Merriam-Webster's Word of the Year

It's bailout. Runners-up: vet, socialism, maverick, bipartisan, trepidation, precipice, rogue, misogyny, turmoil.

Merriam-Webster's Word of the Year 2008

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Uncle Mark Gift Guide & Almanac

The 2009 edition of the Uncle Mark Gift Guide & Almanac is available as a free .pdf download from Mark Hurst, consumer-experience consultant and creator of Good Experience. As Hurst acknowledges, it's a strange time to be making recommendations about spending money, but as he adds, "any purchases we do make today should be as well-informed as possible." Hurst's guide offers single recommendations in various categories, along with some unusual and useful lifehacks. (All telephone users should read "How to leave a telephone message.") The Guide is a document whose clarity of content and design inspires readerly confidence. See for yourself:

Uncle Mark Gift Guide & Almanac

Thanksgiving at Sing Sing, 1908

Roaming the New York Times archive on Thanksgiving last year, I found a 1907 report on Thanksgiving at Sing Sing. The Times was back in 1908:

"Minstrels in Sing Sing. Prisoners Provide Entertainment for Themselves — Get a Good Dinner," New York Times, November 27, 1908

My family's having black bean croquettes, sweet potatoes, twice-baked potatoes with garlic and spinach, wild rice and mushroom stuffing, roasted Brussels sprouts, cranberry sauce, pumpkin pie, and Beaujolais nouveau. But no cigars.

Happy Thanksgiving to all.

And to readers from India: please know that people everywhere grieve the barbarous violence in Mumbai.

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Thanksgiving at Sing Sing

Books as calendars (Proust)

There are no days of my childhood which I lived so fully perhaps as those I thought I had left behind without living them, those I spent with a favourite book. Everything which, it seemed, filled them for others, but which I pushed aside as a vulgar impediment to a heavenly pleasure: the game for which a friend came to fetch me at the most interesting passage, the troublesome bee or shaft of sunlight which forced me to look up from the page or to change my position, the provisions for tea which I had been made to bring and which I had left beside me on the seat, untouched, while, above my head, the sun was declining in strength in the blue sky, the dinner for which I had had to return home and during which my one thought was to go upstairs straight away afterwards, and finish the rest of the chapter: reading should have prevented me from seeing all this as anything except importunity, but, on the contrary, so sweet is the memory it engraved in me (and so much more precious in my present estimation than what I then read so lovingly) that if still, today, I chance to leaf through these books from the past, it is simply as the only calendars I have preserved of those bygone days, and in the hope of finding reflected in their pages the houses and ponds which no longer exist.

Marcel Proust, "Days of Reading," in Days of Reading, translated by John Sturrock (London: Penguin, 2008), 49.

Days of Reading, from the third series of Penguin's Great Ideas paperbacks, reprints five short pieces from Against Saint-Beuve and Other Essays (London: Penguin, 1988), now out of print.

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EGGS

As my daughter says, "Must be some good eggs!"

(Thanks, Rachel!)

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Cutting costs at GM

As part of its effort "to cut $15 billion in costs," General Motors no longer maintains the 562 clocks at its proving grounds, thus saving on replacement batteries and the labor required to reset for DST. Things are changing in the supply closets too:

At the proving grounds in Milford, Mich., where the clocks are now frozen in time, GM has switched to regular Ticonderoga No. 2 pencils instead of the more expensive mechanical pencils that used to be freely available in storage closets, known in GM-speak as "pull stations." Many of the moves have left employees scratching their heads. "Is this the best they can do to save money?" asked one engineer recently while checking the drawers at one pull station near his desk. "There's a lot of rubber bands but not much else — a handful of pens and Post-It Notes," he said.

Pencils? Wall Clocks? No Cost Cuts Are Too Small at GM (Wall Street Journal)

Yes, the Wall Street Journal, not The Onion.

General Motors is also cutting costs by selling two of its five corporate planes.

Orange crate art (Brown)

[Illustration by Leonard Shortall.]

Encyclopedia Brown and Sally Kimball match wits:

The great battle of brains took place in the Tigers' clubhouse. The two champions, seated on orange crates, faced each other. The Tigers crowded behind Encyclopedia. The girls' softball team crowded behind Sally. That left just enough room in the tool shed to think.

