I put that quote in the post title because it had "festoon" and I'd just written "festoon" yesterday. A lot of people in the comments talked about "festoon," so I infer that you might want to talk about "festoon" again today.
The word began as a noun, and the original "festoon" was a garland of flowers. The etymology is "fest" (feast) plus the ending "-oon" (which is just an ending used way to make a noun). There are many words with "-oon," and I feel that a certain silliness is conveyed: balloon, cartoon, baboon, Brigadoon, doubloon, dragoon, lagoon, lampoon, maroon, harpoon, macaroon, pantaloon, saloon, saskatoon.... not to mention all the spoon and moon words and those outdated racial words quadroon and octoroon.
But the passage in the Jeremy Strong interview that I really wanted to highlight is this discussion of something in the book "Diaries, 1898-1902," by Alma Mahler Werfel:
But the passage in the Jeremy Strong interview that I really wanted to highlight is this discussion of something in the book "Diaries, 1898-1902," by Alma Mahler Werfel:
Werfel, a composer, who died in 1964, was married to her fellow composer Gustav Mahler, the writer Franz Werfel and the architect Walter Gropius. She also had a relationship with the painter Gustav Klimt. She was with Mahler and Klimt. She wrote that she observed this ongoing tension between what she called the loving soul and the calculating soul. The calculating soul only led so far. So there’s a desire in me and maybe in others to align with only that other part of myself. But it’s not the whole truth. You want to play in first chair and you want to play pieces that will make you grow and allow you to be fully expressed; there’s a reason to try to gravitate toward the best material. The fact is, sadly, you don’t have access to that unless you have a certain amount of power — access to what they call in the business “deal flow.” I guess actors don’t want to talk about the idea of there being a marketplace, because that does feel, as you said, gauche. I do feel that there’s an inverse relationship between creative flourishing and whatever recalibrations you’re willing to make to fit into a market....
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Alma Schindler was a beautiful and intelligent woman who had a penchant for finding the most interesting men she could find and starting something. This is an art, and she was one of its most accomplished practitioners.
For each of these men she was the muse - she was the straw that stirred the drink, but they did not take her seriously as an composer. For her, there were dead husbands and children along the way, just as it was for the less materially fortunate at that time. These were "modern times" but not medically. She certainly lived through "interesting times" and she did it with interesting people.
People are still talking about Alma, something which may still be true in another hundred years.
Tom Lehrer wrote a song about Alma:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L35IiVHZBTk
Maroon is both a verb and a noun. As a verb, it refers to a punishment or a banishment at sea. Just for giggles, let's assume that Althouse is a pirate living and thieving among other pirates on the Spanish Main. However, she's an unusually disagreeable pirate... well, all pirates are disagreeable to their victims, but let's stipulate that Pirate Althouse is disagreeable with her shipmates to the point that she has gotten into a fight and killed one. A peculiar thing about 17th-century piracy, particularly the buccaneers, the "brethren of the coast" as they often called themselves, was their code of ethics. The pirates were democrats (small d, infinitely preferable morally to large D) -- they elected their leaders, shared the loot equally, and compensated the wounded. Furthermore, pirates were generally forbidden to kill other pirates, though a pirate who broke the rules was seldom punished with death. Instead, he was marooned -- put ashore on a deserted island with a loaf of bread, a flask of water, and a pistol with one shot. Usually, the marooned pirate died of thirst or suicide, but a few survived by discovering a source of water and food. Pirate queen Althouse has killed her fellow sea thief, Quaestor Pegleg, in a quarrel over the exact meaning of replevin. Consequently, she earns buccaneer capital punishment and is marooned.
Sometimes, pirates volunteered to be marooned. One of these was one Alexander Selkirk, who signed onto a buccaneering enterprise in the Pacific intended to raid Spanish settlements on the western coasts of the Americas. He grew dissatisfied with the seaworthiness of ship and requested to be marooned on one of the uninhabited Juan Fernández Islands off the coast of Chile where he lived alone for 52 months. His adventures inspired the novel Robinson Crusoe.
The problem with being marooned and surviving is going crazy from the isolation, which brings us to the noun. A maroon is a sort of lunatic, not a raving maniac per se, but definitively cracked. The stereotype is the character Ben Gunn from Robert Lewis Stevenson's Treasure Island. Like "poor Ben Gunn", Althouse manages to survive marooning but goes a bit loopy and starts blogging. Bugs Bunny frequently used the term in the classic WB cartoons. Some believe he is mispronouncing moron, but it's clear from the scripts Bugs was using maroon in its original sense known to all seafarers in the Golden Age of Piracy.
Is he gay?
I've always liked poltroon.
Althouse writes, "...not to mention all the spoon and moon words and those outdated racial words quadroon and octoroon."
