mike's web log

One more, I think. Our assignment for the Old English class this week was ...

People retold some excellent fables — The Scorpion and the Frog, The Wolf in Sheep's Clothing, and The Peacock and the Crane. One person retold Schleicher's fable (!), which was originally a fable written in reconstructed Proto Indo-European about a sheep and some horses.[1]

Anyway, I (as usual) didn't entirely follow the assignment, and I retold a more modern "fable" about capitalism written in 1971. The tale concerns a greedy Once-ler, a forest of profitable Truffula trees, the inhabitants of the woods, and a moralizing Lorax.

The Lorax was published when I was past my Dr. Seuss years, so I didn't know it very well. It's written in a frame, with the bad guy (the Once-ler) as the narrator of the interior story. The nominal hero — the Lorax — keeps issuing dire environmental warnings to the Once-ler, which are ignored, but when the devastation is complete ...

I suppose that leaving is what most people would do, but the Lorax is definitely not in the mold of a Germanic hero, haha. Still, I tried to tell the tale as it was presented, with the addition of an Anglo-Saxon style moral at the end.

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[1] Our instructor noted that you really need to know Schleicher's fable if you want language-nerd cred, ha.

Another fun assignment in our Old English class:

Write 6–10 lines (not a strict limit) of Old English verse paraphrasing a famous speech from history or literature. Include at least four formulae and at least one hypermetric line.

In Anglo-Saxon poetry there are 4 beats ("lifts") per line, 2 in the first half-line (the A verse) and 2 in the second half-line (the B verse). Here's an example from a modern English rendering of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; the half lines are separated with a caesura marked with ||.

But sometimes poets created "hypermetrical" lines that had more beats than this 2+2 convention, typically 3+2 or 3+3. As one source puts it, "No one knows what these changes in rhythm are meant to imply." Per our instructor, it seems that hypermetrical lines sometimes set off quotations and sometimes implied a kind of elevated thought. To state a couple of theories.

Anyway, a famous speech, you say? An easy choice is the Gettysburg Address (the original is below). Here's my rendering, which is not a line-for-line restatement, given the length[1] and that the assignment has us including formulae and whatnot.

Original

"Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate—we can not consecrate—we can not hallow—this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."

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[1] A little irony, right? The GA is one of the shortest speeches (or the shortest?) in presidential history.

This semester I'm taking a class in Old English (Anglo-Saxon) poetry. In the class we read poems and learn about poetic techniques. That includes the mechanics (alliteration, meter) as well as the themes and styles that were favored by Anglo-Saxon poets.

We also compose our own poems! The assignment for our most recent class was this:

Write 6–10 lines (not a strict limit) of Old English verse likening a particular fictional character to a Germanic hero. The more incongruous the comparison, the better! Include at least 5 formulae.

A fun challenge. In addition to tending to the mechanics, there's this "formulae" thing. Poetry was an oral art in the old days; the formulae are quasi-stock phrases — things like þegnas æt þearfe ("thanes at the hour of need") and strang and stiþmod ("strong and resolute"). It seems that Anglo-Saxon poets would improvise poems and could throw in these formulae to keep the poem moving along. Our class keeps a hoard of these stock phrases, conveniently sortable by how they alliterate.

Students wrote some outstanding stuff: there were two (!) poems with Star Wars themes (people came up with Old English terms for "X-wing fighter" and "lightsaber"); one about Bugs Bunny, with the excellent twist that the hunter has a lisp (hawa instead of hara for "hare", i.e. "wabbit"); and a poem about Babe the Sheep-Pig.

I wrote about a beloved character who was about as un-warrior-like as I could imagine. I took the "not a strict limit" instruction to heart and ended up summarizing (sort of) an entire chapter of a well-known children's book. Here's the attempt:

In case you want to refresh your memory, here's the original: In Which Piglet Meets a Heffalump.

Some notes. There are surely grammatical and vocabulary errors. (Alas, I'm not yet fluent.) In a few cases I violated some of the poetic rules, oh well. A couple of the more awkward lines are part of my attempt to include formulae; some of these are probably obvious?

Our next assignment is to find a well-known speech or soliloquy and render it in Old English. There is this war poem that starts with "Fourscore and seven" ...

