Ben Adams, Matthew Belinkie, Peter Fenzel, and Matthew Wrather overthink horror film and the cinema of the late, great Wes Craven.
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Your Panel
Further Reading
- “Wes Craven, Horror Maestro, Dies at 76”
- Wes Craven: IMDb, Wikipedia
I would be very curious to know how Wes Craven made the jump from Professor of English Literature to porn director.
Well, a survey of 20th century American Lit has taught me that English Professors are generally pretty sexually frustrated. Maybe he just didn’t feel like he had a novel in him.
Most indigenous languages of Turtle Island are highly descriptive and many names of places are just that descriptive place names. So I deny Wrather’s challenge on this one.
Places like Michoacan just mean Place where people have Fish (I could translate that as Fisherton ;)
http://www.wlrp.org/ or since some of the OTers are in the east coast
Original Name: Mâsach8sut (maa-sa-choo-sut)
Current Name: Massachusetts
Translation: Place of the foothill. This was probably referring to the Blue Hills
Native names just seem to work like that, highly descriptive and not as “High or lofty”
Funny how the exotic name just translate into rather normal sounding names once translated but the “fake Indian names” are almost always high falooten like Floating Eagle Feather.
Excellent podcast as usual. Hey Matt, you weren’t too bad in this cast. Tho your pronunciation of the horror is fascinating, I just hope it wasn’t a bad pun relating to Craven’s pornographic works…
It’s not like Europeans were all that evocative when they named the stuff in their backyards. The Rhine and the Rhone both mean something like “flowing” if you happen to speak Proto-Indo-European, and the Danube and the Don probably just mean “the river.” The centerpiece of the Alps (Celtic: “the tall mountains”) is Mont Blanc (French: “white mountain;” it has snow on it).
This sounds like an XKCD comic in the making, if it’s not one already.
In fact the more exotic it sounds (to Americans) the more likely it is to have a simple meaning.
Mesopotamia is Greek for “Land between the rivers” and seems to be a direct translation from regional languages going back to the invention of writing.
Transylvania means “Beyond the Woods” and seems to always have been named as something related to either woods or mountains.
And Dublin just means “Black Water”… never mind that could be taken either descriptively or evocatively, or both ways together…
I think the Irish take pride in breaking patterns.
Unfortunately my proto-indo-european is rather rusty! :3
Matthew… THERE’S A SPIDER ON YOUR BACK!
You know the first time I read this I read “SPADER” and I thought that I was on the Blacklist or something.
That joke was shamelessly stolen from Kids in the Hall.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9YrDQ18P9x4
http://www.ktoo.org/2014/10/24/forbidden-alaskas-native-languages-now-official-state-language More good news, the local languages that were outlawed, along with their religions among other things, until fairly recently are now oficial languages in Alaska! Huzzah! Nice to hear a bit of good news. Maybe someday they’ll translate an OTI article into Tlingit, ;)