These come into English via 16th-century Spanish. Thanks to Eurasian diseases like smallpox and cholera, the native populations of the New World were drastically reduced to the point that the importation of African slaves became economically viable. When you run short of Indians to do the hard manual labor you're unwilling to pay wages for, what else can you do? The Spanish kept track of their lower orders in such detail that quadroon, someone with one black African grandparent became common words. Apparently, a quadroon ranked below an octaroon.
Many other oon words are of Spanish origin, doubloon and maroon among them. Having discussed maroon ad nauseam, prepare for further tummy trouble regarding doubloon. Hernan Cortez captured tons of gold from the conquered Mexica and shipped much of it back to Spain in whatever form the gold happened to be in -- jewelry, idols, what have you... decades later the Spanish established mints in the New World where looted or newly mined gold and silver was made into coinage ready for circulation, among these were the doubloons, five to be precise, but the most common then and rarest now was the double escudo, a 22-karat coin weighing about as much as seven paperclips -- not very big and not very durable. Being soft the double escudos often got bent or crushed or defaced to the point that their value as currency became suspect. Consequently, many got recycled into jewelry or dental gold. The larger eight escudo doubloon was more durable and most often found in modern collections. It was also the model for the first United States gold coinage since they were already in common circulation, particularly in the South. In a similar manner, the Spanish ocho reales coin, the buccaneer's piece of eight, became the model for our silver dollar.
From nearly the beginning of Age of Exploration and New World Slavery, the bolder badasses among the enslaved jumped the fence and lit out for the hills. There are 'maroon' communities in Brazil and other places that are centuries old.
My former colleague Rachel Scott is an authority on Alma Mahler.
I'm sure I don't know who Jeremy Strong is.
Quaestor, in a previous era Althouse was accused of being a dirty libtard pirate whore, though not an unusually disagreeable one. Retirement can be a kind of Marion's. intellectual marooning for some but not if you keep around a curmudgeonly band of fellow maroons.
BarrySanders20 writes, "I've always liked poltroon."
A very useful word in a world containing Keith Olbermann.
Ah, one of them play-actin' fellas.
My favorite -oon word is poon.
George Washington is quoted at least a couple times calling someone a stupid poltroon. So I have become a sort of fan of that word myself.
Too soon the coon ran over the dune
chased by babboons.
What a paltroon.
Bassoon. Monsoon, cartoon, boon, coon, rune. Soon. Loon, noon.
"There’s a part of me that doesn’t have anything to say..."
I believe this is probably healthy because he has to share/platoon himself with the characters he is asked to play.
At the theme park I used to work at, string lights became popular a few years ago...VERY popular. The design department referred to them as "festoon lights." It got to the point where, if someone said "festoons" at a production meeting, it was automatically assumed they means string lights. I was, literally, purchasing miles of festoon lights every year.
Ann - My favorite -oon word is buffoon, especially its variant buffoonery, meaning stuff so stupid it can only be the end product of one or more buffoons. You should use these two words more!
Alma Mahler, who I just now heard of, got around. There are some women, interesting in their own right, who manage to pair off with some of the more interesting men of their era. They weren't really groupies or star fuckers like Lady Hamilton or Hillary. They were accomplished women. I suppose Cleopatra holds the patent, but one thinks of Madame de Stael, Frida Kahlo, and Lou Salome. Too bad Alma never got it on with Salome. That would be cool. I'd rather have a threesome with Alma and Salome than with Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville West, but their dinner conversation was probably more interesting.
"What an ultra-maroon!"
- B. Bunny.
After seeing Jeremy Strong festooned in an orange idiot hat.
festooned in an orange idiot hat.
poltroon (n.)
"A coward; a nidgit; a scoundrel" [Johnson, who spells it poltron], 1520s, from French poultron "rascal, coward; sluggard" (16c., Modern French poltron), from Italian poltrone "lazy fellow, coward," from poltro "lazy, cowardly," which is apparently from poltro "couch, bed" (compare Milanese polter, Venetian poltrona "couch"), perhaps from a Germanic source (compare Old High German polstar "pillow;" see bolster (n.)), or perhaps from Latin pullus "young of an animal" (from PIE root *pau- (1) "few, little").
- etymonline.com
Thar she blows... pardon me, pass me the harpoon.
Althouse writes, "...not to mention all the spoon and moon words and those outdated racial words quadroon and octoroon."
Here's a ditty from the 1950s TV series, Disneyland, full of oons delivered at high speed.
(You should watch the entire program, it's quite nice and a hint at what good taste was and can be again.)
Crap, I linked to the beginning of that video. Try this one instead.
n.n writes, "poltroon (n.)
It appears "couch potato" is a synonym.
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