"'That's really chill,' is saved for something really good, like new suede sneakers with a double set of laces..."

"... or some sharp clothing, known as 'gear.' But that's only if the shoes or 'kicks' are Pumas or Adidas. For teen-age boys, this summer's sharpest 'gear' is matching nylon BVD T-shirts and shorts, with the elastic waistband showing out of the top of Lee jeans. A 'chill' outfit for a girl is tight Sergio Valente or Tale Lord jeans, black loafers and anklets."

That's from an August 1983 NYT article, "City Teenagers Talking Up a 'Say When' Storm."

I'm reading that article this morning because I got a bit annoyed by the use of "chill" in this NYT headline: "Austin Abrams Is Pretty Chill, Actually." Ugh. When did we start talking like that and why haven't we stopped?

I'm talking about "chill" as an adjective meaning "Free from anxiety or stress; relaxed, calm; easy-going, laid-back" — to quote the definition in the OED.

The OED calls it "North American slang," and, tracing its appearance in print back to 1983, quotes that NYT article and a slightly earlier writing, the March 1983 UNC-CH typescript "Campus Slang": "Try to be chill when the cops ask you why you ran the red light doing 75 mph."

The slang use of "chill" as a verb meaning to "calm down, relax, take it easy" — which I find less annoying — is a few years older. The OED finds it first in a 1979 song lyric (quoted in a 1992 book):

"We do not become good readers and learners by mastering generalizable skills but rather by acquiring the vocabulary, grammatical knowledge and stock of information..."

"... that allow us to make sense of a text. A child who knows a lot about baseball will do a better job reading and summarizing a passage on baseball than a child with a higher reading level but no knowledge of the subject. From this perspective, it is better to read a classic than a relatable contemporary story not only because one is beautiful and the other is not, but because a classic, by the very fact of its persistence over time, has become part of our shared culture. It thus increases our conversancy with all the texts from that culture. That is why it makes sense for fifth graders in Texas to read 'The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe,' 'The Phantom Tollbooth,' 'Paul Revere’s Ride' and even, speaking of baseball, 'Casey at the Bat.'"

I'm reading "What Blue States Can Learn From the Texas Book List" and "Texas Book List: See What Students Will Be Required to Read/What is essential reading? Texas has an answer: Classics, including the Bible" (NYT gift links).

I liked reading that booklist. Interesting to see various Bible readings pop up amid the poems and storybooks. You know what the first Bible story is? I comes up in Kindergarten: Jonah 1:1-5, 10-17, 2:10. What translation?, I wonder. And what verses are skipped over? Are the little ones going to read...

The water came over me and choked me;

the sea covered me completely,
and seaweed wrapped around my head.
I went down to the very roots of the mountains,
into the land whose gates lock shut forever

"It was a garbage truck the size of a whale."

Says Alec Baldwin, on Instagram, endeavoring to explain why he crashed his car into a tree. Apparently, he was "cut off" by the biggest garbage truck he'd ever seen. "To avoid hitting him, I hit a tree." 

ABC has the story: "Alec Baldwin crashes car into a tree in East Hampton: Authorities/Alec Baldwin is okay after he crashed his car into a tree, authorities said." ("He went on [Instagram] and said that a 'garbage truck the size of a whale' cut him off on the road").

Had you thought about the relative size of a whale and a garbage truck?

Thanks to Chris for asking ChatGPT for that visualization. And for this alternative, from Gemini:

Trump likened to a lion and to Elon Musk's rocket.

In this ad, tweeted last night by Elon Musk:

pic.twitter.com/aVk3rLClpT

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 28, 2024

I have to just try to imagine the people who get all jazzed up by music and montage like that. Here's something — also pro-Trump and heavy on the A.I. — that I saw yesterday and found more appealing:

"Researchers are unsure... but theories include that it is a playful manifestation of the mammals’ curiosity, a social fad or..."

"... the intentional targeting of what they perceive as competitors for their favourite prey, the local bluefin tuna."

