Finally! I won first place in the Logos Chili Cook-Off. I’ve been entered in all seven annual Logos Chili Cook-Offs, and I’ve never done better than second place.

You can find the the recipe for my winning concoction, Chilisaurus Rex in my growing Recipes section.

Check out my recipe for Hummus (Hummous) over in the Recipes section.

Sorry folks, I’m disabling comments for now. Too much comment spam.

Part A / Part B

I realized that I hadn’t taken any pictures of my setup, so I went ahead this evening and set it all back up the way I had it the other night.

My scribal desktop, with source text on the left, work sheet in the middle, and ink and pens on the right:

A close up of my layout grid:

The pens I used:

Well, once I had that all set up, I figured: Why not play around a little more? So I started another copy of 2 Timothy. This time, though, rather than going for speed, I slowed down and took my time. I drew each letter rather than simply writing it. The consistency and overall text color were much improved, as you can see from this sample:

I decided to stop at one column of text; my back was getting tired again. After a short rest, I decided to do a column from the Latin Vulgate just to see if a) it was more or less difficult, and b) if I made more or fewer mistakes.

Given that I know the Latin alphabet much better than the Greek, I expected that it would be less difficult. It surely was. I could see very large words, like “promissionem” and “progenitoribus” without reading them aloud, and without spelling them wrong. This leads me to believe that a native (or at least fluent) Greek speaker would have much less difficulty copying Greek than I did — which should be obvious if you think about it. On the other hand, I think I made just about as many errors; the first one is a “quae” missing its “u”. Then I capitalized “nostro,” for no apparent reason. Half the time I transcribed “u” to “v” (I don’t know why; it’s anachronistic) and half the time I didn’t.

Oh well.

Read Part A of this post first.

Method : Materials

• I decided to go for as “authentic” a scribal experience as I could manage, given what materials I had on hand. I have done calligraphy in the past — nothing worth bragging about — so I actually had quite a bit of scribal stuff lying around.

• I used 10” x 13” sheets of parchment paper. Real parchment made from stretched animal skins is obscenely expensive, but paper products with a faux-parchment finish can be gotten cheaply at any art supply store. The sheets I had lying around have a “natural” tan color and are semi-transparent with a patchy grain.

• Rick decided to write with continuous-flow writing instruments, either a rollerball pen or a felt-tip marker. I don’t know what kind of pen Suzanne used, but it looks like a speedball to me. I decided that the dip-pen route was the way to go. I didn’t have any reeds or quills lying around to cut my own pen, but I do have an assortment of metal calligraphy nibs. I used a Speedball C5 calligraphy nib in a plastic pen body, and some Higgins Black Magic india ink. You can make reasonably good ink from candle soot and turpentine, but I didn’t feel like stinking the house up.

• I layed my page out in three columns on 13” x 11” parchment paper. Each column was about 3” wide and 8” tall. I went ahead and drew out all the lines as well, 1/4” tall. Since my “parchment” paper was translucent, I made a layout grid in dark pencil lines on one sheet and then laid my working sheet over top. I affixed both in place with scotch tape that I de-stickified a little by taping to my shirt first.

Method : Practice

• I put my ink bottle to the right of the working sheet with a smaller sheet of paper underneath it. As I copied, I dipped my pen in the ink, tapped off the extra drop on the side of the inkwell, and then I drew three or four short strokes with the just-inked pen on the sheet of paper by the inkwell. This helped to even things out — the first few strokes off of a just-inked pen are usually pretty blobby. Even with this trick, you can still discern some wet and dry spots in my manuscript.

• I put the text to be copied to the left of the working sheet, with a sheet of blank paper on top. As I copied, I moved the blank top sheet down to just underneath the line I was copying. That way, I was able to keep my place vertically. This was especially helpful when I had to change sheets, since it took a few moments to re-align a new sheet with the grid and tape it down. As I wrote, I put my left finger on the word I was copying and did all of the inking and writing with my right hand.

• As I wrote, I said each word aloud and then I wrote it. I broke longer words into syllables and copied each syllable one at a time. I did not stop to try to figure out what the sentences said, nor what the words meant (as if I could).

• I copied in two sittings: Thursday night and Friday morning. My manuscript ended up being four sheets long, with the last sheet having only two and a quarter columns filled. I did the first two sheets Thursday night, and the last two sheets Friday morning. In all, it took five hours.

Method : Writing

Here’s a sample of the first few lines of 2 Timothy:

• I did not try to emulate a particular extant manuscript hand, nor did I attempt to follow the scribal practices from any single period. I wrote in duocase Greek using shapes that were much like the Gentium font of the source text that Rick supplied, with my own quirks added.

