Word of the day: loggerhead

From an Atlantic piece by Wayne Curtis about flaming cocktails:

At Booker and Dax, part of the Momofuku empire in Manhattan, “red-hot poker” drinks are made with electrically charged rods modeled after the colonial-era loggerhead, a tool used to keep tar pliable. The modern version heats up to 1,500 degrees, and when it’s plunged into a drink, it caramelizes the sugars, giving the beverage a slightly butterscotchy flavor and a toasted top note.

I’ve known the word loggerhead only as part of the idiom at loggerheads, which describes two parties or sides stubbornly disagreeing. The idiom makes me think of two logs butting heads, so to speak, and of a logjam, an impasse.

The Oxford English Dictionary gives the earliest meaning of the word: “A thick-headed or stupid person; a blockhead” (1595). And shortly thereafter: “A head out of proportion to the body; a large or ‘thick’ head” (1598). So my folk etymology seems (to me anyway) plausible. But here is “sense 3”: “An iron instrument with a long handle and a ball or bulb at the end used, when heated in the fire, for melting pitch and for heating liquids” (1687).

The OED ’s speculation about the idiom has nothing to do with blockheads: “The use is of obscure origin; perhaps the instrument described in sense 3, or something similar, may have been used as a weapon.” And now I’m confused, as the idiom (dated to 1671) predates “sense 3” (1687). But I’m not at loggerheads with the OED. Perhaps the tool was known as a loggerhead for some time before the word entered the written record.

Check Wikipedia for loggerhead and you’ll find a photograph of Wayne Curtis himself, in colonial regalia, standing before a table that holds a pineapple, a pitcher, a propane torch, several bottles, and a loggerhead. Try a Google Image search for a loggerhead though, and it's turtles all the way down, at least since 1657.

A tenuously related post
Little Baby Turtle (pehaps a loggerhead)

Nick Bilton on digital etiquette

Nick Bilton doesn’t like it when people e-mail him to say thanks. He thinks you should use Google Maps to find the way to someone’s house rather than ask the person for directions. Bilton and his mother communicate “mostly through Twitter.” And last year, his father learned a “lesson” about leaving voice mails for his son: Digital Era Redefining Etiquette (New York Times).

After reading this column, I see no reason to change the advice I offer in How to e-mail a professor: “When you get a reply, say thanks.” For students e-mailing a professor, this small courtesy is a good choice. And it closes the loop. A professor who prefers not to receive such replies can let students know.

I will go further and suggest that everyone say please and thank you and and hello and see you soon and so on in e-mail. So many inefficiencies? No, they are ways of being human together. They are what we need to make time for.

One of my earliest learning experiences online happened when someone on a fountain-pen mailing list offered a lengthy and helpful answer to a question I asked. I e-mailed him backchannel (remember backchannel?) to say thanks and acknowledged that I didn’t know whether it was standard practice to do so. His reply: “A thank-you is always welcome.” That made and makes sense to me. My correspondent later proved a great source of advice on all things Pelikan.

Related posts
E-mail etiquette
How to e-mail a student

[I’d hate to be Nick Bilton’s parents. Who, by the way, would know the best route to their house.]

Dreyfus online

Of possible interest to readers of Proust: the New York Times reports that the contents of the secret file used to convict Alfred Dreyfus are now online. Ou, en ligne.

Thanks, Stefan, for passing on the news.

Signage repair

The legalization of homosexuality what ? Daughter Number Three makes things right.

Lost in machine translation

From the Google Translate version of a drop-down menu at the Japanese stationery site Bundoki:



I think that translators, the human kind, will be in business for many years to come.

David Foster Wallace sometimes didn’t know what he was talking about

From a David Foster Wallace Fall 2002 class handout now online, Your Liberal-Arts $ at Work:

For a compound sentence to require a comma plus a conjunction, both its constituent clauses must be independent. An independent clause (a) has both a subject and a main verb, and (b) expresses a complete thought. In a sentence like “He ate all the food, and went back for more,” you don’t need both the comma and the and because the second clause isn’t independent.

One mistake: the sentence “An independent clause (a) has both a subject and a main verb, and (b) expresses a complete thought” should not have a comma: it has only one clause.

