It won't be long until 50,000 Tucsonans head down to the 4th Avenue Winter Street Fair this weekend. Food vendors have already started setting up the on North Fourth Avenue and East Seventh Street. The infamous PIGGLY'S BBQ and Grill didn't waste anytime setting up shop, and the only thing missing is the auroma from the turkey legs on the grill and the deep fried piggly fries.

If you build it, they will come ... #Tucson #streetfair pic.twitter.com/WqmnfwEY65
— Tucson Weekly (@tucsonweekly) December 12, 2013

It's been too long since we have enjoyed a 4th Ave Street Fair funnel cake. #Tucson #food #cake pic.twitter.com/r6elrzY7rp
— Tucson Weekly (@tucsonweekly) December 12, 2013

It’s time to feed your inner nerd.

Restaurant. Here in the 21st century we take restaurants for granted. But restaurants didn’t exist in the Western world until the late 1700’s. There were taverns and inns that served food and drink to travelers, and you could take out baked goods from a bakery, but there was nothing like leisure social dining just for the heck of it. There wasn’t even a word for the concept, not until the restaurant was invented. The story of the origin of restaurant that I’m about to tell has been the accepted version for a couple of hundred years, but as is often the case with word origins that go back a ways, parts of it have been disputed in some quarters. Anyway, here we go…..

Attending City High School is a much different experience than if I had chosen to go to a public school. Charter schools in general have a different agenda, and being located in downtown Tucson provides even more of a chance to stand out among most high schools. Whether its by calling our teachers by their first name or gathering for a Whole School Meeting every Wednesday (yes, we can fit the whole school into one room), we always manage to set ourselves apart. Especially when, once a month, we have our Community Day.

Community Day was designed around the idea that students not only learn better when outside of the classroom and in their surrounding environment, but that they can give back, as well. A week in advance, we're sent an email in which we choose from a list of community organizations that we want to participate in that following Friday. The options include Ben's Bells, Ironwood Tree Experience, going down to the Las Milpitas farm, the Poetry center, and my personal favorite, Playformance.

It’s time to feed your inner nerd.

Now that Chanukah (or is it Hannukah, or Hannukkaahh?!), is upon us, a lot of candles are being lit. Even those who don’t celebrate the Festival of Lights are lighting candles and luminaria—there’s just something about the winter holidays that sends us into a lighting frenzy.

This got me to thinking about light, and that got me to thinking about dictionaries. Yeah, I know, that seems like a weird connection, but there is a connection—in a geeky sort of way.

We take all those stuffy dictionary definitions for granted, but some of them were really, really hard to come up with. One of the most notoriously difficult definitions was for light. Samuel Johnson wrote the first general English dictionary, published in 1755. When he got to light, he complained to his friend Boswell: “We all know what light is, but it is not easy to tell what it is.”

Think about it for a second and see how you’d describe it. Time’s up.

When I tried it myself, I kind of vaguely thought of it as “that stuff that comes from the sun that lets us see other stuff.” As it turns out, that’s not too far off from what Johnson eventually came up with as a first definition, which was: “that quality or action of the medium of sight by which we see.” For a quotation to back up this meaning, Johnson cited Sir Isaac Newton’s book on Optics, where Newton said that “light is propagated from luminous bodies in time, and spends about seven or eight minutes of an hour in passing from the sun to the earth.”

Today, Merriam-Webster’s Online Dictionary defines light this way: “ a : something that makes vision possible b : the sensation aroused by stimulation of the visual receptors c : electromagnetic radiation of any wavelength that travels in a vacuum with a speed of about 186,281 miles (300,000 kilometers) per second; specifically : such radiation that is visible to the human eye.”

Fair enough. But there was a second aspect of light that made Johnson’s job even more difficult: we use light as a word not just for the stuff from the sun that illuminates things, but in a lot of other ways, too, with slightly different shades of meaning. Such as a light, like the kind with a lampshade. As a verb, you can light a match. Or better yet, baby, light my fire. But I’m just starting to warm up. Still related to light as in luminous, but heading in a different direction, light is a color word. A dark-skinned woman might say that a pale man has light skin.

