The Secret Lair

Image by Evil King Macrocranios via Flickr

This is Doc Blue, transmitting again from my secret underground laboratory.

Let me start by thanking everyone for their kind welcome and particularly Natalie Metzger, Bruce Baugh, and John Cmar for their suggestions of magazines to read.

During my last Overlord-sanctioned outing, I was able to find only one of the suggestions: Cinefex. I will be honest, the title font and spelling put me in mind of some sort of pseudo-Celtic cultural magazine, but little could be further from the truth.

It doesn’t tell you anywhere on the cover or title page, but Cinefex is about movie special effects. (The title becomes obvious when you think about that for a little bit.) This issue focused on The Rise of the Planet of the Apes, Hugo, The Tree of Life, and Real Steel. There is not a lot of wasted space in this 120+ page magazine. A title page, a significant amount of high gloss and very industry targeted advertising, and four very dense articles. There is no fluff here, no letters page. This is a magazine about special effects for people involved in or with a deep interest in the industry.

I found the articles a bit hard to get through. Though there was a lot of explanation of each technique, there was also a lot of assumed knowledge – and a great deal of industry name dropping. In many ways, if it weren’t for the beautiful photography, it would be very easy to mistake this for an academic or industry journal (which I suppose it really may be). One thing I really appreciated was that each article tracked the basic narrative of the movie as it discussed the special effects. It may it a lot easier to parse what was going on and, combined with the multitude of images, it really enhanced my overall understanding.

But I promised that this would not be a review. The real point of this exercise was to avoid mental ruts and make new connections. The first task was definitely achieved this month. I would have never picked this up without the suggestion. (Thanks again to Bruce Baugh.)

So what did I take away from Cinefex?

(1)    Know your audience. Cinefex feels like it was written for special effects professionals, but I found it in a chain bookstore somewhere in the Midwest. As far as I know, there isn’t a huge cinematography community here. So I’m not certain who the magazine is really intended for. This is a beautiful and well written magazine, but as designed, it is going to be for a very focused audience.

(2)    Narrative is important. Were I to package an article about movie special effects, I would be tempted to ignore the story of the movie, or perhaps just provide a brief summary at the beginning of the piece to set context. I really appreciated that the story was threaded through the entirety of all four articles. This is clearly an editorial decision on the part of the magazine and it is really helpful. In my day job, narrative is almost an afterthought.  I am definitely going to think about how to package my analyses in terms of the story rather than in terms of the just the facts and the techniques.

(3)    Base Your Fantasy in Reality. The one thing that struck me about all four movies, and possibly about the process, is how deeply the directors embedded their stories in the real world. Hugo was based in historical France, but leveraged footage of modern Paris, as well as, historical photos. Rise of the Planets of the Apes and Real Steel were near future, but had to be filmed in the modern day. Effects were largely used to transform the real world and none of the directors wanted to create from digital whole cloth. Sometimes when writing, especially when crafting sci fi or fantasy tales, it is tempted to throw out the world and build up everything from the ground up. The discussions in Cinefex really drove home the power of starting with reality and making subtle alterations. Film the bottom 20 feet of those redwoods – and then augment to create your towering primeval forest. Weigh down your stunt martial artists to simulate the movement of combat robots.

I think this was very successful first stage of my year long experiment.

My current list of magazines to look for includes Imagine FX, Diabetic Cooking, and Fortean Times. My next Overlord-sanctioned outing is scheduled for the last weekend in January. Hopefully I can find one of these then. I also still need more suggestions to fill out my year of reading 12 new magazines, so please don’t hesitate to throw suggestions out.

Until next time, this is Doc Blue, signing off!

Beowulf manuscript. Image via Wikipedia

Previously, on History of English:

• Introduction
• When Angles Met Saxons

In our last little chat together, we talked a bit about how English got started when a bunch of Germanic tribes decided to go a-conquerin’ (like you do). This time, let’s take a look at just what that earliest form of our crazy language actually looked and sounded like.

Without a doubt, the most famous Anglo-Saxon (a.k.a. Old English)¹ poem is the epic Beowulf.² You’ve probably been forced to read parts of it at some point in your schooling (or if you’ve been subjected to any of the film versions, God help you).

