Jeremiah Moss’s Vanishing New York

“A Cranky Blogger Crusades to Preserve the Ordinary in New York”: The New York Times reports on Jeremiah Moss and Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York.

The rising cost of college

Law professor Paul F. Campos, writing in The New York Times about “The Real Reason College Tuition Costs So Much” : “If over the past three decades car prices had gone up as fast as tuition, the average new car would cost more than $80,000.”

The real reason, Campos explains (and which should be no surprise to anyone who has observed the workings of colleges from the inside): the growth of administration and administrative salaries. Vice presidencies, directorships, and assistants to assistants to assistants. I’m exaggerating, but not by much.

[The real reason? At least a real reason. Campos could also consider amenities: increasingly lavish recreation centers and such. And lack of public funding has hurt higher education.]

How to improve writing (no. 56)

I missed the lunar eclipse, but I caught this sentence, from USA Today :

As with all lunar eclipses, its safe to look at the moon during the eclipse, unlike during solar eclipses.

It’s safe: it is. But also: unlike during is an awkward construction. The things that are unlike are lunar and solar eclipses, not during the eclipses. Better:

It’s dangerous to look at the moon during a solar eclipse, but lunar eclipses are always safe for viewing.

Or:

Lunar eclipses, unlike solar eclipses, are safe for viewing.

On September 28, there will be another lunar eclipse to view, or miss.

Related reading
All OCA How to improve writing posts (Pinboard)

*

April 5: The sentence no longer appears in the USA Today article.

[Garner’s Modern American Usage glosses unlike in as common in American and British English. Still, Bryan Garner says, “careful writers will avoid it.” This post is no. 56 in a series, “How to improve writing,” dedicated to improving stray bits of public prose.]

Webster’s endpapers

[Click for a larger, swirlier view.]

Endpapers of Webster’s New International Dictionary, second edition (1954). I’ve used the third edition for many years. Reading Mary Norris’s Between You & Me made me decide to buy a W2, a dictionary I’ve used only in libraries.

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The Story of Ain’t (W2 and W3)

CW Pencil Enterprise

“CW Pencil Enterprise of New York City was founded in November 2014 by Caroline Weaver, amateur pencil collector but lifelong pencil lover”: CW Pencils, 100a Forsyth Street, in Lower Manhattan.

One more from Sheridan Baker

From the chapter “Correcting Bad Sentences”:

Now let us contemplate evil — or at least the innocently awful, the bad habits that waste our words, fog our thoughts, and wreck our delivery. Our thoughts are naturally roundabout, our phrases naturally secondhand. Our satisfaction in merely getting something down on paper naturally blinds us to our errors and ineptitudes. Writing is devilish. It hypnotizes us into believing we have said what we meant, when our words actually say something else: ”Every seat in the house was filled to capacity.” Good sentences therefore come from constant practice in correcting the bad.

Sheridan Baker, The Practical Stylist (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1973).

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The Practical Stylist

The Practical Stylist

[Sheridan Baker, The Practical Stylist (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1973). Click for a larger view.]

I like this cover. The assemblage, as the back cover calls it, is by Murray Tinkelman, an artist who works in a great many styles. (Here he appears to have assembled not pictures of type but type itself.) If you browse Leif Peng’s The Art of Murray Tinkelman, you may realize that you’ve seen this artist’s work many times before.

I like The Practical Stylist too. It is — or in earlier incarnations, was — an elegant book. It is a distinguished example of the “handbook,” the kind of book typically assigned in first-year college English. Sheridan Baker (1918–2000) recognized that brevity in a handbook can be a virtue, that brevity makes such a book engaging and useful. The first edition, in print from 1962 to 1967, weighs in at a modest xvi + 144 pages. The third (1973) edition: x + 182 pages. Longman’s most recent ghost edition (2005): 288 pages, still far smaller than the average handbook, which now often runs close to a thousand pages. A thousand pages! Such a book is like a black hole: it holds everything and gives no light. While it may be browsable, it is not readable. From Baker’s Preface:

I mean the book to be practical also in its brevity. Most handbooks on writing seems too big, too wordy, too involved. They seem to get mired in their own diligence and to stay stuck on the student’s shelf. This book aims to travel light, to cover the ground without inordinate deliberation. I have included only what seems useful and essential.

“This book aims to travel light”: what a lovely way to say it. And what a wonderful example for students: a teacher of writing who uses I. Here and elsewhere in The Practical Stylist, Baker writes with uncondescending intelligence. About words:

“What we need is a mixed diction,” said Aristotle, and his point remains true twenty-three centuries and several languages later. The aim of style, he says, is to be clear but distinguished. For clarity, we need common, current words; but used alone, these are commonplace, and as ephemeral as everyday talk. For distinction, we need words not heard every minute, unusual words, large words, foreign words, metaphors; but used alone, these become gibberish. What we need is a diction that marries the popular with the dignified, the clear current with the sedgy margins of language and thought.

