Saw-pits, top dogs, and underdogs

In the penultimate chapter of Charles Dickens’s Bleak House (1853), “two young ladies are occasionally found gambolling in sequestered saw-pits and such nooks of the park.” Saw-pits? Huh? The Oxford English Dictionary explains:

An excavation in the ground, over the mouth of which a framework is erected on which timber is placed to be sawn with a long two-handled saw by two men, the one standing in the pit and the other on a raised platform.

The first citation is from 1408, where the word is spelled sawpytt. Wikipedia has a photograph of a saw-pit, or sawpit, or saw pit in action.

Talk about fortuitous reading: Richard Rorty’s Contingency, Irony, Solidarity (1989) contains a passing reference (in a footnote about the use-mention distinction) to Dudley Do-Right’s faithful dog Faithful Dog. That reference made me wonder about the origin of underdog. And it so happens that folkloric etymology has it that top dog and underdog refer to the two sawyers of a saw-pit, with the sawyer down below, the underdog, being showered with the top dog’s sawdust. But there’s no evidence to support that claim.

Instead, think dog fighting (ugh). The OED defines top dog as “the dog with the best chance of winning a fight; the dominant dog in a fight.” First citation: 1847. And underdog: “the beaten dog in a fight; figurative the party overcome or worsted in a contest; one who is in a state of inferiority or subjection.”

Elaine and I both think that I’m part-beagle. No wonder I’m always going down rabbit holes.

Also from Bleak House
At Peffer and Snagsby’s : Bucket’s Moleskine? : Dickens in the house : Five sentences : Gridley’s monologue : “It must be a strange state” : Jellyby closets : Learning to write : Living on credit : “London particular” : Not quite teleportation : Reading don’t pay : “Town-talk”

A law-writer’s hand

[From Bleak House (dir. Justin Chadwick and Susanna White, 2005. Click for a much larger view.]

It’s yet another legal document in the endless case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce.

The 2005 BBC adaptation of Charles Dickens’s Bleak House is exceedingly terrific. And speaking of Bleak House : is there another novel that so hinges on matters of handwriting and literacy?

Related reading
All OCA Bleak House posts

[I think 2005 is superior to the BBC’s 1985 adapatation. Both are streaming at Amazon Prime.]

Local man hits 100-post limit

An odd Blogger problem confounded me: I happened to notice that a March 1 post with the WPA tax photograph of James P. Johnson’s house was missing from the monthly archive in the Blogger sidebar. I asked about the problem in the Blogger Help Community and tried various suggestions offered there. (Thanks, Vaishnav.) But nothing changed. The only fix I could hit on: changing the post’s date from March 1 to February 28. But if changed back to March 1, nothing in the sidebar.

What had happened: I had run up against a limit for the monthly archive list. Adam, a Google Product Expert on all things Blogger, explained:

It turns out there is a limit of 100 posts per month in the archive (not on the blog).

In your honor (not kidding), that will be increased to 128 posts per month. That won’t be in effect right away: maybe next week sometime.

Thanks for bringing this up, and for being a good sport about this.

As I wrote back, I like the idea of 128 — appropriate for anything having to do with computers. My first computer, an Apple //c, had 128KB of RAM.

Thanks, Adam, and thanks to Blogger/Google for increasing the archive limit.

[The limit must be relatively recent: the May and October 2020 archives for OCA each show 102 posts.]

Nightly tabloid news

I need to learn to Just Say No. The next time I’m tempted to watch the evening news on commercial television, I will remind myself of the headlines that began last night’s ABC World News Tonight :

~ Multiple Fatalities in Fatal Plant “Rupture”
~ Pilot Declares Medical Emergency During Landing
~ Massive Home Blast Rocks Neighborhood
~ 30+M Under Dangerous Flood Threat
~ Trump Visits Doctor Amid Iran Tensions
~ CDC Seeking Volunteers for Ebola Screening
~ Critical Senate Race Runoff
~ Knicks Await Final Opponent
~ Urgent Search For Children
~ Bounce House Scare
~ Woman Killed by Umbrella
~ Teenager Bitten by Shark While Fishing
~ America Strong

And without a headline: “And we remember a jazz great tonight.”

I gave up after the bounce house. (No children were in the house.) I checked this morning and saw that the America Strong segment, about a kid who faltered while singing “The Star-Spangled Banner” at a softball game (and, surprise, the crowd helped him out) ran for 1:46. Sonny Rollins got seventeen seconds. And not much of “the world” in that broadcast at all.

And events at the immigrant detention center Delaney Hall got nothing. (Is it a concentration camp yet?)

“We’re all still here”

The PBS NewsHour last night aired a segment about Sonny Rollins, with excerpts from a 2011 interview. Jeffrey Brown asked Rollins if being “one of the last ones” from an earlier time in music weighed on him. Rollins’s reply:

Well, it does. All my friends are gone, Miles, Coltrane, Monk. I mean, in a sense, they're gone, but not really.

I’m the last guy. But, in a way, I’m not, because, when I’m gone, the music, my music, is going to be here. So we’re all still here. We’re all still here.

Related reading
All OCA Sonny Rollins posts (Pinboard)

[Sonny Rollins was the last living musician from Art Kane’s celebrated 1958 photograph, known as A Great Day in Harlem .]

A simple game, a great game

A cooperative game, a six-year-old’s suggestion. For four players, or any number of players.

~ Arrange yourselves in a loose circle.

~ Toss a largish ball from person to person, clockwise or counterwise, your choice.

~ After ten consecutive catches, everyone takes a step back.

~ Repeat.

~ If someone drops the ball, move back in and start again.

No winning, no losing, just fun and mild suspense for all.

Penn Station, ugh

WNYC’s Gothamist reveals architectural renderings of a rebuilt Penn Station:

The winning plan to rebuild Penn Station features renderings of a new train hall with American flags at the entrance, gold-accented railings, columns and escalators — and a presidential seal featuring President Donald Trump’s name.

It’s not difficult to imagine the rebuilt station becoming a magnet for vandals and pranksters.

Related reading and viewing
The Rise and Fall of Penn Station (PBS)

Colbert in Monroe

For those who caught the joke on the electrical box in the last episode of The Late Show (or didn’t): Stephen Colbert has hosted another episode of Only in Monroe. We watched the other night and laughed helplessly. How musical director Jack White kept a straight face, I dunno.

There’s also Colbert’s 2015 guest-host spot.

Words from Democritus

[“Of practical wisdom these are the three fruits: to deliberate well, to speak to the point, to do what is right.” Rediscovered on a piece of cardboard tucked away on a bookshelf.]

My son Ben wrote out these words from Democritus of Abdera (circa 460-370 BCE) some years ago. I think they’re worth sharing. The English rendering is a standard one. I’d like to call Ben (a philosophy major) Democritus Jr., but that name was already claimed by Robert Burton.

Sonny Rollins (1930–2026)

The tenor saxophonist has died at the age of ninety-five. The New York Times has an obituary (gift link).

I was fortunate to see Sonny Rollins twice, unforgettably twice, in 1989 and 2006. And he showed up in a dream last year, about to perform with Mary Lou Williams on my university campus.

These are five of my favorite Rollins performances: “St. Thomas,” “Wagon Wheels,” “The Bridge,” “There Will Never Be Another You,” and “Without a Song.”

“One day in the future people will be saying ‘Yes I once saw Sonny Rollins.’ ” From The Notebooks of Sonny Rollins, ed. Sam V.H. Reese (New York Review Books, 2024).

Related reading
All OCA Sonny Rollins posts (Pinboard)