September 8, 2015

The figurehead.

IMG_0764

Seen today, on campus, near the law school.

A figurehead — according to the (unlinkable) OED is "A piece of ornamental carving, usually a bust or full-length figure, placed over the cut-water of a ship." It's also "Said depreciatingly of one who holds the position of head of a body of persons, a community, society, etc., but possesses neither authority nor influence."

From the NYT archive, 1889:



ADDED: Who was the Queen of Korea in 1889 and what was her costume?



"In the early morning of 8 October 1895, the Hullyeondae Regiment, loyal to the Daewongun, attacked the Gyeongbokgung.... Upon entering the Queen's quarters... the assassins 'killed three court [women] suspected of being the queen. When they confirmed that one of them was Min, they burned the corpse in a pine forest in front of the Okhoru Pavilion, and then dispersed the ashes.' She was 43 years old."

19 comments:

Nichevo said...

Nothing about bondage, the patriarchy? Ann, you're slipping.

traditionalguy said...

Perfect breasts, but are they plastic?

rehajm said...

Let it go...let it go.

cubanbob said...

A remarkable woman judging from the Wikipedia.

rhhardin said...

The bungee cord with hooks is a very bad idea on a bicycle.

When securing a load that shifts, a hook will come free and instantly grab a spoke, throwing you over the handlebars.

Stick with ball-end bungee cord loops, like they use to fasten canopies.

Grant said...

I had wondered about the general assertion that Koreans hate the Japanese when on the other hand you find many Koreans in Japan and significant influence from Japan in Korea. And it's really confounding on a much more fundamental level that the Chinese, Korean, and Japanese languages are not at all closely related.

Grant said...

Clearly her real downfall was that she smoked American cigarettes by the thousands.

Balfegor said...

Re: Grant:

And it's really confounding on a much more fundamental level that the Chinese, Korean, and Japanese languages are not at all closely related.

Depends on what you mean by "related." Korean and Japanese are widely theorized to be part of a single language family (including Turkic languages).

In terms of grammatical structure, Korean and Japanese are incredibly close, to the point that you can usually make a one-to-one substitution of words and morphological elements and have it come out intelligible. The example I always use is the progressive tense ("he is doing"). Korean is 하고 있어요 (hago isseoyo). Japanese is しています (shite imasu). The hago and shite are direct analogues and are used in other, different contexts more or less the same way. The isseoyo and imasu are also analogues, both meaning "there is" when standing alone. Similarly, the Korean topic particle (는 or 은) is an analogue for the Japanese topic particle (は), and so on. I don't know any other languages that are closer, in terms of grammatical structure, than Korean or Japanese. Maybe German and Dutch? As you can see from the example I gave, the morphemes involved are quite different, which is why the usual tests of language relatedness don't pick up Korean and Japanese as closely related. But they certainly look really close.

Chinese is completely different, though.

On the level of basic vocabulary, there is a huge amount of overlap between all three, because a significant proportion of the basic vocabulary in both Korean and Japanese consists of borrowings from Chinese.

Balfegor said...

Also, re: the Empress Min, if you read between the lines there, her role (or really, her family's role) in late Joseon politics is a little more problematic. It's not for nothing that peasant rebellions in the late 19th century included among their principal goals, alongside the expulsion (or extermination) of Westerners and Japanese, the destruction of the Min clan.

Because the Min clan were opposed to the Japanese, modern Korean politics require that they be made into the heroes of the story (and the Daewongun into something of a villain). But they were tools of the Chinese in the struggle between Japan and China for mastery over Korea.

Grant said...

Thanks very much, Balfegor, for such interesting responses. If only there were a virtual pub where we could retire to hash all this out.

Static Ping said...

Microaggression? Yes? No?

MikeD said...

Aggression? Micro bad! Macro good! A pox on anybody who gives a shit!

Anonymous said...

Balfegor: Hyakuten Manten!

jaque222 said...

Deprecating and depreciating are two different things.

Ball-end bungee cord loops are something else.

sykes.1 said...

I'm surprised the People's Republic allows this symbol.

Sam L. said...

Bondage Barbie on a bike!

Guildofcannonballs said...

dep·re·cate
ˈdeprəˌkāt/
verb
gerund or present participle: deprecating
1.
express disapproval of.
"he sniffed in a deprecating way"
synonyms: deplore, abhor, disapprove of, frown on, take a dim view of, take exception to, detest, despise; More
2.
another term for depreciate (sense 2).
"he deprecates the value of children's television"
Translations, word origin, and more definitions
Self-deprecation - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-deprecation
Wikipedia
Self-deprecation is the act of reprimanding oneself by belittling, undervaluing, or disparaging oneself, or being excessively modest.

I think of depreciation in accounting terms and it is different than deprication. Why is Google doing this? To whom, as the who is known here.

I guess the oil well deprecates as its not as valuable (with technology the same in the same conditions) over time and realizes itself so.

Guildofcannonballs said...

"Ball-end bungee cord loops are something else."

The dingus that keeps the ball of the ball-end cord loops, ultra-cheap little stamped metal dingus that help the system absorb an extra bit of "load" in addition to a certain sway capability built-in via a distance between where the ball is inserted and the ball is ultimately kept secure dingus-wise (but this dingus be a stitching of certain dimensions helping to preclude unwanted slippage) that would cause the, hook as it were, to come unraveled, is the theory.

But consider cheap inputs resulting in cheap disaster versus quality inputs resulting in routine capital formation. Are not markets existing for stupidly-expensive products relating to "extreme" or Xtreme sports warriors, if only in the spending wars? Do they not focus on the reliability and strentgh of the product compared to any sane, rational use of/for such?

I work with ladders and trust only triple-backed systems to not fail me or American Family when in transit, at minimum.

*"something else" is a phrase the Crack Emcee used regarding jr565 and I thought it memorable. The great William Frank Buckley Junior, aka WFB, aka Bill Buckley, aka Reagan's buddy, knew "timing is everything" and said it for posterity along with other wisdomatic words.

Guildofcannonballs said...

"take a dim view of"

Yeah the things that traumatize are bright and clear forever seemingly, along side the beauty and decency too dim to move into Michele Obama's idea of fitness.