U.S.P.S., +1

“Something I take for granted now just didn’t occur to me: There were standardized rates, and you could just slap a stamp on your letter, drop it in a mailbox, and it would go to its destination.” Zeynep Tufekci writes about the wonders of the U.S.P.S.: “Why the Post Office Makes America Great.”

John Bradbury (1953–2015)

John Bradbury was the drummer for the Specials. I loved that group. For instance. Also for instance.

Tom Jones’s sense of purpose

Tom Jones, Sir Tom Jones, on having underwear thrown at him on stage: “That’s not why I was there. I was there to sing.” From an interview with Charlie Rose, November 27, 2015, rebroadcast last night.

Word of the day: frammis

[Nancy panel, June 2, 1951. From Random Acts of Nancy, January 2, 2016.]

Ernie Bushmiller is said to have said that he drew his comic strip for “the gum chewers”: I doubt that he was aiming to send anyone to the dictionary with this bit of dialogue. In 2016, though, frammis might require a gloss. The Merriam-Websters (Second , Third , Collegiate ) are no help, but the Oxford English Dictionary comes through:

frammis, n .

U.S. colloq. (freq. humorous ).

1. With capital initial. As a generic surname, esp. in comic strips or in an invented company name.

2. Nonsense, jargon; commotion, confusion. Also as a count noun.

3. Esp. in imitations of jargon or technical vocabulary: a thing which the speaker cannot or does not name, a thingy. Cf. gismo n ., thingummy n .

The Dictionary’s earliest instance of frammis (as a surname) dates to 1940. The other senses of the word soon follow (1946, 1948). Sense 3 has some especially choice quotations. From 1948: “Mitynice is the only marmalade that gives you that special, seal-tested, bottled-in frammis.” From 1978: “The frammis on my graffle plate isn’t working and I’ll have to take it apart and clean it.”

In this Nancy panel, FRammis works as an exchange-name version of 555. Of course, a clever gum chewer could have tried dialing 376-649. Or more cleverly, 372-6649.

See also: franistan.

Related reading
All OCA Nancy posts (Pinboard)

[The complete strip appears in Nancy Loves Sluggo: Dailies, 1949–1951 (2014), the third volume in Fantagraphics’s Nancy series. This panel comes first. In the second panel, Nancy runs from the telephone. In the third, she shouts from around a corner: “Hello Gracie — how is your mumps?” And whence frammis ? The OED : “Origin uncertain. Perhaps a humorous use of the surname Frammis , attested earlier in the 20th cent.”]

Domestic comedy

Caught on tape:

“This is a close-up of our real family life: having boring stuff doing.”

That’s our son Ben — at four or five? — as he roamed the house with a Fisher-Price tape recorder, interviewing and reporting. He and Rachel made countless cassette recordings: music, newscasts, skits, streams of consciousness. The energy of it all! We were listening earlier this week.

Since early August, I’ve kept my dad’s last word — “Thanks” — in the space below this blog’s title, as what Blogger calls “blog description.” With the turn of the year, I’m going to begin varying the description again, starting with a few of these words from Ben back in tykehood.

Related reading
All OCA domestic comedy posts (Pinboard)
Two hundred blog description lines
Fifty blog description lines

New Year’s Eve 1915

[“New Year Revelers Crowd the Hotels: Largest Throngs in Years Entertained by Costly and Elaborate Programs.” The New York Times, January 1, 1916.]

Bagpipes, auto horns, sirens, fez horns, accordeons, pipes: 1915 knew how to make some noise. But the “fez horn” has me stumped. My best guess is that this term (which appears nowhere else in the Times ) is a bit of awkwardly inventive journalese for a shofar:

Rabbi Isaac ben Jacob Alfasi, a well-known halakhic authority whose life spanned the majority of the eleventh century, blew the shofar on the Sabbath in Fez, Morocco, when it coincided with Rosh Hashanah. He did so despite the fact that this practice was approved only for the Temple in Jerusalem, with a few notable exceptions.

Roberta Rosenthal Kwall, The Myth of the Cultural Jew: Culture and Law in Jewish Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015).

Or perhaps a fez horn is merely a party hat that doubles as a noisemaker. But only a shofar would be able to go up against bagpipes and auto horns and such. (And only when in the hands of a skilled player.)

I didn’t plan to go down a rabbit hole when I spotted this Times article. But now that I’m back: Happy New Year.

Aretha Franklin at the Kennedy Center Honors

If you didn’t see her performance last night, you should see it now, before it disappears.

How to improve writing (no. 62)

From the bag holding a baguette:

We consider our breads a work of art that honors the traditions and techniques of European bakers. Each of our loaves are baked in small batches and hand crafted to ensure the highest quality crust, flavor and texture.

It’s good bread. But not good writing. The mix of plural and singular words in the first sentence — breads , work , honors — is confusing. The plural loaves would seem to explain the subject-verb disagreement in the second sentence, an instance of what Garner’s Modern American Usage calls “false attraction to noun intervening between subject and verb.” I see at least three more ways to improve that second sentence.

A possible revision, allowing the hype to stand:

We consider each of our breads a work of art that honors the traditions and techniques of European bakers. Each variety is handcrafted and baked in small batches to ensure the highest quality crust, flavor, and texture.

The three more ways: joining hand and crafted to make the usual compound word, placing the cart (the handcrafting) before the horse (the baking), and adding a serial comma. Another possible revision, eliminating much of the hype:

Our bread honors the traditions and techniques of European bakers. We bake each variety in small batches to ensure excellent crust, flavor, and texture.

I’m not sure what counts as a small batch though.

Related reading
All OCA How to improve writing posts (Pinboard)

[About hand and crafted : Merriam-Webster makes them a solid word. The Oxford English Dictionary joins them with a hyphen. The serial or Oxford comma is much debated, but as GMAU notes, “virtually all writing authorities” outside the world of journalism recommend using it. This post is no. 62 in a series, “How to improve writing,” dedicated to improving stray bits of public prose.]

Bad news from the MLA

The Modern Language Association reports that the 2014–2015 job market in English and foreign languages was the worst in forty years: fewer jobs than ever, and a smaller percentage of tenure-track positions.

In 1984, when I was job-hunting, the MLA listed 1492 jobs in English, 1442 in foreign languages. The 2014–2015 numbers: 1015 jobs in English, 949 in foreign languages. In 1984, the great majority of listings were for tenure-track positions. In 2014–2015, two-thirds of the English listings (67.3%) and half of the foreign-language listings (50.4%) were tenure-track.

Another Henry gum machine

[Henry, December 29, 2015.]

At the risk of stating the obvious: one can never have too many streetside gum machines.

Related reading
All OCA Henry posts (Pinboard)

And more gum machines
Henry : Henry : Henry : Perry Mason : Henry : Henry : Henry : Henry : Henry