Domestic comedy

[After closing up a box of pasta with plastic wrap and a rubber band.]

“It keeps the weevils out.”

“We don’t have weevils.”

“And this is why.”

Related reading
All OCA domestic comedy posts (Pinboard)

Peanuts Donald

[Peanuts, June 6, 1970.]

His name is Thibault, but his hair and manner say “Donald.”

Related reading
All OCA Peanuts posts (Pinboard)

“Salacious material”

From James Comey’s prepared testimony:

During the dinner, the President returned to the salacious material I had briefed him about on January 6, and, as he had done previously, expressed his disgust for the allegations and strongly denied them. He said he was considering ordering me to investigate the alleged incident to prove it didn’t happen. [January 27 dinner.]

He described the Russia investigation as “a cloud” that was impairing his ability to act on behalf of the country. He said he had nothing to do with Russia, had not been involved with hookers in Russia, and had always assumed he was being recorded when in Russia. [March 30 telephone call.]

Strange: Trump circles back — twice — to the “salacious material” and denies wrongdoing. Was anyone besides Trump still thinking about that stuff in March? He doth protest too much, methinks. And I wonder: is “hookers” Comey’s word, or Trump’s?

*

April 19, 2018: With the release of James Comey’s memos, we now know that “hookers” is Trump’s word: “can you imagine me, hookers?” And we now know that on February 8, 2017, Trump circled back once more to “the hookers thing,” as he then called it.

“Sgt. Petsound’s”

Now, at WFMU (or, in the future, in the archives): “Sgt. Petsound’s.” Gary Sullivan is playing “tributes, covers, deconstructions, mashups, samples, nods, and more in response to two of the most influential albums of all time.”

Thanks to Music Clip of the Day for passing on the news of this show.

Too many ands?

The New Arthurian alerted me to a recent controversy involving the word and. When Paul Romer of the World Bank criticized the Bank staff’s writing and called for shorter, clearer documents, he pointed specifically to excessive use of and and insisted that the word account for not more than 2.6% of a Bank report. In a highly critical 2015 analysis of “Bankspeak,” Franco Moretti and Dominique Pestre cite that percentage as the average frequency of and in academic writing.

One passage from a World Bank report that has come in for attention, by way of Moretti and Pestre’s analysis:

promote corporate governance and competition policies and reform and privatise state-owned enterprises and labour market/social protection reform

Is and really the problem? Moretti has said that “a few fewer ands” won’t fix the Bank’s writing problems. Romer has acknowledged that his emphasis on the conjunction is “a gimmick,” a way to call attention to matters of writing. Mark Liberman has listed literary works with more than 2.6% and. In first place: the King James Version of Genesis, with 9.55% and. As I began to think about and, Sammy Cahn’s lyrics for “Love and Marriage” popped into my head. Cahn beats Genesis: his 100-word lyric is 10% and. “Love and marriage, love and marriage, / Go together like a horse and carriage”: there’s a sentence that’s 23% and.

The real problem with the passage of Bank writing is not the ands but the words in between, piled up with an utter lack of clarity. Look again:

promote corporate governance and competition policies and reform and privatise state-owned enterprises and labour market/social protection reform

Does policies apply to both governance and competition, or to competition alone? Is the first reform a noun that pairs with policies, or a verb that pairs with privatise? And if reform is a verb, what sense is there in reforming enterprises that are to be privatized? And how might “labour market/social protection reform” be privatized? Wouldn’t privatizing reform amount to permitting private enterprise to do whatever it pleases?

And here I’m reminded of George Orwell’s observation in “Politics and the English Language” (1946) that one need not take on the responsibility of thinking when composing sentences:

You can shirk it by simply throwing your mind open and letting the ready-made phrases come crowding in. They will construct your sentences for you — even think your thoughts for you, to a certain extent — and at need they will perform the important service of partially concealing your meaning even from yourself. It is at this point that the special connexion between politics and the debasement of language becomes clear.

Or economic policy and the debasement of language.

Paul Romer fought a good fight, but the enemy is much bigger than and. Yes, fought. As Bloomberg reported in late May:

The World Bank’s chief economist has been stripped of his management duties after researchers rebelled against his efforts to make them communicate more clearly, including curbs on the written use of and.

