Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2016 June 25

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June 25

Medical question to be diagnosed

The webpage of the Huffington Post reports that a commentator (his name is vaguely familiar to me) has described one of the US presidential contenders as “America´s inner arsehole”. I have never heard / read this term, Googling seems to reference solely this specific TV-quotation and I can think of no intuitive guesstimate to interpret this phrase.
Question (ESL): What does it mean? --Cookatoo.ergo.ZooM (talk) 14:07, 25 June 2016 (UTC)

It's presumably a play on the concept of inner child. Just as everyone supposedly has a childlike aspect, often buried deep within, the candidate exemplifies the assholish aspect of the U.S. "personality". Deor (talk) 14:25, 25 June 2016 (UTC)

I'll second Deor, and add that parodies of "inner child" are innumerable; e.g., "unleash your inner Gene Kelly" could be a jocular way to say "dance". —Tamfang (talk) 09:52, 26 June 2016 (UTC)

Heh. My "inner child" is currently "grounded" as they took money from my wallet and spent it on cigarettes and beer.--Shirt58 (talk) 13:15, 29 June 2016 (UTC)

in their order and time of first song

"Next the wren explodes into song. Half a dozen other wrens give voice, and now all is bedlam. Grosbeaks, thrashers, yellow warblers, bluebirds, vireos, towhees, cardinals---all are at it. My solemn list of performers, in their order and time of first song, hesitates, wavers, ceases, for my ear can no longer filter out priorities." Does the phrase "in their order and time of first song" simply mean in the order of their first song? What does "time" mean here? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 222.128.175.160 (talk) 14:54, 25 June 2016 (UTC)

There are a number of possibilities, but if we had more context we could pin it down. Was the author trying to make a list of the birds entering the dawn chorus, in order of appearance? We could tell that if you could give us the source of the quotation. --TammyMoet (talk) 22:57, 25 June 2016 (UTC)

A Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold, apparently, but this is based on an answer the OP obtained to the same question on another forum. Google doesn't give any other hits for the verbatim text of the quotation. Tevildo (talk) 23:41, 25 June 2016 (UTC)

I only found it using portions of the OP's quote. The complete paragraph, without omissions, goes "Next the wren—the one who discovered the knothole in the eave of the cabin—explodes into song. Half a dozen other wrens give voice, and now all is bedlam. Grosbeaks, thrashers, yellow warblers, bluebirds, vireos, towhees, cardinals—all are at it. My solemn list of performers, in their order and time of first song, hesitates, wavers, ceases, for my ear can no longer filter out priorities. Besides the pot is empty and the sun is about to rise. I must inspect my domain before my title runs out." ---Sluzzelin talk 02:38, 26 June 2016 (UTC)

Oh, and for context, preceding paragraphs indicate that Leopold stepped from his cabin door at 3.30 a.m., armed with a coffee pot and a notebook, and started protocoling what he heard at which minute, e.g.: "At 3:35 the nearest field sparrow avows, in a clear tenor chant, that he holds the jackpine copse north to the riverbank". I'm guessing the "solemn list" not only includes the order of appearance of first songs by species, but also time of first appearance as recorded by the author (e.g. 3.35 a.m. ) (even if he didn't delight us with this exciting data in his Almanac :-) ---Sluzzelin talk 03:35, 26 June 2016 (UTC)

And based on that, "time" apparently means the time that each species starts to sing. Our dawn chorus (birds) article has a list (unreferenced) of birds in the UK in the order in which they start to sing. Aldo Leopold was writing about Sauk County, Wisconsin. Alansplodge (talk) 16:33, 26 June 2016 (UTC)

The two things - order and time - are really the same - it is just a literary style which says the same thing trwice in order to make the writing sound better. This is not quite poetry - but the language used is at time quite poetic, and is used for effect rather than for a specific meaning. Wymspen (talk) 17:30, 26 June 2016 (UTC)