"ur-text of Vegas" - 03/11/05 11:55 AM
Here's an interesting use of "ur" as a prefix [similar to uber] from Frank Rich's column in today's New York Times: [It's new to me. Could be new to others as well. Wikepedia* definition below extract.]
"Boschian relish" is a nice turn of phrase as well, and very timely considering the discussion about owl symbolism in Hieronymous Bosch's paintings in Father Steve's thread "Owl in the Moss".
Extract:
If you can see only one of the shows that he wants to banish or launder, let me recommend the series that probably has more four-letter words, with or without participles, than any in TV history. That would be "Deadwood" on HBO. Its linguistic gait befits its chapter of American history, the story of a gold-rush mining camp in the Dakota Territory of the late 1870's. "Deadwood" is the back story of a joke like "The Aristocrats" and of everything else that is joyously vulgar in American culture and that our new Puritans want to stamp out. It's the ur-text of Vegas and hip-hop and pulp fiction. It captures with Boschian relish what freedom, by turns cruel and comic and exhilarating, looked and sounded like at full throttle in frontier America before anyone got around to building churches or a government.
http://snipurl.com/ddap
*From Wikipedia
Ur- is a German prefix meaning "prot(o)-", "first", "oldest", "original" when used with a noun. In combination with an adjective, it can be translated as the intensifier "very".
"Boschian relish" is a nice turn of phrase as well, and very timely considering the discussion about owl symbolism in Hieronymous Bosch's paintings in Father Steve's thread "Owl in the Moss".
Extract:
If you can see only one of the shows that he wants to banish or launder, let me recommend the series that probably has more four-letter words, with or without participles, than any in TV history. That would be "Deadwood" on HBO. Its linguistic gait befits its chapter of American history, the story of a gold-rush mining camp in the Dakota Territory of the late 1870's. "Deadwood" is the back story of a joke like "The Aristocrats" and of everything else that is joyously vulgar in American culture and that our new Puritans want to stamp out. It's the ur-text of Vegas and hip-hop and pulp fiction. It captures with Boschian relish what freedom, by turns cruel and comic and exhilarating, looked and sounded like at full throttle in frontier America before anyone got around to building churches or a government.
http://snipurl.com/ddap
*From Wikipedia
Ur- is a German prefix meaning "prot(o)-", "first", "oldest", "original" when used with a noun. In combination with an adjective, it can be translated as the intensifier "very".