Thrifty Appliance Parts (motto: “Dig in, get dirty”) is an excellent source for, yes, thrifty appliance parts. We just bought four burner knobs from this company after comparing prices. Four knobs from General Electric: $219. (Really.) Amazon’s best price for the same knobs: $129.16. The Thrifty Appliance price for four knock-offs (made by Exact Replacement Parts): $76 (or $80, minus a 5% discount on orders over $75). The knock-offs are indistinguishable from the originals.
Non-OEM parts may not always be a wise choice. (Using them can void a warranty.) But for burner knobs, paying a manufacturer’s price seems like folly, at least when the price is $54.75 per knob. Thrifty Appliance Parts, huzzah!
[The replacement knobs (with assorted plastic inserts) available from home-improvement stores are a waste of money. Don’t ask me how I know that.]
Tuesday, August 2, 2016
Thrifty Appliance Parts
Monday, August 1, 2016
Allegory
The restaurant has a limited menu — very limited. There are, for practical purposes, just two dishes, A and B. If you order one of them, you will get it or the other dish. There are other dishes on the menu, but no chance of getting them. If you order one of these other dishes, you’ll get A or B, and you’ll have lost your chance to choose between the two (which, of course, might not have made a difference). There are no other restaurants. So you choose from what’s available: A or B.
That paragraph explains why I will be voting — utterly without enthusiasm — for Hillary Clinton, and not for Jill Stein.
A related post
About last night
[Something I wrote, more or less, about an unrelated matter, in a comment on a friend’s blog: It’s good to know your own mind, but it’s good, too, to know that you can change it.]
Peanuts and none
[Peanuts , August 4, 1969.]
Today’s Peanuts first ran almost forty-seven years ago. “Gramma says that none of her other grandchildren has a blanket”: Lucy seems to be heeding The Elements of Style (1959), which declares that none “takes the singular verb,” period. (The declaration is an E. B. White addition to William Strunk Jr.’s 1918 text.) Subsequent editions of The Elements (1972, 1979, 2000) allow more flexibility: “A plural verb is commonly used when none suggests more than one thing or person.”
Bryan Garner’s Garner’s Modern English (2016) points out that none can mean “not one” or “not any.” Garner offers this guidance about choosing a verb:
To decide which to use, substitute the phrases to see which fits the meaning of the sentence: not one is or not any are.Which phrase fits the meaning of Lucy’s sentence: “Not one of her other grandchildren,” or “not any of her other grandchildren”? I give up! But I know that the singular has sounds strange to my ear here. Garner has a helpful comment:
Generally speaking, none is the more emphatic way of expressing an idea. But it’s also the less common way, particularly in educated speech, and it therefore sounds somewhat stilted. The problem is exacerbated by the unfortunate fact that some stylists and publications insist that none is always singular, even in the most awkward constructions.What was once plainly correct — the singular verb — now sounds stilted. I’d opt for “None of her other grandchildren have a blanket.” And now I wonder if Lucy gets her crabbiness from her grandmother.
You can find the complete run of Peanuts at GoComics.
Related reading, via Pinboard
All OCA comics posts
All OCA grammar posts
All OCA comics and grammar posts
[Linus’s reply to his sister: “Tell Gramma that I’m very happy for her, and that my admiration for those other wonderfully well-adjusted grandchildren knows no bounds!”]
Sunday, July 31, 2016
Prophecy of the day
“By the year 2000 there’ll be thirty-six TV stations, twenty-four hours a day, telling you what to think”: Cyril Bender (Phil Davis), in High Hopes (dir. Mike Leigh, 1988).
Saturday, July 30, 2016
Everybody and his brother is or are
A reader (and writer) asked: “everybody and his brother is ,” or “everybody and his brother are ”?
My answer: is . I consulted Garner’s Modern English Usage (2016), The American Heritage Dictionary of Idioms (1997), and The Merriam-Webster Dictionary of English Usage (1989) and found nothing. My homemade argument for is is that the phrase everybody and his brother is an intensification of everybody , which takes a singular verb. When you think about it, everybody already includes that brother.
