The word conglomerate was in the news last month because of General Electric Co.’s decision to split itself into three parts. Though it has divested itself of several businesses over the years—including appliances, financial, and entertainment—GE has remained a true conglomerate in that it’s an entity with diverse businesses.
I occasionally see conglomerate used to more broadly mean “a big-ass business,” as in this Vox story’s reference to “Stellantis, the Dutch automotive conglomerate.” Stellantis is a large company—it had third-quarter revenue of €32.6 billion—with a number of well-known brands, including Chrysler, Fiat, and Maserati, but it really has one business: to make and sell cars.
Another business term I sometimes see misused is spin-off, which takes me back to that GE story. The company will be spinning off its healthcare and energy businesses, leaving aviation as its only remaining industry. In a spin-off, the current shareholders of a company receive newly created shares in a division of that company. When I worked as an editor for a business magazine, I would occasionally have to change references to a company spinning off a division when it was actually selling it to another company.
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Cafe Press, the printer of the 2021 calendar I’ve been looking at all year, screwed up and put Thanksgiving on a Friday.
Or maybe it was the fault of the calendar’s creator? Anyway, the calendar (which has the same art in its 2021 and 2022 incarnations) features some adorable photos of corgis, as does its sister calendar, which focuses on corgi butts.
The rescue group we adopted Missy from called her a corgi mix, but I’m no longer sure she has any corgi in her at all. I’m pretty certain she is part papillon, mostly because of the way the hair on her ears grows, and I’m becoming increasingly convinced she’s part Australian shepherd, a breed I don’t really know much about, other than it was actually developed in California. Several people we’ve encountered on walks have suggested they see Australian shepherd in her, and I saw a photo of a dog in a Facebook group I follow that was the spitting image of Missy, and he was half Australian shepherd. The dog’s human told me he was actually a much bigger dog than Missy and was also half German shepherd, which seemed unlikely to me.
Where the hell am I going with all of this? Where I inevitably go when I write about dogs on the blog: to a cute picture of our baby girl, who was eager to find out what her Papa Tony was putting on the dinner table the other night.
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Even though I’m a word guy, most songs draw me in through a beautiful melody or a nonlyrical, super-catchy hook. But one of my favorite genres is folk, in which the lyrics are often the star and the songwriter can make you feel like you’ve heard a short story set to music.
The best story-telling song I’ve ever encountered is “Cold Missouri Waters,” which is written from the point of view of Wag Dodge, who survived the devastating Mann Gulch wildfire of 1949 only to die of cancer five years later. (I didn’t say it was a happy story.) Songwriter James Keelaghan created the song after reading Young Men and Fire, a book-length account of the fire and the people who fought it, by Norman Maclean.
I first heard the song on Cry Cry Cry’s 1998 self-titled album, and I got to hear the members of that folk supergroup—Lucy Kaplansky, Richard Shindell, and Dar Williams—sing it live back in the day.1 I've since listened to Shindell's solo version, Keelaghan's original version, and various other live and studio recordings—eight of which can be found here.
Once you've heard or read the lyrics, you know all the key elements of Dodge's story. The words take you from his hospital bed back in time to an airplane above the fire (the people who fought the fire, led by Dodge, were smokejumpers), then into the path of the fast-moving fire, and, finally, back to the hospital, where Dodge says he'll soon be joining the 13 men who died in the blaze.
My favorite verse is the penultimate one:
Sky had turned red, smoke was boiling / Two hundred yards to safety, death was fifty yards behind / I don't know why, I just thought it / I struck a match to waist-high grass, running out of time / Tried to tell them, step into this fire I’ve set / We can't make it, this is the only chance you'll get / But they cursed me, ran for the rocks above instead / I lay face down and prayed above the cold Missouri waters
Isn't that phenomenal writing?
Because this is an editing-focused post, I'll point out two wording-related questions I pondered after listening to the song many times.
First, on "the hottest day on record," in early August, is the Missouri River still going to be cold, even in the northern state of Montana? Eh, maybe it was only cool, but "cool Missouri waters" doesn't carry the same weight.
The second question I had was answered by blogger Tony Dalmyn. In the earlier studio versions, Keelaghan and Shindell (as part of CCC) sing "north Montana," while in other versions, the lyric is "west Montana." Why the two different directions? West Montana looks to be more accurate according to the map in the Wikipedia article linked above at "Mann Gulch wildfire." Dalmyn writes that Keelaghan changed the lyric at the request of people who live near the Gates of the Mountains.
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I bought People magazine’s Sexiest Man Alive issue—for the articles, of course. On a page about Paul Bettany, two sentences popped out at me, in addition to the actor’s blue eyes.
First up: “Life’s curly.” I’d never seen curly being used in a sense other than “having curls” or something similar. One online dictionary says the word can mean “difficult to counter or answer” to English speakers in Australia and New Zealand, so I assume Bettany is saying “Life isn’t always easy.”
And I think hurdle later in that quote should be hurtle. “Move rapidly” makes more sense there than “jump over” or “overcome.”
1I didn't get to see CCC on their 2018 reunion tour; it didn't come anywhere near Fort Lauderdale. This YouTube clip shows CCC's performance of three songs from the Berkeley, California, stop of that tour: "Ten Year Night," which was written by Kaplansky and her husband, Richard Litvin; "Cathedrals," which was written by Jump, Little Children's Jay Clifford; and "Cold Missouri Waters."