Monthly Archives: April 2006

Stream: Sleaze

Posted on by
5
[The scene opens with an interior shot of an automobile driving through the city.  Chad is at the wheel.  Carly sits in the passenger seat reading aloud from a flyer which says "LIVE and IN CONCERT -- ROTARY NICKLES" on the back.  In the backseat sits Terence and Simone, somewhat slouched over and using a jacket as a blanket... they appear to be dozing.  The lighting suggests that it is late afternoon.]
 
CARLY:   …ever since 1991.  Rotary Nickles are a true testament of how strong girl-bands are in the music business.  With their new album Bake for One Hour, released on Ballista Records, Rotary has maintained their synth-pop roots that have gained them fans with early releases: Blacktop Fandango and Scattered Nails.  Rotary Nickles continues to garnish attention from music critics and fans alike.  This June you will not want to miss Rotary Nickles live and in concert. [pauses to take a breath]
 
CHAD:   That's pretty verbose for a flyer!
 
CARLY:   [looking it over] Looks like they copied some of it from the liner notes on Chills in Stillness. [continues] June 9th, 9 PM, West Easterbrook Stadium, Tickets $40 (reservations recommended — don't get bumped!)
 
[The car lurches suddenly, jarring everyone.  Carly grabs the dash for support. Simone and Terence go sprawling and then pull themselves upright, awake now, blinking and confused.]
 
SIMONE:   Merde!
 
TERENCE:   What the fuck?
 
CHAD:   Sorry, pothole.
 
[Simone puts her head back and groans, while Terence rolls his eyes.]
 
TERENCE:   Something else we can thank our skinflint Mayor Monius for.
 
CARLY:   Skinflint?
 
TERENCE:   Miserly.  Spendthrift.
 
CARLY:   How does that follow?
 
TERENCE:   I dunno… ask Boy Britannica over there.
 
CHAD:   It's pretty straightforward really.  Flint was once an inexpensive commodity, being a stone that one could strike to produce a spark and start a fire.  The process of striking the flint stone repeatedly would cause bits of it to break off and eventually it would get so small and so hard to work with one would have to spend a penny to buy a new flint.  Miserly sorts would continue using a flint long past the time where its size would be completely impractical, so as to avoid spending anything, completely ignoring the time wasted trying to start a fire with a thin layer (or skin) of flint.  That's what it means to “skin a flint”.
 
TERENCE:   There you go.
 
SIMONE:   Ah oui.  My maman would say “tondre sur un oeuf”.  To shave an egg.
 
CARLY:   Hmph.  Well it's tough to blame Percy Monius for being tight with the purse strings.  What with all the corruption charges against the last city administration, he's really got to play it safe.  I'm sure after awhile he'll start spending more city money.  It's not his fault Mayor Bent was such a sleaze.
 
TERENCE:   I suppose.
 
SIMONE:   Ce qui?
 
TERENCE:   Hmm?
 
SIMONE:   What are “slees”?
 
TERENCE:   Remember that guy who tried to trick you into a crappy contract on that film?
 
SIMONE:   Edouard? Quel con! Oooh, I despise zat man.
 
TERENCE:   Well he's a “sleaze”.
 
SIMONE:   Like in “sleazy”?
 
CARLY:   Right.  It's the root word for “sleazy” which basically means corrupt, filthy, and of low moral value.
 
[Terence nods.]
 
CHAD:   No it's not.
 
[Terence shakes his head. He looks at Chad.]
 
CHAD:   Sleaze is a back-formation.
 
CARLY:   Something on one's back?
 
SIMONE:   Ah! Like Terence's birthmark!
 
TERENCE:   [slaps head] I told you never to mention that!
 
SIMONE:   Oh Terribear, but eet's so cute.
 
CARLY:   Do tell!
 
TERENCE:   [to Simone] No, do NOT tell. [to Carly] Do fuck off. [to Chad] What the heck is a back-formation?  Sounds like a military term.
 
CHAD:   No it's just when people make incorrect assumptions about the roots of words and then form new words because of that.  There are a lot of common suffixes and prefixes in English which one can add to a root word to make a related word.  For example one of the meanings of “port” is to carry, and therefore a “porter” is one who carries.  But there are other words in English that came into the language with an ending or a beginning that looked like a standard suffix but which really isn't.
 
CARLY:   Such as…
 
CHAD:   Burger.  A porter is one who ports.  But a burger is not one who burgs, its a shortened form of hamburger, which comes originally from the city of Hamburg in Germany.
 
TERENCE:   Yeah Carly, GERMANY… not IRELAND.
 
SIMONE:   Ireland?
 
TERENCE:   As in “Mc”Donalds.
 
SIMONE:   [rolls her eyes] Mon Dieu!
 
CARLY:   It was an honest mistake!
 
