Monday, June 18, 2012

Postal abbreviations

Christopher Lasch on postal abbreviations:

Do not use the new postal abbreviations either in the running text or in footnotes. The old abbreviations — Mass., Miss. — are sanctified by custom. The new ones — MA, MI — are bureaucratic innovations designed to surround the postal service with an illusory air of efficiency. Accordingly they fall under the general prohibition of bureaucratic speech and writing, the invariable purpose of which is evasion and obfuscation, even when it appears, as here, to signal the streamlined, computerized elimination of waste motion.

Plain Style: A Guide to Written English, ed. Stewart Weaver (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002).
Lasch’s mid-1980s recommendation was sound: the thirteenth edition of The Chicago Manual of Style (1982), whose recommendations Lasch adopts here and there in Plain Style, includes both sets of abbreviations, with the dowdy ones listed first as “preferred” in notes and bibliographies. That arrangement and judgement hold in the fourteenth edition (1993), which also notes that short names “like Alaska, Iowa, Maine, and Ohio” may be spelled out. Everything changes with the fifteenth edition (2003): there the two-letter abbreviations come first, though the editors note that “Many writers and editors . . . prefer the older forms.” In the sixteenth edition (2010), the editors are more direct about their preference: “Chicago prefers the two-letter postal codes to the conventional abbreviations.”

A related post
Christopher Lasch’s Plain Style

[This post is for Daughter Number Three, who hates to see postal abbreviations in writing.]

Christopher Lasch’s Plain Style

Christopher Lasch. Plain Style: A Guide to Written English. Ed. Stewart Weaver. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002. 121 pages. $18.95.

I am grading papers with the usual sense of futility. . . . Every year the illiteracy gets worse.

Christopher Lasch, in a letter to his father, May 1985
O you who teach: there is bitter consolation in knowing that you are not alone, in knowing that even, say, Christopher Lasch (professor at the University of Rochester, eminent cultural historian, author of The Culture of Narcissism) felt the futility of grading student writing. Many instructors hide from that feeling, dispensing cheery grades and wishful comments in the margins (“Take more care!”). But Lasch, in early 1983, began work on a style sheet for his students’ use. What set him to this task: the poor writing of his graduate students and their failure to improve after exposure to William Strunk Jr. and E. B. White’s The Elements of Style. By October 1985 the style sheet had grown into a small guide to writing, typed and duplicated for distribution to students in Rochester’s history department.

Lasch’s final revised typescript is the source for Plain Style, which might be the most streamlined guide to writing now available: just seventy-seven printed pages, with chapters on “Elementary Principles of Literary Construction” (commentary on a short essay by Randolph Bourne), “Conventions Governing Punctuation, Capitalization, Typography, and Footnotes,” and “Characteristics of Bad Writing,” followed by lists of misused words, mispronounced names and words (“Neet′-chuh, not Neetsch or Neet-chee”), and proofreaders’ marks.

Plain Style invites comparison to The Elements of Style: both books began as in-house publications for student use; both number their principles and rules (allowing for brief marginal corrections); both issue confident, no-nonsense directives:
Strunk (revised by White) on interesting: “An unconvincing word; avoid it as a means of introduction. Instead of announcing that what you are about to tell is interesting, make it so.”

Lasch on life style: “The appeal of this tired but now ubiquitous phrase probably lies in its suggestion that life is largely a matter of style. Find something else to say about life.”
You may want to dismiss these sorts of prohibitions as the grumblings of curmudgeons, but any competent teacher would call attention to “It is interesting to note that” or “Agamemnon’s lifestyle” in student writing. There is nothing curmudgeonly about suggesting that a writer show rather than tell or that a writer avoid trite (and anachronistic) phrasing. If you labor in the realm of what Lasch calls “downright unreadable sentences,” you already understand that teaching students to become better writers is often a matter of teaching what not to do: don’t write “It is interesting to note that”; don’t use “a famous quote”; don’t begin with “In this essay I will discuss.” Or as teachers end up writing in the margin, Avoid.

