About last night Casting a write-in vote in Illinois may be a waste of one’s vote.
Wednesday, June 8, 2016
Spelling in the news
In Louisiana, a man has been arrested for attempting to cash forged checks. What gave him away: misspelling fifty as fiffty . The double f can be tricky: in 2015, three men posing as police officers misspelled sheriff as sherif on their costumes.
Trivia: what film character has a last name that begins with two lowercase f s?
Related reading
All OCA spelling posts (Pinboard)
About last night
I’m deeply saddened by the results of yesterday’s Democratic primaries. I have been a strong supporter of Bernie Sanders, for reasons summed up by Hillary Clinton, then Rodham, in her 1969 Wellesley commencement speech. (I’m not kidding.) But I cannot vote for Hillary Clinton. I think that the Obama campaign got it right in a 2007 memo:
HRC is driven by politics, not conviction. From the war, to NAFTA, to Social Security, to her choice of baseball teams, Clinton is constantly shifting, dodging and changing positions to satisfy the politics of the moment. Her penchant for secrecy and non-disclosure reflect an underlying disdain for the “invisible” people for whom she claims to speak.I was thinking about possible choices in this presidential election when I posted, last October, an observation from Peter Drucker about integrity in leadership:
No one should ever be appointed to a senior position unless top management is willing to have his or her character serve as the model for subordinates.I went on to write,
With necessary changes in terminology, one might apply Drucker’s thinking to elections, with integrity of character as a primary consideration for a voter. I for one would find it impossible to vote for a candidate who did not evince some core element of integrity, however consonant with my views that candidate’s views might be.
*
5:20 p.m.: Casting a valid write-in vote in Illinois is no easy matter. From the Cook County Clerk’s website:
Prospective write-in candidates in Illinois must file paperwork with the county clerk, or election authority, in each jurisdiction where their name will appear on the ballot.Otherwise, a write-in vote is for naught. More on other states here.
*
August 1: It’s good to know your own mind, but it’s good, too, to know that you can change it. I’ve decided to vote Hillary Clinton. This allegorical paragraph explains why.
[“Her penchant for secrecy and non-disclosure reflect”: should be reflects .]
If and whether
Sir Ernest Gowers:
Care is also needed in the use of if in the sense of whether , for this too may cause ambiguity.Also from The Complete Plain Words
Please inform me if there is any change in your circumstances.Does this mean “Please inform me now whether there is any change” or “If any change should occur please inform me then”? The reader cannot tell. If whether and if become interchangeable, unintentional offence may be given by the lover who sings:What do I care,The Complete Plain Words , rev. Sidney Greenbaum and Janet Whitcut (Boston: David R. Godine, 1988).
If you are there?
Buzz-phrase generator : The etymological fallacy : “Falling into incongruity” : Thinking and writing
Tuesday, June 7, 2016
Stamps for Plutocrats
Our household is well supplied with stamps: first-class, second-ounce, two-ounce, postcard. When I went to the post office today to mail a package, I was almost able to resist the usual “Need stamps?” The clerk showed me a page of Views of Our Planets , but I declined. No Pluto! (As I have written in these pages, I am a total third-grader on the subject of Pluto.) But then the clerk showed me a little (heh) block of four stamps.
[The block has two of each stamp.]
It’s Pluto — Explored! The brave little orb may no longer count as one of “our” planets (or their planets). But the United States Postal Service has shown Pluto some significant respect. Plutocrats, get to your post office at once.
Related reading
All OCA Pluto posts (Pinboard)
[Elaine gave me “Plutocrats.” Thank you, Elaine.]
Elections of the future
The Associated Press’s announcement of a Democratic nominee, an announcement made on the eve of major primaries and seven weeks before the party’s convention, is to my mind a low point in journalism. AP, report the news. Don’t manufacture it. And don’t suppress the vote.Breaking: Hillary Clinton wins re-election in 2020! I know it must be true because the establishment told me so! #APRetract
— Cenk Uygur (@cenkuygur) June 7, 2016
Domestic comedy
[The subject was one of Beverly Cleary’s characters.]
