English teachers and spelling

From a series of exchanges concerning the spellings timpani and tympani , published in the Letters pages of The Atlantic in October 1986 and February 1987. These passages appear in the October issue. David Francis Urrows is taking issue with William Youngren’s use of the spelling tympani :

William H. Youngren, who teaches English at Boston College and writes about music for your journal, might take a few lessons in spelling from his colleagues.

Snarky, no? In his reply, Youngren says that Urrows is “quite wrong,” points to the presence of tympani in recent dictionaries, and looks at the history of tympany , tympanies , cetel  and drum in the Oxford English Dictionary . He adds that one Anglo-Saxon word for kettle drum was timpan or tympan. (See? There’s a y .) And then:

Finally, I wonder where Urrows got his curious idea that people who teach English are good at spelling. Most of us are actually pretty poor at it. But this disability has encouraged in us the useful habit of looking words up in the dictionary.

Take that!

Bill Youngren was a teacher of mine (a great one). He loved a good debate, and he didn’t hesitate to concede a point. But you had better have done your homework (so to speak) if you wanted to be persuasive.

A related post
Bill and Virginia Youngren’s house

[“So to speak”: in graduate school there’s no such thing as “homework.”]

California Typewriter

California Typerwriter (dir. Doug Nichol, 2016) is a new documentary. From the film’s website:

California Typerwriter is a documentary portrait of artists, writers, and collectors who remain steadfastly loyal to the typewriter as a tool and muse, featuring Tom Hanks, John Mayer, David McCullough, Sam Shepard, and others.

It also movingly documents the struggles of California Typewriter, one of the last standing repair shops in America dedicated to keeping the aging machines clicking.

In the process, the film delivers a thought-provoking meditation on the changing dynamic between humans and machines, and encourages us to consider our own relationship with technology, old and new, as the digital age’s emphasis on speed and convenience redefines who’s serving whom, human or machine?

The first sentence makes me curious. The second sentence makes me want to see the film. (California Typewriter is a family-run shop in Berkeley.) The third sentence, not so much. The film’s trailer equates the typewriter with freedom and rebellion: there’s even a still on the film’s website of a typewriter bearing the (Woody Guthrie-inspired) words “THIS MACHINE KILLS FASCISTS.” That claim would come as news to the totalitarian regimes that documented their genocidal efforts in meticulous detail with typewriters. A machine can be put to any number of human purposes.

Related reading
All OCA typewriter posts (Pinboard)

William Weld’s reading

My friend Stefan Hagemann (who has written a great guest-post about how to answer a question in class) pointed me to an All Due Respect interview with William Weld, Libertarian candidate for vice president. Speaking about the books that have meant the most to him, Weld cites James Thomas Flexner’s biography of George Washington as his “favorite historical book.” And then:

“In literature, my two favorite authors are Jorge Luis Borges, Ficciones , Labyrinths , the Buenos Aires, the porteño, Argentinian, and Vladimir Nabokov, the Russian, probably my favorite author of all time. My favorite Nabokov book is Pale Fire .”

What?! Thank you, Stefan.

Elaine adds: “If only Gary Johnson knew what Aleppo is.”

Added strangeness: “That in Aleppo Once . . .” is the title of a Nabokov story.

Related reading
Borges on reading
All Nabokov posts (Pinboard)

[If Gary Johnson is asked about his running mate’s literary tastes, he can respond in the Philip Larkin manner: “Who is Jorge Luis Borges?”]

And what is ...?

“And what is Aleppo?” Gary Johnson asks https://t.co/po7gg7UPWi pic.twitter.com/FnMf65IN6o

— POLITICO (@politico) September 8, 2016

But wait. Can we be sure that Gary Johnson was asking “And what is Aleppo?” Could he have been asking “And what is a leppo?” Either way, his response is sad and frightening beyond belief.

We are really in the Upside Down, or the total animal soup of time, or something even worse.

*

3:43 p.m.: See also:

Word of the day: spatula

Spatula : what’s up with that?

Webster’s Third has a remarkable definition:

a thin flexible dull-edged usu. metal implement used esp. for spreading or mixing soft substances (as paint, plaster, ointment, frosting), scooping, or lifting (as in removing cookies from a pan).

I like the unsettling series — paint, plaster, ointment, frosting — and the surprising touch of coziness at the end. I hope there will be milk with the cookies.

The word spatula looks like Latin, and it is. It’s from Late Latin. And here things get interesting: all that W3 says is “more at EPAULET.”

Epaulet (“something that ornaments or protects the shoulder”) comes from the French épaulette, the diminutive of épaule, which means “shoulder.” Épaule comes from the Old French espaule , which itself comes from the Late Latin spatula or spathula , which means “shoulder blade, spoon for stirring.” Spatula or spathula is the diminutive of the Latin spatha , which means “wooden spoon, sword.” And spatha comes from the Greek spathē , “blade of a loom, oar, or sword.”

And here the dictionary tells us that there’s “more at SPADE.” And there is: the Greek spathē is the source of spade as the name of a card suit (♠︎). The Greek word also figures in the history of the word spade as the name of an implement, a word with a different, more complicated history: “more at SPOON.”

