OT: Possible French idiom? (fairly long, ok? ok?)

In a message dated 2004:02:16 08:31:46 PM, axiem@FASTMAIL.FM writes:

>From my experience, both "slow down" and "slow up" are perfectly acceptable,
>and I've both heard and used both. As for any difference or origin, I can't
>think of much. My best guess is that if you have a spinner a la Wheel of
>Fortune (where it has a bunch of poles that click something), as the wheel
>slows down in a rotation, the sound produced "goes down" in pitch (tone?
>I don't know sound terms).
    Pitch periodicity IIRC is the most specific acoustic/musical terminology.

Of related interest might be this website on "acousmatics":
http://cec.concordia.ca/econtact/Quebec/McFarlane.html


In a message dated 2004:02:16 06:52:46 PM, treborjung@FREE.FR writes:

>Another question: Why in English do we say 'Slow down!' and 'Hurry up!'?
>Why not 'Slow up!' and 'Hurry down!'? Or is this just how idioms work -
>they make no sense - or is there some (historical?) reason for using 'up'
>with one verb and 'down' with another?
    It's all about a language's - and a culture's or even a subculture's
sense of lexico-semantics.
    Just look at the Afro-American slang for anti-intellectualism: dummy down
        as in "Hey man, don't be so f*ckin' White [or, in my case, geeky
Chink-like]. Dummy down to our level." To which I have replied: I do not play that
game as I do not think a level playing field is realistic in the long run ;)
Don't you want to have a sharp edge and be truly dangerous? Then now aspire to
greater things instead of being lazy.
    Pisses them off pretty mightily, but mayhaps enough that they end up
reaching for the stars...

    - versus the quite different lexico-semantic space of HardBoiled slang for
 "playing dumb": _dummy up_
        i.e. "I never talked to either the bulls [prison guards] or blowhard
cons when I was doin' hardtime [a long sentence in prison]. I never talked to
cops on the beat. Or your average thug out on the Streets. I dummied up. I
ain't no snitch or busybody. I mind my own ball of wax..."

    ... AFAIK only in America has anti-intellectualism and the "Lowest Common
Denominator" have been extolled with such colourful slang in mainstream
popular culture...
    Everywhere else it's quite different  -  esp'ly in certain "scholar
subcultures" like those of the Jewish and Chinese ... & the once great British
"soldier-scholar" ideal as exemplified by Sir Richard Burton and Sir Ernest Henry
Shackleton.
    And most of the time, "the best and brightest" cut the bleedin'
mamby-pamby B.S. and just call it "mob-mentality"* or "rabble-mindedness","the
democracy of mediocrity" and "plain and simple idiocy"...

* and considering gangster/gangbanger rap music,
this definitely takes on a darker shade of meaning ;)

    ... and the more Nietzschean/Social Darwinistic/Eugenic/neo-Fascistic
amongst intellectuals call for the "culling of the human race" or, as one friend
of mine sarcastically says, "time to chlorinate the shallow end of the gene
pool"... to which I said the shallow end of the gene pool seems to be killing
itself off quite well without any further measures or "solutions" necessary or
called for... Mother Nature works just fine, thank you. Just my lil Taoist vote
of confidence in the mysterious seemingly chaotic ways God or the Cosmos
moves and works...
    ... and my feral-child-like Anarchistic response to any euphemistic
schemings for State-sponsored mass abortions and mass capital punishment/murder and
a Techno-elitist Globalist culture of total war and death-dealing for profit,
the filthy lucre of Mammon and Babylon. (Gibber Gibber ides of March thee
Roman Empire istill with us in the Statist-US Quo...)
    IMHO Murder is Murder, killing is killing, ... death is death is death!!!

    Let's not fool ourselves with Orwellian "NewSpeak" and chatter of
"necessary evils," it does not serve humanity in the long run. We Higher Primates are
a creative and resourceful species - let's use our monkeybrainies to avoid
all "necessary evils" and the "everyday banality of evil."
    I believe in "Perpetual Revolution, raw life, like love, dazzling at
every moment" - By Any Means Creative and Imaginable.
    I believe in Total Animal Liberation: time to stop being "bad animals"
and start being "good animals." All us animals are all onboard this Good
Spaceship Earth together...

    Besides the best and longest lasting forms of social change always start
from the grass-roots up - on this Taoism, Anarchism and some decent thinking
forms of non-kneejerk Christianity are in total agreement. I am utterly
confident there are other "human-animal-sized" worldviews that share this principle
as well :)
    And the best well-known example of this is Jesus Christ. He worked and
lived and "hung out" with the dregs of society - the wretched, the poor, the
despised, the feared... and he was also famous for such proto-Surrealistic
word-play such as the earthy peasant, GrouchoMarxist, transcultural humour of the
parable form, i.e. the splinter in your neighbor's eye versus the beam in your
own. What a worldview! ;)

my friend and music teacher/colleague John Chalmers writes:

>There is a research center at Rotarua, NZ that had close connections to
>the Genetics department at Berkeley. One of my friends was there for awhile--
>said the local Maori cheftains used to order fresh fish brought by runner
from
>the ocean. If the fish weren't fresh enough, they ate the runners instead.
    LMAO No blinkin' wonder the North Island Maori extol efficiency and
strategic thinking. They had no choice but to... No wonder they practically fought
the British to a standstill.
    And my Russian Afghan war vet friend Yuri - lurking on this list
somewhere or accessing it somehow - admires them saying that Soviet Communism could
have learned immensely from them as they - like so many strong tribalists, past,
present and accounted for - are the world's only true practising
Anarcho-Communists.
    "They know how to look out for the interests of the collective and that
the very existence and survival of the collective starts with individual and
total commitment - love - for one another."
    This from a hard-bitten ex-KGB/SPETSNAZ political officer/expert on
guerilla warfare is impressive praise indeed.

    "It is we who built those palaces and cities here in Spain and America
and everywhere. We, the workers, can build others to take their place. And
better ones. We are not in the least afraid of ruins. We are going to inherit the
earth.... We carry a new earth in our hearts." - Buenaventura Durruti y Domingo
(1896- 1936), anarchist militia organizer in the Spanish Civil War,
assassinated by 5th columnist fascists

    All of the above may seem long-winded and "off-the-wall" Off Topic, but I
remind you that one reason I love language (and language play) is also
part&parcel of my worldview which is interdependent with/on, YEP, duh, language...

    enuff said, never enuff ever done...

--- *DiDJiBuNgA!!* ---

Hanuman "Stitch" Zhang, ManglaLanger (mangle + manga + lang)

     Language[s] change[s]: vowels shift, phonologies crash-&-burn, grammars
leak, morpho-syntactics implode, lexico-semantics mutate, lexicons explode,
orthographies reform, typographies blip-&-beep, slang flashes, stylistics
warp... linguistic (R)evolutions mark each-&-every quantum leap... languages are
"naturally evolved wild systems... So language does not impose order on a chaotic
universe, but reflects its own wildness back." - Gary Snyder

"Some Languages Are Crushed to Powder but Rise Again as New Ones" -
a chapter on pidgins and creoles, John McWhorter,
_The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language_

= ¡gw'araa legooset caacaa!
    ¡reez'arvaa. saalvaa. reecue. scoopaa-goomee en reezijcloo! =
[Fight Linguistic Waste!
    Save, Salvage, Recover, Scavenge and Recycle!]