Arne Duncan on Colbert

If you missed Secretary of Education Arne Duncan on The Colbert Report last night, you can watch here. It’ll take under six minutes.

One highlight: Duncan says that the best ideas in education come from “local teachers.” But hurrah for the Common Core.

And hurrah for replacing books with digital media, everywhere.

The most revealing moment: Duncan’s evasions when Colbert asks whether under the Common Core, students will read instruction manuals and memos instead of Shakespeare and Treasure Island. If students will be reading Shakespeare and Stevenson, Duncan’s claim that textbooks become obsolete “the day we buy them” falls apart. If anything, it is our devices that are instantly obsolete. But that never troubles a technocrat.

And by the way, a Secretary of Education who refers to “less dropouts” needs to go back to school.

Related reading
Carlo Rotella, No Child Left Untableted (New York Times)

[“Less dropouts”: at 5:21.]

Delete and deleterious

The question came up in class: are delete and deleterious related? It seems possible, even plausible: what’s deleterious removes wellbeing, right? Wrong.

The Oxford English Dictionary traces delete to “Latin dēlēt-, participial stem of dēlēre to blot out, efface.” Deleterious goes back to “modern Latin dēlētērius, < Greek δηλητήριος [deleterios] noxious, hurtful, < δηλήτηρ [deletor] destroyer, < δηλεῖσθαι [deleisthai] to hurt.”

Well, if these words aren’t related, they should be.

[I’ve added the transliterations.]

Grice

When I was in grad school, in the mid-1980s, reading lots of “theory,” the Dickensian name Grice was much in the air: the philosopher H. P. Grice, whose initials-only name (Herbert Paul) only added to his mystery. No book then went with that name, but there was a crucial essay, “Logic and Conversation,” which appeared in a collection of essays by various hands, Syntax and Semantics: Speech Acts, edited by Peter Cole and Jerry L. Morgan (New York: Academic Press, 1975).

“Logic and Conversation” presents principles of conversation that have become known as Gricean maxims. Informing them all is a “Cooperative Principle”: “Make your conversational contribution such as is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged.” The maxims concern Quantity, Quality, Relation, and Manner:

Quantity: Make your contribution as informative as is required (for the current purposes of the exchange). Do not make your contribution more informative than is required.

Quality: Try to make your contribution one that is true. Do not say what you believe to be false. Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence.

Relation: Be relevant.

Manner: Avoid obscurity of expression. Avoid ambiguity. Be brief (avoid unnecessary prolixity). Be orderly.

From Paul Grice’s Studies in the Ways of Words (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989).

Thinking of Grice now, after so many years, I think of the practical applications his work has. Consider how a healthy respect for Gricean maxims would improve the world of online discourse. One might add to these maxims, as Grice suggests, “Be polite,” though the Cooperative Principle seems to cover matters of both courtesy and rudeness. The “accepted purpose or direction” of almost any online discussion would preclude, say, comments whose primary purpose is to cross-examine, hector, raise extraneous issues, snipe, or drive “traffic” in the commenter’s direction. The purpose or direction of a discussion devoted to vulgar banter and insults, however, would require that one not be polite, or at least not too polite. The brief guidelines for Orange Crate Art comments — “Play fair. Keep it clean. And please be relevant” — now suggest to me, all these years later, Grice’s influence.

As I suspected, Gricean maxims have been of interest to those working on autism. Here’s one example.

Further reading
Paul Grice (Wikipedia)
Gricean maxims (Wikipedia)
Lifehacker’s guide to weblog comments (Lifehacker)

[The “avoid unnecessary prolixity” bit has to be a joke, à la “eschew obfuscation.”]

All the music in Casablanca

I’ve needed this list for years.

The libraries of Route 66

Route 66 abounds in physical labor and fisticuffs, but Tod (Martin Milner) and Buz (George Maharis) and, later, Linc (Glenn Corbett) still make time to use a local library. In “The Mud Nest” (November 10, 1961), Tod and Buz visit the Central Library of Baltimore’s Enoch Pratt Free Library in search of information about Buz’s mother. This episode has an extraordinary cast: Ed Asner, Lon Chaney Jr., Betty Field, and three Maharis siblings. Chaney and Field never share a scene — a pity, given their work in Of Mice and Men (dir. Lewis Milestone, 1939). But if you watch the episode, you’ll understand why.


[That’s what they call “Doris Day parking.”]




[Click on any image for a larger view.]

