From Newark to Boston

[A few weeks ago.]

We were sitting in Newark’s Penn Station, waiting for the Bolt bus that would take our son Ben back to Boston. It was quite a scene. An elderly black woman had just cussed out an interracial couple for being an interracial couple. The couple gave back as good as they got, drove the woman off, and began laughing about the encounter. And then I noticed a young white guy pacing. He wore track pants and a sleeveless T-shirt, and he kept doffing and donning his baseball cap, which he wore backwards. He had a muscular upper body and a shaved head and looked tightly wound, as if waiting for a bell to ring and a boxing match to begin. He had been standing outside near the Bolt bus that had been idling when we arrived, which of course had not been the bus to Boston. Now, inside the waiting area, he walked our way: “Are you waiting for the bus to Boston? Because I think that’s it.” He had spotted another Bolt pulling up outside. He too was going to Boston. We headed out, but it was the wrong bus, again.

Now he and I stood by the curb watching for further activity, and we spotted a third bus, waiting to turn the corner and head our way. He saw it first. Greyhound? We saw greyish-blue. But then as the bus began to move toward the intersection: orange. A Bolt bus. “They should hire you to keep everyone on top of things here,” I said. “No thanks — I spent enough time around here homeless,” he replied, entirely matter-of-factly. He explained that he had moved up to Boston, that it had been a good decision, and that he had come back to New Jersey to visit family. ”I hope there are better days ahead for you,” I said. “Thanks,” he said, and nodded.

This third Bolt was the bus to Boston. We said goodbye to Ben, watched as he queued up, and walked back to our car.

Amieux-Freres sardines

[Advertisement by Georges Fay, 1896–1900. From the New York Public Library Digital Collections. Click for a larger view.]

An approximate translation: “Amieux Brothers / Sardines and other canned goods / 11 factories employing 3500 workers producing 12 million cans a year / Required on every can: Our motto is like our name: Always the best.” I like the pun on Amieux and à mieux.

I may forget litotes , but I never forget sardines. Amieux Freres continues to this day. Not a bad run.

Related reading
All OCA sardine posts (Pinboard)

[Translation corrections and improvements are welcome.]

A useful made-up word

Coined by Kathyrn Schulz, the word is lapsonym : “a word whose meaning you forget no matter how many times you look it up.” I’d like to think of lapsonym as also applying to a word you forget no matter how many times you look it up. My favorite lapsonym is litotes . Again and again, I have to stop and wonder: what’s the name for the figure of speech that, &c. Or I confuse litotes with apophasis. But probably not after writing this post.

Reader, what’s your favorite (or least favorite) lapsonym?

[I know, all words are made up.]

Eames radios

“These little-known artifacts, which date from the mid- to late-1940s, are among the Eameses’ earliest experiments with their plywood-molding process”: “Design’s Best-Kept Secret: Eames Radios” (The Wall Street Journal).

Related reading
All OCA Charles and Ray Eames posts (Pinboard)

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.

Related reading
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.]