France debates le point-virgule

Not a belated April Fool's joke:

In the red corner, desiring nothing less than the consignment of the semicolon to the dustbin of grammatical history, are a pair of treacherous French writers and (of course) those perfidious Anglo-Saxons, for whose short, punchy, uncomplicated sentences, it is widely rumoured, the rare subtlety and infinite elegance of a good semicolon are surplus to requirements. . . .

In the blue corner are an array of linguistic patriots who cite Hugo, Flaubert, De Maupassant, Proust and Voltaire as examples of illustrious French writers whose respective oeuvres would be but pale shadows of themselves without the essential point-virgule, and who argue that — in the words of one contributor to a splendidly passionate blog on the topic hosted recently by the leftwing weekly Le Nouvel Observateur — "the beauty of the semicolon, and its glory, lies in the support lent by this particular punctuation mark to the expression of a complex thought."

Read all about it: The end of the line? (Guardian)

Related posts
Paul Collins on the semicolon
A semicolon in the news

Lucky numbers

Perhaps there's a shortage at the fortune-cookie factory. In Jewish tradition, the number 18 is lucky: the letters of חי (chai, "living") add up to 18. It's not unusual for a Bar Mitzvah or Bat Mitzvah gift to be a multiple of 18 — e.g., $36: a double chai. But as Wallace Shawn says in My Dinner with André, "the cookie is in no position to know about that." Related reading Chai (Wikipedia)

Going on break

An e-mail from my friend Sara got me thinking of words from my retail past, when I would "go on break." I went on break at two discount department stores in New Jersey, Valley Fair (in Little Ferry) and Two Guys (in Hackensack), where I worked during college as a housewares stock-clerk. (To this day, I refer to an aisle of kitchen tools as "the gadget aisle.")

It was always "go on," never "take a." That's how I started smoking — on break, as there was nothing else to do, and everyone smoked, sitting in the store's snack bar with a Coke or a styrofoam cup of miserable coffee. The older ladies carried cigarette purses. The younger employees would usually have Marlboros in the box. I, going my way, had Pall Malls. I remember a co-worker demonstrating how to make a cigarette pack smoke, by pulling down the cellophane wrapper, burning a hole in the bottom, letting the open space fill with smoke, and pushing the pack in and out of the wrapper to puff smoke through the hole.

I remember just one Two Guys co-worker who spoke of "break" as her own: not "I'm going on break" but "I'm taking my break." We found her one Saturday in the garbage can aisle, hiding in a plastic garbage can, where, it seemed, she had been taking her break for several hours.

Sometimes all of Housewares would go on break together (a team-building activity, of course), and then we'd hear "Someone from Housewares to Aisle 12 for customer assistance" on the loudspeaker. And once, during the lunacy of Dollar Days (four rolls of Reynolds Wrap for a dollar!), we barricaded ourselves, along with our department manager, in our stockroom, where we ate Chinese take-out and let the customers figure things out for themselves. Our feast was interrupted by Mr. Miller, one of three store managers, who banged on the door, demanded access, and lectured us on our sorry ways. And then: "What've you got? You got anything good? Let me have an egg roll." Mr. Miller ate with us and went away mollified. He was by far the most decent of our store managers.

There are still few everyday realities sadder to me than a discount department store at closing time:

"Attention shoppers, that old clock on the wall tells us that another fine day has come to an end. We here at Valley Fair appreciate your business and hope to see you again soon. Until then, have a safe trip home, and good night."

Bad simile of the day

Bill Clinton is scheduled to visit Pembroke, North Carolina, today:

Charles Locklear dined on fried chicken and cabbage as he talked about former President Clinton's visit. He said it will be a good thing for the town.

"This will kind of put us on the map like back in the '50s when we had the Ku Klux Klan shoot out. We might be back on the front page again," he said.

Pembroke buzzes about Bill's visit (Fayetteville Observer)

American Idol and Orange Crate Art

Though I have watched no more than a few chance minutes of American Idol (and a couple of Sanjaya Malakar clips on YouTube), I find it strangely exciting to learn that an American Idol contestant has read Orange Crate Art. He is Michael Johns, who went in search of the meaning of "in your wheelhouse," as used by American Idol judge Randy Jackson. On his Idol blog, Johns writes

I found another blogger who says that Wheelhouse is a metaphor for a "hitter's power zone, among other things."

I am that blogger, in a post on James Carville's metaphors:

As I just learned, wheelhouse is (among other things) a metaphor for "a hitter's power zone."

