How to improve writing (no. 30)

From a New York Times obituary for percussionist Howard Van Hyning:

Mr. Van Hyning was also a collector who amassed a trove of vintage percussion instruments that he rented to orchestras worldwide. Comprising more than 1,000 items, his collection includes a snare drum built by Billy Gladstone, a highly regarded Radio City Music Hall drummer of the 1930s and ’40s. Its crown jewel is the set of “Turandot” gongs.

Note the slight bump in the road at the start of the final sentence: its of course refers to Howard Van Hyning’s collection, not Billy Gladstone’s snare. Any reader of these sentences can figure its out, but the greater the distance between a pronoun and its antecedent, the greater the chance for confusion. Consider this possibility:

Comprising more than 1,000 items, his collection includes a snare drum built by Billy Gladstone, a highly regarded Radio City Music Hall drummer of the 1930s and ’40s. Its value is estimated at a quarter of a million dollars.

Now it’s no longer obvious that its refers to the collection. So one might rewrite:

The collection’s value is estimated at a quarter of a million dollars.

In the original passage, replacing its solves the problem:

Comprising more than 1,000 items, his collection includes a snare drum built by Billy Gladstone, a highly regarded Radio City Music Hall drummer of the 1930s and ’40s. The collection’s crown jewel is the set of “Turandot” gongs.

Howard Van Hyning’s obituary describes a man who led a good life, doing something he loved and sharing his instrumental finds with others.

[This post is no. 30 in a series, “How to improve writing,” dedicated to improving stray bits of public prose.]

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All How to improve writing posts (via Pinboard)

Pluto redux?

As Boing Boing noted this morning, Pluto is back in the news. What better time to listen to Clare and the Reasons’ tributes to the finest of dwarf planets? In English and French:

Clare and the Reasons, “Pluto,” “Pluton” (YouTube)

“Chin up, Pluto.”

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Venetia Phair (1918–2009)

Another word for today: ineluctable

It’s Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Day:

ineluctable \in-ih-LUK-tuh-bul\ adjective
: not to be avoided, changed, or resisted : inevitable

*

Like drama, wrestling was popular in ancient Greece and Rome. “Wrestler,” in Latin, is “luctator,” and “to wrestle” is “luctari.” “Luctari” also has extended senses — “to struggle,” “to strive,” or “to contend.” “Eluctari” joined “e-” (“ex-”) with “luctari,” forming a verb meaning “to struggle clear of.” “Ineluctabilis” brought in the negative prefix “in-” to form an adjective describing something that cannot be escaped or avoided. English speakers borrowed the word as “ineluctable” around 1623. Another word that has its roots in “luctari” is “reluctant.” “Reluctari” means “to struggle against” — and someone who is “reluctant” resists or holds back.

Ineluctable is a word I know from and always associate with James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922). The word begins the “Proteus” episode, as Stephen Dedalus wrestles with the nature of reality:

Ineluctable modality of the visible: at least that if no more, thought through my eyes. Signatures of all things I am here to read, seaspawn and seawrack, the nearing tide, that rusty boot. Snotgreen, bluesilver, rust: coloured signs.

[“Signatures of all things I am here to read”: from Jakob Böhme (1575–1624), mystic and theologian.]

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Bandbox (Other words, other works of lit)

Prepend?

[Say what?]

Poking around in the Lists options in TextEdit, the text-editor / word-processor that comes with every Mac, I was baffled by this drop-down box. What might it mean to “Prepend enclosing list marker”?

Prepend, I immediately discovered, is unmentioned in TextEdit’s Help file, which has little to say about lists at all. The word appears in neither the Mac’s New Oxford American Dictionary nor Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate. In Webster’s Third New International, the word means “consider, premeditate.” It’s the Oxford English Dictionary for the win, supplementing the word’s older meanings — “To weigh up mentally, ponder, consider; to premeditate” — with a more recent one: “trans. To add at the beginning, to prefix, prepose; esp. to add or append (a character, string, file, etc.) at the front of an existing string, file, etc.”

Further digging: Apple’ documentation says that
NSTextListPrependEnclosingMarker “Specifies that a nested list should include the marker for its enclosing superlist before its own marker.” One software developer notes, dryly, “We are confident that someone will find this useful.”

Well, I have: I’ve made a post about it. But I’ve made various lists, with and without the box checked, and I still cannot figure out what an enclosing list marker is and what difference prepending one might make. I wonder if any TextEdit user does.

Update, 10:39 a.m.: Someone does! An explanation may be found in the comments. Thanks, Arne.

Movie recommendation: Catfish

I recommend Catfish. I also recommend reading no reviews, watching no trailers, asking no questions of anyone who’s seen it. Go see Catfish!

Sparky Anderson on language

Steve Rushin remembers baseball manager Sparky Anderson:

“I truly don’t know the language,” Sparky once told me. “I wish I could know the difference between a noun and a pronoun and an adverb and a verb, but I don’t know, and you know, I don’t wanna know. Why do you have to know English? It's like ‘two.’ There‘s three ‘twos’! There’s tee-oh, there’s tee-double-ya-oh, and there’s tee-double-oh! Three twos! Now, if I put any one of those down in a letter, you know which one it is I’m talkin’ about. It’s like ‘there’ and ‘their.’ What’s the difference, as long as you know there’s a there there."

Former Tigers, Reds manager Sparky Anderson had own language (Sports Illustrated)

Sometimes, alas, there is no there there.

On One Morning in Maine

Elaine Fine has written a beautiful post on the crucial book of her childhood, Robert McCloskey’s One Morning in Maine: Surrogacy and Wishes.

Fake ironing

If you prefer, as I do, cotton shirts, the kind whose collars end up wizened after a spell in the dryer, you might be interested in fake ironing. Here’s how to fake-iron a shirt collar:

1. Roll collar into a tight ball, looking something like a cinnamon roll.

2. Wrap collar as tightly as possible with a rubber band.

3. Shower, shave, brush teeth, get partly dressed.

4. Remove rubber band from collar. Don shirt.

It works! I wasn’t plan to write this post this morning, but I wasn’t planning to invent fake ironing either. As you can see, I did, both.

Update, 5:58 p.m.: In response to a request for visual clarification, here’s a photograph. Note the cinnamon-roll effect. More clarification: start by grasping the collar at the back. Bring the two ends together. Roll from the back to the ends, keeping the fabric as smooth and as tightly wrapped as possible.

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Minor kitchen wisdom (Household hints)

BUCK TO READING: DROP DEAD

Principal Andrew Buck explained in a horribly written memo why books are not necessary at his school, Brooklyn’s Middle School for Art and Philosophy. A sample:

Personal experience aside, which surfaces a concern about the potential adverse affects of textbooks to students learning, let’s return to the essential question of learning and how it is best achieved.

Yes, let’s.

Writing-challenged principal Andrew Buck stands behind his idiotic letter (New York Daily News)

November 5, 2010: For some reason (a stray touchpad or mouse move), comments were off for this post. Now they’re on.

[Post title with apologies to this Daily News headline.]

Mitch McConnell’s to-do list

Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY): “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.”

By now this statement has been widely quoted. But I haven’t seen anyone ask: is there any precedent in modern American political life for this sort of declaration? Has anyone in a comparable position ever said such a thing about a sitting president?