Phone manners

[As seen in the 1940 New York City telephone directories. Click for a larger, clearer view.]

The Anti-Digit Dialing League

[Update: There’s now a post with excerpts from Phones Are for People.]

[Lewis Banci and Milburn Smith, The Ten O’Clock Scholar (1969).]

The Anti-Digit Dialing League was a short-lived movement that arose in 1962 and faded, it would seem, in 1964. Founded in San Francisco, the ADDL opposed “creeping numeralism” and fought a losing battle to preserve the use of telephone exchange names. I came across the group’s name while exploring the 1940 New York City telephone directories earlier this month. Among the ADDL’s members, the semanticist S.I. Hayakawa, a co-author of the group’s pamphlet manifesto Phones Are For People (1962). Here is what Hayakawa told Time (July 13, 1962):

“These people are systematically trying to destroy the use of memory. They tell you to ‘write it down,’ not memorize it. Try writing a telephone number down in a dark booth while groping for a pencil, searching in an obsolete phone book and gasping for breath. And all this in the name of efficiency! Engineers have a terrible intellectual weakness. ‘If it fits the machine,’ they say, ‘then it ought to fit people.’ This is something that bothers me very much: absentmindedness about people.”

The same Time article reported that the Bloomington, Indiana chapter of the ADDL had turned to a mild form of sabotage:

Interpreting the area code and seven digits as one huge number, they place calls by saying, “Operator, give me S.I. Hayakawa at four billion, one hundred fifty-five million, eight hundred forty-two thousand, three hundred and one.” Growls Chapter Leader Frederick Litto, “If they want digits, we’ll give them digits.”

I remember when grown-ups used to growl about automation and “computers.” I remember owning a button with the younger statement of those sentiments: “I am a human being: do not fold, spindle, or mutilate.” I salute the ADDL’s affection for exchange names. Sign me up.

[Life, February 8, 1963.]

*

Update: I have obtained a copy of Phones Are for People.

Related reading
Other exchange name posts

[Befuddled at memory frenzies? You can pick an exchange name for your telephone number from a 1955 list of Bell Telephone’s recommended exchange names, available from The Telephone EXchange Name Project.]

“[B]eautiful and surprising and deep”

Billy couldn't read Tralfamadorian, of course, but he could at least see how the books were laid out — in brief clumps of symbols separated by stars. Billy commented that the clumps might be telegrams.

“Exactly,” said the voice.

“They are telegrams?”

“There are no telegrams on Tralfamadore. But you’re right: each clump of symbols is a brief, urgent message — describing a situation, a scene. We Tralfamadorians read them all at once, not one after the other. There isn’t any particular relationship between all the messages, except that the author has chosen them carefully, so that, when seen all at once, they produce an image of life that is beautiful and surprising and deep. There is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects. What we love in our books are the depths of many marvelous moments seen all at one time.”

Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five (1969)

Roger Ebert on memory and mortality

“Some years from now, at a funeral with a slide show, only one person will be able to say who we were. Then no one will know”: Roger Ebert, “I remember you” (Chicago Sun-Times).

[Do you know the song? Music by Victor Schertzinger, words by Johnny Mercer. Here’s a version by Doris Day.]

Domestic comedy

In a parking lot:

“If you’re looking for hinterlands, those are more hinter.”

Related reading
All domestic comedy posts (via Pinboard)

[Me, I like to park in the hinterlands. Elaine, she understands.]

Noisy for Mac

Noisy is a free app (OS X 10.5 or later) that generates pink noise or white noise, masking background chatter and other distractions. Noisy is based on the old Mac app Noise, which never became a Universal Binary.

One can get the benefit of noise by running SimplyNoise in a browser or by downloading a SimplyNoise MP3. I have an hour of pink noise on my iPod, which has been a concentration-saver in coffeeshops. But I think it’s especially nice to get some noise by running a tiny app. To the anonymous developer who turned Noise into Noisy: thanks.

[Without pink noise, I’d get nothing done in my office.]

Dropbox invitation, anyone?

Dropbox now offers an extra 500MB of storage space to new users who sign up via an invitation. Thus a basic (free) account would now have 2.5GB. The inviter gets an extra 500MB as well. You can see where I’m going with this: here’s my referral link.

“They mess you up”

For the first time in a long time, the word mess has appeared in a Michiko Kakutani book review. From a review of Philip Larkin’s Complete Poems:

Many American readers know Larkin chiefly from his more darkly funny lines: “Sexual intercourse began / In nineteen sixty-three / (Which was rather late for me) — / Between the end of the ‘Chatterley’ ban / And the Beatles’ first LP” (from “Annus Mirabilis”). Or: “They mess you up, your mum and dad. / They may not mean to, but they do. / They fill you with the faults they had / And add some extra, just for you” (from “This Be The Verse”).

“This Be the Verse” begins like so: “They fuck you up, your mum and dad.” If the New York Times refuses to print fuck, couldn’t the reviewer have used asterisks to suggest the word? “They mess you up” is an exceedingly decorous and misleading paraphrase.

“This Be the Verse” may be read in its entirety at the Poetry Foundation.

Related posts
All instances of mess and messy in Kakutani’s writing for the Times, 1979–2010
One mess and one messy from 2011

The Palomino Blackwing pencil and truth in advertising

California Republic Stationers, the division of California Cedar responsible for the replica version of the Blackwing pencil, seems prepared to go to any lengths to promote its merchandise. The company’s page on the Blackwing and popular culture now claims John Lennon as among those

who were just rumored to have used the Blackwing (if you have proof one way or the other, let us know!). When there’s controversy and rumors surrounding what kind of pencil a person used, you know you’re dealing with something big.

These assertions are — I’ll say it — bullshit: “stupid or untrue talk or writing; nonsense” (New Oxford American Dictionary). According to the same dictionary, to bullshit is to “talk nonsense to (someone), typically to be misleading or deceptive.”

The alleged rumor that John Lennon used Blackwing pencils seems to have its source in a comment on a Cal Cedar blog post, a comment naming Lennon as a Blackwing user. There is no evidence of a rumor about Lennon’s pencil use, and no evidence that John Lennon had a particular attachment to the Blackwing pencil. That Lennon’s pencil use is a matter of an alleged rumor hasn’t deterred Cal Cedar from giving a place of prominence to a photograph of Lennon (photographer uncredited) in its banner pantheon of Blackwing users. For a company to advertise its products by using the likeness of someone who could never have used those products — who was murdered before they were manufactured — is about as low as it gets.

The comment naming John Lennon as a Blackwing user names several other alleged users, including J. D. Salinger. Salinger’s name, I notice, is conspicuously absent from Palomino Blackwing publicity materials. No doubt the estate would pounce like a mad beast on anyone using Salinger’s name or likeness without permission for marketing purposes (not that such permission would ever be forthcoming).

In response to recent developments, Blackwing Pages has updated its Q. and A. page on the Palomino Blackwing: The Palomino “Blackwing Experience” as Cultural Vandalism.

California Cedar: please. Gimme some truth, as John Lennon might have said.

Related reading
All Blackwing posts (via Pinboard)

[The funny thing is that the Blackwing isn’t even my favorite pencil. That would be the Mongol. But I care about facts, and I don’t like seeing people’s names used in a shoddy marketing effort. A post at Blackwing Pages prompted Cal Cedar to silently remove Frank Lloyd Wright’s name from its marketing materials. Several Orange Crate Art posts led to the silent removal of Duke Ellington’s name. It is time for Cal Cedar to remove John Lennon’s name as well.]

To v. through

From the New York Times, a story about words and parking signs.