I'm impressed that Michael Johns is looking up idioms in his free time. Would I also be impressed by his singing?

American Idol viewers, please add your observations.

Campaign typography

"Put the word 'change' in Comic Sans and the idea feels lightweight and silly. Place it in Times Roman and it feels self-important. In Gotham, it feels just right. Inspiring, not threatening. In the end, typography makes a real difference when it delivers words and ideas that are relevant to people. And for many, that seems to be the case here."

From a New York Times interview with designer Brian Collins on typography and the Obama campaign: To the Letter Born.

Gotham is the work of Hoefler & Frere-Jones, who also have some thoughts on campaign fonts: Fontogenic . . . and Non-Fontogenic.

In search of lost objects

Words of wisdom, sort of:

There are no missing objects. Only unsystematic searchers.

Findologist Professor Solomon has made his How to Find Lost Objects available as a free .pdf.

I've heard of Professor Solomon's 18-inch rule (objects "tend to travel no more than eighteen inches from their original location") and have found it genuinely useful when looking for things like keys, Moleskines, pens, and wallets.

How to Find Lost Objects (.pdf, 5.2 MB) (via Quo Vadis Blog)

LETS PLAY TWO

My friend Stefan Hagemann sends news of a missing apostrophe, missing from a statue honoring Chicago Cub Ernie Banks. The exhortation on the statue's base — "LETS PLAY TWO" — comes from Banks' catchphrase: "It's a beautiful day for a ballgame. Let's play two."

Sculptor Lou Cella: "I'm the sculptor; I'm not a writer. I just read it the way I heard it in my head."

Cella's added an apostrophe, in the right place too.

(Thanks, Stefan!)

Related posts
A semicolon in the news
Spelling in the news (Eistein, Michaelangelo, and Shakespere)

Texting and exiting

There's a curious story in Inside Higher Ed today about Laurence Thomas, a philosophy professor at Syracuse University who ends class and walks out if he sees a student texting. He recently followed one such exit with an e-mail to administrators and his students, expressing his frustration with the lack of respect his students give him. And then he said something more: "he noted that the student who sent the text message is Cuban, and that last year, two Latino students had started to play tic-tac-toe during his class."

But Professor Thomas is no cranky, backwards white guy:

While Thomas noted that white students are also rude, he expressed frustration that — especially as a minority scholar himself — he would be treated in this way. "One might have thought that for all the talk about racism and the good of social equality, non-white students would be particularly committed to respecting a black professor," Thomas wrote.

In his e-mail, Thomas went on to describe himself as a believer "in principles of right and wrong that transcend every race/ethnicity and sexual identity."

There are at least two problems here. One: if Thomas believes in principles that transcend differences of color and ethnicity, the ethnicity of his texting and tic-tac-toe-playing students should be irrelevant. Two: a professorial practice that holds all students responsible for the actions of one is unreasonable. If I were a serious student in Professor Thomas' class, I'd find the texting and tic-tac-toe (tic-tac-toe!) ridiculous. But I'd also find Professor Thomas' dramatic exits insulting and alienating, and far more troubling that my classmates' cluelessness.

A simpler strategy when a someone is texting in class: ask the offending student to put away the phone. If it happens again, ask the student to leave. And if a cellphone rings in class, do what I do: groove to the music for ten seconds or so, head bobbing, fingers snapping — it's always music, never a ring — while the silliness of the situation has a chance to sink in and someone shuts off a phone. And then get back to what you were doing.

Related post
Proust and the finger-snapping bit (with Duke Elllington's advice on finger-snapping)

Boilermakers

What with all the overtures to the (so-called) working-class voter in Pennsylvania, the conversation on MSNBC's Hardball this afternoon turned to boilermakers. None of the four assembled talking heads seemed to know exactly what a boilermaker is.

From Merriam-Webster Online: "whiskey with a beer chaser." That's the only boilermaker I've ever heard of (or drank).

From the Oxford English Dictionary: "a shot of whisky followed immediately by (or occas. combined with) a glass of beer." Combined with? Yes.

And then there's Wikipedia, whose boilermaker entry is a headache-making catalogue of variations.

I just remembered that one of the great scenes in On the Waterfront (1954, dir. Elia Kazan) includes boilermakers. Here, courtesy of YouTube, are Marlon Brando (Terry Malloy) and Eva Marie Saint (Edie Doyle), with "two Glockenheimers and two for chasers": "Dink."

Related post
A boilermaker, sort of, in the news