Geoffrey Pullum on nouns

Linguist Geoffrey Pullum on the inadequacy of traditional definitions of a noun:

It is useless to look for a common ontological nature in airspeeds, apples, and absences, or organizations, orchids, and orgasms. To give a definition that permits decisions as to whether a given English word is a noun or not, you have to consider morphological and syntactic facts.

I have on several occasions taken issue with what I see as Pullum’s distortions and exaggerations regarding The Elements of Style. Here though I think that Pullum is right. He and I agree about something after all.

[This post is for my son Ben, who has grammar and its problems on his mind.]

French bookstores

The New York Times reports that bookstores in France are flourishing. Or at least French-language bookstores in France: the largest English-language bookstore in Paris is folding.

[Can you imagine the United States government subsidizing bookstores? Me neither.]

One more Automat

[“Horn & Harda[r]t’s Automat sign blacked out re New York City’s ‘browned out’ or dimmed lights, a wartime defensive measure against enemy attack.” Photograph by Andreas Feininger. New York, New York, 1943. From the Life Photo Archive.]

Other Automat posts
Automat beverage section
“Lunch Hour NYC”
New York, 1964: Automat

Automat beverage section

[“1725 Broadway — New beverage section open to public. Sept. 19, 1949.” From the New York Public Library Digital Gallery. Click for a larger view.]

“For two nickels, a cup of coffee comes spurting from the mouth of an engaging beast, the likes of which Linnaeus never saw”: Harold H. Hart’s Hart’s Guide to New York City (New York: Hart Publishing, 1964). I’m guessing that nothing had changed between 1949 and 1964. A 1914 Automat advertisement (also from the NYPL) shows the same kind of beast at work.

Related posts
“Lunch Hour NYC”
New York, 1964: Automat

[I remember eating at the Automat in childhood. But what? All I can remember is using coins.]

New York, 1964: Automat

From Harold H. Hart’s Hart’s Guide to New York City (New York: Hart Publishing, 1964). I’m following a train of thought.

Hart’s Guide is probably my favorite library-book-sale find of all time.

Also from Hart’s Guide
Chock full o’Nuts
Greenwich Village and coffee house
King Karol Records and The Record Hunter
Mayflower Coffee Shop(pe)
Minetta Tavern and Monkey Bar
Schrafft’s

“Lunch Hour NYC”

“Drawing on materials from throughout the Library, the exhibition explores the ways in which New York City — work-obsessed, time-obsessed, and in love with ingenious new ways to make money — reinvented lunch in its own image.” At the New York Public Library, opening tomorrow, “Lunch Hour NYC.” The exhibit includes a bank of Automat windows. I wish I were on vacation again.

There’s more on this exhibit at the New York Times: Revisiting the Era of Automatic Dining.

Related posts
Chock full o’Nuts
Chock full o’Nuts lunch hour
New York, 1964: Chock full o’Nuts

On Mitt Trail’s trail

[Mark Trail, June 20, 2012.]

Mitt Trail flees reporters asking about immigration reform, tax deductions and exemptions, and things of that nature. You know, issues. Context here.

Mitt Romney and D-list comic-strip hero Mark Trail are, it seems to me, the same (two-dimensional) person. Four previous posts offer more evidence: 1, 2, 3, 4.

Austen, art, hypochondria, summer

Hypochondriacal Henry Woodhouse has one criticism of his daughter Emma’s drawing of her friend Harriet Smith:

“It is very pretty,” said Mr. Woodhouse. “So prettily done! Just as your drawings always are, my dear. I do not know any body who draws so well as you do. The only thing I do not thoroughly like is, that she seems to be sitting out of doors, with only a little shawl over her shoulders — and it makes one think she must catch cold.”

“But, my dear papa, it is supposed to be summer; a warm day in summer. Look at the tree.”

“But it is never safe to sit out of doors, my dear.”

Jane Austen, Emma (1816).

Today is the first day of summer. Break out your shawls.

Related reading
All Jane Austen posts

VDP on Song Cycle

“It was outside of its time, and it still is”: Van Dyke Parks on Song Cycle, a short film by Richard Parks.

Related reading
All Van Dyke Parks posts

Teacher, beware

I just had a look at the Terms and Conditions at sharemylesson.com, available via a tiny link at the bottom of the main page. The link is labeled t&cs, so that you’re sure to recognize its importance at once.¹ Here’s one passage from Terms and Conditions:

With respect to all Content you post on the Service, you grant SML a royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive and fully sub-licensable right and license to use, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, create derivative works from, distribute, perform and display such Content (in whole or part) worldwide and/or to incorporate it in other works in any form, media, or technology now known or later developed. With respect to all Content you post to the Service, you hereby waive any moral rights you have in the Content. You agree to perform all further acts necessary to perfect any of the above rights granted by you to SML, including the execution of deeds and documents, at our request. SML does not acquire any title or ownership rights in the Content that you submit and/or make available. After you submit, post, email, display, transmit or otherwise make available any such Content, you continue to retain any such rights that you may have in such Content, subject to the rights, licenses and privileges granted herein.

In other words, SML can do what it wants with your work. In copyright law, moral rights include the right to attribution. If you waive that right, I’m not sure what “any such rights that you may have in such Content” can mean. What this passage seems to mean though is that anyone who contributes material to Share My Lesson can kiss her or his work goodbye.

Another passage:

You acknowledge that other persons may have submitted Content to us, may have made public or developed, or may originate, submit, make public or develop, material similar or identical to all or a portion of your Content or concepts contained therein, and you understand and agree that you shall not be entitled to any compensation because of the use or exploitation thereof and the submission of Content, or any posting or display thereof, is not any admission of novelty, priority or originality. Even if you subsequently see or learn of a presentation, sound recording, composition, demo, idea, script, drawing, motion picture, photograph, film, video or any other content which appears to incorporate any idea or concept or include anything similar or identical to that contained in any Content you or anyone else submits, that is purely coincidental and unavoidable.

I.e., kiss your work goodbye.

And then there’s this passage:

You are prohibited from reproducing, copying, modifying, renting, leasing, loaning, selling, distributing, exploiting, extracting, providing links to, creating derivative works of or otherwise communicating or making available to third parties any part of the Content of the Service without SML’s prior written consent.

You acknowledge that, by making use of the Service, you are agreeing to comply with this prohibition and that any breach thereof is likely to result in legal proceedings being issued against you.

This passage is merely puzzling. It seems to say that teachers cannot reproduce materials from Share My Lesson for use in their classes. Yet doing so seems to be the whole point of the website.

Teacher, beware.

¹ Irony.

A related post
sharemylesson.com