A Merriam-Webster advertisement

[Life, November 15, 1937. Click for a larger view.]

I like the idea of a hat-holding man asking a librarian, and a college president, and a newspaper editor, and a bookseller for dictionary advice, even if the illustration makes the hat-holder look like a representative of the local loan shark. “Time? I’ll give you time — in the hospital!”

I invested in a Webster’s Second (a 1954 copy) a year ago. No loan sharks were involved. I’ve cited this beautiful, dowdy dictionary in at least a dozen posts. I like having both the Second and the Third in the same room. Sparks sometimes fly.

Here are three more Merriam-Webster ads, from 1965, 1966, and 1967.

Related reading
All OCA dictionary posts (Pinboard)

Irrelevancies and solid objects

Joseph Joubert:

Fleeting irrelevancies often serve to stamp solid objects in our memory; a sound, a song, an accent, a voice, a smell engrave forever in our mind the memory of certain places, because these small things were what made up our pleasure or boredom there.

The Notebooks of Joseph Joubert: A Selection  , trans. Paul Auster (New York: New York Review Books, 2005).

That sentence seems like a milder version of a passage from T. S. Eliot’s prose:

Why, for all of us, out of all we have heard, seen, felt, in a lifetime, do certain images recur, charged with emotion, rather than others? The song of one bird, the leap of one fish, at a particular place and time, the scent of one flower, an old woman on a German mountain path, six ruffians seen through an open window playing cards at night at a small French railway junction where there was a water-mill: such memories may have symbolic value, but of what we cannot tell, for they come to represent the depth of feeling into which we cannot peer.

“The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism” (1933).

Also from Joseph Joubert
Another world : Form and content : Lives and writings : Politeness : Resignation and courage : Self-love and truth : Thinking and writing

Involuntary Brooklyn

I was cutting the grass this afternoon. Elaine was making meatballs. And suddenly I was eight or nine years old in Brooklyn. I even said it out loud: “Brooklyn.” Elaine must have been running the exhaust fan, wafting olive oil and meat and herbs and garlic into the previously grass-scented air.

I’ve smelled olive oil and meat and herbs and garlic countless times in our house. Smelling them outside is rare. That’s what brought me back to the late afternoons of my childhood, when kids played outside as mothers made dinner, up and down the block.

Lest you think our division of labor replicates that of a mid-century Brooklyn household: I made the sauce. And Elaine filled the gas can. Thank you, Elaine.

More involuntary memories
Proust: involuntary memory, foolish things
In a memory kitchen
Involuntary bicycle

Filling seats in graduate programs

The New York Times reports on Western Kentucky University’s effort to fill seats in graduate programs with less-than-qualified students from abroad. The student-body president: “It is ethically wrong to bring students to the university and let them believe they can be successful when we have nothing in place to make sure they’re successful.” The school’s president: “There are growing pains.” Along with growing pains, there are delusions of grandeur, evident in WKU’s slogan, “A leading American university with international reach.” A reach indeed.

“He’s in the library”

From The Honeymooners episode “Opportunity Knocks But,” first broadcast May 5, 1956. The head of the Gotham Bus Company, J. J. Marshall, has received a pool table as a birthday present. He asks Messrs. Kramden and Norton (Ralph and Ed) to come to his house and teach him the game. “We’re playin’ pool on Park Avenue tonight!” says Norton. I love this exchange, which might be as old as vaudeville:

Butler: “Just make yourselves at home, gentlemen. Mr. Marshall will be here presently. He’s in the library.”

Ralph: “What?”

Butler: “He’s in the library.”

Ed: “He oughta be here soon. The library closes at nine.”

Did you notice the butler’s tony diction? Presently , not momentarily . I’m pretty sure that this exchange was one of the many bits that used to be cut in reruns to make more time for commercials.

Related reading
All OCA Honeymooners posts (Pinboard)

[Mr. Marshall’s address: 1149 Park Avenue. It’s a single-family residence, valued today at $9,472,029.]

