Thank you for laying out all that, but what do you think of the usages?
> Encomiums: a speech or piece of writing that praises someone highly. Lou Reed, not noted for his gushing encomiums about fellow artists, said, “They just made the songs up, bing bing bing. They have to be the most incredible songwriters ever - just amazingly talented.”
As I understand it, it's not 'praise highly', but "A formal or high-flown expression of praise; a eulogy, panegyric." (per the Oxford English Dictionary) Reed's praise isn't that.
> Antipodean: relating to Australia or New Zealand (used by inhabitants of the northern hemisphere) I wondered if [Get Back] was the result of a man who, locked down in his Antipodean editing suite, had waded too deep into his material and lost control of it, a Kurtz in the Beatle jungle. Peter Jackson is from New Zealand :)
But so what? Clearly it is meant to say much more than geography, but what? Why should we think Jackson's tools or process or ... (or what?) are somehow upside down? What is upside down? How are they upside down? Why use a word, one that stands out, if there is no way (afaict) to understand its meaning? One (at least) suspects it means nothing.
As I work away in my own Antipodean lair, a few miles away from Jackson (sadly working on projects that will make any number of orders of magnitude less impact) it felt like an entirely natural sentence that resonated deeply with me.
> I wondered if [Get Back] was the result of a man who, locked down in his Antipodean editing suite, had waded too deep into his material and lost control of it
Note that Peter Jackson is a New Zealander, and presumably was in the country while editing, so the editing suite was ‘Antipodean’ in the sense of the dictionary.
Yes. That's what I mean to address (apparently imperfectly) with the sentence beginning, "But so what? Clearly it is meant to say much more than geography ...".
As an Australian who lived a number of years in the UK, I was initially surprised had how frequently I’d encounter people using the term antipodes to refer to Australia and New Zealand. A term I understood but had never actually seen or heard used previously. Yet it had fairly common and casual usage in the UK.
> "But so what? Clearly it is meant to say much more than geography ...".
Maybe. Maybe it was meant to emphasise the distance and isolation from much of the rest of the world. Or maybe it was just a turn of phrase that is common and understood in a context and experience outside your own.
This is definitely written from a British perspective -- “Antipodean” and “recce” at least are much more conventional in British English than you might guess.
In this case I took “Antipodean” to have the additional meaning of extreme remoteness from Britain (both the setting of the documentary and implicitly the centre of the universe from the British perspective).
Yeah, the author seems to be British - there’s no obvious Brit spellings in this piece, but if you look at https://ianleslie.substack.com/ you’ll see a story excerpt with “favourite”, plus pieces about the BBC and Boris Johnson.
Writing in British as opposed to American covers quite a few subtly different shadings of word meanings, as well as a willingness to use words a fourth-grader wouldn’t have encountered.
New Zealand isn't far at all from the British center of the universe, other than in miles. Jackson's movies did pretty well in the UK; they weren't shown in the art house theatres with the subtitled movies.
Bear in mind Britain sent convicts to Australia because it was so remote. 'Antipodean' still carries with it a sense of remoteness in the UK even if the countries may be culturally close.
> Britain sent convicts to Australia because it was so remote
That was a long time ago. We could bear in mind that for most of human history, people in Britain had no idea that Australia or most of the world existed.
> 'Antipodean' still carries with it a sense of remoteness in the UK even if the countries may be culturally close.
A number of us have done our best to explain what the author is conveying with the choice of language he is using but if you don’t believe us then there’s not a lot more we can do.
> Encomiums: a speech or piece of writing that praises someone highly. Lou Reed, not noted for his gushing encomiums about fellow artists, said, “They just made the songs up, bing bing bing. They have to be the most incredible songwriters ever - just amazingly talented.”
As I understand it, it's not 'praise highly', but "A formal or high-flown expression of praise; a eulogy, panegyric." (per the Oxford English Dictionary) Reed's praise isn't that.
> Antipodean: relating to Australia or New Zealand (used by inhabitants of the northern hemisphere) I wondered if [Get Back] was the result of a man who, locked down in his Antipodean editing suite, had waded too deep into his material and lost control of it, a Kurtz in the Beatle jungle. Peter Jackson is from New Zealand :)
But so what? Clearly it is meant to say much more than geography, but what? Why should we think Jackson's tools or process or ... (or what?) are somehow upside down? What is upside down? How are they upside down? Why use a word, one that stands out, if there is no way (afaict) to understand its meaning? One (at least) suspects it means nothing.