Samuel Charters (1929–2015)

Samuel Charters was a pioneer of blues scholarship. He may have done more than anyone else to popularize the inchoate but deeply appealing idea of “the country blues.” The New York Times has an obituary: “Samuel Charters, Foundational Scholar of the Blues, Dies at 85.”

[Deeply appealing to whom? To young palefaces like me who were looking for something genuine in music.]

Word of the Day: sprachgefühl

Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Day is sprachgefühl :

1: the character of a language

2 : an intuitive sense of what is linguistically appropriate

M-W explains:

Sprachgefühl was borrowed into English from German at the end of the 19th century and combines two German nouns, Sprache, meaning “language, speech,” and Gefühl, meaning “feeling.” (Nouns are capitalized in German, and you'll occasionally see sprachgefühl capitalized in English too . . . .) We’re quite certain that the quality of sprachgefühl is common among our readers, but the word itself is rare, making only occasional appearances in our language.

It’s surprising that this commentary on sprachgefühl makes no mention of David Foster Wallace, whose essay “Authority and American Usage” mentions the word in its gloss of SNOOT, the Wallace family acronym for a usage fanatic: “Sprachgefühl Necessitates Our Ongoing Tendance” or “Syntax Nudniks Of Our Time.”

Then again, it might not be surprising that Wallace is missing from this commentary: he was a member of the American Heritage Dictionary Usage Panel. Dictionary politics could be at work.

A related post
See Bryan Garner and David Foster Wallace (More on SNOOT)

[Merriam-Webster, why do you make it difficult to share the Word of the Day in the old-fashioned way? I had to go to Twitter to get a link to today’s word.]

Time Savers Easy Correspondence Card

[Made by E. C. Kropp Co., Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Click for a larger view.]

Long before canned e-mail, or any e-mail, there was the Time Savers Easy Correspondence Card. It has the linen finish one often finds on older postcards. 1930s? 1940s? I like “I spend evenings but no money.” And I like roaming through an antiques mall and buying a single postcard. Big fun, cheap.

Unlike canned e-mail, this card of course is a joke on modern ideas about efficiency.

Yours sincerely.

Domestic comedy

“Me, you know what I’m like when it gets cold, don’t you?”

“Yes, I do.”

Related reading
All OCA domestic comedy posts (Pinboard)

[Yesterday: spring. This morning: 29°.]

Canned e-mails

Canned Emails (no hyphen) is a free service offering just that. And boy, do they sound canned. Here is “it’s been a while, let’s catch up”:

Subject: Hey. How’s it going?

It’s been a while since we’ve last talked!

How are you?

I just wanted to catch up with you and see how you’re doing.

Hit me back, and let me know what’s happened since we last talked. I’d love to catch up.

To which the appropriate (canned) reply might be “received task, will do later”:

Subject: Got it. Thanks

Just a heads up: I’m extremely busy right now, so it will take me some time to get to this.

Please remind me again if I don’t get to this soon.

Also, let me know if your priorities change, and you no longer need this finished.

File under O brave new world.

A related post
Sample letters, 1952

[I’ve added proper apostrophes to the canned messages. Couldn’t help myself.]

A small press v. the Salinger estate

From Publishers Weekly :

The Devault-Graves Agency filed a lawsuit against the J.D. Salinger Literary Trust in a Tennessee court on March 16, claiming that the estate has, without legal basis, thwarted the press’s attempts to publish and distribute international editions of its collection of early Salinger short stories, Three Early Stories .

It seems to me quite a trick for the Salinger estate to stake a claim to stories for which Salinger never held copyright.

*

June 7, 2015: The Salinger Trust has asked that the suit be dismissed.

*

October 20, 2015: The case has been transferred to New Hampshire Federal Court.

*

December 11, 2015: Devault-Graves is dropping its lawsuit.

*

December 12, 2015: More: “If the law in their home country backs our copyright, then the Salinger Trust cannot prevent publication in that country,” Devault said. “Our decision to withdraw the lawsuit is certainly no loss for us. We’ve essentially put the Salinger Trust on notice that we will defend our right to publish in every foreign market that is legitimately open to us. It is merely a new way of looking at the equation.”

And still more: “Despite Salinger’s opposition, Graves told [Publishers Weekly ] that the publisher has licensed the book to 10 foreign publishers, and that there are now six foreign editions in print.”

An aside: David Shields and Shane Salerno’s claim (in their biography Salinger ) that a volume of new Salinger work will appear in 2015 is beginning to look doubtful.

[I wrote about Three Early Stories last year.]

Five sentences on the post office

A Google exploratory module lands on Orange Crate Art: could you write five sentences on the post office .

Yes, you could, if you would forget Google, sit down, concentrate, and do your own homework.

Other “five sentences” posts
Bleak House : The cat : Clothes : The driver : My house : Life : Life on the moon : The past (1) : The past (2) : The rabbit : The ship : Smoking : The telephone : The world

[Ever since I wrote a post on five sentences from Charles Dickens’s Bleak House, Google searches for five sentences (that is, for ready-made homework) have been ending up at Orange Crate Art. Could you write five sentences on the post office is one of them.]

