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“[I]f your teachers force you to use two spaces, send them a link to this article. Use this as your subject line: ‘If you type two spaces after a period, you’re doing it wrong.’”

A better Notational Velocity icon

[Before and after.]

If you, like me, like the Mac app Notational Velocity but cannot abide its icon, a substitute Evernote icon from iconaholic.com is a great alternative.

Eberhard Faber Ruby Erasers

“There is one for every purpose”: Eberhard Faber Ruby Erasers, a photograph by Christian Montone.

Thanks to Bent Sørensen, whose Ordinary finds is full of good things.

The word and the world

As you probably know, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has been in the news, as a professor and publisher have joined to produce an expurgated text of the novel in which the word slave replaces another word, 219 times. Three thoughts:

1. It’s been done before. In April 1963, the Philadelphia Board of Education removed Mark Twain’s novel from the city’s schools, substituting an adaptation with muted violence, simplified speech, and the elimination of “all derogatory references to Negroes.” And in 1984, middle-school administrator John H. Wallace published The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Adapted, with that word and the word hell removed. I’ve seen no reference to these previous expurgations in news coverage.

2. Changing the word does little to change the categories that structure Huck Finn’s thinking, which are those of the world in which Huck has been raised. When, for instance, Jim bests Huck in an argument about whether it is natural for people to speak different languages, Huck explains that he chose not to continue the debate: “I see it warn’t no use wasting words — you can’t learn a [          ] to argue.” The joke is on Huck. You may fill in the blank with the less offensive noun of your choice, but no substitution changes Huck’s mind, which assumes (always) Jim’s inferiority.

3. None of which is to say that the language of Twain’s novel poses no complications or causes no pain. But the more urgent complications and pain of Huck Finn lie, I think, elsewhere: in Huck’s deformed conscience (he believes of course that in helping Jim he is doing wrong) and in Tom Sawyer and Huck’s absurd, dangerous, not-funny humiliation of Jim in Arkansas, a humiliation in which Jim is thoroughly complicit.

I’ve taught Adventures of Huckleberry Finn any number of times, and each time, I’ve resolved never to teach it again. (Thus far I’ve kept my resolution.) As a piece of American myth-making, as a meditation on the varieties of human freedom, Huck Finn is crucial. And there is no easy, uplifting lesson to take away from it. The image many readers have of the novel — Huck and Jim drifting along the Mississippi, just getting along with each other, just two people, free of an oppressive culture — is undercut by the novel itself, in which Huck and Jim drift further and further from the prospect of Jim’s freedom, their raft filled with the baggage of their culture.

[I learned years ago of previous expurgations from Peaches Henry’s essay “The Struggle for Tolerance: Race and Censorship in Huckleberry Finn”, in Satire or Evasion? Black Perspectives on Huckleberry Finn, ed. James S. Leonard, Thomas A. Tenney, and Thadious Davis (1992).]

Trouble trouble

What to do when the Pop-O-Matic die doesn’t quite come to rest on one side? The rules offer no guidance. But Wikipedia offers a reasonable solution:

If the die in the “Pop-O-Matic” container has not clearly landed on a number, then the player who popped it can tap the “Pop-O-Matic,” but may not re-pop while the die is in limbo. The player can flick the board, but should not flick so hard that the board is moved.

Yes, we are speaking of Trouble. Elaine, Ben, and I hit upon the same solution last night.

I know that there are more important things in the world to be thinking about (and I am). But for an hour or so last night, nothing was more important than playing Trouble.

Readers of a certain age will remember this commercial.

“Famous Roast Beef Suppers”

From Yankee, a report on the “Famous Roast Beef Suppers” (yes, in quotation marks) of Hartland, Vermont — as frequented by J.D. Salinger.

Fargo, 1940

From NPR, the story behind one of the greatest Ellington recordings — Fargo, North Dakota; November 7, 1940 — as told by audio engineer Jack Towers, who recorded the night’s proceedings with his friend Dick Burris.

The Fargo performance is available in The Duke Box (Storyville Records).

