Spoiler alert, spoiler alert

Re: National Velvet (dir. Clarence Brown, 1944):

“National Velvet” is not a horse. She is a girl named Velvet Brown, played by Elizabeth Taylor. She rides a horse in the Grand National. Thus “National Velvet.”

Both members of our household had assumed, without seeing the film, that “National Velvet” is a horse. But as I have said, “National Velvet” is not a horse. She is a girl named Velvet Brown, played by Elizabeth Taylor. She rides a horse in the Grand National. Thus “National Velvet.”

We saw only the last few minutes of National Velvet. Still enough to think of Turner Classic Movies as The Learning Channel.

[The horse’s name: The Pie. The Pie.]

Today’s xkcd

Today’s xkcd: “Mispronunciation.” Very meta. Don’t miss the mouseover text — which, as I just discovered, you can see on an iPhone in Safari. Just hold down on the image.

Word of the day: heirloom

Did heirloom first denote a loom so great that it’s passed down from generation to generation? I’d been meaning to look that up for months. Seeing the word heirloom while shopping for seeds finally prompted me to find out. Is there a loom in heirloom? Yes and no.

The Oxford English Dictionary explains it all. Heirloom is made of two nouns. The second is the surprise: loom (c. 900) derives from the Middle English lome, meaning “tool, utensil.” Thus an heirloom is

a chattel that, under a will, settlement, or local custom, follows the devolution of real estate. Hence, any piece of personal property that has been in a family for several generations.

And later, figuratively, “anything inherited from a line of ancestors, or handed down from generation to generation.” The OED dates heirloom to 1424. Loom as a machine for weaving fabric is earlier (1404), but the citations for heirloom make clear that the word has to do with any kind of property, not with machines for weaving.

As for heirloom in relation to plants, that sense of the word is a recent invention:

Chiefly N. Amer. Of or designating a variety of plant or breed of animal which is distinct from the more common varieties associated with commercial agriculture, and has been cultivated or reared using the same traditional methods for a long time, typically on a small scale and often within a particular region or family.

The first citation for this use of heirloom comes from the New York Times, 1949: “One of the old heirloom varieties of lettuce seems to be coming to the fore.”

As for the verb loom, “to appear indistinctly; to come into view in an enlarged and indefinite form”: it’s unrelated. The OED explains:

Skeat suggests that the original meaning may have been “to come slowly (towards),” and compares East Frisian lômen, Swedish dialect loma to move slowly, Middle High German luomen to be weary, < luomi slack.

The OED also notes the word loomy (Scots and northern dialect), meaning “misty, cloudy.”

Long story short: an heirloom isn’t a weaving machine, nor is it something looming in the distance. Nor is it related to Erroll Garner, though the rights to “Misty” would be quite a heirloom.

[As for loom the noun, the word’s “ulterior etymology,” as the OED calls it, is murky: lome may derive from the Old English gelóma, “utensil, implement,” or from the Old English gelóme, “often,” the latter possibility suggesting that lome designated “things in frequent use.” Skeat: Walter William Skeat (1835–1912), distinguished philologist.]

Truck amok

[Donald Trump at the wheel, March 23, 2017. With apologies to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.]

Domestic comedy

“I feel kind of princess-y sitting here.”

“Well, if the glass slipper fits . . .”

Related reading
All OCA domestic comedy posts (Pinboard)

“Short Order Menus”

Not from Shirley May’s. It’s from a used-book store find:


[Linotype Keyboard Operation (Brooklyn: Mergenthaler Linotype Company, 1930). Click for a larger view.]

Zippy’s Shirley May’s

[Zippy, March 24, 2017.]

I find it strangely pleasant to look up diners and other establishments that appear in Zippy. For instance. Matching the so-called real world to the strip helps strengthen my confidence in reality. And sometimes the strip depicts a reality I already know.

Shirley May’s may be found at 36065 Santiam Hwy SE, Albany, Oregon. In the unending effort to protect individual privacy, the Googlerithms have blurred this mascot’s face in Street View. But not in every shot. Yow!


[There is a T on his chest, though it’s not visible here. For Texas? For Tennessee?]

Related reading
All OCA Zippy posts (Pinboard)

Geoffrey Nunberg on Trump’s “amateurish quotation marks”

Geoffrey Nunberg, writing about “the least literate president to take office” since Zachary Taylor:

Trump’s success as a politician owes a lot to his conspicuous disregard for the language of public life, of course. But when he tweets, he exposes himself as someone who has only a tenuous acquaintance with that language in its written form — not just as a man who doesn’t read books, but as a man who doesn’t read. Sealed in the bubble of his orality, he’s cut off from history, from biography, from sciences hard and soft.

That’s no impediment to running a large company, but it seriously impairs his ability to run a country, particularly if he’s at pains to deny or conceal it.

Cosmetic, cosmos

I wondered last night in a conversation with friends: could cosmetic and cosmos be related? Yes, they could be, and are. The Oxford English Dictionary traces both back to the Greek κόσμος, kosmos, meaning “order, ornament, world or universe,” “so called by Pythagoras or his disciples,“ says the OED, “‘from its perfect order and arrangement.’”

Stranger than strange: the first citations for cosmetic and cosmos come from the same source, John Bulwer’s Anthropometamorphosis (1650): “Which damnable portion of cosmetique Art”; “As the greater World is called Cosmus from the beauty thereof.” The OED identifies Bulwer as a “medical practitioner and writer on deafness and on gesture.” A Wikipedia article notes that Bulwer was “the first person in England to propose educating deaf people.”

The mishaps I can imagine resulting from the similarity between cosmetic and cosmos — say, someone wanting to study cosmetology and wondering where all the telescopes went — probably have little relation to reality.

NYT at Merriam-Webster

The New York Times visits lexicographer Kory Stamper at Merriam-Webster headquarters in Springfield, Massachusetts. With a peek into the Consolidated Vocabulary Files.