The lunatic fringe again

As my wife Elaine remembered and confirmed last night, “lunatic fringe” first referred to hair. She remembered what Ma says in Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little Town on the Prairie (1941):

“And I can’t think that a lunatic fringe is the most becoming way to do your hair. It makes any girl’s ears appear larger to comb the hair up back of them and to have that mat of bangs above the forehead.”

Fred Shapiro explains it all:

In the Yale Book of Quotations, I gave the standard sourcing for this political/social expression:

[Of an international exhibition of modern art:] The lunatic fringe was fully in evidence, especially in the rooms devoted to the Cubists and Futurists, or Near-Impressionists.

Theodore Roosevelt, Outlook, March 29, 1913

More recently, I searched for lunatic fringe in historical databases. To my surprise, I found many uses from before 1913 — all in a very different sense from Roosevelt’s. Here are a few:

“The girls!” exclaimed Miss Lizzie, lifting her eyebrows till they met the “lunatic fringe” of hair which straggled uncurled down her forehead.

Oliver Optic’s Magazine, February 1874

“LUNATIC Fringe” is the name given to the fashion of cropping the hair and letting the ends hang down over the forehead.

Wheeling Daily Register, July 24, 1875

The “lunatic fringe” is still the mode in New York hair-dressing.

Chicago Inter Ocean, May 24, 1876

It appears, then, that Teddy Roosevelt was playing on an existing phrase. His usage was a metaphorical extension of an expression previously applied to bangs — evidently, bangs that were considered outré. Fringe is still used in Britain for bangs, but the usage has been abandoned for so long in the United States that lexicographers were completely unaware of the coiffure-related prehistory of lunatic fringe.

The Oxford English Dictionary traces the phrase to another 1913 Roosevelt sentence: “There is apt to be a lunatic fringe among the votaries of any forward movement.” Or backward.

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Lunatic fringe

Lunatic fringe

That hair. “Lunatic fringe,” said Elaine, and she said I should post it here. See also these posts. Thanks, Elaine.

Taco Bell lawsuit

From the Los Angeles Times:

A lawsuit aimed at forcing Taco Bell to stop calling the meat it serves beef has been withdrawn. The suit, filed in January in federal court in California, alleged that what Taco Bell calls “seasoned beef” does not meet federal requirements to be labeled beef.

It turns out that Taco Bell’s “seasoned beef” is eighty-eight percent beef. And the “Isolated Oat Product”? It’s for moisture. Of course!

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Close reading Taco Bell

Moleskine app

There’s now a free Moleskine app for the iPad and iPhone, offering the choice of a plain, ruled, or squared page. To my mind, the design involves the same analog-to-digital mistake that Apple’s Notes app makes. Lines or squares are useful when one writes by hand. On a screen, they’re superfluous. As is Notes’s left margin: one can’t write in it. But to each, their own.

My favorite iPad writing app is Simplenote. Even its name is simple: note the absence of a capital in the middle. Nice.

[Yes, singular they.]

Secret writing, 1917–1918

[“How to open sealed letter without detection.” Click for a larger view.]

From an April 19 CIA press release:

The Central Intelligence Agency today declassified the United States Government’s six oldest classified documents, dating from 1917 and 1918. These documents, which describe secret writing techniques and are housed at the National Archives, are believed to be the only remaining classified documents from the World War I era. Documents describing secret writing fall under the CIA’s purview to declassify.

“These documents remained classified for nearly a century until recent advancements in technology made it possible to release them,” CIA Director Leon E. Panetta said. “When historical information is no longer sensitive, we take seriously our responsibility to share it with the American people.”

The documents contain recipes for invisible ink and directions for opening sealed letters without detection. No sign of the documents at the CIA website, but they’re available from The Maddow Blog at MSNBC. I could’ve used them in my espionage-filled boyhood.

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Invisible ink cigarette card

Used typewriter ribbon

[“Used typewriter ribbon being sealed in locked cabinet, during Academy Award voting.” Hollywood, California, 1972. Photograph by Bill Eppridge. From the Life Photo Archive.]

Related reading
Price Waterhouse (Wikipedia)

How to improve writing (no. 34)

Signage: “Reserved for Visiting Guests.”

Better: “Reserved for Guests.” Or “Reserved for Visitors.”

Omit needless words!

[This post is no. 34 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)

Across the wide Missouri Pacific

Last week our son Ben participated in a hyper-present improvisation on “Shenandoah” that joined musicians in Urbana, Illinois and Melbourne, Australia. The project is the work of composer and violinist Benjamin Day Smith, who explains it in this lecture.

Pocket notebook sighting

Union Station (dir. Rudolph Maté, 1950) stars William Holden and Nancy Olson in a story of kidnapping, surveillance, and enhanced interrogation techniques. Holden plays William Calhoun, a railroad detective intent upon protecting the sacred space of Los Angeles’ Union Station. Olson is Joyce Willecombe, a secretary who sees something suspicious on her train and does her civic duty by reporting it. It’s odd how little chemistry there is between these two: in Sunset Boulevard, released in the same year, they’re sexy peers, smoking and writing in the deep of night. Here Holden’s character is crankily middle-aged, and Olson’s is more or less a former Girl Scout. Very strange. Stranger still that the film turns into a love story.

I’m not joking about “enhanced interrogation techniques”: Union Station has a scene of police brutality that fits any reasonable definition of torture. How did it get past the censors? There are also long and quietly suspenseful episodes of surveillance in the train station, with plainclothes men sitting, standing, pretending to read.

Oh, and there’s a good scene with a notebook too.

More notebook sightings
Angels with Dirty Faces : Cat People : Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne : Extras : Journal d’un curé de campagne : The House on 92nd Street : The Lodger : The Mystery of the Wax Museum : The Palm Beach Story : Pickpocket : Pickup on South Street : Red-Headed Woman : Rififi : The Sopranos : Spellbound

A Pale King event

Babbitt’s Books in Normal, Illinois, had a reading on Friday night to mark the publication of David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King. There are few more appropriate settings for such an event: Wallace taught at Illinois State University in Normal from 1993 to 2002, and he was a regular customer at Babbitt’s, which he once called his favorite bookstore. The setting for the reading was fittingly modest: a table with a small lectern, a dozen or so folding chairs, and aisles filled with people sitting and standing. (They included a Peoria Journal Star reporter.) Nine people read, from “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again,” “Good Old Neon,” Infinite Jest, and The Pale King. The readers included three of Wallace’s ISU friends, one of his ISU students, two of my students, and me. This event offered one of the plainest and best pleasures: listening to words read aloud.

Much kudos and gratitude to Brian Simpson and Sarah Lindenbaum for their hospitality.

[The world of The Pale King is an IRS office in Peoria, Illinois. Kudos is a singular noun. Brian’s last name is not Babbitt.]