How to improve writing (no. 58)

From the news: “The current investigation is ongoing.” Can a current investigation be anything but? This sentence is an example of journalese. A Google search returns 59,000+ results.

Plain and nonredundant: The investigation continues.

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All OCA How to improve writing posts (Pinboard)

[This post is no. 58 in an ongoing series, “How to improve writing,” dedicated to improving stray bits of public prose.]

Tobias Frere-Jones on cigar-box edging

“Everything is collected by somebody, and I’m grateful for that. Ephemera, the fragile snapshots of everyday design, would be lost without collectors”: Tobias Frere-Jones looks at cigar-box edging.

Doff, don

At some point in our recent travels, it occurred to me to wonder: could the verbs doff and don be related to the prepositions off and on ? Nah, I thought: too neat, too obvious, too much like false etymologies. But I was wrong.

The Oxford English Dictionary dates doff to approximately 1375: “to put off or take off from the body (clothing, or anything worn or borne); to take off or ‘raise’ (the head-gear) by way of a salutation or token of respect.” The Dictionary describes the word as the “coalesced form of do off ,” meaning “to put off, take off, remove (something that is on).”

Don dates to 1567: “to put on (clothing, anything worn, etc.).” The word is “contracted < do on ,” meaning “to put on.” Both do off and do on originate in what the OED calls eOE, the operating system also known as early Old English. Do off is now archaic; do on, obsolete.

So if you’ve ever wondered about doff and don: there you have it, or them. I am not putting you on, or off.

Joseph Mitchell and small words

From an interview with Norman Sims:

“I do believe the most commonplace words are the ones that in the end have the most power. . . . The commonplace words are the strong ones. It reminds me of those old paving stones the fishermen use to weight the nets. Those words are like stones. I’ll search endlessly for the right small words of a few syllables that hold something up. A foundation.”

Quoted in Thomas Kunkel’s Man in Profile: Joseph Mitchell of “The New Yorker” (New York: Random House, 2015).

Related reading
All OCA Joseph Mitchell posts (Pinboard)

[How many would like to see Sims’s three interviews with Mitchell in print? Raise your hands.]

Joseph Mitchell the collector

[Poster for The Collector: Joseph Mitchell’s Quotidian Quest, a 2009 exhibit of photographs by Steve Featherstone, at Duke University’s Kreps Gallery.]

Here is an article about the exhibit. And here is an article, slightly fuzzy, with more photographs of Mitchell’s finds. My favorite detail: the wedding-day doorknob.

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Joseph Mitchell and things

Joseph Mitchell and things

Bricks, posters, forks, insulators, menus, matchbooks, hats, jars, vacuum cleaners:

He was fascinated by architecture and building materials, and it wasn’t uncommon for him to return to the tiny Greenwich Village apartment he shared with his wife and two daughters with bricks (all the manufacturers had their distinctive signatures), or discarded posters from the Fulton Fish Market, or pickle forks from hotel dining rooms (Mitchell wound up accumulating nearly three hundred), or the colorful glass insulators from telephone and electric lines. He saved restaurant menus and matchbook covers and the tiniest of receipts, and he was a faithful member of both the James Joyce Society and the Gypsy Lore Society. He was fastidious to the point of mild eccentricity. He never went outside without his hat, even if he was taking out the trash. If that trash included discarded razor blades or the lids of opened tin cans, he wrapped these carefully and then put them into Mason jars to protect the garbage collectors from accidental cuts. He routinely dusted his extensive book collection. He also enjoyed vacuuming, so much so that, later in life, he was known to turn up at his daughter’s apartment having lugged his own Hoover onto the train.

Thomas Kunkel, Man in Profile: Joseph Mitchell of “The New Yorker” (New York: Random House, 2015).

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Joseph Mitchell, scissors, paper clips

[This short New Yorker film shows Gay Talese wearing a hat to descend the stairs of his townhouse to an underground office. Found via Submitted for Your Perusal.]

One more piece of paper

My piece of paper of choice is an 8½″ × 11″ page folded into eighths and scissored across the middle — a design made popular, or at least semi-well-known, by the PocketMod. I use a blank page, no lines or grid. A PocketMod has been in my pocket for many a concert, many a film. When I travel, I keep one in my shirt pocket, the better to collect addresses, subway info, bits and pieces learned along the way. Everything in this recent post went into one little PocketMod, cleverly titled Summer 2015 .

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Joseph Mitchell, paper and pencil
William Shawn, paper and pencil

William Shawn, paper and pencil

Charles McGrath, writing about the New Yorker editor William Shawn:

Shawn carried a list inside his breast pocket — a piece of copy paper folded lengthwise and covered with notes in his tiny, feathery handwriting — and sometimes he would pull it out and consult it, crossing off items one by one with a silver mechanical pencil.

“Remembering Mr. Shawn” (The New Yorker, December 28, 1992).

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Joseph Mitchell, paper and pencil

Joseph Mitchell, paper and pencil

The everyday carry:

He overhears snippets of conversation off to one side or another, and once in a while, maybe catching a well-turned phrase, he removes a folded piece of paper from his jacket and makes note of it. (His note-taking regimen has never changed: Before he goes out for the day, he takes a piece of New Yorker copy paper, folds it in half, then neatly folds it again into thirds — the perfect size to slide in and out of a coat pocket, where he also keeps his ever-ready pencil.)

Thomas Kunkel, Man in Profile: Joseph Mitchell of “The New Yorker” (New York: Random House, 2015).

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Joseph Mitchell, scissors, paper clips

[See also Gay Talese: “I Don’t Use Notebooks. I Use Shirt Boards.”]

On Campus, worth reading

The Summer 2015 issue of On Campus (a publication of the American Federation of Teachers) has worthwhile reading for anyone who cares about American higher education. Virginia Myers’s “University Inc.” looks at corporate influences on academic life, with particular attention to the brothers Koch. Lakey’s “Koch case study” documents the Koch influence at Florida State University, “from the president’s office to content in the classroom.” “UnKoch your campus” offers guidelines for doing just that. And an unsigned article on Pearson PLC, “The power of Pearson threatens academic integrity,” examines one company’s role in publishing, testing, online instruction, and teacher education.

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Boycott Koch Industries (With a list of products)

[Nothing missing: it’s just Lakey.]