Most likely, you read it in a translation into Modern English (of which there are a number of very good ones, though my personal favorite is the Seamus Heaney translation). Now, if you’re like me, this may have seemed a little odd to you; after all, isn’t this already supposed to be a great English poem? The beginning of English literature? So we have to read English translated into… English? Well, here’s why. Here are the opening lines of Beowulf in the original text:³

Hwæt! We Gardena         in geardagum, 
þeodcyninga,         þrym gefrunon, 
hu ða æþelingas         ellen fremedon. 
Oft Scyld Scefing         sceaþena þreatum,
monegum mægþum,         meodosetla ofteah, 
egsode eorlas.         Syððan ærest wearð 
feasceaft funden,         he þæs frofre gebad, 
weox under wolcnum,         weorðmyndum þah, 
oðþæt him æghwylc         þara ymbsittendra 
ofer hronrade         hyran scolde, 
gomban gyldan.         þæt wæs god cyning!

And through the magic of the Interwebs, here’s a video of how it sounded to its original audiences!

Um, as the Anglo-Saxons would say, hwæt? That certainly doesn’t sound (or look) like the language I’m writing in here! Even though that is, in fact, an early form of English, if you were to fire up your TARDIS and go back to the British Isles circa 800 AD you’d be just as much at a loss to understand anyone as if you were dropped into rural China today.⁴ This is so much so that scholars today who study Anglo-Saxon have to learn it in the same way they would any other foreign language.

And yet, once you get past the initial alienness of it, you can start to see some recognizable parts. Take the last phrase above, for example: “þæt wæs god cyning.” At first glance it looks and sounds like gibberish, but that’s mostly just changes in pronunciation and manner of writing.⁵ For example, that weird letter “þ” that looks like it can’t decide if it wants to be a “p” or a “b” is called thorn and is the equivalent of the modern “th.”⁶ And that weird combination of “a” and “e,” “æ,” just becomes an “a” in modern spelling.⁷ So the first two words, then, are “that was.” The next word is a little misleading, since in Modern English we’d write it with two “o”s. In the last word, you just have to remember that the “c” is pronounced like a “k” and the “y” like the modern “short” “i.” Say it enough times fast, and you’ll likely shorten it into its modern equivalent, “king.” So that line says, exactly, “that was (a) good king!”

Hey, this is easy! So reading Anglo-Saxon is just a matter of learning different spellings and pronunciations, right?

Well, um, no. Anglo-Saxon had a radically different grammar from Modern English. Anglo-Saxon was largely an inflecting language; that is, a word’s function in a sentence was determined by changing the ending of a word, as in languages like Greek, Russian, Latin, and German. In Modern English, how a word fits into a sentence is determined mostly by its position relative to the other words: “The boy hit the ball” and “The ball hit the boy” are very different ideas!

We still have a few remnants of the old system of inflections, however; for example, we add -ed to the end of (most) verbs to make past tense, we add “‘s” to make a word possessive (e.g., the book belonging to Jason is “Jason’s book”), and we make words plural by adding -s. In Anglo-Saxon, however, the system was much more complex. Nouns, for example, used a system of cases (nominative, genitive, dative, and accusative) with each case corresponding to a particular grammatical use. Let’s take a look at all the forms the word “stán” (stone) can take:

• Nominative singular: stán
  The nominative case denotes the subject of the sentence, e.g., “The stone rolled over poor Thrydwulf!”
• Genitive singular: stánes
  The genitive case is used for possession, e.g., “The stone’s weight crushed the life out of him!”
• Dative singular: stáne
  The dative case indicates the indirect object of a sentence, e.g., “Someone teach the stone a lesson!”
• Accusative singular: stán
  The accusative case indicates the direct object of a sentence, e.g., “I’m going to smash the stone into little bits!”

And then to make it plural, there was a whole difference set of endings:

• Nominative plural: stánas
  “Stones don’t crush people on purpose.”
• Genitive plural: stána
  “It’s not the stones’ fault!”
• Dative plural: stánum
  “Don’t do anything to the poor stones.”
• Accusative plural: stánas
  “Save the stones, man!”

And this was just for one type of noun! Other nouns used different sets of endings. And that’s to say nothing of verbs…

As different as it looks, sounds, and, well, works, this is where the English language began. It’s come a long way (baby), but I for one find it pretty amazing to remember that there’s a definite connective thread stretching from Beowulf to LOLcats.

Before we wrap this one up, one quick word about dialects.⁸ What I’ve presented here, and what you’ll almost certainly learn if you ever study Anglo-Saxon, is really only one specific dialect of the language. Specifically, it’s what’s called the West Saxon dialect, and is just one of four major Anglo-Saxon dialects (or more properly, categories, each almost certainly having countless variations). When people talk about the Anglo-Saxon language, they’re almost always talking specifically about the West Saxon dialect.