From "Yacht sinks after latest incident involving orcas in strait of Gibraltar/Vessel measuring 15 metres in length sank after encounter with the animals, Spain’s maritime rescue service reports" (The Guardian). 

Also: "Experts believe them to involve a subpopulation of about 15 individuals given the designation 'Gladis.'"

From last year in The Guardian: "The orca uprising: whales are ramming boats – but are they inspired by revenge, grief or memory?" That's a much more interesting article....

"There was no emotion. While we were getting things done, we all had that feeling, ‘I can’t believe this is happening,’ but it didn’t keep us from doing what we needed to do and prepare ourselves to abandon ship."

From "Sailboat crew rescued in Pacific after abandoning ship sunk by whale/ Four people aboard the Raindancer were stranded in the Pacific Ocean for 10 hours" (WaPo).

"I want to write a story about whale research"/"That is boring"/"What if I insinuate misogyny in the headline?"/"What does that have to do with the research? And how would you manage that?"/"Oh... I have a plan."

A conversation between the reporter and the editor is imagined by the most-liked commenter on the WaPo article, "Young women are criticized for this vocal tic — but it helps whales survive/A new study in the journal Science finds many of the marine mammals vocalize in a strikingly similar way to humans."

The "tic" is vocal fry, AKA "creaky voice."

The whales and dolphins are engaging in echolocation. I'd listen with delight to young women doing vocal fry if I thought it was helping them find their way in the darkness. Well, but... be creative: "the darkness" is a metaphor. It can symbolize the cruel and ignorant world. Who is to say that women are not navigating through the use of those wacky throat vibrations as they speak? They sound more masculine — and more annoying too. Clear the path, they're coming through!

"They’re surprisingly flexible animals, and they twist and turn and their flukes get entangled. The lobster lines can then tighten..."

"... around their caudal peduncle – the tail stock – causing it to necrotise... a horrible slow death...."

Says Philip Hoare, author of Leviathan," quoted in "Save whales or eat lobster? The battle reaches the White House/Fishing gear used by Maine lobstermen is killing right whales. Will boosting a $1bn industry trump protecting an endangered species?" (The Guardian)(The White House served lobster at a recent state dinner).

In his effort to stir up an appreciation for whales that outstrips our taste for lobster, Hoare stresses their "very long sessions of foreplay of three or four hours." 

Males possess the biggest testes of any animal on the planet, and the mating often involves several males and a single female – a “socially active group” in scientific terms. “You see them rolling around in shallow water in a very sensual way, stroking each other with their flippers. There are a lot of animals involved, and it’s clearly erotic. They seem so caught up in the moment.”

When you think about how far you would go sacrificing your own interests for the sake of saving an animal from suffering and needless death, how much are you counting their sexual performance? What counts more — the size of their testicles, the amount of time devoted to insuring that the female has an orgasm, or the extent to which they seem to be having what the humans call "fun"?

"Plum-pudding is the term bestowed upon certain fragmentary parts of the whale's flesh, here and there adhering to the blanket of blubber..."

"... and often participating to a considerable degree in its unctuousness. It is a most refreshing, convivial, beautiful object to behold. As its name imports, it is of an exceedingly rich, mottled tint, with a bestreaked snowy and golden ground, dotted with spots of the deepest crimson and purple. It is plums of rubies, in pictures of citron. Spite of reason, it is hard to keep yourself from eating it. I confess, that once I stole behind the foremast to try it. It tasted something as I should conceive a royal cutlet from the thigh of Louis le Gros might have tasted, supposing him to have been killed the first day after the venison season, and that particular venison season contemporary with an unusually fine vintage of the vineyards of Champagne."

Just a fragment of "Moby Dick," pulled up this morning as part of a real-world conversation that I am too discreet to recount.

A royal cutlet from the thigh of Louis le Gros — that killed me.

"But I’m also getting more obsessive about human beings over huge swaths of time. Part of that came out of being on the Isle of Skye..."

"... during the serious U.K. lockdown. On Skye, if there’s a rock somewhere, it’s probably because somebody put it there. I realized that the rock that I was using to keep the lid on my dustbin was a stone that had been dragged around. People have been in this place for thousands and thousands of years, and in this bay I’m living in, they’ve left behind rocks!"

