Downton Abbey stuff

Elaine and I watched Episode 6 of you-know-what last night and noticed three little flurries of stuff:

Lady Edith Crawley: “Oh, just family stuff — an errand for my grandmother.”

Lady Mary Crawley: “Nothing. Women’s stuff.”

Matthew Crawley: “Nonsense, you had stuff to see to.”

Stuff is an old, old noun. But the three young Crawleys are using the word in a new way. The Oxford English Dictionary has it:

Used loosely to denote any collection of things about which one is not able or willing to particularize . . . ; material, matter, business. colloq.

The young Crawleys are a colloquial avant-garde. The OED’s first citation for this use of stuff is from 1922, from an American source, Radio News:

Take a look at S. M. Brown, Chief on the Mauretania, “doing his stuff” in the saloon.

I can’t imagine that the influx of stuff in this episode is just coincidence: it’s one sign among many that the world is changing.

A related post
Word of the evening: hobbledehoy

[Other signs of change in this episode: new techniques in land-management, new roles for women, and jazz.]

How to succeed in college without really trying

More specifically, how to get a perfect score on a final examination without taking it (Inside Higher Ed).

I’ll say what no one commenting on the article has said: the organizers should be ashamed of themselves, as should those who went along.

*

Here’s a later post that explains why these students should not have received 100s.

Truman Capote?

In this scene from Mad Dog Coll (dir. Burt Balaban, 1961), who’s that walking down the hallway? Is it Truman Capote?





[Click each image for a larger view.]

Well, is it? Several IMDb readers also have wondered about the identity of this passerby. Jerry Orbach, John Davis Chandler, and Neil Nephew look like they’re wondering too.

A related post
John Davis Chandler and Steve Buscemi

Eberhard Faber’s Diamond Star

At Contrapuntalism, Sean penetrates the mystery of Eberhard Faber’s Diamond Star logo: Just what does the Diamond Star logo mean?

I too have wondered about that Diamond Star.

DFW Kenyon discrepancies

And while I’m thinking about David Foster Wallace’s commencement address:

There are at least three significant discrepancies between the audio and print versions of the 2005 Kenyon College commencement address. The second sentence of this passage, present in Audible’s audio version, is missing from the print version:

It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in . . . the head. They shoot the terrible master. [Ellipsis in the original.]

And the second sentence of this passage, present in the print version, is missing from the audio:

The capital-T Truth is about life before death. It is about making it to thirty, or maybe even fifty, without wanting to shoot yourself in the head.

The absence of the “terrible master” sentence has been widely understood as an attempt to moderate the tone of a passage that seems to point to Wallace’s suicide. But there is a less conspiracy-minded explanation: Wallace’s publisher used the written text of the address, which would seem to mean that the missing-from-print sentence was an impromptu addition. The missing-from-audio sentence would seem then an impromptu deletion from the written text.

A third discrepancy: some of the details of the end-of-day trip to the supermarket are missing from the audio version. At Kenyon, Wallace skipped this print passage:

and of course there are also the glacially slow old people and the spacey people and the ADHD kids who all block the aisle and you have to grit your teeth and try to be polite as you ask them to let you by

and replaced it with

et cetera, et cetera, cutting stuff out because this is a long ceremony.

Related reading
All David Foster Wallace posts (Pinboard)

[The print version: This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life (New York: Little, Brown, 2009). A handful of words per page, to make a 144-page book. I can’t imagine that Wallace would have been happy about that.]

DFW, Kenyon, and the Internet

Elizabeth Lopatto explains how David Foster Wallace’s 2005 Kenyon College commencement address became an Internet sensation: Everlasting Speech.

You can still find a transcription of the speech online — here, for instance.

Related reading
All David Foster Wallace posts (Pinboard)

John E. Karlin (1918–2013)

The New York Times reports that John E. Karlin, whose work helped to bring about all-digit dialing, has died:

By the postwar period, telephone exchanges that spelled pronounceable words were starting to be exhausted. All-digit dialing would create a cache of new phone numbers, but whether users could memorize the seven digits it entailed was an open question.

Mr. Karlin’s experimental research, reported in the popular press, showed that they could. As a result, PEnnsylvania and BUtterfield — the stuff of song and story — began to slip away. By the 1960s, those exchanges, along with DRexel, FLeetwood, SWinburne and scores of others just as evocative, had all but disappeared.

Here at Orange Crate Art, telephone exchange names are a minor but, it appears, permanent preoccupation. Thus this post.

Related reading
All telephone posts (Pinboard)
The Anti-Digit Dialing League
Phones Are For People (1962 pamphlet mainfesto from the Anti-Digit Dialing League, disputing the looming number shortage)

Paul Tanner (1917–2013)

From the New York Times:

Paul Tanner, a former trombonist for the Glenn Miller Ochestra who played an unlikely role in the history of rock ’n’ roll when, using a device he helped invent, he performed the famous electronic accompaniment on the Beach Boys’ signature recording “Good Vibrations,” died on Tuesday in Carlsbad, Calif.

The Beach Boys’ Mike Love called that device, the Electro-Theremin, a “woo-woo machine.” But it is better known as the Tannerin.

Correction, thanks to Andrew Hickey: Mike Love played a synthesizer, not a Tannerin.

[Mike Love at Michigan State University, October 26, 1966: “Hey man, they expect me to play this woo-woo machine.”]

Mac Dictation

OS X’s Dictation service is for me both boon and bane. It makes the work of transcribing passages from books wonderfully easy. But the ease is illusory, for improbable, unforeseeable mistakes creep in. And because I cannot anticipate my Mac’s mishearings, the products of Dictation require more careful proofreading than typed text.

Making a page to go with Langston Hughes’s 1951 poem Montage of a Dream Deferred, I tried to get Dictation to recognize boogie-woogie. Some results: boogie-boogie, boogie-looking, boogie-wiki, boogie-Woodkey, Boogie-Woody (almost a Beach Boys title), Boogie-Wookie, okay-Wookie, the de-wiki. Yes, I kept trying out of curiosity. My favorite: boogie-what.

The trick to getting it right: not speaking the hyphen. Dictation might be smarter than I thought.

A helpful page for anyone working with Dictation: Mac Basics: Dictation.

Same time, next year (plagiarism)

From Businessweek:

Sixty-three MBA applicants at Penn State and UCLA have been rejected after admissions officials discovered they had plagiarized parts of their admissions essays, a number that the schools say is likely to increase in subsequent application rounds.

In February 2011, twenty-nine applicants to Penn State’s MBA program were found to have plagiarized in their application essays. In February 2012, a dozen applicants to UCLA’s Anderson School of Management were found to have done the same.

MBA programs could do our culture and economy a favor by sharing miscreants’ names across institutions. Students who cheat when the stakes are so high have, I would say, no business getting MBAs (or any other professional degrees). Think of the disregard for integrity such students would carry into their careers.

[Re: some of the cases: I’m not persuaded that plagiarism can be excused by an appeal to differing cultural attitudes about the use of source material. There is much to suggest that assertions of such differences are part of the folklore of teaching.]