So why do we only look at West Saxon? Mainly it’s because most of the surviving Anglo-Saxon texts (Beowulf included) are written in West Saxon. And why is that? Well, two reasons: money and power. West Saxon was the dialect spoken by most of the kings and their courts. Books were expensive and time-consuming to produce, and writing was an extremely rare and specialized skill. Kings were the ones who could pay to have books made for them, and when they did they wanted them in the type of English they spoke. In fact, many works which students of the language read today in the “original” Anglo-Saxon are translations into West Saxon from other dialects! Also, many official records (the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, for example) were naturally written in the “King’s English,” if you see what I mean.

Next time: Vikings invade! Then, later, the French (who were really Vikings in disguise) invade! English is doomed (to change in really cool ways)!

1. Though “Anglo-Saxon” and “Old English” are interchangeable terms, I tend to prefer the former. “Old English” often makes people think of “Ye Olde Englishe,” which is a faux-historical type of writing where extra -e’s, -eth’s, and thous are thrown frivolously and often incorrectly into current English sentences. As we’ll see later, this is really more a caricature of Early Modern English. [↩]
2. If you read only one epic Anglo-Saxon poem this year…! [↩]
3. Text courtesy “Beowulf in Hypertext.” [↩]
4. Assuming you don’t speak any form of Chinese, that is. [↩]
5. The technical term is orthography, if’n ya wants ta get all fancy. [↩]
6. Thorn actually represents only the unvoiced “th” sound, the sound at the beginning of the words “thick” and “thin.” A different letter, “ð” (called edh) was used for the voiced sound at the beginning of “this” and “thus.” [↩]
7. Anglo-Saxon orthography used “æ” to represent, roughly, the vowel in “hat” and “a” for the first vowel in “father.” [↩]
8. Can you tell yet that I find the subject of dialects really interesting? [↩]

Image via Wikipedia

I cannot claim inception of the ideas expressed in this essay, although neither can I recall with any certitude the particulars of whence I may originally have overheard them. For although I originally had the sense that the notion rose to my notice from some manner of interaction in the waking world, it occurs to me upon further rumination that these thoughts took root in my brain as I slumbered, a perverse and feverish dream, perhaps a nocturnal sending from some distant and unnatural realm.

Few are the unfortunates who have deeply pondered these matters, for once a thing is known it cannot be unknown. I caution you to continue at your own peril.

My topic begins with those creatures whom we have in modern day termed “vampires”. I speak not of those who cavort and sparkle in the sun’s light like some manner of deranged disco abomination, driveling putrid sex, cavorting and having congress with callow and scarcely nubile mortals. Rather, I refer you to vampires of the Old Blood: gothic, aristocratic, and terrible. The likes of Lestat, Vlad Tepes, and the infamous Count Dracula.

These beings enjoy a wealth come of unnatural long life, and I have yet to learn of one who has come by his fortune through honest employment. They survive through predation, by leeching the vital essence from those whom they know to be their inferiors. We most often think of vampirism in its most literal sense, as it is well-known to even the most parochial minds that a vampire’s overdeveloped canine teeth are wont to rend soft jugular flesh so as to sup upon the prey’s vital fluid. But the figurative is equally true: the vampire magnate’s business practices are as predatory as his carnal proclivities; they suck the financial life blood from hapless souls foolish enough to venture into the eldritch realms of finance. Hence do the blue-bloods feed upon the red-bloods and embody every fear that we have about the upper class.

The middle class are a more familiar folk, a people with whom many of us identify. Ask yourself: what manner of unnatural beast best exemplifies the everyman?

Whereas vampires have the resources to immure themselves daily so as to conceal their monstrous nature, blending in with the ubiquitous middle class presents unique challenges. Those of us without the fortune of inheritance needs must work to remain solvent. Thus to viably blend with the middle class necessitates disguise suitable to securing gainful employment. I present then for your examination the werewolf.

Whereas vampires remain aloof and separate from mainstream society, werewolves are directly part of it. Before having descended from mortality, a werewolf may have been your doctor, your neighbor, your brother.

So during waking hours, when God-fearing workmen toil for wages, the lycanthrope walks amongst them, and only by the dead light of the gibbous moon will its hideous curse compel transformation, and then beware! For the murderous beast slays indiscriminately, knowing no friend and no kin.

