Ok...after a nasty interruption due to faulty wiring that laid my typing input mechanism low, we're back with a new column this week. It's May 2014 now, and, after nearly ten of these columns, I'm running low on stored material. I may even use up my 'bag' this week, so if you have any questions or new words or usages to discuss, feel free to post them. While I was offline, I read a bunch of David Foster Wallace and some older Russell Kirk, so most of the words we'll cover this week come from these two writers. These will be more obscure words than usual, just to increase our vocabulary a little. But we'll start with a more common term, a very useful one, and go from there. That term is:

1) provenance

This is a useful term. It occurs most frequently, perhaps, in discussion of artworks, such as paintings. What is the 'provenance' of a particular piece? This means, what is its history, background, pedigree, as it were. This term was also big with the older conservatives in National Review and books by their set of writers back in the '70s. They were concerned with the 'provenance' of a particular idea. Tracing an idea from an originator or through history, as it were advocated by different personages and groups. You could say, the provenance of this particular nostrum dates back to at least the French Revolution. But to do that you have to know that nostrum doesn't just mean notion, it means bad notion, bad idea. Nostrum is basically snake oil, originally. It is used to describe bad ideas, bad notions, dumb policy ideas - ideas which are the equivalent of snake oil. Many people do not realize that nostrum means something dumb and ineffective, they just think it's another way of saying notion.

Here's a definition of nostrum.

Nostrum is Latin, means 'ours.' You will see the relation to 'Cosa Nostra,' the mob's supposed name for itself - 'Our thing,' or 'this thing of ours.' The 'nostrum' the snakeoil salesman is selling off the back of the wagon is his shop's peculiar mix, his pharmacy's or apothecary's unique elixir - 'good for what ails you,' as they liked to put it. Just as snake oil is a quack elixir, nostrum is a quack idea.

Now here's a definition of provenance.

Literally the term refers to where something comes from or originates, but in practice it's just a fancier way of saying "What's the story behind this curious painting (of a blue square woman descending the stairs)?" To repeat, inevitably what you'll find in practice is that provenance means the story behind something, not just the bare fact of its author or hometown. Those are only directly pointed up in uses such as 'the provenance of the fart was a matter of contentious dispute among the crapulent assembly.' Which itself begins to approach the comedic, combining a word generally associated with high-toned things such as wine or art with the low matter of odiferous flatulence. Disputed provenance is another common use - something that will crop up wherever art fraud is suspected, or in cases in which the author or painter is contested or simply unknown. 'Disputed provenance' is a known term, not to say cliche. You seldom see the direct, active form: 'Experts disagree' who painted Dogs Playing Poker; rather, always used is the passive: 'The provenance of the painting is disputed.'

As a word beloved of old-school conservative intellectuals, provenance always smacks at least faintly of Leslie Nielsen, the mock gravitas, or pseudo-heaviness, even when it's used straight. It's a term perfectly cast for achieving comedic effects, like all heavy words, or words that seem or sound heavy. When you're presented with anything recent, shabby or weightless -- anything with nothing behind it -- you can well play this up by using 'provenance.'

- what is the provenance of this "two buck Chuck"? - cheap wine. Wine without a story behind it, such as a bum might acquire to fortify himself for facing a freezing fall night.

On my latest podcast, MP3 here, I play a snatch of " ." It might interest us to wonder about the background of this song; to inquire into its provenance. I did that, and here it is:

Well, that's an interesting provenance, isn't it? Appears the song traces to a jew, surprise, surprise, carrying on the usual Frankfurt School mission of normalizing sexual deviance. Also in that line, I say in an aside, is the 2013 movie, out of France,

Blue is the Warmest Color

Blue_Is_the_Warmest_Colour

. It's about a teenager's discovering she prefers jamming clams to normal sex, and features an overt and extended bout of said jamming, so up close and personal you'll have to wipe the cunt mist off your glasses. This film won many awards, gold leaves and such. Normalizing perversion as a means of breaking down white society is job #1 for the jew-controlled media, the mass media, the junk media, whether aurally, as with Lesbian Seagull, or visually, through tv and movies. BITWC at least had one new 'thing' for our vocabulary and general-knowledge purposes: an instrument created by a German around 2000 called a Hang. German nouns are all capitalized; in English most are not, except by dumb people. Picture of a 'hang,' which is a sort of barbecue-shaped steel-drum-sounding thing.



Since last column, I also came across another example of pareidolia...

(Seeing Mary/Jesus in a pancake or piece of toast/tree.)

...which you may remember from an earlier column, here.

You will see the relation to the word eidolon, which is of Greek origin, and means apparition or phantom. Notice it is pronounced with the accent on the middle syllable: eye-DOLE-un. (Most of the links to these words offer audio clips so you can hear the word spoken correctly.)

Eidolon is not common. I would have to look it up myself. But I have seen it in older literature from time to time. Fancy word for ghost, I guess you could say. Somewhat pretentious if you're using it straight in 2014, as opposed to using it in 1860 when you're studying sweetness and light (effects) under Matt Arnold. Or if we were going for a mock-pretentious effect for comedic purposes, as we often will be.

