Word of the day: illeism

Found while browsing Bryan Garner’s Garner’s Modern American Usage (2009):

illeism /il-ee-iz-em/. Reference to oneself in the third person, either by the third-person pronoun (he, she) or by name or label. Two examples. In Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar (1598), the eponymous character consistently uses illeism, saying at one point: “Caesar should be a beast without a heart / If he should stay at home today for fear” (2.2.42-43). In the 1996 presidential election, the Republican candidate, Bob Dole, was widely lampooned for his illeism (“Let me tell you what Bob Dole thinks.”).

I just met up again with the fictional illeist Uncle Doc Hines, a misogynist racist religious fanatic in William Faulkner’s Light in August (1932):

“It was the Lord. He was there. Old Doc Hines give God His chance too. The Lord told Uncle Doc what to do and Old Doc Hines done it.”

And so on.

Related reading
All OCA Garner-related posts (Pinboard)

[Orange Crate Art is a Garner-friendly site.]

Domestic comedy

“You’re not bringing mad money?”

“I have my phone.”

Related reading
All OCA domestic comedy posts (Pinboard)

[Mad money: “Money carried by a girl or woman with which to pay her own way home if she leaves her escort, usu. because of his sexual advances.” Harold Wentworth and Stuart Berg Flexner, A Dictionary of American Slang, 1975.]

Manhattan is losing bookstores

The New York Times reports on the dwindling number of bookstores in Manhattan:

State data reveals that from 2000 to 2012, the number of bookstores in Manhattan fell almost 30 percent, to 106 stores from 150. Jobs, naturally, have suffered as well: Annual employment in bookstores has decreased 46 percent during that period, according to the state’s Department of Labor.

My favorite bookstores in Manhattan are The Corner Bookstore and St. Mark’s Bookshop.

Naked City milk prowler

[The hands of the milk prowler. “And by the Sweat of Thy Brow,” Naked City, October 10, 1962.]

Someone is stealing money from 65th-Precinct milk bottles. Says Lieutenant Mike Parker, “I want that milk prowler, and I want him now.”

Try as I might, I can find no evidence that “milk prowler” was an expression ever in use. But this Naked City episode, about a horribly scarred young man who lives in the shadows, draws its inspiration from life. On April 12, 1962, The New York Times ran a short item with the headline “Judge Frees Boy Who Shuns Light”:

A 17-year-old youth accused of stealing money left in milk bottles was discharged in Bronx County Court yesterday because he had “suffered nothing but tragedy and sorrow.”

Roy Shelton appeared before the bench homeless and penniless, and he wept. Judge Joseph A. Martinis learned that Roy had been so badly scarred in the face by a fire that killed his mother, sister and aunt twelve years ago that he took odd jobs with milkmen so that few persons would see him.

His father, also scarred in the fire, vanished later, and Roy was shunted between relatives. Finally, he slept in halls and on park benches, trying always to avoid daylight and people’s stares.

“Society owes it to this defendant to give him a chance to become a useful citizen,” the judge said. Roy was turned over to an uncle who agreed to take him into his home in East Orange, N. J.

I can find no other reference to Roy Shelton in in Times archive. I hope that he found a measure of happiness and peace in his life.

Related reading
All OCA Naked City posts (Pinboard)

2048!

Gabriele Cirulli’s 2048 has a simple premise: join matching pairs of tiles to make larger and larger numbers: 2, 4, 8, 16, and so on. I hit the magic number this afternoon.

Did I mention that 2048 is fiendishly addictive? Try at your own risk.

Gabriele Cirulli, the game’s creator, is a web designer and developer. Grazie!

Levenger misspelling

[Oops.]

It seems like just yesterday that I wrote this sentence: “The problem with paying attention to words: you’re always paying attention.” That’s because it was yesterday, in this post.

A Levenger catalogue came in today’s mail. I always scan the handwriting in Levenger photographs and was surprised by a word, or non-word, in the sample above. That’s not how to spell palette .

