Archive: Arts & Entertainment

Smart TalkSMART TALK

by Dr. Verbos Metikulos

MASS MEDIA:  By their nature, the media are agencies of mass communication, so that makes mass media redundant.  But the advertising business, which also thinks lite is acceptable, as well as many who slept in English class, say that a media is newspapers. 

Unredundant but ungrammatical.  Doctors at the Institute for the Linguistically Impaired have to give patients a language lesson to clear up the problem.

One could almost say that our language is made up of spare parts, and medium and media are Latin words, so they don't behave like English words.  Medium, like paramecium, is singular.  The plurals are media and paramecia. 

Pat Sajak, the very bright gentleman who runs the not-so-bright Wheel of Fortune on TV, recently presented a prize trip to Polynesia.  Very seriously, he looked into the camera and told the nation that a single island is called a Polynesium.  Here at the Institute, we laughed for days, but I wonder how many Wheel viewers understood the wordplay.

I hope Mr. Sajak's joke will help you remember that television is a mass medium.  The media are television, radio, newspapers, magazines, and the Internet.  Mass media is redundant because the media always implies that list, so "mass" is obvious.

But no, the plural of Tum isn't Ta, because Tums isn't Latin.

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v4i12

Smart TalkSMART TALK

by Dr. Les Terse

A LONG WAYS:  Honest Al touts his Johnson's Used Car's as "just a little ways down from the Hotel Inn," here in Underbelly, Texas.

Dr. Clark Chousie, at the William Safire Center at the Institute for the Linguistically Impaired, has a fine record treating what we call Plural Compulsive Disorder.  We've tried for years to sign up poor Al, who has a full blown case.

He retorts, "I talk as good as anybody anywheres around here.  If they buy car's from me anyways, why should I change?"

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v4i11

Smart TalkSMART TALK

by Dr. Molto Breve

 

MEET TOGETHER:  The staff of the Institute for the Linguistically Impaired has invented a word game.  Relaxing in the Fowler Lounge, they play Redundancy Crunching to liven the evening and their wits.

Nurse Laconia Crisp asked Dr. Parley Speake to sit in far proximity.  Dr. Speake, in point of warm fact, was making her feel surrounded on one side. 

Dr. Speake assured her of his true pretenses.

Feeling somewhat better, Nurse Crisp told Dr. Speake that he had a thick veneer of culture and honor.

Our staff psychologist, Dr. Viva Palaver, said that her eyes were glazing under and suggested that everyone meet separately later.

Unfortunately, Redundancy Crunching will never achieve popularity.  To play it, one must develop a hyperawareness to redundancies by treating patients every day.  Outsiders often don't even understand that each "corrected" phrase is still wrong.

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v4i10

The first downtown Ithaca Gallery Night of 2008 will be held on Friday, March 7th from 5:00 to 8:00 p.m., with 10 downtown galleries showcasing the talents of local, national, and international artists. Among the displays and exhibits will be a grand opening for the Ink Shop Artists who were displaced by fire and have relocated to the CSMA building at 330 E. State St., and the popular 19th Annual Juried Photography show at the State of the Art Gallery.


Here's a list of the different galleries that are participating and the exhibits that'll be on display:

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Smart TalkSMART TALK
By Dr. Les Terse

MAJOR BREAKTHROUGH:  We've never had a major breakthrough at the Institute for the Linguistically Impaired.  We've had our share of breakthroughs, though, such as our development of the Logical Systems Transplant to cure cerebroporosis.

And as to major milestones - how many minor milestones has anyone reached?  As with breakthrough, milestone will do nicely, thank you very much.

We at the Institute achieved a breakthrough when we described William F. Buckley Syndrome in the literature. 

To call it a major breakthrough or a major milestone makes a thinking person wonder about its true significance.  You protest too much.  Really. Truly.  Honestly.  I mean it.

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v4i9

The Kitchen Theatre Company will present with Harold Pinter’s  haunting classic OLD TIMES. In 1971 The Observer said of the play “Wonderfully taut, comic and ominous, OLD TIMES shows Pinter more and more himself and less like any other playwright writing today.”  More than thirty years later, Pinter's plays continue to intrigue and challenge audiences with Pinter’s signature “comedy of menace.” Harold Pinter is widely viewed as the most influential and accomplished playwright in postwar Britain and was awarded the 2005 Nobel Prize in Literature.

Kate (Camilla Schade) and her husband, Deeley (Greg Bostwick), live in an isolated farmhouse by the sea.  The mundane harmony of their lives is disturbed when Kate’s old friend Anna (Leigh Keeley) comes to stay. A night of reminiscing between the married couple and the old friend becomes a struggle to discover the truth in memory, desire in love, and to whom the past belongs.  A battle for possession begins in which past and present merge with shattering consequences.