Tony Bennett at ninety

In case you missed it:

The video has long since been removed. It was Tony Bennett on The Late Show, singing “This Is All I Ask,” by Gordon Jenkins.

Tony Bennett has often spoken of the advice about practice he received from his vocal coach, Pietro d’Andrea: “The first day you don’t do the scales, you know. The second day, the musicians know. The third day, the audience knows.” Tony Bennett is in practice. Long may he wave.

WSJ vulgarity

The Wall Street Journal now allows the printing of vulgarities. Insert gratuitous vulgar exclamation here .

The New York Times , which has gone so far as to rewrite a Philip Larkin line and sanitize a David Foster Wallace sentence to avoid such words as fuck and fucking , should take heed.

Haiku

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Font haiku

[Context: Elaine, Rachel, and I enjoyed one beer apiece last night — one. (Lagunitas.) As I discovered this morning, Rachel put her empty bottle in the nearest wastebasket. I have posted this haiku with Rachel’s permission. It’s a great joy to have her here for a few days.]

Thrifty Appliance Parts

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.]

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.

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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.

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[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!”]

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).

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 : 10,400
everybody . . . is : 60,700
everyone . . . are : 32,500
everyone . . . is : 178,000

The 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.

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.

PBS, sheesh

David Brooks, earlier this evening on the PBS NewsHour : “Every pundit, from Mark and I on down . . . .”

From Mark and me . Watch or read here.

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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>.

Compare and contrast is an English teacher’s tautology, for in comparing two things (one thing with another) one notes both similarities and differences.

Persnickety children and young adults: raise your hands and correct your teachers. Do it this fall!

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[Orange Crate Art is a Garner-friendly zone.]