Linus van Pelt, pencileer

[Peanuts , April 18, 2016. First ran April 21, 1969. Click for a larger view.]

Charlie Brown doesn’t realize that it’s more fun to know.

Related reading
All OCA pencil posts (Pinboard)

[Pencileer is Sean’s coinage.]

WordService

[For Mac users.]

One more from Devon Technologies: the free WordService, which adds many options for working with text on the Mac. I’ll mention just two options, which I’ve used again and again: 1. ⌘-" changes straight quotation marks to smart ones (⌘-' does the opposite); 2. ⇧-⌘-C puts initial capitals on words.

Mac Services are found in Preferences > Keyboard > Shortcuts. There’s no need to memorize ⇧-⌘-C and the like: Services for a given app are available from the menu bar. Click on the name of the app, and you’ll see Services.

Also from Devon Technologies: XMenu.

[Really, can an iPad ever replace the Mac? Not for me, not yet anyway.]

XMenu

[For Mac users.]

XMenu, a free app from Devon Technologies, adds up to six menus to the Mac menu bar, allowing quick access to apps, folders, and files. I hit on XMenu as a way to get to files without cluttering my desktop with a dozen or more icons: now I have a user-defined menu that opens a folder named Current stuff .

One piece of advice: read the XMenu Help file. That’s the only way to figure out how to set up a user-defined menu: by placing something in ~/Library/Application Support/
XMenu/Custom.

One trick: When making a user-defined menu, create an alias (shortcut) to add to ~/Library/Application Support/XMenu/Custom. Using an alias instead of a folder lets you keep your stuff in its usual place. And using an alias makes it possible to use a Dropbox folder with XMenu.

Another trick: Make a tidier menu by renaming the alias. I retitled Current stuff as [ ]. In other words, a single space is the alias.


[See? No folder name.]

One more trick: If XMenu’s menu-bar icons aren’t to your taste, it’s easy to change them. Quit the app, and go to Applications/XMenu. Right-click and choose Show Package Contents. Go to Contents/Resources. The menu bar icons are 16 × 16 .png files. You can replace any menu-bar icon by renaming its .png file (rename Userdefined.png, for instance, as Old.Userdefined.png) and adding to the Resources folder a new .png file with the original file name. I found a nice document icon at Flaticon, a good source for simple (and free) 16 × 16 .png files.


[XMenu’s Documents icon and User-Defined icon, and my User-Defined replacement icon.]

Credit where it’s due: my replacement icon is by Vectors Market, available from www.flaticon.com and licensed by CC 3.0 BY.

Also from Devon Technologies: WordService.

Zippy noir

[Click either image for a larger view.]

Today’s Zippy  pays homage to The Big Combo (dir. Joseph H. Lewis, 1955). In a memorable scene, Mr. Brown (Richard Conte) uses a hearing aid to extract information from Police Lieutenant Leonard Diamond (Cornel Wilde), speaking, shouting, and playing the radio at high volume — it’s jazz, with “crazy drums.” Henchmen Mingo (Earl Holliman) and Fante (Lee Van Cleef) look on. That’s Lippy, Zippy’s “diametrically opposite & anhedonic twin brother,” failing at torture with Kiss.

Related reading
All OCA Zippy posts (Pinboard)

Dick Cavett on Donald Trump

Dick Cavett writes about “‘Trumpo,’ the Unfunny Marx Brother”:

Lee Iacocca, a truly successful businessman by any standard, declined to run for the highest office, because he knew that there was a fundamental difference between big business and big government. In government, the successful leaders can’t just walk out, or sulk when someone disagrees. To be successful in government, a leader has to build a strong, inclusive coalition. Conversely, in big business, ultimately, the lead dog has to take responsibility and make a decision, and then everybody else has to follow. It’s not a democracy.

Bruce Rauner, former venture capitalist, now Illinois’s governor, is already an officeholder who doesn’t seem to understand the difference between business and government.