Saturday night dysfunction

“We’re playing the hand we were dealt. I guess Christmas Eve was booked”: Michael Briggs, a spokesman for the Bernie Sanders campaign, on the scheduling of Democratic presidential debates. There’s a debate tomorrow night, the last Saturday before Christmas and the night of a Jets–Cowboys game.

As a veteran of academic life, I am all too familiar with efforts to suppress genuine debate in the interest of pushing through what’s supposed to be a done deal. It saddens me to see the Democratic National Committee so transparently rig the game. I called the DNC contributions number this morning to say so: 877-336-7200.

[Post title with apologies to Duke Ellington.]

Got winter?

Out for a walk. And someone said, “Good morning! It got winter, didn’t it?”

It was 28 °F, so yes, it did. But I’d never heard that idiom before. Have you?

A quick search turned up a handful of examples. From northern California oral history: “it got winter and they built this lean-to or cache or whatever you might call it.” From a novel set in Kentucky: “It was like it got winter all at once.” From a Flickr photograph: “It got winter . . . a little.” Does winter here function as an adjective? Or does the idiom omit to be, as in the common-in-these-parts idiom “need + past participle”? As in The car needs washed. Or maybe, soon, The snow needs shoveled.

Robert Walser: small towns

Simon Tanner tells Rosa that he would find employment in a small town “the most beautiful thing imaginable”:


Robert Walser, The Tanners , trans. Susan Bernofsky (New York: New Directions, 2009).

Related reading
All OCA Robert Walser posts (Pinboard)

Mayberry mash-ups

A mash-up: “Webern in Mayberry,” by Michael Monroe. Which reminds me of another: “Single Ladies (In Mayberry),” by Party Ben.

Thanks, Elaine.

Related posts
Involuntary memory in Mayberry : Mayberry and abstraction : Mayberry and kinship networks

Barton Keyes’s office

[Double Indemnity (dir. Billy Wilder, 1944. Click any image for a larger view.]

Barton Keyes (Edward G. Robinson) is the claims manager for the Pacific All Risk Insurance Company. Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray) is an agent. Keyes is Information Central. His vest pockets are crammed with pens and papers (and cigars). His office has three telephones, a Dictaphone, extra cylinders, books, papers, a desk calendar, wall charts, and file cabinets. Oh, those file cabinets.

Related posts
At the Queen Street Police Station (From Niagara)
Keyes on desks, pencils, and papers
Raymond Chandler in Double Indemnity

“Resounding words and flowery phrases”

From Bryan Garner’s Usage Tip of the Day:

The tendency to resort to polysyllabic vocabulary is not usually the fault of the user. His high school teachers may have encouraged him to indulge in resounding words and flowery phrases; perhaps because their teachers had never impressed upon them the virtue of simplicity.

Ellsworth Barnard, English for Everybody (1979).

The Usage Tip of the Day is available by e-mail only. Follow the link above, scroll down, and you’ll find the address to write to.

Related reading
All OCA Garner-centric posts (Pinboard)
Beware of the saurus
A wrong-headed “dead words” movement

“The most evil sounds in the world”

The sound recordist Tony Schwartz, in a piece from The Story , “Tony Schwartz: 30,000 Recordings Later”:

“Most people think of evil as the sounds of gunfire or thunder or lightning or something. I found and believe that the most evil sounds in the world are the sounds out of mouths of people.”

Having watched a fair amount of the “debates” last night, I found this observation hitting home when I heard it today.

Robert Walser: thinking while working

Simon Tanner is describing his daily routine:


Robert Walser, The Tanners , trans. Susan Bernofsky (New York: New Directions, 2009).

Related reading
All OCA Robert Walser posts (Pinboard)

Mr. Hyphen and e-mail

The Washington Post is dropping the hyphen from e-mail . Bill Walsh, who calls himself “the keeper, more or less, of The Post’s style manual,” isn’t happy about having to make the change. I find his reasoning sound:

While it’s true that commonly used two-word or hyphenated compounds often solidify into single words over time, that had never before happened with a compound based on a single letter. We had T-shirts and X-rays for a long time before electronic mail showed up, but we still aren’t writing about tshirts and xrays .

For whatever reason, though, e-mail quickly became email as America went online.

I started walking through the alphabet: A- and B-list , C-clamp , D-Day , F-hole , G-spot, H-bomb. And, of course, e- words, all hyphenated: e-book , e-commerce , e-reader , e-tail , e-zine . Keeping the hyphen in e-mail seems a logical choice.

The title of the most popular post on this blog, How to e-mail a professor, has always had a hyphen. It’s old school.

Related posts
Bad hyphens, unhelpful abbreviations : “Every generation hyphenates the way it wants to” : Got hyphens? : The Hammacher Schlemmer crazy making hyphen shortage problem : Living on hyphens : Mr. Hyphen and Mr. Faulkner : One more from Mr. Hyphen : Phrasal-adjective punctuation

[Mr. Hyphen: protagonist of Edward N. Teall’s Meet Mr. Hyphen (And Put Him in His Place) (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1937), the subject of several of these hyphen-centric posts.]

WRONG?

[Mini Puzzle, The New York Times, December 15, 2015.]

It’s difficult to say that this clue-and-answer pairing is plainly wrong. Merriam-Webster’s discussion of disinterested notes that the word was first used to mean “not having the mind or feelings engaged, not interested” and that this meaning reappeared in the early twentieth century:

The revival has since been under frequent attack as an illiteracy and a blurring or loss of a useful distinction. Actual usage shows otherwise.

Garner’s Modern American Usage thinks a distinction between uninterested and disinterested is

still best recognized and followed because disinterested captures a nuance that no other word quite does. . . .

A disinterested observer is not merely “impartial” but has nothing to gain from taking a stand on the issue in question.

I like (and honor) the distinction. If disinterested describes an observer with nothing to gain, why use the word in place of a word that has a much wider application?

But there’s a Higher Authority that has a bearing on this clue-and-answer. “The New York Times” Manual of Style and Usage (2015) distinguishes between disinterested and uninterested: “Disinterested means unbiased or impartial; uninterested means bored or indifferent.”

So by Times standards, clueing BORED with disinterested is