BREAKING: Sometimes Famous People Die

[The Lone Ranger]

I'm wondering if maybe it wouldn't be a good idea to drive a wooden stake through Roger Ailes' heart -- just to be sure.

[erimir]

Originally Posted by The Man

I’m having a difficult time thinking of a death I’d have been gladder to hear about, other than the president*’s.

Jeff Sessions and Mitch McConnell.

[Kyuss Apollo]

Aww man, Chris Cornell?

I am still not over Bowie.

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

Space need dark for Cornell.

[JoeP]

Originally Posted by Kamilah Hauptmann

Space need dark for Cornell.

Space Needle dark for Cornell is the actual headline. Your version is altogether too much like "Need dark space - Cornell" which may be uncomfortably accurate.

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

That'll teach me to not proofread.

[The Man]

I missed this, and most people here have probably never heard of him, but Gabriel Mafa, drummer and co-founder of the Romanian metal band Negură Bunget (perhaps better known by the pseudoynm Negru), died unexpectedly of a heart attack in March, aged 42.

Extreme metal is overall rather selective in its appeal. There's a beauty to the work many of these bands create, but it's esoteric and not easily understandable to people who haven't trained their ears to listen to it. I suspect much of this is due to the harsh vocal style most of these bands employ. It's generally assumed that harsh vocals are used to express negative emotions, but that's not always necessarily the case. A person who doesn't understand how screams could, for example, be screams of ecstasy is unlikely to find extreme metal appealing.

Mafa apparently had a master's degree in the ethnogenesis of Romania. This often shone through in Negură Bunget's music, which was deeply rooted in the pre-Christian pagan spirituality of the Romanian people. I will fully admit that I don't entirely understand the concepts behind their music; not being able to speak Romanian undoubtedly doesn't help here. This particular review is a particularly informative exegesis of one of the band's best albums (though I would say its successor, Om, is even better). There is an atmosphere to the band's music that is almost unique, which likely comes from its deep Romanian folk influence. Black metal is known for its weird melodies, but Negură Bunget's melodies are weird even by black metal standards. Mafa and his bandmates' skill as composers doesn't hurt here, either; their music is always incredibly complex and emotionally evocative.

Mafa was also one of the best drummers in extreme metal; he was apparently classically trained. The fills he played were often fascinating and required great technical skill.

It's not clear what will happen to Negură Bunget now. They were apparently in the midst of recording an album and it's unknown what will happen to it. They had also been touring, and all planned shows have been cancelled. I can't find any communication from the surviving band members since Mafa's death, which is understandable; presumably an event like that would leave people speechless for awhile. The members of Dordeduh, a spin-off group formed by two former Negură Bunget members, did post a R.I.P. message for Mafa.

This is a huge loss for extreme metal music. I'd kind of lost track of Negură Bunget's more recent work, and I'm going back and revisiting their discography and it's even better than I'd remembered. Negură Bunget was one of the best progressive black metal bands out there, and no one else (except Dordeduh) created music that sounded remotely similar.

Learning about Mafa and Cornell's deaths in the course of a few days was a huge gut punch, to say the least. Here are a couple of particularly great tracks from Om, for those willing to take the journey.

Țesarul de lumini

Cel din urmă vis

[mickthinks]

Originally Posted by Kamilah Hauptmann

That'll teach me not to not proofread.

[erimir]

That's an interesting usage, but the way Kamilah used it is typical.

This Language Log post discusses usages like that: Language Log: That'll teach me ...

The sort of explanation is that when used in that sense it is sort of like saying "you will be taught the (negative) consequences of doing X." That sort of usage (as in "I'll teach you to disrespect me!") is in the OED and dates back centuries.

I imagine it's probably seen as an odd idiom by non-native speakers though.

[Miisa]

Sir Roger Moore, James Bond actor, dies aged 89

[Stormlight]

Damn.

[mickthinks]

Originally Posted by erimir

That's an interesting usage, but the way Kamilah used it is typical.

This Language Log post discusses usages like that: Language Log: That'll teach me ...

Hmmm Maybe it's a British v US thing (like "could/couldn't care less"). But the Language Log isn't as clear on the issue as you think it is. There are two, perhaps three, parallel syntaxes here:

1. The 1st person threat: "I'll teach you/him/them to ..."
2. The abstracted prediction/1st person regret: "That'll teach me to ..."
3. Variants of the abstracted prediction such as "That'll teach you to ...", "That'll teach him to ..." etc.

The Language Log talks about all of them, but most of the examples given are of type 1. While type 2 is discussed, the only example of an implicitly negative type 2 is the author's own, and thus we have only his word that his example is not idiosyncratic.

It is also striking that the VP part of those cases held up by the Language Log as examples in which VP is being discouraged is invariably not negated: as in "throw stones" "blow your quarters" "interfere" as opposed to "not to proof read". I suggest Kamillah's "not" makes a critical difference.

