Adjectives to excess

Brown bourbon, a neon red maraschino cherry, the crisp pages of a letter, a thick piece of cream-colored stationery someone is about to write on.

But bourbon just is brown, and maraschino cherries are bright red, at least if they come from a jar, as this one did. “Crisp” rightly describes potato chips and other delights, but the pages of a letter aren’t crisp, and it’s difficult to think of recognizing a piece of paper that’s not in one’s own hands as thick. Cream-colored? That’s good; it suggests an upscale product.

Elaine and I are reading a memoir — not our usual stuff, but someone recommended it, and we bit. It’s a good story, sometimes funny, often moving, at times terrifying, but the writer lards its sentences with intrusive adjectives. They become tiresome. Here is William Zinsser in On Writing Well , suggesting that most (I’d say many ) adjectives are unnecessary:

Like adverbs, they are sprinkled into sentences by writers who don’t stop to think that the concept is already in the noun. This kind of prose is littered with precipitous cliffs and lacy spiderwebs, or with adjectives denoting the color of an object whose color is well known: yellow daffodils and brownish dirt. If you want to make a value judgment about daffodils, choose an adjective like “garish.” If you're in a part of the country where the dirt is red, feel free to mention the red dirt. Those adjectives would do a job that the noun alone wouldn’t be doing.

Most writers sow adjectives almost unconsciously into the soil of their prose to make it more lush and pretty, and the sentences become longer and longer as they fill up with stately elms and frisky kittens and hard-bitten detectives and sleepy lagoons. This is adjective-by-habit — a habit you should get rid of. Not every oak has to be gnarled.

Related reading
All OCA adjective posts (Pinboard)

[The book is Meredith May’s The Honey Bus . Where was an editor to strike brown , &c.?]

The Ivy League and AI

In The Chronicle of Higher Education , Anastasia Berg suggests that “The Ivy League’s Surrender to AI Is Insane”:

How will encouraging students to use AI when writing papers in political theory, philosophy, literature, or history deepen learning? I have taught in UChicago’s social sciences core sequence, I have studied the linguistic and analytic capacities of LLMs, and I can say with confidence that there is no use of AI that can “deepen” students’ learning of Plato, Machiavelli, Nietzsche, Marx, and Du Bois over and above an unmediated engagement with the original works. If one wants to deepen students’ understanding of human beings’ most difficult, elevated and important intellectual and artistic achievements, one needs to give instructors the means of demanding that students spend time with the works, alone. Allow professors to require students to spend the time they are nominally already required to dedicate to the course outside the classroom in tech-free reading rooms; shut down the WiFi; scramble the cell signal; send them to weeklong retreats in the deep, dark woods. Whatever.

Failure to do so will mean giving up on mastery in the humanities and humanistic social sciences, and with it, the liberal-arts model of college education itself.

Amen, and amen.

Something smells fishy, or meaty

In The New York Times (gift link), Eric Schlosser writes about the current occupant’s large order of mystery meat:

If American consumers knew where that beef was coming from, they might not want to eat it.

The cuts of meat covered by Mr. Trump’s proclamation aren’t fresh sirloins, rib-eyes and filets. They’re lean beef trimmings that will be added to fattier American cuts to make ground beef. They’re small chunks of frozen meat that could have been kept in cold storage overseas for years. They are the quintessence of generic industrial meat, imported here to be subsequently processed in massive grinders that combine pieces of tens of thousands of cattle from multiple countries, mainly into fast food hamburgers.

The details that follow are, well, disgusting. Our household has been off ground beef for some time now.

Three in a row

[1116 Remsen Avenue, Canarsie, Brooklyn, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

[1124 Remsen Avenue, Canarsie, Brooklyn, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

[8913 Glenview Road, Canarsie, Brooklyn, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

Candy Stationery Cigars, Stationery Candy Soda Cigars, Cigars Stationery Candy: these establishments indeed stood in a row, across the street from an elementary school (P.S. 114, built and expanded between 1907 and 1912) and the Remsen Playground. The name Remsen in Brooklyn goes back to the seventeenth century. Canarsie takes its name from the Canarsee people. My brother Brian found the store in the middle, which he identified as Mike’s Stationery. I’m sure that the kids in Canarsie found their way to all three stores. The store with all the kids outside is the one closest to the school.

