So the staffing company that put me at my current job has, in the last day or so, decided to place my brother’s girlfriend at the same company. That’s cool, but that brings up a linguistics question:

Is there any analog to “foo-in-law” for serious but non-marital partner relations? In which if any cultures/languages?

Certainly, “my brother’s girlfriend” isn’t oppressive — it’s not significantly more work to produce than, for example, “sister-in-law” would be — but why not something to express more clearly the serious-and-ongoing-non-marital-relationship notion?

Partner fits the mold fairly well, but at this point I feel it’s strongly associated (in US culture, at least) with gay/lesbian relationships — while the phrase “my partner” doesn’t explicitly mark the relationship as homosexual, there’s some semantic spillover. What I’m looking for is something entirely neutral to the sexual question, as fiance is used casually in the US. (If I remember, there are actually two French words here originally, referring to the man and the woman in the engagement and varying slightly in spelling or inflection — two E’s in one, or something. And there’s an accent in there that I’m too lazy to verify and render. Je ne parle pas franç¡©s.)

But, of course, this mystery word would be a complement to “fiance”; it would denote a relationship that is explicitly not a formal engagement, one that is not necessarily intended to be a pre-cursor to, but rather potentially simply an alternative to, a traditional engagement and marriage.

The phrase that occured to me as a possible solution: “sister-in-date”. Explicitly dating, explicitly not engaged, implicitly involved in a fairly comfortable and intimate relationship with my brother’s family.

It has the advantage of serving the very specific purpose I have in mind. I don’t know that it’s really all that good, however; I’m having trouble imagining people using it naturally. For one thing, “law” and “date” don’t feel like they match up that well. “law” and “dating” feel more similar, but “sister-in-dating” just sounds awful to me.

I just don’t think I’m cut out to be a professional neologer.

Talking, in IRC, to good friend (and core Josh Millard superfan) Mike last night about the music retrieval/archive project I’m starting into, he summed up a lot of what is wrong/oh-so-right with my old high school songs as such:

  the angst was palpable 

I’ve put out a call to my old college friends: send me the mp3s of my music that you have sitting around. Over the years, I’ve lost any number of older recordings to hard drive crashes and plain jackassed disorganization, and I find myself now in a introspective, retroflective sort of mood. And so I’ve started pulling in some of the yield, including my first demo tape, a collection of songs recorded in late summer 1997 shortly before I left for my freshman year at WPI.

And oh. my. god.

Some of it is pure 17-year-old angst-monkey super-pretentious proto-folky dreck. Just plain bad. Questionable artistic decisions is what I’m talking about.

And then some of it is not so bad. Nice melodies. Cool arrangment ideas. Some good lyrical ideas here and there, even if many of the songs are just very, very contrived and inconsistent.

It’s food for thought. I’m fixin’ to put together as complete an archive of my music as I can manage. Annotated lyrics full of footnotes and hyperlinks, perhaps.

It is with a tinge of guilt that I perpetuate the dissemination of a particularly cruel blond joke that’s running the blog circuit right now.

Let me establish my prejudice: I really, really like jeans. As pants go, they are, as the kids say, teh win. Sure, I like my cords, and have been a fan of cargo pants since about the time they went out of style. And yes, there is even something to be said for slacks, of which I own several pair; but what slacks I own are a statement of compromise, a concession to a business world to which I have only obligatory financial ties.

I mention it because, where I work, the permissibility of jeans-wearing on Fridays is a contentious issue. We have, on occasion, Jeans Friday, but barring that occasional exception they are, within our department at least, verboten. This came up in an email exchange today — someone asked, sort of in context, after the possibility of adopting the same general Friday Jeans Day policy held by some other departments — and the response was not affirmative.

A quote, from The Man:

“Let’s be clear, the majority of this company follows a dress code where jeans are not permitted. The only areas that should be using jeans days as a perk are those areas that have issues with attracting and retaining quality talent, which we don’t.”

It’s a position. It’s not one I agree with, but, well, see above; I’m enough of a slacker and para-aesthete that I am almost bound by honor to be contrary to an anti-jeans policy.

But stating the position as above requires the direct statement that some (minority) portion of the company can’t attract and retain talent. And that while names are not being named, one can damned well identify the talentless (or soon-departing) members of said portions by the blue denim in which they are on Fridays clad.

Harsh.

You better chown yourself
Before you pwn yourself

I thought I was so smart, googling for “small composed salad” earlier today. In a moment of reflection, I tried a more permissive search, for what occurred to me as being the likely minimal unit of meaning: “composed salad“.

Lo. Behold. Some 10,000 hits, including the page containing this explanatory quote:

“A composed salad, according to On Cooking: Techniques from Expert Chefs (Prentice Hall, 1999) by Sarah R. Labensky and Alan Hause, is a salad that usually uses greens as a base and is built by artistically arranging a variety of other ingredients on a plate.”

So it’s industry lingo, this composed salad. (And now I will think of flower arrangments next time I sit down to a colorful bowl of greens. Dammit.)

The term is apparently adapted from French, according to this definition attributed to The New Food Lover’s Companion, 1995:

“A salad in which the ingredients are artfully arranged, rather than tossed together. The dressing for a composed salad is usually drizzled over the top of the ingredients. In French the term is known as salade composée.”

And it looks like the (presumably older) French term is on much more solid ground: a google for the French name produces 62,000 hits, fully five times the number for the English version.

What an educational afternoon.

There’s a sort of upheaval going on in the food-service stratum of my workplace; a recent re-jiggering of the employee benefit plan includes the sudden and complete cessation of a long-running 50% food discount at the various little food outlets in our buildings. The cafe in the building in which I don’t work had a little going out of business party just before new years — they didn’t want to bother trying to hack it charging full price — and the coffee stand in this building has introduced frequent-drinker punch cards. Buy 9, get one free, that sort of thing.

And the cafe in this building is advertising some specials for the new year, including something that I can’t quite make sense of:

small composed salad

It’s a salad, and small, that much I can work with unflinchingly. But it is also, uh, composed? Whence? Is the notion that, yes, your salad comes pre-built, no assembly required? Is it a calm, rational salad? Is there a musical theme?

Did they, god help us, misspell compost?

Google doesn’t offer any explanation. A search for “small composed salad” gave me 7 hits, including some redundancies (I look forward to being number 8). And none of them convinced me there was any argument for the unpuncutated “small composed salad”.

I don’t really know who Murs is yet, and certainly can’t confirm nor deny vis-a-vis Murs Rules the World being an accurate album title, but I have a hard time not liking a lyric like this:

Ima dedicated this album
To everyone who cried
When they killed Optimus Prime

Happy New Year.