1. Maybe Robert Horry's performance in the fourth quarter and overtime last night will put an end to this kind of criticism.
2. Amber Taylor and others are looking for alternative etymologies of barbecue that would explain why the abbreviation is BBQ rather than BBC. But isn't this taking things a bit far? I don't see why creative abbreviations can't be based on sound rather than the actual letters present. (Also, does the term abbreviation really even apply here? I suppose it does, but BBQ is almost a schematic representation of the word barbecue; its letters arguably stand in for syllables and retain the rhythm and texture of the original word in a way that abbreviations usually don't.)
3. Here's a list of rebuttals (via Metafilter) to common arguments against standardizing English spelling (including the complicating effects for investigating etymologies). Maybe the weakest rebuttal is to what in my view is the strongest argument: that no standardized spelling system could encompass all the regional and dialectic differences in English, and that any attempt to do so would necessarily consecrate some dialects and marginalize others (making it a big political question). This might be easier to deal with if the proposed standardized spellings were phonemic rather thank phonetic, but of course there would still be significant (and apparently unacceptable) variation in how individual letters were pronounced.
4. And Gapers Block publicizes this theatrical piece from the Albany Park Theatrical Project about Noon-O-Kabab, a Persian restaurant on Kedzie. I ate at Noon-O-Kabab for the first time last week with friends, and the food was absolutely wonderful, highly recommended. It was only the second Persian restaurant I'd ever been to; the other one, Paradise, is in Bombay, and was also excellent, despite this iffy review.
Re: Horry, "Hear, hear." I'm ashamed that I doubted him in the first three quarters, and I had not even made my doubts public!
Per BBQ - I thought this was from the french. I belive it had some to do with cooking a goat, but ALL of the goat from the to the tail - de barde en queue, or a queue. Of course I didn't read the articles, who's got time for that.
jon -- that's not the OED etymology, but Raffi mentions it here and dismisses it (although for questionable reasons, in my opinion). If it's true, then the abbreviation should also have a long history, since it would have had to arrive separately from the term barbecue in order to maintain its spelling independence.
That Slate article on Horry was pretty stupid, obviously he's not a fraud, but it does make a couple of decent points that have been lost in the never-ending hype about him as an unstoppable hero in the clutch. He did miss potentially series-changing shots in each of the last two Spurs-Lakers playoffs series, one for each team. Naturally, that doesn't cancel out all the big plays and shots that he's made over his whole career, but they should at least be mentioned, when articles come along praising him as a perfect clutch shooter who never misses in the final seconds.
For instance, Bill Simmons at ESPN went completely crazy in his post-game article, claiming that Horry's Game 5 performance ranked right up there with Clyde Frazier in Game 7 of the 1970 finals, James Worthy in Game 7 in 1988, and Michael Jordan in Game 6 in 1998. Without taking anything away from Horry's great 4th quarter/OT performance in an extremely important game, those comparisons are simply insane.
I'm not enough of an NBA historian to really do the comparisons, but there's no doubt in my mind that this will end up being one of the most memorable finals performances ever, all the more so because it comes from a non-star who's already surrounded with such a clutch performer mystique.
His reputation is obviously somewhat inflated, but that doesn't really bother me. Isn't almost everything in sports inflated these days? Sports reporting is THE place to look for superlatives and over-the-top descriptors.
It was memorable, but again, Simmons is being crazy. There's no way this will go down in history on THE SAME LEVEL as the other three performances he mentioned:
Clyde Frazier in 1970, Game 7: 36 points, 19 assists. That means he had a direct hand in SEVENTY-FOUR of his team's points. In Game 7!
James Worthy in 1988, Game 7: 36 points, 16 rebounds, 10 assists. A TRIPLE-DOUBLE. In Game 7!
Michael Jordan in 1998, Game 6: 45 of his team's 87 points. Over 50 PERCENT of his team's points in the game! And had they lost, they would have had stayed in Utah, for a Game 7 on the road.
Horry was huge in the 4th quarter and OT, but he did nothing in the first three quarters (until he hit a buzzer-beating 3 at the end of the third). And as important a game as it was, it wasn't Game 7, and the Spurs were not facing any more road games in the series. Yes, a clutch performance, and a memorable one, no doubt about it. But people who know their stuff, like Simmons certainly does, should be more responsible than this. Which he usually is, actually, he often skewers the pretensions of sports conventional wisdom. But he's falling prey to its silliest excesses here, he knows the history and should have some perspective about it.
Paul, you tease. What's questionable about Raffi's dismissal of the beard-to-tail etymology?
But since that's not really an explanation of how one skewers meats (and what of cubed and cut meats, which the early french also ate?), I think it's pretty clear that this is not really the correct origin.
It's nothing too exciting... Raffi dismisses the barbes a queue explanation because the meaning isn't very precisely corelated with skewering practice, but there are plenty of potential explanations for this semantic shift -- it could have been metaphor from the start, it could go back further, it could relate to some other non culinary practice, etc. Anyway I don't disagree with his conclusion (esp since the OED agrees), I just think the explanation itself is far from dispositive.
Post a comment