A couple pints

I was surprised to read this sentence in The New York Times:

On a Saturday night in Youngstown, Ohio, Representative Tim Ryan and Mrs. Clinton made a surprise visit to O’Donold’s Irish Pub and Grill for a couple pints of Guinness.

A couple pints? “The New York Times” Manual of Style and Usage (2015) requires of :

Used colloquially to mean a handful or a few, couple should always be followed by of (a couple of pomegranates , never a couple pomegranates ).

Bryan Garner’s (extensive) discussions of couple of and couple are helpful here. From Garner’s Modern American Usage (2009):

As a noun, [couple ] requires the preposition of to link it to another noun <a couple of dollars>. Using couple as an adjective directly before the noun is unidiomatic and awkward.

But Garner’s Modern English Usage (2016) acknowledges a change:

As a noun, [couple ] requires the preposition of to link it to another noun <a couple of dollars>. Using couple as an adjective directly before the noun has been very much on the rise since the late 20th century <a couple dollars>. This innovation strikes many readers as unidiomatic and awkward — or perhaps downright wrong. But the change will doubtless continue.

Garner calls the use of couple without of a “low casualism,” pointing out that the traditional phrasing a couple of is eight times more common in print: “idiom has not yet accepted this casual expression as standard.”

A Times reporter, or any other writer, could avoid these problems by using a fine Illinoism:

On a Saturday night in Youngstown, Ohio, Representative Tim Ryan and Mrs. Clinton made a surprise visit to O’Donold’s Irish Pub and Grill for a couple three pints of Guinness.

A related post
How many in a couple?

Cohn, Lewandowski

 
[Roy Cohn and Corey Lewandowski.]

Not exactly separated-at-birth, but it seems to me that there’s more than a passing resemblance between Donald Trump’s one-time lawyer and his just-fired campaign manager.

Recently updated

Where are the 2017 Moleskine planners? Now with a reply from the company.

“Ordinary, thrown-away things”

“There are intrinsic beauties in ordinary, thrown-away things”: the photographer Joel Meyerowitz on photographing objects in the painter Giorgio Morandi’s studio. The New York Times has a short film.

The Getty Research Portal leads the way to a 1981 exhibition catalogue of Morandi’s work.

[So much does depend upon a red wheelbarrow.]

A joke in the traditional manner

Why do newspaper editors avoid crossing their legs?

No spoilers. The punchline is in the comments.

More jokes in the traditional manner
The Autobahn : Did you hear about the cow coloratura? : Did you hear about the mustard-fetching dogs? : Did you hear about the thieving produce clerk? : Elementary school : A Golden Retriever : How did Bela Lugosi know what to expect? : How did Samuel Clemens do all his long-distance traveling? : How do amoebas communicate? : What did the doctor tell his forgetful patient to do? : What did the plumber do when embarrassed? : What happens when a senior citizen visits a podiatrist? : What is the favorite toy of philosophers’ children? : What kind of dogs do scientists like? : Which member of the orchestra was best at handling money? : Why did the doctor spend his time helping injured squirrels? : Why did Oliver Hardy attempt a solo career in movies? : Why did the ophthalmologist and his wife split up? : Why does Marie Kondo never win at poker? : Why was Santa Claus wandering the East Side of Manhattan?

[“In the traditional manner”: by or à la my dad. He gets credit for all but the cow coloratura, the produce clerk, the mustard-fetching dogs, the scientists’ dogs, the amoebas, the toy, the squirrel-doctor, Marie Kondo, and Santa Claus. He was making such jokes long before anyone called them “dad jokes.” I am now the custodian of his pocket notebook of jokes, from which I’ve chosen this one.]

Happy Father’s Day

[Photograph by Louise Leddy. March 3, 1957.]

On a Sunday in Brooklyn, my dad Jim and me. I love him and miss him.

Happy Father’s Day to all.

Good advice

Bernard Kleina, who as an untrained photographer documented Martin Luther King Jr.’s participation in the Chicago Freedom Movement: “I like to tell people that if you wait until you’re completely qualified for something, maybe it’s too late.”

The passing show

The Oxford English Dictionary ’s Word of the Day is passing show : “the spectacle of contemporary life; (also) an entertainment taking as its subject matter current events and interests.” I’m surprised to see that the first citation comes not (as I would have guessed) from the world of journalism but from Alexander Pope’s translation of the Iliad (1715). The lines are about Paris’s journey to Sparta:

When Greece beheld thy painted Canvas flow,
And Crowds stood wond’ring at the passing Show.

The phrase “the passing show” later became a title for several musical revues and for a newspaper column (1897–1900) by the young Willa Cather.

You can subscribe to the OED ’s Word of the Day here. And you should. As an OED representative reminds us, the Word of the Day is special.

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SparkNotes and Homer

Swipe speed

A man asks a question in memory of his father: “What is the speed, in miles per hour, of a proper MetroCard swipe?” The answer: 10–40 inches per second, or 0.57–2.27 miles per hour.

I think my dad and this guy’s dad would have gotten along very well.

The Eisenhower S

Did The New York Times really create a special skinny S to squeeze the name Eisenhower into headlines? Sort of. The paper created, in fact, a special skinny everything. The Atlantic explains.

Thanks to Sean at Contrapuntalism for passing this story along.

Related reading
All OCA typography posts (Pinboard)