"It must be a strange state"

It must be a strange state to be like Jo! To shuffle through the streets, unfamiliar with the shapes, and in utter darkness as to the meaning, of those mysterious symbols, so abundant over the shops, and at the corners of streets, and on the doors, and in the windows! To see people read, and to see people write, and to see the postmen deliver letters, and not to have the least idea of all that language — to be, to every scrap of it, stone blind and dumb!

Charles Dickens, Bleak House (1853)

What irony?

As legislators weigh impeaching Gov. Rod Blagojevich and federal prosecutors prepare to indict him on corruption charges, his acting chief of staff and a deputy governor will be keynote speakers Wednesday at an "Ethics in the Workplace" seminar for some 200 state employees. . . .

But is it wrong for any members of the Blagojevich administration to instruct state workers on ethics?

"That's a real tough question, but . . . I don't see the irony really," said Rev. Tim Fiala, executive director of University of Illinois at Chicago's Integritas Institute, an ethics forum.

Gov. Rod Blagojevich's staffers to speak at ethics lecture for state workers (Chicago Tribune)

At Peffer and Snagsby's

Mr Snagsby is a law-stationer:

In the shade of Cook's Court, at most times a shady place, Mr Snagsby has dealt in all sorts of blank forms of legal process; in skins and rolls of parchment; in paper — foolscap, brief, draft, brown, white, whitey-brown, and blotting; in stamps; in office-quills, pens, ink, India-rubber, pounce, pins, pencils, sealing-wax, and wafers; in red tape, and green ferret; in pocket-books, almanacks, diaries, and law lists; in string boxes, rulers, inkstands — glass and leaden, penknives, scissors, bodkins, and other small office-cutlery; in short, in articles too numerous to mention; ever since he was out of his time and went into partnership with Peffer.

Charles Dickens, Bleak House (1853)

What a wonderful sentence, a catalogue of the materials of "legal process," put together with eleven ins and one out. Some of what's in Peffer and Snagsby's is still familiar to the present-day stationery addict. The Oxford English Dictionary can help with the less familiar:

It's easy to think of parchment as crinkly, old paper, the kind of stuff kids make with tea — or with a candle, if they're daring and unsupervised. But parchment isn't paper. The OED: "A piece of animal skin, esp. from a sheep or goat, dressed and prepared as a surface for writing; a scroll or roll of this material; a manuscript or document written on this."

I somehow think of foolscap as cheap paper, the sort of stuff I was given in elementary school (the paper with huge splinters in it that Bill Cosby once joked about). But foolscap is simply "A long folio writing- or printing-paper, varying in size." The fool's cap or dunce cap was once used as a watermark.

Brief is brief-paper, used for writing you-know-whats. The OED quotes a 1923 Dictionary of Stationery: "A legal pattern of ruled or watermarked foolscap comprising 36 or 42 feint lines and a marginal line."

Brown paper: "A coarse stout kind of paper made of unbleached materials; chiefly used for wrapping." (See also Rodgers and Hammerstein, "My Favorite Things.")

The OED has no entry for whitey-brown, but it does include whity-brown: "Of a brown colour inclining to white; whitish brown; pale brown: most commonly of paper. As n. (properly two words) a whitish brown; ellipt. = whity-brown paper."

A pen, in Dickens's time, is what we would now call a nib, or a nib and its holder. Or as the OED puts it, "the complete contrivance of pen-holder and nib," also known as a dip pen (not to be mistaken for the later fountain pen).

Pounce: What a swell noun. The OED: "A fine powder, made from pulverized sandarac or cuttle shell, used to prevent ink from spreading (esp. when writing on unsized paper) or to prepare the surface of parchment to receive writing."

Wafer: "A small disk of flour mixed with gum and non-poisonous colouring matter, or of gelatine or the like similarly coloured, which when moistened is used for sealing letters, attaching papers, or receiving the impression of a seal." My guess is wafers took the place of sealing wax with less important documents.

Red tape: "Tape of a red colour such as is commonly used in securing legal and official documents." That's where the metaphor comes from.

Green ferret: "A stout tape most commonly made of cotton, but also of silk; then known as Italian ferret. green-ferret, fig. of officialism (cf. red-tape)." It's easy to understand why green ferret lost out to red tape as metaphor.

Pocket-book: As I thought, a pocket-notebook.

The OED includes law-list in a list of compound-words made with law-, without a definition. But Webster's Third New International has one: "A publication compiling the names and addresses of those engaged in the practice of law and information of interest to the legal profession often including the courts, court calendars, lawyers engaged in specialized fields (as admiralty or patent law), public officers, stenographers, handwriting experts, private investigators, or abstracts of law." Law lists (still known as such) can now be found online.

String box: As I thought, a case "containing string."