Pantone 347

The color of the day: Pantone 347. Happy Saint Patrick’s Day.

[C? Pantone explains: “The letter suffix refers to the paper stock on which it is printed: a ‘C’ for coated or gloss paper, ‘U’ for uncoated paper and an ‘M’ for matte or dull paper.”]

Rip and run

A great moment in The Wire: Omar Little, testifying for the prosecution, tells State’s Attorney Ilene Nathan how he makes a living. From “All Prologue” (July 6, 2003):

“What is your occupation?”

“Occupation?”

“What exactly do do you for a living, Mr. Little?”

“I rip and run.”

“You . . . ?”

“I robs drug dealers.”

This exchange has led some viewers to conclude that rip and run and rob drug dealers are synonymous. Urban Dictionary’s top-rated definition for rip and run has the phrase meaning just that. Ripping and running can indeed suggest criminal activity: the phrase turns up in the title of a book on addiction and crime, Michael Agar’s Ripping and Running: A Formal Ethnography of Urban Heroin Addicts (1973). And “Ripping and Running: Heroin and Crime” is a chapter title in Tom Carnwath and Ian Smith’s Heroin Century (2002). But UD’s top-rated definition for ripping and running suggests a much broader meaning: “Maintaining a busy, frantic pace; hyper tasking.”

The OED and Webster’s Third are of no help with rip and run, but both offer definitions of rip that suggest this broader meaning. From the OED: “To rush along vigorously; to move at great speed” (1858). From W3: “to move unchecked : proceed without restraint : rush headlong.” We might say that one who is ripping and running is on a tear.

A sampling of references that suggest a much broader meaning:

I lets you rip and run, baby, just as long as
    you please
Lets you rip and run, baby, just as long as you
    please
You might meets another man who will set my
    heart at ease

Bob Gaddy, “Rip and Run” (1958)

*

Children play nearby and among the men. They rip and run up and down the street and occasionally stop a man, apparently unmindful of how he looks, to say, “Got a quarter, mister?”

Elijah Anderson, A Place on the Corner (1976)

*

“I’m always ripping and running and ripping and running,” she likes to say. “Here and there, to the church and back, all day, every day. But that’s what it takes to do it right.”

Susan Orlean, Saturday Night (1990)

*

Children from these generally permissive homes have a great deal of latitude and are allowed to “rip and run” up and down the streets. They often come home from school, put their books down, and go right back out the door.

Elijah Anderson, “The Social Ecology of Youth Violence” (1998)

*

Seeing the kids ripping and running through the mega Toys “R” Us was a sight for sore eyes. Jordan was terrorizing the store employees. He was pulling down everything in sight that his two-and-a-half-year-old stature could reach.

Danielle Santiago, Grindin’: A Harlem Story (2006)

*

The tempo of life increased significantly upon the return to work. The EAADM mother described the tempo of their days as “ripping,” “running,” “hurrying,” “constantly moving,” and “racing.”

Mary Podmolik King, The Lived Experience of Becoming a First-Time, Enlisted, Army, Active-Duty, Military Mother (2006)

*

Ripping and running the streets

Perrie Gibson, A Tribute to Mama (2008)

*

Ripping and running to and fro,
Not really knowing which way to go.

A. D. Lawrence, When the Lioness Roars (2009)

Gaddy’s lyric suggests painting the town red — doing, as people now say, “whatever.” Every other use suggests an unspecified movement, energetic and hectic (and with children, unsupervised). Rip and run appears in this broader sense at least twice in The Wire. In “Port in a Storm” (August 24, 2003), Detective “Herc” Hauk, who’s been relegated to surveilliance duties, says, “The job had a little more rip-and-run to it, the way I remember it.” And in “Refugees” (October 1, 2006), Lieutenant Charles Marimow says, “That’s what we do here now. We get on the street and we rip and run.”

So, yes, Omar robs drug dealers, but rip and run has a much broader meaning. It’s even possible to hear his “rip and run” as a vague response that doesn't mean rob drug dealers: I‘m on the streets, I get around, I’m doing one thing or another. Certainly Omar would understand the theatrical value in following up a deliberately vague response with the blunt “I robs drug dealers.”

My acquaintance with rip and run goes back to my days doing literacy tutoring. I’d pick up my student to go to the library and ask, “How’s it goin’, [name redacted ]?

And his reply, often: “Rippin’ and runnin’, tryin’ to get things done.”

He was caring for his wife and, often, for their granddaughter. He was not out robbing drug dealers.

A joke in the traditional manner

Here is the punchline: The Autobahn.

No spoilers. The setup is in the comments.

More jokes in the traditional manner
A Golden Retriever
How did Bela Lugosi know what to expect?
How did Samuel Clemens do all his long-distance traveling?
What did the plumber do when embarrassed?
Which member of the orchestra was best at handling money?
Why did the doctor spend his time helping injured squirrels?
Why did Oliver Hardy attempt a solo career in movies?
Why was Santa Claus wandering the East Side of Manhattan?

[“In the traditional manner”: by or à la my dad. He must take credit for all but the doctor and Santa Claus.]