In “Who in His Right Mind Needs a Nice Girl” (February 7, 1964), Tod and Linc visit the City Island Library, Daytona Beach, Florida. Hiding out in a bookmobile: Joe (Lee Philips), a murderer on the run. Lois Smith plays Lucy Brown, a lonely librarian who falls under his spell. The present-day City Island Library postdates this episode.


[Click for a larger view.]

Elaine and I love Route 66.

Related reading
All Route 66 posts (Pinboard)
The Wheel of Information (a Pratt resource)

Probably not from Calvin Coolidge

My friend Rob Zseleczky had in his apartment a postcard with these words:

Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful people with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan ‘press on’ has solved and will always solve the problem of the human race.

This passage has been atttributed, famously so, to Calvin Coolidge, and appeared with his name in a Depression-era pamphlet issued by the New York Life Insurance Company, of which Coolidge was a director. But Coolidge scholars David Pietrusza and Amity Shlaes, the source of the information in the preceding sentence, make a strong case that the passage is “probably not Coolidge’s.” It’s good advice though, whoever its source. For me, its source is Rob Zseleczky.

Number nine, number nine

Orange Crate Art turns nine today. In the word of Timmy Martin, who is probably older than nine in the photograph to your left: Yippee.

I remember, one night after dinner, sitting and typing a first post at the fambly “terminal” — a Gateway available for everyone’s use. Rachel and Ben were coaching me. Rachel suggested what to say and gave me the title Orange Crate Art. Such angst I had.

Deciding to write in these pages is one of the best choices I have ever made: it’s opened worlds to me and has made the work of writing a daily or nearly daily pleasure. The “post” — a form that can hold content of any sort, any size — has become for me a highly congenial environment, the best possible form to accommodate everyday attention and curiosity.

Orange Crate Art, like so many nine-year-olds, is becoming more independent, but it still relies on me for every post, or almost every post. And it relies on you too, reader. To everyone reading: thank you.

The two guest-posts
Rachel Leddy’s tips for success in college
Stefan Hagemann’s advice on answering a question in class

[That’s Jon Provost as Timmy. He and Lassie loomed large in my childhood.]

Another Big Lots tea find

Now, perhaps, at a Big Lots near you: Thompson’s Irish Breakfast tea, $3.50 for eighty bags.

Thompson’s must be the maltiest Irish Breakfast I’ve ever tasted. Big Lots continues to bring my oikos new and surprising possibilities in tea.

Other Big Lots tea finds
Barry’s Irish Breakfast and PG Tips : Good Strong Tea and Hedley’s : Typhoo : Typhoo and Wissotzky

Sherwin Cody wants to know

[Popular Mechanics, February 1942.]

If you suspect that Sherwin Cody stepped out of the nineteenth century to ask this question: yes, he did. And he asked it again and again and again, with great success, enough even to be in Wikipedia.

*

11:18 a.m.: From an earlier, lengthier Sherwin Cody advertisement (Popular Mechanics, October 1930):

Many people say “Did you hear from him today?” They should say “Have you heard from him today?”

Uh-oh, I’m in trouble.

Falling in love with words

I have an abiding and foolish affection for old mass-market paperbacks that promise to improve one’s vocabulary or writing. No doubt such books play upon a reader’s sense of intellectual and social inferiority. (Is your vocabulary holding you back?) Still, I like the idea that the ordinary citizen, long out of school, might step into a candy-cigarettes-newspapers store, walk over to the paperback rack, and pick out a book to become a better reader or speaker or writer. That effort seems to me a happy blend of self-knowledge, humility, and optimism.

Here is a wonderful passage from one such book, Wilfred Funk and Norman Lewis’s 30 Days to a More Powerful Vocabulary. It was published by Funk & Wagnalls in 1942, became a Pocket Book paperback in 1949, and went through sixty-one printings before a 1971 revision. My copy, which my son Ben found for me, is from 1971:

From now on we want you to look at words intently, to be inordinately curious about them and to examine them syllable by syllable, letter by letter. They are your tools of understanding and self-expression. Collect them. Keep them in condition. Learn how to handle them. Develop a fastidious, but not a fussy, choice. Work always toward good taste in their use. Train your ear for their harmonies.

We urge you not to take words for granted just because they have been part of your daily speech since childhood. You must examine them. Turn them over and over as though you were handling a coin, and see the seal and superscription on each one. We would like you actually to fall in love with words.

Consider it done. Thanks, Ben.