Parody - Definition and Examples of Parodies in English

Parody s of Parodies in English Definition A parody is a  text that imitates the characteristic style of an author or a work for comic effect. Adjective: parodic. Informally known as a spoof. Author William H. Gass observes that in most cases parody grotesquely exaggerates the outstanding and most annoying features of its victim (A Temple of Texts, 2006).See Examples and Observations below. Also see: AmphigoryCaricaturePasticheSatire Words at Play: An Introduction to Recreational Linguistics Examples of Parodies Christmas Afternoon, by Robert BenchleyHow Shall I Word It? by Max BeerbohmJack and Gill: A Mock Criticism, by Joseph DennieA Meditation Upon a Broomstick, by Jonathan SwiftThe Most Popular Book of the Month, by Robert BenchleyShakespeare Explained: Carrying on the System of Footnotes to a Silly Extreme, by Robert BenchleySome Historians, by Philip Guedalla You! by Robert Benchley EtymologyFrom the Greek, beside or counter plus song   Examples and Observations [P]arody works only on people who know the original, and they have to know it intimately enough to appreciate the finer touches as well as the broad strokes of the imitation. Part of the enjoyment people take in parody is the enjoyment of feeling intelligent. Not everyone gets the joke: if you dont already know about the peach, you wont laugh at the prune. Its fantasy baseball for bookworms.(Louis Menand, Parodies Lost. The New Yorker, Sep. 20, 2010) Lewis Carrolls Parody of a Poem by Robert SoutheyOriginal PoemYou are old, Father William,’ the young man cried;‘The few locks which are left you are grey;You are hale, Father Williama hearty old man:Now tell me the reason, I pray.’‘In the days of my youth,’ Father William replied,‘I remember’d that youth would fly fast,And Abus’d not my health and my vigour at first,That I never might need them at last. . . .(Robert Southey, The Old Mans Comforts and How He Gained Them, 1799)Lewis Car rolls Parody‘You are old, Father William,’ the young man said,‘And your hair has become very white;And yet you incessantly stand on your headDo you think, at your age, it is right?’‘In my youth,’ Father William replied to his son,‘I feared it might injure the brain;But, now that I’m perfectly sure I have none,Why, I do it again and again. . . .(Lewis Carroll, Alices Adventures in Wonderland, 1865) Lord of the Rings ParodyAnd that boy of his, Frito, added bleary-eyed Nat Clubfoot, as crazy as a woodpecker, that one is. This was verified by Old Poop of Backwater, among others. For who hadnt seen young Frito, walking aimlessly through the crooked streets of Boggietown, carrying little clumps of flowers and muttering about truth and beauty and blurting out silly nonsense like Cogito ergo boggum?(H. Beard, The Harvard Lampoon, Bored of the Rings, 1969) Characteristics of Parodies[M]ost parody worthy of the name is ambivalent toward its target. This ambivalence may entail not only a mixture of criticism and sympathy for the parodied text, but also the creative expansion of it into something new. Most other of the specific characteristics of parody, including its creation of comic incongruity between the original and the parody, and the way in which its comedy can laugh both at and with its target, may be traced to the way in which the parodist makes the object of the parody a part of the parodys structure.(Margaret A. Rose, Parody: Ancient, Modern, and Post-Modern. Cambridge University Press, 1993) Six Parodies of Ernest Hemingway  - Most of the tricks were good tricks and they worked fine for a while especially in the short stories. Ernest was stylish in the hundred-yard dash but he didnt have the wind for the long stuff. Later on the tricks did not look so good. They were the same tricks but they were not fresh any more and nothing is worse than a trick that that has gone stale. He knew this but he couldnt invent any new tricks.(Dwight Macdonald, Against the American Grain, 1962)- I went out into the room where the chimney was. The little man came down the chimney and stepped into the room. He was dressed all in fur. His clothes were covered with ashes and soot from the chimney. On his back was a pack like a peddlers pack. There were toys in it. His cheeks and nose were red and he had dimples. His eyes twinkled. His mouth was little, like a bow, and his beard was very white. Between his teeth was a stumpy pipe. The smoke from the pipe encircled his head in a wreath. He lau ghed and his belly shook. It shook like a bowl of red jelly. I laughed. He winked his eye, then he gave a twist to his head. He didnt say anything.(James Thurber, A Visit From Saint Nicholas (In the Ernest Hemingway Manner). The New Yorker, 1927)- I rolled into Searchlight around midnight and walked into Rosies beer joint to get a cold one after the ride over from Vegas. He was the first one I saw. I looked at him and he stared back at me with those flat blue eyes. He was giving me that kind of howdy wave with his good right arm while his left sleeve hung armless from the shoulder. He was dressed up like a cowboy.(Cactus Jack, The One-Armed Bandit, 2006 Bad Hemingway competition)- This is my last and best and true and only meal, thought Mr. Pirnie as he descended at noon and swung east on the beat-up sidewalk of Forty-fifth Street. Just ahead of him was the girl from the reception desk. I am a little fleshed up around the crook of the elbow, thought Pirnie, but I commute good.