Words of the day

These two fit:

MUGGISH, MUGGY, a. 2. Moist; damp; close; warm and unelastic; as muggy air. [This is the principal use of the word in America.]

From Websterisms: A Collection of Words and Definitions Set Forth by the Founding Father of American English, ed. Arthur Schulman (New York: Free Press, 2008). An entry from Noah Webster’s American Dictionary of the English Language (1828). Websterisms compiles 500 entries from the dictionary.

I found Websterisms yesterday in a campus bookstore in a nearby city, marked down from $23.95 to $5.00. The bookstore seems to be divesting itself of books: perhaps three-quarters of the stock was shelved as Bargain Books. The non-bargain shelves had the familiar look of the dying bookstore: books turned face front, with six or eight inches of empty space between them. Stranger still: Websterisms had a Daedalus sticker on its cover. I asked two employees what was going on: one was new and had never seen things looking different; another said that people mostly go for New York Times bestsellers. Yes, I wanted to say, but it’s a college bookstore. Or was.

It was a muggy day.

You can search the 1828 dictionary online, courtesy of the University of Chicago.

[The Oxford English Dictionary dates muggish to 1655; muggy, to 1728. Where do the words come from? Muggy comes from mug, “a mist, a fog; light rain or drizzle; a dull, damp, or gloomy atmosphere.” Mug, says the OED is “apparently” the source for muggish too, though the first citation for this meaning of the noun (also 1728) postdates the first citation for the adjective.]

Mac shortcut to save as PDF

From MacSparky, a keyboard shortcut to save anything as a PDF. This shortcut will save me tens of seconds each month. The real benefit is what it saves in tedium.

Found via Practically Efficient.

Twenty-first-century OED slips

Bryan Garner posted two photographs — one, two — of the paper slips used by lexicographers at work on the Oxford English Dictionary. In other words, they still use paper slips.

Re: the second photograph: extra credit if you can decipher the word without reading the whole slip. (I couldn’t).

You can see slips from the early days of the OED here.

Art Brown, gone

“The closing of Art Brown also represents one more loss for a way of life — people who write with a fountain pen”: Quo Vadis Blog reports that Art Brown is out of business. The store began in 1924.

Ciseaux - Sécateur - Cisailles

[Click for a larger view.]

I think it must be the best deal in the Museum Shop at the Art Institute of Chicago: The Art of Instruction: 100 Postcards of Vintage Educational Charts, from Chronicle Books. Above, a sample.

[Yes, they’re all in French.]

Minor bill-paying wisdom

Twice in recent months I’ve forgotten to sign my name to the checks that pay our water bill. I have a good excuse though: the feeling of accomplishment I get from writing our account number on the check’s memo line obliterates all thoughts of further writing. You should know that our account number is a twelve-digit string of 0s, 1s, and 2s. Our water department appears to keep its accounts in base three.

But I digress. Here is the minor wisdom:

When you need to write a check, sign first. That way you’ll never get a call from the water department, or any other department, because your check needs signed.

Reader, is there any minor bill-paying wisdom that you would like to share?

A related post
Minor kitchen wisdom (from me and from readers)

[“Need + past participle” is a regionalism I like.]

Route 66 de Chirico

[From the Route 66 episode “Same Picture, Different Frame,” October 4, 1963.]

Jack Marta, director of photography for ninety episodes of the Route 66, was an ace. Take a look at his IMDb page and you’ll see a career that ran from 1926 to 1980.

Here, for a fleeting moment at the beginning of an episode, is an arresting composition that could have been painted by Giorgio de Chirico.

Related reading
All Route 66 posts (Pinboard)

Thomas Jefferson’s PDA

“Thought you’d like this,” says my son Ben: Jefferson’s Portable Ivory Notebooks. I do. Thanks, Ben.

The Jefferson notebook attracted a flurry of interest in 2005, during the salad days of the hipster PDA. Everything old is new again, and again.

A related post
Thomas Jefferson’s handwriting

[You can buy a brass and ivory notebook here. The pages look like piano keys. Ouch.]

Casting By

Tonight on HBO, Casting By (dir. Tom Donahue, 2012), a documentary film about casting directors. A CNN article describes the film as giving considerable attention to Marion Dougherty, who early in her career cast many episodes of Naked City and Route 66.

As I just learned from The New York Times, it was Dougherty who recommended Carroll O’Connor and Jean Stapleton for All in the Family. What the Times doesn’t mention is that both O’Connor and Stapleton appeared in episodes of Naked City (though not the same episodes); Stapleton was also in an episode of Route 66.

You can watch the film’s trailer online.

Related reading
All Naked City posts (Pinboard)
All Route 66 posts (Pinboard)

[As regular readers of Orange Crate Art know, Naked City and Route 66 have become matters of mildly obsessive interest in my household.]

Tom Hanks types

In The New York Times, Tom Hanks writes about life in the dowdy world of typing: “I use a manual typewriter — and the United States Postal Service — almost every day.”