• I wrote in continuous justified lines with spaces between words. I used a small decoration (a line with a flared right end and a dot) to fill in short spaces at the ends of some lines. I let longer words break across lines, indicated with a hyphen. I started the first line of each new paragraph with a two-line dropped capital letter, except for the first paragraph, which has the word “Paulos” in single-line all-caps, like Rick’s source.

• I used nomina sacra abbreviations for names of Christ, God the father, and the spirt, although not with any consistency. I abbreviated anthropos once. I marked each of these abbreviations with a line above. (Update: Rick tells me that my nomina are all wrong; they should be uppercase, not lowercase. Call it a quirk of this particular scribe, I guess.)

• I used a kai ligature whenever I felt I needed to (see the next-to-last line in the image above). At the beginning of a line, I was more likely to write the word out than use the ligature, and at the end of a line, vice versa — unless, of course, I thought a full-sized kai would fill out the line.

• Twice I used a horizontal line to stand in for a nu at the end of a line, rather than hyphenate the word (leaving the nu stranded alone on the next line) or letting it stick out into the margin. Once I wrote an “ou” out into the margin, rather than hyphenating.

Report

• Like both Rick and Suzanne, I did not stop to read the words or comprehend the text. There simply wasn’t time, and I had other things on my mind: The shape of the letters, putting the pen in the right spot to start a new letter, making sure the pen had enough (but not too much) ink, thinking about the letter I was drawing and also the next letter, thinking about the length of the line, checking my spot in the source text.

• Longer and more unfamiliar words were harder to copy, but because of this, I slowed down and checked the spelling several times as I wrote. Most of the errors I caught as I wrote were in shorter words that I thought I knew how to spell. I got into trouble when I thought it was going to be easy, not the other way around.

• I had the most trouble with writing omicron for omega and epsilon for eta. I did not have trouble distinguishing the epsilon-iota dipthough from eta, but that is probably an artifact of my Greek pronounciation. I did grow up in Texas afterall. But omicron and omega gave me fits. There are a few of my omegas that are closed on the left side, because I wrote omicron, realized my mistake, and then put a tail on it to make it into an omega.

• The duocase alphabet for Greek is difficult to write with a metal nib. I much prefer the uncial with this type of pen. I almost wish I had some reeds or quills lying around, as a softer nib would have been easier to deal with. Many of the strokes go upward, which is against the natural writing direction of a dip pen. Since a metal nib is not very flexible, it tends to resist going upward even more. To compensate for this tendency, I had to over-ink the pen just a bit. Modern ball point pens, of course, don’t have this problem; the spherical tip writes easily in any direction.

• The letters I had the most trouble with were alpha, kai, and nu, all of which have upward strokes. The alpha was particularly onerous, and there is a lot of variation in them. I just don’t like the “fish” alpha. Eta, xi, and zeta, on the other hand, were very easy to write. Their shapes make a lot of sense with a broad-tip pen, and not a whole lot of sense with a modern pen. My delta has a large sharp hook at the top; usually, I don’t like that shape, but I found that it was very easy to write. My mu looks almost Coptic. I often wrote alpha-nu in one stroke.

• The spacing between my words tends to be uneven. This is partly due to the justification of the line, and partly due to laziness. I got very tired toward the end of each session, and my letters got more and more uneven. Even with the line grid beneath, keeping a consistent baseline was tough.

• I did not achieve consistent letter shapes or spacing. I probably could with practice and with better materials. Still this is not something you can just do without training and a lot of practice. Most of the texts I’ve calligraphed have been very short, and an art calligrapher tends to put a lot of thought into the motion of the letters. In text copying, you don’t put big swashes on letters, nor do you intentionally vary letter shapes; consistency and an even text color is more important. It almost makes me want to do this a second time.

• Twice I skipped a letter and I realized it, so I simply wrote it in above the word. Thus, when I wrote “pistis” where I should have written “pistois”, I wrote an omicron over the tau.

• Once or twice I wrote a medial sigma when I should have written a final. In these cases, I put a dot over the letter. Had I been writing on parchment, I would have come back to those and erased them with a knife and written them back. Several times I dotted an iota, which is clearly my English roots poking through. I think I erased all of them, but you never know.

• I introduced a couple of variants in the first paragraph. One is a casing variant on the word Timothy. The other is an omega that I missed. I wrote an omicron, then realizing my mistake, I went ahead and finished it off as if it were an omega. The result could be read as either a funky-looking omega with one side closed off, or else omicron-upsilon. (Yikes!)

