Bad handwriting and job security

A look at life at the U.S. Postal Service’s Remote Encoding Center, “a room where hundreds of clerks sit in silence, day and night, staring at America's worst-addressed envelopes”:

Poor Penmanship Spells Job Security for Post Office's Scribble Specialists (Wall Street Journal)

[I’m reminded of The Pale King: David Foster Wallace might have made a great novel about boredom, attention, and these postal workers.]

Fake speeding ticket

A new direction in spam, or new at least to me. This ticket came with a no-doubt lethal attachment. Strangely enough, twenty-four other people (e-mail addresses all visible) are getting the same ticket. The Bcc: option would add at least a smidge of greater realism, as would a city name and zip code.

Other spam posts
Achilles and stochastic : English professor spam : The folks who live in the mail : Great names in spam : Introducing Rickey Antipasto : The poetry of spam : Spam names : Spam names again

Charles Simic on writing by hand

[A] scrap of paper and a stub of a pencil are more preferable for philosophizing than typing the same words down, since writing a word out, letter by letter, is a more self-conscious process and one more likely to inspire further revisions and elaborations of that thought.

Take Care of Your Little Notebook (New York Review of Books)

Debit-card fee canceled

It’s difficult not to think that the Occupy movement has something to do with this decision: In Retreat, Bank of America Cancels Debit Card Fee (New York Times). See also: Are big banks feeling pressure from Occupy Wall Street? (Washington Post). But the decision doesn’t seem to have made much difference at Zuccotti Park: Occupy shrugs off bank’s debit-card move (MarketWatch).

-wise-wise

In a recent post, I mentioned that in 1960 the suffix -wise “was very much in the air”: the object of lighthearted yet firm rebuke in Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style (1959), and a running joke in Billy Wilder’s The Apartment (1960). Looking back at David Skinner’s 2009 article on Webster’s Third New International Dictionary has reminded me that -wise was very much in the air in 1961 too, the year of that dictionary’s publication. As Skinner notes, Life magazine “singled out the ending -wise for condemnation” in its editorial comment on the new dictionary. Google Books has the passage:

[“A Non-Word Deluge.” Life, October 27, 1961.]

Skinner notes that the Third New International labels irregardless as nonstandard and distinguishes enormity from enormousness. He also points out that concretize, finalize, and -wise “were all established enough to have appeared without warning labels in W2 [the second edition of the New International], the very dictionary Life’s editors claimed to know and trust so well.”

A weekly magazine editorializing (even if mistakenly) about an unabridged dictionary: those were heady times.

The American Heritage Dictionary, fifth edition

The fifth edition of The American Heritage Dictionary is out today, in print and as an app, and with a free website of limited usefulness. (Compare, say, the treatment of irregardless in the online American Heritage and the online Merriam-Webster.)

I would like to go out and buy this dictionary today. O reason not the need, King Lear said. But with the Oxford English Dictionary, Webster’s Third New International, and at least a dozen other dictionaries in the house, and the OED online, and dictionaries on my Mac and iPad, I think I’m full up dictionary-wise (at least if I plan on buying the Fourth New International, whenever it appears).

*

June 24, 2012: The online AHD now has a lengthy usage note for irregardless. Hmm.

Michael Bierut's notebooks

“For the past three decades, [the design firm] Pentagram’s Michael Bierut has kept a numbered series of notebooks — plain composition books, filled with rough sketches, notes taken in client meetings, doodles and design ideas — that cumulatively provide a record of his working life.” The notebooks are the stuff of an exhibit at the College of Saint Rose (Albany, New York): 30 Years 90 Notebooks (via Notebook Stories).

A related post
Angelo Bucco’s composition book

An Iliad

“In their one-man adaptation An Iliad, Lisa Peterson and Denis O’Hare (TV’s True Blood) return Homer’s epic poem to the voice of the lone poet as he recounts a story of human loss and folly that resonates across three millennia of war and bloodshed.” An Iliad runs at Chicago’s Court Theatre, November 10 to December 11.

[Thanks to Music Clip of the Day for the news.]

Close-reading Herman Cain

The charge that Herman Cain sexually harassed two women when he headed the National Restaurant Association may indeed be false. But the candidate’s responses merit close reading.

“I never sexually harassed anyone,” Cain insists. Consider this statement in light of an exchange from Sunday’s Face the Nation (before the scandal broke), concerning an electric border-fence:

Bob Schieffer: You also said at some point that you might want to back that fence up with a moat and fill it with alligators. Was that a joke too?

Cain: That was totally in jest, Bob. Some people are getting used to my sense of humor and as I get more attention I will tone down this sense of humor until I become president because America needs to get a sense of humor.

Thus “I never sexually harassed anyone” can easily translate to “That was totally in jest.” And of course the women involved need to get a sense of humor, &c.

Consider too Cain’s “Nothing happened.” What does this assertion deny? It might mean that no mingling of bodies took place: “We just talked. Nothing happened.” This denial too seems to deny, uh, nothing. It depends on what the meaning of nothing is.

Given this candidate’s willingness to joke (?) with the American public about electric fences and moats, I think it’s reasonable to wonder what he might say in private.

Related reading
Herman Cain claims on cash settlement raise questions (CBS News)

7:42 p.m.: There’s already more — an odd story about commenting on a woman’s height, and this exchange:

Judy Woodruff: Was there any behavior on your part that you think might have been inappropriate?

Cain: In my opinion, no. But as you would imagine, it’s in the eye of the person who thinks that maybe I crossed the line.

Cain Confident He Can Win Nomination, Says Harassment Claims Are “Baseless” (PBS NewsHour)

Next day, 8:12 a.m.: And still more:

“I believe I have a good sense for where you cross the line relative to sexual harassment but you have to know the lady, the individual.”

Herman Cain Changes Story, But Tells FOX He’s Innocent (Talking Points Memo)

[In 1998, when Bill Clinton told PBS’s Jim Lehrer that “There is not a sexual relationship,” I immediately asked (yes, out loud), “But was there?” Would things have turned out differently had Lehrer asked that question?]

Happy Halloween

[Ellsworth Kelly, Untitled (orange and black), n.d. Yale University Art Gallery. Gift of Mrs. Henry J. Heinz, II. From the Yale Digital Commons.]