I shouldn't follow social media discussions about language usage, because the chance of insightful commentary is ... small. But even knowing this, I did follow a thread in which people were complaining about the figurative use of the word literally, as in something like "I literally died laughing".

A couple of sample cites from that thread:

This is the one change of usage I find most distressing. "Literally" is a word we previously used to clarify whether someone was using a word literally or figuratively. However, now we end up in an infinite regress: "did you use literally to mean literally or figuratively?".... "I meant literally".... "and by that do you mean figuratively?"... "I mean literally".... "and by that do you mean figuratively?" etc etc

language should (and does) evolve. But when a word shifts from a specific and precise meaning to an ambiguous, inexact or contrary meaning, we have not improved our ability to understand each other.

Apparently some people don't know that the "figurative" sense is listed as a second meaning in many dictionaries, including Merriam-Webster, American Heritage, Oxford Learner's, Collins, and Cambridge. In fact, I'd be surprised to find a contemporary dictionary that doesn't include this sense. When I noted that M-W has this entry, one guy argued "not the OED and therefore not definitive".[1] But sad for him, it's also in the OED (paywall):

Some people don't know that this usage goes back centuries. As you can see from the OED listing, the first cite for this "figurative" meaning goes back to 1769 and has had a healthy history since then. So this usage is not an example of the youths of today ruining the language or a failure of today's education system or whoever (whatever) the usual suspects are when folks decry the sad state of the world.

And some folks don't realize that this is another example of selective outrage, so to speak. As the commenters' opinions suggest, some people claim that the figurative use of literally is confusing, maybe even illogical. But I haven't seen any complaints (?) about usages like the following:

That would be awfully nice of you.
The lecture was terribly boring.
That video looks really fake.
That house is pretty ugly.

These are all examples where the adverbs — awfully, terribly, really, pretty — would be "confusing" if interpreted literally. But they're not being used in their literal senses — here, they're just qualifiers. Basically, these adverbs are variations on very. (Pretty is more like "somewhat".)

The figurative use of literally is along those lines: it qualifies what follows to suggest that it's exaggerated ("I was literally dying of laughter") or surprising ("There are literally hundreds of ways to make this classic soup").

All this being true, I don't think that the claim that literally is literally ambiguous holds up. But if people have examples (with context) where a figurative literally is ambiguous, I'd be interested to see them.

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[1] This assertion about the OED being "definitive" is a misunderstanding of lexicography generally and a misunderstanding about the purpose of the OED.

As a fun walking project, I walked around Lake Washington. Not at all at once, of course — it's possible to walk the lake in one day, but that takes a special kind of person.[1]

I ended up walking around 65 miles. (I didn't track my mileage closely, but I walked between 7 and 15 miles for each segment.) I mostly followed the Lake Washington Loop, a well-known route for bicyclists, which is 50 miles. But I also deviated from the Loop in order to stay close to the lake and to, you know, check stuff out and to wander through neighborhoods that I don't really know.

I did the walk in six segments over a couple of weeks. I used public transport to get to and from the endpoints for each leg.

• The 6 segments
• Map
• Photos
• Randon observations

The 6 segments

1. North Seattle to Bothell (Lake City–Lake Forest Park–Kenmore–Bothell)
2. Bothell to south Kirkland (Bothell–Juanita–Kirkland)
3. Kirkland to south Bellevue (Clyde Hill–Bellevue–Beaux Arts Village)
4. Bellevue to south Seattle (Bellevue–Newcastle–Kennydale–Renton–Bryn Mawr–Rainier Beach)
5. South Seattle to UW (Rainier Beach–Seward Park–Madrona–Madison Park–Arboretum–UW)
6. UW to North Seattle (UW–Laurelhurst–Windermere–Magnuson Park–Lake City)

If you know the Seattle area, you might recognize that I got more ambitious with each leg.

Map

Here are some maps (taallll, sorry about that, but that's Lake Washington).

The numbers indicate photos. I don't have a detailed map of the route, oh well.

Lake Washington north

Lake Washington south

Photos

The corresponding photos. (I took a lot more photos than this, but I reckoned there was an upper limit to how many times anyone needs to see my mug.)

