As revised by Eli Grober (The New Yorker). I especially like “Omit needless words.”
Related reading
All OCA Strunk and White posts (Pinboard)
Tuesday, March 25, 2025
The Elements of Style, 2025
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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.
“Part-beagle”
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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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
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In memory of
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- Origin of an idiom: “lightning in a bottle”
- Overheard
- Fun with Shapes
- Today’s Saturday Stumper
- It’ll be lit
- Thomas’ carriage has really disappeared
- The craziness
- A Nabokov story with a misprint and something else
- A new (to me) direction in spam
- Get me Washington, D.C.
- Resubscribing to The Atlantic
- Got italics?
- Books, cooked
- Incentivize
- Nine movies, three mini-series
- The Elements of Style, 2025
- Domestic comedy
- A Harrison mondegreen
- A Guy Fleming website
- The Greatest Show on Earth
- Howard Lutnick tells all
- How to begin
- The one thing needful
- Today’s Saturday Stumper
- “Floss, Floss, Floss!”
- Feel and Feels Like
- Casablanca speculation
- Trouble on the Hi-Lo line
- Pilsa
- The mail and us
- A Hi and Lois harbinger
- How many straphangers?
- Talking sideways
- “Another Sinatra”
- Social Security sabotage
- Dictator speaking
- Origin of an idiom: “at loose ends”
- “A vaticanned viper catcher”
- Cheer Up?
- Where’s Mary?
- Today’s Saturday Stumper
- Schumer’s telephony
- Pen & Ink, “not done with you yet!”
- “Lookee”
- Separated at birth
- More from Robert Reich
- Larry Applebaum (1957–2025)
- Gathering parts
- Q: When is a day not a day?
- Mary Miller got there first
- Un ours
- Six friends
- WWDFWD?
- Watergate Warrior
- Noun & Noun
- No shouting match, no passing
- dnt lk rdcls
- Two mini-series, ten movies
- Somewhere in L.A.
- UIC TO LCSC: DROP DEAD
- Official languages
- Today’s Saturday Stumper
- Colored pencils
- More from Robert Reich
- Leaving MAGA
- Word of the day: backwords
- “The birds is coming”
- HCR today
- Another tyrant
- “It’s going to be very, very long!”
- “Thank you for your attention to this matter”
- “The long reign of the 3B pencil”
- The only reason
- Mystery actor
- Word of the day:psychophant
- “Plenty of poor people”
- Searching for the right word
- “Casimir Pulaski Day”
- A repurposed margin
- SNL, hopeful and hopeless
- Two pedestrians and a tinsmith
- Boris Spassky (1937–2025)
- Today’s Saturday Stumper
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March
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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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