Use less words

From the New York Times public editor’s journal, on how to refer to Chelsea (formerly Bradley) Manning:



Yipes. Perhaps only the copyeditors themselves, not those who supervise them, are expected to know that one uses fewer words, not less.

[The Times Manual of Style and Usage recommends copy editor; Garner’s Modern American Usage recommends copyeditor.]

Lexikaliker at 1,000

At Lexikaliker, Gunther has just posted his thousandth post, with a photograph of an 1888 inscription from a house in Bad Doberan, Germany:

Der Eine betracht’s
Der Andre verlacht’s
Der Dritte veracht’s
Was macht’s

Google Translate turns that into gibberish. A plausible idiomatic translation might read:

One contemplates it
Another laughs at it
The third despises it
Who cares

Reading these words, I thought I was facing some impossible riddle. But no. It is the building itself:


[The American Architect and Building News 28 (1890).]

Thank you, Gunther, for this post and so many other thought-provoking posts and beautiful photographs. Hurra!

[“Hurra”: German for “Hurrah.”]

Word of the day: presbyopia

I went in for my biennial eye exam this week and learned that I have presbyopia. No, I am not seeing the world through Presbyterian eyes — though in a way I am.

The Oxford English Dictionary makes presbyopia sound dire:

Deterioration of near vision occurring with advancing age, owing to increasing rigidity of the lens of the eye with reduction in the power of accommodation.

The New Oxford American Dictionary sounds not nearly as bad:

farsightedness caused by loss of elasticity of the lens of the eye, occurring typically in middle and old age.

My optometrist’s explanation was closer to the NOAD. Presbyopia is a matter of becoming more farsighted with age. It’s a fact of life, and it’s why the gods gave us progressive lenses.

But why presby-? My optometrist said it had to do with age. Sure enough: presbyopia joins the Greek πρέσβυς [presbus, “old man”] and the “post-classical Latin -opia or its etymon ancient Greek -ωπία.” The ending -opia (“forming terms denoting visual disorders and abnormalities,” such as ambylopia and myopia) joins -op, “eye” and the suffix -ia. That suffix, used in both Greek and Latin, turns up everywhere — Australia, dahlia, mania. And, says the OED, “in French -ia became -ie, whence Middle English -ie, English -y.” Nouns ending in -ency, -ography, and -ology owe their -y to the ancient -ia.

And why Presbyterian? The OED explains:

In Presbyterian Churches no higher order than that of presbyter or elder is recognized, the “bishop” and “elder” . . . of the New Testament being held to be identical. All elders are ecclesiastically of equal rank; but, in their function in the church, while some are “ruling and teaching elders” or “ministers,” others are only “ruling elders” (popularly called “lay elders,” but erroneously, since all elders are ordained or “in orders”).

I’m glad I went in for my eye exam and got these things cleared up.

[All quotations and examples are from the OED.]

Cedar Walton (1934–2013)

“Mr. Walton sat in with Charlie Parker, spent a year accompanying the singer Abbey Lincoln, and recorded with both John Coltrane and, much later, the saxophonist Joshua Redman. . . . Yet he probably remained best known for his early work with one of the most influential incarnations of the Jazz Messengers, the group that the drummer Art Blakey ran as a kind of postgraduate performance academy for rising jazz stars”: Cedar Walton, Pianist and Composer, Dies at 79 (The New York Times).

Two great musical losses in the news today. As the bluesman Skip James is reported to have said when surveying the musical scene, “The old heads are dying off.”

Marian McPartland (1918–2013)

“As the host of Marian McPartland’s Piano Jazz, an NPR program pairing conversation and duet performances, she reached an audience of millions, connecting with jazz fans and the curious alike”: Marian McPartland, Piano Jazz Host, Has Died (National Public Radio).

Of all the duets Marian McPartland played, my favorites are the ones on a 1973 Halcyon LP with Joe Venuti, The Maestro and Friend, now out of print. I’ll put it on the turntable later today.

The Beloit Mindset List, 2017 edition

The Beloit Mindset List is back, with a 2017 edition purporting to map the cultural landscape of eighteen-year-olds entering college this fall. I see three problems with the idea of the Beloit List:

§ The “cultural touchstones” the list claims to collect — in the interest of reminding faculty “to be aware of dated references” — are often mere bits of grit. From this year’s list:

25. Planes have never landed at Stapleton Airport in Denver.

43. Don Shula has always been a fine steak house.

Better scotch those Stapleton Airport analogies, Professor Higginbotham! The kids today won’t “dig” them.

And yes, as the list points out — rather crassly, I think — “Dean Martin, Mickey Mantle, and Jerry Garcia have always been dead.” Which means — what, exactly?

§ The list includes items that would be difficult or sometimes impossible to establish as having a basis in fact. For instance:

5. “Dude” has never had a negative tone. [Really? Dude!]

