Author Archives: ncowie

The Meaning of Christmas

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Here is a timely post from Daily Writing Tips:

The word Christmas has been around for centuries. Some dictionaries say it belongs to the late Old English period; others that it dates back to the 12th century. Old forms include cristes masse and christmasse, meaning the festival (mass) of Christ. Christmas actually replaced a number of significant pagan midwinter festivals when the church was trying to persuade Romans to convert to Christianity.

In the phrase Merry Christmas, the word merry does not refer an excess of seasonal good cheer, nor yet to drunkenness. Those meanings date from the 14th century onwards. However, the original meaning of merry was pleasing or agreeable. That meaning is also found in the phrase God rest you merry, gentlemen (NOT God rest you, merry gentlemen), where rest is used in the same sense as in rest assured.

The use of the abbreviation Xmas drives some people crazy, yet it is not a modern aberration, but an ancient usage. X was used to represent the Greek symbol chi, which is also the first letter in Christ. That usage has been around since Roman times.

The Kite Runner Flies

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It won’t be long until the film of Khaled Hosseini’s novel ‘The Kite Runner’ is released in New Zealand. It has opened in the US and I have posted a few snippets from the the first reviews to give you some ideas about how the film has been received.

According to critic Richard Schikel at Time “The Kite Runner flies”. “The movie version of Khaled Hosseini’s best selling novel doesn’t feel like it has been, as people used to say, “ripped from headlines.” It instead has about it something of the air of a big, rich, very old-fashioned novel, telling the far-ranging story of two boys, one of them rich and well-favoured, the other a servant in his household, growing to manhood in an increasingly violent world… It also features a heartbreaking betrayal, a disappearance into disparate refugee voids by both of them and the inspirational working out of one of those deep family secrets that were the great specialty of Charles Dickens and, for that matter, of American movies in their classic age, when they so often made first-rate entertainments of second-rate popular fiction.”

For Laura Flanders at AlterNet, “Khaled Hosseini’s moving novel and film hits on all the right themes for a tale about the West and Afghanistan.”

She felt that, “Within the first five minutes of the newly released film The Kite Runner, the leitmotif is laid out in a Karachi-to-California telephone call. Come home to Afghanistan, the protagonist, a young writer “Amir” is told by an ailing uncle. It won’t be an easy journey, the uncle explains, but it’s not too late: “There is a way to be good again.”

She also noted, “At the level of metaphor, the film adaptation of Khaled Hosseini’s best-selling novel is right on target. Abuse of power, remorse, shame, grief, guilt and the dream of redemption: They’re exactly the right emotions to stir in a movie about the United States and Afghanistan. The Kite Runner is a tear-jerker for the politically conscious. Unfortunately, when it comes to real-life U.S.-Afghan relations, the metaphors hit more bases than what’s actually on the screen.”

Ron Wilkinson at Monsters and Critics thought the film was “A sweet and masterful story of survival, transcendence, loyalty and friendship told with striking cinematography. A spiritual piece of work.”

‘The Kite Runner’ has not impressed all the critics but as you can see from the comments above there are some very positive comments on the film. I am looking forward to seeing it and making my own mind up.

Terry Pratchett suffering from Alzheimer’s disease

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It was really sad to read that popular author Terry Pratchett has Alzheimer’s disease. Pratchett is suffering from a rare form of early Alzheimer’s disease and he said in a statement that with forthcoming conventions and the need to inform his publishers it would have been “unfair to withhold the news”. He told fans the statement should be interpreted as “I am not dead”. “I will, of course, be dead at some future point, as will everybody else,” he said. “For me, this may be further off than you think. It’s too soon to tell. “I know it’s a very human thing to say ‘is there anything I can do’, but in this case I would only entertain offers from very high-end experts in brain chemistry.”

From the BBC.

Woot is the word of the year

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According to BoingBoing, voters at Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Year 2007 poll have chosen “woot” as 2007’s most iconic word. M-W says that the word is a gamer’s acronym for “we own the other team,” but BB are more inclined to think that that’s a backronym, a back-formed acronym created to explain a word already in use.

woot (interjection) expressing joy (it could be after a triumph, or for no reason at all); similar in use to the word “yay” eg. “woot! I won the contest! ”

Here are the other words in the Top Ten List, click on them to get their definitions from either Merriam-Webster’s Online Dictionary or Merriam-Webster’s Open Dictionary:

  1. facebook
  2. conundrum
  3. quixotic
  4. blamestorm
  5. sardoodledom
  6. apathetic
  7. Pecksniffian
  8. hypocrite
  9. charlatan