• Speaking of erasure, there were a couple of spots where I wrote the wrong letter and I simply couldn’t let it stand. Once I wrote the first two letters of Iesou in a nomina sacra rather than the first and the last letters. I scraped the surface of the paper away with an exacto knife, burnished the area as best I could with the back of my pen, and wrote the letter over top. It actually worked surprisingly well; had my paper been higher quality, or real parchment, I’m sure you wouldn’t be able to tell. But in any case, you can’t just erase right after you’ve written something; you have to wait for the ink to completely dry. That’s why I used the dot — to mark things for correction later, when the ink dried. The following picture shows an erasure and rewriting of the word “mou”:

• As Suzanne notes, if you are going to be a scribe, you’d better think of something else to do in your old age. It was extremely painful. Three days later, my neck and back still hurt. The constant gripping of the pen inflamed the already large writer’s callous that I have on the middle finger of my right hand. I had to stop several times because of sharp pains in my right pinky, which was curled up underneath. This is not a job for sissies.

My colleague Rick Brannan has been running a manuscript transmission experiment for the past few weeks. The task is to copy out the Westcott-Hort text of 2 Timothy, sans accents and punctuation, by hand. You can read about his own attempts here. He also has a few others participating in the program, including Suzanne McCarthy of abecedaria and Better Bibles fame.

The other day, Rick received Suzanne’s manuscript submission (which you can read about here). He got the pages at work, which means that I saw them, too. Lovely!

Then I said, “Hey, I want to play, too!” I had hinted as much to Rick when he first started the project, but I expected to be rejected since I don’t technically qualify for his requirements. That is, I haven’t had “at least a year of Greek”. Basically, I know the script pretty well (actually, both scripts: the earlier uncial majescule and the later duocase script), and I can (mis)pronounce it pretty well, although I don’t usually get the accent on the right syllable. I know many of the small functional words (articles, prepositions), I can usually tell a noun from a verb, and I can actually read a few of the words. (Actually, when doing this, I was surprised how many Greek words I actually do know. Not nearly enough to make any sense of the text, but more than I would have thought.)

Anyway, Rick said that I could play. In fact, as it turns out he had already said so when I first asked, by sending an email to an address I never check. Oops.

So, last Thursday night (and a little Friday morning), I copied 2 Timothy. I’ll explain my methods and findings in a series of later posts.

I just noticed that Rhapsody has Flatulina’s Fabulous Holiday Spectacular — you know, the album of Christmas Carols set to audible expressions of gas — categorized as Classical music. “Classical > Performer > Orchestra,” to be exact. Check out the screenshot if you don’t believe me.

If you’re interested in Flatulina, you may also be interested in: Mozart Symphonies, Broadway’s Best Musicals, Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, Schumann’s Symphonies, and a CD of operatic Overtures by Rossini.

Heh, fat chance.

Is it horrible Christmas music time again already? Last year’s winner (or loser?) for worst album was Happy Clucking Holidays, which, in addition to having a very un-punny name, consisted of a (presumably very lonely) man making simulated chicken noises to the tune of various Christmas carols. Holy Night, Batman. That’s horrible!

Race to the Bottom

This year, I challenge you to find a worse album on Real Rhapsody’s music service than Flatulina’s Fabulous Holiday Spectactular, which is the same idea as HCH, only with simulated flatulence. Yes, that’s right: the sound produced by the gaseous by-product of the human digestive tract, complete with a random watery plop! here and there. No matter how juvenile you think it is, trust me, it’s that bad and worse. This album is in danger of collapsing in on itself under the cosmic weight of its own lameness, thus producing a (very smelly) rip in the fabric of space-time. If you are brave enough visit the transdimensional locus of galactic wrongness that is Flatulina’s Fabulous World on the World Wide Waste, you will be treated to videos on the production of the songs. I turned back in terror. Best leave it be. Leave it be, I say.

Calling Gargamel

Dishonorable mention goes to Merry Christmas with the Smurfs. If you think that a chorus of diminuative blue humanoids — including such vocal luminaries as Handy Smurf, Papa Smurf, and of course, Smurfette — singing Christmas carols is a good idea, then you probably need to have your medication checked. Again. Truly, the sound of Brainy Smurf singing (passionately, no less) about the second person of the Holy Trinity is more than a little bit creepy. First they ruined the Nutcracker Suite (“Smurf Berry Crunch is fun to eat / a smurfy, fruity breakfast treat!”), and now they’ve sprinkled their tiny blue freakishness all over Silent Night. Gadzooks! This crime against nature will run you $40 on Amazon. Used. (For what, I wonder?) Caveat emptor, indeed. Save yourself the clams and listen for free on Rhapsody. Better yet, save yourself and don’t.

