don't dorp by

My company recently moved into space in the historic Woolworth Building downtown, one of the great iconic skyscrapers in, well, the world really, and an appropriately gothic setting for yours truly.

But that's another story.

Every evening for the past two weeks, as I've walked out to go home, I have seen queues of people waiting for express buses that roll down Broadway, heading for two destinations on Staten Island. One is Ettingville, which, fine, most interesting thing about it is the first thing Google finds is a French birdwatching site. But the other is New Dorp, and I find myself a little obsessed with it.

Bad enough my mind keeps trying to process it like it's spelled wrong. I can't explain why, but Dorp is one of those combinations of sounds, like 'aspic,' that just grates and vexes and annoys. I thought maybe it had something to do with sounding like 'dork,' though of course 'York' sounds like 'dork' too, and I find 'York' romantic and wonderful. If any of the good people of New Dorp are reading this, I apologize, but it sounds like the ass-end of nowhere. And to think there should be more than one such place; plain old Dorp not being good enough, they had to go make a new one.

So, research. It's Dutch, of course (all funny words are, in the end), and it simply means 'small town.' So Nieuwe Dorp (which would at least have the excuse of clearly being non-English) became New Dorp at some point, and that's how it stayed. And they have a high school, and it seems people actually live there, and are...content? and think after a long trip "ah, home to New Dorp, thank God." I'm mystified by all of it.

Tangentially, and this will end my small obsession with this topic, 'dorp' presents an interesting example of a word whose sound conveys its meaning. I don't mean onomatopoeia, which, duh. I mean more abstract words that nonetheless convey their idea in the phonetics of the word itself. I'm convinced they exist, despite what philologists and linguists would say about arbitrary associations of sound and meaning. It's not just 35 years of association in my brain that make 'joy' convey joy, or 'sparkle,' well, sparkliness. Or, maybe it is and I'm crazy.

But I had no idea what Dorp meant a week ago, even if I knew what I thought it meant (see: ass-end of nowhere). And in my digging around, I discovered that if it's value-neutral in Old Dutch, not so in Afrikaans. Dorp (the London industrial-punk band)'s myspace page explains:

Kevin and Piet’s heritage also gave them their name, ‘Dorp’ being an Afrikaans word for ‘small village’ or ‘shanty town’. “We were very against all these bands who were popping up in South Africa and they were grabbing all these Seattle-sounding grunge names,” says Piet. “But there was so much going on in South Africa, but not only that, we were going to get the uncoolest name we could think of. When something is really backwards, you can say that is ‘so Dorp’.”

Q.E.D.

nature, red in...claw at least

So, I have a friend, who spends a lot of time in New York but who bought a house in the hamlet of Andover, Vermont. Why? Well he sort of claims he likes to get back to nature.

I bring this up because it's useful to remember that even in the middle of Manhattan, you're not really all that far away from it. Case in point would be, you're sitting enjoying your cheerios one morning and you hear a noise like some pigeons on your air conditioner and you move the curtain aside to shoo them away and you see something like this.
Okay, not especially gloomy. In fact, damned exciting. And the point is, this sort of thing happens all the time here. We just keep it a secret.

at least i'll forget my troubles

What do you get if you cross my greatest fear with the deepest truth of my existence?

No, not another lengthy disruption to posting blog entries.

But good guess.

Actually you get this BBC story, the punchline to which is

People who are lonely are twice as likely to develop Alzheimer's disease, a large US study has suggested.

Great. Just great.

It also does my heart, to say nothing of my brain, good to know that

Rebecca Wood chief executive of the Alzheimer's Research Trust said, "What I find particularly interesting about this study is the fact that it is an individual's perception of being lonely rather than their actual degree of social isolation that seems to correlate most closely with their Alzheimer's risk."