And now I reach the final point. For as even as I sit typing in the study of my rustic Connecticut home, the distant ghoulish moans and thumps at the down-stairs shutters foretell the grim revelation of my every mobid fear. If I can muster the willpower, I will upload this essay before they come for me.

For you must by now have realized what creature represents the lower class. The woe-begone creatures who trudge along hopelessly, mindlessly, endlessly. Individually, they are slow and puling lackwits, their stiffened and unbreathing faces utterly devoid of purpose. But when they band together, zombies become a threat too dire for any to stand against.

Many have asked: Can a man change his class? And only now at the end has the truth revealed itself to me. Should any of us be bitten by the unknown things of the night, we become one of them.

And now the proletariat comes for me. Lacking pitchforks and torches, they bear instead yellow rotted teeth and useless bulging eyes. Even now I hear dead feet scuffling on the steps.

Ia-R’lyehl Cihuiha flgagnl id Ia!

Recently, we decided it was time to change things up in our home.  The furniture layout of the main floor had remained essentially unchanged since we moved in almost ten years ago. Since our kids are getting to be of starting gaming age, we decided to convert the family room into a game room.

We started by moving the large sofa and new television into the front room to become our prime television watching room and removed the old computer desk from the house entirely.  We then moved the love seat and the entertainment center to the far end of the room. The addition of an unused television created a small video gaming nook.

The small table seen here was adopted by my younger minion as a “news desk”. The ‘gaming center’ is in the corner on the other side of the mural.  The mural itself was painted by a family friend and is based on the same castle as Hogwarts in the Harry Potter movies.

We looked at a store with “container” in the name for storage, but were notably unimpressed. Instead we purchased some press board storage which we liked better – at a fraction of the price.

Note the retro-style classic board games used as wall décor. These are fully playable games.

So we now have a room, storage, but are still in need of a table. We’ve got a friend who is going to build us a table – once we figure out what we want – but until then we are noticeably shy of a surface on which to play games.

We decide in the interim to re-purpose a couple of tables that were being under-used, abused, or both. The only problem is that they are a light wood in a room full of dark wood.

(Observe my elder minion’s disinterest in physical labor.)

I picked up some dark faux leather on clearance at a local fabric store. However, before I could upholster the tables, I needed to do some maintenance. We cleaned them both and I glued and tightened the legs. Using the round table as support for the rectangular table, I set to work. (Using the tables as support for each other both provided me a good working height and a firm surface to work on.)

In each case, I pre-cut the leather roughly to size and laid it face down on the supporting table before centering the working table on top of it. The rectangular table was fairly easy with which to work. I folded the leather over the sides of the table and secured them with the liberal applications of a staple gun.  I only needed to do creative folding, trimming and stapling on the corners.

The second table, a round one, was more challenging. In the end, I folded and stapled the four compass directions. I then worked from each of the cardinal staples toward the mid-points between the staples.  It took some thoughtful folding, but in the end, I ended up with a very smooth and symmetric table top.

My younger minion is ready to play!

I overlapped the two tables to provide a more or less continuous surface. This configuration will comfortably allow eight players to sit around the table – more if we separate the tables. Our bigger problem will be finding enough chairs.

That’s more or less it! I’m ready for our face-to-face RPG game to return from hiatus.

After I get the basement cleaned up, I will introduce you to my other (not so) secret lair – super-hero themed office space.

Like any man who wants to know what is going on in the world, I prefer to start my day with a cup of coffee and my morning paper.  Like any modern person who is well-versed in the ways of the Internet, I know that I can get better news, more timely, more interesting, more custom tailored to my needs by subscribing to a number of RSS feeds and social stream instead of subscribing to my local newspaper.  The hitch in the plan has always been the laptop…I dislike having the laptop and keyboard in front of me when reading.  The reason is purely psychological: as someone who spends all day in front of a traditional computer, I prefer that my off-time be a lap- and desk-top free as possible.

Until recently, this was an impossible dilemma. When I received a Samsung tablet at Google I/O last year, that changed.  It became possible to sit and read on my little Star Trek-like device and still pull the most current news from the web. Additionally, when I got my new iPhone, this became even more interesting.

Pulse

The program I use most often is Pulse. Pulse allows you to subscribe to suggested feeds, feeds aggregated by the Pulse service into several Top lists (top tech, top politics, etc) , your Google Reader feeds, or any RSS feed you can enter into their system. The design of the program is especially nice, articles from a source are arranged into horizontal bands with photos and their headline. Selecting an article allows you to read it, then flips across the page with your finger will move you to the next article. The motions and gestures are intuitive and simple. On top of this, Pulse allows share interesting articles to your social feeds with a touch of a button¹.  Reading the paper is a simple and pleasing experience, and when I’m done, I feel like I’ve got a better handle on my day.