1. Log Boom Park, Kenmore

Kenmore has invested in providing attractive public spaces, this park being one of them. While sitting at the park you can watch Kenmore Air seaplanes taking off and landing.

2. Juanita Bay Park

This is a beautiful natural area that gives you a sense of what the lakeshore must have been like before it was densely settled.[2]

3. Doris Cooper Houghton Beach Park, Kirkland

The city of Kirkland has a series of parks along the water and has carved out little public shore access points.

4. Chesterfield Beach Park, Bellevue

I took a little detour through the Beaux Arts Village neighborhood of Bellevue with the idea that there might be vistas of the lake. There weren't many, but there was this tiny park. (Many steps down and then back up, oof.)

5. Mercer Slough, Bellevue

A wonderful natural area that's only a tiny bit marred (ahem) by having a freeway running over it. That said, you can follow trails from South Bellevue Station all the way to Renton.

6. Eastrail Corridor

I loved this trail; it was a highlight of the walk. For some reason the Google Maps walking route guides you away from it, but ignore them — it runs uninterrupted to Renton. Among other landmarks is the Seattle Seahawks training facility.

7. Gene Coulon Memorial Beach Park, Renton

A gorgeous park and surprisingly (to me) big.

Some of the local denizens.

8. Cedar River, Renton; Renton Municipal Airport

The Cedar River runs through Renton (under the library!) and emerges into Lake Washington after going through the Boeing 737 plant. But you can still get close to bits of the river.

Renton Municipal Airport takes up the southwestmost part of the lakeshore. It's where new and refurbished 737s take off to be distributed to airlines all over the world.

9. Rainier Beach

The swing around the south end of the lake is the least picturesque part of the loop, imo. The Boeing 737 plant and the Renton Municipal Airport sit on the lakeshore, and even once you're past those, it's a long-ish walk up Rainier Ave S to Rainier Beach. I was surprised that there was a sidewalk, albeit sometimes overgrown, the whole length of Rainier Ave S.

10. Mount Baker Park

The trail along Lake Washington Blvd S going north from Seward Park is mere feet from the shore. It's no wonder that they film car commercials along there.

11. Madison Park

I wanted to stay close to the shore so I aimed at Madison Park. It's a slight detour — to keep going north, you have to juke west a bit up E Madison St to get around Broadmoor. But then you get to go through the Arboretum, and that's nice.

About to step onto the Arboretum Loop Trail.

12. Montlake over 520

The recent Montlake improvements are great for pedestrians and bicyclists.

13. Laurelhurst

I've lived in Seattle for 45+ years and I'd never once set foot in Laurelhurst, so another detour. The photo is at a pocket park whose official name apparently is NE 31st St Public Shore (East) Street End Park.

14. Windermere entrance to Magnuson Park

As with Laurelhurst, I decided to take a little detour through Windermere. There's a trail from there to Magnuson Park.

15. Matthews Beach Park

After walking through Magnuson Park, I ran out of real shoreline, so I went up the Burke-Gilman Trail to Matthews Beach. And from there I made my way back to Lake City.

Random observations

• For a fair bit of the walk, you can go on dedicated trails, but parts of the route are along city streets.
• When I'm walking, the Burke-Gilman trail just feels iffy to me, given how fast some bicyclists ride.
• Nice neighborhoods mostly have sidewalks, but not always! Corollary: as a walker, I've become extremely interested in how safe a street is for pedestrians.
• Nice neighborhoods often have (open) bathrooms in their parks. Backups are community centers, libraries, and indoor malls. I have to plan accordingly.
• You can stay fairly close to the lake, but there are a few substantial impediments that force you off, such as the Renton Boeing plant, Husky Stadium, and various communities like Broadmoor.

I did amuse myself thinking about how many alerts I might have set off on Ring cameras and on the Nextdoor app while I was walking through different neighborhoods. :)

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[1] From the Seattle Times: Here's what it's like to walk around Lake Washington in a single day.

[2] I am reminded that the lakeshore looked considerably different before it was densely settled because the lake was also almost 9 feet higher. In 1909, the Corps of Engineers made the Montlake Cut that connected Lake Washington with Portage Bay and Lake Union without locks. This drained Lake Washington so much that it was significantly lowered. This was "good" for commerce but was environmentally egregious, ruining salmon runs on which local tribes subsisted and who knows what other habitats.