Said Neil Gaiman, quoted in "Neil Gaiman Knows What Happens When You Dream" (NYT).

Very like a whale.

 

Nice. Irrelevantly, that got me thinking of the cloud-gazing in "Hamlet":

Hamlet: Do you see yonder cloud that’s almost in shape of a camel? 

Polonius: By the mass, and ‘tis like a camel, indeed. 

Hamlet: Methinks it is like a weasel. 

Polonius: It is backed like a weasel. 

Hamlet: Or like a whale? 

Polonius: Very like a whale.

Yonder dialogue is almost in the shape of an activist talking to a wokester....

Fisherman in Yemen haul in a dead sperm whale and discover, inside it, ambergris worth $1.5 million.

 

On the topic of ambergris, there is this from Herman Melville's "Moby Dick":

At the Moby Dick Café...

 

... you can pursue your dreams.

"'chunk" and 'chunks' two posts down. Lot of chunk-ing this morning. How often has that word appeared in your posts over the years?"

TML writes in the comments to a post that begins with the Trump quote "So they take over a big chunk of a city called Seattle."

The other post is about a city that "voted to name a park for a 1970 explosion that rained chunks of rotting whale flesh on curious bystanders."

So how often has "chunk" come up over the 16 years of this blog? Oh, maybe 50 or 100, but the most interesting thing is that one time, back in 2015, it came up twice in one day and I made it the word of the day:

"Chunk" is the word of the day here... for no other reason than that it's come up on its own twice: "invented something called the 'Cha-Chunker'" and "pegs in their hubs that can 'take chunks out of' the granite ledge." It's a funny word, isn't it? One thinks of "blowing chunks" or the "Goonies" boy Chunk or — if you're really old — "What a chunk o' chocolate":



The word "chunk" somehow devolved from "chuck" — the squarish cut of meat — and "chuck," like "cluck," is the English speaker's reproduction of the sound a chicken makes.

"Chunk" is a notably American word. Here are some of the quotes collected by the (unlinkable) OED:

1856   E. K. Kane Arctic Explor. II. i. 15   A chunk of frozen walrus-beef....
1833   J. Hall Legends of West 50   If a man got into a chunk of a fight with his neighbour, a lawyer would clear him for half a dozen muskrat skins....
a1860   New York in Slices, Theatre (Bartl.),   Now and then a small chunk of sentiment or patriotism or philanthropy is thrown in....
1894   Congress. Rec. 13 July 7445/1   Just one moment, my friend. You are a lawyer... Yes, a chunk of a lawyer.
1907   Chicago Tribune 8 May 7 (advt.)    It's really ridiculous the way we've knocked chunks off these Spring overcoat prices.
1923   P. G. Wodehouse Inimitable Jeeves xiii. 148   Eustace and I both spotted that he had dropped a chunk of at least half a dozen pages out of his sermon-case as he was walking up to the pulpit.
1957   T. S. Eliot On Poetry & Poets 49   Crabbe is a poet who has to be read in large chunks, if at all.

As for other uses of "chunk," there's Trump on June 12, 2020, also going on about Seattle: "They took over a city, a city, a big city, Seattle, a chunk of it. A big chunk."

And I myself used the word only yesterday: "We — some of us — prefer the multicolored distractions of illusionism on the flat surface of the embedded video on Twitter as protesters drag down another stately chunk of metal."

This is also me, on July 5, 2018: "You know, out there in New York, California, and Massachusetts, they may think of the Midwest as a big undifferentiated chunk of flyover country, but to those of us who live here, our state (and even our region within the state) is quite specific."

In 2017, I wrote: "The corpse of Salvador Dali was exhumed to cut out some body parts to test to determine whether he was the father of a woman who's seeking a chunk of his estate." You can see that I used "chunk" there to create a poetic connection between the estate and the fleshly corpse.

