Bam!

“It’s all learning-is-fun and invented spelling, and then — bam! — second grade.”

[Caption to a New Yorker cartoon by Barbara Smaller, on my desk calendar.]

A vowel shift in the wild

Out and about, I heard someone on a phone, spelling to make herself understood: “No, no, p-a-c-k r-a-t-s.” And then she spoke the words: “Pehk rehts! ” That’s one small instance of the Northern Cities Vowel Shift. The person on the other end of the conversation must have been in a different gear.

Thanks, Rosemary, for confirming that this pronunciation is a matter of the shift.

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The ’sation
William Labov

Twin rockers

“Daddy’s gonna play them a little song while they’re eating their peas”: eleven-month-old twins rock out. Just lovely, and so much more enjoyable than the Republican whatchamacallit.

Thanks, Rachel.

Cheating at Harvard

Shocking.

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Other cheating posts (via Pinboard)

Blackwings for sale

I thought that Western Civ had come to an end when the Vermont Country Store started selling vibrators.¹ But now the VCS is selling replica Blackwing pencils, only (or “only”) $3.90 each. This little bit of copywriting adds another layer to the Blackwing story:



That can only be Howlin’ Wolf, composer of “Smokestack Lightning” and the latest member of the Blackwing pantheon. Welcome!

¹ They do. Really.

Related reading
All Blackwing posts (via Pinboard)
Blackwing Pages (a website devoted to the Blackwing pencil)

Elderly Instruments documentary

Online for a limited time: All Things Strings: Inside Elderly Instruments, a documentary about what may be the greatest guitar (and banjo and mandolin and ukulele) store in the world. Elaine and Ben and I made a visit last year, and when we weren’t trying instruments (and bows), we admired the tone balls.

Letter box and lock

We were taking a walk before buying tickets to see Monsieur Lazhar. For some reason or no reason, we decided to look into a former department store that’s been turned into office space. The back entrance was unlocked on a Sunday afternoon: an invitation to adventure.

We followed the obtuse angles of a long hallway, which brought us to the front of the building. Along the way, we saw no sign of activity. But we did see this mail chute and letter box in the lobby.


[O dowdy world, that had such boxes in it.]

The box’s lock seems to have grown soft and luminous with age. I wonder how long it’s been working.

Related reading
Diane Schirf on mail chutes
Molly Dodd, Molly Dodd, Molly Dodd (with a mail chute)
Monsieur Lazhar

@, !

From Smithsonian, the stories of @ and !.

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Matthew Crawford on problems

A philosopher and mechanic on finding problems:

When you do the math problems at the back of a chapter in an algebra textbook, you are problem solving. If the chapter is entitled “Systems of two equations with two unknowns,” you know exactly which methods to use. In such a constrained situation, the pertinent context in which to view the problem has already been determined, so there is no effort of interpretation required. But in the real world, problems don’t present themselves in this predigested way; usually there is too much information, and it is difficult to know what is pertinent and what isn’t. Knowing what kind of problem you have on hand means knowing what features of the situation can be ignored. Even the boundaries of what counts as “the situation” can be ambiguous; making discriminations of pertinence cannot be achieved by the application of rules, and requires the kind of judgment that comes with experience. The value and job security of the mechanic lie in the fact that he has this firsthand, personal knowledge.

Matthew B. Crawford, Shop Class as Soul Craft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work (New York: Penguin, 2009).

This insight in this passage seems to me applicable in many ways. In terms of writing instruction, I think of the difference between a grammar exercise and the work of revising an essay. With an exercise, one knows what to look for, and often, though not always, there’s a rule to follow to make things right. With revision, who knows what the problems are? One must figure out what they are, problems of all sorts, wherever they might be. Is a paragraph too long? Is a sequence of sentences right? Answering such questions is a matter not of rules but of “the kind of judgment that comes with experience.”

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Hommage à Ernie Bushmiller

[Zippy, August 29, 2012.]

Zippy and Griffy as Nancy and Sluggo. Stage left, Bill Griffith has placed the mystical configuration of “some rocks.” Scott McCloud explains:

Art Spiegelman explains how a drawing of three rocks in a background scene was Ernie’s way of showing us there were some rocks in the background. It was always three. Why? Because two rocks wouldn't be “some rocks.” Two rocks would be a pair of rocks. And four rocks was unacceptable because four rocks would indicate “some rocks” but it would be one rock more than was necessary to convey the idea of “some rocks.”

A related post
Nancy + Sluggo = Perfection