Another quick post just for myself so I don't keep having to look things up. Today it's about displaying an image (for example, an icon) inline with text in a web page.

Here's the HTML for one way to do this:

<div>
<p><span style="font-size:24px;float:left;width:12ch;margin:0;">
Inline text
</span></p>
<img src="test_icon.png" style="margin:0;float:left;">
<p style="clear:both;"></p>
</div>

Notes:

• The text and image are in a div element, with a span element for the text and an img element for the icon.
• Both the span and image are set with float:left, which puts them on the same line.
• The icon is pushed to the right of the text by setting the text width. Here, I use width:12ch; the ch unit is approximately the width of a character. The most important thing about the ch unit is that it's proportional to the current font size.
• Margins for both the span and img elements are set to 0 so that the text and image are right next to each other.
• The text and image are followed by an empty p element that has clear:both to reset the floating.

Obviously, the image has to be of a size to fit the line of text, but that's a different issue that can be solved by resizing the image.

In action:

• How to make image inline with text (Stack Overflow)
• How to Place Image and Text on the Same Line in HTML (SheCodes)

My first car was a 1968 VW Beetle. This was an honorable tradition in our family — my Oma drove a 1959 Beetle, and my mother had a 1973 "Super" Beetle. I am (was) a third-generation Bug owner.

Technologically, a '68 Beetle was trailing edge even in its day. Everything was mechanical; no fancy fuel injection, no electronic ignition, none of that. On the plus side, this retro-tech made it practical for an owner to do a lot of the maintenance themselves.

(The engine ran and took me all the way from Denver to Seattle, so my work and/or the step-by-step instruction was apparently good enough.)

Shifting gears (haha). Sarah's car died yesterday; she parked it for an errand, and when she was ready to head home, it wouldn't start. So this morning I cleaned the battery terminals, and that seemed to resolve the no-juice issue. But the car was running noticeably rough.

If this had been my 1968 Bug, I would have known what to do: get a small screwdriver and adjust the idle speed, which is something you can (could) do via a spring-loaded screw on the carburetor.

I knew, of course, that Sarah's car doesn't have anything so manual — we're several (many) decades beyond carburetors and idle-adjust screws. And I don't have a book about how to keep your 2005 Toyota alive for the compleat idiot. But now there's Google and YouTube.

What I discovered is that if the battery has died or been removed, you need to "reset the idle". When there's no battery, the car loses its mind and has to be retaught basic functions, like what speed it's supposed to idle at, weirdly. There are no screwdrivers involved — basically, you start the car and then put it under different load conditions (A/C on, idling while in Drive) until its memory has been reset.

I don't entirely miss the days of having to get your hands dirty (literally) to do car maintenance. There are many ways in which having the car be "smart"[3] improves the performance and probably life of the car.

Still, it does feel a little more ... distant? is that the word? ... to not be able to find a knob or a screw someplace and be able to turn it to adjust the engine.

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[1] Is it possible this is the original "Idiot's" book? If not, it might be close.

[2] This book has a well-deserved cult following; he wasn't kidding that it was for the "compleat idiot", i.e., the completely inexperienced. As I have noted at other times, I learned a lot about both Volkswagens and technical writing by studying this book intently.

[3] "Everything's computer", to quote our Car-Salesman-in-Chief.

Some fun ("fun") with AI today. To start, I saw this post on Bluesky:

Text:

The post is an AI repurposing of an observation about media accuracy. There are various names for this. One of them is the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect, which is an observation about "the tendency of individuals to critically assess media reports in a domain they are knowledgeable about, yet continue to trust reporting in other areas despite recognizing similar potential inaccuracies" (Wikipedia).

Another name is Knoll's Law, which states that "everything you read in the newspapers is absolutely true, except for the rare story of which you happen to have firsthand knowledge".

It's unclear whether the person who made the Bluesky post is deliberately echoing these laws, but I wouldn't be surprised. And it's funny, either way.

