Recently updated

Mongol 2 3/8 Sean at Contrapuntalism tracks down the origin of Eberhard Faber’s Diamond Star emblem.

Recently updated

“Think middle school report” Eyes roll everywhere as heads roll at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Thanks, Sara.

2015 calendar

Since December 2009 I’ve been making a dowdy-looking calendar for the new year. I’ve made these calendars in what I am guessing must be a primitive way, using tables in the Mac app Pages, three months per page, in licorice (black) and cayenne (dark red). Each year I’ve gotten a bit better at bringing off a glitch-free production.

If you’d like a 2015 calendar for yourself or for a loved one, or even for a random acquaintance, it’s available as a PDF from this link. Paper not included. Staples and punched hole also not included. Supplies may be limited. Order today!

And if anyone would like a Dropbox referral code, here’s mine. More Dropbox for you, more Dropbox for me. Like the calendar — free.

Nancy New Year

[Nancy, January 1, 1951. Click for a larger view.]

The fence needed mending. Happy New Year from Nancy and Sluggo and me.

Related reading
All OCA Nancy posts (Pinboard)

New Year’s Eve 1914

[“RECORD REVELS USHER IN 1915. Broadway’s Largest Crowd Gives a Noisy Welcome to the New Year.” The New York Times, January 1, 1915.]

Steven Pinker, name-caller

Steven Pinker in The Sense of Style:

slinging around insults like simplistic , naïve , or vulgar , does not prove that the things the person is saying are false. Nor is the point of disagreement or criticism to show that you are smarter or nobler than your target.

Steven Pinker in The Atlantic :

Nathan Heller’s an ignoramus.

Again with the name-calling. This epithet joins a lengthy catalogue of epithets that appear in The Sense of Style: “anal-retentives,” “faultfinders,” “the Gotcha! Gang,” ”grammar nannies,” and so on.

What Heller says (about the sentence “It was he”) is mistaken. Pinker is right about that. But again with the name-calling, which violates The Sense of Style ’s fifth and final piece of advice (quoted above) about what’s really important in writing.

I have no idea if Pinker has read my review of his book. If he has, he hasn’t called me an ignoramus, at least not publicly. But then unlike Heller, I don’t write for The New Yorker. (Also, I’m not an ignoramus.)

I’ll quote my post on bad advice and misinformation: “It’s easier to persuade someone that what you’re saying is true and useful if you can keep from calling them stupid.” Or better still: “It’s easier to persuade someone that what you’re saying is true and useful if you can keep from thinking that they’re stupid.”

Related posts
Bad advice and misinformation
Pinker on Strunk and White
Steven Pinker’s The Sense of Style

[Yes, I realize that the post title is an instance of name-calling.]

Overheard

In a nearby city, weeks and weeks ago, as I was walking down the street:

“Party, party, party! Hey, old year, let’s all go to sleep.”

Related reading
All OCA “overheard” posts (Pinboard)

The McNulty

To mark the remastered release of The Wire, McDonald’s has added an item to its menu: the McNulty. I quote from the press release, which describes the ingredients like so: “a generous helping of horseshit and testosterone, served on a bed of broken promises, garnished with red ribbon and Jameson’s.”

Overtime not included.

A related post
“Day at a time”

Looking up salve

The noun salve (“a healing ointment for application to wounds or sores”): even though the l is silent, the word must come from the Latin salvāre , no? Some idea of saving, healing, making whole, no?

No. The OED, source of the definition above, explains:

Old English sealf (feminine) = Old Saxon salƀa , Middle Low German salve (whence Middle Swedish salva , Swedish salfva , Danish salve ), Middle Dutch salve , salf (Dutch zalf ), Old High German salpa , salba (feminine), salb , salp neuter (Middle High German, German salbe feminine) < Germanic *salbā strong feminine < pre-Germanic *solpā , cognate with Sanskrit sarpís clarified butter, sṛpra greasy, and Albanian ǵalpe butter; perhaps also with Greek ὄλπη , ὄλπις oil-flask.

Yes, it came up in conversation.

Domestic comedy

“The opposite of instant isn’t pour-over. The opposite of instant is regular.”

Related reading
All OCA domestic comedy (Pinboard)

[Though in our house, regular is pour-over.]