A page-ninety test

I bought the book a few years ago and never got around to reading it. So I took it from a shelf this week and began. I lasted six or seven pages before deciding to do a page-ninety test. It’s a Ford Madox Ford practice: turn to page ninety, choose the first paragraph of any real length, and read it to gauge the quality of the writer’s prose:

This is another of the ironies of the melancholy existence. In feeling fractured and fragmented, isolated and bereft, one actually comes to experience wholeness and unity. To suffer melancholy is also to understand its polar opposite, joy. Lacking joy, one broods on it more deeply than when one possesses this state. Contemplating this condition, one eventually comes to understand it more profoundly than one would if one were actually experiencing joy. In vacillating between sorrow and joy, one grasps the secret harmony between these two antinomies. Doing so, one apprehends the rhythms of the whole cosmos, itself a dynamic interplay between opposites. To get this fact is to move close to the core of the world, to become acquainted with how the universe works and breathes and is. In such moments as this — those instants when we feel connected to the whole — we return, in a strange way, to innocence.

Or we return the book to the shelf — or better, we bring the book to the nearest library sale or used-book store. In its redundancies (“fractured and fragmented,” ”isolated and bereft,” “polar opposite,” “whole cosmos,” “moments” and “instants”), inelegant variations (“this condition” for “this state,” “opposites” for “antinomies”), slackness (“actually” twice, “this — those”), and vague pseudo-profundities (“wholeness and unity,” “the rhythms of the whole cosmos,” “a dynamic interplay,” “the core of the world,” “the whole,” “in a strange way,” “innocence”), this writer’s prose is, for me, unreadable. I wish I’d figured that out before buying the book.

Related reading
Ford Madox Ford’s page-ninety test
My Salinger Year, a page-ninety test
Nature and music, a page-ninety test
The history of handwriting, a page-ninety test

[The book’s writer is a professor of English, or as he describes himself, “a literary humanist searching for a deeper life.” Though it’s not clear from this passage, he makes a sharp distinction between melancholia and depression. Still, “polar” is an unfortunate choice in this territory. And the whole passage strikes me very wishful thinking.]

In other news

In other news: rain. Keeps rainin’. All the time.

Jeez, rain — cease!

A related post
Armstrong and Arlen, blues and weather

Zweig on “the technological spirit”

Sefan Zweig, from a lecture given in 1932:

The technological spirit working today towards the unification of the world is more about a way of thinking than anything to do with humanity. This spirit has no country, no home, no human language; it thinks in formulae, reckons in figures and it creates machines which, in their turn, create us, almost against our will, in an exterior form which is more and more identical.

“European Thought in Its Historical Development,” in Messages from a Lost World: Europe on the Brink, trans. Will Stone (London: Pushkin Press, 2016).

At so many points in these essays, Zweig is eerily relevant to our times.

Related reading
All OCA Stefan Zweig posts (Pinboard)

“A French garden in Hamilton”

Godfrey St. Peter, professor, historian, writer of an eight-volume Spanish Adventurers in North America, is something of a conquerer in his own midwestern town:


Willa Cather, The Professor’s House (1925).

Elaine and I just finished reading The Professor’s House, and we’ve now read, aside from a handful of uncollected stories, all of Willa Cather’s fiction. Elaine was reading the novel for the second time; I was reading it for perhaps the twentieth time (still finding new things to notice). I’ve been trying to decide upon a passage that might interest a reader, and this paragraph is the best I can do. If the professor seems like a mock version of his — it’s a telling word — “adventurers,” imposing a foreign order upon a place, well, he is. But set against that mockery are the generous descriptions of the garden’s delights: slender poplars, geraniums dripping over a wall. Tom Outland’s name at the end of the paragraph, the first reference to him in the novel, adds a note of mystery.

To my mind, The Professor’s House is Cather’s greatest novel and one of the greatest American novels. It’s an experiment in form (with lapidary, musical, and painterly analogies to account for its three-part structure), an exploration of cultures modern and ancient, and an examination of what Cather calls “the double life” of human connection and utter aloneness. The novel has haunted me from the time I first read it. I was younger than Tom Outland then, and older that Godfrey St. Peter now.

Related reading
All OCA Cather posts (Pinboard)

Commitment

A Republican political analyst opines:

Taken as a package, the 100 Days interviews sound like evidence submitted in an involuntary commitment hearing to a mental institution.

— Rick Wilson (@TheRickWilson) May 2, 2017

“Broom Clean Daily”

[While stopped at a red light.]

I like this sign, whose rules, for the most part, might apply to any workplace: “Work Safe / Hardhats Required / Broom Clean Daily / No Smoking / Fine: $250.00.”

Hi and Lois watch

[Hi and Lois, May 2, 1017.]