Two Paul Romer websites
Notes for Bank insiders : Paul Romer

[“Love and Marriage,” music by Jimmy Van Heusen, lyrics by Sammy Cahn. I skipped the repeats when counting ands.]

Efficiency and effectiveness

“Efficiency is concerned with doing things right. Effectiveness is doing the right things”: Peter Drucker, Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices (New York: Routledge, 1974).

Other Drucker-related posts
On figuring out where one belongs : On income disparity in higher ed : On integrity in leadership

“Fact from Fiction”

From the PBS NewsHour: “Fact from Fiction,” about teaching young people how to distinguish genuine news stories from falsehoods. Fred Croddon, a third-grader: “People, if they don’t know how to analyze it, will just say, ‘Oh, wow, that’s true!’” Smart kid.

Anil Dash on choices

“We don’t have a media and tech ecosystem that rewards long-term, thoughtful, contemplative, slow, meaningful choices”: Anil Dash, interviewed by Debbie Millman for the Design Matters podcast.

A page-forty-five test

The book is short: a four-page preface and just ninety pages of text, followed by acknowledgements, sources, and index. So instead of a page-ninety test, I chose to do a page-forty-five test:

Positive emotions in an academic context are linked, as we have seen, “to social relationships” (Beard et al. 638). Laughter can promote social harmony, as long as it is not derisive. Jaak Panksepp (who coined the term “affective neuroscience”) argues that the adult “taste for humor” originates in childhood: children love to be chased and tickled because it ”arouses the brain” and promotes bonding. Adult laughter “is most certainly infectious and may transmit moods of positive social solidarity, thereby promoting cooperative forms of social engagement” (184).

This paragraph reveals a tendency that runs through the book: the citing and quoting of sources to bolster commonplace, unobjectionable statements. Do we really need a source to confirm that laughter is infectious? Are “to social relationships” and “taste for humor” phrases distinctive enough to merit quotation? Ninety pages of text, and a Works Cited list with 151 entries: something is off. The paragraph I’ve quoted is fairly short; others in this book run more than a page; a few, more than two pages. (Thirty-seven lines per page.) I’m in complete sympathy with the writers’ argument (against the corporatization of academia), but this book is best borrowed from a library.

Related posts
Ford Madox Ford’s page-ninety test
My Salinger Year, a page-ninety test
Nature and music, a page-ninety test
A history of handwriting, a page-ninety test
A book about happiness, a page-ninety test

[The book is Maggie Berg and Barbara K. Seeber’s The Slow Professor: Challenging the Culture of Speed in the Academy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016).]

Dylan and Homer

Bob Dylan, in his Nobel Prize lecture:

When Odysseus in The Odyssey visits the famed warrior Achilles in the underworld – Achilles, who traded a long life full of peace and contentment for a short one full of honor and glory – tells Odysseus it was all a mistake. “I just died, that’s all.” There was no honor. No immortality. And that if he could, he would choose to go back and be a lowly slave to a tenant farmer on Earth rather than be what he is – a king in the land of the dead – that whatever his struggles of life were, they were preferable to being here in this dead place.

That’s what songs are too. Our songs are alive in the land of the living. But songs are unlike literature. They're meant to be sung, not read. The words in Shakespeare’s plays were meant to be acted on the stage. Just as lyrics in songs are meant to be sung, not read on a page. And I hope some of you get the chance to listen to these lyrics the way they were intended to be heard: in concert or on record or however people are listening to songs these days. I return once again to Homer, who says, “Sing in me, oh Muse, and through me tell the story.”

I have to say: Dylan’s lecture makes me feel a lot happier about his Nobel Prize.

*

June 15: He plagiarized.

Related reading
All OCA Homer posts (Pinboard)
Positively Oslo

[Dylan quotes almost exactly the opening line of Robert Fitzgerald’s 1961 translation of The Odyssey: “Sing in me, Muse, and through me tell the story.” The phrase “tenant farmer” appears in Robert Fagles’s 1996 translation and, as I now know, in the CliffsNotes for the poem. “I just died, that’s all” is all Dylan.]