(E.B. White, Across the Street and Into the Grill. The New Yorker, Oct. 14, 1950)- We had great fun in Spain that year and we traveled and wrote and Hemingway took me tuna fishing and I caught four cans and we laughed and Alice Toklas asked me if I was in love with Gertrude Stein because I had dedicated a book of poems to her even though they were T. S. Eliots and I said, yes, I loved her, but it could never work because she was far too intelligent for me and Alice Toklas agreed and then we put on some boxing gloves and Gertrude Stein broke my nose.(Woody Allen, A Twenties Memory. The Insanity Defense, 2007)- In the late afternoon the Museum was still there, but he was not going to it any more. It was foggy in London that afternoon and the dark came very early. Then the shops turned their lights on, and it was all right riding down Oxford Street looking in the windows, though you couldnt see much because of the fog.(David Lodge, The British Museum Is Falling Down, 1965) David Lodge on ParodyIn a way, it may be impossible for writers themselves to identify what is parodiable in their own work. It may be dangerous even to contemplate it. . . .One would suppose that any writer whos any good has a distinctive voicedistinctive features of syntax or vocabulary or somethingwhich could be seized on by the parodist.(David Lodge, A Conversation About Thinks in Consciousness and the Novel. Harvard University Press, 2002) Updike on ParodyPure parody is purely parasitic. There is no disgrace in this. We all begin life as parasites within the mother, and writers begin their existence imitatively, within the body of letters.(John Updike, Beerbohm and Others. Assorted Prose. Alfred A. Knopf, 1965) Weird Al Yankovics Chamillionaire ParodyLook at me, I’m white and nerdyI wanna roll withThe gangstasBut so far they all think I’m too white and nerdyFirst in my class here at MITGot skills, I’m a champion at DDMC Escherthat’s my favorite MCKee p your 40, I’ll just have an Earl Grey tea.My rims never spin, to the contraryYou’ll find that they’re quite stationary.All of my action figures are cherrySteven Hawking’s in my library.My MySpace page is all totally pimped outGot people beggin’ for my top eight spaces.Yo, I know pi to a thousand placesAin’t got no grills but I still wear braces.(Weird Al Yankovic, White and Nerdyparody of Ridin by Chamillionaire) Pronunciation:  PAR-uh-dee

The Twin Towers Collapse Explained

The Twin Towers Collapse Explained In the years since the terrorist attacks in New York City, individual engineers and committees of experts have studied the crumpling of the World Trade Center twin towers. By examining the buildings destruction step-by-step, experts are learning how buildings fail and discovering ways to build stronger structures by answering the question: What caused the twin towers to fall? Aircraft Impact When hijacked commercial jets piloted by terrorists struck the twin towers, some 10,000 gallons (38 kiloliters) of jet fuel fed an enormous fireball. But the impact of the Boeing 767-200ER series aircraft and the burst of flames did not make the towers collapse right away. Like most buildings, the twin towers had a redundant design, which means that when one system fails, another carries the load. Each of the twin towers had 244 columns around a central core that housed the elevators, stairwells, mechanical systems, and utilities. In this tubular design system, when some columns became damaged, others could still support the building. Following the impact, floor loads originally supported by the exterior columns in compression were successfully transferred to other load paths, wrote examiners for the official Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) report. Most of the load supported by the failed columns is believed to have transferred to adjacent perimeter columns through Vierendeel behavior of the exterior wall frame. Belgian civil engineer Arthur Vierendeel (1852-1940) is known for inventing a vertical rectangular metal framework that shifts shear differently than diagonal triangular methods. The impact of the aircraft and other flying objects: Compromised the insulation that protected the steel from high heatDamaged the sprinkler system of the buildingSliced and cut many of the interior columns and damaged othersShifted and redistributed the building load among columns that were not immediately damaged The shift put some of the columns under elevated states of stress. Heat From Fires Even if the sprinklers had been working, they could not have maintained enough pressure to stop the fire. Fed by the spray of jet fuel, the heat became intense. It is no comfort to realize that each aircraft carried less than half of its full capacity of 23,980  U.S. gallons of fuel. Jet fuel burns at 800 to 1,500 degrees Fahrenheit. This temperature is not hot enough to melt structural steel. But engineers say that for the World Trade Center towers to collapse, its steel frames didnt need to melt- they just had to lose some of their structural strength from the intense heat. Steel will lose about half its strength at 1,200 Fahrenheit. Steel also becomes distorted and will buckle when heat is not a uniform temperature. The exterior temperature was much cooler than the burning jet fuel inside. Videos of both buildings showed inward bowing of perimeter columns resulting from sagging of heated trusses on many floors. Collapsing Floors Most fires start in one area and then spread. Because the aircraft hit the buildings at an angle, the fires from impact covered several floors almost instantly. As the weakened floors began to bow and