The lettering on the window reads correctly: no more ETATSE LAER. But that bald spot, or rather, the hair that surrounds it: yikes.

Related reading
All OCA Hi and Lois posts (Pinboard)

An Obama thought

From a New York Times editorial:

It is disheartening that a man whose historic candidacy was premised on a moral examination of politics now joins almost every modern president in cashing in. And it shows surprising tone deafness, more likely to be expected from the billionaires the Obamas have vacationed with these past months than from a president keenly attuned to the worries and resentments of the 99 percent.

If I were Barack Obama, I would have skipped the $400,000 speech and sought an opportunity to speak at an Illinois state university’s commencement. Not at the state’s flagship institution: at a second-tier (“regional”) school, any second-tier school. I would have used the occasion to speak about higher education as a public good, as something deserving of strong support from the state’s governor, legislature, and people. I would have done it for no fee. I would have paid for the cost of security myself. But I’m not Barack Obama. And neither, in some ways, is he.

Related reading
All OCA Illinois budget crisis posts (Pinboard)
Obama on the Titanic (In Springfield)

[Illinois has gone nearly two years without a full state budget.]

The “Jane Austen” fallacy

In 2013 a medical editor who calls himself mededitor coined the term “the ‘Jane Austen’ fallacy” to describe a strategy that informs some discussions of grammar and usage:

In many discussions of usage, you’ll find language experts pointing to past authors’ works as evidence that a particular point of grammar is OK because so-and-so used it. For example: singular they.

Yes, you can find instances of singular they used by Shakespeare, Austen, and many others. Likewise you’ll find idiosyncratic spellings and constructions that today would be disallowed in edited prose.

The point here is that past usage does not justify modern practice.

Exactly. As I wrote in a review of a new book about lexicography:

Yes, Shakespeare used double negatives and Austen used ain’t and the possessive it’s. But so what? Try using them in a letter of application to Merriam-Webster and see how far you get.

I wish I’d known the term “the ‘Jane Austen fallacy’” when I was writing that review.

And why is it the “Jane Austen” fallacy? I think that mededitor’s quotation marks are meant to suggest a speaker or writer invoking a name — which, now that I think of it, is a favorite strategy of childhood argument: “But Jane Austen’s going. And Bill Shakespeare’s going too!” And the parental reply: “If Jane Austen and Bill Shakespeare jumped off a bridge, would you follow?”

Related posts
Orient and orientate (Invoking W.H. Auden and others)
Pullum on Strunk and White (Invoking “classic texts”)

[I’ve italicized the two instances of they in mededitor’s prose.]

Orient and orientate

[Thinking about usage.]

Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Day today is orientate. A note on usage adapted from The Merriam-Webster Dictionary of English Usage (1989) accompanies the word. Here is today’s note:

Orientate is a synonym of “orient,” and it has attracted criticism as a consequence. “Orient,” which dates from the early 18th century, is in fact the older of the two verbs — “orientate” joined the language in the mid-19th century. Both can mean “to cause to face toward the east” and, not surprisingly, they are related to the noun Orient, meaning “the East.” Both also have broader meanings that relate to setting or determining direction or position, either literally or figuratively. Some critics dislike “orientate” because it is one syllable longer than “orient,” but you can decide for yourself how important that consideration is to you. Personal choice is the primary deciding factor, although “orientate” tends to be used more often in British English than it is in American English.

I see two problems with Merriam-Webster’s commentary:

~ Casting a preference for orient as a matter of stinginess about syllables is a little misleading. That red, for instance, has one less syllable than orange is not a reason to prefer red. A better reason to prefer orient to orientate is that orientate is, as Garner’s Modern English Usage (2016) calls it, a “needless variant,” doing work that orient already does. Add a dis- and orientate sounds even more ungainly: “I felt disorientated in my new surroundings.”

~ The advice to “decide for yourself” between orient and orientate is, to my mind, wildly unhelpful. On what basis will you decide? What if you hold the mistaken belief that longer words make you sound more intelligent? To think of “personal choice” as “the primary deciding factor” seems to miss the point that your language is for another, for some listener or reader who will be weighing what you say or write. Will orientate strike that listener or reader as intelligent and sophisticated, or as merely pompous? Will it inspire respect for what you say, or will it leave your audience wondering why you can’t just say or write orient?

The Merriam-Webster Dictionary of Usage supplements its discussion with sample sentences from writers “who obviously saw nothing wrong with orientate”: W.H. Auden, Aldous Huxley, Margaret Mead, Robert Morley, and others. Yes, and one of those writers (Morley) also saw nothing wrong with using the word Chinamen. In 2017, what Merriam-Webster fails to point out is that in British English, as in American English, orient is far more common than orientate. Here’s just one Google ngram to help make the point. Choosing orientate on either side of the Atlantic might mark a speaker or writer as something of an outlier.