“Welcome in” in the Times

“Welcome in” makes The New York Times (gift link): Nitsuh Abebe writes about “What the Retail Greeting ‘Welcome in’ Says About What Customers Really Want.” The conclusion:

Customers want something rare and unreasonable — the worker who is genuinely, irrationally devoted to helping them, for peanuts. They walk into stores with finely calibrated preferences about what language suggests workers are ready to simulate that experience.

Well, some customers, in some stores. (Spend some time in Wal-Mart.)

Did you notice the lowercase in in the headline? According to the most recent edition of The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage (2015), that in should be capitalized:

Some of the “little” headline prepositions occasionally turn into adverbs, modifying the preceding word; in those situations, they are capitalized: Mayor Drops In ; Meeting Drones On .

But maybe the house style has changed.

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“Welcome in!” : “Welcome in,” again

Pagination

From William Zinsser’s Writing with a Word Processor (1983). I had forgotten about the joys of pagination with an IBM Displaywriter:

But you don’t have to reinstruct the machine every time you paginate. You can program it to paginate on an inexact line count every time. Then you just press ENTER and sit back and listen to the machine cleaning up your mess. First you’ll see the words PAGINATING DOCUMENT at the top of the screen. This is the machine telling you what it has started to do. Then you’ll hear a series of irregular clunking noises from the diskette unit. This is the machine working its way through your document, bringing lines forward or back, incorporating the fragmentary pages and closing up the gaps.

The noise may continue for five or ten minutes, depending on how long the document is. It’s a metallic noise, not exactly pleasant, and yet it has a certain music, for it is the sound of the machine laboring to put your house in order. Sometimes there is a pause: the machine wonders how to negotiate a tricky crossing. Sometimes the clunks come in triumphant bunches: the machine has made it to the other side, brilliantly leaping across the ice floes.

Finally the clunks stop altogether and a message on the screen tells you that your document has been paginated. You are now ready to print it — almost. But first you should read it one more time, “scrolling” the pages from beginning to end, to see if the pagination has left any bad breaks. It probably has. You might find, for instance, that the last line on a page says CHAPTER III. The machine doesn’t know that this is a lousy place for CHAPTER III to be; it was only asked to paginate, not to make aesthetic judgments. You therefore move CHAPTER III to the next page yourself, perhaps lowering it somewhat because you like your new chapter headings to have some air.

This, of course, ruins the rest of the pagination. So you paginate it again, from that point on. The menu will ask you where you want to begin paginating. Tell it the page number, press ENTER, and listen to the clunking again. In fact, you may have to repeat the process several times.

Been there, done that. And now I remember why it was such a joy to use an Apple //c.

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Memory and money (Computer memory and Displaywriter pricing) : Utnapishtim’s word-processor (With a photograph of an enormous Displaywriter disk)

Memory and money

Idle curiosity moved me to revisit William Zinsser’s Writing with a Word Processor (1983) and relive my days typing a dissertation into an IBM Displaywriter. Speak, memory:

Memory, in the world of word processors, is temporary. The word applies to what you have been typing until you transfer it to a diskette for storage. The machine holds your words in its “memory” while you are working on them so that you can keep looking at them and changing them. You’ll grasp this fact more easily if you visualize where the memory is. The memory is inside the electronic module that the screen sits on top of. It’s part of the equipment that is actually enabling you to write; it’s not off to one side, like the diskette unit, which is for storing what you have written, or like the printer, which is for printing what you have stored.

Another helpful fact to keep in mind is that the memory has a limit to what it will hold: approximately 1,000 words. After that it will automatically start moving words over to the work diskette to be stored. This means that you can lose up to 1,000 words while typing if anything goes wrong with the equipment or the power.

Not for the fainthearted. And not for those without means. Wikipedia says that the introductory (June 1980) price of a Displaywriter system was $7,895 (equivalent to $32,220.67 in October 2026). The monthly rental was $275 ($1,122.32 these days). As I recall, there were two university Displaywriters available to me. One required a letter of permission; one required a key to get into an office after hours.

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Pagination : Utnapishtim’s word-processor (With a photograph of an enormous Displaywriter disk)

Walking in the twilight zone

Elaine and I drove out to take a walk in the woods around a lake on Monday. We entered the woods after walking a long stretch of pavement that runs alongside the lake. A complete circuit around the lake is about five miles. Think of the woods as a box, five miles in length, with a way in or out at each end.

