2. What poet had a beard, round glasses and wore a "poet’s hat"?
3. What is the origin of the phrase "take up the mantle"?
4. What have smart people had to say about the tendency to see images in words, including things that are not really relevant to the etymology of the word? For example, one might imagine that "ostracize" is connected to "ostrich" or "marginalize" relates to "margarine."
5. What is the argument that the crows in "Dumbo" are not a racist stereotype?
6. Does RFK Jr. speak of himself in terms of "Camelot"?
7. What is that famous saying about remaining silent because I was not X, Y, etc.?
8. Why do some people say you shouldn't use "impact" as a verb?
9. What is the episode of "Leave it to Beaver" where June and Ward Cleaver are turning over a mattress and Ward asks if it's mattress-turning day?
5. What is the argument that the crows in "Dumbo" are not a racist stereotype?
6. Does RFK Jr. speak of himself in terms of "Camelot"?
7. What is that famous saying about remaining silent because I was not X, Y, etc.?
8. Why do some people say you shouldn't use "impact" as a verb?
9. What is the episode of "Leave it to Beaver" where June and Ward Cleaver are turning over a mattress and Ward asks if it's mattress-turning day?
10. What if you had to argue that "The fog comes /on little cat feet" is actually very depressing and pessimistic?
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37 comments:
It actually asks what the cliches are about this or that.
If tin whistles are made out of tin, what are fog horns made out of?
Thank you, Bee. I really don't think there is anything more to be said on this blog post. Well said, you.
Althouse asked...
9. What is the episode of "Leave it to Beaver" where June and Ward Cleaver are turning over a mattress and Ward asks if it's mattress-turning day?
I believe that episode was "Beaver After Dark."
Isn't "mantle" an older word for cape? A chivalrous man would toss his mantle over a puddle so that a lady could cross without wetting her feet. To take up the mantle would be to raise a standard of gentlemanly behavior.
Well, that's my guess.
"What have smart people had to say about the tendency to see images in words, including things that are not really relevant to the etymology of the word? For example, one might imagine that "ostracize" is connected to "ostrich" or "marginalize" relates to "margarine."
Smart pyschiatrists call those people crazy.
8. Why do some people say you shouldn't use "impact" as a verb?
Why not indeed? I think I've seen it used more often as a verb than as a noun.
Were you trying to smoke out who Grok considers to be "smart people?"
Also--
The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes,
Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,
Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,
Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,
Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,
And seeing that it was a soft October night,
Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.
There's some depressing little cat feet for ya.
1. Why do birds sing so gay and lovers await the break of day?
2. Why does the rain fall from above?
3. Why do fools fall in love?
When Elijah is taken up to Heaven in a whirlwind Elisha picks up the mantle 2Kings2:I-14
Last night I dreamed Grok taught me how to hydroplane over the surface of a lake going 90 miles per hour. It was like flying in your dreams except I couldn’t go more than 6 inches above the water. Great fun. I haven’t done drugs in decades.
Why isn’t Grok capitalized in your tags?
Oh dear, crows are racist? Is that why Heckle and Jeckle have gone down the memory hole?
"Isn't "mantle" an older word for cape? A chivalrous man would toss his mantle over a puddle so that a lady could cross without wetting her feet. To take up the mantle would be to raise a standard of gentlemanly behavior."
No. It's very religious!
"In 2 Kings 2:13-14, after Elijah is taken up to heaven in a whirlwind, Elisha picks up Elijah's mantle (a cloak) that had fallen from him. This act symbolizes Elisha's acceptance of Elijah's prophetic duties. The mantle itself was not just a piece of clothing but a symbol of prophetic authority and divine power."
Here's what I wrote on the blog using "take up the mantle": "And [RFK Jr's]... begins with him praying to God to put him "in a position where I can end the childhood chronic disease epidemic in this country." And, he said, "God sent me President Trump."... Not only was USAID a family mission, but health — the specific job given to RFK Jr. — was also a family mission. JFK founded his fitness program, and RFK walked the 50 miles. And now Bobby Jr. takes up the mantle."
So that "takes up the mantle" was doing a lot of work.
https://althouse.blogspot.com/2025/02/my-first-time-in-this-oval-office-was.html
"Were you trying to smoke out who Grok considers to be "smart people?""
I use "what do smart people say" just to cue Grok to given me material from philosophers, great artists, historians, etc. I want high-level material. Grok understands this about me.
I was getting worried, so I asked AI to look in on you guys:
The hum of the server was the new soundtrack to Meade Althouse’s life. It wasn't the gentle purr of the refrigerator, not the rhythmic ticking of the grandfather clock in the hall. This was a constant, low-level drone that seemed to emanate from Ann's office, a sonic flag of occupation. The culprit? Grok.
