Don Featherstone of Fitchburg, Massachusetts, passed away Monday morning, a victim of Lewy body disease. A couple of years ago, we featured Featherstone and his wife Nancy, who wore matching outfits every day for the last 37 years of their marriage. But Featherstone is best remembered as the man who invented the plastic pink lawn flamingo.
Don created the flamingo when he was freshly graduated from art school, and newly employed at a plastics factory. One of his first assignments was to create three-dimensional plastic lawn ornaments (up to that time, most plastic lawn ornaments were more or less flat). The flamingo was one of his earliest efforts for the factory.
Eventually he became president of the company. After Don retired, dire things were done, by his successor, to the flamingo, triggering a worldwide protest, which eventually led to a more or less happy rallying of the forces of Good, and a restoration of the plastic pink flamingo’s status. In 2011, the flamingo attained new heights, when the Disney movie Gnomeo and Juliet featured a plastic pink lawn ornament named “Featherstone”. Don and Nancy were feted at the film’s premiere.
Featherstone was awarded an Ig Nobel Prize in art for his creation in 1996, and later appeared in several of the Ig Nobel ceremonies. Don Featherstone was 79. -via Metafilter
(Image credit: Harbor House Flamingo Festival)
Comments (1)
BTW: "Salado" means salty literally.
However there is no word for "not thirsty" in German. Try that.
Regarding this topic, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ilunga which says "When asked for confirmation by one reporter, representatives of the Congo government recognized the word only as a personal name." and see the commentary at Language Log at http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/001104.html .
But there is one, very common Dutch word that is notoriously hard to translate or even explain: 'gezellig'.
'Gezellig' is a feeling, an atmosphere. It is usually translated as 'cozy', but it's more than cozy. A situation or room can be 'gezellig', but also people and objects. It's warm, peaceful, you forget time, there is togetherness, no complications or problems.
Some could even say Neatorama has a 'gezellige' quality to it.
I often use the word "shadenfreuden" - finding humor in others misfortunes.
It would be nice to see a larger list of words difficult to translate into English.
Lagom can be applied to many things. It could almost denote sufficient, enough, moderate, ample, appropriate but it is much more than that.
A portion of food could be 'lagom stor' (big enough), not too much, not too little. One's state could be lagom without being too rich or too poor. A conversation or meeting could reach a state of lagom to represent concensus.
It is difficult for me to explain, I personally think it is rooted in socialist culture where excess has no place.
The other is in ancient greek. I believe this is more common in attic and homeric greek than koine. In english, verbs have either an active(I am doing x) or a passive(x is being done to me) voice. Ancient greek adds a middle voice. If we take, for example, the verb "to loosen". In greek, with the active voice, it means you are untying something. With the passive voice, you are being let free. But, in the middle voice, it means you are being ransomed.
The middle voice simply has no direct parallel in english.