How to improve writing (no. 14 in a series)

As we lunched in a chic bistro (i.e., Subway), Elaine brought these sentences to my attention. From a package of Subway apple slices:

I see at least three problems:

Subject-verb disagreement: medley, are. But changing the verb won't help, as it makes no sense to say that the medley is picked.

The phrase "packaged into" is cumbersome: the slices are packaged in a bag.

There's a general air of overkill. As far as I can tell, all apples are harvested by hand — difficult, painful work. An apple's "best flavor" could probably be had without the addition of vitamin C as a preservative. A "specially designed bag" is a bag, which you already know about if you've bought this item. An "apple crunch" is the only crunch an apple can have.

A possible improvement, preserving some of the flavor of the original:

A medley of sweet red and tart green apples, picked at the peak of ripeness. The slices are cleaned and packaged to lock in their juicy crunch.

I'd prefer to eliminate the second sentence, but I suspect that it's meant to reassure someone, somewhere, that this product is fit to eat.

This post is no. 14 in a very occasional series, "How to improve writing," dedicated to improving stray bits of published prose.

(Thanks, Elaine!)

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July 10, 1871

Bon anniversaire, M. Proust.

MOre TElephone EXchange NAme NOstalgia

The Telephone Archive has numerous images of exchange-name-bearing number cards (so that's what they're called):

      The Number Card Archive

And Sonja Shield's Brooklyn Ramblings has two posts with photographs of Brooklyn storefronts still displaying exchange names. Hint: Try a Google search for an exchange name dear to you. Searching for GEdney, the Brooklyn exchange name of my childhood (gedney exchange name), brought me to Brooklyn Ramblings:

Mid-Century Telephone Numbers
Operator, get me PEnnsylvania 6-5000

That's a Brooklyn number card above. And as a Brooklyn native, I must note that in the Honeymooners episode "The Baby Sitter," Ralph and Alice Kramden's Brooklyn phone number is BEnsonhurst 0-7741.

Related posts
Telephone exchange names
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Tenuously related post
Ralph Kramden on Christmas

Proust: "like talking to an octopus"

Frail from birth, living with asthma, Proust had ample reason to meditate upon illness and the body:

It is illness that makes us recognize that we do not live in isolation but are chained to a being from a different realm, worlds apart from us, with no knowledge of us, and by whom it is impossible to make ourselves understood: our body. Were we to meet a brigand on the road, we might manage to make him conscious of his own personal interest, if not of our plight. But to ask pity of our body is like talking to an octopus, for which our words can have no more meaning than the sound of the sea, and with which we should be terrified to find ourselves condemned to live.

The Guermantes Way, translated by Mark Treharne (New York: Penguin, 2002), 291-92

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Overheard

"Soy sauce, like vibrato, covers a multitude of sins."

Related reading
The Power of Vibrato (Musical Assumptions)
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My favorite line from Ratatouille

Even rats and figments of the imagination know despair:

"We are in a cage in a car trunk, awaiting a future in frozen food products."

There are many wonderful things in Ratatouille, including a genuinely touching moment that evokes Proust's idea of involuntary memory.

Ratatouille (Official website)

Telephone exchange names

[Hello, Boing Boing readers!]

Hearing Mike Hammer's telephone number reminds me:

If you'd like to replace the dull first two digits of your telephone number with an authentic and evocative exchange name, Robert Crowe at the Telephone EXchange Name Project has reproduced a 1955 Bell Telephone Company list of approved names. Says the TENP: "If you do not have a historically accurate exchange name to use for your current telephone number, you should choose one from this list." I'm set to go with FIrestone 5-, authentic, evocative, also alliterative.

I still remember MUrray Hill 7-7500 from the commercials for Gimbels Custom Reupholstery that ran on New York's WPIX-TV on weekday mornings. Cartoons and the Little Rascals at 7:00 a.m., and they were trying to get people to think about reupholstering furniture?

Recommended Exchange Names (The Telephone EXchange Name Project)
Gimbels (Wikipedia)

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MOre TElephone EXchange NAme NOstalgia
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[The original link to the EXchange Name Project is defunct.]

Mike Hammer's answering machine

"This is CRestview 5-4124. Mister Hammer, whom you are calling, is not available at present. If you wish to leave a record of your call, please state your message at the sound of the tone."

Kiss Me Deadly (1955, directed by Robert Aldrich) is terrific: sometimes brutal, often surprising, beautifully filmed. A Christina Rossetti poem, foreign cars, Cloris Leachman, Paul Stewart (Raymond the butler in Citizen Kane), the use of popcorn as a weapon, someone singing "M'appari," allusions (Cerberus, Lot's wife, Medusa, Pandora), a walk through a modern-art gallery, and Mike Hammer's answering machine:



[Ralph Meeker as Mike Hammer]

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Covering v. uncovering

Some dedicated decluttering of my workspace (inspired by Merlin Mann's example) yielded two nice finds today: Harvey Pekar's The Quitter, which I bought last fall and then placed upon a stack of books (which continued to grow), and, sitting in a file tray, a page with some thoughts on the idea of "covering" a century or half-century of literature in a college semester:

When I think about what the word cover is supposed to mean, I think of the joke scenario of tourists rushing from one landmark or museum to another, determined to "see" (or better, "have seen") each one so that they can cross it off their list and get on to something else. But the desire to "cover" or "get things done" is antithetical to genuine appreciation of places or works of the imagination. (And I'm reminded that one of the meanings of cover is "to hide from sight or knowledge.") The real work of seeing might be thought of as a matter of uncovering, which takes time and extended attention. That's the mindset of the museum-goer who looks at just a handful of works and leaves the museum having had an authentic experience of looking at art. And who then keeps looking, again and again.

Another decluttering post
Notary Public

Teunously related post
Harvey Pekar's The Quitter

Blaming Mister Rogers

In today's Wall Street Journal:

Don Chance, a finance professor at Louisiana State University, says it dawned on him last spring. The semester was ending, and as usual, students were making a pilgrimage to his office, asking for the extra points needed to lift their grades to A's.

"They felt so entitled," he recalls, "and it just hit me. We can blame Mr. Rogers."

Fred Rogers, the late TV icon, told several generations of children that they were "special" just for being whoever they were. He meant well, and he was a sterling role model in many ways. But what often got lost in his self-esteem-building patter was the idea that being special comes from working hard and having high expectations for yourself.

Only someone with a cursory knowledge of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood would make this claim. Hard work and high expectations? Consider the many visitors to the neighborhood who talk about and demonstrate their hard-earned abilities: violinist Itzhak Perlman and gymnast Chaney Umphrey, for instance. Or consider the ways in which Mister Rogers himself bumbles and struggles when trying to learn a new skill (often, as I remember, in Negri's Music Shop). Consider too that being "special" is something that comes with a context: "You are my friend. You're special to me." That's a statement not about innate grandeur but about the way someone else sees you.

What I always hear in Mister Rogers' closing words is something quite different from an encouragement to narcissism: "There's just one person in the whole world like you. And people can like you just the way you are." In my ears, those words sound as a reminder of the beauty and mystery of individuality, offering consolation to children whose circumstances — clothes, speech, family situation — put them at a remove from others.

Self-esteem is busting out all over, but I think there are more likely causes to finger. Stay out of my 'hood.

Blame It on Mister Rogers: Why Young Adults Feel So Entitled (Wall Street Journal)

Related post
The inverse power of praise