And now I wondered: if the Latin spatula is the diminutive of a word that means “sword,” could spatula have something to do with spat ? A petty quarrel, like a fight with little swords and not larger weapons? Apparently not. W3 says that that spat is “prob. of imit. origin.” And by the way, spat as in fancy footwear is short for spatterdash , “a usu. knee-high legging worn as a protection from water and mud.”

Having learned about spathē , I thought I understood why we have shoulder-blades . But the English-language shoulder-blade is the scapula , not spatula . And scapula explains scapular.

I will never look at a thin flexible dull-edged usu. metal implement in the same way.

[Spatula , capitalized, is also the name of “a genus of ducks consisting of the shovelers and often included in Anas .” Uncapitalized, spatula also means “a spatulate [shaped like a spatula] process on the body of an insect.”]

Recently updated

Nancy Kerouac I’ve come to a conclusion.

Cargo-shorts debate

How did I miss this story?

Relationships around the country are being tested by cargo shorts, loosely cut shorts with large pockets sewn onto the sides. Men who love them say they’re comfortable and practical for summer. Detractors​ say they’ve been out of style for years, deriding them as bulky, uncool and just flat-out ugly. In recent days, the debate has engulfed the nation.

Perhaps you missed it, too: “Nice Cargo Shorts! You’re Sleeping on the Sofa” (The Wall Street Journal). The subhead is a thing of beauty: “Fans of the roomy summer staple meet pockets of resistance.”

Personally (and I once knew a student who prefaced every statement with that word), I find cargo shorts exceedingly practical. How else am I supposed to carry a phone, a wallet, keys, and a pack of Kleenex? A thing of practicality is a joy forever.

*

4:30 p.m.: Finally got the link to work.

“Be a good adult”

On children’s awareness:

These children, who are at our mercy, are well aware of our power over them, and aware too of the things in us which can do them harm. There’s little sense in our saying to them, “Now be a good child.” Better for us to say to each other, “Be a good adult.”

Caroline Pratt, I Learn from Children: An Adventure in Progressive Education . 1948. (New York: Grove, 2014).

Also from Caroline Pratt
Art criticism : On waste in education : Pencils in school : Snow in the city in the school

Zippy and Shecky

[Zippy , September 7, 2016.]

See Kliph Nesteroff’s Outrageous and Courageous: The Myth and Legend of Shecky Greene (WFMU). A sample of Greene’s comedy: “Frank Sinatra saved my life once. He said, ‘Okay, boys. That’s enough.’”

Related reading
All OCA Zippy posts (Pinboard)

How to improve writing (no. 67)

Ford Madox Ford’s page-ninety test (and it is page ninety, not ninety-nine), can yield amazing results. The Ford practice: open a book to page ninety and consider the first full paragraph of any length. How’s the prose?

This past Sunday I applied the test to a book Elaine and I bought at a library sale. Was this book, about nature and music, worth our time? Here’s the first full paragraph on page ninety:

The first thing I noticed at each location was how much emphasis the other researchers on-site — each concentrating on a narrow topic — placed on the visual aspects of their study animals. For those whose scope of work involved sound at any level, the biophony — and in many cases even the individual species’ sounds — was completely overlooked. Yet I realized quickly just how varied and rich the natural soundscapes were.

The first two sentences are ponderous. Dashes are part of the problem: the first two separate placed from researchers ; the next two may have convinced the writer that sounds was not part of a compound subject. An error in subject-verb agreement results: biophony and sounds was overlooked. But were overlooked wouldn’t be much of an improvement: the passive-voice verb is a dull choice, especially if the writer wants to emphasize that other researchers missed something. Elsewhere, an overreliance on to be minimizes the writer’s agency: “The first thing I noticed . . . was.”

Reading the paragraph a third or fourth time, I noticed that an overabundance of prepositional phrases adds to the first sentence’s ponderousness: “at each location,” “on-site” (where else could the researchers be?), “on a narrow topic,” “on the visual aspects,” “of their study animals.” And I began to wonder what it might mean to describe an animal’s “visual aspects.” Do they have something to do with a creature’s ability to see? Or are we speaking of a creature’s appearance? One more thing: the paragraph’s final sentence seems to me a bit too self-congratulatory.

My best revision:

At each location, I found that other researchers did little more than look at animals. Even those whose work involved some attention to sound failed to notice the biophony and the distinctive vocalizations of individual species. It was as if these researchers were deaf to the richness and variety of natural soundscapes.

My revision takes this paragraph from seventy words to fifty-two, with no dashes. The dash problem, as I discovered by turning pages, is everywhere: 236 pages, and only twenty-odd are dashless.

The book, by the way, is from Little, Brown. The writer thanks his editor for a “finely tuned combo of eye and ear for proper voice and structure.”

*

3:35 p.m.: One more change: from “distinctive sounds” to “distinctive vocalizations.” I didn’t like the repetition of “some attention to sound” and “distinctive sounds.”

Related reading
All OCA How to improve writing posts (Pinboard)
The page-ninety-nine test
The test applied to My Salinger Year

[Biophony? The writer defines it as “sounds originating from nonhuman, nondomestic biological sources.” This post is no. 67 in a series, “How to improve writing,” dedicated to improving stray bits of public prose.]