Plain Style is a worthy successor to The Elements of Style (a book not nearly as bad as its detractors suggest, though in many ways dated). Lasch values strong verbs, distrusts abstractions and the passive voice, and hates blather and cant. The sentences and passages illustrating his points are wonderfully varied and assume a reader with a lively range of cultural reference: Aaron Burr, Candide, Steve and Cyndy Garvey, Antonio Gramsci, Pauline Kael, Beatrix Potter’s Mr. McGregor, George Orwell, Talcott Parsons, and William Faulkner’s Snopeses all make at least one appearance. Lasch’s guidance is hardly exhaustive: the brief paragraph on the semicolon, for instance, is not likely to cure comma splices. And complications sometimes grow beyond what’s helpful: the discussion of conventions governing quotation marks might create confusion where none had existed.

Is Plain Style enough? No, but no one book is enough to solve writing problems. The Elements of Style is dated; Michael Harvey’s The Nuts and Bolts of College Writing is not especially helpful on thesis statements; Joseph Williams’s Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace is at times bewildering (and, always, a typographical horror). Plain Style is beautifully designed and well written, and the soundness of its prose makes a strong case for the soundness of its advice. Lasch of course knew that one book was not enough:
We learn to write well, if we ever do, by reading good prose, paying close attention to our own words, revising relentlessly, and recalling the connections between written and spoken language.
Close attention to one’s words, a healthy (not paralyzing) self-consciousness, is what Plain Style seeks to foster in its reader.

Plain Style includes a lengthy introduction by Stewart Weaver, who places this guide to writing in the context of Lasch’s intellectual development and interest in the political implications of language. Professor Weaver tells me that Plain Style is still given free to the Rochester history department’s incoming graduate students.

xkcd: “Words for Small Sets”

Today’s xkcd:



What you get in the mouseover:

If things are too quiet, try asking a couple of friends whether “a couple” should always mean “two.” As with the question of how many spaces should go after a period, it can turn acrimonious surprisingly fast unless all three of them agree.
My son Ben and I have debated “a couple,” just once, for a few minutes. Garner’s Modern American Usage sides with Ben.

Sunday, June 17, 2012

Happy Father’s Day


[Photograph by Louise Leddy, May 25, 1957. Click for a larger view.]

My dad James and me, posing for my mom, on a Saturday in Brooklyn. My dad still has that smile: he remains one handsome devil. Happy Father’s Day, Dad. And Happy Father’s Day to all.

Saturday, June 16, 2012

Bloomsday 2012

From the catechetical “Ithaca” episode of James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922):

What is home without Plumtree’s Potted Meat?

Incomplete.

With it an abode of bliss.

Manufactured by George Plumtree, 23 Merchants' quay, Dublin, put up in 4 oz pots, and inserted by Councillor Joseph P. Nannetti, M. P., Rotunda Ward, 19 Hardwicke street, under the obituary notices and anniversaries of deceases. The name on the label is Plumtree. A plumtree in a meatpot, registered trade mark. Beware of imitations. Peatmot. Trumplee. Moutpat. Plamtroo.
The present time of Ulysses: June 16, 1904. (The novel ends in the early hours of June 17.) June 16 is Bloomsday, named for the novel’s hero, Leopold Bloom. “Potted meat” is death: yes, ads for Plumtree’s appear in the newspaper under obituary notices, and Bloom’s just-buried friend Paddy Dignam is, as Bloom thinks, potted meat. Potted meat is also sexual union, something missing from Leopold and Molly Bloom’s marriage. Without: incomplete. With: yes, an abode of bliss. Yes: that’s Molly’s last word, the novel’s last word. Happy Bloomsday.

[The Strand Magazine, December 1898.]

Other Bloomsdays
2007 (The first page)
2008 (“Love’s Old Sweet Song”)
2009 (Marilyn Monroe reading Ulysses)
2010 (Leopold Bloom, “water lover”)
2011 (“[T]he creature cocoa”)

Friday, June 15, 2012

SAF-T-HED Thumb Tacks

[Life, January 11, 1960.]

