A Horse’s Ass
I had some fun with this one. It’s more stream of consciousness than a coherent narrative. Though it certainly seems to be insinuating something.
“Have you seen the carsy? Just a bucket with a seat on top!”
DIRTY BIRDS CLEAN CLOACAE
How many bird gags can fit in one image? This is a good start, but uhh, I’m going to need you to go ahead and come in on Sunday, too. We need more suggestions for bird gags, mmkay? Thaaanks.
Fun fact: This is the only Abecedary where I used the golden rectangle to lay out the composition. It also inspired a companion piece.
“With beast and bird the forest rings, Each in his jargon cries or sings.”
jargon, n. 1. The inarticulate utterance of birds, or a vocal sound resembling it; twittering, chattering.
Dictating Clauses
In neofeudal—er, neoliberal America, the laws are drafted by the corporate aristocrats—uh, the corporate persons, and the natural persons who represent them. They’ve got the resources to buy the guns which bring home the resources. As long as the serfs—no, as long as the citizens are kept distracted, it’s just a matter of getting the pesky committee-havers and bill-passers to go along. Just sign on the line, Senator, and we’ll let you get back to your vassal duties, or call time.
When I drew this in early 2015 the dissenting lawmaker was just a generic white guy. Since then the number of voices in the legislature speaking out against imperialism, corruption and capital has grown more prominent. Appropriately they come from far more diverse backgrounds than in my original drawing. So I updated it to an Ilhan Omar-esque figure.
“The insurgent barons dictated whatever clauses they deemed desirable.”
insurgent, A. adj. 1. Rising in active revolt.
Through Being Cool
You ever fuck around and spend years assembling a collection of cultural artifacts, preferences and mannerisms that conform to a shifting, unwritten set of standards in pursuit of social acceptance, while occasionally breaking with consensus to look like an independent and unique person?
Nah, me neither.
“As Norman Mailer would say, it’s ‘hip’ to use obscure terms and meaningless symbols.”
hip, n. slang (orig. U.S.) 1. The quality or condition of being hip; fashionable sophistication. adj. 2. More generally: fashionable, up-to-date; stylish, sophisticated; cool (sometimes in ironic use). Now the usual sense.
Recipe for Deviled Gallimaufry
A heaping of deviled gallimaufry big enough for the whole brood! Smokey, spicy, meaty and unrepentant, get ready to cook up a sinfully good dinner right in your corner of Hell! You can’t have too many family dinner recipes; and one that uses locally-sourced ingredients! There’s always room for that!
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Why a Gallimaufry?
One of the first routines to fall by the wayside when I’m being tormented for an eternity is family dinner, which is a shame, because I have bestial craving for it. It’s hard to justify the time spent catching popes, striking unspeakable deals, and making a reduction for dinner, when my clan’s hunger can never be sated. Still, I inevitably perk up and feel better when I make these things. They’re reminders that the varieties of suffering are endless. And there’s nothing like a hot meal on cold nights infinitely removed from God’s light, pure and simple.
My unholy spawn can’t get enough deviled gallimaufry. While I’m cooking, they can barely resist clawing and rending my body to pieces in their impatience. My big boy especially loves the pitch-soaked slabs of senator. His wretched probosci wetly funnel hocks of meat into a maw that never stops gnawing. His younger brother loves to settle on dinner like a putrid mist, rotting everything and causing great blooms of mold, just the way he likes it. My husband, the Deceiver, always breaks out in a vessel-popping rictus grin when I put this dish on the supper table, and our littlest one can’t wait to drag a steaming bowl of gallimaufry back to her cage. With her thousand mouths it’s a guarantee she’ll be rattling her chains for seconds soon enough!
Deviled Gallimaufry Ingredient List
1 gallon fetid water
½ cup extra virgin oil
2 cups pitch
½ cup boiled blood with extra pulp of tyrants
1 handful of maggots
1 cup soothsayer heads
½ pound flayed senator
3 simonious popes
1 avaricious cardinal
2 charbroiled heretics, entombed
3 ounces leprous scabs of an alchemist
1 head of frozen traitor
1 pound sodium
1 tablespoon mustard seed
¼ cup ground black pepper
¼ cup smoked hot paprika
Sulfur sauce
Deviled Gallimaufry Preparation Instructions
Toss the sodium into a large pot of fetid water and bring to a rolling boil.
