Billie Holiday centenary

Eleanora Fagan, Billie Holiday, Lady Day, was born on April 7, 1915. WKCR-FM is playing her music all day today and all day tomorrow. All Day, all day. Now: Billie Holiday and Ben Webster.

Other Billie Holiday posts
In the Manhattan telephone directory : On December 8 : Portrait of Billie Holiday and Mister : “[T]hree days after Bastille day, yes”

Sidney synchronicity

The quoted passage attached to Garner’s Usage Tip of the Day today is from Sir Philip Sidney’s Astrophel and Stella, the final lines of sonnet 1:

Biting my truant pen, beating myself for
    spite,
“Fool,” said my Muse to me, “look in thy
    heart, and write.”

I dig Sidney: Astrophel and Stella , An Apology for Poetry , Arcadia. I’m pretty sure that I read both The Old Arcadia and The New Arcadia back in grad school days. One, or both, came in the form of an enormous Penguin, orange-spined.

[The title of Sidney‘s sequence appears on a classroom blackboard in this post. You can subscribe to Garner’s Usage Tip of the Day here. I’ve used a different text from Garner’s for Sidney’s poem. Why getting lines of poetry to look right on an iPhone means having them look awkward elsewhere, I just don’t know.]

Overheard

“It is important for men in the middle ages to eat right.”

And for Renaissance men, too.

Related reading
All OCA “overheard” posts (Pinboard)

[The television was on for “warmth.” The speaker meant middle age.]

“Us teenagers”

[“Us Teenagers. Beard hopefully started on pensive teenage high school student as others work on lessons at blackboard & desk.” Photograph by Alfred Eisenstaedt. Oklahoma City, 1948. From the Life Photo Archive. Click for a larger view.]

What was going on in this classroom: Astrophel Stella, Conebury Tails, Liric Poetry, Elizabethan, Elizabethan, Elizabethan? Spelling practice?

*

7:54 a.m.: Elaine figured out that it must be a grid: Macbeth → Drama → Elizabethan. But the grid also yields Conebury Tails → Liric Poetry → Elizabethan. I thought J. Celia (Celio ?) might mean Ben Jonson’s “Song: to Celia,” but whatever it is, it goes with Essay and Old English. Help! Which, by the way, is Old English.

[A Google search for conebery tails yields ”Did you mean: canterbury tales.”]

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.

A related post
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).

A related post
The Practical Stylist