Master and Commander

On my boat at lunch today, I snatched a snippet of Master and Commander by Patrick O’Brian.  Wonderfully written; I only allow myself little bits of it and only while on the boat.

It is very entertaining how he heavily lays on the nautical terms and then manages to explain them through context without becoming pedantic.  As a sailor, I enjoyed the epiphany of “mainstay” as not just a crucial element of something, but as the line that hold up the main mast — a crucial element indeed.

Equally entertaining was the movie version of “Master and Commander” starring Russell Crowe.  Gripping, dramatic, it draws you in.  I’m looking foward to reading the whole Aubray/Maturin series.

Peripatetic

Just read an article about the founders of YouTube.  It described them as young, creative, and peripatetic.  That word has the sense for me of someone who wanders, who moves about.  To get more exactitude, I looked it up — on the world’s dictionary, Google, of course.

Turns out it does have the common meaning of walking about, of being itinerant.  But it also carries a meaning related to Aristotle.  Using Peripatetic (with the initial capitalization) as a descriptor means related to Aristotle or to the Aristotelian school of philosophy.  All this because Aristotle taught while walking around the Lyceum in Athens.

You can see Aristotle walking and teaching in the The School of Athens, painted by Raphael in 1511.  He’s in the center, stepping foward, with hand extended, in the blue robe, carrying his Nicomachean Ethics.  Here’s an art print of this scene, which I have in my hallway:

Yippee ki ay

I encountered this phrase at the end of the new Bruce Willis movie “Live Free or Die Hard“.  It’s his signature phrase from the earlier movies in the series:  ”Die Hard“, “Die Hard 2 – Die Harder“, and “Die Hard with a Vengeance“.  I had to know where it came from.

It’s a variant of cowboy yodelling.  The most famous song that contains these sounds is “I’m an old cowhand from the Rio Grande“, which was written in 1936 by Johnny Mercer.

Bing Crosby recorded it for the the 1936 movie “Rhythm on the Range” and Roy Rogers recorded it for the 1943 movie “King of the Cowboys“.  There were also versions by other famous singers, such as Frank Sinatra, Harry Connick Jr., and Ray Charles.

There are a wide variety of spellings for these sounds.  Yippee is also rendered as yippie, yippe, and yippy.  Ki can be kay and kai.  Ay is sometimes a, aye, yah, and sometimes combined with ki to form kayah.

So Willis is alluding back to the wild days of the American cowboy, with a twist of humor, since the song is actually about a Texan who drives a Ford V-8 and learned all his songs from the radio.  :->