Domestic comedy

[Grimacing.] “This tastes too much like root beer.”

“What is it?”

“Root beer.”

Related reading
All “domestic comedy” posts (via Pinboard)

Were and was

From my blog stats:

This sort of thing amuses me, unduly so.

If I were, if I was has become one of the most popular posts on Orange Crate Art. I just made a substantial addition to the post, with some further commentary on the trickiest sample sentence therein. So pretend you’re a congressional staffer — or even a member of Congress, if you dare — and read all about it. I would, if I were you.

A secret location on the Upper East Side

A three-minute film by Andrew David Watson about a used-book store in a Manhattan apartment: There’s No Place Like Here: Brazenhead Books (via Andrew Sullivan).

Pencil fans, note the Mongol at 2:45.

Elaine, we gotta get there.

[[The Firefox extension Flashblock will prevent this film from playing. Add player.vimeo.com and vimeo.com to your whitelist. Post title inspired by a library exhibit and book.]

The news from Boro Park

I saw the first grim news — a child missing — on Tuesday night, via a Google Alert for boro park. The story began at Twelfth Avenue and Forty-fourth Street, at the school where Leiby Kletzky was attending summer camp. I passed that building hundreds of times as a kid, back when it was an apartment house. I lived on Forty-fourth Street, less than a block away.

The story began with what many parents have experienced, at least briefly — the terrifying feeling of not knowing where a child is. What followed was a horror beyond imagining, born of psychopathy and the haphazard cruelty of circumstance. My heart breaks for the Kletzky family.

Murdoch’s issues

Did you notice this sentence in Rupert Murdoch’s letter of contrition?

In the coming days, as we take further concrete steps to resolve these issues and make amends for the damage they have caused, you will hear more from us.

The passive voice would be the more usual way to skirt responsibility in such a context:

In the coming days, as we take further concrete steps to resolve these issues and make amends for the damage that has been done, you will hear more from us.

Murdoch’s phrasing — “resolve these issues,” “make amends for the damage they have caused” — is a more subtle (though still transparent) way to avoid acknowledging responsibility. Murdoch’s phrasing places blame not on individual agents but on difficulties and problems that were somehow in the air. It’s like a driver blaming issues with alcohol for the damage to his car. But it’s not issues that drive drunk — or hack phones. A more forthright version of Murdoch’s sentence might read as follows:

In the coming days, as we take further concrete steps to set things right and make amends for the damage we have done, you will hear more from us.

I still wouldn’t believe him though.

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)