Life at Merriam-Webster

“A powerful culture of silence in the office”: a report on life at Merriam-Webster. With great photographs of the citation files and of the editorial floor in 1955. Shhh!

Night Mail

“This is the Night Mail crossing the Border, / Bringing the cheque and the postal order”: the short film Night Mail tracks the journey of a mail train from London Euston to Glasgow, Edinburgh, and Aberdeen. The film is a 1936 production by the GPO [General Post Office] Film Unit, directed by Basil Wright and Harry Watt, with a poem by W. H. Auden and music by Benjamin Britten. You can see Night Mail in three parts at YouTube.

Night Mail reminds me again and again of early Hitchcock: quick cuts, unintelligible dialogue, and sudden explosions of sound. The mail was moving briskly.

The cultural bed

[“Public demonstration of the ‘cultural bed’ designed by Ely Alexander, central divider contains shelves for books, sheet music, sculpture, or painting, built in record player and cabinet, and coffee pot on heat proof serving board.” Photograph by Yale Joel. May 1957. From the Life Photo Archive. Click for larger views.]

I can think of only one problem.

[The stringed instrument is a biwa. Ely Alexander is a mystery to me. Life appears not to have a run a story on his creation. Life ran a story with these photographs in its June 3, 1957 issue. Thanks to Bent for the correction.]

Kyle Wiens, stickler?

At the HBR Blog Network, CEO Kyle Wiens, self-styled “stickler,” explains why he won’t hire people who use poor grammar. I see three problems in what he’s written:

1. Every example of what Wiens calls “poor grammar” is a matter of punctuation or usage, not grammar.

2. Wiens allies himself with self-styled stickler Lynne Truss. But as Bryan Garner says in a review of Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation (2003), “The true sticklers of the world are uniting against Lynne Truss.” Her book is a mess. Look at its title: notice the missing serial comma? And the missing hyphen?

3. Wiens needs to take more care with his writing. Consider this sentence:

And just like good writing and good grammar, when it comes to programming, the devil’s in the details.

Indeed. The comparison that this sentence aims to make never gets made: just like writing and grammar ... what? A possible revision:

With programming, as with writing, the devil’s in the details.

Why, by the way, did I remove grammar? Because writing and grammar aren’t equal elements; one subsumes the other.

Wiens’s post still makes a useful exhibit for a teacher trying to convince students that in the world beyond college, writing counts. By any means necessary: that’s my motto in these things.

A related post
Garner, Menand, and Truss

[Omitting the serial comma isn’t an error, but as Garner points out, “In opposing the serial comma, [Truss] puts herself at odds with the vast multitude of punctuation authorities, who favor it.” Zero-tolerance, a phrasal adjective, requires a hyphen. The expression is originally “The devil is in the detail,” but the plural is widely used and hardly counts as a mistake.]

Motuweth frisas

From Vladimir Nabokov’s Pnin (1957):

Pnin’s birthday for instance fell on February 3, by the Julian calendar into which he had been born in St. Petersburg in 1898. He never celebrated it nowadays, partly because, after his departure from Russia, it sidled by in a Gregorian disguise (thirteen — no, twelve days late), and partly because during the academic year he existed mainly on a motuweth frisas basis.

The last time I read Pnin all the way through, there was no Internet, at least not for me. Now there is, and motuweth frisas no longer baffles me. But perhaps the words aren’t meant to baffle: I showed these sentences to my fambly, and they figured out motuweth frisas right away, no Internet needed. You too?

If you give up and want the answer, click here.

Related posts
Nabokov’s index cards
Pnin’s pencil sharpener
Pnin’s posy

[If you haven’t read Pnin, you’re missing a great novel.]

Semi-homemade music

One of the great pleasures of having Rachel and Ben home for a while is the chance to make music together. Here is our cover of Old Crow Medicine Show’s “I Hear Them All.”

[Semi-homemade : because the song is from the store, so to speak.]

Another mystery object

Daughter Number Three has posted a photograph of an object and invites speculation.

[Why another ? Because of this post.]

Recently updated

Crocodile Now with an identification of the mysterious object above.

Museum of Endangered Sounds

Just a block or two away from the Library of Vanished Sounds, so to speak: it’s the Museum of Endangered Sounds.

Thanks to Music Clip of the Day for sending the link to the MES my way.

[One sound conspicuously absent from the MES: dial-up.]

Molly Dodd, Mongol user

[Blair Brown as Molly Dodd, Mongol pencil user. From “Here’s some ducks all in a row,” The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd, June 17, 1989. Click for a larger view.]

Some generous soul has made all five seasons of The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd available on YouTube. Elaine and I are doing our bit by watching. Notice that even in a videotaped-from-TV blur, the Mongol’s ferrule is immediately recognizable.

Whys isn’t this series available on DVD? The cost of licensing music rights appears to be a problem. Why is the cost of licensing music rights a problem? Because Molly does a lot of singing. In the scene above, she’s singing Edward Redding’s “The End of a Love Affair.” But someday this series will be released on DVD. I just know it. Like Molly, I’m an optimist.

The Mongol (now defunct in the United States) is my favorite pencil. Here’s some proof.