Over at Byzantium's Shores, blogger Jaquandor recently brought to my attention an apparently long-running controversy about a line in Casablanca. In the film, Ugarte (Peter Lorre) tells Rick (Humphrey Bogart) that he has letters of transit signed by General...somebody. Opinions differ about which general it is that Lorre mentions. Some hear de Gaulle, which would be a mistake on the part of the filmmakers, since Charles de Gaulle was the leader of the Free French forces, and his signature would be less than worthless in Vichy France. Others hear Weygand, which makes more sense—Maxime Weygand was an official in the Vichy government and for a time was in charge of the North African colonies.
A few weeks ago, a staggeringly cute YouTube video made the rounds
of the usual web sites. It shows a three-year-old girl describing
Star Wars. Here it is, for those of you who somehow missed
it:
If you're a Star Wars geek like me, you thought this was
very cool and made you want to have kids like right now. (My
favorite comment on the
MetaFilter thread about the video was "made me ovulate".) If
you're a linguistics geek like me, though, I'll bet you had a
different reaction: "Hmm, what's going on with her postalveolar
consonants?"
Names are tricky. Many of us are assigned them at birth and accept
them without much thought. Others are bolder, taking control of their
arbitrary word-handles, shedding unwanted labels for others somehow
more agreeable. This is a common practice in show business, where
stage names serve to distinguish performers from each other and from
us ordinary folks. This is a story of two such performers who, in
their quest for uniqueness, landed at nearly the same spot in the vast
name-space.
I suppose confusion is understandable—the names are so similar, after all—but I think it's important that we get this straight once and for all. So pay close attention:
Exhibit B: A clip of the Two Minutes Hate from the 1984 film Nineteen Eighty-Four (watch particularly at 1:47, 2:24, 3:45, and 4:04):
Note the distinctive two-wrists-crossed-overhead gesture. Coincidence? Yes—that's what coincidence is. The Xavier fans are forming an X, while I suspect that the gesture in the film is meant to refer to one of Orwell's famous fictional slogans of Ingsoc, "Freedom is Slavery".
Over the last few days I've been noticing a steady stream of visitors to this site who have found it via Google searches for threepio's buddy (for which this page is currently the number one hit). Anybody know what that's about? Is there some new Star Wars parody going around that I haven't heard of? I've gotten a big kick out of thelastthree, and I wouldn't want to miss out.
[I meant to post about this last week and forgot, but I haven't seen any mention of it in the linguistiblogosphere except for this post on Linguaphiles.]
Terrence Malick's new film The New World is a retelling of the story of Pocahontas and John Smith. As this entry in MSNBC's Cosmic Log describes, Malick ran into a small problem when trying to figure out what languages his characters would speak:
Malick thought he could just find some contemporary speakers of the language that was used by Pocahontas and her tribe in pre-colonial Virginia — and he was somewhat surprised to find out that the language had been extinct for more than 200 years.
A less rigorous director might have given up, but Malick instead turned to Blair Rudes, a linguist at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte who specializes in past and present American Indian languages. Rudes' work to reconstruct and revitalize the Virginia Algonquian language might itself make for a good movie — or at least a History Channel documentary.
Saw TCoN:TLtWatW (note: no Oxford comma in the official title) yesterday with The Wife. Capsule review: meh. Various other random thoughts after the jump.
Here's a horrible thought: what percentage of the people who saw the movie version of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy this year thought to themselves, "Oh, a Babel Fish, I get it—it's a reference to the translation web site."
I know it's been once around the blogosphere already, but I finally watched a repeat of "AFI's 100 Years...100 Movie Quotes" last weekend. Such a list is inevitably going to be incomplete—for example, they have exactly zero quotes from The Princess Bride—and you could play the "but what about this quote" game forever. Still, I was repeatedly struck by how, even in the movies they did select quotes from, they didn't always pick the one I would have chosen.
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