The Allusionist, a podcast

“Etymological adventures with Helen Zaltzman“: The Allusionist is a fortnightly podcast about language. I’ve listened to the first eight episodes and am rationing the four now remaining. Cryptic-crossword clues, fake names and fake words in reference works and dictionaries, museum labels (here called “text panels”): The Allusionist has all these. Highly recommended for anyone who loves language.

From The American Language

Captain Basil Hall, who was here in 1827 and 1828, and published his “Travels in North America” in 1829, was so upset by some of the novelties he encountered that he went to see Noah Webster, then seventy years old, to remonstrate. Webster upset him still further by arguing stoutly that “his countrymen had not only a right to adopt new words, but were obliged to modify the language to suit the novelty of the circumstances, geographical and political, in which they were placed.” The lexicographer went on to observe judicially that “it is quite impossible to stop the progress of language — it is like the course of the Mississippi, the motion of which, at times, is scarcely perceptible; yet even then it possesses a momentum quite irresistible. Words and expressions will be forced into use, in spite of all the exertions of all the writers in the world.”

“But surely,” persisted Hall, “such innovations are to be deprecated?”

“I don’t know that,” replied Webster. “If a word becomes universally current in America, where English is spoken, why should not take its station in the language?”

To this Hall made an honest British reply. “Because,” he said, “there are words enough already.”

Webster try to mollify him by saying that “there were not fifty words in all which were used in America and not in England” — an underestimate of large proportions —, but Hall went away muttering.

H. L. Mencken, The American Language: An Inquiry into the Development of English in the United States, 4th ed. (New York: Alred A. Knopf, 1936).

I am taking on The American Language and Moby-Dick this summer, Behemoth and Leviathan. More excerpts appearing soon.

[Re: Captain Hall: see also this (apocryphal) observation.]

The Hammacher Schlemmer crazy making hyphen shortage problem.

Paying attention always costs. In this case, the cost is the hour or two it’s taken me to work on this post. It all began when Elaine ordered an item from Hammacher Schlemmer. But I’m not blaming Elaine. The item arrived with a catalogue. I started to read.

I don’t know how long Hammacher Schlemmer has had hyphen trouble. Judging from the company’s name, I would say a long time. The catalogue’s cover announces “America’s Longest Running Catalog.” Yet the catalogue is not devoted to running gear. Nor is it especially long — only eighty pages. Do you see trouble ahead?

Virtually every item in the Hammacher Schlemmer “Father’s Day 2015” catalogue is identified in a headline that begins with The and ends with a product-name noun followed by a period.¹ All modifiers are attributive — that is, they precede the final noun: The Levitating Lamp. The Tabletop Fireplace. So far, so good. But again and again, Hammacher Schlemmer piles up modifiers that turn these headlines into exceedingly strange descriptions, almost always hyphen-free — or hyphen free.² At their strangest, these descriptions have the flavor of awkwardly literal translations of Homeric epithets — say, “great glittering-helmeted Hector” [μέγας κορυθαίολος Ἕκτωρ ]:

The Brightness Zooming Natural Light Lamp.

The Eye Fatigue Preventing Reading Glasses.

The Intruder Discouraging Television Mimic.

The Knee Pain Relieving Walking Shoes.

The Thinning Hair Boar Bristle Brush.

The Under Seat Rolling Carry On.

The Voice Clarifying Over Ear Amplifier.

My comparison would work better if Homer’s poetry had more consumer goods. But one Hammacher Schlemmer headline is very nearly Homeric:

The Walk On Air Strap Sandals.

Hermes might like a pair of those.³

It may be that there’s an arch, Martini-tinged sense of humor at work in these headlines, a status marker of the sort that Paul Fussell wrote about in his book Class . If so, I think that the comedy comes at the cost of clarity.

The Intruder Discouraging Television Mimic, by the way, is old wine is a new bottle. Or as Hammacher Schlemmer would say, The Containing Old Wine New Bottle.

Related reading
All OCA punctuation posts (Pinboard)
Living on hyphens
Mr. Hyphen and Mr. Faulkner
One more from Mr. Hyphen

¹ I count one exception in eighty pages: The Hard Floor Scrubber with Spray Applicator. Or in true catalogue syntax: The Spray Applicator Included Hard Floor Scrubber.

² I count three hyphens in eighty pages: The Canadian Year-Round Rain Barrel, The One-Acre Natural Attractant Mosquito Trap, The Spring-Loaded Running Shoes.

