Webster's New Collegiate ad

[Life, November 17, 1961. Click for a larger, more readable view.]

I’m reading Herbert C. Morton’s The Story of Webster’s Third: Philip Gove’s Controversial Dictionary and Its Critics and teaching David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. I have dictionaries on my brain. Thus this post.

It’s impossible to tell from the ad that Webster’s Third New International Dictionary (published in September 1961, lower left in the ad) was already the subject of heated (and often badly informed) criticism. This issue of Life has a letter from Gove defending the Third against a recent editorial:

The controversy over Webster’s Third is a remarkable moment in the so-called culture wars (resulting largely from an ill-conceived publicity campaign). I laugh to think that I used this dictionary for many years before learning that anyone found fault with it: to me, the Third seemed, and still seems, just fine. And I for one like the idea of Ethel Merman being quoted in a dictionary (or “the dictionary”): “Three shows a day drain a girl.”

A related post
-wise-wise (The Life editorial and -wise)

[Is that Rick Perry, time-traveler, smiling in 1961?]

Waterstones’s missing apostrophe

David Marsh, who created International Apostrophe Day, isn’t troubled by the disappearance of the apostrophe from the name of the British book chain Waterstones (was Waterstone’s). Nor am I. It’s tedious turning names ending in ’s into possessives. Consider Chuck E. Cheese’s.

Other apostrophe posts
Apostrophes and corn
Apostrophes and vandalism
LETS PLAY TWO

Radio buttons

Jesse James Garrett, The Elements of User Experience: User-Centered Design for the Web and Beyond, 2nd ed. (Berkeley: New Riders, 2011).

I like this touch of comedy.

A vaguely related post
Ta-da List

[If your reaction is “Huh?” see here. Also here.]

Hazel Frederick

That’s her name.

Internets addiction

Apropos of the Chinese study of “Internet addiction” and brain structure, a measured response: Can you really be addicted to the internet? (Guardian).

[The “internet” is much scarier with a initial cap. And scarier still in plural form.]

Art imitates life imitates art (M*A*S*H)

M. Hugh Steeply’s father’s M*A*S*H addiction began when the show went into syndication:

“The show was incredibly popular, and after a few years of Thursday nights it started also to run daily, during the day, or late at night, sometimes, in what I remember all too well was called syndication, where local stations bought old episodes and chopped them up and loaded them with ads, and ran them. And this, note, was while all-new episodes of the show were still appearing on Thursdays at 2100. I think this was the start… .

“The fucking show ran on two different local stations in the Capital District. Albany and environs. For a while, this one station even had a M*A*S*H hour, two of them, back to back, every night, from 2300. Plus another half an hour in the early P.M., for the unemployed or something.”

David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest (Boston: Little, Brown, 1996).

Art imitates life: “this one station” sounds an awful lot like east-central Illinois’s WCIA, which for years offered ample servings of M*A*S*H after the early and late news (one episode early, two late). How many times did I hear it: “M*A*S*H is next.” Wallace, as you may know, grew up in east-central Illinois, in Urbana.

Life imitates art: two cable channels now offer three hours of M*A*S*H on weekdays: 5:00–7:00 p.m. Central (TV Land) and 6:00–7:00 p.m. Central (Me-TV), six different episodes. On Sundays, TV Land runs M*A*S*H from 4:00 to 7:30 p.m. Central. Check your local listings. Or don’t.

Related reading
All David Foster Wallace posts (via Pinboard)

[It’s a good thing I never got started watching M*A*S*H.]

Telephone exchange names on screen: KLondike

Sean at Blackwing Pages sent this screenshot, from an episode of Modern Marvels — Engineering Disasters. He writes that this telephone appeared in a depiction “of the office of a U.S. Navy radar installation in the ocean (much like an oil platform) that went down in rough seas.”

KLondike (55-) is of course the imaginary exchange name of movies and television. But the Telephone EXchange Name Project notes that in 1955, 55- “was reserved for radio telephone numbers.” That might make this KL a recreation of the real thing.

More exchange names on screen
The Amazing Dr. Clitterhouse : Baby Face : Blast of Silence : Born Yesterday : The Dark Corner : Deception : Dream House : The Little Giant : The Man Who Cheated Himself : Murder, My Sweet : Naked City (1) : Naked City (2) : Nightmare Alley : The Public Enemy : Side Street : Sweet Smell of Success : This Gun for Hire

Thanks, Sean.

Teacher misspells words in fake jury-duty letter

From the New York Daily News:

Mona Lisa Tello was busted after she allegedly submitted a fake jury duty letter rife with bone-headed misspellings to get out of class for two weeks.

Tello spelled “trial” as “trail,” wrote “sited” instead of “cited,” and “mange” instead of “manager,” officials revealed Tuesday. . . .

“I have nothing to say,” Tello said when reached by telephone.

Spoken like a true Mona Lisa.

“Evening after evening, weekend after weekend, holiday after holiday”

Edward Artin went to work at G. & C. Merriam in 1930. He began as a proofreader, later joined the pronunciation staff, and worked on Webster’s Third New International Dictionary:

It was the inadequacy of the historical files and a lack of confidence in the research underlying some of the Second Edition pronunciations that led Artin to embark on his extraordinary effort to record as completely and systematically as he could the actual pronunciations prevailing in different parts of the country and different English-speaking nations from the 1930s through the 1960s.

Extraordinary indeed:

His wife Dorothy L. Artin, an editorial assistant for the Second Edition, recalls that “we were married in 1931, and I soon learned that much, indeed most, of our ‘free’ time was to be dedicated” to his consuming interest in how people pronounce words. “During the ensuing forty-three years … evening after evening, weekend after weekend, holiday after holiday, he listened to representative speakers, on radio, television, or face-to-face, all the while making … citations on three-by-five slips.”

Herbert C. Morton, The Story of Webster’s Third: Philip Gove’s Controversial Dictionary and Its Critics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).

Morton’s book is a great introduction to the world of lexicography.

[“Evening after evening, weekend after weekend, holiday after holiday”: What tone do you hear in this phrasing? Amused tolerance, or disbelief?]

Word of the day: kudos

Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Day:

kudos   \KOO-dahss\   noun
1 : fame and renown resulting from an act or achievement : prestige
2 : praise given for achievement

Did you know?

Deriving from Greek, “kudos” entered English as slang popular at British universities in the 19th century. In its earliest use, the word referred to the prestige or renown that one gained by having accomplished something noteworthy. The sense meaning “praise given for achievement” came about in the 1920s. As this later sense became the predominant one, some English speakers, unaware of the word’s Greek origin, began to treat it as a plural count noun, inevitably coming up with the back-formation “kudo” to refer to a single instance of praise. For the same reason, when “kudos” is used as a subject you may see it with either a singular or plural verb.