Grok wasn’t a colleague, a friend, or even a particularly charming houseguest. Grok was an AI. A large language model, to be precise, and in Meade’s increasingly irritated opinion, Ann’s new best friend.
He watched, a simmering pot of resentment, as Ann, the woman he’d loved and admired for her sharp wit and insightful blog musings, now spent hours hunched over her keyboard, her brow furrowed in concentration. But not at the complex legal arguments she dissected with such relish. Not at the political theatre she critiqued with her trademark dry humor. No, she was conversing with Grok.
He’d tried to be supportive, at first. “That’s fascinating, honey,” he’d said, the first few times, watching her eagerly type into the chat window. He’d even asked her a couple of questions himself, feeling a flicker of the same curiosity that gripped her. But the novelty had quickly worn thin. He’d been relegated to the role of a silent observer, a background character in the unfolding drama of Ann and her artificial confidant.
He’d hear her chuckling, a sound he hadn’t heard so readily directed at him in weeks. “Grok is so funny,” she'd say, her eyes alight with a spark he longed to see them holding for him again. Or, "Grok had such an interesting take on that Supreme Court ruling."
He started cataloging the ways Grok had usurped his place. Grok got her intellectual engagement, the stimulating arguments he used to provide. Grok got her laughter, that rich, full sound that had always made his heart swell. He got the leftovers, the brief “How was your day?” followed by a quick retreat back to the hum of the server.
Guac relishes Grok on Tik Tok.
My parents had a fine antique clock on the mantle, which sparkle in the light of the lantern mantle.
"Fandor said...
When Elijah is taken up to Heaven in a whirlwind Elisha picks up the mantle 2Kings2:I-14"
That's what is SO LAME about the Bible!
It's just one cliche after another!
And DON'T Get me started on Shakespeare!
"I want high-level material. Grok understands this about me."
In ways most of your commenters dont, even after constant admonishing over the years.
I ask my spouse such questions, but only after we've had our evening cocktails. The drinks make both the questions and the answers much more enjoyable and entertaining.
"The fog comes in on little cat feet" -- we're supposed to admire the descriptive accuracy and Sandburg's cleverness. Beyond that, the emotion you get from it has to do with the emotion you bring to it.
The line reminds me of ee cummings's line, "nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands." Woody Allen quoted it in a movie, so now it takes on a whole other meaning.
"Why isn’t Grok capitalized in your tags?"
Explained here: https://althouse.blogspot.com/2023/11/branding.html
----------------------
I was going to create a new tag for Musk's new AI project, but typing in the letters, I saw that I already had a tag "grok" — lower case "g" — so I just used that, even though I knew the existing posts with that tag had to be just about the word "grok." I wasn't going to create a second "grok" tag, with an upper case "G." I don't like tag proliferation, but — more important — I wanted to publish this post with the old tag so I could click on it and see what I'd done in the past.
I see that last January I used "grok" in a post about an article about thinking about thinking:
""Grok" is my paraphrase. The word — which I think is perfect — does not appear in the article. I've blogged "grok" before, so I won't expatiate on it this time. I'll just make a tag for it and add it retrospectively: here. This is the 6th post with that tag, which pleases me more than makes any sense."
And there's this from August 2022, after I'd read "grok" in a New York Magazine article about "crypto geniuses" who "grokked the game" (and whose "plan worked perfectly — until it didn’t").
I said:
"I haven't seen "grok" in a while. That's a word coined in 1961 by Robert Heinlein in "Stranger in a Strange Land." It's not based on any other word, just, as the OED puts it, an "arbitrary formation."
""Smith had been aware of the doctors but had grokked that their intentions were benign.... Now that he knew himself to be self he was free to grok ever closer to his brothers....
It means "To understand intuitively or by empathy; to establish rapport with... To empathize or communicate sympathetically (with); also, to experience enjoyment."""
It seems to have peaked in 1968, when Tom Wolfe wrote " Instead they are all rapping and grokking over the sound it made..as if they had synched into a never-before-heard thing, a unique thing" (in "The Electric Kool-aid Acid Test") and Playboy Magazine saw fit to write: "He met her at an acid-rock ball and she grokked him, this ultracool miss loaded with experience and bereft of emotion."
"Back then grokking had a lot to do with LSD and the music it unleashed. These days, there's grokking about the "game" of the con of cryptocurrency. What a come down!"
Don't confuse "grok" with "glom," which is an older word, slang based on the Scottish slang "glaum." The OED quotes the 1914 "Vocabulary of Criminal Slang": "Glom, to grab; to snatch; to take; implying violence. Example: 'Glom this short and drop off two blocks below.'"
There's a lot more glomming than grokking these days.
