Garner, Menand, and Truss

Good reading: two devastating appraisals of Lynne Truss’s Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation (2003), by Bryan A. Garner and Louis Menand.

Idle and curious, I looked at Truss’s book in the library a few weeks ago and found myself stopping short at the subtitle, which should read The Zero-Tolerance Approach to Punctuation. It was downhill from there.

[Sheer, strange coincidence: Garner’s Usage Tip of The Day (taken from Garner’s Modern American Usage) has just hit punctuation. Today’s tip concerns the apostrophe. You can subscribe here (bottom right). The Garner link above is now dead.]

Word of the day: earthling

The Oxford English Dictionary Word of the Day is earthling. I was surprised to learn that the word is much older than I’d thought. The meaning that I think of — “A person who lives on or comes from the earth as opposed to another planet” — first appeared in 1858, in a newspaper item about a comet. As the OED notes, this meaning later turns up mainly in science fiction. (As in, say, “Attention, earthlings!”)

But earthling has earlier meanings. In 1600, Sir William Cornwallis used the word to denote “A worldly or materialistic person.” In 1593, earthling appeared in Thomas Nashe’s Christs Teares Over Iervsalem, meaning “An inhabitant of the earth as opposed to heaven”: “Wee (of all earthlings) are Gods vtmost subiects.”

Earlier still (beyond today’s Word of the Day), earthling (that is, yrðling, yrþling, or urþling) meant “A ploughman, a cultivator of the soil.” And as yrðling, ærðling, and irdling, earthling also meant “A kind of bird (not identified).” Perhaps a bird that couldn’t fly? I wonder.

[You can subscribe the the OED Word of the Day at the dictionary’s homepage.]

Brian Wilson’s former house for sale

For sale, in St. Charles, Illinois: Brian Wilson’s former house, with nine fireplaces, six full bathrooms, five bedrooms, two half-bathrooms, and one underground recording studio. A newspaper reports that the studio is not in use: “‘It’s just space,’ said the resident who answered the door there last week.“

Wilson lived in St. Charles briefly, where he worked on the Imagination album (1998) with producer Joe Thomas. In Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys: The Complete Guide to Their Music (2004), Andrew G. Doe and John Tobler write that Wilson spent “maybe a total of three months in the house” and later sold it.

Beach Boy's former St. Charles house for sale (Daily Herald)
5N129 Dover Hill Road, St. Charles, Illinois (Caldwell Banker)

BBC on podcasts

From the BBC: Podcasts: Who still listens to them?

The answer would seem to be “Lots of people.” The point of the article is that interest in podcasts continues to grow, though Facebook and Twitter get more attention.

Me, I barely keep up with three podcasts: Joe Bussard’s Country Classics, This American Life, and To the Best of Our Knowledge. How about you?

[“Facebook and Twitter”: I find it difficult to use the term social media without wincing.]

Night Train to Munich

[Rex Harrison, Basil Radford, Naunton Wayne, in close quarters.]

How is it that Night Train to Munich (dir. Carol Reed, 1940) is so little known? It’s brilliant, in the colloquial British sense of that word — amazing, fantastic. The film moves at the speed of early Hitchcock and has a little of everything: betrayal, comedy, espionage, friendship, unconvincing model landscapes, pursuit, romance, secret messages, song, suspense, and train travel.

Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes (1938) is the clear inspiration — easy to understand, as Sidney Gilliat and Frank Launder wrote both screenplays. Margaret Lockwood returns, here as a young Czech who follows her scientist-father in fleeing the Nazis to England; Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne, traveling home from a visit to Berlin, reprise their roles as Charters and Caldicott. Best of all is a plot element that owes nothing to the earlier film: a tricky triangle with Lockwood, Rex Harrison, and Paul Henreid. In the train-lavatory scene above, Harrison, impersonating a Nazi officer, gets the warning that the real Nazis are onto him.

Night Train to Munich is available, beautifully restored, from the Criterion Collection.

Six stars

The Flag of Equal Marriage gets a sixth star, as the Marriage Equality Act goes into effect in New York. New York joins Connecticut, Iowa, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont, and the District of Columbia in granting equal marriage-rights to same-sex partners.

After Long Wait, Same-Sex Couples Marry in New York (New York Times)

Mississippi John Hurt for Chevy

Flipping through channels, I was surprised to hear the guitar and voice of Mississippi John Hurt in a Chevrolet commercial. Hurt’s fingerpicking style has turned up in commercials before: with products like coffee and lemonade, the sound signifies “old-time goodness” (and rightly so, no matter the quality of the product advertised). To my knowledge, the Chevy commercial marks the first time Hurt himself has been heard in a commercial, in a 1963 Library of Congress recording of “You Are My Sunshine,” played in C position, with the guitar tuned two whole-steps down.

I suspect that someone at the ad agency really, really loves Hurt’s music: note that the African-American dad in the commercial (ten seconds in) is wearing a hat that resembles Hurt’s signature fedora, dark brown with a tan band. Hardly coincidental, I’d say.

Why Maxwell House has never used Hurt’s “Coffee Blues” in a commercial is beyond me: “Ain’t Maxwell House all right!”

A related post
Mississippi John Hurt (From Pete Seeger’s Rainbow Quest)

Related reading
Mississippi John Hurt Museum

[Yes, The Lovin’ Spoonful took their name from “Coffee Blues.”]

Garner on writing in law school

Bryan A. Garner, in a New York Times forum on law school:

Most legal scholarship is poorly written and is mired in nonpractical abstraction that few can understand and fewer still can benefit from. Most law professors don’t know how to write well, so they could hardly teach the subject if they wanted to. On top of that, lawyers of all kinds — both academic lawyers and practicing ones — rationalize their linguistic ineptitude by claiming that legal jargon is necessary (most of it isn’t); that writing instruction is elementary, remedial stuff (it should progress to advanced techniques); and that writing style doesn’t matter anyway. But it does matter: clear writing equates with clear thinking, and judges and employers cry out for both. Put all these things together, and you have serious educational pathologies.

Garner’s suggested start toward a cure: “much more research, writing and editing,” with frequent short papers (revision required) in all second- and third-year classes.

Note, by the way, how well Garner writes.

[Garner recommends the Oxford comma. The Times must be responsible for "research, writing[,] and editing.”]

Norway

The news from Norway grows grimmer as we learn more:

Blasts and Gun Attack in Norway; 7 Dead (New York Times)

I have friends in Oslo and would really like to know that they’re okay.

(They are.)

Counterfeit-coin puzzle

From Futility Closet: “You have nine coins and a balance scale. One of the coins is lighter than the others. Is it possible to identify it in only two weighings?”

(via Boing Boing)