Surfing

I was mindlessly flipping through the channels when I caught the tail end of this cool video/song. I hope you like it.

From the Archives: An Ever So Recently Unfinished Post

This post, previously titled "The OED: Stuff You Didn't Know Before," was mostly written in early April. I'm not sure why I finished it, but it seemed interesting enough to finish it today.

The first editor of the OED, Sir James Murray, circa 1880 in his "Scriptorium"

While preparing for my Brazilian Audio and Visual Culture class I looked up the word "anthropophagy" in the OED. In the definition I saw the following labels: (Cycl. Supp. s.v.). I went to the Guide to OED entries in order to figure out what they meant and I came across this interesting tid-bit:

"5. Erroneous, spurious, or ghost words

Occasionally ‘ghost’ words find their way into print and into dictionaries. Typically these are the result of misreadings of manuscripts or of typographical errors by printers. The Dictionary includes a number of these, labeled as ‘spurious’ entries, when the words have been used incorrectly in former editions of texts or have otherwise achieved some spurious existence."

Niiice! I'll have to think about this one more after I sleep, there is some potential to the notion of a ghost word. Tomorrow I am presenting on the chapter "Myth, Melopeia, and Mimesis: Black Orpheus, Orfeu, and Internationalization in Brazilian Pop Music" from this book. As the chapter title indicates, it examines the central role that the music from Vinicius de Moraes's Orpheus play and the subsequent film adaptations had in globalization Brazilian pop music.  So I thought it was rather serendipitous that one of the quotations in the OED that demonstrates the usage of the word "anthropophagy" reads, "1753 CHAMBERS Cycl. Supp. s.v., The Greek writers represent Anthropophagy as universal before Orpheus." How cool is that?! It seems as if there is some strange intertextual play between the the word, anthropophagy, the many incarnations of the Orpheus myth in 20th century Brazil, and Oswalde de Andrade's 1928 "Manifeste Anthropophage." Or maybe I'm just tired and it's much more random than it appears, probably the latter.