We also use light metaphorically—a lot. If I said “you light up my life”, you’d, well, you’d probably throw up, because in the 70’s Debby Boone’s song with that title played over and over and over, year after year after year. But you know what I’m saying. Here’s a slight twist on the same metaphor. In the New Testament Book of Luke, an old man named Simeon, upon seeing Jesus, called him “a light to shine upon the Gentiles”. We can shade this metaphor in other ways, too. When we have a revelation, we might say that the light went on.

But there are other meanings that seem pretty far removed from these, like the way of describing an object’s weight. A rock is heavy, while paper is light. A lightweight: a person with little substance, or a boxer who is not big but can still knock the average man on his butt. Twist the meaning just a little bit, and we can say that a dancer who is nimble is light on her feet. Along the same lines—in the sense of a contrast to heavy—is light beer. When we make light of something, we don’t take it seriously—like light beer.

But wait, there’s more!! Light is a movement word: you can light out for ‘Frisco. When you get there, you might alight from your horse. And…and…many more….

I hope today’s Word Odyssey has shed some light on the hardships of dictionary makers, so that you’ll never take their achievements lightly. Now put a match to a candle and pray for enlightenment.

It’s time to feed your inner nerd.

It’s that time of year that we think of turkeys and pumpkin pie, falling leaves and chilly nights, the Macy’s parade and ….football. Yes, Thanksgiving is upon us.

We wouldn’t have Thanksgiving if it weren’t for the Pilgrims, and there’s a story behind that name. No, the term “pilgrim” did not mean “people with an astounding lack of fashion sense.” Let’s get serious. The word pilgrim traces back to Latin “per”, meaning beyond, and “agri”, meaning country. So that peregrinus meant foreigner—someone who traveled outside his native country. In Old French “peregrinus” was corrupted to “pelegrin”, and further corrupted in Old German, and then to English, so that we wind up with pilgrim. In English the usage evolved to mean someone who journeys to a holy site, usually in a foreign land, as when Muslims make a pilgrimage to Mecca.

Now it’s true that the Pilgrims, who were dissenters from the Church of England, when boating to the Americas on the Mayflower, were making a religious journey. But they never called themselves Pilgrims, nor did anyone else. Their Governor William Bradford wrote a book containing one tiny reference to their group as pilgrims, lifting it nobly from the Bible (apparently from Hebrews11:13 in the King James version, which was published just before their departure from England; my Revised Standard version uses exiles rather than pilgrims). But the term didn’t get any play until over a century and half later when a Boston Forefathers’ Day celebration romantically referred to them as pilgrims. Daniel Webster later publicized them as pilgrims, as did writers and poets, and the term then stuck. So, pilgrim, as John Wayne would say, that’s how we got pilgrims.

After pilgrim, the word most closely connected with Thanksgiving is that funny bird, the turkey. I’d wondered whether the name turkey could be related to the nation of Turkey, but I couldn’t think how they could possibly be connected. Turkeys are a New World bird, and the Turks didn’t have a whole lot going in the way of American colonies. But oh, the convoluted route by which words sometimes originate. Here’s how it happened.

When the first colonists from England arrived, they mistook the wild fowl we know as turkeys for a smaller guinea hen that was imported to Europe from Madagascar, off the East coast of Africa. Despite coming from Madagascar, these guinea hens were called turkeys because they were imported by traders through the land of the Turks. So, turkey was mistakenly applied to the New World bird. Ironically, the Turks themselves call the bird hindi, as in “India”, which they probably got from the French, who called it poulet d’inde—meaning fowl from India, so-called because the bird was from the New World, which they mistakenly thought that was the Indies. Wow.

Another staple of the Thanksgiving diet is the hallowed pumpkin. That comes from French “pompon”, which the English borrowed while dropping the French nasal pronunciation, and attaching “kin”, which is a diminutive from Dutch. Why the diminutive? Maybe back then all they had were cute little pumpkins, not the county-fair sized ones we have today?

Another traditional Thanksgiving food is squash, which is from the language of the Narragansets, in the Algonquin language family. In Narragansett, squash meant green things that may be eaten raw. Today most of us prefer it cooked, or better yet, just hand me a second helping of mashed potatoes and dressing, and I’ll skip the squash altogether, then get ready to watch the Detroit Lions, God bless them, get walloped.

Apparently, there are people in the country that call water fountains "bubblers," people that call pecans "pee-cans," and it seems there are folks that call bags "begs." The point is, everyone talks funny and, in my opinion, uses the wrong words for everything... and this video proves it.


