One Word of the Year: singular they

The American Dialect Society has chosen singular they as its 2015 Word of the Year. I like the idea of a plainish Word of the Year. I like too the idea of a Word of the Year that’s a word, not an emoji — which is what Oxford Dictionaries chose as its 2015 Word of the Year. (Clickbait might have been a more honest choice.)

My thoughts about singular they are in two posts: this post and this other one, over here. I continue to think that singular they is sometimes a good choice in writing, and sometimes not a good choice at all. I used singular they in a recent post, where it seemed idiomatic and appropriately colloquial: “Who in their right mind,” &c. But the more formal the discourse, the less appropriate singular they becomes, at least without checking in advance.

Chestnuts, pigeons, statues

Gay Talese, New York: A Serendipiter’s Journey (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1961).

It behooves me to say that the part about the hoofs is not accurate. But it was the chestnuts, or rather their aroma, that drew me to this passage. I’m ten again, leaving the American Museum of Natural History. I don’t like chestnuts, just the aroma.

A related post
“Fo-wer, fi-yiv, sev-ven, ni-yen”

[The statue that first comes to my mind: the Sherman Memorial, with one hoof off the ground. William Tecumseh Sherman did not die of wounds received in battle. Frank O’Hara put that statue in a poem.]

On ambition

The philosopher Mark Kingwell on ambition:

The idea that somehow ambition is always about achievement in measurable ways itself needs to be queried. We’re here for a mortal span whose length we know not, and our ambition should really be to make the most of the time that we have, not knowing how much of it there is. And there is no time to be spent feeling shame at not doing things. You should find things you can do — however, whatever, method works for that — and enjoy doing them.

From the 2011 To the Best of Our Knowledge episode “ProcrastiNation,” recently rebroadcast.

Related reading
All OCA procrastination posts (Pinboard)

“Fo-wer, fi-yiv, sev-ven, ni-yen”

Gay Talese, New York: A Serendipiter’s Journey (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1961).

What a wonderful book, odds and ends of all sorts about the city and its creatures, human and non-. I saw a reference to the book (Talese’s first) in a New York Times piece last Saturday that Matt Thomas linked to. (Talk about serendipity.)

New York: A Serendipiter’s Journey is out of print and hard to find. AbeBooks and Alibris list a single copy for sale ($61.01). I snagged a copy as an interlibrary loan and have already suggested to New York Review Books that the book merits reissuing. For now, I’m xeroxing.

A related post
Gay Talese’s address book

ImageOptim

ImageOptim is a free app for Mac that applies lossless compression to images. Meaning: ImageOptim reduces file size without compromising image quality — useful when storing images, useful when posting images online. The app is ridiculously easy to use: drag files or folders to its window or right-click on a single image or a group of images to apply compression.

Here are two Slouch Gavitskys. Can you see any difference?

 
[Zippy, December 21, 2015.]

Slouch-left weighs in at 78 KB; Slouch-right at 24 KB. Image after image, those differences add up. I’ll be using ImageOptim often. Even its shortened (compressed) name is appealing.

There are many image optimizers for Windows. Any recommendations?

A related post
GTmetrix

GTmetrix

A useful tool for those who write online: GTmetrix clocks the speed at which a webpage loads and gives recommendations to make things faster.

With a Blogger blog, many of the recommendations are about matters beyond the user’s control. But following just one of GTmetrix’s recommendations — to use lossless compression with images — took the loading time for Orange Crate Art’s front page from 1.99 to 1.43 seconds. It’s difficult for me to say that with a straight face. But really, when one visits page after page, those fractions add up. Greater speed is a courtesy to the reader.

I owe my discovery of GTmetrix to a post by Prayag Verma. Prayag is the Blogger user who figured out a way to fix blurry images in Blogger’s Profile widget.

A related post
ImageOptim

Oliver Sacks and sardines

Henri Cole remembers Oliver Sacks:

Once when I gave him Cole’s Portuguese sardines in piri piri sauce, he opened a tin immediately and ate the sardines while standing at the kitchen counter. I think sardines were his secret to long life and acuteness of mind, or maybe they were just a leftover from his bachelor days. In my cupboard, I have several tins of Norwegian sardines in olive oil that Oliver presented to me.

I imagine that this page is seeing more than its usual number of visits today.

Related reading
All OCA Oliver Sacks and sardines posts (Pinboard)

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.

Related reading
All OCA DFW posts (Pinboard)

[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.