Back in 2014, I had the occasion to parody Bob Dylan:

Well, that wigged art blonde
With his wheel in the gorge
And Turtle, that friend of theirs
With his checks all forged
And his cheeks in a chunk
With his cheese that says "ouch"
They’re all gonna be there
On that 82-million-dollar couch

In October 2008, I said: "The most honest admission in the book, to my ear, was the confession that he spent a huge chunk of his formative years watching TV sitcoms with his (white) grandfather." I had just read Obama's "Dreams From My Father."

And speaking of "From My Father," I have something from my "Records From My Father" series. I said: "Unfortunately, this record, my 5th choice for this Records From My Father series, has a chunk taken out of it, and so I can't listen to Count Basie's 'One O'Clock Jump' or Dinah Shore singing 'Buttons and Bows.'"



What were all the other things? Mostly "chunk" appeared in quotes. The chunks tend to be of food, of time, of land or rock, and of money. I was pleased to see that in these years, I'd never once used (or even quoted) the trite phrase "chunk of change."

"We should celebrate our mistakes" says one resident of Florence, Oregon...

... quoted in "‘Exploding Whale’ Park Memorializes Blubber Blast 50 Years Later/Residents of a coastal Oregon city voted to name a park for a 1970 explosion that rained chunks of rotting whale flesh on curious bystanders" (NYT).

It's not so much the belief in celebrating mistakes that caused this park to get the name "Exploding Whale Memorial Park." It's that they put up an online survey, and the alternatives were things like “Bridge View Park” and “Siuslaw River View Park.” It's how that British ship (almost) got stuck with the name “Boaty McBoatface” and some town in Estonia ended up with a marijuana leaf on its flag....

I just love #Estonia! The rest of the European Union, especially Sweden, has so much to learn from Estonian civilisation. The commune of #Kanepi just voted to let a #cannabis plant grace its local flag. Hurrah hurrah! https://t.co/HNFYGtFOFn #marijuana #EU

— Alexander Bard (@Bardissimo) March 9, 2018

ADDED:

"Beluga trip's off."

Your aunt who just now realized we should quarantine pic.twitter.com/IQ7EHWnRBQ

— Meg Stalter (@megstalter) March 17, 2020

From "Escape Our Current Hell With These (Good) Coronavirus Jokes" (NY Magazine).

Brandishing a narwhal tusk to fight the London Bridge terrorist.

The terrorist was armed with a knife, and the narwhal tusk was 5 feet long, I'm reading in "Narwhal tusk and fire extinguisher used to tackle London Bridge attacker/Members of the public, including a convicted murderer, bring terrorist to the ground" (The Guardian).

Scotland Yard is investigating how 28-year-old Usman Khan was able to launch the attack in London Bridge, despite being known to the authorities and fitted with an electronic tag to monitor his movements. He was allowed out a year ago after serving time for his part in a plot to blow up the London Stock Exchange.

In footage that has since emerged, Khan is sprayed with a fire extinguisher, while another man tries to suppress the assailant with a narwhal tusk – a long pointed tooth from a type of whale – lunging at him. It is believed the item was pulled from the wall of Fishmongers’ Hall, a grade II-listed building on London Bridge, by a Polish chef called Lucasz....

ADDED: I'm re-reading "Moby-Dick," so let me give you the chapter on the narwhal:

"What was America in 1492 but a Loose-Fish, in which Columbus struck the Spanish standard by way of waifing it for his royal master and mistress?"

"What was Poland to the Czar? What Greece to the Turk? What India to England? What at last will Mexico be to the United States? All Loose-Fish. What are the Rights of Man and the Liberties of the World but Loose-Fish? What all men's minds and opinions but Loose-Fish? What is the principle of religious belief in them but a Loose-Fish? What to the ostentatious smuggling verbalists are the thoughts of thinkers but Loose-Fish? What is the great globe itself but a Loose-Fish? And what are you, reader, but a Loose-Fish and a Fast-Fish, too?"

