Yesterday I updated my Mac to OS X 10.11, El Capitan, and I’m impressed by its speed and apparent sturdiness. Things haven’t felt this good on my Mac since 10.8 (Mountain Lion).
Major glitch: an endlessly spinning beach ball while installing. I held down the power button, restarted, and all was well. Minor glitches: getting cDock to work and reinstalling the Safari extension Disconnect. I gave up on replacing Apple’s new system font (San Francisco) with Lucida Grande. Trying to make the change, at least for now, brings a host of complications, including squashed text in the Finder and in browser tabs. So I’m convincing myself that I’m happy with San Francisco, which itself is a clear (pun intended) improvement over Helvetica Neue.
I’m a little saddened to see that the sempervirens bug, a problem I first noticed in OS X 10.10, is still present, having persisted through 10.10.1, 10.10.2, 10.10.3, 10.10.4, and 10.10.5. Sempervirens isn’t present on every Mac, but a tech-support person reproduced the bug when I called about it in 2014, and a higher-level person filed a report. And the bug is still here. I guess I didn’t call it semper for nothing.
Itr’s always smart to check that crucial apps and hardware will work with a system update. I waited until I knew that aText was working in 10.11. Elaine has to wait until the music-writing app Finale works in 10.11. That’s supposed to happen “by the end of November 2015.” Sigh.
Friday, October 9, 2015
OS X El Capitan
The criminal subjunctive
The Lineup (dir. Don Siegel, 1958) is a fine bit of black-and-white filmmaking, a police procedural (not noir, no matter what the DVD claims) in which two detectives pursue two criminals who pursue three travelers who have unwittingly brought heroin-filled keepsakes back to the States. With San Francisco scenery, a chase on an unfinished freeway, and a terrific script by Stirling Silliphant, who would soon create the television series Naked City and Route 66 .
Here, our criminals, Dancer (Eli Wallach) and Julian (Robert Keith), discuss a point of grammar on their way to work.
I wondered if this scene, complete with a “little book,” might be a nod to The Elements of Style. But no, I suppose not. The film was released in June 1958. The Elements of Style was published in April 1959. Grammar and usage as the keys to self-improvement have a long history in American culture. Sherwin Cody, anyone?
My amusing (I hope) explanation of “if I was” and “if I were” is one of the most popular posts on Orange Crate Art. It’s nice to know that speakers and writers want to get it right.
[Is it my imagination, or does Julian strongly resemble Walter White of Breaking Bad ?]
Thursday, October 8, 2015
Sluggo sardines
Sardines and sardines
[From Hearings of the General Tariff Revision before the Committee on Ways and Means, House of Representatives, 1921. Joseph W. Fordney of Michigan chaired. George O’Hara represented the Associated Importers of Food Products, New York. Click for a larger view.]
The Chairman. In your opinion, what creates the chief difference between the retail prices, they are somewhere near the same size.I have always thought of sardines as a poor-people’s food: my dad, as a boy, had a sardine sandwich for lunch every damn schoolday. But now I understand that there were sardines and there were sardines. O’Hara goes on to say that what’s packaged in Maine is herring, not sardines. He mentions a tin of domestic “sardines” selling seven cents and a tin of French sardines selling for ten times as much.
Mr. O’Hara. The quality, absolutely nothing else.
The Chairman. The quality?
Mr. O’Hara. The quality, yes; there is no such thing as a sardine on the Maine coast. Those sardines on the Maine coast are shipped south and sold to the negroes. They are sold as low as $3.50 and $4 a case, I believe. They are also sent to the large centers and sold in the sweat shops in the large commercial centers where a man buys a 5-cent tin of sardines and a package of Uneeda Biscuit and calls that his lunch.
Fordney follows this exchange with some fulminating: “In the South I employ negro labor”; “I know that the negroes are well fed”; “I know that the negro has a better lunch than that.” (Fordney was in the lumber business.) But no one on the committee disputes the sardine-and-cracker lunch of the sweatshop worker.
And speaking of sardines and crackers.
Related reading
All OCA sardine posts (Pinboard)
[Seventy cents in 1921 = $9.32 in 2015.]
