[xkcd. “Schwa.” March 14, 2024.]
A related post
My proof that I never knew phonics
Saturday, March 16, 2024
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
skip to main |
skip to sidebar
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.”
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.
View Profile
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.
Search this blog
Creative Commons
StatCounter
Subscribe
Click to subscribe in a reader.
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
-
▼
2024
(910)
-
▼
March
(78)
- Musicians, before or after it’s too late
- Castorini and Cammareri
- Today’s Saturday Stumper
- Washington Week in Review misses the point
- “Meticulous,” “commendable,” “intricate”
- Look closely
- Marcus, Wal-Mart, pickleball
- One series, eleven movies
- “Cursive Letters”
- “The surface of things”
- Marjorie Perloff (1931–2024)
- Recently updated
- Moon-like
- “Moon in the afternoon”
- Hip-hop Moleskine
- The New York Times, or The Onion ?
- Ben Stern (1921–2024)
- How to improve writing (no. 120)
- Buttonholes
- In the Garment District
- Lyn Hejinian (1941–2024)
- Today’s Saturday Stumper
- Ballaké Sissoko and Derek Gripper
- New directions in eating
- Kafkish
- Mystery actor
- Alterations & Repairs
- Two doctors talking
- Confused
- “Happy Reunion,” four times
- Postal abbreviations
- Review: Carol Beggy, Pencil
- Thinking about November
- 631–639 5th Avenue
- Today’s Saturday Stumper
- ə
- Recently updated
- A Gamewell close-up
- A consequential chute
- No coincidence
- Jacques Pépin’s sardine salad
- Twelve movies
- So you can always get what you want?
- A Calvino “over and over”
- “Is cognac waning, Papà?”
- Recently updated
- “Philosophic Guide”
- Connecting dots
- How to improve writing (no. 119)
- Mystery actor
- Domestic comedy
- Katie Britt is a dirty no-good rotten liar
- A golden pig
- Today’s Saturday Stumper
- PBS priorities, good grief
- Keyword: all
- Recently updated
- John McWhorter on prepositions
- José Andrés on sardines
- Slam the Scam
- Vision Pro Television
- “Bad news about Biden”
- Word of the day: lukewarm
- Postal consolidation
- Paying attention
- “The true noises of the night-time city”
- A joke in a neo-traditional manner
- Leggings
- An EXchange name sighting
- Full-page screenshots in iOS and macOS
- Letters listing
- Shave and a haircut
- A cognitive test to be president
- Iris Apfel (1921–2024)
- Today’s Saturday Stumper
- A missing painting
- Ticonderoga sightings
- Logo change
-
▼
March
(78)
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.
comments: 2
Oddly, in UK English well over half of those vowels would not be schewa! But we do use it a great deal, perhaps in slightly different circumstances. For example, one of the valleys near here, Borrowdale, is pronounced by older locals with only the first o sounding, and both the second o and the a flattened into schewas.
I just — literally, just before I came in the door — heard an episode of A Way with Words that addressed dissimilation. Wikipedia: “a phenomenon whereby similar consonants or vowels in a word become less similar.” That seems to be what’s going on with “Borrowdale.”
Post a Comment