9. Gaga has never been baby talk. [Lady Gaga’s first CD appeared in 2008.]

§ The list fosters the belief that if it hasn’t happened in your lifetime, it isn’t real and you can’t be expected to know about it. It patronizes young adults while purporting to explain them to their elders. I will quote what I wrote in 2010:

What bothers me about the Beloit list involves some unspoken assumptions about reality and young adults. The list reads like a nightmare-version of the proposition that begins Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921): “Die Welt ist alles, was der Fall ist.” “The world is all that is the case” — all that is the case, that is, in the life-experience of a hypothetical eighteen-year-old American student.

Thinking that your reality begins with your year of birth: that’s the most terrible mindset of all.

Previous Beloit List posts
2010 : 2011 : 2012

[“Orange Crate Art: Expressing skepticism about the Beloit Mindset List since 2010.”]

Sales associates (Route 66)

You never know who will show up in an episode Route 66. Here are Bibi Osterwald, Soupy Sales, and Dawn Nickerson, in one of the show’s loopiest episodes, “This Is Going to Hurt Me More Than It Hurts You” (aired February 14, 1964). If you scroll the screen really fast, you will feel that Soupy Sales is turning his head to look at you, just as he did in 1964.

I know Bibi Osterwald best as Boothy in The World of Henry Orient (1964). I know Soupy Sales as a funny, funny figure from local children’s television when I was a boy. Think of him as the anti-Fred (Rogers, that is). (Here’s a complete show from 1965, in three parts.) Dawn Nickerson has disappeared from film and television, but she appears to be on Facebook.

Oh, and it wouldn’t be a Sales effort without pies.


[Sales and Martin Milner.]

Elaine and I watched all 116 episodes of Route 66 this spring and summer, starting in April and ending in July. What a great television series: terrific writing, terrific acting, terrific cinematography, an amazing array of guest stars, and locations, locations, locations. Naked City is the only other show in its class.

Related reading
All Route 66 posts (Pinboard)

Albert Murray (1916–2013)

From The New York Times: “Albert Murray, an essayist, critic and novelist who influenced the national discussion about race by challenging black separatism, insisting that the black experience was essential to American culture and inextricably tied to it, died on Sunday at his home in Harlem.”

From Murray’s The Omni-Americans: New Perspectives on Black Experience and American Culture (1970):

when the Negro musician or dancer swings the blues, he is for fulfilling the same fundamental existential requirement that determines the mission of the poet, the priest, and the medicine man. He is making an affirmative and hence exemplary and heroic response to that which André Malraux describes as la condition humane. Extemporizing in response to the exigencies of the situation in which he finds himself, he is confronting, acknowledging, and contending with the infernal absurdities and ever-impending frustrations inherent in the nature of all existence by playing with the possibilities that are also there. Thus does man the player become man the stylizer and by the same token the humanizer of chaos; and thus does play become ritual, ceremony, and art; and thus also does the dance-beat improvisation of experience in the blues idiom become survival technique, esthetic equipment for living, and a central element in the dynamics of U. S. Negro life style.

The New Yorker has unlocked (for how long?) a 1996 profile of Murray by Henry Louis Gates Jr.: “King of Cats.”

[I have to say it: I have little use for the Albert Murray-Stanley Crouch-Wynton Marsalis idea of jazz, promulgated by means of Jazz at Lincoln Center and the Ken Burns PBS series Jazz. There: I said it.]

Sketching suspects

“The last thing I want in a room when I have a trauma victim is a machine.” In the New York City Police Department, the Artist Unit still sketches suspects by hand: Fighting Crime With Pencil and Paper (The New York Times).

Faber-Castell Type Cleaner

A second box has a large price sticker with the code 11983: January 1983? November 9, 1983? I bought both boxes, at a much later date, from an office-supply store that was surrendering, finally, to time’s slow-chapt power. I had no need for Faber-Castell Type Cleaner: I just wanted to give these items a home.

The packaging design seen here — Helvetica type, a black-and-white photograph, a colored flap — was once found on a range of Faber-Castell products. I have a box of Mongol pencils with brown flaps. Blackwing Pages has photographs of similar boxes for Blackwing pencils, light blue flaps and then brown. I don’t know what other products wore green.

Looking at the photograph on this package leaves me convinced of something that I’ve suspected ever since getting an iPhone: that the jumping-up keys on the iPhone’s keyboard are more than practical, visual feedback. I think that they’re yet another bit of skeuomorphic design, meant to suggest the movement of a typewriter’s typebars. I have no evidence, but it’d be difficult to persuade me otherwise.

[This post is the fourteenth in an occasional series, “From the Museum of Supplies.” Supplies is my word, and has become my family’s word, for all manner of stationery items. The museum is imaginary. The supplies are real.]

Other Museum of Supplies exhibits
Dennison’s Gummed Labels No. 27 : Eagle Turquoise display case : Eagle Verithin display case : Fineline erasers : Illinois Central Railroad Pencil : A Mad Men sort of man, sort of : Mongol No. 2 3/8 : Moore Metalhed Tacks : National’s “Fuse-Tex” Skytint : Pedigree Pencil : Real Thin Leads : Rite-Rite Long Leads : Stanley carpenter’s rule