Word of the day: bogart

Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Day is the verb bogart :

1 : bully, intimidate
2 : to use or consume without sharing

I recall bogart also serving as a noun back in my high-school days, as in “Don’t be a bogart.” That is, don’t be someone who bogarts: don’t hog the ball; let someone else have a chance. A basketball was about the only thing anyone in my crowd would have been bogarting, honest.

I’m writing about bogart not to reminisce but to question M-W’s explanation of the word’s origin:

The legendary film actor Humphrey Bogart was known for playing a range of tough characters in a series of films throughout the 1940s and 1950s, including The Maltese Falcon , Casablanca , The African Queen , and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre . The men he portrayed often possessed a cool, hardened exterior that occasionally let forth a suggestion of romantic or idealistic sentimentality. Bogart also had a unique method of smoking cigarettes in these pictures — letting the butt dangle from his mouth without removing it until it was almost entirely consumed. Some believe that this habit inspired the current meaning of bogart , which was once limited to the phrase “Don’t bogart that joint [marijuana cigarette],” as popularized by a song on the soundtrack to the film Easy Rider , among other things. Today bogart can be applied to hogging almost anything.

Did Bogart let a cigarette dangle from his lips now and then? Of course. Who didn’t? But “a unique method of smoking” that carried over from film to film, with cigarettes dangling until they’re nearly done? That’s nonsense.

And who in their right mind would smoke a joint by letting it dangle from the mouth? I would suggest that the verb bogart has more to do with Bogart’s intensity when smoking, as in this scene from Casablanca .

*

11:50 a.m.: As I just discovered (to my surprise and delight), bogart appears in the Oxford English Dictionary . The OED has the right idea: “with allusion to Bogart’s frequent on-screen smoking, especially to the long drags he took on cigarettes.” It’s the smoker’s intensity, not the placement of the cigarette, that better explains bogart .

A related post
Two-word utterances of my adolescence

The Pale King: “1984 totalitarianisms”

David Foster Wallace, The Pale King (Boston: Little, Brown, 2011).

I like the mix of foresight and the lack thereof in this exchange, from a conversation between IRS employees stuck in an elevator, sometime in 1980. Apple’s “1984” spot aired (famously) during the Super Bowl on January 22, 1984. You can see the commercial again at YouTube.

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[Our two-person reading club has now taken up The Pale King. First time through for one member, second or third for the other.]

In Connecticut, in Chicago

Announcing executive actions on gun control earlier today, President Barack Obama spoke of the first-graders killed in Newtown, Connecticut: “Every time I think about those kids, it gets me mad. And, by the way, it happens on the streets of Chicago every day.”

The New York Times omitted that second sentence from its reporting and from video excerpts of today’s event. I think it’s important to let that second sentence register, as a reminder of the alarmingly routine violence that flourishes when weapons are so easy to obtain. You can hear both sentences at the 34:39 mark in the White House video of this morning’s announcement.

Robert Walser: the theater

Robert Walser, “The Theater, a Dream,” in Berlin Stories , trans. Susan Bernofsky (New York: New York Review Books, 2012).

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Infinite Winter

A group reading-project, starting January 31: Infinite Winter, reading David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest in thirteen weeks. The schedule has both page numbers and Kindle locations.

Thirteen weeks, a semester’s time, is about right. Some of those weeks will be more difficult than others. (I know.)

A twentieth-anniversary edition of Infinite Jest will appear on February 23.

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Tube Benders

Here is a fine 99% Invisible episode about neon: “Tube Benders.” Neon in daylight is “a / great pleasure.”

Fordite

Rocks, sort of, from car factories: Fordite, aka Detroit agate.

Thanks, Rachel!

Summit Diner redux

 
[Zippy. March 13, 2015; January 1, 2016.]

Yes, 2016 doesn’t feel different from 2015, though the motel and street are differently colored. I would imagine that many artists reuse their work now and then (if not often). But this past Friday’s strip is the first Zippy in which I’ve spotted old art. I doubt I’d have noticed if I hadn’t made a post about the March 13 strip.

When I checked the Zippy archive, I realized that not just these panels but the two strips themselves are, save for their dialogue, identical. Same balloons, different words. Yes, 2016 doesn’t feel very different from 2015. Very meta, Bill Griffith!

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Teaching ancient Greek

“Sisyphus would sympathize with my condition. Every year I begin rolling my stone up a four-month-long hill, my hopes high. Every year I end up far closer to the bottom than the top”: James Romm, a classics professor, writes about teaching ancient Greek.

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.”