I found this (in reality tiny) advertisement while looking, as usual, for something else. Before seeing this ad, I never thought about the danger of pin passing “thru head.” Now I’ll be unable to press on a thumbtack without thinking about that danger. Ouch. I like though the idea that our nation once had a favorite thumbtack. Imagine the conversations.

The American Tack Company, founded in 1937, lives on as AmerTac, “a decorative home accent company,” making everything but thumbtacks.

Related posts
Antique Packaging
Moore Metalhed Maptacks

[This post is for Gunther, who appreciates thumbtacks.]

Thursday, June 14, 2012

Words I can live without

A spontaneous list: delve, -flecked, get (as in “So-and-so gets it,” meaning that So-and-so sees things as you do), helm (as a noun or verb, unless you’re at sea, literally), limn, the planet (as in “on the planet”), tome. These words are tired. Let us allow them a rest.

Delve often becomes a slightly pompous substitute for examine, go into, or look at. But the primary meaning of delve (“reach inside a receptacle and search for something”) makes the word best reserved for figurative use that suggests a genuine search. It makes no sense to describe, for instance, a letter-writer as refusing to “delve into specifics”: if those specifics are available to the writer, no search is needed. Better to say that the letter-writer is refusing to go into specifics, and give delve a rest. The use of -flecked to form phrasal adjectives also needs a rest: I cringe when I read that a new film is “laugh-flecked.” And when told that someone is at the helm of a committee, I want to abandon ship, even if the person helming gets it.

Michiko Kakutani’s overuse of limn has created problems for the word, which seems to lend itself to misuse anyway, as when an art critic writes that lines on graph paper limn a portrait. No, they form one. Here is the portrait in question. See?

Referring to the planet is silly. The greatest tenor saxophonist on the planet is the greatest tenor saxophonist, period. (That would be Sonny Rollins, I’d say, or David Murray.) One might say greatest living. But “on the planet” will make sense only when there are saxophonists on the moon. For now, “on the planet,” like “of all time,” suggests the American penchant for grandiose statement.

As for tome, the New Oxford American Dictionary notes that use of the word is “chiefly humorous”: tome as a substitute for book sounds a bit absurd. If the novel you’re reading is “an interesting tome,” you’d better be speaking archly. My friend Aldo Carrasco and I used tome as a joke with reference to letters, some of which ran for — think of it — several pages.

Related posts
More words I can live without
That said,

[All examples are drawn from journalism or life. The definition of delve is from the New Oxford American Dictionary. Michiko Kakutani’s overuse of limn got me noticing her overuse of mess and messy, which I wrote about here, here, and here. I like extra details in brackets and hope that you do too.]

Wednesday, June 13, 2012

Telephone exchange names
on screen: SLOane


[Click for a larger view.]

SLOane (for Sloane Square) was indeed a London exchange name, and SLOane-2965 was indeed Noël Coward’s number. The SLOane exchange makes a cameo appearance in My Week with Marilyn (dir. Simon Curtis, 2011), a terrific film that mixes comedy, desire, and sorrow in perfect proportions.

What — do you think that just because this exchange name appears in a film about Marilyn Monroe that I’m going to post a screenshot of Michelle Williams as Monroe? You do? Oh, okay. Monroe prefaces this pose (for a small crowd outside Windsor Castle) by asking Colin Clark (Eddie Redmayne), “Shall I be ‘her’?”


[Click for a larger view.]

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 : Modern Marvels : Murder, My Sweet : Naked City (1) : Naked City (2) : Naked City (3) : Naked City (4) : Nightmare Alley : The Public Enemy : Side Street : Sweet Smell of Success : This Gun for Hire

This Is Coffee!

From 1961, the Coffee Brewing Institute presents This Is Coffee! (Open Culture).

My favorite line: “Perfect coffee, sending its glow into our lives around the clock.” Never no sleeping!

Tuesday, June 12, 2012

Recently updated

Adventures in education A scheme to measure student engagement with “galvanic skin response” bracelets recalls an earlier Microsoft scheme to monitor employee metabolism.