Dead give-away

Why a dead give-away?

The Oxford English Dictionary explains. A give-away is “an inadvertent betrayal or revelation of oneself, of plans, the truth, etc.” Among the meanings of dead: “absolute, complete, entire, thorough, downright.” A dead give-away is “a complete betrayal; also, a person or thing that causes such a betrayal or revelation.” One more nagging question answered. Thanks, OED.

Recreational and recreative reading

From Bryan Garner’s Usage Tip of the Day:

“Recreational” is the standard adjective corresponding to the noun “recreation”; it’s about 1,000 times as common as its synonym “recreative,” a needless variant. But “recreative” is genuinely useful in the sense “tending to re-create” — e.g.: “The paradoxically destructive and recreative force of the mythical flood seemed as real to Friday’s performers as it must have to the composer.” Timothy Pfaff, “Innocence of Children Survives ‘Noah’s Flood,’” S.F. Examiner, 24 June 1995, at C1.

I remember some years ago hearing of a college administrator who characterized English studies as “recreative reading.” It seems appropriate that he chose the needless variant. Dumb and dumberer.

Bryan Garner, author of Garner’s Modern American Usage (Oxford University Press, 2009), offers a free Usage Tip of the Day. You can sign up at LawProse.org. Orange Crate Art is a Garner-friendly site.

Awesome People Reading

Awesome People Reading collects photographs of just that: a young Rachel Carson, Buster Keaton, Lisa Simpson, and many, many more. Above, the cast of Dracula (dir. Tod Browning, 1931). Click for a larger view.

Marshall McLuhan’s reading strategy

Marshall McLuhan’s reading strategy: begin on page 69.

(via Taking Note)

Duke Ellington and a Blackwing

[Photograph by Valerie Wilmer, 1965.]

Duke Ellington in a BBC studio, at work with a Blackwing pencil. Yes, it’s a Blackwing: the ferrule is the give-away. That’s most likely a Pall Mall in Ellington’s other hand. This photograph appears in Derek Jewell’s Duke: A Portrait of Duke Ellington (New York: W.W. Norton, 1977). There appears to be no evidence that Ellington had any particular attachment to the Blackwing pencil, or to any writing instrument.

Related reading, via Pinboard
All Blackwing posts
All Ellington posts

[Note to a certain pencil company: Orange Crate Art is licensed under a Creative Commons 3.0 License. No commercial use allowed. Thanks for your cooperation.]

Marco Arment on blogging

“This site represents me, and I’m random and eccentric and interested in a wide variety of subjects.” From all the way back in 2009, Marco Arment’s Avoiding the blogger trap, good advice for anyone who writes online.

[Marco’s Instapaper has changed my life — and for the better.]

Literature and word-processing

The New York Times has a good story on literature and word-processing: The Muses of Insert, Delete and Execute. One choice bit:

Jimmy Carter set off what may have been the first word-processing-related panic in 1981, when he accidently deleted several pages of his memoir in progress by hitting the wrong keys on his brand-new $12,000 Lanier.

Here’s a picture of a Lanier Model 103.

“Don’t be a brute”

[“Don’t be a brute: handle your disks as you would handle LPs — by the edges.” Click for a larger view.]

The words above, in stately mauveine, come from a three-page guide that I made for students in a Spring 1987 writing class, an experiment in teaching writing with word-processing. I discovered this document in a folder underneath a folder underneath a — suffice it to say that the document is recently unearthed. I’m amused to realize that it’s the older disks in my analogy that would be familiar to at least some 2011 students.

In 1987, teaching writing with word-processing was a bit cutting edge. Now computer-assisted writing classes are everywhere. I remain unenthusiastic though, because writing is not word-processing. The work of inventing, developing, and arranging ideas is entirely different from the work of preparing a document. Word-processing makes it all too easy for the novice writer to conflate the two kinds of work, so that even the roughest draft (what Anne Lamott calls the “shitty first draft”) looks like a finished product. I take great happiness in seeing my students discover the difference between writing (really writing) and word-processing, typically by (1) working out ideas on paper before typing and (2) revising on paper.

My favorite tools of writing: index cards, pocket notebooks, legal pads, TextWrangler, and WriteRoom. I consider a word-processing window a hostile workplace.

A related post
Beagle Bros disk-care warnings
Writing by hand

[The disks we used in 1987: 5¼" floppies.]

Ebert documentary picks

Roger Ebert picks the best documentaries of 2011.

“Auggie Wren’s Christmas Story”

From NPR, to stream or download: Paul Auster reads “Auggie Wren’s Christmas Story.”

Merry Christmas to all who celebrate it.