How to improve writing (no. 42)

The words that began episodes of The Paper Chase, as spoken by Professor Charles W. Kingsfield Jr. (John Houseman):

“The study of law is something new and unfamiliar to most of you — unlike any other schooling that you have ever known before.”

Something new = new. New = unfamiliar. Any other schooling = any schooling. Ever known before = known. Like they say, omit needless words. Thus:

“The study of law is new to most of you — unlike any schooling you have known.”

I’m not sure whether removing the curlicues makes the statement more Kingsfieldian, or less so. What do you think? Yes, Mr. Hart?

Related reading
All How to improve writing posts (Pinboard)

[Why “most of you“? Perhaps some of the students have previously tried law school, left, and returned. This post is no. 42 in a series, “How to improve writing,” dedicated to improving stray bits of public prose.]

On PBS tonight

On Frontline: Raising Adam Lanza. See also this story from the Hartford Courant.

Proust at the Morgan Library

At the Morgan Library & Museum, a celebration of Marcel Proust’s Du côté de chez Swann, a century old this year. Here’s a New York Times review.

I wish I could go. But I’m grateful beyond words to have had this experience a few years ago.

Related reading
All Proust posts (Pinboard)

Presto change-o, Tazo

Tazo Awake was an esteemed brand in our chambers (read kitchen, living room, study). The tea was recently repackaged as Tazo Awake English Breakfast, or as the box would have it, “awake english breakfast.” The 2.0 packaging lacks the Indian design elements and dowdy typography of the old, but it’s acceptable. The problem is that what’s inside has changed. Awake English Breakfast is not Awake.

I’m offering that assertion as a fact, even after calling Tazo and hearing a friendly fellow tell me — after putting me on hold to check — that the Awake blend has remained the same. It hasn’t. The old Awake was a distinctive tea: its instantly recognizable flavor came from a blend of Assam and Ceylon leaves. Awake English Breakfast tastes like any other English Breakfast tea. It’s an adequate black tea. But there’s nothing distinctive about it, and there’s no reason to continue to pay more for it.

My tea-drinking wife Elaine also notices the difference. And we are not alone: of the thirteen reviews on this Tazo page, eleven note that the tea has changed for the worse. As for the other two reviews, one appears to be of the old Awake, and one appears to be from a tea-drinker who is unaware of the change.

Tazo, if you’re reading, please bring back the old Awake. If Coca-Cola can own up to a mistake, you can too.

*

February 20: An e-mail from Tazo says that the blend remains unchanged. But it just ain’t so.

Related reading
All tea posts (Pinboard)

“Love Is All Around”

Have you ever heard the theme from The Mary Tyler Moore Show in its entirety? Here, listen. That second verse: sheesh. So much for women’s rights.

Related posts
Hazel Fredrick
I envy Mary Richards

Zippy and Hi and Lois

[Zippy, February 18, 2013.]

Bill Griffith’s affection for Bil Keane’s The Family Circus is well known. Since the residents of Dingburg’s “humorless enclave” recoil in horror from that strip, it would seem that Griffith must like Hi and Lois too.

Related reading
All Hi and Lois posts (Pinboard)
“Bushmiller Country”
Hommage à Ernie Bushmiller
Landscape with some rocks
Nancy + Sluggo = Perfection
Zippy and Bukowski

Word of the evening: flip

Another bit of language from tonight’s Downton Abbey: Mrs. Patmore spoke of how her suitor, Mr. Tufton, was only interested in her for her cooking. He would go on and on, she said, about how he liked his pancakes flipped. No double entendres here: Mrs. Patmore was speaking literally.

The Oxford English Dictionary traces pancake back to approximately 1400. But this use of flip is a fairly new arrival:

trans. orig. and chiefly U.S. To cook by turning over on a hotplate, grill, or griddle, esp. as a job in a fast-food restaurant. Chiefly in to flip burgers.

The OED’s first citation is from the Chicago Tribune, January 21, 1913: “Unknown celebrities . . . The artist with a heart tattooed on his arm, who flips flapjacks in the window of Childs’ restaurant.”

As with last week’s stuff, American English leads the way.

Other Downton Abbey words
Hobbledehoy
Stuff

Separated at birth?

 
[Harriet Sansom Harris and Phoebe Nicholls.]

I hadn’t planned to make two such posts in one day. Elaine and I thought that had to be Harriet Sansom Harris (Frasier Crane’s crafty agent Bebe Glazer on Frasier) playing Susan MacClare, Marchioness of Flintshire, in tonight’s Downton Abbey. But no.

Tonight’s show was a Christmas Special. Some Special. I have come to think of Julian Fellowes’s screenplays as bowling balls. The characters are the pins.

Related posts
Nicholson Baker and Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Ted Berrigan and C. Everett Koop
Steve Buscemi and John Davis Chandler
Ray Collins and Mississippi John Hurt
Ted Cruz and Joseph McCarthy
Broderick Crawford and Vladimir Nabokov
Elaine Hansen (of Davey and Goliath) and Blanche Lincoln
Ton Koopman and Oliver Sacks

[Have these women met? And would they see a resemblance?]

Separated at birth?

 
[Senators Joseph McCarthy and Ted Cruz.]

The resemblance of junior senator to junior senator is more than rhetorical. It’s the curling lower lip that does it.

*

February 22: The New Yorker reports on Cruz’s claim that when he was a student at Harvard Law School, twelve Harvard law professors believed, in Cruz’s words, “in the Communists overthrowing the United States government.”

Related posts
Nicholson Baker and Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Ted Berrigan and C. Everett Koop
Steve Buscemi and John Davis Chandler
Ray Collins and Mississippi John Hurt
Broderick Crawford and Vladimir Nabokov
Elaine Hansen (of Davey and Goliath) and Blanche Lincoln
Ton Koopman and Oliver Sacks

A heads-up about comments

I’ve noticed lately that many readers are leaving two or three versions of a comment. The second and third tries don’t seem to be matters of rethinking things: rather, they suggest that the commenter is uncertain about whether a comment has gone through, or stuck, or whatever the appropriate metaphor might be.

I moderate comments to keep spam and other kinds of unpleasantness from appearing on my blog, which means that comments don’t appear immediately. Not long ago, I added a paragraph to my minimalist comment policy (you see it when you click on a link for comments):

Notice the (easy-to-miss) text that appears at the top of the page after you leave a comment: “Your comment has been saved and will be visible after blog owner approval.” Comments don’t disappear; there’s no need to repost them.

I suppose that this paragraph, like Blogger’s message, is also easily missed.

Reader, keep the comments coming, please. But you can save yourself some tedium if you remember: once is enough.