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Crosswords, copied A plagiarism scandal, now with (minimal) consequences.

CSS

Before CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), there was CSS: the Comprehensive Storage System Wall Unit, designed by George Nelson, manufactured by Herman Miller. It’s a Cooper Hewitt Object of the Day, and it makes me think of The Bob Newhart Show .

On Duke Ellington’s birthday

[Duke Ellington and His Famous Orchestra, 1930. Freddie Jenkins, Cootie Williams, Arthur Whetsol, trumpets. Joe “Tricky Sam” Nanton, Juan Tizol, trombones. Harry Carney, Johnny Hodges, Barney Bigard, reeds. Fred Guy, banjo. Wellman Braud, bass. Sonny Greer, drums. Photograph from the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. New York Public Library Digital Gallery. Click for a larger view.]

Duke Ellington was born on April 29, 1899.

Here is one of my favorite Ellington recordings from 1930: “Old Man Blues.” The soloists: Hodges (alto), Bigard, Williams, Bigard, Nanton, Carney, Nanton, Hodges (soprano), and Jenkins. So much music in three minutes.

And here is a clip of the same band playing “Old Man Blues” in the (otherwise execrable) Amos ’n’ Andy movie Check and Double Check (dir. Melville W. Brown, 1930). I think the band is playing in real time. (Watch the piano player.) The soloists are Nanton, Carney, Hodges, and Jenkins. Juan Tizol, you will notice, has been blacked up for the screen.

If you listen closely to the movie clip, you can hear someone — Ellington? — speak at 1:52 and 1:55: “C’mon, Harry” and “That’s it.” Yes, it is.

Related reading
All OCA Ellington posts (Pinboard)

[Do you recognize the source material for “Old Man Blues”? The title gives it away.]

Les Waas (1921–2016)

Les Waas, creator of the Mister Softee jingle, has died at the age of ninety-four. From the New York Times obituary:

In nearly a thousand jingles, he celebrated the virtues of clients including Holiday Inn, the Philadelphia Phillies and at least one local food manufacturer. (“Give me a little Kissling’s Sauerkraut, / It’s fresh and clean, without a doubt. / In transparent Pliofilm bags it’s sold, / Kissling’s Sauerkraut, hot or cold.”)

But none captured the public — and held it captive — like the Mister Softee song.

In an earlier post, I called the Mister Softee jingle “a permanent sound of summer in my head.” I should have called it the sound of summer. I think that our nation’s mobile ice-cream vendors should observe a moment of din in Mr. Waas’s honor.

Mark Trail , recycling

[Mark Trail, revised. May 10, 2014; April 28, 2016.]

James Allen continues the practice of recycling handed down by his predecessor Jack Elrod. I remember Mark’s sweaty 2014 face only because of my revised version, which dramatized the words of a Twitter user who took issue with my sentence-style capitalization in post titles. (Really.) I couldn’t resist revising today’s panel.

But where else had I seen this desperate look? Oh, of course — in Mark Trail , in 2015.


[Mark Trail, revised, May 10, 2014. Mark Trail, May 14, 2015; April 28, 2016. Click any image for a larger view.]

Keep moving! Back to yesterday’s art!

Related reading
All OCA Mark Trail posts (Pinboard)

Saag and vindaloo

Elaine and I had great chicken saag and lamb vindaloo last night. And it finally occurred me to wonder what the words saag and vindaloo are all about. The Oxford English Dictionary explains. Saag is easy to guess:

< Hindi sāg greens, vegetable, vernacular adaptation of Sanskrit śāka . Compare Bengali śāk , Marathi śāk .

But vindaloo is quite a surprise:

Probably < Portuguese vin d’alho wine and garlic sauce, < vinho + alho garlic.

Wikipedia has a brief account of the origins of vindaloo.

Thank you, Sitara Indian Restaurant and Lounge. We will be back.

[It’s especially great to find vindaloo without potatoes. Wikipedia: “Even though the word aloo (आलू) does mean ‘potato’ in Hindi, traditional vindaloo does not include potatoes.”]

My son the graduate student

Ben Leddy, studying at the Harvard Graduate School of Education:

“You don’t have to choose between rigor and joy in the classroom,” he says. “By creating engaging curriculum we could help so many kids and make the classroom experience much more meaningful.”

Right on, Ben.

[So proud!]

Happy, harmonious nation-state

“The nation-state remains the true foundation of happiness and harmony.”

Who said it? Kim Jong-il? Kim Jong-un? Mao? No: Donald Trump.

Front as guest

A talking head on MSNBC earlier this afternoon:

“. . . have ushered in a new front in the battle between the front-runners . . .”

More thusly

More about thusly :

Webster’s Second labels the word “colloquial.” Webster’s Third drops the label and adds a citation from the Congressional Record : “he summoned his counselors and spoke ∼ to them.”

The first and second editions of Fowler’s Modern English Usage make no reference to the word.

Bergen Evans and Cornelia Evans’s A Dictionary of Contemporary American Usage (1957) suggests that the word is “the product of illiteracy or exuberance.” The Evanses’ conclusion: “Thus is an adverb and nothing is gained by attaching the regular adverbial suffix -ly to it.”

Theodore Bernstein’s The Careful Writer (1965) calls the word a casualism, and a superfluous one: “it says nothing that thus does not say.”

Wilson Follett’s Modern American Usage: A Guide (1966) mentions the word in passing: “we add -ly for ridiculous or jocular effects to forms that are already adverbs: muchly , thusly .”

The Merriam-Webster Dictionary of English Usage (1989) makes a point missing from other discussions:

One reason thusly has gradually been able to gain a secure foothold in the language is undoubtedly that it is used primarily in ways that are, to some degree, distinct from the principal uses of thus .

M-W points out that “thusly almost always follows the verb it modifies” and that “its most frequent use is as an introductory word preceeding a quotation or other passage set off by a colon.” Zounds! That’s just how I’ve used the word. For instance:

The American Heritage Dictionary . . . defines banausic thusly: &c.

The Magic Rub’s maker, Prismacolor, describes the eraser thusly: &c.

I knew I wasn’t being ridiculous or jocular.

M-W is not my favorite usage guide: too often its advice seems to be to do what you like. But I like its advice about thusly :

[W]hatever its origins, thusly is not now merely an ignorant or comic substitute for thus : it is a distinct adverb that is used in a distinct way in standard speech and writing. Knowledge of the subtleties of its use may give you the courage to face down its critics, but if discretion, prudence, or faintheartedness compels you to shun it (or if you just dislike it), our advice is not to replace it automatically with thus but to consider instead a more natural-sounding phrase such as “in this way” or “as follows.”

I’m not faint of heart: I’ve restored the two thusly s I’ve quoted above. The third remains gone, replaced by a plain, more suitable as :

Gevalia describes its Traditional Roast thusly: as &c.

[Google’s Ngram Viewer shows thusly rising sharply since 1996.]