Leave the bone alone

An interesting metaphor for musical understatement:

"When Bill Clinton was inaugurated," Alpert said, "they had ten saxophone players at the party. It was mostly the young guns, but Gerry Mulligan was in there, too. Afterward, he called me and said, 'Man, you know, these young guys, they know all the modes, they know all the chords, they can play high and low and fast, and they can do amazing things, but the one thing they don’t know how to do is leave the bone alone.'"

From a New Yorker item on trumpeter Herb Alpert and the album Whipped Cream & Other Delights.

» Whipped Again

Slugabed

From Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day:

slugabed \SLUG-uh-bed\ noun
: a person who stays in bed after the usual or proper time to get up; broadly : sluggard

Example sentence:
Rather than be a slugabed for her entire vacation, Jeanne made it a goal to rise at 6:00 AM and go for a jog every morning.

Did you know?
The first known usage of "slugabed" in English can be found in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet (1592), when Juliet's nurse attempts to rouse the young heroine by chiding, "Why, lamb! why, lady! Fie, you slug-abed!" The first half of the word, "slug," is a now-rare verb once used in English to mean "to be lazy or inert" or "to move slowly." Experts believe this word to be of Scandinavian origin, and the same thing can be said of the noun "slug," which can mean "sluggard" or "lazy person" as well as refer to the slow-moving gastropod. The second half of our featured word, "abed," is a word still used in English today to mean "in bed."

Personally, I think Jeanne needs to have her head examined.

Dinner

Something I wrote in a December 2004 end-of-semester post for a class reading Homer's Odyssey:

As you move away from your parents' oikos and toward making one of your own, remember the importance of sharing with family and friends the pleasures of meals and conversation. Sharing food and drink and talk is one of the practices that make us human. (Isn’t it sad that we need television commercials to encourage us to eat together at the family table?)

Some good news in today's New York Times:

After decades of decline in the simple ritual of family dinners, there is evidence that many families are making the effort to gather at the dinner table. A random nationwide survey by the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University found a recent rise in the number of children ages 12 to 17 who said they ate dinner with their families at least five times a week, to 58 percent last year from 47 percent in 1998.

Getting everyone around the table can be a huge juggling exercise for overworked parents and overscheduled children. But many parents are marshaling their best organizational skills to arrange dinners at least once a week.

"There's definitely an awareness that was not there a few years ago," said Miriam Weinstein, author of "The Surprising Power of Family Meals: How Eating Together Makes Us Smarter, Stronger, Healthier and Happier" (Steer Forth Press, 2005). "All the factors that have been working against family dinners are still in full force, but it's very much a subject on people's minds."

In my house, the dinner window, so to speak, is sometimes a mere twenty minutes. But we plan accordingly and, as the sign says, EAT.

» Families With Full Plates, Sitting Down to Dinner (New York Times)

A pastoral name

Reading the Wikipedia entry on pastoral, I wondered whether it had been targeted for an outré prank. But no. Syphilis, the disease, really does take its name from Syphilus, a character in a pastoral poem:

A harsher note was struck in Girolamo Fracastoro's 1530 poem Syphilis, sive Morbus Gallicus ("Syphilis, or the French Disease"), in which Syphilus ("pig-lover"), a typical pastoral name for a shepherd, is stricken by the disease syphilis that takes its name from Fracastoro's poem. Fracastoro's poem contains the first recognisable description of the symptoms of syphilis; today, far too few contemporary physicians announce their discoveries in verse, pastoral or otherwise. Fracastoro has Syphilus the shepherd catch it for having offended Apollo, a somewhat unusual method of infection. Fracastoro's Latin poem was much admired in its day; it was translated into English heroic couplets by Nahum Tate:

       A shepherd once (distrust not ancient fame)
       Possest these Downs, and Syphilus his Name;
       Some destin'd Head t'attone the Crimes of all,
       On Syphilus the dreadful Lot did fall.
       Through what adventures this unknown Disease
       So lately did astonisht Europe seize,
       Through Asian coasts and Libyan Cities ran,
       And from what Seeds the Malady began,
       Our Song shall tell: to Naples first it came
       From France, and justly took from France his Name

» Pastoral (from Wikipedia)

Zounds!

I know that trying to read the text in the above image is a bit like trying to read the compact edition of the Oxford English Dictionary without a magnifying glass. (You can see a larger version by clicking.) The point of the above is that if you typed how to write an email to your professor into Google this evening (as one visitor did), my blog post on how to e-mail a professor was the first of 98,500,000 results.

» How to e-mail a professor

Good advice from Rob Zseleczky

My friend Rob Zseleczky wrote these words in an e-mail. I think they're great for anyone to consider:

Life is hard enough when you try and you choose to at least try to do your best. It is much much much harder on those who do NOT try. Paradoxically, the EASIEST route through life is the path that chooses hard work and constant devotion to doing your best. Why is this? It's because life is difficult, and those who fully accept that life is difficult, and then choose to do their best in response, they paradoxically discover that for them, because they have developed the habit of always trying to do their best, for them life paradoxically becomes easier. But it only becomes easier for those who truly accept life's difficulty and meet it head on.

