“Missile Mail”

“Missile Mail: Regulus Scores Historic First” (1959). From British Pathé. Found via Sidedoor.

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Sidedoor, a podcast

Sidedoor is a new podcast from the Smithsonian: “stories about science, art, history, humanity and where they unexpectedly overlap.” My favorite episode: mail by missile, an orangutan being prepared for motherhood, and Phyllis Diller’s joke files. What brings those three stories together? Delivery!

The podcast’s delivery itself is sometimes a little hard to take: I cringe when I hear a phrase like “straight-up hubris.” But Sidedoor is a show to keep an eye on — that is, to listen to.

Words as money

“Money,” Wallace Stevens says, “is a kind of poetry.” Words and sentences, Harry R. Warfel says, are a kind of money. A surprising passage in a book about the place of grammar in education:

Language is the coin of the realm of thought. Like money, words and sentences interchange among people in the life processes of society. Just as the fiscal operations of a nation are intricate and infinitely complicated and yet seemingly simple to the child that exchanges a nickel for a candy bar, so the transfer of a few words — like “I love you” — produces a simple yet immense effect. That effect arises not merely from a momentary vocal noise or written scrawl but from a complexity of present and past experiences. Its very utterance portends a future of untold consequences of shared joys, pains, sorrows, griefs, and hopes.

Who Killed Grammar? (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1952).

Related posts
Money as poetry : The Warfel Law of Divided Usage

The Warfel Law of Divided Usage

Harry R. Warfel:

Several years ago I announced the Warfel Law of Divided Usage: “Whenever a variant is denounced as wrong by books or teachers, that ‘wrong’ usage will gain currency and will occur frequently in speech and writing.” The harping upon due to, different than, ain’t, and try and do has merely accelerated the adoption of these so-called errors by speakers and writers. . . . Emphasis creates a pattern that flashes automatically into the mind. For this reason wise teachers stress normative usages rather than “errors.”

Who Killed Grammar? (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1952).

See also David Lambuth’s Golden Book on Writing: “what the ’prentice writer needs to be told is what to do and not what not to do.”

But as one of Warfel’s examples suggests, emphasizing “normative usages” can itself lead to problems: She, he, and I (with I placed last), Warfel says, leads to Give some candy to he, she, and I. (And, I would add, to between he and I.) Misguided corrections also lead to problems: over many years of teaching, I often noticed students using in which where which alone was needed. (For instance: Hamlet’s soliloquy, in which shows us his difficulty in taking action.) I have long suspected that in which results from misguided teachers changing, say, the house I live in to the house in which I live. At some point, an in before which may become unfortunately automatic.

I hope some teacher somewhere finds the Warfel Law of Divided Usage useful in helping students to understand the sources of some of their writing problems.

A related post
Ending a sentence with it

[I noticed Why Grammar? mentioned in the first pages of Bryan Garner’s Chicago Guide to Grammar, Usage, and Punctuation (2016). Among Warfel’s books: Noah Webster: Schoolmaster to America (1936) and, as co-author, American College English: A Handbook of Usage and Composition (1949).]

Some winter rocks

The Google Doodle for the Northern Hemisphere’s first day of winter: some rocks, some shivering snow-capped rocks. Not, strictly speaking, “some rocks” — that is, three rocks — but some rocks. Or “some” rocks.

Thanks, Martha, for bringing these rocks to my attention.

[“Some rocks”: a motif in Ernie Bushmiller’s Nancy, and in these pages.]

“This Week in Hate”

At The New York Times, a fourth installment of “This Week in Hate.”

A Brooklyn bar menu

Why not make your own?

See also: “Adjective Foods.”

[Make here means “to generate by clicking.”]

Blue-light special

Not long ago I noticed pumpkins and squash bathed in an eerie orange light. Well, they had an orange light shining on them. There was no bathing, and nothing eerie. It was just the produce section.

Now I’ve noticed what The Crow mentioned seeing: blue light in the produce section.



And here’s why:


[Turnips, radishes, rutabagas, parsley, kohlrabi, rhubarb, and leeks with a blue light shining on them. Why do some vegetables lack separate plural forms?]

Reaching for a book

Eliot Weinberger, quoted in a New Yorker piece about his writing: “‘When I hear the word “Trump,”’ he said, ‘I reach for a book.’”

What books are you reaching for? Me: Stefan Zweig’s Collected Stories (trans. Anthea Bell), Bryan A. Garner’s The Chicago Guide to Grammar, Usage, and Punctuation, Harry R. Warfel’s Who Killed Grammar? And Arlie Russell Hochschild’s Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right, which leads back to current events.

M-W Word of the Year

Not fascism, which was never a contender. Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Year is surreal.