Whisk the extra virgin oil, pitch and boiled blood together, over medium high heat in a stained steel pan.
From the feet of uncommitted sinners, harvest 1 handful of maggots and mince until fine.
Soothsayer heads come attached to their body, twisted backwards in the packaging. Pop the heads off and discard the bodies, they are useless husks. Soothsayers tend to cry a lot, so poke out their eyes and rinse them of their lamentations. Bash their faces until bloody.
Add the maggots to the pan and whisk to dissolve, until aromatic. Then add the soothsayer heads and flayed senator to the pitch and oil along with the mustard, pepper and paprika. Reduce to low heat and cook until the deviling is coagulated.
Meanwhile, decapitate the simonious popes. This is easy as their heads come stuffed in a rock. The heads are bitter and disgusting, but their bodies are juicy and fat. Hold their feet to the fire until golden brown and demonic. Pro tip: use a simoniac rock to beat the soothsayers in step 4; just make sure all the pope has been removed first.
Un-entomb the heretics (careful: they are usually still on fire!) and hack them to pieces, along with the cardinal.
Mix together the popes, cardinals and heretics in a large bowl. Zest the leprous scabs into this mixture and then add everything to the boiling water.
Boil for 10,000 years, or until the wailing and gnashing of teeth subsides. Add the thawed traitor’s head and continue to simmer for 10,000 more years until whimpering.
Stir the deviled reduction into the gallimaufry and serve immediately. Add sulfur sauce to taste.
Enjoy!
“The Devil mince me into a Galli-mafry, if I do not tremble for fear.”
gallimaufry, n. 1. A dish made by hashing up odds and ends of food; a hodge-podge, a ragout.
Official Narratives
I illustrated this in 2015, during the Obama years. That time saw many things come to light. The Snowden leaks revealed the vast reach of the government’s domestic surveillance regime and the shadow courts that providing legal fig leaves. The federal security state wasn’t alone, as law enforcement at all levels was shown to have access to sophisticated surveillance equipment with little oversight. In the financial and corporate sphere, the fraud that perpetuated the 2008 Great Recession was not enough. Major banks engaged in endemic money laundering on behalf of criminal cartels and terrorist organizations. New abuses came to light about Guantanamo Bay, which remained stubbornly open despite campaign promises, and continued to be a propaganda boon to recruiting violent extremists. On top of that the facility was revealed to be just one in a globe-spanning archipelago of black sites operating outside the jurisdiction of the U.S. legal system.
These problems did not begin then. Many trace their origin to the paranoia in the aftermath of 9/11, and the jingoist response from the Bush administration. (A time that gave us the factoid-synonymous term ‘truthiness’ after all.) Others are intensifications of existing fault lines in American society. All undermine the official narratives offered by the institutions in charge, statements repeated from on high which have the shape of fact but none of the contents.
Prescriptivism is an approach to language which sets up rules for usage, for proper grammar and spelling, and for acceptable pronunciation. These attempts to build a wall around language are ultimately political. They serve to define who belongs to the linguistic community and who is an outsider, speaking a deformed or degenerate tongue, potentially contagious. It would be remiss then not to mention that ‘factoid’, by dint of usage, has come to also mean a free-floating bit of information or trivia. This usage is valid, even if it is an inversion of the original definition. Who speaks properly? Who speaks the truth? These questions are intertwined. Deviant speech excuses suppression while the official story elides the abuse. That, at least, was how I drew it back then.