“He seems to have . . .”
[And then in unison.]
“. . . a very high opinion of himself!”
Related reading
All OCA domestic comedy posts (Pinboard)
Cute and the dictionary
A “boy” — the still mysterious Johnny Chessler — has called Jean Jarrett cute:
Beverly Cleary, Jean and Johnny (1959).
One could read this passage in relation to W. E. B. DuBois’s idea of double-consciousness: “this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others.” Double-consciousness is unmistakably at work here: Jean sees herself as insignificant when others call her Half Pint; she begins to see herself as cute when Johnny Chessler pronounces her so. She later looks in a mirror and imagines how she might have looked to Johnny. By the end of the novel, Jean is able to look in a mirror with a stronger sense of self.
To my mind, Cleary’s wit heightens rather than diminishes the pathos in this passage.
Related reading
All OCA dictionary posts (Pinboard)
Dowdy-world miracle (From Fifteen )
Jean Jarrett, letter writer
Ramona Quimby and cursive
Ramona Quimby, stationery fan
[Whatever dictionary Jean is using, I don’t have it.]
Monday, June 6, 2016
The New Yorker that and which
Mary Norris’s explanation of The New Yorker approach to that and which is likely, I think, to leave many viewers confused. The New Yorker follows Fowler’s Modern English Usage in using that with restrictive sentence elements and which with non-restrictive elements. The confusion comes with Norris’s sample sentences. Norris attributes these two (which she uses to introduce that and which ) to E. B. White:
The New Yorker is a magazine, which likes “that.”The second sentence is fine. But the first doesn’t make sense. It’s comparable to a sentence that says
The New Yorker is the magazine that likes “which.”
Il Bambino is a restaurant, which serves paninis.The unfortunate implication is that a magazine is a thing that likes the word that , and that a restaurant is an establishment that serves paninis.
Norris’s next example, in which that takes the place of which (“a fifty-two-thousand-square-foot gym that passersby sometimes mistake for a megachurch”) raises no complications. But her final example baffles me. What should The New Yorker use here, that , or which ?
[S]he suffered a series of pulled hamstrings, rolled ankles, and stress fractures that required cortisone shots in her elbow.The New Yorker opted for which , a puzzling which . I would read the sentence as saying that this athlete suffered not just fractures but fractures that required cortisone shots. That’s how serious the fractures were. Norris herself says that that seems fine here. And which could be mistaken, if only for a moment, for the magazine’s irregular restrictive which , in which case it would be the entire series of injuries that required cortisone shots in the elbow (which of course would make no sense). The irregular restrictive which is a complication that Norris does not mention.
[S]he suffered a series of pulled hamstrings, rolled ankles, and stress fractures, which required cortisone shots in her elbow.
I appreciate what seems to be the intent behind these New Yorker videos: to offer the viewer a light-hearted, pain-free engagement with matters of grammar and usage (while proclaiming the magazine’s adherence to high standards). But the history and complications of that and which must be found elsewhere — in, for instance, the three columns of text devoted to the two words in Garner’s Modern English Usage .
Two related posts
Important-ly
Review of Norris’s Between You & Me
One that got away
One more thing I learned on my summer vacation: an Italian-American bookstore opened in Boston’s North End in October 2015. I AM Books calls itself the first Italian-American bookstore in the United States. It’s a small store, with a sampling of used books (large volumes of Leonardo and Michelangelo were just five dollars each) and shelves devoted to children’s books, cookbooks, history, travel, Italian writers (in Italian and in English translation), and Italian-American writers. I picked up a novel by a writer I’d never heard of: Leonardo Sciascia’s The Day of the Owl (1961). And I recommended that the store look into stocking some Gilbert Sorrentino. (Brooklyn, represent.)
Favorite moment: two teenaged girls were browsing and noticed the music playing in the store: “Was Frank Sinatra Italian?” one of them asked.
Related reading
Gilbert Sorrentino (1929–2006)
Things I learned on my summer vacation, 2016
[New York City’s S. F. Vanni began in 1884, but that was a bookstore for books in Italian.]
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