Separated at birth

[Fredric March and Tobey Maguire.]

A recent pre-Code spree gave Elaine and me the chance to see a young Fredric March in Merrily We Go to Hell (dir. Dorothy Arzner, 1932). We agreed: March and Tobey Maguire were separated at birth. It’s the corners of the mouth that make the resemblance so striking.

Merrily We Go to Hell is a frank depiction of alcoholism and adultery in the pre-Code world. The film is available in a 3-DVD set, Universal’s Pre-Code Hollywood Collection. Thank you, library.

Also separated at birth
Nicholson Baker and Lawrence Ferlinghetti : Ted Berrigan and C. Everett Koop : John Davis Chandler and Steve Buscemi : Ray Collins and Mississippi John Hurt : Broderick Crawford and Vladimir Nabokov : Ted Cruz and Joe McCarthy : Jacques Derrida, Peter Falk, and William Hopper : Elaine Hansen (of Davey and Goliath) and Blanche Lincoln : Harriet Sansom Harris and Phoebe Nicholls : Ton Koopman and Oliver Sacks : Steve Lacy and Myron McCormick : Michael A. Monahan and William H. Macy

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

[Photographs from the Internets. The photograph of March has no connection to Merrily We Go to Hell.]

aText

For many years I used the handy Mac app TextExpander. I was loyal, very. When OS X Mavericks made life with TextExpander (temporarily) difficult, I bought aText, and sad to say, I never went back to TextExpander.

A simple explanation of aText: “aText accelerates your typing by replacing abbreviations with frequently used phrases you define.” It can get much more complicated and much more wonderful than that. A fairly simple example: I’ve created an abbreviation to make a hyperlink, ,paste. (The abbreviation could be anything; I find that the less cryptic, the better.) The content that goes with this abbreviation:

<a href="[clipboard]">[|]</>

After copying a URL to the clipboard, I type ,paste. The result:

<a href="http://somelink.com">|</a>

with the cursor (|) positioned for adding text. The app makes HTML so easy that I’ve never felt any great need for Markdown.

TextExpander now sells for $44.95. The price for aText: $4.95. Seeing the price for the latest update to TextExpander ($19.95) prompted me to write this post. I know which app I’d buy if I were starting out.

Both apps remind me of early adventures with MacroWorks, a Beagle Bros program that modified AppleWorks. MacroWorks gave me my first practice in getting a computer to do things my way.

A tenuously related post
Beagle Bros disk-care warnings

NYT quizzes

Test your knowledge of punctuation and verb tenses with The New York Times. Beware of the robotic dogs.

A colon followed by a dash

Is there a name for an older habit of punctation, the semicolon followed a dash? An entry in Webster’s Second made me wonder. I think the answer is no . But that’s a provisional think.

There is, however, a name, rarely used, for another older habit of punctuation, the colon followed by a dash. I associate that habit, always, with Willa Cather:

His daughter Kathleen, who had done several successful studies of him in water-colour, had once said:—“The thing that really makes Papa handsome is the modelling of his head between the top of his ear and his crown; it is quite the best thing about him.” The Professor’s House, 1925.

Of course she regretted Tennessee, though she would never admit it to Mrs. Rosen:—the old neighbours, the yard and garden she had worked in all her life, the apple trees she had planted, the lilac arbour, tall enough to walk in, which she had clipped and shaped so many years. “Old Mrs. Harris.” In Obscure Destinies, 1932.

When I searched for colon followed by a dash , Google returned this page, and I went straightaway to the Oxford English Dictionary.¹ The colon-and-dash is known as dog’s bollocks, or dog’s ballocks. The OED labels it Brit. coarse slang and rare :

Typogr. a colon followed by a dash, regarded as forming a shape resembling the male sexual organs.

The only citation is from the third (1949) edition of Eric Partridge’s A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English : “Dog’s ballocks , the typographical colon-dash (:—).”

The OED gives a later meaning, c. 1986 (with the ): ”the very best, the acme of excellence.” An OED citation: “Yeah, Jon Bon Jovi is the dog’s bollocks.” Someone had fun getting that in the Dictionary.

The OED is also the dog’s bollocks, especially now that I know that it’s possible to search for text in definitions. But Willa Cather is not the dog’s bollocks. She is just the very best, the acme of excellence, especially in The Professor’s House. James Schuyler: “Willa Cather alone is worth / The price of admission to the horrors of civilization.”

¹ The page at the link gets it wrong: dog’s bollocks, not the dog’s bollocks, is the typographical slang.

Related reading
All OCA punctuation posts (Pinboard)
All OCA Willa Cather posts (Pinboard)

Domestic comedy

“Nothing says ‘summer’ like a big pot of stew.”