Things are different now. ‘Fake news’ is emblematic of the New Sophistry of the Trump era. The gap between what the powerful say they are doing and what happens is an unconcealed, yawning chasm. The dissonance has been seized upon as a tool in itself for managing expectations and controlling responses. This move allows what was formerly concealed to be perpetrated openly, skating on the confusion of the masses to escape accountability. The rhetorical style of the current elite does not bother to deny the Facts but instead shatters them into a bewildering array of factoids then moves on, no longer concerned with the need to construct legitimacy from the wreckage.
“It is a valuable and entertaining, if partisan and factoid, chapter in the struggle to reveal the intimate secrets of the judiciary to those it exists to serve.”
factoid, A. sb. Something that becomes accepted as fact although it is not (or may not be) true; spec. an assumption or speculation reported and repeated so often that it is popularly considered true; a simulated or imagined fact. B. adj. Of or having the character of a factoid, quasi-factual; spec. designating writing (esp. journalism) which contains a mixture of fact and supposition or invention as accepted fact.
A Language is a Dialect with an Army & Navy
The wording of this definition has been revised since I created this comic. It now reads “To talk incessantly or at great length,”, ‘Ear-basher’ has its own entry (‘A person who talks excessively; a bore’), and the quotation has changed. The line from We Were Rats is now “Ya know them things he's often ear-bashing about.” This may be a different passage, or excerpted from an inferior translation, sadly missing much of the character of the original Australian.
“‘Time for you bastards to do some spine bashing,’ said one. ‘Are you going to sit there ear bashing all night?’”
Ear-bash, v., transitive & intransitive slang. (chiefly Australian). To talk inordinately (to someone). Hence ear-bashing, verbal substantive & participle adjective; ear-basher, a chatterer; a bore.
Thug
A wave of national protests began in 2014 in Ferguson, Missouri, after a white cop fatally shot Mike Brown, an unarmed African-American teenager. The protests focused on the police brutality, extortion and murders targeting predominantly black communities. It was followed by a stomach-turning series of widely-covered extrajudicial assassinations by law enforcement officers, many captured on video and spread through social media. Markedly few of the officers faced any legal consequences for their actions. A Department of Justice investigation found that the Ferguson PD was using outrageous fines, questionable arrests and a pattern of violence and intimidation to squeeze the local population for revenue. Subsequent reporting suggested this conduct is not limited to the St. Louis suburbs, but is a nationwide pandemic. The demand for justice, equality, and the recognition that Black Lives Matter spread rapidly. But just as fast a counter-narrative was propagated; a vicious, uncharitable rot of grotesque stereotypes. This poisonous bile was distilled by the major organs of American media. Talking heads sprayed each new viral snuff video with a suggestion that the unarmed and unconvicted dead was a ‘thug,’ a newly favored dysphemism.
It was a symptom of a growing dyspeptic rump in the American body politic; a strain of reactionary ideas that seemed, at least for a little while, to have gone into remission. Instead it revealed itself as a boil, swollen with resentment. Dysphemisms police how we talk about systems of exploitation. They can infect movements for solidarity, create perpetrators where there are none, or launder injustice as part of the natural order. The abscess of hate that surfaced was built up over decades injecting dysphemisms peddled by cable news and AM radio quacks. It is a bitter malpractice that continues to this day, while the only beneficiaries of the treatment are those who profit off society’s ills.
“‘Robber’ may also be one of those political dysphemisms used to discredit a nationalist rebel.”
dysphemism, n. The substitution of an unpleasant or derogatory word or expression for a pleasant or inoffensive one; also, a word or expression so used; opposed to euphemism, n..
It’s the Real Thing
The locals know which leaves make the good tea; all these other shrubs will have to go. Don’t just stand there chewing, get to work! Cook us a batch, send it up North—give it plenty of bubbles, pop-pop-pop. Life just got sweeter. I wish they would replace the water with this stuff.
This was the last Abecedary I drew on regular printer paper. I used a brush pen for this one which seems ridiculous in hindsight given the amount of detail I tried to fit on a small canvas, drawing specific plants and stuff.
“The coco-colanization [sic] of the viticultural regions.”
Coca-Cola n. The proprietary name of a popular American soft drink. Also fig. So in various humorous or allusive formations as coca-colonization.