The Hills are Alive With Ew-sic

I’m giving third runner-up to Christmas With the von Trapp Children. Sure, the little tykes can sing (although mostly in the range that causes small rodents extreme discomfort), and what they lack in pitch and diction they make up for in volume. That, and pure unadulterated Aryan übermensch-iostity. However, listening to one of eine kleine kindersingeren screech Jose Feliciano’s Feliz Navidad at the top of his blonde little lungs — in Spanish, with a Germanic accent — was just too much for me to bear. Isn’t this the sort of thing that the Geneva Conventions were designed to protect us from? Call the Hague! Bonus: You don’t even need Rhapsody to get in on this quirky konzertmusik. There are MP3 samples of the whole album on the von Trapp Children website.

Here’s the Rhapsody playlist, if you dare.

I’ve recently been involved in several proofreading/discussion groups — for Bob Pritchett’s upcoming book Fire Someone Today, among others — and I have been loudly proclaiming that certain dearly held “rules” of English grammar are in fact invented nonsense. Bunk. Never happened. Among these:

• Use of generic he in place of singular they.
• Omit needless words.
• Never use clause-initial however.
• Don’t use passive sentences.
• Never split infinitives.
• Never end a sentence with a preposition.
• Never begin a sentence with a conjunction.
• Don’t use adjectives and adverbs; use verbs and nouns.

I could go on. (My personal favorite is the that/which rule, which is not only difficult to remember, it’s not worth enforcing if you could.) Now, I’m not a linguistic anarchist, but most of these rules are just downright silly. And wrong. They are empty acts of literary asceticism. They encourage us to count leaves of mint and dill and cumin while disregarding the weightier issues of whatever we happen to be writing. (Apologies to Mt 23:22.)

Well, I’m in good company in this regard. If you perform a Google site-specific search for “Strunk White” on the Language Log server, you’ll find — oh nevermind. You aren’t going to look it up yourself. You probably have much better things to do. But if you did, you’d find gems like these, mostly by Geoffrey Pullum, but with some support from other loggers:

If you look in Strunk and Whites vile little assemblage of stupid advice about usage in The Elements of Style, you will find (this is how stupid they are) that the word people is actually banned. They say the plural of person should always be persons. So ... it should have been “We the persons.” (You da man)

Nice.

Throw your Strunk & White away, and hang the pages on a nail in the guest outhouse for emergency use. Or tear out the pages and use them as liner paper for the bottom of the parrot cage ... (Don’t put up with usage abuse)

That might actually constitute cruelty to animals. Check your local ordinances.

Regular readers will be able to name my least favorite book in the world: it is Strunk & White’s The Elements of Style, a horrid little compendium of unmotivated prejudices (don’t use ongoing), arbitrary stipulations (don’t begin a sentence with however), and fatuous advice (“Be clear”), ridiculously out of date in its positions on appropriate choices among grammatical variants, deeply suspect in its style advice and grotesquely wrong in most of the grammatical advice it gives. (Don’t make me go on; if you want an hour-long lecture on the demerits of this beastly little book, that can be arranged.) One of the things that worries me about the number of Americans who seem to treasure this little piece of trash ... is that they just don’t realize how absurdly old it is — that it is pretty much not even a work of the last century, but rather reflects ideas formed in the one before that. (Red Sox win)

What is the attraction? Is it just having rules for the sake of rules? I’m sure that Western civilization will be just fine if we let go of the (nonexistent) distinction between which and that in “restrictive” clauses.

If I have one ambition for my professional life, it is to do something to drive back the dark forces of grammatical fascism of this kind, to help get English language teaching back into a state where the things that are taught about the grammar of the language are broadly the things that are true, rather than ridiculous invented nonsense like that all words are forbidden except where they are required. (Omit stupid grammar teaching)

Fascist grammar, indeed.

Was it your father or your mother who broke his leg on a ski trip?

That is not how we say things in English. (The commonest way to get around the gender problem here is to use singular they: Was it your father or your mother who broke their leg on a ski trip?; Either the husband or the wife has perjured themself. Shakespeare used it; Jane Austen used it; loads of fine authors use it. Get used to it. And if you have a usage book like Strunk and White that declares singular they to be an error, throw that book away.) (Canada supreme court gets grammar right)

Yep.