CHAD:   Anyway, sometimes people will see one of these words and mistakenly remove what look like prefixes or suffixes to get at the “root” word.  When in fact they are inventing a new word altogether, like for example “donate”.  People assumed the word “donation” had a root “donate”, and used it as a verb to mean giving something to a charity or a good cause, but donation's latin root is “donatio”.  The word “donate” is basically an error which has become part of our language.
 
CARLY:   So what has this got to do with sleaze?
 
CHAD:   Sleaze is a back-formation.  The word “sleazy” is not a noun with an added suffix to make it an adjective like “inky” or “sporty” are — “sleazy” cannot be broken down that way.  At some point in the past someone made the assumption that it was a compound form, and broke out the word “sleaze”, creating a new word.
 
TERENCE:   So where the heck does “sleazy” come from?
 
CHAD:   From Silesia.
 
CARLY:   Bless you!
 
CHAD:   Silesia, being the name of a province in Germany where they made linen and cotton fabrics.  You see originally the word sleazy meant hairy or fuzzy, like these fabrics from Germany.  Later it came to mean flimsy or insubstantial, and still later took on the darker connotations of sordid and corrupt.
 
CARLY:   Sleazy comes from Germany?
 
CHAD:   Yes.
 
SIMONE:   Germans are sleazy?
 
CHAD:   Yes. I mean NO!  Of course not!  It simply hearkens to the name of the province in Germany where the fuzzy fabrics came from.  Much like Hamburgers hearken back to the name of a city.
 
TERENCE:   … in Germany.
 
CHAD:   Yes.  [glances at Terence]  What?
 
TERENCE:   Nothing just seems like you have a thing for Germany because you've brought it up twice now.
 
CHAD:   I don't [shakes head and looks back at the road ahead] have a thing for Germany.
 
CARLY:   So sleaze is a back-formation… not a real word.  Are there other words like that?
 
CHAD:   [nods] Oh sure.  Lots.  There are a number of back-formations in use today.  Liase from liason.  Surveil from surveillance.  Bushwhack from bushwhacker. This is one reason why etymology is such challenging study, sometimes word formation runs backwards because sometimes people assume that cranberry morphs are free morphs.
 
[Everyone is silent for a moment.]
 
TERENCE:   Personally I think cranberry morphs are delicious, and I can't imagine why anyone would just give them away.
 
CARLY:   [laughing] Okay Chad, come on, what's a morph?
 
TERENCE:   What's a cranberry morph?
 
SIMONE:   What is a cranberry?
 
CHAD:   Morph is short for “morpheme”.  A morpheme is the smallest part of a word that has meaning.  Like take the word “talking”, it contains two morphs “talk” and “-ing”, “talk” being the root word and “-ing” being the continuous tense suffix.  If you were to pull out some other part of the word like “lk” or “ta”, those parts add no meaning to the word by themselves.  “Sport” and “-y” are the morphs found in the word “sporty”.  No other portions of that word can be identified as contributing to the meaning of the word.
 
CARLY:   Okay, and where does cranberry fit into this?
 
CHAD:   Well some morphs can stand alone, and others can't.  Take a word like “blueberry”.  It contains two free morphs, “blue” and “berry”.  They can stand by themselves.  Now consider the word “cranberry”.  The morpheme “cran” definitely contributes to the meaning of the word, “cranberry” is definitely different than just “berry”.  But cran can't stand alone.  What's a “cran”?
 
CARLY:   A bucket of fish.
 
[Everyone looks at her.]
 
CARLY:   What?  I play Scrabble too, you know.  “CRAN” won me 24 points once, but I had to look it up.  It's a unit of measurement for fish… specifically herrings.
 
CHAD:   Okay, be that as it may, it is unrelated to the “cran” in the word “cranberry”, which comes from the word “crane”.  This “cran” cannot stand alone.
 
TERENCE:   Crane?  What have cranberries to do with cranes?
 
CHAD:   Well the word was originally “kraanbere” in its original tongue, “kraan” meaning “crane”… I assume probably because birds and notably cranes would eat them.
 
CARLY:   Kraanbere?  What language was that?
 
CHAD:   Um. [glances at Terence briefly]  German.  Specifically a low german dialect.
 
[He glances at Terence again.  Terence says nothing but raises his eyebrows innocently.  Chad looks back at the road for a moment and then quickly glances at Terence again.]
 
TERENCE:   Oh.  That's interesting!
 
CHAD:   Yeah so anyway, that's what a cranberry morph is.  A morpheme that can't stand alone.  The “sleaz” part of “sleazy” can't stand alone, but someone made the mistake of assuming it could, and there you go.  Back-formation.  Person knows you can get “cheesey” from “cheese” and therefore assumes you get “sleazy” from “sleaze”.
 
TERENCE:   Because “cheese” is a free morph.
 
CHAD:   Right.
 
TERENCE:   So basically you're saying that the cheese stands alone.
 
[Chad rolls his eyes.]
 
TERENCE:   So if a cranberry morph is a morph that can't stand alone, why don't they call free morphs “blueberry morphs”?  It has a nice symmetry to it.
 
