household, the residents had a name for a particular category of foodstuffs, especially as salad ingredients: gay greens, taking in, for instance: arugula (or rocket), radicchio, watercress, mâche (or corn salad), fennel, (curly) endive, Belgian endive, flat (or Italian) parsley, and basil (especially the fancy varieties). (Sprouts of all kinds are hippie greens.) The association with queers comes primarily from these being fashionable foodstuffs, connected in many people’s minds with fancy cooking, adventurous dining, and foodie enthusiasm — activities that are also associated with gay men. Plus the widespread attitude that green salads are “unmanly” food: Real Men eat red meat, not green salads.

(The association of these foodstuffs with queers will no doubt come as a surprise to many Italian-Americans, not to mention actual Italians, who are accustomed to them as everyday ingredients.)

Today I’ll look at the Big Two of the gay greens, arugula and radicchio (noting that I am very fond of them both).

Stone fruits, nuts, and berries

Posting about flowering pear trees reminded me of some complexities in the classification of fruits. Putting aside the well-known divergence between the use of the word fruit in botany and its use in cooking and dining contexts, I’ll look at some more specific cases, in particular stone fruit(s). Again, there’s a divergence between the technical terminology of botany and ordinary language — a result of botanists having taken over ordinary vocabulary and employed it as technical vocabulary in specialized senses.

abuse

Commenter Nightflower takes objection to my use of the term abuse in my posting on fetish / kink:

I take issue with your use of the word “abuse” in this context. One very significant difference between BDSM/kink/fetish play and genuine abuse is the presence or absence of consent.

There’s the linguistic issue: despite the fact that my very brief AZBlog link referred to “(ritualized) abuse”, Nightflower takes the position that the word means what he uses it to mean, distinguishing between “genuine abuse” and BDSM practices he doesn’t use the word abuse for. He’s claiming that his technical use, within his community of practice (linguistic and sexual), is the “true” one.

Soft serve

Yesterday’s Zippy:

In ZippyPopLand, redemption can be found in soft serve. (In particular, New England Soft Serve, which would appear to be the franchise in Colchester CT, though I haven’t been able to find images of the place.)

Brief mention: Technical terminology

Caught on NPR’s Morning Edition this morning, a piece on Gen. Norton Schwartz, beginning:

The top officer in the U.S. Air Force, Gen. Norton Schwartz, is stepping down Friday after four years on the job.

Schwartz got the job after his predecessor was fired for — among other things — clashing with his Pentagon bosses over how many fighter jets the military needs.

Schwartz is most likely to be remembered for pushing another kind of aircraft: drones.

At this moment, dozens of these unmanned aircraft are flying high above Afghanistan.

Just don’t call them drones when speaking with Schwartz.

“Drones mischaracterize what these things are. They’re not dumb. Nor are they unmanned, actually. They’re remotely piloted aircraft,” he says.

They are remotely piloted from places like Creech Air Force Base, not far from the glittering hotels of Las Vegas. The pilots there work a joystick on an aircraft flying half a world away. And Schwartz says this will be the future of the Air Force.

So: don’t say drone, or unmanned aircraft, around Gen Schwartz.

Seasons

Today is the summer solstice, the “first day of summer” in some reckonings. But there are a number of these reckonings — in the U.S., the summer season is often taken to begin with Memorial Day, late in May and about three weeks before the solstice, and the autumn to begin with Labor Day, two to three weeks before the autumnal equinox. So there are often pointless arguments about when a particular season “really” begins.

Here’s a brief summary, using the (somewhat chaotic) Wikipedia survey as a starting point.

translating, interpreting

From a NYT editorial (“Lost in Translation”) on the 24th:

A persistent problem in American courts is the lack of translators to ensure that litigants who don’t speak or read English can take part in their cases. That’s the purpose of the Court Interpreters Act of 1978, which allows federal courts to order losing parties to pay prevailing parties the cost of interpreters.

In a disappointing 6-to-3 ruling, the Supreme Court defined “interpreter” narrowly to mean “one who translates orally from one language to another.”

This takes us into a thicket of complexities surrounding the verbs interpret and translate and the nouns interpreter, interpretation, translator, and translation.

Technical distinctions

Watching the 101st running of the Bay To Breakers race in San Francisco, on television. In addition to the actual race, there are vast numbers of people walking the course (from the Embarcadero, on the bay, to the ocean), most of them in silly costumes (and some of them without clothes at all, which KRON’s cameramen have to avoid showing, so as not to get the station fined by the FCC). (Jacques and I walked the race in 1991. In unremarkable clothes.)

Many of the entrants are in thematic groups: a bunch o’ bananas, seven (playing) cards and a stud (a shirtless hunk), a spine, a gaggle of beauty queens (Miss Behave and her sisters) and so on. Including the Golden Gate Bridge, in a sizable model carried by a group of people. The bridge gave rise to a technical question that had to be decided by the judges: was it a costume (allowed) or a float (prohibited)? It was judged to be a costume, since all the participants were on foot.

(Addendum 5/21: a naked superhero from B2B, on AZBlogX.)

learning analytics

In my Palo Alto neighborhood, tech companies spring up (and, often, disappear) frequently. Not too long ago, Junyo appeared around the corner from my house, and now the sign on the door has been expanded to

Junyo Learning Analytics

Ah, learning analytics is a technical term, one that I hadn’t encountered before. It’s a N + N compound glossable as ‘analytics having to do with learning’. So that drives things back to analytics.