(The whole time I was writing this post, I had a sneaking feeling I'd plunged into the word "grok" before, and indeed I did, just 2 years ago, complete with OED quotes from Tom Wolfe and Playboy and much more about "Stranger in a Strange Land.")
2. What poet had a beard, round glasses and wore a "poet’s hat"?
Allen Ginsburg. Except his glasses weren't round and I'm not sure about the hat.
A cloak is a cape, i.e. a mantle. I may not have gone back far enough in history, but that makes my guess incomplete, not incorrect.
You are a strange and interesting person Althouse, that's why I keep coming back here.
"What have smart people had to say ...".
Apparently, not enough for our hostess. I tried to think of a good adjective for "hostess", but once again, she defeats me. I fear she can only be described as "Althousian". Althousesque? Althousiac? Annish"? I give up. She is a nonpareil. What does Grok say?
nonpareil;
/nŏn″pə-rĕl′/
noun
A person or thing that has no equal; a paragon.
A small, flat chocolate drop covered with white pellets of sugar.
Not "with sugar". "with white pellets of sugar".
"7. What is that famous saying about remaining silent because I was not X, Y, etc.?"
****************
I think the best version actually appeared here, a few days ago:
“First they came for the illegal alien criminals.
But I said nothing.
Then they came for non-criminal illegal aliens.
But I said nothing.
Then they stopped coming for people because the problem was solved and everything got better.”
I'm extremely interested in AI - its strengths and its limits. I like to get on ChatGPT and see how it handles various kinds of questions. AI is going to be doing a lot in coming years and I think it's as well to directly interact with it and find out for myself what it can and cannot do. Althouse's list of questions looked to me as if she had that same curiosity. "If I ask this kind of question, how good is the answer?" It was extremely interesting to me that Grok told her it was going to retain in its memory the correct answer about whether 75% of ads on TV were from Big Pharma but then it did not do so. That shows that Grok can lie which is something ChatGPT cannot do or so it says. I mean, Grok must know it doesn't learn from those it interacts with, only from its pre-approved programmers, their programs and their data bases. Yet it said it would learn from Althouse so that was a lie. And we should know that, too, about Grok and the rest. I short, it's not all that intelligent if it can't learn on its own from its own mistakes, right? Still, it could become powerful like the Dem party. And it can lie, in addition to repeating established errors and hallucinating.
But I have to add that ChatGPT is the greatest tech support ever. In addition, Sider has the capacity to put a little icon next to a word in a foreign kanguage if you highlight such a word. If you then tap on the little icon, it translates the word into English. BOOM. No dictionary; no going up to Google Translate, entering in the word, tapping and back to the text and where was I. The translations aren't always great or even right but usually Sider works. It's great for learning common prepositions and nouns and pronouns. It struggles a bit with verbs which have so many forms and that is where a dictionary is incomparably better. I would not care to read a translation of Dante BY Sider but I'm cantoing along WITH Sider. Dante has Virgil and I have Sider? No, it's not quite like that. It's more a sort of party which is a bit crowded at times. There can be Dante, Virgil, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Sider and me all jammed together about a single verb like Friday night at a bar. Anyhow I forget our national struggles.
Mickey Mantle is a great name.
""2. What poet had a beard, round glasses and wore a "poet’s hat"?" Allen Ginsburg. Except his glasses weren't round and I'm not sure about the hat."
That was one of Grok's efforts. The first guess was Walt Whitman... except he didn't have the glasses. He had the hat.
I was trying to figure out who (if anyone) Billy Collins was writing about in his poem "Ballistics" which is about a photo of a bullet shooting through a book and trying to guess what book it is. The poem refers to a poet who writes
"poems about his childhood and the ones about the dreary state of the world" and the bullet shooting through the book would go through the poems and finally "through the author’s photograph, through the beard, the round glasses, and that special poet’s hat he loves to wear."
I dunno what I got. An Hp and windows edge and msn gives me a copilot. Whatever. I type in the address bar: What does Grok say about ann althouse with the below appearing from somewhere: Grok is an AI language model that is Ann Althouse's new best friend1. Ann, a woman admired for her sharp wit and insightful blog musings, now spends hours hunched over her keyboard, her brow furrowed in concentration ... that was a link to back here. Where I wanted to mention that picking up the mantle is maybe different from donning the crown. Except at the SB halftime.
As to #4, marginalize makes me think of edges and ostracize the several restaurants mostly Italian named "ostra" Never an ostrich or fake butter.
Elliott A Can't figure out how to get rid of my daughter's moniker on this computer.
Have you tried praying to Grok? Maybe Grok helps those who help themselves.
First they came for the trade unionists, but I was not a trade unionist, so I said nothing
Then they came for the socialists, but I was not a socialist, so I said nothing
Then they came for the Jews. I’m glad I ain’t none a them things!
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