Being Garrulous About "Garrulous"

This may not really make sense, but: garrulous sounds like it should mean something else.

dictionary.com defines it as "excessively talkative in a rambling, roundabout manner, esp. about trivial matters." All right. But it doesn't sound like that!

I have a sort of intuition (based on lots of reading, I guess) that I use to evaluate words. It normally works pretty well: I can guess what a word means even if I've never seen it before.

But "garrulous" trips me up. It sounds like it should mean "argumentative," or some such synonym of "hostile." Why? Probably I'm associating it with "garrison," a military outpost, and "queruluous", which means complaining.

But beyond that: the sound of the word itself suggests it. Gar-yuh-lus: the syllables lurch from one to the next ungracefully, and generally sound kind of miserable.

Compare "chatty" or "gabby": they're both short words that suggest idle, casual talk. "Longwinded," with its long "o," suggests a politician who goes on and on in a pompous way. "Babbling" sounds like a repetition of nonsense sounds, which is why it's commonly applied to babies and brooks.

But "garrulous"? Where did that come from?

Salome's Dancing Lesson

I can't believe I haven't done any Dorothy Parker yet. Well, better late than never:

Salome's Dancing-Lesson

She that begs a little boon
(Heel and toe! Heel and toe!)
Little gets- and nothing, soon.
(No, no, no! No, no, no!)
She that calls for costly things
Priceless finds her offerings-
What's impossible to kings?
(Heel and toe! Heel and toe!)

Kings are shaped as other men.
(Step and turn! Step and turn!)
Ask what none may ask again.
(Will you learn? Will you learn?)
Lovers whine, and kisses pall,
Jewels tarnish, kingdoms fall-
Death's the rarest prize of all!
(Step and turn! Step and turn!)

Veils are woven to be dropped.
(One, two, three! One, two, three!)
Aging eyes are slowest stopped.
(Quietly! Quietly!)
She whose body's young and cool
Has no need of dancing-school-
Scratch a king and find a fool!
(One, two, three! One, two, three!)

... A Dorothy Parker Bible study would be either horrifying or brilliant. I can't quite decide which.

The Garfield Sampler

This is probably a lot more fun than it should be. It takes panels from the comic strip "Garfield" and posts three of them at random, as if they were a regular strip.

Most of them almost make sense, and some of them are actually funny. (At least, funny in the Far Side sense of "What does that mean?") And this is perhaps what makes it semi-compulsive: they make sense just often enough to tempt you to try again.

The Misenchanted Sword

The Misenchanted Sword is Lawrence Watt-Evans' all-time bestseller. (As witness the name of his homepage.) And no wonder: it's a clever, well-told light fantasy novel.

Valder is a scout for the army of Ethshar, which is fighting an endless war with the Evil Empire of the north. He gets cut off behind enemy lines, hides in the shack of a hermit who turns out to be an eccentric wizard, and gets his sword enchanted by the grumpy old man so that he stands a chance of making it back home.

The fact that the hermit is grumpy, and arguable insane, and working with secondhand components, leads to the misenchantment of the title. Valder is left with a magic sword, "Wirikidor," that cannot lose a fight, which is obviously useful (indeed, he does make it home); but there are drawbacks.

Wirikidor is enchanted to protect his life, so he's basically unkillable by anything else. He's not immune to pain, disease, disfigurement, etc.: he just can't die until the spell is used up. And that will happen on the one hundredth killing- at that point, the sword will turn on Valder and kill him.


The first charm of the book is probably Valder- he's a likeable low fantasy hero, which is to say that he's not much of a hero at all. He just wants to survive the war, retire to find a civilian career and have a happy, uneventful life. When Wirikidor falls into his life, he doesn't want to become a war hero, he just wonders how he can be rid of it. (He can't.)

The second part of the book's appeal is its clear approach to magic. We're given pocket summaries that seem to make sense and delineate what's possible, which is essential since the whole plot is about Valder's dilemma with the sword. It approaches the status of a pure logic puzzle: if the unbreakable spell makes him unkillable, but still prone to the degenerations of extreme old age, then what can he do about it?

The ending, in terms of logic, is a copout; but by the time I got there I liked Valder enough that it didn't bother me.

Well, the Ship Didn't Sink

... Which is to say: as far as I know, the drills went pretty well. We won't officially know until Monday, but if we'd failed catastrophically I probably would have heard about it.

(Rumor has it that we did fail the swimmer-saboteur exercise; but like the entrenched-invader scenario, this scenario has a high expected failure rate. So hopefully that won't fail us for the whole thing.)

Recessional

Something important for military people to bear in mind:


Recessional
by Rudyard Kipling

1897
God of our fathers, known of old,
Lord of our far-flung battle-line,
Beneath whose awful Hand we hold
Dominion over palm and pine—
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget—lest we forget!

The tumult and the shouting dies;
The Captains and the Kings depart:
Still stands Thine ancient sacrifice,
An humble and a contrite heart.
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget—lest we forget!

Far-called, our navies melt away;
On dune and headland sinks the fire:
Lo, all our pomp of yesterday
Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!
Judge of the Nations, spare us yet,
Lest we forget—lest we forget!

If, drunk with sight of power, we loose
Wild tongues that have not Thee in awe,
Such boastings as the Gentiles use,
Or lesser breeds without the Law—
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget—lest we forget!

For heathen heart that puts her trust
In reeking tube and iron shard,
All valiant dust that builds on dust,
And guarding, calls not Thee to guard,
For frantic boast and foolish word—
Thy mercy on Thy People, Lord!

Yaah! Terrorists!

So it's another duty day. Today is special, though, because it's the start of our Force Protection Training Exercises, a 36-hour process where the ship faces one threat after another and we try not to get killed.

(I really wish I'd gotten more sleep last night. Grrrrr!)

We've had a bomb left by the pier gate, an intruder trying to gain access to the ship, and a team of intruders who successfully got on board and had to be rooted out of their entrenched position.

(That last drill is one of the worst, in that it's almost guaranteed to cause casualties. But we passed, which is to say that our casualties weren't horrendously high and our technique didn't have anything especially wrong with it; and so the drilling continues...)

My part varies from drill to drill; but it generally involves me and one other sailor running around with plastic guns, taking cover behind convenient large objects, and guarding whatever space we're assigned to.

It's going to be interesting to see how sleep-deprivation-incoherent I get by tomorrow afternoon.