International Women’s Day

[Dia Internacional de la Mujer / International Women’s Day. Poster designed by the Women's Graphics Collective. Chicago, Illinois. 28 3/16" × 20 3/8".)]

“This bold poster was printed by the Chicago Women’s Graphics Collective to celebrate International Women’s Day on March 8, 1975.” It’s Cooper Hewitt’s Object of the Day.

[The identifying information on the Cooper Hewitt page says “ca. 1980.” Whatever the year, it’s International Women’s Day. Some history here.]

Cobble Court on the move

Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York marks the fiftieth anniversary of Cobble Court’s move to the Village. Short story long: Cobble Court is an old Manhattan farmhouse, transplanted from Lenox Hill to Greenwich Village in 1967. At one point before the transplant, the house served as the studio of Margaret Wise Brown. (Goodnight little house.)

You can find many photographs at Scouting New York, from a time when Cobble Court was in danger of being torn down for condominium development. Today, for now, Cobble Court appears to be safe.

A related post
Maeve Brennan, The Long-Winded Lady (With an excerpt from Brennan’s New Yorker piece about the move)

Word of the day: counterpane

Our household has begun to use, in fun, the word counterpane. It’s an older word for bedspread, familiar to us from reading Willa Cather and Herman Melville. The word’s most famous appearance in literature must be in the title of the unforgettable fourth chapter of Moby-Dick: “The Counterpane.”

I began to wonder: counterpane, windowpane. Is a pane then a panel? Is the idea that a bedspread is made of such pieces, sewn together to make a whole? That sounded plausible. But why counter?

The Oxford English Dictionary has the answers to these questions. Counterpane is “an alteration of counterpoint,” with the second element of that word made into pane, which derives from the French pan and the Latin pannus, meaning “cloth.” The pane in windowpane (“a division of a window”) goes back to the same Latin pannus. How strange to see cloth grow transparent and harden.

That clears up pane. But why counter? The OED explains its history, which begins with the

Old French contrepointe . . . , synonym of countepointe, both forms being apparently corruptions of Old French cuilte-pointe, coulte-pointe, coute-pointe, repr[esenting] Latin culcita puncta . . . lit[erally] “quilt stabbed or stitched through, quilted mattress.” The first element is thus the same word as quilt.

So a counterpane is a quilt.

But what about countertop, or as the OED spells it, counter-top? Where does it fit in? It doesn’t. Its counter derives from the Anglo-Norman counteour, countour, which (omitting many steps) goes back to the Latin computātōrium: computāre, meaning “to compute, count,” and a suffix. A counter is first “anything used in counting or keeping account” and later “a banker’s or money-changer’s table; also, the table in a shop on which the money paid by purchasers is counted out, and across which goods are delivered.”

This post, I hope, has delivered the goods, or at least some of them, in over-the-counter fashion.

“Some staples”

In the March 13 New Yorker, Alec Wilkinson writes about the musician Jack White, who likes having fewer choices:

The number three is essential to his purposes. He says it entered his awareness one day when he was an apprentice in the upholstery shop. He saw that the owner had used three staples to secure a piece of fabric and he realized that “three was the minimum number of staples an upholsterer could use and call a piece done.” The White Stripes were built around the theme of three — guitar, drums, and voice. As both a stance and a misdirection, they wore only red, white, and black. White wanted the White Stripes to play the blues, but he didn’t want to be seen as a boy-girl band attempting them.

Some staples, some instruments, some colors. As a regular reader should know, “some,” as in Ernie Bushmiller’s “some rocks,” comes up now and then in these pages.

Work with Care

[Nathan Sherman. Work with Care. WPA Federal Art Project. Pennsylvania, 1936 or 1937. Click for a larger view.]

You can explore the world of WPA posters at the Library of Congress website.

WPA stamps

[Click for a larger view.]

From the USPS: “The U.S. Postal Service celebrates posters of the Work Projects Administration, striking and utilitarian artwork created during the Depression by the Poster Division of the WPA Federal Art Project.” The stamps are due out today.

“The world’s choosing up sides”

From Saboteur (dir. Alfred Hitchcock, 1942). Barry Kane (Robert Cummings), a defense-plant employee, tells the fascist plotter Charles Tobin (Otto Kruger) what’s what:

“Love and hate. The world’s choosing up sides. I know who I’m with. And there are a lot of people on my side, millions of us in every country. And we’re not soft; we’re plenty strong. And we’ll fight standing up on our two feet, and we’ll win. Remember that, Mr. Tobin. We’ll win, no matter what you guys do. We’ll win if it takes from now until the cows come home.”

Related reading
All OCA Hitchcock posts (Pinboard)

UPS My Choice

From United Parcel Service: UPS My Choice is a nifty free service. If you’ve ever come back from a few days away and discovered an unexpected package left at your door, you will appreciate UPS My Choice. It alerts you to upcoming deliveries and allows you to reschedule. Tracks everything too, of course.

[Does everyone else know this stuff already?]

Prelude to a “Choo”

[Nancy, February 4, 1950.]

Hi Flagston’s “Ug!” made me think of Nancy Ritz’s “Ak.” Nancy has just gazed upon a poster for Health Week: “Cover That Sneeze.” Her “Ak” is the prelude to a megaphone-shaped “Choo.”


[Nancy, February 4, 1950.]

Could “Ak” be the etymon of Cathy Andrews Hillman’s “Aack,” “Aaack,” and “Aaaack”? Nah, I didn’t really think so either. If Cathy’s “Aack” has an etymon, it’s almost certainly “Aaugh.”

Related reading
All OCA Nancy posts (Pinboard)
“Kchaou!” (A sneeze in the Odyssey)

Meet the Rubber Man

Meet the Rubber Man, British Pathé (1947).

This fellow would have been a wonderful subject for a Beatles or Kinks song.

Related reading
All OCA eraser posts (Pinboard)