Achievement Unlocked
This war takes up an enormous amount of space and has no campaign mode. Multilateral mode’s waiting room is broken and the matches are horribly uneven. Buggy maps cause missions to reach victory conditions but then mysteriously keep going. I had to read pages of forums just to figure out who I was fighting on some levels. The aerial levels are boring and impossible to finish without driving your collateral death stat through the roof. Every year costly DLC are churned out with barely any publicity. Each one adds sprawling, repetitive maps and unusable new weapon packs. One automatically deleted my SimEarth save. This is a company that does not care about the people who play their games and if they ever-- what? Okay, okay I’ll leave the Activision lobby. Please don’t get security.
1 star
“Prizes were as banal as medals after a modern war.”
banal adj. 1. Of or belonging to compulsory feudal service. 2. (From the intermediate sense of, Open to the use of all the community): Commonplace, common, trite; trivial, petty.
Abecedarian Ignorance
The thought of doing some sort of project with the dictionary had been in my head since at least 2006, when I read The Autobiography of Malcolm X, and when I received a condensed but complete copy of the Oxford English Dictionary for Christmas. The preponderant tome had nine pages reproduced on each side of the thin sheets, and came with a bulbous magnifying lens to aid reading. Initial explorations yielded etymological treats, quizzical, comical words of yore, and a flyby of the white guys of English literature. But, since I wasn’t in prison, the dictionary went up on the shelf. I mean, did I actually think I would read an entire reference book straight through hahaha ha ha?
The idea lay dormant until 2013. I was a month away from dropping out of a part time (post bac) stint in art school when I put this ‘dictionary comic’ notion in action. I got down the big book and the fish-eye lens and started looking through ‘A’. Luckily, the titular word was near the beginning. What I wanted to create was an alphabetical book of interesting words: an abecedary, n. Moreso, the related adjective ‘abecedarian’ described how I felt at the time about my artistic ability: novice, inexperienced and requiring instruction. The Abecedary could be a project where I indulged amateur word-sleuthing and worked toward professional illustration. The Montaigne quotation produced in me a strong visual, (this would later prove to be the most productive way of selecting words,) and I doodled the above cartoon in one frantic sitting. It was, iirc, very late at night.
Time passed. Over a whole year in fact. Obviously I returned to the Abecedary, and picked up at ‘B’, which you can see...
NEXT WEEK!! SAME ABECEDARY TIME* SAME ABECEDARY CHANNEL**!!!
*maybe **online
“There is a kind of Abecedarie ignorance preceding science: another doctorall following science.”
abecedary A. adj. 1. Of or according to the alphabet; alphabetic; marked with the alphabet; arranged in alphabetical order. 2. Engaged with or needing to learn the alphabet; illiterate.
about
The Abecedary is a comic based on definitions and quotations from the Oxford English Dictionary. The OED is not limited to current words and usages. It also contains historical, obscure, specialized and nonce words. The definitions in the dictionary are deeply sourced; they tell a story about the English language and its spread across the world, carried on the tips of tongues and spears.
“words, Words, WORDS,,”
— @hamlet2b
Each Abecedary incorporates a definition, and an example quotation that inspires the illustration. The meanings of words are *~*𝖘𝖔𝖈𝖎𝖆𝖑𝖑𝖞 𝖈𝖔𝖓𝖘𝖙𝖗𝖚𝖈𝖙𝖊𝖉 & 𝖍𝖎𝖘𝖙𝖔𝖗𝖎𝖈𝖆𝖑𝖑𝖞 𝖘𝖎𝖙𝖚𝖆𝖙𝖊𝖉*~*. The ‘correct’ definition and the ‘proper’ usage of words is not fixed, but under constant renegotiation. The OED is a core sample library of the English lexicon. Each entry contains centuries of textual sediment showing the natural semantic drift of language. This feature of the dictionary animates the Abecedary.
The Abecedary is by Lyall Wallerstedt. Other work can be seen at lyallw.art. The Oxford English Dictionary is online at www.oed.com, and full access is probably available through your local library.