Wednesday, October 7, 2015
Dumb stupid list
Elaine pointed me to a mega-listicle from Esquire, The 80 Best Books Every Man Should Read. Just two of its books predate the twentieth century, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Brothers Karamazov . (Note to magazine: there’s no the in Twain’s title.) Only one book on the list is by a woman, Flannery O’Connor’s A Good Man Is Hard to Find.
Esquire’s sole comment on its no. 4 book, The Grapes of Wrath: “Because it’s all about the titty.” Grow up, Esquire . Oh, wait: you were born in 1933.
Domestic comedy
[Talking about a nearby institution.]
“ . . . greater transparency in how moneys are allocated. I can’t believe I used the word moneys .”
Garner’s Modern American Usage :
Why doesn’t the collective noun money suffice? The answer lies in idiom. While money generally functions in collective senses <we made a lot of money on that deal>, moneys is frequently used, especially in financial and legal contexts, to denote “discrete sums of money” or “funds” <many federal and state moneys were budgeted for the disaster relief>.Related reading
All OCA domestic comedy posts (Pinboard)
Tuesday, October 6, 2015
Nabokov at Cambridge
The first day of school:
Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory (1966).
This passage makes me recall with a laugh my first entry into a classroom as a teacher, of sorts. I was a graduate student, subbing for a professor on a Friday afternoon (gee, thanks). As I made my way into the room with book and notes and coffee, the pneumatic door began to close on me, and my coffee went all over the floor. I went off to get paper towels from a men’s room. And so began a class on Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
Related reading
All OCA Nabokov posts (Pinboard)
The mere fact
On NPR’s All Things Considered this morning:
John Bellinger, a former legal advisor to the State Department, says the bombing of the hospital was a terrible tragedy, but he believes it would be a rush to judgment to call it a war crime.The mere fact? From Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate :
“The mere fact that civilians are killed, that a hospital is damaged, doesn’t automatically mean that there has been a war crime. It only becomes a war crime if it is shown that the target was intentionally attacked.”
1 : having no admixture : PUREBellinger could be using mere in its first sense — this fact, and this fact alone. But the word is typically used to minimize importance. As the New Oxford American Dictionary points out, mere may be “used to emphasize how small or insignificant someone or something is.” The deaths of civilians in war ought never to be considered a mere fact.
2 obsolete : being nothing less than : ABSOLUTE
3 : being nothing more than <a mere mortal> <a mere hint of spice>
Monday, October 5, 2015
Bull, of the Woods
[Side-stapled, 5 7/16″ × 2 15/16″. Found in an “antiques” “mall.” Key word: chew , not eat .]
Thinking about bull and euphemisms reminded me that I am in possession of this pocket notebook. Its inside-front cover dates the Bull of the Woods chewing tobacco brand to 1883. I would date the notebook to the 1950s or ’60s or ’70s. The pages (still blank) are ruled for writing, with slogans at the top: “Your Best Tobacco Buy,” “Tobacco at Its Best.” At the center, a four-page spread with adages, thoughts about tobacco, and stale jokes featuring a lady driver, a mule-driver, a beautiful blonde, an Englishman, and assorted others.
There is no bringing those jokes up to date: like chewing tobacco itself, they belong to another time. It might be possible to soften the cover, though perhaps not all that convincingly.
Is Bull of the Woods still around? YouTube has a 2012 review from a young chewer. (Quit, kid, while you’re ahead of the game.) There’s also commercial in black and white. Chewing tobacco on TV! They must have been buying in a regional market.
No bull
The essentially English word bull is refined beyond the mountains, and perhaps elsewhere, into cow-creature, male-cow, and even gentleman-cow . A friend who resided many years in the West has told me of an incident where a gray-headed man of sixty doffed his hat reverently and apologized to clergyman for having used inadvertently in his hearing the plain Saxon term.Also from The American Language
John Russell Bartlett, A Glossary of Words and Phrases Usually Regarded as Peculiar to the United States (1848). Quoted in H. L. Mencken, The American Language: An Inquiry into the Development of English in the United States , 4th ed. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1936).
The American v. the Englishman : B.V.D. : “[N]o faculty so weak as the English faculty” : On professor : Playing policy : “There are words enough already” : The -thon , dancing and walking : The verb to contact
[John Russell Bartlett was a historian and linguist. No relation to Quotations.]