About sentences:

Your style will emerge once you can manage some length of sentence, some intricacy of subordination, some vigor of parallel, and some play of short against long, of amplitude against brevity. Try the very long sentence, and the very short. The best short sentences are meatiest. . . . Experiment, too, with the fragment. The fragment is close to conversation. It is the laconic reply, the pointed afterthought, the quiet exclamation, the telling question.Try to cut and place it clearly (usually at the beginnings and ends of paragraphs) so as not to lead your reader to expect a full sentence, or to suspect a poor writer.

And about paragraphs:

You build the bulk of your essay with standard paragraphs, with blocks of concrete ideas, and they must fit smoothly. But they must also remain as perceptible parts, to rest your reader’s eye and mind. Indeed, the paragraph originated, among the Greeks, as a resting place and place finder, being first a mere mark (graphos) in the margin alongside (para) an unbroken sheet of handwriting — the proofreader’s familiar ¶. You have heard that a paragraph is a single idea, and this is true. But so is a word, usually; and so is a sentence, sometimes. It seems best, after all, to think of a paragraph as something you use for your reader’s convenience, rather than as some granitic form laid down by molten logic.

Sedgy margins, the laconic reply, molten logic: it kills me, as Holden Caulfield would say, that, not so long ago, a textbook writer could write with such verve — and could trust that he would be understood by college freshmen. The voice that speaks in The Practical Stylist is not that of a textbook: it’s that of an older writer addressing a younger writer, without condescension, offering insight and advice from long experience. Looking at the chapters about words and sentences and paragraphs in a recent 926-page handbook, I find a brief history of English; guidance on dictionary use; lists of commonly confused words; explanations of slang, regionalisms, and jargon; examples of coördination and subordination and parallelism; instruction in the importance of unity, organization, and coherence; and much, much more. But I find nothing comparable to the writerly intelligence in these passages from Baker. Nor do I find the word diction , or the suggestion that the student writer will achieve an individual style, or an explanation of how the paragraph began.

The cover, the prose, the absence of cheesy graphics and stock photos: The Practical Stylist, third edition, seems to me an artifact of a less colorful but far more sophisticated time.

Richard Marius’s A Writer’s Companion (1985, out of print), Verlyn Klinkenborg’s Several Short Sentences About Writing (2012), and Michael Harvey’s The Nuts and Bolts of College Writing (2013) are three recent books that share The Practical Stylist ’s virtues of brevity and a writerly voice. I’ve written briefly about Marius and Klinkenborg (whose Several Short Sentences wouldn’t be considered a “handbook”) and have recommended Harvey’s book in its first and second editions many times in passing.The alternatives to the book-as-brick are fewer than they should be.

A related post
Guy Fleming frontispiece, The Practical Stylist (first edition)

[The first course I taught as a grad student: Practical Stylistics, an ungainly name for “comp.” We grad students were given not Baker’s book to use but Frederick Crews’s The Random House Handbook, a dreadful book whose illustrative sentences ran to thickheaded athletes and cheerleaders and faculty complaints about parking. Brilliant, eh? About black holes: I don’t know how they work, or if they even exist. I’m just making a metaphor.]

Domestic comedy

“It’s not so much that they’re egomaniacs; it’s more that they don’t seem to know that other people exist.”

Related reading
All OCA domestic comedy posts (Pinboard)

A new Fowler

Oxford University Press has published a new (fourth) edition of Fowler’s Dictionary of Modern English Usage, edited by Jeremy Butterfield. Here is a sample, on the use of like as a space-filler in conversation:

Many people below the age of, say, twenty-five, or rather more if they are American, seem incapable of constructing a single affirmative sentence without at least one like in it. One devoutly hopes that the unfortunates hooked in early life will be able to kick this American verbal drug as they mature, but the signs are not good: weaning them off this addiction looks as unlikely as eliminating crack cocaine.

It is no doubt true, as highly technical academic papers have suggested, that it is not merely a “meaningless” filler, that it has its own complex rules, and that it fulfils subtle interpersonal functions. However, it is just as true that its overuse will cause listeners outside the speaker’s immediate circle, wider social group, or age cohort to ignore the content of the message completely, to assume that the speaker is little short of brain-dead, or, in extreme cases, to wish they had a discreet firearm to hand.

Such hyperbole, such melodrama. Shades of Lynne Truss. I’m like, Oy.

A David Schubert poem

April is National Poetry Month. In nearly eleven years of blogging, I have taken notice of this month just once. For anyone who loves poetry, the idea of month is silly. Poetry is every day. “For poetry is the blossom and the fragrance of all human knowledge, human thought, human passions, emotions, language”: Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

Here is a poem with blossoms, a love poem, by David Schubert (1913–1946), whose exuberance and wit belie the circumstances of his short life. Schubert is, to my mind, one of the great American poets, though his work remains little known. I am lucky to have found my way to it.



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David Schubert, TR5-3718

[“Hail and farewell”: Ave atque vale, from the Roman poet Catullus’s poem addressed to his dead brother. Les Sylphides, unitalicized in the poem, is a 1909 ballet, choreography by Michel Fokine, music by Frédéric Chopin. I found Coleridge’s sentence in the entry for poetry in Webster’s New International Dictionary, second edition, a copy of which just came in the mail.]