From Chapter 89 "Moby-Dick" — "Fast-Fish and Loose-Fish" — which I'm reading this morning because of one of the best comments I've ever read on this blog, written by Left Bank of the Charles, on a post about an article in Slate in which a man complains about the difficulty making money by picking up and recharging the electric scooters of Santa Monica.

(The earlier post gives you a longer passage from "Moby-Dick" and the connection to the electric scooter problem, but new comments would be better on this new post.)

"There are a lot of movies about reading. I think there are a lot of people who consume movies that cater to their self-image as a reader of books."

"It's quite silly," I wrote in the comments to the post about the trailer for the high-action, special-effects HBO movie based on "Fahrenheit 451." My comment was inspired by a comment from Ron Winkleheimer:

I'm surprised that HBO made this movie since the people in charge are all leftists. I suppose they are still flattering themselves about being the side that's in favor of knowledge and learning and free speech and all that.

What are the movies about reading that cater to this vanity I'm imagining exists?

Here's "25 best movies about books" (Stuff), but many of these are about writing books. The central character is a writer, not a reader. "Neverending Story" "The Princess Bride," "Fahrenheit 451," "Misery"... those fit my search.

Here's "When movie characters read books." For example, the guy in "Friends with Kids" reads "Cod," so, yeah, you get it: That guy! The guy who reads "Cod." Matilda reads "Moby-Dick." You know what that means!

Anyway... it's a hypothesis. Something else reading-related that I was reading this morning is "RuPaul’s Drag Race Recap: Fun, Friends, Maybe More" (New York Magazine):

[A] fun and playfully shady conversation between several of the queens has Asia O’Hara reading Vixen for wearing someone else’s wig during last week’s Best Drag runway. It’s an understandable thing to pick at, and the Vixen responds good-naturedly about it. Until Aquaria butts in.

“Can we talk about how your best drag is someone else’s wig, though? That’s confusing.” Game over. As the Vixen prepares to go fully in on Aquaria in response, a spider crawls its way up someone’s tulle and wreaks total pandemonium* with its mere existence....

Boldface added. I had to look up "reading" in Urban Dictionary:

In gay culture, the act of pointing out a flaw in someone else (usually publicly and in front of them) and exaggerating it.

Gay guy 1: "Those shorts weren't made for you, honey. Look at that muffin top. More like a cupcake top!"

Gay guy 2: "Bitch, why are you reading me?

Also, "read":

To tell someone about themself, mostly used by gay black men.

"That was a read honey!"
"Don't do it hone[y], I will read your ass"

Great slang. Perfect!
___________________________

* Pandemonium — originally "The abode of all demons; hell, the infernal regions" (OED) — is now usually "Utter confusion, uproar; wild and noisy disorder; a tumult; chaos." Like this:

At the Whale-Vomits-Jonah Café...

... feel free to spew what you like.

And remember the Althouse Portal to Amazon.

The photo is from the "Ancestral Modern: Australian Aboriginal Art" exhibit at the Chazen Museum. The painting in the foreground is "Whale Fish Vomiting Jonah" (1993) by Jarinyanu David Downs.

The fish story from the Bible (KJV): "Now the Lord had prepared a great fish to swallow up Jonah. And Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights. Then Jonah prayed unto the Lord his God out of the fish's belly, and said, I cried by reason of mine affliction unto the Lord, and he heard me; out of the belly of hell cried I, and thou heardest my voice. For thou hadst cast me into the deep, in the midst of the seas; and the floods compassed me about: all thy billows and thy waves passed over me. Then I said, I am cast out of thy sight; yet I will look again toward thy holy temple. The waters compassed me about, even to the soul: the depth closed me round about, the weeds were wrapped about my head. I went down to the bottoms of the mountains; the earth with her bars was about me for ever: yet hast thou brought up my life from corruption, O Lord my God. When my soul fainted within me I remembered the Lord: and my prayer came in unto thee, into thine holy temple. They that observe lying vanities forsake their own mercy. But I will sacrifice unto thee with the voice of thanksgiving; I will pay that that I have vowed. Salvation is of the Lord. And the Lord spake unto the fish, and it vomited out Jonah upon the dry land."