From The American Language

Text from 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). Image from the collective unconscious.

Also from The American Language
“There are words enough already”

Nantucket ≠ Illinois

Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (1851):



Also from Moby-Dick
“Nothing exists in itself”

Bloomsday 2015

It is Bloomsday. James Joyce’s novel Ulysses (1922) begins on June 16, 1904, and ends in the early hours of the following day. Here is a passage from “The Oxen of the Sun,” the novel’s fourteenth episode. The setting is a maternity hospital, where a Mrs. Purefoy is in labor, and where Stephen Dedalus and medical-student friends carouse. In Joyce’s schema for Ulysses, the technic of “The Oxen of the Sun” is “embryonic development”: the episode is written in shifting styles that chronicle the development of English prose, ending in parody, slang, slurred speech, and the language of an American revival preacher: “The Deity ain’t no nickel dime bumshow.” It is getting late (“Keep a watch on the clock”), and Stephen Dedalus and company are very drunk:


[From the Modern Library edition (1961).]

Other Bloomsday posts
2007 (The first page)
2008 (“Love’s Old Sweet Song”)
2009 (Marilyn Monroe reading Ulysses)
2010 (Leopold Bloom, “water lover”)
2011 (“[T]he creature cocoa”)
2012 (Plumtree’s Potted Meat)
2013, 2013 (Bloom and fatherhood)
2014 (Bloom, Stephen, their respective ages)

Recently updated

Eberhard Faber IV, Purée Mongole The story behind the Mongol name turns out to be apocryphal.

RZ, i.m.

[Lines from the Percy Bysshe Shelley poem “With a guitar. To Jane.” The guitar that Shelley gave to Jane Williams is in the Bodleian Library. All details there.]

This post is in memory of my friend Rob Zseleczky, who died at this time two years ago. He was a guitarist, and a poet, and his favorite poet was Shelley. We toasted to Rob’s memory last year on this night, and we’ll toast to his memory again tonight.

“In the Nostalgia District”

Mike Brady has been out looking for Marcia’s diary, which little Cindy donated to a book drive. Oops. But Mike is making progress: “It’s at one of the used-book stores downtown,” he says. ”I don’t know which one. I’ve checked a number of them.” And he still has “a handful,” as he puts it, to go. Such a handful that he and Carol divide them up to continue the search.

Where do these people live? Their townful of books reminds me of Roz Chast’s cartoon “In the Nostalgia District.”

A related post
Canned Heat and the Brady Bunch (No kidding)

[Dialogue from The Brady Bunch episode “The Possible Dream,” February 27, 1970.]

iPhoto lives

If you prefer Apple’s iPhoto to the new Photos app (as I do), you should know that it’s still possible to use iPhoto in OS X 10.10.3.

iPhoto 9.6 will not open in 10.10.3, nor can the app be updated in the App Store. (The circle-with-slashed-line on the iPhoto icon makes the app’s status clear.) As 9.6 is unusable, I felt no fear about deleting it. I then opened the App Store app, clicked on Purchases, found iPhoto in the list of purchased apps, and clicked to install. And now I have iPhoto 9.6.1, which works with 10.10.3.

Proceed at your own risk. All I am saying is that I found it possible to bring back iPhoto. Why I never saw an update notification for 9.6.1 is a question for which I have no answer. A check of the Internets suggests that many Mac users have that same question. A cynic might suspect that Apple is trying to move its users to Photos, no questions asked.

Recently updated

Purée Mongole Now with a photograph.

Pencil and paper

Khoi Vinh recently surveyed designers about the tools they use. He has now posted preliminary findings. The most common response to the question “What is your primary tool for brainstorming/ideation?”: pencil and paper.

Word of the day: gazype

[Speaking with Larry Williams (Robert Armstrong), Dan Healy (James Gleason) expresses skepticism in a colloquial manner.]

Elaine and I just went on a pre-Code tear, watching six films in Universal’s Pre-Code Hollywood Collection. The word gazype makes an appearance in the last film of the set, Search for Beauty (dir. Erle C. Kenton, 1934). Dan Healy is doubtful about Larry Williams’s scheme for a health-and-beauty magazine:

“Hey, look, you say this is on the up-and-up? Well, I don’t want to spit in no cop’s eye. If you’re hooked up with this, there's some kind of a gazype in it.”

Gazype appears to fly under all radar. But the Oxford English Dictionary has a word that could be its inspiration: the slang gazump, also spelled gasumph, gazoomph, gazumph, gezumph. As a transitive verb: “To swindle; spec. to act improperly in the sale of houses, etc.” And as a noun: “a swindle.” One citation suggests that it’s a Yiddish word, but “origin uncertain,” says the Dictionary.

The first citation for the verb is from 1928:

“Gazoomphing the sarker” is a method of parting a rich man from his money. An article is auctioned over and over again, and the money bid each time is added to it.

The first citation for the noun is from 1932:

Ere ’e is . . . parasitin’ on people all day  . . .  and then ’e objects to a little gasumph!

As Dan Healy uses the word, it seems to mean crookedness, fishiness. Was gazump well enough known that gazype would get a laugh, with Healy out of his depth in an attempt to use the lastest slang? Was gazype a fleeting variation on gazump? Or an Americanized version of British slang? Did a writer or actor pick up the word in England and misremember it? And is there no end to unanswerable questions?

Other pre-Code posts
Baby Face : Lady Killer : The Little Giant : The Mystery of the Wax Museum : Other Men’s Women : Red-Headed Woman