Google search results support is — which is not to say that whatever is more frequent is right. But the numbers are telling:
everybody . . . are : 10,400The Google Ngram Viewer shows everybody . . . is and everyone . . . is as the preferred forms in our time (though from 1947 to 1953, everybody . . . are ruled). For whatever reason, the Ngram Viewer shows nothing for everyone . . . are , and it shows everybody . . . is dropping steadily since 1995 as everyone . . . is rises. My guess is that everyone is winning because it’s the shorter word.
everybody . . . is : 60,700
everyone . . . are : 32,500
everyone . . . is : 178,000
After doing all that looking, I found a post by the linguist Arnold Zwicky about everybody and his — suffice it to say that a naughty comic strip prompts his investigation. Zwicky’s conclusion about is and are: “Either choice is acceptable (and reasonable) — there’s no One Right Way — though there’s often a considerable preference for one choice in practice.”
My correspondent and I agree that is is less likely to call attention to itself than are . I would hope everybody and his brother agrees.
Friday, July 29, 2016
PBS, sheesh
Compare with or to
Bryan Garner glosses compare with and compare to :
The usual phrase has for centuries been compare with , which means “to place side by side, noting differences and similarities between” <let us compare his goals with his actual accomplishments>. Compare to = to observe or point only to likenesses between <he compared her eyes to limpid pools>.Persnickety children and young adults: raise your hands and correct your teachers. Do it this fall!
Compare and contrast is an English teacher’s tautology, for in comparing two things (one thing with another) one notes both similarities and differences.
Related reading
All OCA Bryan Garner posts (Pinboard)
[Orange Crate Art is a Garner-friendly zone.]
Weather in the air
“I remember a flat, tinny male voice, most likely not a ‘voice talent’”: Diane Schirf writes about weather radios. Follow the links and you’ll meet up with Mark Trail and the four voices of National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Weather Radio: Donna, Javier, Paul, and Tom.
[Diane Schirf has written about a number of “relics”: clotheslines and push mowers, for instance.]
Two Guys
An unexpected benefit of decluttering our laundry room: I was reunited with a bottle of Revere Ware Copper Cleaner bearing a Two Guys price sticker. Two Guys was a discount department-store chain; I worked in a Two Guys housewares department through two or three years of college. I must have brought the copper cleaner with me (along with some familial Revere Ware) when I left New Jersey for Boston in 1980. This bottle traveled around with me, with Elaine and me, with Elaine and Rachel and Ben and me, for thirty-six years.
I have thrown the bottle away, but I had to save the (slightly damaged) sticker. It now stands in a frame with another piece of found ephemera.
I remember well the men and women I worked with at Two Guys. John, who showed me how to use the shrink-wrap machine, treating every step as if it were a matter of life and death. (I understood only later: he was a vet.) Doug, refugee from the Bronx (“I’m bookin’”). Another Doug, who would reprice Farberware boxes for family and friends. Michael, who was surprised that my family had potatoes with dinner, just as I was surprised that his family had rice. Dave, who had lost his dry-cleaning business and couldn’t see well enough to manage the numbers on the pricing gun (everyone helped him out). Vickie, who spent several hours curled up in a garbage can one day. It was a clean can — merchandise, back in the can aisle. (God knows what might have happened had a customer lifted the lid.) Eric, assistant department manager, who would head back to the stockroom for an occasional dose of Southern Comfort. (He was quite open about it.) Don, department manager, with a child on the way, and the company beginning to sink. Elaine, our other department manager, whose chipped front tooth only made her more attractive. All the guys dug Elaine. Yes, she knew it.
Here is a strange, depressing Two Guys commercial. Here is some Two Guys background from Pleasant Family Shopping. And here is an Orange Crate Art post about “going on break.”
[“Elaine and me”: my wife and me, not my manager and me.]
Thursday, July 28, 2016
Lobby doors
From a New York Times article about money and the Democratic elite:
Occasionally, as bellhops leapt to open the lobby doors for another guest, the chants of protesters outside could be dimly heard.“Lobby doors” — get it? I think that the pun is intended.
[Every time I talk myself into thinking that I have to vote for Hillary Clinton, I read or see something that makes me say no . Hamlet, anyone?]
