"Art does not make sense"
« previous post | next post »
Well, approximately as much as lexicography does…
The current Dinosaur Comics:
Mouseover title: "later: t-rex is all, "on the plus side i didn't know i could make THOSE noises come out of THESE vocal cords" and he pronounces even more punctuation, working his way up to the full grawlix set"
bks said,
February 16, 2025 @ 7:42 am
The Pont Neuf is the oldest standing bridge across the Seine.
Philip Taylor said,
February 16, 2025 @ 8:15 am
Ah, but is it "the new bridge" or "bridge nine" ?!
Edith said,
February 16, 2025 @ 8:28 am
New Street in Birmingham, England, first enters the records in 1296.
Just off it is a road called Needless Alley.
Names do not have to make sense, logically or temporally.
They just have to make enough sense at the time to be useful.
Carlana said,
February 16, 2025 @ 9:04 am
Someone needs to tell T-Rex about the band Nouvelle Vague.
Wiki dixit, ‘Their name means "new wave" in French, and refers simultaneously to the French New Wave cinema movement of the 1960s, to the new wave music movement of the 1970s and 1980s, which provides many of the songs that the band covers, and to bossa nova (Portuguese for "new wave"), a musical style that the band frequently uses in its arrangements.’
Timothy Rowe said,
February 16, 2025 @ 9:06 am
The new castle of Newcastle-upon-Tyne was built in 1080 CE…
Matt McIrvin said,
February 16, 2025 @ 10:08 am
The New River in the Appalachian US is one of the oldest rivers in the world.
eurobubba said,
February 16, 2025 @ 10:49 am
Prague's New Town (Nové město) was founded in 1348.
Francisco said,
February 16, 2025 @ 11:01 am
The literal meaning of bossa is protuberance (boss, embossed are cognates in English). Brazilian slang of the thirties and forties came to use the word as a synonym for flair or panache. Bossa nova is thus more accurately translatable as 'new flair' – a manner rather than a movement.
David Marjanović said,
February 16, 2025 @ 11:33 am
"New bridge"; it's just so old it's called Pont neuf – which would be more like "novel bridge" today – instead of Nouveau pont.
Wiener Neustadt – the new town founded out of Vienna – was founded and built from 1192 onwards, with the ransom for Richard the Lionheart.
Wiener Neudorf was first mentioned in 1176.
Gregory Kusnick said,
February 16, 2025 @ 12:25 pm
Let's not forget the New Wave in science fiction of the late 1960s, exemplified by the stories published in Michael Moorcock's New Worlds and Judith Merril's Best of the Year anthologies. Though as Robert Silverberg said at a convention in the mid-80s (I'm paraphrasing from memory), "By about 1973, to call someone a New Wave writer was to say that they were dead meat."
Rodger C said,
February 16, 2025 @ 12:31 pm
In what AFAIK is the first use of "postmodern," Arnold Toynbee used it for the period after 1914. Antedatings welcome.
KevinM said,
February 16, 2025 @ 12:52 pm
The Neolithic period. (Cheating a little, since that wasn't its name at the time.)
Michael Vnuk said,
February 16, 2025 @ 3:47 pm
Similarly, there are cars named 'Futura' and 'Moderna'.
Stephen Goranson said,
February 16, 2025 @ 3:50 pm
On "postmodern" see
PREHISTORY OF POSTMODERN AND RELATED TERMS: EVIDENCE FROM THE JSTOR ELECTRONIC JOURNAL ARCHIVE AND OTHER SOURCES
FRED R. SHAPIRO
American Speech (2001) 76 (3): 331–334.
DOI: https://doi-org.proxy.lib.duke.edu/10.1215/00031283-76-3-331
Published: 01 August 2001
J.W. Brewer said,
February 16, 2025 @ 4:07 pm
New College in the University of Oxford was founded in 1379 – later than a few colleges that are even older, but earlier than the vast majority that now exist.
Julian said,
February 16, 2025 @ 4:09 pm
I'm always amused by the dusty 70 year old old anthologies you see in second hand bookshops with titles like "Modern Poetry".
Y said,
February 16, 2025 @ 6:04 pm
Nablus was née Flavia Neapolis in 72 AD, after the destruction of old Shechem.
Robot Therapist said,
February 16, 2025 @ 6:11 pm
And Fowler's Modern English Usage no longer seems quite so modern. I guess "modern" was as opposed to old and middle English?
J.W. Brewer said,
February 16, 2025 @ 11:13 pm
I probably don't want to get drawn into an argument with a cartoon dinosaur about late 20th-century music history, but beyond "New Wave" and the earlier "Bossa Nova" there's also the response to New Wave (with a little lag) in the German-speaking lands known as die https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neue_Deutsche_Welle And perhaps others as well.
Peter Grubtal said,
February 17, 2025 @ 2:35 am
..and should the New Forest, Hampshire, England be forgotten?
First mentioned under that name (albeit in Latin) in the Doomsday book of 1086. I wonder if there's an earlier reference (but would be after 1066 of course) in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.
Peter Cyrus said,
February 17, 2025 @ 4:29 am
I was surprised to learn "bossa" means wave in Brazilian, since it means "bag" in Catalan, alongside its barbarism "bolsa". So I looked it up in Google Translate, where it gave me Castilian "jefe", Spanish for "boss" as in your employer or manager.
J.W. Brewer said,
February 17, 2025 @ 7:33 am
More precisely, it appears that "bossa" means or perhaps used to mean in a colloquial register of Brazilian Portuguese “inclination, propensity, trend,” as an extended sense of a word meaning literally “protuberance” (from French "bosse"). So it doesn't literally mean a wave on an ocean, but of course the wave in English "New Wave" is using "wave" in an extended metaphorical sense meaning "trend."
French wikipedia, meanwhle, has the useful reminder "La nature de la musique new wave est le sujet de nombreuses controverses et confusions."
Nick Z said,
February 17, 2025 @ 2:43 pm
There's also NWOBHM, the New Wave of British Heavy Metal, c. 1980
Andreas Johansson said,
February 18, 2025 @ 6:57 am
Carthage is from the Phoenician for "new town". There must be older examples.
To historians, "early modern" means roughly AD 1500-1800. To my mild disappointment, nobody calls the succeeding period "late modern".
Big Hairy Petey said,
February 18, 2025 @ 11:36 am
If you ever visit Gloucester, I recommend staying at the New Inn–it's the oldest hotel in the city, and one of the best-preserved medieval galleried inns in the UK.
Barbara Phillips Long said,
February 19, 2025 @ 2:46 pm
Art Nouveau began in the late 1800s.
Mid-century modern furniture is post-war, but the war is World War II, not the Vietnam War or some other war.
Christian Dior launched the fashion trend called the New Look in 1947.