Rob says that he's repeating an idea that he read somewhere, possibly in M. Scott Peck's The Road Less Traveled, but as he also says, Who cares? The advice is good, and I'm glad that it came into my mailbox. Thanks, Rob.

ZNH links

Students, here are three links concerning the Florida hurricane of 1928:

» A storm of memories (St. Petersburg Times)
1992 interview with a 78-year-old survivor

» Water World, by Michael Grunwald (New Republic)
Review of Eliot Kleinberg, Black Cloud: The Great Florida Hurricane of 1928, and Robert Mykle, Killer 'Cane: The Deadly Hurricane of 1928.

» The Florida Flood [...], by Eliot Kleinberg (History News Network, George Mason University)

An excerpt:

In 1928, thousands stayed in the interior. People asked many times, “Why didn’t they flee?” Now people are asking the same questions about New Orleans. The answer in both cases is the same. For many people, fleeing just wasn’t an option.

As in Katrina, many of the victims were poor -- in this case, poor migrant workers. While Katrina's targets had the option of an Interstate highway system, those along Lake Okeechobee had the option of following a winding 2-lane road north or taking the road to the coast -- the last place anyone would want to go with a hurricane bearing down. And the vast majority didn't have access to a car, much less own one.

And here's a link to Max Gordon's essay on the made-for-tv movie of Their Eyes Were Watching God (the best discussion of the movie that I've read):

» Watchers and Witnesses: Oprah, Zora, and James

An excerpt:

Oprah informs us that she believes Zora would "shout" if she could see what had been done with her novel. When I reached the end of the movie, two and a half hours later, I realize Oprah's introductory words are the truest experience of the evening. Yes, praise God, Zora would be shouting, but would it be a shout of glee that her work had finally been mass-produced and commercialized, or would it be a death-scream of betrayal, as all the juicy Africanisms of her book, all the tasty and trashy bits of black culture were sandblasted and filed down to a smooth dish of caramel custard?

The weatherman's reply to the shepherd

Local television weather coverage is an unending melodrama, which made me rethink lines from Sir Walter Ralegh:

Time drives the flocks from field to fold
When rivers rage and rocks grow cold --

And StormTracker 3 is there!

To bring you, of course, the latest updates.

How to improve writing (no. 12 in a series)

It's sad to see a sentence such as this one on official letterhead, in a letter soliciting donations:

Many people assume X covers all the expenses for Y however, the reality is - it cannot.

That's a fused sentence or run-on sentence, two sentences run together with no punctuation between them. Add a comma before however and you get a comma splice, another serious sentence problem. (In formal writing, a comma works to join sentences only if it's followed by a co-ordinating conjunction -- and, but, for, nor, or, so, or yet.) A semicolon, the mark of punctuation often found before such words as however, nevertheless, and therefore, is what’s needed here.

But the writer here has made other mistakes, more difficult to name. Consider the awkwardness of a corrected sentence:

Many people assume X covers all the expenses for Y; however, the reality is - it cannot.

Part of the problem is that three nouns -- expenses, Y, and reality -- fall between it and X, its antecdent. Another problem is the awkward use of a hyphen (which should be a dash anyway) in a very short sentence: "however, the reality is - it cannot." A third problem involves tone: noting what "Many people assume" might be at least slightly insulting. Are you, reader, one of those who labor under this mistaken assumption? A fourth problem: the semicolon-however combination begins to feel mighty ponderous, like the work of a student striving for an unneeded formality of expression.

A better way to make this pitch might go as follows:

It would be great if X could cover the cost of Y. But it can't.

Notice how much more direct the revision is -- from 16 words to 15, from 28 syllables to 16 (half-price!). And now the writer sounds less like someone writing a ponderous essay and more like someone attempting to persuade an audience.

This post is one in a very occasional series devoted to improving stray bits of prose.

» Previous "How to improve writing" posts (via Pinboard)

Writing for thinking

I just came across an essay by Gerald Grow that I'd call required reading for anyone who writes with a computer. Here's an excerpt:

Computers seem to tempt people to substitute writing for thinking. When they write with a computer, instead of rethinking their drafts for purpose, audience, content, strategy, and effectiveness, most untrained writers just keep editing the words they first wrote down. . . . Drawn in by the word processor's ability to facilitate small changes, such writers neglect the larger steps in writing. They compose when they need to be planning, edit when they need to be revising.

Would one guess from the above that this essay was published in 1988? Aside from some details of diction (e.g., "microcomputer"), Grow's essay seems entirely contemporary -- suggesting that the problems of writing with a computer transcend the ever-changing specifics of word-processing technology.

Alas, Grow never suggests a return to paper and pencil for planning and drafting, but he does offer other useful suggestions.

» How Computers Cause Bad Writing