James Brown sells miso

From music clip of the day: James Brown’s miso soup commercials. They’re awesome.

Glover’s Mange Medicine

[Life, March 3, 1941.]

It’s a bit startling to see the word mange in a human context. Yes, a “serious-purpose” treatment was in order: no Dapper Dan for this guy.

Speaking of this guy: does he bear a more than slight resemblance to Liberace, or what?

Mange has made one previous appearance on Orange Crate Art, as one of the best typos I’ve seen.

[Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary gives a definition: “any of various persistent contagious skin diseases marked especially by eczematous inflammation and loss of hair, affecting domestic animals or sometimes humans, and caused by a minute parasitic mite.” Dapper Dan: the pomade of choice for Ulysses Everett McGill in O Brother, Where Art Thou? (dir. Joel Coen, 2000). The ad’s exclamation point is alas chopped off in the source, Google Books. Glover products (not this one though) are still available from J. Strickland & Co. of Memphis, Tennessee. I love adding details in brackets.]

Clothes, information, suds, pants

A plurale tantum: “a noun that in a particular sense is invariably plural in form.” For instance, clothes. A singulare tantum is invariably singular. For instance, information.

Years ago, I explained this difference (minus the Latin) while doing literacy tutoring. My off-the-top-of-my-head example of a plurale tantum was suds. I’m surprised now to see that the Oxford English Dictionary includes the singular sud, but that word means “a soap solution,” not “the frothy mass which collects on the top of soapy water in which things are washed.” The frothy mass is plural.

Pants looks like a plurale tantum, but there is a singular form, “chiefly used in the retail clothing industry,” as the OED notes. You might know pant from the L.L. Bean catalogue. The use of the singular form was a nice detail in Alfred Gingold’s 1982 Bean spoof Items from Our Catalog.

[Definition of plurale tantum from Bryan Garner’s Garner’s Modern American Usage ((Oxford University Press, 2009). Says Garner, “catalogue is still the better form.”]

Red light, green light

Walking around in a nearby city yesterday, Elaine and Ben and I came to a corner where two one-way streets intersected. Already waiting to cross: a mother and daughter, the latter perhaps three years old. There wasn’t a car in sight, and there they stood. Who were we to set a bad example? It took a long time for the light to change. And then we crossed safely and went on our way.

Hi and Lois watch

[Hi and Lois, July 13, 2011.]

I think of the great lines from Out of the Past (dir. Jacques Tourneur, 1947): “All I can see is the frame. I’m going in there now to look at the picture.” But there is no picture: how noir can you get?

I’m not sure how to account for today’s Hi and Lois. The not-so-still-life bowl and its contents may have jumped from canvas to table. Or the Flagstons may have traded their Twombly for a Rauschenberg. Or someone may have been careless. I just don’t know.

Related reading
All Hi and Lois posts (via Pinboard)

Snow, snow, snow

Earlier this morning, I dreamed that it was snowing. These were giant flakes, perhaps a foot across. I saw them through our living-room window, which looked onto a city sidewalk that had already been shoveled. The crews are out early, I thought. Analyst, do your worst.

[Illustration by Harry McNaught, from Weather: A Guide to Phenomena and Forecasts, a Golden Science Book (1965).]

Bryan Garner and David Foster Wallace

From Boston’s WBUR, March 2001, Judy Swallow talks with Bryan Garner and David Foster Wallace about modern American usage. My favorite exchange, Swallow and Wallace:

“Do you want your students to be SNOOTs?”

“That’s a really good question. No, to be a SNOOT is a lonely, stressful way to be. [Garner laughs.] It’s, you know, having a big red button which is pushed all the time. And to be honest, I would prefer to be less SNOOTy than I am.”

But as Wallace goes on to say, he wants his students to be able to speak and write in ways that convey their credibility and learning.

Related viewing
Garner asks Wallace about genteelisms (LawProse.org)

[In the essay “Authority and American Usage,” Wallace glosses SNOOT as his “nuclear family’s nickname for a really extreme usage fanatic.” The acronym stands for “Sprachgefühl Necessitates Our Ongoing Tendance” or “Syntax Nudniks Of Our Time.” “Authority and American Usage” appears in Consider the Lobster and Other Essays (New York: Little, Brown, 2005). The essay first appeared in Harper’s as “Tense Present: Democracy, English, and the Wars over Usage.”]

Ebert on Murdoch

Roger Ebert on Rupert Murdoch: “This man has done more to harm journalism in America and Britain than any other person. I cannot speak for Australia.”

The Dirty Digger (Roger Ebert’s Journal)

Lieutenant Columbo’s notebook

[Peter Falk as Lieutenant Columbo. From the Columbo episode “Murder in Malibu,” first aired May 14, 1990.]

For once he has his own pencil. More often he borrows.

Another shot from this episode reveals the notebook to be an Ampad Citadel (no longer manufactured). Appropriately rumpled, no?

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 : Quai des Orfèvres : Red-Headed Woman : Rififi : The Sopranos : Spellbound : Union Station

[The closeup is upside-down for readability.]

E.B. White was born.

From the “Book Bench” at the New Yorker:

E. B. White was born on this day in 1899. He’d not approve of that construction, I fear. Nor would Strunk. So how about, for colloquial clarity, if not quite temporal precision: today is E. B. White’s birthday.

Ian Crouch, E.B. White, on His Eighteenth Birthday

Was born: aha. The passive voice. Here is some of what The Elements of Style in fact says about it, under the the (in)famous heading “Use the active voice”:

The active voice is usually more direct and vigorous than the passive. . . . This rule does not, of course, mean that the writer should entirely discard the passive voice, which is frequently convenient and sometimes necessary.

Completely unobjectionable advice (accompanied, I should note, by several illustrative sentences). A writer who disapproves of was born is a writer whose ideas about language no one need take seriously. But neither Strunk nor White is that writer. Which is not to say that The Elements of Style is beyond criticism.

Related posts
All Strunk and White posts (via Pinboard)
The Elements of Style, one more time (Lots of criticism)
Zimmer on Strunk and White (on the “blanket rule” against the passive)

[The quoted passage appears in all editions of The Elements of Style.]