Such use of forms of they with singular antecedents is attested in English over hundreds of years, in writers as significant as Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Austen, and Wilde. The people (like the perennially clueless Strunk and White) who assert that such usage is “wrong” simply haven’t done their literary homework and don’t deserve our attention.

I didn’t like generic they at first, but I have warmed to it.

It is a familiar myth from bad usage books that sentences like Everyone does what they are told are grammatically incorrect. The claim, let me stress immediately, is absolute nonsense. The pronoun they (in its various inflectional forms: they, them, their, theirs, themselves) has been used with a singular antecedent for hundreds of years. It occurs in Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Austen, Wilde... it is natural, idiomatic, fully grammatical English for every native speaker who has not had their brain completely warped by bad usage books like Strunk & White’s disgusting little atavistic compendium of falsehoods The Elements of Style. (Postcard from Vegas 2)

By the way, this has nothing to do with my position on gender-neutral translation of the Bible, which is this: Translate the words that are there, and let the readers sort it out for themselves.

[E.B.] White wields the English language like an elderly gardener using his 9-iron as a weed wacker:

: Nationalism is young and strong, and has already run into bad trouble. [As opposed to “good trouble”?] We take pains to educate our children at an early age in the rituals and mysteries of the nation, infusing national feeling into them in place of the universal feeling which is their birthright; but lately the most conspicuous activity of nations has been the blowing of each other up, and an observant child might reasonably ask whether he is pledging allegiance to a flag or to a shroud.

“The blowing of each other up”? Cool, I thought to myself as I drifted off, but is that actually English? (The blowing of each other up)

That is nonsense up with which we ought not to put.

If you want to see what the very worst of the usage and style recommenders say, it is always a good idea to turn to Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style first. Sure enough, on page 71 of the 4th edition, they say: “Write with nouns and verbs, not with adjectives and adverbs.” As usual, moronic advice, and impossible to follow. And in the very next sentence they use adjectives themselves, of course. (An indecisive disjunction of adjectives, in fact: “weak or inaccurate”. Well which is it? Be clear, they would say to you if you wrote that.) (Those who take adjectives from the table)

Sentences without adjectives are ... uh ... wait, I can do it ... No, I can’t.

One of the sternest strictures delivered in Strunk & White’s stupid little book is the prohibition on the use of adjectives and adverbs. Simply do not use them, they say: “Write with nouns and verbs, not with adjectives and adverbs” (The Elements of Style, p. 71).... As I have said before (and it has made many people quite edgy), it is not just that Strunk & White offer crappy usage advice; it’s that they demonstrate that their advice is crappy whenever they write, because they are utterly unable to follow their own rules, even on a bet.... White isn’t at all a bad writer. But the dimwitted ukases that his book with Strunk promulgates have nothing to do with good writing or elegant style. (The blowing of Strunk & White’s rules off)

Gotcha.

One might just as well attribute it to a greater willingness on the part of Americans to accept (unwisely) the pronouncements in Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style, that pox-ridden little pocketbook of pointless pontifications. (Which vs That: I have numbers!)

Nice alliteration!

... one of William Strunk Jr.’s irrational little prejudices:

: The word people is not to be used with words of number, in place of persons. If of “six people” five went away, how many “people” would be left? [The Elements of Style, 1918]

That might be the most illogical argument I’ve ever encountered. Since Prof. Strunk died before I was born, it’s only in imagination that I can answer: “One, you pompous old crank. Another glass of sherry?” (Counting People)

I rest my case.

Let the shooting commence!

By the way, anonymous commenter, I have heard of crossbows, balistas, foot bows, long bows, short bows, and flat bows. But I be done seen about everything when I sees a bow gun fire.

Every proprietor, lessee, or occupant of any place of amusement, or any plat of ground or building, who allows it to be used for the exhibition of skill in throwing any sharp instrument or in shooting any bow gun or firearm of any description, at or toward any human being, is guilty of a misdemeanor punishable under chapter 9A.20 RCW.

Revised Code of Washington 9.41.260, “Dangerous Exhibitions”

I assume they want commas in “bow, gun, or firearm of any description.” Either that, or I’m permitted to shoot an apple off someone’s head so long as I’m not shooting a “bow gun” (whatever that is).

Hey, does “plat of ground” mean I can’t use my backyard to — What? I’m just asking ...

I just received word from master bowyer Grózer Csaba in Hungary that my Mongol bow is in the mail!

The bows are all hand made, so this isn’t my bow, but my bow will look something like this:

(I guess I need to add a new “archery” category ...)