M-W recycling

Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Day today is madeleine. It is a word that brings back memories, memories of September 26, 2006, when madeleine was also the Word of the Day.

Naked City monkeys

[From the Naked City episode “Kill Me While I’m Young So I Can Die Happy,” October 17, 1962. Click for a larger, more primatial view.]

Detective Frank Arcaro (Harry Bellaver) has decorated a wall of the detectives’ room with these monkeys. When Lieutenant Mike Parker (Horace McMahon) looks askance at that wall, Frank explains that the monkeys came from Coney Island. Frank went there with Ruth Curran (a newly retired city employee). Frank, who still lives with his mother (strong Marty-esque overtones), is dating. I would say that this Naked City episode is an unusual one, but every episode in this series is in some way singular.

Seeing these monkeys gave me a jolt: I had such a monkey in childhood. I wish I knew where he or she came from, and I wish I knew where he or she went.

Related reading
All OCA Naked City posts (Pinboard)

A very big day

[Photograph by Michael Leddy.]

It’s a very big day for our two families.

[i just realized: I was doing tile work.]

Jim Leddy at American Olean Tile

[Photograph by Elliott Photos. Click for a larger view.]

That‘s my dad on the left, Jim Leddy, Leddy Ceramic Tile, in a promotional photograph for American Olean Tile. On the back, the rubber-stamped names and addresses of the photographer and American Olean.

No one in my family remembers the circumstances that led to this photo. My guess is that it’s from the 1970s. I found it at the back of a file drawer in my office, stashed with various newspaper clippings and postcards. I had no idea it was there.

[Real men wear plaid.]

A strange strawberry

It’s like two, two, two strawberries in one. The photograph is all that’s left of it. Are such strawberries common?

A related post
Brain-shaped Cracker Jack

Domestic comedy

“‘Men’s Wearhouse’ is a pun.”

“What?”

“They spell it w-e-a-r-h-o-u-s-e .”

[Hysterical laughter from both parties.]

Related reading
All OCA domestic comedy posts (Pinboard)

[To get the Men’s Wearhouse pun, one must be looking at the television as the commercial runs. No wonder we were in the dark for so long.]

Domestic comedy

On editorial authority:

“He makes it seem as if there’s a we — which is a he.”

Related reading
All OCA domestic comedy posts (Pinboard)

Microsoft ends Windows XP support

Microsoft: “As of April 8, 2014, support and updates for Windows XP are no longer available.” But it’s hard to think that the date marks the end of an era. As Marco Arment observes, “People just don’t care to upgrade.” XP users gonna use. XP is the best version of Windows I ever used: it was the arrival of Vista that prompted me to switch to OS X when I bought a new laptop in 2007.

I just looked at my blog stats: Windows 7 is in first place, with 31% of visits to this blog. In second place, OS X, with 24.3%. Windows 8.1 and 8 users together account 7.2% of visits. XP users account for 6.1% of visits. Those two percentages say something about Microsoft’s troubles: the thirteen-year-old Windows accounts for almost any many visits as the most recent versions. Other versions of Windows — Vista, 2003, 2000, 98, and NT — account for 2.3% of visits.

8.1, 8, 7, Vista, XP, 2003, 2000, 98, NT: do you notice the version of Windows missing from this sequence? Hint: It was later than 98 and earlier than XP.

Writing advice from Verlyn Klinkenborg

Wise advice:

You can almost never fix a sentence —
Or find a better sentence within it —
By using the words it already contains.

Verlyn Klinkenborg, Several Short Sentences About Writing (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2012).

I just quoted these lines in a reply to a thoughtful question about a troublesome sentence.

I’m high on (“enthusiastically in approval or support of”) Klinkenborg’s book. My students like it too. It’s one of the best books I’ve chosen for teaching a writing course.

Other Klinkenborg posts
More from Several Short Sentences : On the English major : On e-reading

[Defintion from Merriam-Webster.]

No points

Several years ago students began to ask me a question I’d never heard and didn’t know how to answer: “How many points is this worth?” I had, and still have, no good answer. I have no points.

My first attempt at an answer — “Well, everything’s out of 100” — sent one asker into a panic. And then I realized what was going on: an increasing number of college classes are organized by points, five for this assignment, ten for that. The work of the semester adds up to several hundred points. So a grade of 100 attached to a measly page-long piece of writing appeared to be cause for concern.

My next attempt at an answer was to point out (as my syllabus already pointed out) that all the writing in a course added up to, say, 60% of the semester grade. So an assignment of, say, four pages, about 20% of the writing, would equal 12% of the semester grade. But that isn’t entirely accurate (I would add), because the best writing grade would count more heavily. Thus the essay would end up counting for more or less than 12%.

As they say on Facebook, it’s complicated. And “12% of the semester grade” isn’t likely to signify much to anyone.

My most recent attempt at an answer is too simple but more satisfying: I average everything to make the writing part of the grade. The details are on the syllabus: writing is 60% of the semester grade, with participation and a final examination counting as 20% each. End of story.

But not the end of my dismay about “points,” a system that fosters unhealthy attitudes toward coursework among students. A point system encourages academic gamesmanship — choosing opportunities for maximal and minimal effort. Students make such choices all the time: study harder for this exam, let this quiz go. But attaching a number to each bit of work explicitly demeans daily incremental effort, the effort that shows itself in quizzes and short assignments (and makes it more likely that a student will do well with larger assignments and examinations). Losing five points here, five points there — it’s too easy for a student to think, So what? I’ll ace the big test and win. Thus a point system demeans the work of learning, which is a matter not of picking targets and acing tests but of engaging a body of knowledge and practice, patiently, over time. How many points are, say, a musician’s daily scales and etudes worth? All of them.

[The worst use of points: as “extra credit” for attendance at an event, turning an occasion better experienced for its own sake into a trivial number. Bad alchemy.]