Related reading
All OCA domestic comedy posts (Pinboard)

Word of the day: gam

You might wear out your index-finger running up and down the columns of dictionaries, and never find the word. Dr. Johnson never attained to that erudition; Noah Webster’s ark does not hold it. Nevertheless, this same expressive word has now for many years been in constant use among some fifteen thousand true born Yankees. Certainly, it needs a definition, and should be incorporated into the Lexicon. With that view, let me learnedly define it.

GAM. NOUN — A social meeting of two (or more) Whale-ships, generally on a cruising-ground; when, after exchanging hails, they exchange visits by boats’ crews: the two captains remaining, for the time, on board of one ship, and the two chief mates on the other.

Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (1851).

An incomplete survey:

Gam did make it into a dictionary in Melville’s lifetime: The Century Dictionary (1889–1891, online here) has entries for the word as a noun and verb. The word is missing from Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913, online here), but it appears in Webster’s New International Dictionary, second edition (1934). Or it at least appears in my 1954 copy. As a noun: “A herd, or school of whales. A visit between whalers at sea, hence, Local , U.S. , social intercourse between persons ashore.” As an intransitive verb: “Naut . To gather in a gam;— said of whales. To engage in a gam, or, Local , U.S. , in social intercourse anywhere.” As a transitive verb: “To have a gam with or visit with.” The OED has another noun, gamming , which is missing from Webster’s Second and Webster’s Third. It, too, describes a visit at sea.

In The Century and Webster’s Second , gam refers first to whales and later to human beings. In Webster’s Third and the OED, it’s the other way around. So Melville’s meaning came first. It would seem that sailors at some point must have begun to describe whale gatherings in terms of their own stop-and-chats.

But whence gam ? The Century suggests “Perhaps a var. of jam .” The OED suggests that the word may be a variant of game, “Amusement, sport, fun; pleasure, enjoyment.” Webster’s Second : “Origin uncert.” Webster’s Third: “perh. short for obs. gammon talk, chatter.”

Surprising to me: gam has meant “leg” since 1785. I think of that gam as originating in old-movie talk: “Nice gams, sister.”

Also from Moby-Dick
“Nothing exists in itself”
Nantucket ≠ Illinois
Quoggy
“Round the world!”

[That lovely bit of punctuation — “To gather in a gam;— said of whales” — says a lot about the spaciousness of Webster’s Second . Compare Webster’s Third ’s perh. and obs.]

Happy Father’s Day

[Photograph by Louise Leddy. August 22, 1957.]

It was a Thursday, probably in Brooklyn. That’s my dad Jim and me. He or my mom cut the circle and pasted the photo into the “baby book.”

Happy Father’s Day to all.

Wa kei sei jaku

Elaine and I attended a Japanese tea ceremony today. It was a beautifully calming occasion and one that I would want to experience again. A scroll on a wall had the four characters above, the four principles of the tea ceremony as given by Sen Rikyu. A placard below gave their equivalents: wa kei sei jaku, or harmony, respect, purity, tranquility. Here is a page with further explanation. The relation to current events is pretty clear. What the world needs now: wa kei sei jaku.

Related posts
Excerpts and more excerpts from Kakuzo Okakura’s The Book of Tea

Cole’s Portuguese sardines

French sardines, they say, are the best. Portuguese sardines, they also say, are the best. They say so many things, don’t they?

When I spotted, in our international grocery, a single can of Cole’s smoked Portuguese sardines, I had to have it, or them. When I pulled the lid, after waiting for more than a week, I found five sardines. They were skin-and-bones sardines, but with the meatiness of their skinless and boneless kin. They tasted light and smoky, like an elegant, mysterious appetizer. There was nothing fishy about these sardines. They were great. They were sardinhas espectaculares.

The only problem: price. Our nearby international grocery charges $7.99 for a can. The Cole’s website, as I have discovered, sells the same can for $3.99. Even that price seems steep. But $3.99 for an occasional treat? That’s reasonable. Cole’s also has skinless and boneless Portuguese sardines, $4.99 a can. I’ll bite.

I have yet to see French sardines in person, or in a can. Et toi?

Related reading
All OCA sardine posts (Pinboard)

NYT on Charleston

The horrific church shooting in Charleston, S.C., leaves the nation at an all too familiar juncture — whether to do something positive to repair society’s vulnerabilities or to once again absorb an intolerable wound by going through what has become a woeful ritual of deep grief followed by shallow resolve to move on toward  . . .  what? Toward the inevitable carnage next time.

So begins a New York Times an editorial about the killings in Charleston, South Carolina.