As a perfect bonus to all this, I couldn't remember the name of the law, so I did a Google search. And Google's AI response did not disappoint — it gave me the wrong information:

Text:

In case you don't already know, Betteridge's Law is "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no". Not only did AI suggest the incorrect term, it botched the definition of that incorrect term.

As it happens, because I have some experience with these various laws — that is, I had a little expertise — I knew that AI had gotten it wrong.

The observations about both media (Gell-Mann) and about AI are insightful and a bit disturbing. If we never really learned to be distrustful about media, we're that much less likely to distrust information that's provided by, you know, a computer. I shudder to think.

A Word macro/VBA tip. I'm writing this up primarily because I do this just seldom enough that I look it up every time. At least now I'll now where to look.

Suppose you're writing a Microsoft Word macro (in VBA). You want to add text to beginning and end of the paragraph. In my case, I'm adding HTML tags around the paragraph content, which is why this is interesting to me.

The Paragraph object has a Range property that returns a Range object. The Range object in turn supports the InsertBefore and InsertAfter methods. So you'd think that you could do this:

Dim para as Paragraph
Set para = ActiveDocument.Paragraphs(1)
para.Range.InsertBefore("<p>")
para.Range.InsertAfter("</p>")

This almost works. However, the closing </p> tag is added after the paragraph as a new paragraph:

Instead, do this:

Dim para As Paragraph
Set para = ActiveDocument.Paragraphs(1)
para.Range.Select
Selection.InsertBefore ("<p>")
Selection.MoveLeft unit:=wdCharacter, Count:=1, Extend:=wdExtend
Selection.InsertAfter ("</p>")

This is what's happening:

1. Use the Range.Select method to select the paragraph. This gives you access to a Selection object.
2. Use the Selection.InsertBefore object to insert your starting text before the Selection object range.
3. Use the Selection object's MoveLeft method to reduce the size of the selection by 1 character (iow, by the size of the paragraph break).[1] This is the piece I'm always forgetting.
4. Use Selection.InsertAfter to insert your closing text after the selection.

And look, it works very nicely. :)

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[1] I'm deliberately not using the work shrink here, because there is a Selection.Shrink method, but it doesn't allow you to shrink by just 1 character. At least, not that I've been able to find.

Anyone who reads Old English poetry will soon enough encounter the word wæl, which means "slaughter". (There are a lot of fights in Old English poetry.) In poetic senses, it was also used for "battlefield" or sometimes metaphorically for those who had been slain in battle (hold that thought).

Naturally, there are compounds:

• wælsceaft: "slaughter-shaft" = spear
• wælstow: "slaughter-place" = battlefield
• wælfus: "slaughter-eager" = ready for death
• wældreore: "slaughter-gore" (dreore gave us "dreary", originally meaning "bloody; gory")

... and many more.

Ok. The word wæl died out in English, and we don't have any words today that directly descend from it. But the word also appeared in other Germanic languages, like Old Norse, which kindly lent us some words that are relatives of wæl.

One is Valhalla, the place in Norse mythology where slain heroes go. Although this concept wasn't widespread in Saxon thinking (apparently), you can see the etymological connection to wæl + hall, where wæl here refers to those who have been slain.

Another wæl-ish borrowing is Valkyrie, who are "maidens of Odin" (M-W) who conduct those slain heroes to Valhalla. The Norse/Germanic roots are again val, a relative of wæl, plus kyrie. The word kyrie is an inflection of the verb for "to choose" (ceosan in Old English).[1] So literally "slaughter-choosers".

That was in Old Norse mythology; whatever the Saxons might have believed about slaughter-choosers, walkyrie took on the meaning of "a malevolent goddess or female demon", used as an Anglisc translation for e.g. the Furies of classical mythology.

As with wæl, the word walkyrie died out in English before the time of Shakespeare. I think we can have some confidence that any use of Valkyrie in modern English probably has something to do with Wagner and the Ring Cycle, for better or worse. :)

I'm not familiar with fantasy literature, so I would not be the slightest bit surprised to learn that "wæl", or some version of it, is used inventively by authors like Tolkien in that genre. Perhaps someone can fill me in.

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[1] Reflecting an s/r change in certain contexts; see also was/were. German speakers might also recognize it in words like erkoren ("select, chosen").