It's all about what the word can do for you. How you can use it. Comedically. Or simply accurately - for what it denotes. Comedically will really fix it in your mind, similar to the way lyrics are easier to remember than prose. When you know something well enough to play with it without thinking about it, it's just one of your tools, then you really know it. If you have to think about it, you're not there yet. It's still a stranger to you, somewhat formal and respectful. See what's in the word, lick its ear, get to know it, brew it some coffee, have a chat with it. Make it a part of your life, see what it's all about, how it fits with what you're doing. See if the two of you are compatible. See if its a workin', fightin', hard-charging word, suitable for drafting, reading to be sent off to fight in Laffghanistan. Well, that's how I see it, anyway. Grass nibblers can focus on: a) recognizing the term, b) spelling it correctly, c) using it accurately. This column has higher aims than the pedestrian, a term which means not just ambulant pavement-slapper but

Your choice, Digby. You can use words exactly as they're intended, like a good li'l amateur schoolmarm. Be a lot cooler if you didn't, though.


2) a graphic of lowest-level language mistakes



3) she-werewolves: do they exist and if so what should we call them?

Here's a long and interesting if feminist article on the etymology and concept of the werewolf, with the ultimate silly-ideological aim of popularizing the use of wifwolf for she-werewolves. 'Were' simply means man. Man-wolves.

4) bai lao men - paying respects to the cell god.

This term comes from the Chinese communists. I can find no reference to it on google save on VNNF:

Isn't it great that we at VNNF are the only ones in the world with any interest in the verbalisms related to communist tortures? They murder 100,000,000+ men last century, and meh is the general reaction.

[I was going to say 'torture practices.' Then I said to myself - how is that any different from the 'frost event' you criticized in earlier column. What part of practices is different from or not encompassed in tortures?

The lesson here is that a lot of the best use of words and language is simply thinking carefully (can one think uncarefully?) about what one is doing.]

5) medborgarvärd -

Means: citizen host (Swedish). A PC/Swedish term. Link. Here it is google-translated from Swedish to English. Link.

Note: I had this term in my grabbag, shorn of provenance in mind or notes. So I ran google. The story linked above, with top paragraph, was very first result when I googled it.

I can't provide the fine points of this term because I don't know Swedish, or fully grasp what's going on here, but you can get the sense of the make-believe from the translation. Strikes me as parallel to calling taxes 'contributions'; the false analogy is constructed to make things coerced seem cozy. We let in all these raving, violent Muslims quite against your democratic will becomes, filtered through the conspiring media, "you get to host a dinner party for these wondrous creature-humans we celebrate as diversity, aren't you lucky?!"

6) factional tendentiousness

This is a communist term. Communists have an ideology. Many variants of the same basic worldview. Splinters, factions, sects - just as with any nutty religion. An ideology is defined as a political faith. A man is only accurately described as ideological when he side with his political views when reality refutes them. He lets his ideal trump actual facts. You can see the relation between this and the mentality underlying the pravda (noble lie or ideological truth) and istina - gritty, factual, real-world truth. White nationalism is not, properly speaking, an ideology. It, like any political position, can become one, if one allows it. An example of ideological thinking would be a man who says 2+2 can't be 4 because a jew said. Since jews are bad, according to WN, anything they say is wrong, or a lie. Even if what they say is demonstrably true. 2+2 is an overstatement, but there are plenty of things intelligent jews such as Murray Rothbard or Ludwig von Mises said that certain WN refuse to acknowledge as true purely because Rothbard and von Mises were jews. Letting ideology trump reality is a bad idea, for a number of reasons that should be obvious and aren't worth going into. Last thing to notice about ideology is that conservative big thinkers such as the Russell Kirk I've been going on about lately define conservatism as anti-ideological. It's not about constructing a system, it's about virtues and order. Ordering the soul, first. Being prudent. Respecting things, and trying to figure out why they are the way they are, rather than rushing to alter them or wholly revise them. That makes sense, doesn't it? But you can also see how it leads to a certain passivity where violent, quick action is required. Anything calm and reflective, anything appreciative, is going to be psychologically on the back foot when faced with the aggression of the ideologues like the communists or the neocommunists, the anti-white multiculturalists. This horrifying irony echoes in the often-quoted words a certain poet the conservatives like to quote to the point that the best are full of doubt while the worst are full of furious intensity. So it is. If you believe God created this, you must also believe he is not a loving god but a god of sadistic irony.

Communists are famous for splintering into competing intellectual factions. One of the more famous depictions of these was provided by Irving Kristol, NYC jew, and the godfather of neo-conservatism, in his memoirs,

Last time I checked, dresses and tops came in numbered sizes as well. Though, frankly, I don't think she's that small in bottoms either...unless she's quite short, or shopping at a store where vanity sizing is in effect.

One

Vanity_sizing

All content is copyright © 2024 Alex Linder.