The linguist John McWhorter looks at Donald Trump’s tweets and finds a “blindness to the basics of adult-level composition.” With a contrast to Harry Truman.
Sunday, January 13, 2019
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Michael Leddy“Orange Crate Art” is a song by Van Dyke Parks and the title of a 1995 album by Van Dyke Parks and Brian Wilson. “Orange Crate Art” is for me one of the great American songs: “Orange crate art was a place to start.”
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Nancy, October 19, 1950.
“Who are we as a country?”
Michael Leddy
Don’t look for premiums or
coupons, as the cost of
the thoughts blended in
ORANGE CRATE ART pro-
hibits the use of them.
Comments are welcome, appended to posts or by e-mail. I moderate comments to keep out spam, so please be patient.
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Top twenty tags
Words to live by
Life is to be lived, not controlled; and humanity is won by continuing to play in the face of certain defeat.
Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
*
Νέος ἐφ’ ἡμέρῃ ἥλιος. [The sun is new every day.]
Heraclitus
*
Every day is a new deal.
Harvey Pekar, “Alice Quinn”
*
Nos plus grandes craintes, comme nos plus grandes espérances, ne sont pas au-dessus de nos forces, et nous pouvons finir par dominer les unes et réaliser les autres. [Our worst fears, like our greatest hopes, are not outside our powers, and we can come in the end to triumph over the former and to achieve the latter.]
Marcel Proust, Finding Time Again
*
Surely, in the light of history, it is more intelligent to hope rather than to fear, to try rather than not to try.
Eleanor Roosevelt, You Learn by Living
*
I don’t really deeply feel that anyone needs an airtight reason for quoting from the works of writers he loves, but it’s always nice, I’ll grant you, if he has one.
J.D. Salinger, Seymour: An Introduction
*
I’m not afraid to get it right
I turn around and I give it
one more try
Sufjan Stevens, “Jacksonville”
*
L’attention est la forme la plus rare et la plus pure de la générosité. [Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.]
Simone Weil, in a letter
Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
*
Νέος ἐφ’ ἡμέρῃ ἥλιος. [The sun is new every day.]
Heraclitus
*
Every day is a new deal.
Harvey Pekar, “Alice Quinn”
*
Nos plus grandes craintes, comme nos plus grandes espérances, ne sont pas au-dessus de nos forces, et nous pouvons finir par dominer les unes et réaliser les autres. [Our worst fears, like our greatest hopes, are not outside our powers, and we can come in the end to triumph over the former and to achieve the latter.]
Marcel Proust, Finding Time Again
*
Surely, in the light of history, it is more intelligent to hope rather than to fear, to try rather than not to try.
Eleanor Roosevelt, You Learn by Living
*
I don’t really deeply feel that anyone needs an airtight reason for quoting from the works of writers he loves, but it’s always nice, I’ll grant you, if he has one.
J.D. Salinger, Seymour: An Introduction
*
I’m not afraid to get it right
I turn around and I give it
one more try
Sufjan Stevens, “Jacksonville”
*
L’attention est la forme la plus rare et la plus pure de la générosité. [Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.]
Simone Weil, in a letter
#1 hit
In memory of
Blog Archive
-
▼
2019
(976)
-
▼
January
(83)
- Strunk and Kondo again
- Less reading, more “writing”
- A Ravel Kaddish
- For all in the weather
- Angry robot
- Peanuts chute
- BAGS TO RAGE
- Joe Namath on TV
- Recently updated
- Strunk and Kondo
- “A North-west passage to the intellectual world”
- Harvest Refill Leads
- Ink, nibs, and Zip-a-Tone
- Good timing
- Michel Legrand (1932–2019)
- What better place to be
- Today’s Saturday Stumper
- NPR, sheesh
- How to improve writing (no. 79)
- In the early morning raid
- Got it
- Notebook on a bus
- A “spectacular building,”a “beautiful room”
- Public Official A
- It’s National Handwriting Day
- Defunding public higher education
- ⌘-V
- Giuliani interviewed
- Two minutes
- MLK
- Fools
- Domestic comedy
- Today’s Nancy
- Today’s Saturday Stumper
- Larkin anachronism
- Pasta, sardines, and fennel
- Pork bellies
- A thinking-about-a-MacBook tip
- “Traditional blogs,” past and future
- Cash and a glove
- Heat and knowledge
- Uncle Toby and the fly
- WWLS
- Recently updated
- Digressions
- The Value of the Dictionary
- Duck Fat
- A linguist looks at Trump’s tweets
- Universities without history
- One more about Joseph Jarman
- Today’s Saturday Stumper
- Joseph Jarman (1937–2019)
- “Hands off my piles”
- Grammar and Hardy
- Recently updated
- Commence to dancin’
- Twelve movies
- “Whooaa . . .”
- Bratty pro tip
- Librarians at work
- Beer and puns
- Statue vs. wall
- A notebook sighting in Boston
- Dunning-Kruger on the rise
- NYRB covers
- Writing and money
- “One of the last places”
- The origins of “the” wall
- No shampoo, no shirt
- Kids ’n’ coffee
- Today’s Saturday Stumper
- “So now we have everything so beautifully handled”
- Mid-century cigarette machine
- “How to use the passive voice”
- Domestic comedy
- Selected titles
- Philadelphia Solari
- Notebook sightings: The Racket
- Reading, really fast
- A political thought
- A Mongol sighting
- Resolution 2019
- A 2019 calendar
-
▼
January
(83)
favorite posts
- Against “deep reading”
- Alkalize with Alka-Seltzer
- At the World Trade Center and St. Paul’s Chapel
- Being wrong about beauty
- Bobbing for apples
- “Bon Appétit!”
- “The Case of the Purloined Prairie”
- ChatGPT’s twenty-line poems
- “The ’Clipse”
- Couric and Palin and Orwell
- Digital naïfs
- Donald Trump’s spelling
- Ebinger’s
- Ellington for beginners
- “Extra credit?”
- Five desks
- Five pens
- Fluke life
- The gold standard, haircuts, and everyone else
- Happy birthday, Mr. Piletti
- Hoagies, pizza, and English studies
- Homeric blindness in “colledge”
- How to Write a Sentence
- Imaginary liner notes
- Invisible man: Louis Armstrong and the New York Times
- Invitation to a dance
- Is there a pencil in The House?
- John Lee Hooker and Canned Heat
- A Kerouac notebook page
- The kitchen shink [sic]
- Klenosky!
- “Make My Jotter Quit!”
- Lady Elaine’s can
- Mysteries of the tollbooth
- National’s et cetera
- Nick DeMaio and the Eldorado
- Obama revisions
- Obama thoughts
- On “On the New Literacy”
- On “Politics and the English Language”
- “On the Road”
- The Oteris and Marty
- The other little book
- Out of the past
- Peppa Pig and the Brontës
- Phones Are For People
- Politics and theory
- “The Poet”
- Proust: involuntary memory, foolish things
- P.S. 131
- Pullum on Strunk and White
- Re: the Beloit Mindset List
- Some have gone and some remain
- “The Spokesmen”
- Sports Illustrated and Proust
- The Springfield Daily Gazette
- That (in)famous line
- Things I learned on my summer vacation
- Van Dyke Parks in Chicago
- W(h)ither grammar
- What I hear in “Walk Away Renee”
Nancy, October 19, 1950.
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