“Sardines in instant cans”

[Life, July 24, 1964. Click for a larger, fishier view.]

What will they think of next? Perhaps a way to make sardines more photogenic. Oh, wait — it’s been fifty years.

Related posts
Alex Katz, painter, eater Sardines for lunch, every day
City for Conquest (and sardines)
End of the U.S. sardine industry
The frightening truth that they don’t want you to know about sardines
Go fish
New directions in sardines
Sardine moose
Satan’s seafood

[The lunch hour approaches.]

Word of the Day: expiate

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

1 : to extinguish the guilt incurred by

2 : to make amends for

M-W explains:

The word derives from expiare, Latin for “to atone for,” a root that in turn traces to the Latin term for “pious.” Expiate originally referred to warding off evil by using sacred rites or to using sacred rites to cleanse or purify something. By the 17th century, Shakespeare (and others) were using it to mean “to put an end to”: “But when in thee time’s furrows I behold, / Then look I death my days should expiate” (Sonnet 22). Those senses have since become obsolete, and now only the “extinguish the guilt” and “make amends” senses remain in use.

Expiate is for me a William Faulkner word. It’s prominent in Light in August (1932), where it’s used by the narrator (along with expiation ) and by two characters, both religious fanatics:

“To what I done and what I suffered to expiate it, what you done and are womansuffering aint no more than a handful of rotten dirt.”

*

He was lying so, on his back, his hands crossed on his breast like a tomb effigy, when he heard again feet on the cramped stairs. They were not the man’s; he had heard McEachern drive away in the buggy, departing in the twilight to drive three miles and to a church which was not Presbyterian, to serve the expiation which he had set himself for the morning.

*

She began to talk about a child, as though instinct had warned her that now was the time when she must either justify or expiate.

*

Again they stood to talk, as they used to do two years ago; standing in the dusk while her voice repeated its tale: “. . . not to school, then, if you dont want to go . . . Do without that . . . Your soul. Expiation of . . .”

*

The mind and the heart purged then, if it is ever to be; the week and its whatever disasters finished and summed and expiated by the stern and formal fury of the morning service; the next week and its whatever disasters not yet born, the heart quiet now for a little while beneath the cool soft blowing of faith and hope.

Expiate is one of a number of words that always recall works of literature in which I encountered them. Other such words:

Apoplexy, avatar, bandbox, heifer, sanguine, sempiternal : Artificer : Ineluctable : Iridescent : Magnifico : Opusculum

Erin McKean on how dictionaries work

Lexicographer Erin McKean, interviewed for The Chicago Manual of Style ’s Shop Talk:

I’d love for dictionary entries to be used as you’d use the technical specs for some piece of equipment. In the same way that you’d check whether the washing machine you want to buy has the right cubic capacity for your household, you’d look up a word to check whether it had the right denotation, range of use, tone, literary allusions, or what-have-you for your intended use. The role of the dictionary is to help you decide on the right word for you, not to rule whether something is or isn’t a word.

I truly believe that if something is used as a word, it’s a word. The rest is just bookkeeping.

Related posts
Erin McKean talks (Why isn’t asshat in the dictionary?)
A “wheelchair dude” in our Macs

Domestic comedy

“Perry Mason meets The Man from U.N.C.L.E.! It’s like Godzilla meets Rodan!”

Related reading
All OCA domestic comedy posts (Pinboard)

[David McCallum appeared in the Perry Mason episode The Case of the Fifty Millionth Frenchman (February 20, 1964). Later that year he began playing Illya Kuryakin on The Man from U.N.C.L.E.. Better living through TV!]

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.]