Part of being a good speller is knowing when you should look up a word. If a word is even slightly unfamiliar, it can be smart to check. Then again, if you can plunk down $129 for Levenger’s Tyler Folio, you can probably spell words any damn way you please. Then again again, if you’re preparing a page for a nationally distributed catalogue, you should check the dictionary.

Other items from the Levenger catalogue
Bookography™ : Chess set : Lizard chunks : Pocket Briefcase : Replica pencils

Word of the day: opusculum

Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Day is opusculum, “a minor work (as of literature)”:

“Opusculum” — which is often used in its plural form “opuscula” — comes from Latin, where it serves as the diminutive form of the noun “opus,” meaning “work.” In English, “opus” can refer to any literary or artistic work, though it often specifically refers to a musical piece. Logically, then, “opusculum” refers to a short or minor work. (“Opusculum” isn't restricted to music, though. In fact, it is most often used for literary works.) The Latin plural of “opus” is “opera,” which gave us (via Italian) the word we know for a musical production consisting primarily of vocal pieces performed with orchestral accompaniment.

For readers of modern poetry, opusculum will recall Wallace Stevens’s poem “Study of Two Pears.” The poem begins with a Latin proclamation: “Opusculum paedagogum.” The poem’s pedagogue offers a little lesson about seeing things (namely, pears) as they really are: “The pears are not viols, / Nudes or bottles. / They resemble nothing else.” But the lesson falls apart, line by line by line. Why, for instance, mention viols, nudes, and bottles if pears resemble nothing but themselves? The pedagogue (who is not to be confused with Wallace Stevens) has lost control of the classroom.

What words stick in you head because of their literary associations?

Other words from works of literature
Apoplexy , avatar , bandbox , heifer , sanguine , sempiternal : Iridescent

Liveright Bookshop, Hotel Dressler

[The New Yorker, February 21, 1925.]

I found this advertisement while browsing the digital version of the first issue of The New Yorker. I like the ad’s contradictory promises of sanctuary and speed, relaxed browsing and instant gratification. Those promises remind me of the advertising ace Harwinton’s logic in Steven Millhauser’s novel Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer (1996). Here is Harwinton on the Hotel Dressler:

The Dressler, he argued, was a rural retreat, a peaceful outpost far from the clamor of downtown Manhattan, but at the same time the Dressler was located in a new and thriving part of the city, only a short distance from a convenient Elevated station, and even closer to the projected subway station on the Boulevard — was located, in short, in the very path of progress. For it was Harwinton’s belief that every city dweller harbored a double desire: the desire to be in the thick of things, and the equal and opposite desire to escape from the horrible thick of things to some peaceful rural place with shady paths, murmuring streams, and the hum of bumblebees over vaguely imagined flowers.

Martin Dressler is a wonderful novel, literally: a nineteenth-century fable about the attractions and limitations of virtual worlds.

The Liveright Bookshop’s address was recently occupied by the restaurant Alfredo’s of Rome, now closed. Alfredo’s online gallery of famous eaters is worth a look. I cannot tell who, if anyone, now occupies 4 West 49th.

Prompting disaster?

On NPR’s Morning Edition this morning, a voice reading headlines noted the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Exxon Valdez oil spill. The voice said that the spill “prompted an economic and environmental disaster.” Disaster, yes. Prompt? No.

Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate offers these definitions of prompt: “to move to action,” “incite”; “to assist (one acting or reciting) by suggesting or saying the next words of something forgotten or imperfectly learned,” “cue”; “to serve as the inciting cause of.”

The oil spill didn’t prompt a disaster, no more than a burning cigarette prompts a forest fire. The oil spill was and is a disaster, a disaster still in the making.

[The problem with paying attention to words: you’re always paying attention.]

Common misspellings

Truk, turck : 15 Most Common Misspellings.