then collapse, they pancaked. This means that upper floors crashed down on lower floors with increasing weight and momentum, crushing each successive floor below. Once movement began, the entire portion of the building above the area of impact fell in a unit, pushing a cushion of air below it, wrote researchers of the official FEMA report. As this cushion of air pushed through the impact area, the fires were fed by new oxygen and pushed outward, creating the illusion of a secondary explosion. With the weight of the plunging floors building force, the exterior walls buckled. Researchers estimate that the air ejected from the building by gravitational collapse must have attained, near the ground, the speed of almost 500 mph. Loud booms were heard during the collapse. They were caused by airspeed fluctuations reaching the speed of sound. Why They Flattened Before the terrorist attack, the twin towers were 110 stories tall. Constructed of lightweight steel around a central core, the World Trade Center towers were about 95 percent air. After they collapsed, the hollow core was gone. The remaining rubble was only a few stories high. April 2005 Presentation by Lead Investigator Shyam Sunder, NIST. Stephen Chernin/Getty Images (cropped) Strong Enough? The twin towers were built between 1966 and 1973. No building constructed at that time would have been able to withstand the impact of the terrorist attacks in 2001. We can, however, learn from the collapse of the skyscrapers and take steps to construct safer buildings and minimize the number of casualties in future disasters. When the twin towers were constructed, the builders were granted some exemptions from New Yorks building codes. The exemptions allowed the builders to use lightweight materials so the skyscrapers could achieve great heights. According to Charles Harris, author of Engineering Ethics: Concepts and Cases, fewer people would have died on 9/11 if the twin towers had used the type of fireproofing required by older building codes. Others say the architectural design actually saved lives. These skyscrapers were designed with redundancies- anticipating that a small plane could accidentally penetrate the skyscraper skin and the building would not fall from that type of accident. Both buildings withstood the immediate impact of the two large aircraft bound for the West Coast on 9/11. The north tower was hit at 8:46 a.m. ET, between floors 94 and 98- it did not collapse until 10:29 a.m., which gave most people one hour and 43 minutes to evacuate. Even the south tower was able to stand for a remarkable 56 minutes after being hit at 9:03 a.m. ET. The second jet hit the south tower on lower floors, between floors 78 and 84, which structurally compromised the skyscraper earlier than the north tower. Most of the south tower occupants, however, began evacuating when the north tower was hit. The towers could not have been designed any better or stronger. Nobody anticipated the deliberate actions of an aircraft filled with thousands of gallons of jet fuel. 9/11 Truth Movement Conspiracy theories often accompany horrific and tragic events. Some occurrences in life are so shockingly incomprehensible that some people begin to doubt theories. They might reinterpret evidence and offer explanations based on their prior knowledge. Passionate people fabricate what becomes alternative logical reasoning. The clearinghouse for 9/11 conspiracies became 911Truth.org. The mission of the 9/11 Truth Movement is to reveal what it believes to be the United States covert involvement in the attacks. When the buildings collapsed, some thought it had all of the characteristics of a controlled demolition. The scene in Lower Manhattan on 9/11 was nightmarish, and in the chaos, people drew on past experiences to determine what was happening. Some people believe that the twin towers were brought down by explosives, although others find no evidence for this belief. Writing in the Journal of Engineering Mechanics ASCE, researchers have shown the allegations of controlled demolition to be absurd and that the towers failed due to gravity-driven progressive collapse triggered by the effects of fire. Engineers examine evidence and create conclusions based on observations. On the other hand, the Movement seeks the suppressed realities of September 11th that will support their mission. Conspiracy theories tend to continue in spite of evidence. Legacy on Building While architects strive to design safe buildings, developers dont always want to pay for over-redundancies to mitigate outcomes of events that are unlikely to happen. The legacy of 9/11 is that new construction in the United States must now adhere to more demanding building codes. Tall office buildings are required to have more durable fireproofing, extra emergency exits, and many other fire safety features.The events of 9/11 changed the way we build, at local, state, and international levels. Sources National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Final Report on the Collapse of the World Trade Center Towers. NIST NCSTAR 1. September 2005. Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). World Trade Center Building Performance Study, FEMA 403 September 2002. Bazant, Zdenek P.; Le, Jia-Liang; Greening, Frank R.; Benson, David B.  What Did and Did not Cause Collapse of WTC Twin Towers in New York. Journal of Engineering Mechanics ASCE, Vol. 134 (2008), p. 15.Griffin, Dr. David Ray. The Destruction of the World Trade Center: Why the Official Account Cannot Be True. January 26, 2006.