Over the years, researchers have studied the differences in American dialects (see this 2003 Harvard Dialect Survey, as well as this 2013 NC State Survey, though I don't recommend you start digging through either while you still have something to do today), and The Atlantic has taken a swing at their own version of the map, using questions from the Harvard survey:

For the video above, we called people across the country to ask them a few of Vaux's questions, then layered the answers with maps based on Katz's. You'll hear what Philadelphians call a group of people, the many ways of pronouncing "pecan," and what Southerners mean when they say "the devil is beating his wife."

Since I've apparently included "People Making Fun of Kanye West" on my regular Tucson Weekly beat (along with beer news and wanting to self-immolate whenever I see something new about Amy's Baking Company, of course), I feel it's only proper that we take a look at one of the few YouTube videos to make me startle myself with laughter: James Franco and Seth Rogen's reinterpretation of Kanye West's "Bound 2" music video.

"Bound 2" features West riding a motorcycle in front of a greenscreen through scenic locations while his fiance/heir-to-his-spawn Kim Kardashian straddles him, topless. (For the record, the video reaches Peak Awkward when West rhetorically asks the listener "have you ever asked your bitch for other bitches?" as the mother of his child looks into his eyes. Love!)

Even if you don't generally dig Franco or Rogen, their video's version features far less "Actin' Hard An' Shit While Rapping" and more "Seth Rogen's Bedroom Eyes/Hairy Back," which is a welcome change.

Pharrell Williams, more recently famous for his production on Daft Punk's "Get Lucky" and Robin Thicke's "Blurred Lines" is looking to make your day just a bit brighter, with a bright, dance-filled 24 hour music video for his latest song, "Happy."

The music video is, in truth, 24 hours of clips of people dancing to his entry on the Despicable Me 2 soundtrack, but it's so damn cheerful that it's difficult to be upset with it. I mean, I'm on my fourth listen of the song, but I'm still bobbing my head and singing along to it, and not in a Stockholm Syndrome-y way...though if this is all part of Pharrell's plan to hypnotically suggest Western civilization into doing his bidding, this is absolutely one of the more pleasant ways to go about it.

You may have noticed that rapper/clothing designer/sire-to-Kardashian-hellspawn Kanye West is, from time to time, a tremendous asshole.

While his previous feuds could be understood to an extent (I mean, I guess; I'm not sure George Bush hated black people so much as he wasn't very good at crisis management), his latest smacks of a businessman who doesn't understand that he needs to handle his business in private.

During a podcast with Bret Easton Ellis, writer of American Psycho, West talked about a recent tour he took at the Las Vegas headquarters of Zappos, given by Zappos CEO Tony Hseih himself.

West's take:

"I got into this giant argument with the head of Zappos that he's trying to tell me what I need to focus on. Meanwhile, he sells all this s—t product to everybody, his whole thing is based off of selling s—t product," West stated.

Speaking of shit products, I would like to note that West is still charging $120 for a plain damn T-shirt.

Now, while West being a douche isn't exactly news in and of itself, Zappos' response is brilliant. The shoe retailing giant has decided to fire back at West by literally selling a Shit Product:


Zappos' informative copy underneath is perfectly pitched, as is the accompanying video (which I would have embedded here, had the embed code not turned out something oddly sized and funky):

• Interested  in  buying  sh-t product? You've  come to the right place! Here at Zappos.com, we happily sell sh-t  products to everybody! This is the throne, everyone has been watching. Whether you're #1 or #2, your clique will show no mercy, even in Paris. 
  
• The perfect gift for the man that has everything
  
• Requires lots of "focus" for most productive use.
  
• Considered a "safety zone" when in arguments.
  
• Makes giant arguments seem much smaller.
  
• Caution: Do not place our Sh-t product near any fans.
  
• Avoid storms.
  

No word yet on a response from West, though if I remember his M.O. correctly, he'll bitch about it for a while drop a diss in his next album, two years from now.

[reddit.com]

Five year-old Miles has been battling acute lymphoblastic leukemia since he was 20 months old. He wanted to be Batman for a day, and the Make-A-Wish Foundation made it happen. Today San Francisco transformed in to the dark and gritty Gotham City with the help of 11,000 volunteers. Miles saved a damsel in distress, drove around in the Batmobile and served some good old fashion justice to the Riddler and Penguin.