There are two unusual items atop Mike’s building. The one on the left is likely an elaborate weathervane. Can anyone suggest what the one below is? Google Image Search says that it’s an antenna atop the Empire State Building. My guess is that it’s a weather station of some sort.

[Click for a larger view.]

The school, the playground, and these three (now repurposed) buildings still stand, with different doodads atop Mike’s.

Related posts
More photographs from the NYC Municipal Archives (Pinboard)

“A dire warning”

“On Thursday, in The New Republic, conservative judge J. Michael Luttig published a dire warning to the Republican Party ... and to all Americans”: that’s the subject of the most recent installment of Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters from an American.

Writing and AI at Harvard (again)

David Deming, the dean of Harvard College, says there should be “acceptance or even encouragement” of AI in student writing. Some Harvard faculty and students disagree.

If you read the Chronicle article behind that first link, you’ll see that Deming is already sorta, kinda walking it back: “I actually do think it’s good for students to do the writing on their own.” Wow.

A related post
Writing and AI at Harvard

Mutts , mostly New Jersey

[Mutts , September 13, 2026. Click for a larger view.]

In today’s Mutts , Doozy’s “Bobbie Doll” car was there for the taking.

The title (throwaway) panel pays homage to Ed “Big Daddy” Roth.

Related reading
All OCA Mutts posts (Pinboard)

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper, by Matthew Sewell, started out so easily: 1-A, four letters, “Hula hoops, for instance.” I was not fooled. But I soon found this puzzle presenting obstacle after obstacle: 19-A, six letters, “Very sharp in D&D, from Carroll.” 43-A, six letters, “Portmanteau for fortissimo singing.” And let us not forget 35-D, four letters, “Code sharer with Uzbekistan Airways.” Whose wheelhouse is this puzzle in? Not mine. But I did get it, all but one letter. (See 19-A.)

Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:

3-D, three letters, “First string.” This one gave me fits. RNA?

4-D, fifteen letters, “Overtime alert.” Seems a bit blah for a fifteen-letter answer.

10-D, fifteen letters, “Where split decisions are made.” I thought of stocks and boxing rings.

13-D, four letters, “He ‘put chic into chips,’ per Times (1977).” Forty-nine years ago. Ah, yes, of course. (Cough.)

14-A, ten letters, “Japanese belt.” I couldn’t make SUNTORY fit.

26-A, four letters, “Major in ’90s news.” A pretty tortured way to clue this answer.

20-D, six letters, “Father of Agamemnon.” I’d hate to be known as Agamemnon’s father. I’d also hate to be known as Agamemnon.

30-D, five letters, “Goddess associated with olive trees.” Not TEENA. (Short for ATHENA).

38-A, eight letters, “Word from Greek for ‘scatter.’” I learned something.

49-A, ten letter, “Wipe clean to reuse.” Oddly anachronistic.

My favorite in this puzzle: 42-D, five letters, “Ancient character with no followers.”

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

More than $5000

The current occupant has promised $5000 to every adult American if Republicans retain control of Congress. To paraphrase Gertrude Stein, There ain’t any $5000, there ain’t going to be any $5000, there never has been any $5000, that’s the $5000.

But I think there’s more to this faux-promise than dollar signs. I think that the occupant made this faux-promise knowing that he will never have to make good on it, and that the failure to make good on it will then be something he can hang on Democrats. If, say, Republicans became a minority in the House, any new Democratic representative who flipped a seat will have a target on their back for having deprived Americans of the money the occupant promised them.

Does the occupant have the cognitive ability to scheme thusly? Who knows. Perhaps someone suggested the idea to him.

On the 81st floor

“On the 81st floor, there were no Republicans or Democrats, no Black or white. We were just brothers trying to find the way out”: “25 years ago, two strangers met in the twin towers and escaped on 9/11. What happened next?” (The Guardian ).

This story is new to me, and I think it’s worth sharing.