CHAD:   You know what?  If you want to call them blueberry morphs, you go right ahead.
 
SIMONE:   I'm getting hungry, when do we eat?
 
CARLY:   I know, all this talk of cheese, cranberries, blueberries –
 
TERENCE:   Don't forget hamburgers!
 
CHAD:   Justin said when we picked him up at school he'd bring a snack for us.  Should be there in a minute or two. [to Carly] So do you get it now?
 
CARLY:   I think so.  Sleaze is a back formation because someone mistook a bucket of fish for a blueberry.  The real word is sleazy.  Same thing with monk.
 
OTHERS:   Monk???
 
CARLY:   Yeah, from monkey.  It's a back-formation right?
 
CHAD:   [laughing] No, monk is not a back formation from monkey.  Monk comes from the Greek word “monos” which means “solitary” or “alone”, probably because monks lead an isolated lifestyle in a monastery, which has the same root.
 
CARLY:   So someone thought monkeys were like monks?
 
CHAD:   No! No.  Monkey and monk are completely unrelated words.  Monkey comes from the name of an ape in a play dating back to the 1500's.  There's a character in the play called “Martin the Ape” and he has a son named “Moneke”.  THAT'S where the word monkey comes from!
 
CARLY:   Are there any monks in this play?
 
CHAD:   NO! Stop it! It's got nothing to do with monks!  The play was about animals.  Heck it was called “Reynard the Fox”.
 
TERENCE:   Where's it from?
 
[Chad glances at him, looking sheepish.]
 
TERENCE:   You gotta be freaking kidding!
 
CHAD:   Moneke comes from a low German dialect, and the version of the play in which that name is used is thought to have originated in a German-speaking section of Alsace-Lorraine, a disputed territory between Germany and France.
 
TERENCE:   Sheesh.
 
CHAD:   Well it's part of France today!
 
TERENCE:   German German German… is that all you've got?
 
CHAD:   You know what?  A lot of shit comes from Germany!  Deal with it!
 
SIMONE:   So does Justin, for that matter.  Speaking of Justin, there he is Chad, pull over.
 
[Cut to exterior.  Chad's bronze colored Honda Civic sedan is pulling up to the entrance of a large building which bears a sign saying "Terrigan School for the Blind".  Standing there is a young man with dark glasses, a long white stick, and a white paper bag.  Cut to interior of the car.]
 
TERENCE:   I'll get him.
 
[He opens his door and gets out, moments later the opposite door opens and Terence helps Justin in.  Justin sits back, collapses his walking stick, and grins.]
 
JUSTIN:   Hallo meine freunde!  How is everyone today?
 
[They all greet him as Terence gets back in, carrying the white bag.]
 
SIMONE:   Bonjour Justin.
 
CARLY:   Hey Justin.
 
CHAD:   My man!  Rock and roll!
 
JUSTIN:   ROCK UNT ROLL!  Whoooo!  Rotary Nickle!
 
[Chad pulls out into traffic as Terence taps the bag.]
 
TERENCE:   Hey Just.  Is this our snack?
 
JUSTIN:   Oh ja. There's a great German bakery just around the corner from school.  I got muffins, bismarcks, unt berliners.  Yummy!
 
TERENCE:   [looks in bag] Doughnuts.
 
CHAD:   That's what bismarcks and berliners are, Ter, German doughnuts.  I'll take a bismarck.
 
SIMONE:   No crullers?
 
JUSTIN:   Wrong country.  But there is a cranberry muffin in there for you.
 
CARLY:   I'll have a berliner.
 
TERENCE:   No cheese danish?
 
JUSTIN:   Wrong country.
 
TERENCE:   *sigh* I guess I'll have the blueberry muffin.  I've had enough German stuff for one day.  Thanks Just.
 
JUSTIN:   Was?
 
SIMONE:   Chad was telling us about English words with German origins.
 
CARLY:   That and back-formation.
 
JUSTIN:   Oh! Like Terence's teddy-bear birthmark.
 
[Cut to exterior, the sedan has left the city and is driving away down a long road with pastures on either side.]
 
TERENCE:   [voice-over] You TOLD him?
 
SIMONE:   [voice-over] Je suis désolé, darling.  He wanted to know why I call you Terribear.
 
TERENCE:   [voice-over] This does NOT leave this car, is that understood?
 
CHAD:   [voice-over] Sure Terribear, whatever you say.
 
TERENCE:   [voice-over, distant] You sleaze.
 
Ordinarily at this point I would include a bunch of links to the topics discussed in this Stream, but I'm running short of time today, so I'll add that tomorrow weeks from now.  

The Inn

Image

Reply

The place was quite large.  The building in the foreground is the office, and behind it is the inn… all of the rooms have balconies and ocean views.

Unfortunately we didn't stay in any of these rooms.  There is a building behind the inn, a late addition in an effort to house more guests, called “The Atrium”, and that is where we stayed.