So, I am unfamiliar with the abstracted prediction form being used with a negated verb in this "undernegated" sense. Hence my mocking insertion of the missing negative in Kamillah's phrase.

[erimir]

The previous post he made on the topic contains more examples of that'll teach PERSON to VERB.

"That will teach him to talk back", Banzi muttered.

That'll teach her to talk back to me!

Guess that'll teach me to talk back to a couple Diablo fiends.

Additionally, I would say the first page of Google results (not going to bother checking more pages) for "that'll teach me to" (search with quote marks) all appear to be usages of that negative form.

It is true that Kamilah uses a negative, but my interpretation was thus that Kamilah was being taught TO proofread. It seems that "that'll teach me to not" (or "not to") is less likely to have that undernegated sense, but it still occurs plenty. The first page of Google results was about half and half. Generally the meaning can be inferred by context though.

I don't know about it being an American-British difference though. The examples given from the OED date back quite a long time, and the two later uses are from Brits. A Google search restricted to .co.uk sites found a number of uses like Kamilah's (actually more than when I searched without that restriction).

Maybe peculiarities of double negation are at work here also? (If we take "that'll teach me to" as implicitly negative, then Kamilah's usage was a double negative).

For example, for me:

"nobody wasn't crying" = "everybody was crying"
but
"ain't nobody crying" = "nobody is crying" (this is particularly a feature of African-American English, tho)

also there's
"I wasn't NOT looking" = "I was looking"

That type of usage is discussed here (with examples from pop culture): Language Log » Double lie toe tease

I don't know if you're familiar with either of those phenomena either.

I don't really know what dialect of English you speak though aside from some type of British (and I believe you're from England, right?). It's possible that this is not an American vs. British thing, but rather your unfamiliarity is due to your particular dialect (or maybe peculiar to you personally?).

[JoeP]

That'll teach Mick to argue with erimir!

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

Originally Posted by erimir

For example, for me:

"nobody wasn't crying" = "everybody was crying"
but
"ain't nobody crying" = "nobody is crying" (this is particularly a feature of African-American English, tho)

The article gives a passing mention to Creole French, but I read somewhere that the negation there is indeed an artefact of French.

"Je ne sais pas" means, "I don't know". But there's two negatives in there, "I 'no' know not." Or in parts of US south, "I don't know nothin'."

As for that'll teach me, that was intended as sardonic self mockery. "That'll teach me to proofread." though accurate, didn't carry the sarcasm payload the situation called for.

Fascinating etymology discussion, though.

[Watser?]

Dutch (or at least some Dutch dialects like Zeeuws=Zeelandic) used to have that double negative too, Afrikaans still has it.

In old Dutch it was something like Ik en wil dat niet doen with the en now left out and the meaning still I don't want to do that. Afrikaans would probably be Ek wil dat nie doen nie

[Ensign Steve]

Originally Posted by Watser?

Dutch (or at least some Dutch dialects like Zeeuws=Zeelandic) used to have that double negative too, Afrikaans still has it.

In old Dutch it was something like Ik en wil dat niet doen with the en now left out and the meaning still I don't want to do that. Afrikaans would probably be Ek wil dat nie doen nie

Español, tambien. "No tengo ningun idea" y "No me gusta nadie", por ejemplo.

[The Man]

It appears that former Carter security advisor Zbigniew Brzeziński has died at age eighty-nine. He represented a school of foreign policy pragmatism that seems almost quaint in the Shitgibbon era. I'll provably edit in more here later when I'm not on my phone.

e: So yeah. I didn't approve of everything Brzeziński did while in government, but he definitely increased the U.S. government's focus on human rights for its day. I'm not really in a coherent enough frame of mind to write up a worthy overview of his life. The Grauniad, Financial Times', and Washington Post's write-ups are pretty good places to start, though, I think.

[The Man]

...dammit. R.I.P. Gregg Allman. Saw him last year and he was still amazing. He was never going to make it to 90 but I'd hoped he still had a few more years in him.

[JoeP]

Former Blue Peter presenter John Noakes dies at 83 - BBC News

R.I.P. John Noakes - Infamous Elephant Blooper -...

Pay attention at 0m15s

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

Manuel Noriega, Panama ex-strongman, dies at 83 - BBC News

[ShottleBop]

Jean Sammet, Co-Designer of a Pioneering Computer Language, Dies at 89

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

Hawaiian pizza inventor Sam Panopoulos dies aged 83 - BBC News

[JoeP]

Finland should have a day of mourning, considering that 90% of pizzas available there have pineapple on. In some places, 100%.

[lisarea]

Batman dies at 88 - BBC News

(I removed some extraneous words from the link text.)