When I picked up my iPhone, one of the programs I downloaded and use most often is Flipboard. Same idea as Pulse, aggregating personal, social, and featured feeds into a single interface, but Flipboard uses the form faction of the phone to great advantage. TO move between pages, you swipe up with your thumb or finger. The graphic animation is as if the page is folding up to reveal the next article in the queue. The main selling point, beyond the simplicity, is the use of excellent typography and brilliant images — the graphic design of program is stellar. It is the perfect companion when waiting in line or relaxing at the coffee shop of your choice.

How do you keep up with your favorite news? What programs would you recommend?

1. if you follow me on Twitter or Facebook, you’ve seen me sharing links first thing in the morning. [↩]

I am transmitting from a secret underground  location.

I have been instructed by Overlord Miller to inform you that I am here of my own free will and am able to leave in peace at any time I wish. At least I think that’s what he meant.

Since it appears we will be spending an extended amount of time together, it seems only polite that I introduce myself.

My name is David Wendt, though you may address me as Blue or Doc Blue. By training, I am a Ph.D. Statistician (thus the ‘Doc’ portion of my sobriquet). I am employed as a Marketing Research Consultant by day and as a free-lance game-designer by night.  I have a passion for pulp action and super-hero comic books. My brilliant wife and two (equally brilliant) children and I are in the process of converting yet another room in our home into a dedicated gaming space.

During the month of January, it is tradition among some peoples to make resolutions for the new year. For such individuals, the most frequent sort of promise is associated with self-improvement – loose weight, get a new job, paint the house.

Fortunately, for both you and I, I am not the sort to make such a resolution. Instead, I pose a challenge to myself – one that I encourage you in which to participate. I wish to read 12 magazine issues this year. But not any 12 magazine issues – where would be the challenge in that?!? No. I want to be exposed to 12 magazines that I have never read before. And that is where you come in: I would deeply appreciate your suggestions. Make suggestions. Challenge me. I only ask two things: (1) it should be a magazine that I can leave laying about my home reasonably comfortable (i.e. no “adult magazines” as there are kids in the house) and (2) I would strongly prefer magazines I can get off the new stand. I have a Barnes and Nobles nearby.

Why would I want to do such a thing?

(1) I believe in encouraging an open mind. It is very easy to get caught in the same mental ruts and my hope is that by reading material from new writers on new topics I can avoid ruts of my own.

(2) I tend to draw connections from seemingly disconnected sources. So it is my belief that in both my day job and my chosen career I will be able to be more creative and effective by introducing myself to need ideas.

(3) It will give you and I something to talk about here in the Secret Lair each month. For the next twelve months, I will read a new magazine (hopefully recommended by one of you) and share my thoughts about what I discovered within. This will not be a review, as such, merely insights I gleaned and how I might apply them to other fields.

What else can you expect from me during my stay here in the Secret Lair? As I mentioned, I have a passion for games and comics and heroic figures. If I were you, I wouldn’t be surprised to see content about games I’m playing, things I’m writing, and perhaps the odd, exclusive to the Secret Lair, creative content.

No matter what anyone else tells you, I’m thrilled to be a part of the Secret Lair and am looking forward to the coming year!

[How was that Overlord Miller?]

CC BY-NC-SA image from tkelly7029 via Flickr

Firstly, let’s get the obvious out of the way: the world might, in fact, end in 2012. However, this will be far more likely due to a Crackpot Scheme and/or an Unfortunate Synergy devised by our own Minister Lynn that I was unable to stop in time, as opposed to any sort of Mayan prediction. In point of fact, the end of the Mayan calendar no more predicts the final days of the world than the end of our own calendar did three days ago, after which we flipped things ahead to the next year, much like the Mayan calendar will move on to a new age at it’s end.