Walking on the pavement, toward the woods, we saw a young woman walking toward us, from the woods. She wore glasses, pink headphones, and a branded sweatshirt. We walked about a mile and a half into the woods before turning around to head back to the pavement and our car. And on our way out of the woods, we saw her again, walking toward us — glasses, pink headphones, and a branded sweatshirt. Why was she walking back into the woods? Had she lost something on her walk? Who knows.

Driving back into town, we saw her again, walking on a sidewalk. We were now about two and a half miles from the lake. She had not passed us on our way out of the woods.

[A true story.]

Veterans Day

The Great War ended on November 11, 1918 at 11:00 a.m. Paris time. Armistice Day was observed the next year. In the United Kingdom and Commonwealth nations, Armistice Day is now Remembrance Day. In the United States, Armistice Day is now Veterans Day.

In 1926 Armistice Day fell on a Thursday. In New York City, a two-minute period of silence began at 11:00 a.m.

[“Whole City Pauses on Armistice Day.” The New York Times, November 12, 1926.]

Climbing a hill to see the world

Sarah Orne Jewett, A Marsh Island . 1885. (Los Angeles: Smith & Taylor, 2026).

The book’s front matter calls A Marsh Island “the first American gay novel,” but that’s a bit of a reach. It’s certainly a novel about an other, a city-dwelling painter named Dick Dale who injures an already bum ankle and finds himself laid up in coastal Massachusetts among fishermen and salt-hay farmers. Jewett is stronger on description than dialogue. The passage above is especially striking. As someone says in a conversation appended to the novel, Jewett is “such a better painter” than Dick Dale.

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A handful of Sarah Orne Jewett posts

An Inside Higher Ed AI roundup

The first installment of what will be a monthly feature from Inside Higher Ed : “New in AI.”

Related reading
All OCA AI posts (Pinboard)

“I Have a Dream” draft

From The New York Times (gift link), news of a handwritten draft of Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech:

King’s draft had long been assumed to have been discarded. But more than six decades later, it has surfaced from a desk drawer of a former aide, Edward T. Clayton, and will be auctioned at Christie’s in January.

The auction house said it expected the document — the only handwritten final draft of the speech known to survive — to fetch more than $10 million. The proceeds will benefit the King Center in Atlanta and other philanthropic causes chosen by the consignor, the aide’s widow, Xernona Clayton.

Spread across a table at Christie’s offices in Manhattan last month, the document looked unassuming — just seven pages filled with blue ink and the rusted ghost of a paper clip in the upper left corner. But the $10 million-plus price, if reached, would put it in a stratosphere associated with rare copies of the nation’s founding documents.

Peter Klarnet, Christie’s manuscript specialist, said that when he first saw it, his jaw hit the table.

“This is the most important manuscript I’ve ever had the honor to handle,” he said. “I can’t imagine anything better.” He paused, before adding: “That I wouldn’t have to steal out of the National Archives.”

Drafts are tremendously useful for anyone teaching a course in writing: evidence that writing doesn’t just, as they say, “flow.” The page and partial page visible in the Times article would make useful exhibits for their sheer volume of crossouts.

As the Times notes, the draft does not contain the words “I have a dream.” Everyone should know the role Mahalia Jackson played in getting that part of the speech spoken.

“The Moon Is Low”

“The Moon Is Low” (music by Nacio Herb Brown, lyrics by Arthur Freed) debuted in Montana Moon (dir. Malcolm St. Clair, 1930), a pre-Code western starring Joan Crawford and Johnny Mack Brown. You can hear an instrumental version over the opening credits. Brown sings at bit, as does Crawford. Later in the movie there’s a full chorus from Cliff Edwards (aka Ukulele Ike, aka the voice of Jiminy Cricket). If you want more, here’s a 1930 version by a Roger Wolfe Kahn and His Orchestra, complete with the verse.

And now for something completely different: a 1940 recording by Fats Waller and His Rhythm: Gene Sedric, tenor; John Hamilton, trumpet; John Smith, guitar; Cedric Wallace, bass; Slick Jones, drums. As I make my way through Waller’s complete recordings (twenty-five CDs, JSP Records), this number jumped out as exceptional: it’s an instrumental; tenor and trumpet get two choruses apiece, and it’s hotter than hot. From Drew Kent’s liner notes:

One often remarks at Fats’ willingness to tackle the mediocre, but his sidemen were just as creditworthy. “The Moon Is Low” is dealt with so briskly and expertly by the band that any negative impressions are dispelled.

And how.

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All OCA Fats Waller posts (Pinboard)

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