Awkward metaphor of the day

A campaign spokesman, speaking of his candidate to an anchor on CNN:

“He’s not going to be a wallflower that’s going to get pushed around.”

I can’t imagine what metaphor this spokesman was reaching for. But it certainly wasn’t wallflower . Perhaps he was confusing school dances, where the meek stand off to the side, and school hallways, where the meek get pushed up against the lockers.

The comments from Daughter Number Three and Pete Lit on this recent post made me notice the spokesman’s use of “with all due respect” — twice, each time prefacing a reply that said, in essence, You’re completely, totally wrong, you jerk.

Related reading
All OCA metaphor posts (Pinboard)

[“Where the meek stand off to the side”: if they’re even there. I speak from experience.]

A Face in the Crowd

From A Face in the Crowd (dir. Elia Kazan, 1957). Marcia Jeffries (Patricia Neal) asks Larry “Lonesome” Rhodes (Andy Griffith) a question:

“But how does it feel?”

“How does what feel?”

“Saying anything that comes into your head and being able to sway people like this?”

“Yeah, I guess I can.” [Pauses .] “Yeah, I guess I can.”

Lonesome Rhodes is a product, really, made for radio and television. He refuses to follow scripts. His people, as he describes them:

“Rednecks, crackers, hillbillies, hausfraus, shut-ins, pea-pickers, everybody that’s got to jump when somebody else blows the whistle. . . . Only they’re even more stupid than I am, so I gotta think for ’em.”

And there’s more. A Face in the Crowd is disturbingly prophetic.

Dad in a dream

My dad was volunteering at a senior-citizens center, showing silent movies. He would “load the software,” then talk about and show a movie. And to my surprise, he was smoking: True cigarettes. I asked him if they were regular (in the blue pack), or menthol (green). He didn’t know, which surprised me, but I didn’t press it.

In August my dad dropped into a less puzzling dream. I hope I’ll see him again soon.

[In real life, my dad never touched cigarettes. His own father had begun smoking at the age of ten and went on to smoke for sixty-odd years (Camels), becoming apartment-bound with emphysema and dying of lung cancer, years after quitting. I remember the True pack as it looked in the 1970s.]

Atomic fact

I tried my hand, or index finger, at composing a scientific paper with iOS’s autocomplete. I like the way this first sentence came out:

Atomic energy is the best thing ever to get the most Proustian and the most recent fact of the day.

I lost interest though, as autocomplete began to obsess about Proustian , recent , and Wikipedia . I wouldn’t want to use Wikipedia in a scientific paper.

A related post
iOS to the rescue

[Apple spells autocomplete without a hyphen.]

iOS to the rescue

When Christoph Bartneck, an associate professor at HIT Lab NZ, received an e-mail inviting him to submit a paper for the International Conference on Atomic and Nuclear Physics, he found himself with a problem. And a solution: “Since I have practically no knowledge of Nuclear Physics I resorted to iOS auto-complete function to help me writing the paper.”

And his abstract was accepted. Read all about it: iOS Just Got a Paper on Nuclear Physics Accepted at a Scientific Conference. A sample sentence from the abstract:

Molecular diagnostics will have been available for the rest by a single day and a good day to the rest have a wonderful time and aggravation for the rest day at home time for the two of us will have a great place for the rest to be great for you tomorrow and tomorrow after all and I am a very happy boy to the great day and I hope he is wonderful.

The invitation, of course, was an instance of academic spam. Sketchy conferences and journals and invitations abound. See also the classic collaborative paper written in response to another such invitation: “Get me off Your Fucking Mailing List.”

A related post
English professor spam

Go, Cubs, go

I can’t really claim to be a Cubs fan. But several people near and dear to me are. Really, really are. Go, Cubs, go!

[“Cubs Defeat Dodgers to Clinch First Pennant Since 1945” (The New York Times).]

Usage tip of the day

From Leddy’s Imaginary Dictionary of Usage (2016).

Also from this non-existent volume: Nice .

Sarcasm and irony

An explanation:

Sarcasm. The student’s word for irony. Sarcasm intends personal hurt. It may also be ironic, but need not be.

Sheridan Baker, The Practical Stylist (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1962).

I’m happy to have Sheridan Baker’s confirmation of this point of usage, something I figured out for myself early on in my teaching, after reading student evaluations that began, “He is very sarcastic.” I wasn’t sarcastic, but I learned to travel a road of greater straightforwardness, with fewer ironic twists and turns. I also learned to signal moments of comedy more clearly, to minimize possibilities for misunderstanding. And I realize that the previous sentence may sound sarcastic, but honestly, it’s not meant to be.

Also from The Practical Stylist
&QuA? : Bad sentences : Excerpts

#TrumpBookReport

Any resemblance to actual #TrumpBookReport tweets is purely coincidental. These are my fake tweets:

Such bad generals- whatever happened to the element of surprise? Oh wait- it wasn't invented yet.

*

And btw- I was AGAINST the war in Troy.

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10 yrs to get home? I don't think so. Look at a map!

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Illegal immigration, a very old problem. We must build a wall.

*

And btw- NO ONE had more respect for women than Aenus. Didoh- WAY too attached.

*

Like the week I spent talking about Miss Universe, it's not coming back. It's a stupid search. LOSER!

Related reading
All OCA Homer, Virgil, Proust posts (Pinboard)

[It’s too easy, so I’ve stopped with six. I’ve followed Donald Trump’s habit of using dumb quotation marks (here, apostrophes). And in Trump fashion, a hyphen followed by a space substitutes for a dash. How would Donald Trump spell Aeneas and Dido ? Your guess is as good as mine.]

Dunning K. Trump

The Dunning-Kruger effect has interested me since I wrote a short post about it in 2010. Dunning-Kruger helped explain something I had noticed in teaching: that students with serious deficits often have wildly inflated opinions about their ability. According to Dunning-Kruger, a lack of competence entails an inability to recognize one’s lack of competence.

Watching the presidential debate last night left me convinced that Donald Trump is, among other things, a victim of the Dunning-Kruger effect. He has no understanding of how government works, no grasp of how military strategy works, and he has no understanding that he lacks an understanding. Thus his ludicrous assertions: that Hillary Clinton should have changed the tax system (at some point during her “thirty years” in government), that the United States military needs to employ “the element of surprise.” In the second debate he called for “a sneak attack.” A sneak attack! That sounds like the suggestion of a bright third-grader.

And Trump has no understanding that he lacks an understanding of how his words might sound to anyone not already allied with him. “Nobody has more respect for women than I do,” he declared last night. And audience members laughed. I’m reminded of the story of a Hollywood mogul declaring, “I’ve got more class than any son of a bitch in the room.” Or words to that effect.

A related post
Steve Bushakis and Donald Trump