It is worth noting that the origins of our own calendar have nothing to do with our present day beliefs, be they crazy (The Mayans predicted the end of the world this year! Yay! I mean, DOOM!) or otherwise, but rather the pragmatism of ancient Greece and Rome as well as the inspiration of older gods. The original Roman calendar had ten months, with March (or Marius, named for the Roman god of war Mars) being the first month of the new year – this was both due to it being the start of spring, as well as beginning of the military campaign season. This was followed by:

• April, or Aprilis, which may derive from the Latin aperire meaning “to open”, or from the Roman goddess Venus’s name in Greek, Aphrodite
• May, or Maius, attributed either to the Greek goddess of fertility Maia or the Latin maiores, meaning “elders”
• June, or Junius, possibly originating with the Roman goddess (and patroness of marriage) Juno, or the Latin iuniores, meaning “young people”
• Quintilis, named for the Latin for “fifth”
• Sextilis, from the Lation for “sixth”
• September, October, November, and December, all derived from the Latin for “seventh” through “tenth”

The approximately 60 days between December and March were not assigned to months until later Roman revisions added January (or Ianuarius, named for the Roman god Janus) and February (or Februarius, from the Latin februum meaning “purification”) as the first and second months. Subsequently, Quintilis was renamed July in honor of Julius Ceasar, and Sixtilis to August named after Augustus Ceasar.

The above summary of the origins of our current calendar nomenclature is a vast oversimplification, but even more complex is the historical cultural interplay the resulted in the names of our days of the week:

• Sunday, with multiple origins referencing the Sun
• Monday, derived from the Old English for “Moon day”
• Tuesday, originating from various European names for the Roman god of war Mars, such as the Old English name Tiw
• Wednesday, identified with the Germanic god Woden, who has been tied both to the Norse god Odin and the Roman god Mercury
• Thursday, named for one of many cultural identities of the Norse god of thunder, Thor
• Friday, tied to the nomenclature surrounding the Germanic love goddess Frijjō
• Saturday, for the Roman god Saturn

Pulling things back to the month we just entered, January includes other notable days, such as Christmas for Coptic and Eastern Orthodox Christians; Seijin No Hi, the Japanese day that celebrates Coming-of Age of the youth who are twenty years old; and Martin Luther King, Jr. day in the US. Additionally, January 23rd marks the Chinese New Year, which starts the year 4709, the year of the Dragon.

Go forth, enriched in knowledge, and know that a confusing host of gods and goddesses are watching over you as you work to make 2012 a splendid year! Leave the worrying about the end of the world to us here at The Lair, since we do have a good chance of (unintentionally, I swear) bringing it about.

I have no intention telling you what I want to accomplish this year.

I’m not listing any projects, any promises, any resolutions. I have them, sure, but I’m not telling you what they are.

We denizens of the Interwebs, we talk so very much. Talk is cheap.  Social networks are easy, full of sound and fury, amounting to very, very little in the end.

You will only hear about what I’m doing this year when it is complete.  Until then, it’s not worth talking about.

Another November has come and gone, and with it has again passed How Not To Grow A Beard Month. You may recall that this is the annual competition wherein participants do not shave, and document their progress in growing – in some cases, poorly – a beard, while soliciting donations to help it grow in thick and lush. These donations, sponsoring an iconic expression of manhood, are collected for a cause that helps to save an iconic expression of womanhood, namely breast cancer research.

The 2011 iteration of this saw the group of us raise an amazing $5,267.46, which eclipsed our optimistic goal of $5,000, and also welcome several new participants into the fold. As tends to happen every year, there was a large influx of donations on the final day, leading to an exciting finish. When midnight rolled around, it turned out that yours truly was sitting in the number one spot, and so HoNoToGroABeMo founder Bob Voegerl declared me the winner! However, it turns out that there was a delay in a final hefty contribution to last year’s winner, Pete DiLillo, so in the early morning hours of December 1 he accrued the most funds of all of us, and pushed us over the top in making our goal! I imagine his expression the next day to be something like he showed us with his Day 28 pic:

In the end, the true winners of this follicular competition were all of us who participated. It was an entertaining month for an excellent cause, and seeing us hit our donation goal was an awesome thing. Bob posted two recaps looking back on the experience, and as the HoNoToGroABeMo Crackling Virility Hedge Champion for 2011, I add my own humble thanks to all who donated.