Donald J. Sobol, Encyclopedia Brown, Boy Detective (New York: Thomas Nelson & Sons, 1963) 24–25

Thinking about the Scholastic Book Club and reading some comments at Boing Boing made me want to read Encyclopedia Brown books. Yes, I'm reading Encyclopedia Browns. And I understand now why my daughter read so many of them when she was younger.

One element I especially like in these stories: irrefutable presentations of fact compel bad guys to confess, every time. Confronted with evidence of his dishonesty, Bugs Meany doesn't hit Encyclopedia over the head and run off. He owns up to his wrongdoing and returns stolen items to their owners. Con artists, kidnappers, and robbers admit their crimes on the spot. Truth is a powerful thing in the world of Encyclopedia Brown, more powerful perhaps than Sally Kimball's punches. (Sorry, Sally.)

Streets and alleys of the Depression

On the telephone today, my mom and dad mentioned some bits of their Depression childhoods. My mom recalled an organ grinder and monkey at an entrance to the BMT elevated subway in Brooklyn. The monkey collected money from the audience. My dad recalled singers serenading apartment buildings from alleys (never streets) in Union City, New Jersey. What songs? "My Wild Irish Rose" and such. Sometimes a saxophonist or trumpeter would come by. People threw coins wrapped in pieces of newspaper.

Other familiar figures: the fish man, the ice man, the vegetable man, all with horse-drawn carts.

Channel flipping

A man has a chance to make positive changes by reliving Christmas Day over and over again.

*

A ten-year-old orphan spreads a rumor that an elderly man is really Santa Claus.

*

Determined to break into show business, Lucy fakes amnesia.

Bingo.

How to improve writing (no. 23 in a series)

David Frauenfelder, whose Breakfast with Pandora is fine reading for anyone interested in language and myth and storytelling, wonders what I would do with the following sentence, from a Los Angeles Times article by Rachel Abramowitz:

Of all the major American artists, [Woody] Allen has experienced one of the cruelest and most violent whipsaws of fortune, of tumbling from audience adulation to mass approbation.

David notes the various problems with this sentence: "preposition abuse," "false genitive," "a terrible mixed metaphor," "and to top it off, a hilarious malapropism at the end."

Preposition abuse: check. Of all . . . , one of . . . of fortune, of tumbling . . . . The repetition is awkward; the final of could be cut with no loss.

False genitive: check. The genetive or possessive case "marks a noun as modifying another noun." "[A]udience adulation" should be "audiences' adulation." (I'm grateful to know the name for this problem, which I correct often in my students' writing.)

A terrible mixed metaphor: check. P.R. Wilkinson's Thesaurus of Traditional English Metaphors (London: Routledge, 2002) defines whipsaw as "A double disadvantage; bad dilemma; something that cuts both ways and is injurious whatever you do [Amer]." Nothing to do with tumbling, and nothing to do with what happened to Allen. The writer may have been thinking of whiplash or backlash, though those tired metaphors too don't go well with "of fortune" or "tumbling."

A hilarious malapropism at the end: check. Approbation is "an act of approving formally or officially." David suggests that the writer was in search of opprobrium: "something that brings disgrace," "public disgrace or ill fame that follows from conduct considered grossly wrong or vicious."

So what to do with the original sentence? I'd revise to give a clearer sense that Allen's relationship with Soon-Yi Previn generated more widespread interest than his movies. I'd also remove the pretension of "major American artists" and the melodrama of "fortune." Reversal of fortune is a trope that applies to, say, Oedipus or Lear. Such reversal follows from choices made with inadequate knowledge, by those who have no way to foresee what will befall them. It's reasonable though to anticipate disapproval when embarking on a relationship with the adopted daughter of one's long-time partner. My sentence:

Once celebrated by critics and fans, Allen is now a figure of scandal even among those who have never seen his films.

[This post is no. 23 in a very occasional series, "How to improve writing," dedicated to improving stray bits of public prose. And by the way, I like Woody Allen's films, or most of them.]

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