積ん読 [tsundoku]

Today’s Oscar’s Day made me think of a Japanese word I’ve had in my head for a while: 積ん読 [tsundoku]: “the act of leaving a book unread after buying it, typically piled up together with such other unread books.”

Here is an illustrated definition with wide circulation. I wish I knew how to give proper credit to the artist, known to the general public only as the daughter of a Reddit user named Wemedge.

Blackwing goes to Hollywood

In The Hollywood Reporter, Seth Abramovitch looks at the Blackwing pencil’s place in the entertainment industry and asks, Why Is Hollywood Obsessed with This Pencil? Abramovitch calls the Blackwing “one of the industry’s most valuable — and quickly disappearing — possessions.”

For anyone who wants to learn more about the Blackwing pencil, Blackwing Pages, cited in the article, is the place to go. You might start with this post: No Ordinary Pencil: A Portrait of the Eberhard Faber Blackwing 602.

Related reading
All OCA Blackwing posts (Pinboard)

Overheard

“I said, ‘Oh, look at the cheeseballs,’ not ‘Grab the cheeseballs.’”

Related reading
All “overheard” posts (Pinboard)

[All dialogue guaranteed overheard.]

47 Federal Street

It’s still there:

The building, looking out over Springfield from the heights of Federal Street, has all the appearance of exactly what it is — an institution for the preservation and diffusion of learning. A fine, simple, gracious, Georgian brick structure, it stands like some university hall or library, surrounded by broad, clipped lawns and shaded by overarching elms. Its very street-number is significant; when the city officials approved plans for the building, they notified the Merriam Company that it might select any odd figure between 31 and 49. The Company chose “47” in allusion to the year 1847, date of publication of the first Merriam-Webster dictionary.

Robert Keith Leavitt, Noah’s Ark, New England Yankees, and the Endless Quest: A Short History of the Original Webster Dictionaries, with Particular Reference to Their First Hundred Years (Springfield, MA: G. & C. Merriam Company, 1947).

[The book, borrowed from the library, is the source of the image. The book’s circulation slip begins in 1949. Thanks, library.]

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.]