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E. B. White, the fact that Now with speculation about where the missing words might have appeared in proof.

[At least I think they’re missing.]

E. B. White, the fact that

Argosy Book Store has an unusual copy of The Elements of Style for sale:

The book bears the ownership signature of Edith Oliver, the drama critic of The New Yorker, together with a slip reading “with the compliments of the author.” Enclosed is a typed letter from White, signed “Andy,” Brooklin, Maine, 8 May, 1959, promising to have the book sent to her for her “liberry.” In part — “One thing that tickles me about the little book is that I managed to use the phrase ‘the fact that’ (p. 40) after blasting the daylights out of it in two separate places (‘It should be revised out of every sentence in which it occurs.’) Ha.” In a holograph P.S. he writes “The smelts are running. What are you doing in New York when the smelts are running?”

Price: $2500.

But where is the mistake to which White refers? I checked the first edition, first printing, and there’s no the fact that on page 40. Nor does the phrase appear in error elsewhere in the book. In White’s The Points of My Compass (1962), a postcript to the memoir “Will Strunk” also mentions a mistake:

One parting note: readers of the first edition of the book were overjoyed to discover that the phrase “the fact that” had slid by me again, landing solidly in the middle of one of my learned dissertations. It has since disappeared, but it had its little day.

I can think of three possible explanations of what’s going on: 1) my reading skills are not what they used to be; 2) White is referring to readers who read the book in proof; 3) there’s some strange inside joke playing out. I think that 2) is the likeliest explanation.

In the introduction to The Elements of Style, White writes about his tendency to miss the fact that:

I suppose I have written “the fact that” a thousand times in the heat of composition, revised it out maybe five hundred times in the cool aftermath. To be batting only .500 this late in the season, to fail half the time to connect with this fat pitch, saddens me, for it seems a betrayal of the man who showed me how to swing at it and made the swinging seem worth while.

We all miss, but we keep swinging.

Looking at The Elements of Style again made me notice anew details that mark the book as an artifact of the dowdy world. My favorite: “Is it worth while to telegraph?” I would like to see Maira Kalman illustrate that sentence.

[Page 40, first edition, first printing. Thanks, library. Click for a larger view.]

*

An afterthought (7:07 p.m.): I wonder whether the fact that might have appeared on page 40 in the entry on interesting:

Perhaps this sample sentence first read: “In connection with the forthcoming visit of Mr. B. to America, it is interesting to recall the fact that,” &c. This entry of course cautions against relying on the word interesting.

Related reading
All Strunk and White posts (via Pinboard)

[The telegraph sentence appears, still, in the 2009 fiftieth-anniversary edition of The Elements, three years after Western Union’s last telegram. As of this morning, The Elements of Style, fourth edition, hardcover, is #164 of all books at Amazon.]

VDP, “Letters from the Road”

At Bananastan Records, Van Dyke Parks’s “Letters from the Road,” written during his recent European travels. The letters begin with a Berliner: a madeleine in disguise.

[There are eleven pages: click on the trucks to move forward.]

Nancy + Sluggo = Perfection

[Zippy, July 30, 2012.]

The answer checks out.

Bill Griffith is one of Ernie Bushmiller’s many admirers. In an essay on Nancy, Griffith writes:

Bushmiller creates his own reality, where everything is wholly his and the world as we know it has been reduced to its essentials. Only the purest ingredients are used. You can feel the air in a Nancy strip. Objects aren’t merely drawn, they exist. The thing in itself!

Yes, das Ding an sich.

Other Nancy posts
Charlotte russe
The greatest Nancy panel?
Nancy is here
Nancy meets Alfred Hitchcock (Vertigo)
Nancy meets Billy Wilder (The Seven Year Itch)
Nancy meets Stanley Kubrick (The Shining)

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.]