Blogger fail

The Ultimate Responsive Test: Is your site Apple Watch-responsive? Mine, no.

[If you follow the link, be sure to read the entire page. And test the site URL too.]

Domestic comedy

“If you hadn’t reminded me, I wouldn’t have even known what not to talk about.”

Related reading
All OCA “overheard” posts (Pinboard)

Vaudevillians at play

Mencken presents this exchange as the work of one Julius H. Marx — Groucho to you and me:

First Vaudevillian — How they comin’, Big Boy?

Second V. — Not so hot, not so hot. I’m playin’ a hit-and-run emporium over in East New York.

First V. — Gettin’ much jack?

Second V. — Well, the storm and me is cuttin’ up two and a half yards, but when the feed bill and gas for the boiler is marked off, they ain’t much sugar left.

First V. — Why don’t you air her and do a single?

Second V. — I guess I should; everyone that’s caught us says that the trick is a hundred per cent. me. I had ’em howling so forte last night the whole neighborhood was in an uproar. What are you doing these days?

First V. — I just closed with a turkey that went out to play forty weeks and folded up after ten days. Believe me, them WJZ and WEAF wise-crackers ain’t doin’ show business any good. In the West now they are even gettin’ the rodeo by radio.

Second V. — Why don’t you get yourself a partner and take a flyer?

First V. — Well, if I could get a mama that could do some hoofin’ and tickle a uke, I think I would.

Second V. — Well, ta ta, I gotta go now and make comical for the bozos. If you get a chance come over and get a load of me, but remember, Capt. Kidd, lay off my wow gags.

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). Mencken gives the source as Franklin Pierce Adams’s newspaper column “The Conning Tower.” No date.

Also from The American Language
The American a : The American v. the Englishman : Anglic : “Are you a speed-cop?” : Benjamin Franklin and spelling : B.V.D. : English American English : Franco-American : “[N]o faculty so weak as the English faculty” : On professor : Playing policy : Proper names in America : “Slang is . . .” : “There are words enough already” : The -thon , dancing and walking Through -thing and -thin’ : The verb to contact

Remembrance of things past

“There’s a whole world of Internet activity devoted to creating fake files that can’t be opened. What I do is ask the student to send me the text of an essay as a plain e-mail. Wait a minute — I’m retired. I’m done with that! Screw that!”

A related post
The corrupted-file trick

Overheard

[A well-dressed woman .]

“If I’m still married when I’m forty, I’m gonna cut someone. My lawyer!” [Laughter. ]

Related reading
All OCA “overheard” posts (Pinboard)

Dream marriage

I was married to Audrey Hepburn, circa 1950-something, and was showing her that "Funny Face" and some other song were more or less the same song — same chord changes, similar melodies.

What other song? I was married to Audrey Hepburn: how can I be expected to remember these things?

Related reading
All OCA dream posts (Pinboard)

[This dream has my real wife’s approval.]

Recently updated

Missing pencil sculpture Once lost, now found.

Nabokov: “mere scenery”

The past, in the form of the wreckage of an affair:


Vladimir Nabokov, Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle (1969).

Related reading
All OCA Nabokov posts (Pinboard)

College prez likens college prez to star infielder, English prof to minor leaguer

I heard about it but had to read it to believe it. Scott Scarborough, president of the University of Akron (rebranded “Ohio’s Polytechnic University”), explaining the disparity between administrative and faculty salaries:

“It”s hard to explain why a president might make eight times as much as an English-faculty professor in the same way it’s hard to explain why a power-hitting third basemen makes more than someone playing for the RubberDucks. They’re both playing the same sport. They’re both playing the same position. And yet one makes a thousand times more.”

Aside from the insult, this analogy is remarkably faulty. Administrators and faculty don’t do the same work. And there is no reason to assume that an administrator as such is a stellar performer or that a faculty member as such is strictly minor league. The RubberDucks, as you might know, are Akron’s minor-league team, so Scarborough is insulting not just faculty but the hometown team as well.

The University of Akron appears to be a school in crisis. It’s never a good sign when a school’s president becomes the object of mockery in an online game.

The Adjunct Project reports that Akron pays its adjunct faculty $800 to $4,000 per course. Scott Scarborough’s starting salary: $450,000.

*

June 1, 2016: The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that Scott Scarborough has resigned.

Related posts
Income disparity in higher ed
Inequality v. disparity

“Slang is . . . ”

From a Mencken footnote:

“Slang,” said Carl Sandburg, “is language that takes off its coat, spits on its hands, and gets to work.” “Slang,” said Victor Hugo, “ is a dressing-room in which language, having an evil deed to prepare, puts on a disguise.” “Slang,” said Ambrose Bierce, “is the speech of him who robs the literary garbage-carts on their way to the dumps.” Emerson and Whitman were its partisans. “What can describe the folly and emptiness of scolding,“ asked the former (Journals, 1840), like the word jawing ?” “Slang,” said Whitman, “is the wholesome fermentation or eructation of those processes eternally active in language, by which the froth and specks are thrown up, mostly to pass away, though occasionally to settle and permanently crystalize.” (Slang in America , 1885). And again: “These words ought to be collected — the bad words as well as the good. Many of the bad words are fine” (An American Primer , c . 1856.)

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).

And now I think of Julia A. Moore, the Sweet Singer of Michigan, and her trenchant praise of “Temperance Reform Clubs” and their members:

Those noble men were kind and brave
    They care not for the slang —
The slang they meet on every side

Aw, nerts.

Also from The American Language
The American a : The American v. the Englishman : Anglic : “Are you a speed-cop?” : Benjamin Franklin and spelling : B.V.D. : English American English : Franco-American : “[N]o faculty so weak as the English faculty” : On professor : Playing policy : Proper names in America : “There are words enough already” : The -thon , dancing and walking Through -thing and -thin’ : The verb to contact