Zimmer on Strunk and White

Ben Zimmer, who writes the “On Language” column for the New York Times, answers an interviewer’s question:

Q. Your colleague Geoff Pullum, at Language Log, has made it his personal goal to tear down Strunk and White. What’s wrong with The Elements of Style?

A. Pullum has been debunking the argument that this is the one book people should be using as guide to language. I find Strunk and White had a tenuous grasp on grammar. Many of their smaller rules are wrong, such as the blanket rule against using the passive voice.

Their larger rules are something you could never disagree with: “Omit needless words.” If you knew which words were needless, you would not need the advice.

Strunk and White offer no blanket rule against the passive voice, as even Pullum acknowledges in his Chronicle of Higher Ed piece on The Elements of Style:

The authors explicitly say they do not mean “that the writer should entirely discard the passive voice,” which is “frequently convenient and sometimes necessary.” They give good examples to show that the choice between active and passive may depend on the topic under discussion.

And Zimmer’s tired, Pullum-flavored observation about the banality of “Omit needless words” is hardly fair: The Elements of Style presents this principle of composition (as Strunk and White call it, not “rule”) with sixteen examples of how to improve cumbersome phrasing (e.g., “the fact that”) and a demonstration of how six choppy sentences can be revised into one (as I pointed out in a response to Pullum’s Chronicle piece last year).

There are good reasons to find fault with The Elements of Style, but one should be sure that it’s The Elements of Style one is criticizing — the thing itself, not some rumor.

Related posts
Pullum on Strunk and White
Hardly (adverb) convincing (adjective) (Do Strunk and White ban adjectives and adverbs?)
The Elements of Style, one more time (My appraisal)

Jared Lee Loughner, student

Two New York Times articles recount Jared Lee Loughner’s time at Pima Community College in Tucson. A sample:

Don Coorough, 58, who sat two desks in front of Mr. Loughner in a poetry class last semester, described him as a “troubled young man” and “emotionally underdeveloped.” After another student read a poem about getting an abortion, Mr. Loughner compared the young woman to a “terrorist for killing the baby.”

“No one in that class would even sit next to him,” Mr. Coorough said. Another fellow student said that he found Mr. Loughner’s behavior so eccentric — including inappropriate remarks and unusual outbursts — that he wondered if he might be on hallucinogens.

The Washington Post has interviewed Pima instructor Ben McGahee, who had Loughner in a summer 2010 algebra class:

“I always felt, you know, somewhat paranoid,” McGahee said. “When I turned my back to write on the board, I would always turn back quickly — to see if he had a gun.”

McGahee said he had to make several complaints before administrators finally removed Loughner.

“They just said, ‘Well, he hasn’t taken any action to hurt anyone. He hasn’t provoked anybody. He hasn’t brought any weapons to class,’” McGahee recalled. “‘We’ll just wait until he takes that next step.’”

McGahee’s fears are not exaggerated: they will be familiar to anyone who’s put in time in a classroom with a disruptive, unstable student. The Post also has three e-mails from a student in the class.

Administrators at Pima suspended Loughner in September 2010 and required a mental health clearance before he returned to campus. That of course never happened.

Arizona Suspect’s Recent Acts Offer Hints of Alienation (New York Times)
Suspect’s Odd Behavior Caused Growing Alarm (New York Times)
Jared Loughner’s college instructor: I was worried he might have a gun in class (Washington Post)
Jared Loughner's behavior recorded by college classmate in e-mails
(Washington Post)

“Jail mail”

In the news:

In prisons across the country, with their artificial pre-Internet worlds where magazines are one of the few connections to the outside and handwritten correspondence is the primary form of communication, the art of the pen-to-paper letter to the editor is thriving. Magazine editors see so much of it that they have even coined a term for these letters: jail mail.

The Handwritten Letter, an Art All but Lost, Thrives in Prison (New York Times)

[A better way to do that first sentence: “In the artificial pre-Internet world of prison, where magazines are one of the few connections to the outside and handwritten correspondence is the primary form of communication, the art of the pen-to-paper letter to the editor is thriving.” Or more simply, “In the no-Internet world of prison,” &c.]