I post an interesting obituary from the past, daily, on Threads. Check it out!
Cassandras
In Greek mythology, Cassandra was a priestess blessed with the gift of prophecy. She was cursed, however, to never be believed. In Virgil’s Aeneid, Cassandra warns her city about the fate that awaits them. Nevertheless, they welcome the Trojan Horse.
***
Ignoring the intelligence of women is not confined to antiquity. Last year, female Israeli soldiers warned their superiors of a growing threat:
In the months leading up to the 7 October attacks by Hamas, they did begin to see things: practice raids, mock hostage-taking, and farmers behaving strangely on the other side of the fence… they would pass information about what they were seeing to intelligence and higher-ranking officers, but were powerless to do more.
The Israeli military was caught by surprise, and several of these young women were captured or killed.
***
The Tet Offensive was the turning point of the Vietnam War. Up until then, the American public had been told that victory was assured. But in 1968, rebels launched multiple surprise attacks. Such was the shock that popular support for the war never recovered.
It’s worth wondering what would have happened had Doris Allen not been ignored:
She pushed for someone up the chain of command to take her report seriously, but no one did. On Jan. 30, 1968 — in line with what she had predicted — the enemy surprised American and South Vietnamese military leaders with the size and scope of their attacks.
The US military, alas, was not inclined to listen to a Black woman. Ms. Allen’s New York Times obituary recounts the story, as well as some of her other warnings (some heeded, some not).
In 2009, she was inducted to the Military Intelligence Corps Hall of Fame.
Scenesters
Tyrus Wong and Ming Cho Lee were immigrants from China, and both used the artistic traditions of their homeland to change American entertainment.
Ming Cho Lee “radically and almost single-handedly transformed the American approach to stage design,” per his New York Times obituary. Drawing upon his training in Chinese watercolor painting, Lee created sets for hundreds of plays, dance works, and operas. His mastery, alas, did not always guarantee success:
“The most distinguished aspect of ‘Here’s Where I Belong,’ the new musical that opened at the Billy Rose Theater last night, is the scenery by Ming Cho Lee,” Clive Barnes wrote in reviewing that one-day wonder for The Times in 1968. “But no one ever walked out of a theater humming the scenery.”
***
Tyrus Wong was a low-level illustrator at Walt Disney’s studio when his colleagues ran into trouble.
Disney’s animators were struggling to bring “Bambi” to the screen. The wide-eyed fawn and his feathered and furry friends were literally lost in the forest, overwhelmed by leaves, twigs, branches and other realistic touches in the ornately drawn backgrounds.
“Too much detail,” Wong thought when he saw the sketches.
On his own time, he made a series of tiny drawings and watercolors and showed them to his superiors. Dreamy and impressionistic, like a Chinese landscape, Wong’s approach was to “create the atmosphere, the feeling of the forest.” It turned out to be just what “Bambi” needed.
Wong had studied the landscape paintings of the Song Dynasty, and his knowledge was the catalyst for the creation of a classic.
His Los Angeles Times obituary recounts his arduous and improbable journey to becoming an artist, as well as the racial discrimination he encountered. It also notes that in retirement, he became known for the beautiful homemade kites he flew on the beach.
The Originators
A metaphor is when you describe something by saying it’s something else. This may sound confusing, but we use these figures of speech all the time. When you say your vacation was heaven, or you describe the cafeteria as a zoo, the meaning is probably very clear.
Metaphors from sports – e.g. hit a home run, fumble the ball, throw in the towel – are part of everyday English. Below are obituaries of three sportsmen who changed not only their games, but our language.
***
“We don’t need to spike the football, and I think that, given the graphic nature of these photos, it would create some national security risk,” Obama said.
After US commandos killed Osama bin Laden, President Barack Obama declined to release photographs of the terrorist’s corpse. He did so using a football metaphor that expresses victorious celebration.
Professional football’s first spike was performed in 1965 by Homer Jones, on the occasion of catching his first touchdown pass. His joy did not last. According to his New York Times obituary:
…he said that he had watched the end-zone demonstrations over the years with disapproval, and that if he had known what would result from his act, he would have thought twice. “It caused so many things — obscene things and confusing things,” he said. “I wish I hadn’t started it.”
***
Tenet, a basketball fan… leaned forward and threw his arms up again. “Don’t worry, it’s a slam dunk!”
George Tenet, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, convinced President George Bush to go to war in Iraq by using a basketball metaphor. He sought to convey the certainty that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction by using a term that means, colloquially, a sure thing. No such weapons were ever found.
It’s not certain who performed the first slam dunk, but it’s often attributed to Joe Fortenberry, who did so in Berlin in 1936 while leading the US Olympic team to a gold medal. His New York Times obituary notes the game, but not his innovation.
***
The Los Angeles Times obituary of Glenn Burke, who died at 42, is four paragraphs long. It recounts the prejudice he faced as one of the first openly gay players in a major league sport, as well as his troubled life following professional baseball.
The obituary neglects to mention that he brought us the high five.
The Logophiles
There are an estimated 7,000 languages in the world today, a majority of which originated with Indigenous people. Many of these are only spoken, not written, and they have no dictionaries. Because of forced assimilation, relocation and other factors involving Native people, most of these languages are on the verge of dying out.
Marie Wilcox sought to save one of them, Wukchumni. Her task was all the more urgent because she was the only person on Earth to speak it fluently. She created a dictionary so that the language would live on. As her New York Times obituary recounts:
Within short order, many family members started learning Wukchumni. And other Native American tribes were inspired by her story to revitalize their own disappearing languages.
***
Madeline Kripke did not, like Ms. Wilcox, create a dictionary. But she kept one of the world’s largest collections of them.
Beginning with the Webster’s Collegiate that her parents gave her in the fifth grade, she accumulated an estimated 20,000 volumes as diverse as a Latin dictionary printed in 1502, Jonathan Swift’s 1722 booklet titled “The Benefits of Farting Explained,” and the New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s 1980 guide to pickpocket slang.
Her New York Times obituary pays homage to her pursuit:
One question that none of Ms. Kripke’s reference books answers is what will happen to her collection. After avoiding eviction in the mid-1990s by agreeing to remove the volumes stacked in the hallway, she had hoped to transfer the whole enchilada [slang for the entirety] from her apartment and three warehouses to a university or, if she had her druthers [n., preference], to install it in her own dictionary library, which she never got to build.
Happily, the matter has been resolved, and the whole enchilada lives on as the Kripke Collection.