A second mistake: “He ate all the food and went back for more” is a single independent clause, not two clauses. Notice that the sentence explaining an independent clause and the sample sentence follow the same pattern: subject-verb-and-verb. Neither sentence needs a comma.

But there’s more. Look carefully at the third sentence:

In a sentence like “He ate all the food, and went back for more,” you don’t need both the comma and the and because the second clause isn’t independent.

That sentence needs a comma before because, for the very reason that Wallace explains later in the handout:

[B]ecause is a funny word, and sometimes you’ll need a comma before its appearance in the second clause in order to keep your sentence from giving the wrong impression.

Look again:

In a sentence like “He ate all the food, and went back for more,” you don’t need both the comma and the and because the second clause isn’t independent.

In a sentence like “He ate all the food, and went back for more,” you don’t need both the comma and the and [,] because the second clause isn’t independent.

The first version misleads by suggesting that you don’t need both the comma and and for some other reason.

There’s a fourth mistake in passing: afterwards and backwards are not prepositions. And I suspect that Wallace’s observations about a sentence being “nonstandard in the abstract” would set linguists howling.

Pedantry is always tiresome, but it’s especially tiresome when the pedant doesn’t know what he is talking about. I’m reminded of the poet Ted Berrigan’s comment about another Dave, a friend:

“Dave knows just enough to get himself in trouble. . . . He says her name is pronounced Gertrude SCHTEIN because that’s the way German is pronounced. He also thinks that Byron’s poem is called DON WHAN, because he speaks Spanish and that’s the way the name is pronounced in Spanish. When I told him it’s JEWUN, he told me I was a moron.”

Ron Padgett, Ted: A Personal Memoir of Ted Berrigan (1993)

[“Your Liberal-Arts $ at Work.” Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin. Click for a larger view.]

Related reading
All David Foster Wallace posts (Pinboard)
E. B. White on W3 (with DFW on Webster’s Third)
How to punctuate a sentence
How to punctuate more sentences

The model 500

Object of the day: Henry Dreyfuss’s model 500 (Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum).

A related post
Thrift-store telephone

TYPE LOUD

I am contending with the aftermath of an ear infection — and yes, that makes me feel about ten years old. It’s difficult to hear with my clogged left ear, so if you leave a comment today, please, TYPE LOUD. Thank you.

“WE DELIVER”

[From the Naked City episode “A Death of Princes,” first aired October 12, 1960.]

The choice to crop makes the image starker and stranger, doesn’t it? Ernesto Caparrós gets the credit for this episode’s cinematography. The telephone exchange CI? That’s CIrcle.

Forty episodes of Naked City are now available in a ten-DVD set ($24.99 from Amazon). Elaine and I have thirty-two episodes to go.

More exchange names on screen
The Amazing Dr. Clitterhouse : Baby Face : Blast of Silence : Born Yesterday : The Dark Corner : Deception : Dream House : The Little Giant : The Man Who Cheated Himself : Modern Marvels : Murder, My Sweet : My Week with Marilyn : Naked City (1) : Naked City (2) : Naked City (3) : Naked City (4) : Nightmare Alley : The Public Enemy : Railroaded! : Side Street : Sweet Smell of Success : This Gun for Hire

[It is 9:37 in the Naked City.]

Ho Hum

Above, two pages from Ho Hum: Newsbreaks from The New Yorker (New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1931), foreword by E. B. White, illustrations by O. Soglow. A newsbreak is a New Yorker specialty, a snippet of journalism containing “some error of typography or judgment,” as White puts it, used to fill extra space at a column’s end. White selected newsbreaks for many years. Mira Ptacin’s account of a visit to White’s Maine house includes a photograph of a list of newsbreak categories, still tacked to the wall of White’s writing shed.

By the way, the Billboard item must have been placed by a carnival geek. Billboard ran geek ads in its carnival section.

Related reading
All E. B. White posts (Pinboard)
“GEEK WANTED IMMEDIATELY” (Billboard ads)

[I still marvel at the generosity of libraries. If this book were mine, I wouldn’t let it out.]