Our ship danced like a moth in the firelight

[sovay]

I saw Jean Renoir's The River (1951) at the HFA tonight with my mother and nineweaving. I have loved that movie since the first time I saw it in 2011, and I have never written properly about it. Have this highly disparate collection of links instead.

1. The long-persecuted, fiercely endogamous Yazidi religion has changed its traditions to welcome back Yazidi women trafficked by ISIS/Daesh. The current wave of persecution has been recognized by the UN as genocide. If you are interested in supporting survivors or the Yazidi community at large, Yazda looks like the place to start.

2. Eric K. Ward of the Southern Poverty Law Center writes on a subject I have been thinking a lot about lately: "Skin in the Game: How Antisemitism Animates White Nationalism."

3. For reasons both fun and deadly serious, John le Carré recommends learning German: "You can make up crazy adjectives like 'my-recently-by-my-parents-thrown-out-of-the-window PlayStation' . . . Those who teach language, those who cherish its accuracy and meaning and beauty, are the custodians of truth in a dangerous age."

4. Double-checking that I had transcribed its lyrics correctly from the recording I have by Bellowhead, I found a fantastic page about the origins and variants of the nautical folk song "Across the Line."

5. This dialect quiz from the New York Times placed me, by regional English, in New York City, Yonkers, or Jersey City. Back to the drawing board, Henry Higgins. [edit: It correctly located spatch in western Massachusetts and also Boston. "Weirdly prescient." But also Yonkers. We're not sure what's up with Yonkers. "Maybe there's a bunch of expatriates."]

Following the whole adventure with RKO's Girl of the Port (1930) and John Russell's "The Fire-Walker" (1929), I really feel I should read some actual indigenous Pacific writers. Any recommendations?

Comments

[choco_frosh]

Hosey=claim Dibs?

[movingfinger]

I always thought dibs was a Britishism, but apparently not. Yes, hosey is to claim something, and one can double- and triple-hosey. I would guess that it's a corruption of choisir.

[nineweaving]

DARE thinks [Etym uncert; perh < holds + hypocoristic -ie suff2].

Does "bags I" turn up on this side?

Nine

[sovay]

Does "bags I" turn up on this side?

I only know "bagsie" as a Britishism; if it's used in the U.S., I think it's mostly adopted rather than homegrown.

(Qualifiers because I never want to rule out people's parents or living outside of the country as a child. I feel like transmission through books is a different thing, though.)

[sovay]

I always thought dibs was a Britishism, but apparently not.

I grew up with "dibs." I didn't encounter "hosey" until I was an adult, and then I found that most of the people who used it were older than I was, so there may be a generational component in play.

[movingfinger]

Interesting! The really alien one to me is "shotgun," which seems very west-of-the-Mississippi.

Actually, that question has two things going on: hoseying/dibs and what the subject calls that seat (I would call it "the front seat" or "ride in front"). Now that I think of it, we did call it "the suicide seat" also, when we were teenagers, because of the high fatality rate supposedly associated with that position in the car at that time.

[sovay]

Actually, that question has two things going on: hoseying/dibs and what the subject calls that seat (I would call it "the front seat" or "ride in front").

"Call shotgun" is definitely a phrase I grew up with in the Boston area. Otherwise the distinction was "driver's seat" vs. "front seat." "Back seat" was undifferentiated by side. "Backety-back" was relevant only in certain kinds of station wagon. No one I grew up with used "suicide seat"!

[nineweaving]

"Backety-back" is new to me. I've always heard "wayback."

Nine

[sovay]

"Backety-back" is new to me. I've always heard "wayback."

It might just have been my family.

[nineweaving]

It's adorable.

Nine