That noted, it is time to bestow The Cmar Beard Awards for HoNoToGroABeMo 2011. As with last year’s awards, these have nothing to do with any donations received, and everything to do with the glorious pictography of lush face-manes:

• Best Beard Photo: This year saw a new bar raised for photographic excellence and composition, but there was only one picture the entire month that forced me to laugh out loud when I saw it. Additionally, it demonstrates in a very obvious way the principle of How Not To Grow A Beard. As such, the clear winner of the best photo this year is Kris Johnson for his Day 30 entry:



• Man Most Exemplifying How Not To Grow A Beard: In prior years, this has been a rather easy category to judge, but that turns out not to be the case. Prior hands-down winner Jeff Greiner’s jaw-thicket grew in rather thicker this year – perhaps practice does train a beard? – leaving the field a bit more open. After some deliberation, it was clear that newcomer Frederick Hurley showed us all how not growing a beard is done. Or not done, as the case might be, as shown in his final image:



• Best Time Lapse Photo Series: Creative photo composition is the order of the day in this competition, but this year only one person gave us uniformly consistent poses to show his mandibular sprouts from day to day. That man is newcomer Andrew Rothman! (Click through to view the slideshow.)
• Man Most Exemplifying How To Grow A Beard: As this competition broadens in terms of participants, we are adding some to the fold who are able to muster up incredibly dense facial carpets. This year, the mysterious Beard A. Nonymous blew us all away with his jungle-like final jaw result. Seriously, dude, that is vastly impressive:



• Best Use Of Non-Facially Generated Props: The ante was certainly upped in this category, but Pete DiLillo once again takes the prize for his colorful use all manner of headgear and weaponry. (click through for the slideshow)



• Daily Commitment To The Task: November is a busy month, and few find the time and the stamina to start on Day 1 and produce a post every day for all 30 days. Our founder, Bob, led the pack in this regard as he does each year, and finds himself co-accepting this award with Jeff Greiner, Jim Van Verth, and myself for 2011. Strong work, gentlemen!
• Best-Spun Beardy Yarns: Every participant strives to put down some good words with their hairy pictographs. This year saw a range of pithy comments, beard quotes, facial hair history, and inspirational tales, to name but a few. However, Jim Van Verth pulled out the clear and consistent win. He made every picture a clue to a certain board game or digital game, and then followed each up the next day with some fascinating history and insight into the game in question. Congratulations to Jim for spinning some beardy yarns with a gaming bent!
• Most Intriguing Contest In Follicular Bribery: Along with our mandibular shrubbery, anew phenomenon grew forth during this year’s contest, namely that several participants devised their own personal contests to bribe potential donors their way. Of all of these, Jeff Greiner’s was clearly the best. Not only did it require the most work, but it was a meta-contest that involved bribing all of us participants with Manly Points to bring our A-game and increase participation and donations. Excellent work, Jeff! Be sure to check out how the points played out.

Congratulations to all of the winners! To all the participants, it was a pleasure joining you once again in this endeavor, and to give recognition where recognition is due. To everyone else, I’ll merely note that only 314 days remain until HoNoToGroABeMo 2012, and this whole mad affair will start up again.

As the current, reigning, and defending HoNoToGroABeMo Crackling Virility Hedge Champion – even under contested circumstances from the #1 Contender to the Title, Pete – I think it only appropriate to provide some parting beardly thoughts from WWE professional wrestler and current (at the time of this posting) World Heavyweight Champion Bryan Danielson:

Angles, Saxons, and Jutes invade Britain

Previously, on History of English:

• Introduction

Last time, we covered some basic introductory material, but now it’s time to dive into our subject, as the kids say, for realz. So let’s go back to the first time English was spoken and… umm… well, hrm.

Turns out that figuring out just when a language got its start is not as easy as you might at first think. Most people don’t roll out of bed one day and say, “Y’know, today seems like a good day to create a new language. Let’s get on that, then.”¹ In fact, sometimes it can be pretty difficult to tell when one language ends and another begins, due in part to some of that murkiness with dialects that we discussed last time. So first, we need to talk a little bit about where new languages come from.²

There are two main ways that new languages emerge: language contact and language change. Language contact is when speakers of two different languages come together, usually for an extended period of time, and their languages sort of mix. This can happen in a number of different ways, on a number of different levels, but for now just note that sometimes languages can mix together and change each other, or even have new little baby languages (this will be important later).

Language change can be a little more complicated. One thing that seems to be a constant in human experience is that languages do change over time and distance. There are a number of theories as to why this is, and it happens at various rates in different languages, but in the end it seems that we sort of have to take it as a given that languages will change. In once sense, this seems perfectly obvious: we always need new words for new things, right? But the changes can go far, far beyond that, into areas of grammar and structure. As Clive Upton famously commented, “The only language that doesn’t change at all is a dead one.”

