A yucky Wednesday on NPR

I winced a little when I heard a guest on the PBS NewsHour address Judy Woodruff and company as “you guys.” And I winced again this morning when I heard David Brancaccio on NPR’s Morning Edition report that air quality in China is better today after “a yucky Wednesday.” Do high levels of pollution count as “yucky”? Maybe in third grade.

Come on, you guys. It’s called diction.

A college exit-exam

More evidence that a degree in itself is not enough:

Next spring, seniors at about 200 U.S. colleges will take a new test that could prove more important to their future than final exams: an SAT-like assessment that aims to cut through grade-point averages and judge students’ real value to employers.

Are You Ready for the Post-College SAT? (Wall Street Journal)

The Collegiate Learning Assessment (the focus of the article and not an SAT-like multiple-choice test) plays an important part in the research that informs Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa’s Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses. The link goes to my review.

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3:25 p.m.: The link to the WSJ article doesn’t work. What works: search for the article via Google, and you can get to the article from the search results.

Thank you, Bryan Garner

From Bryan Garner’s Usage Tip of the Day, on “thank you” and responses to it:

“Thank you” remains the best, most serviceable phrase, despite various attempts to embellish it or truncate it: “thanking you in advance” (presumptuous and possibly insulting), “thank you very much” (with a trailer of surplusage), “thanks” (useful on informal occasions), “many thanks” (informal but emphatic), *“much thanks” (archaic and increasingly unidiomatic), *“thanks much” (confusing the noun with the verb), and *“thanx” (unacceptably cutesy).

I prefer “thank you.” My favorite embellishment, for use on the telephone when appropriate: “Thank you, you’ve been really helpful.” More:

The traditional response to “Thank you” is “You’re welcome.” Somehow, though, in the 1980s, “You’re welcome” came to feel a little stiff and formal, perhaps even condescending (as if the speaker were saying, “Yes, I really did do you a favor, didn’t I?”). As a result, two other responses started displacing “You’re welcome”: (1) “No problem” (as if the speaker were saying, “Don’t worry, you didn’t inconvenience me too much”); and (2) “No, thank you” (as if the person doing the favor really considered the other person to have done the favor). The currency of “You’re welcome” seems to diminish little by little, but steadily. Old-fashioned speakers continue to use it, but its future doesn’t look bright.

Suddenly I am an old-fashioned speaker.

What do you say when someone says “thank you”?

[Bryan Garner, author of Garner’s Modern American Usage (2009), offers a free Usage Tip of the Day. You can sign up at LawProse.org. Orange Crate Art is a Garner-friendly zone. The Garner asterisk marks an “invariably inferior form.”]

August 28, 1963

Disruptive, a pernicious cliché

In The New Republic, Judith Shulevitz suggests that the business buzzword disruptive (brainchild of Harvard professor Clayton Christensen) is “the most pernicious cliché of our time.”

The “unsavory habits of mind” that Shulevitz sees in those who celebrate “disruption”: “an almost utopian faith in technology,” an assumption that “all public or nonprofit institutions are sclerotic and unable to cope with change,” and a distaste for genuine democracy. This brand of disruption operates from the top down.

A spelling of the future

[As seen at a highway rest stop. Photograph by Michael Leddy.]

My definition: “a misspelling so strange that it must be traveling backward in time to give us a foretaste of our language’s evolution.” Think of it as tomorrow’s spelling today.

You out there: have you seen off  for of?

Other spellings of the future
Aww : Bard-wired : now

Russell Jacoby on Stanley Fish

Russell Jacoby writes about Stanley Fish and the fate of the humanities:

He closes one of his defenses of the humanities with a little vignette of an encounter with a university lobbyist. He offers to accompany the fellow to the next legislative committee investigating the university. But the lobbyist has doubts about Fish’s conduct and asks, “Will you behave?” Fish concludes his chapter, “Some people never learn.” The self-satisfaction is palpable — as is the self-mystification. The unexciting truth is that Stanley Fish has always behaved. He has always bravely defended self-interest. With friends like him, the humanities needs no enemies.

Stanley Fish Turned Careerism Into a Philosophy (The New Republic)

Related posts
Fish on Strunk and White
Review of Fish’s How to Write a Sentence

In-house shoeshines

“Inside New York’s investment houses, a vestige of old Wall Street lives on”: Shoeshines Keep Wall Street in the Black (or Maybe Brown) (The New York Times).

The law firm where I proofread in my student days had an in-house barber — for lawyers only, of course.

Aaron Draplin on “good enough”

Graphic designer Aaron Draplin, interviewed at Creative South 2013, in Columbus, Georgia:

“I never indulge in any of this crap where it’s just good enough. Probably lose my ass on like fees and stuff, but I don’t care. Because I’m not gonna let it go knowing that I could’ve made it better.”

I shared that with my writing students, having asked them last week to think about writing as the work of the 職人 [shokunin], the craftsman, whose overriding concern is getting things right, making things better, not for material gain but for the sake of the work.

My introduction to the shokunin: the beautiful film Jiro Dreams of Sushi.

You can watch a short documentary about Creative South at YouTube. Aaron Draplin comes in at 9:10. The words I’ve quoted begin at 11:59.

[If you’re reading in the United States, you may have seen Draplin’s work without realizing it. Draplin is also one of the minds behind Field Notes.]

Midcult PBS

It was pledge week on PBS, and last night they were flogging Dowton Abbey. The voiceover pledge-driver described the series in this way: “It really is smart TV, but as The New Yorker says —”

And here is the New Yorker sentence that PBS then paraphrased:

the British series, about the aristocratic Crawley family and their titular home, goes down so easily that it’s a bit like scarfing handfuls of caramel corn while swigging champagne.

I think the announcer may have changed scarfing and swigging to eating and drinking.

Dwight Macdonald would have appreciated Downton Abbey as a perfect example of what he called “Midcult”:

A whole middle culture has come into existence and it threatens to absorb both its parents. This intermediate form — let us call it Midcult — has the essential qualities of Masscult — the formula, the built-in reaction, the lack of any standard except popularity — but it decently covers them with a cultural figleaf. In Masscult the trick is plain — to please the crowd by any means. But Midcult has it both ways: it pretends to respect the standards of High Culture while in fact it waters them down and vulgarizes them.

The enemy outside the walls is easy to distinguish. It is its ambiguity that makes Midcult alarming. For it presents itself as part of High Culture. Not that coterie stuff, nothing snobbish inbred so-called intellectuals who are only talking to themselves. Rather the great vital mainstream, wide and clear though perhaps not so deep.

“Masscult and Midcult” (1960)

Funny: in a post earlier this year, I described Downton Abbey as “about as deep as a paper plate.”

Smart but goes down easy; goes down easy but smart: that’s a perfect way to understand Midcult.

Related reading
A handful of Downton Abbey posts

[Macdonald’s essay can be found in Masscult and Midcult: Essays Against the American Grain (New York Review Books, 2011).]