But what is a bodkin? "A short pointed weapon; a dagger, poniard, stiletto, lancet," or "A small pointed instrument, of bone, ivory, or steel, used for piercing holes in cloth, etc."? Dickens includes bodkins as examples of "office-cutlery," so I suppose the first definition applies. One would need a bodkin to cut through all that green ferret! (Or to one's quietus make.)

The rather unsatisfactory notes to the Penguin edition of Bleak House gloss "out of his time": "Had served his time as an apprentice and junior." The notes — which also touch lightly on paper, pounce, red tape, and green ferret — are prefaced by a warning: "New readers are advised that the Notes make details of the plot explicit." In other words, the notes — I mean, the Notes — give away elements of the story. Thanks a lot, Notes. I'm reading the Notes very selectively, which is to say, almost not at all.

[I stand corrected on bodkin: check the comments.]

The sidewalks of New York

Thousands of maps detail the various hundreds of thousands of imperfections in the sidewalks of New York. Whence these maps? They are the work of the the improbably-titled Big Apple Pothole and Sidewalk Protection Committee, an organization created by the New York State Trial Lawyers Association:

They were conceived by a group of trial lawyers who hired a mapping company to scour the streets and sketch every crack, chink and pothole, with the ostensible purpose of giving the city notice of potential hazards it must fix, or face the consequences. When someone fell and was injured on a city sidewalk — the most frequent ground for a personal-injury lawsuit against the city — he could present the map in court as hard evidence of the city’s liability.

City officials have long attacked the maps as nothing more than a useless collection of "700,000 squiggles," created by greedy lawyers, that has forced them to parse the intricacies of geometry — is that line horizontal or vertical? — and cost the city hundreds of millions of dollars in damage awards and settlements.

But now, a recent court ruling has dug a sizable gouge in the pothole map.

In a decision issued Dec. 18, the New York Court of Appeals, the state's highest court, for the first time echoed the city's argument that the maps are inaccurate and unclear.

Ruling Deals a Setback to Sidewalk Injury Lawsuits in New York (New York Times)

In this recent case, the Times reports, a judge wrote that one of the squiggles in question resembled "a poorly drawn X, the Hebrew letter shin, or a pitchfork without the handle."

[Why "improbably-titled"? "Protection Committee" has a presumably unintentional — and to my mind hilarious — overtone of organized-crime rackets. And only out-of-towners still speak of the "Big Apple."]

David Levine on enjoyment

Artist and illustrator David Levine, from an October 23, 2008 C-SPAN interview:

"Enjoying is very important. If there's nothing else but your enjoyment, you've got a lot."

Pre-chewed pencils

"We know it's a bit daft but — hey!"

From Concentrate Design, pre-chewed pencils.

"You gotta get up in the morning"

Spike Lee averages almost a movie a year. From "Outside Man," a September 22, 2008 New Yorker profile by John Colapinto:

He is able to accomplish so much in part because he often rises at 5 A.M. "You want to get a lot done, you gotta get up in the morning," he told me. The rest, he says, is "time management."

Economies of time (Hi and Lois)

Everyone's economizing: in Hi and Lois, months now have twenty-eight (or fewer?) days.

Related reading
All Hi and Lois posts

2008 first-sentences meme

I'm not much for memes, but I like this one, which I found at Robert Gable's aworks: go through your 2008 blog entries and and collect the first sentence from each month. It's an exercise in parataxis. Thus:

Small calendars for the new year, well designed and free. Alas, it's a parking area that's reserved. Victoria's Secret likes to ask in its marketing, "What is sexy?" Whoso would be a G-Man must be a pencil user, as Emerson might have put it. A light cigarette is like a regular one with a pinhole in it. In April, Odette at Reading Proust in Foxborough linked to a fine post from On-Screen Scientist, detailing one reader's initial inspiration for reading Proust: the words of 1950s quarterback Ronnie Knox, as quoted in the November 3, 1958 issue of Sports Illustrated. In eraserdom, black is the new pink. Our attention spans are notoriously short. September 1, 2008 is the day Hurricane Gustav made landfall. It's "Main Street." What if he loses? The Simpsons razz Apple: "Oh, such beautiful packaging!"

"Victoria's Secret" is from a Wall Street Journal article; "A light cigarette," from a New Yorker piece by David Sedaris; "Our attention spans," from Gordon Livingston's Too Soon Old, Too Late Smart. The final sentence quotes Lisa Simpson. The other sentences are mine.

JANUARY (WPA Art Project)

[Poster from the Illinois WPA Art Project, artist unknown. Stamped on the back: January 8, 1941. Via the Library of Congress online exhibit By the People, For the People: Posters from the WPA, 1936-1943.]

Happy New Year, and good reading to all.

I'm reading Dickens, Bleak House. You?