(As an aside, even that can be a little misleading, since sometimes languages don’t really die; they just change into new ones. We call Latin a dead language for example, when really it just turned into French, Spanish, Romanian, and others. In a very real way, Italian is nothing but modern Latin. In fact, as we’ll soon see, the earliest forms of English are about as different from what we speak today as Latin is from Italian.)

Imagine it something like this: a tribe of hunter-gatherers moves into a new land. They all speak the same language, of course. There’s some argument about exactly which way to go, though, and where to settle. Since the tribe is getting pretty big, half of it decides to go one way, and the other half another. Over time, the two groups start speaking a little differently, then even more differently, enough that when they run into each other again a couple generations later, they can’t understand each other anymore. Then, later, those two groups branch out into more, and so on, and so on…

As you can imagine, though, since these groups started out speaking the same language, the new languages that emerge are pretty similar to each other in many ways. They share certain root words, and though they may not sound the same in each language, they probably will end up having similar sounds. They’ll probably put sentences together in similar, though different, ways.

Linguists say that languages like this are related, and group them into families. These language families are even put into a family tree, which is exactly what you’d expect: languages are grouped into subfamilies and branches of families, all going back to a single common ancestor.³

English is a member of the Indo-European family of languages. That is, it’s a group of languages that can all trace their ancestry back to a single language, which linguists call Proto-Indo-European, and which is the ancestor of the majority of the languages spoken in the area between Europe and India.⁴ Specifically, English is a member of the Germanic branch of that family, making it related to languages like German, Swedish, and Dutch. If you want to see where English falls on the ol’ family tree, Wikipedia has a great chart (I’d embed it here, but it’s huge!).

Okay, so remember what I said about language contact? Let’s get back to that.

English as a new language got started sometime around 450 AD⁵ when several groups who spoke various Germanic languages all decided to go and invade the British Isles. Why? I don’t know. Maybe invading things was all the rage back then. Maybe it’s what you and your friends did after a few too many rounds of mead. I mean, I personally think it would take more than a few pints to make “Hey, let’s go take over that cold rainy island!” sound like a good idea, but maybe that’s just me.

Prior to this, Britain had been inhabited by speakers of Celtic languages (Celtic is another branch of the Indo-European family, like Germanic) such as Welsh, Cornish, and Gaelic. The common wisdom is that the invaders pushed these Celtic languages aside, never to be heard from again in the history of English as a language (hint: we’ll be hearing about them again). As I said, there were several groups of Germanic invaders, most notably the Angles, the Saxons, and the Jutes. Each group spoke their own language (or more likely, several dialects of their own language), and though these languages were related, they weren’t the same.

Now that the new invaders had established themselves as the new guys in charge, they needed a way to talk to each other (but not those wussy Celts who let themselves get all conquered, presumably).⁶ So, like people do, they found ways to make it work. Their languages were already fairly close, as such things go, and what started to emerge were various hybrids. Over here, you got a little Anglic mixed with a dollop of Saxon. Over there, some Jute spiced up with Anglic, with maybe a little Frisian thrown in for color. These mixtures were all pretty similar, enough that you could communicate with your buddy who maybe grew up up north speaking a different mix. The mix that eventually emerged is what we call Anglo-Saxon, or Old English.

What’s important to note here–and this is really important, even down to today–is that there never was one original version of English from which all others descended. Instead, you have various different versions emerging as different groups settled and met in different places and at different times. Eventually, these all coalesced into a bunch of dialects similar enough to clump them together as a language, but it’s more of a fuzzy accumulation than a hard boundary. In England, you can still trace dialect lines today that correspond to the locations where different groups of invaders settled.

Next time, we’ll take a closer look at the Anglo-Saxon (or Old English) language and see how, by modern standards, calling it “English” might be a bit of a stretch. Oh, and if we’re lucky, we might even get a visit from our friendly neighborhood Vikings, too! (Hint: the Vikings are not friendly.)

1. Though sometimes people actually do do this, but that’s a slightly different subject. [↩]
2. You see, when a Mommy Language and a Daddy Language love each other very much… [↩]
3. In fact, linguists use this family metaphor extensively. There are mother and daughter languages. Languages are said to be genetically related, though this has nothing to do with the real human genetics of the people who speak them. [↩]
4. In some older sources, you’ll see these referred to as the Aryan languages, but that term understandably fell out of favor following World War II. [↩]
5. Or CE, if you prefer. I’ve always been accustomed to using BC/AD instead of BCE/CE, just as a matter of habit. I intend no religious preference by this. [↩]
6. One can practically hear the high fives and fist bumps ringing across the centuries. [↩]