³ Reading his translation of Odyssey 5 to an audience in 2001, the classicist Stanley Lombardo departed from the printed text and spoke of Hermes’s “golden air shoes.” I cannot resist inventing one Hammacher Schlemmer epithet: The God Made Reality Depicting Shield.

[Mary Norris’s Between You & Me (2015) and Edward N. Teall’s Meet Mr. Hyphen (1937) got me noticing hyphens, and their absence.]

Ambiguous balloon

[Mark Trail, June 8, 2015.]

Rusty’s ventriloquism lessons are paying off. But where is he throwing his voice? Into the dock? Or into Mark’s elbow? That’s some ventriloquism.

Related reading
All OCA Mark Trail posts (Pinboard)

Eberhard Faber IV

Sean at Contrapuntalism talks with Eberhard Faber IV. For me, the most exciting bit of news in their conversation is that the Mongol pencil was named for is said to have been named for John Eberhard’s favorite soup: purée Mongole.

Orange Crate Art is a Mongol-friendly zone.

*

June 15: As Faber made clear in a 1971 article for Fortune (“What Happened When I Gave Up the Good Life and Became President”), the story behind the Mongol name is apocryphal. I have revised accordingly. Thanks to Sean at Contrapuntalism for the reference.

Partie de campagne [A Day in the Country ]

[Inside: Rodolphe (Jacques Brunius) and Henri (Georges D’Arnoux). Outside: Henriette (Sylvia Bataille) and her mother Mme. Dufour (Jane Marken). Click for a larger view.]

Adapted from a short story by Guy de Maupassant, Jean Renoir’s 1936 film Partie de campagne [A Day in the Country ] is about the male gaze, certainly: as Henriette and Mme. Dufour swing, they are watched in turn by M. Dufour (André Gabriello), Dufour’s shop assistant and future son-in-law Anatole (Paul Temps), four grinning schoolboys, a pack of nervous seminarians and their priestly keepers, Rodolphe (a young boatman on the make), and his more somber friend Henri. But the film is about so much more. The Dufours, their daughter Henriette, Mme. Dufour’s mother (Gabrielle Fontan), and Anatole have left Paris for a day in the country, fishing and picnicking. They are urban rubes: “There’s so much dirt in the country!” says Mme. Dufour. Yet they are charmed by the magic of the natural world: sunlight, a cherry tree, a nightingale, a river. Rodolphe and Henri plot to get the two younger women to themselves. What follows cannot be predicted. Yet when one watches the film a second time, the course of the action seems inevitable.

“We cannot go to the country / for the country will bring us / no peace,” William Carlos Williams wrote in “Raleigh Was Right.” So too in Renoir’s film, but for a different reason: here, going to the country stirs feelings that can find expression nowhere else. It ruins a person for the rest of life.

Partie de campagne is available from The Criterion Collection, whose designers have created, as always, a beautiful and inventive package. The restaurant’s signboard inspires the disc menu:




So beautiful. Credit goes (I think) to art director Sarah Habibi and type designer F. Ron Miller.

[A bonus: a musical score by Joseph Kosma, who wrote the music for “Les feuilles mortes” [“Autumn Leaves”]. A special added bonus: Renoir plays the proprietor of the Restaurant Poulain. His longtime partner Marguerite Houlle Renoir plays the waitress.]

Recently updated

A small press v. the Salinger estate The Salinger Trust has asked that the suit be dismissed.

Hermann Zapf (1918–2015)

The typographer and calligrapher Hermann Zapf has died. Here, from Quartz, is a look at his work (it includes a 1967 film of Zapf drawing letters). Hermann Zapf, as in Optima, Palatino, Zapf Dingbats, and Zapfino.

From Robert Walser

A park like this resembles a large, silent, isolated room. In fact it’s always Sunday in a park, by the way, for it’s always a bit melancholy, and the melancholy stirs up vivid memories of home, and Sunday is something that only ever existed at home, where you were a child. Sundays have something parental and childish about them.

Robert Walser, “The Park,” in Berlin Stories, trans. Susan Bernofsky (New York: New York Review Books, 2012).

I know: there are many kinds of Sundays, including those with “late / Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair.” But when I read Walser, I believe him.

Related reading
All OCA Robert Walser posts (Pinboard)

Ronnie Gilbert (1926–2015)

Ronnie Gilbert, singer, songwriter, and social and political activist, was one of the original Weavers. The New York Times has an obituary.

There’s more to Ronnie Gilbert’s work than the Weavers. But here is Weavers’ last song (and a little bit more).