“Heavy, black pencils”

The tools of a copy editor, as described by Lincoln Grahlfs, a New York Times copy editor for forty years:

a handful of heavy, black pencils; a sheaf of copy paper; a pot of paste; a pair of scissors; a spike; and in the back of his head, a nice big fund of pertinent (and possibly impertinent) information.

Like the pastepot, the Times copy desk itself will soon be a thing of the past.

[“His head”: there’s no date for this description. The Times first employed a woman at the copy desk in 1958. The generic he would have been in use well after that. Lincoln Grahlfs died in 1968.]

Aeschylus and criminal justice

The New York Times reports on Theater of Law, which brings Aeschylus’s The Eumenides (or The Furies) to audiences concerned with fairness in the American criminal-justice system, “particularly,” the Times notes, “as mandatory minimum sentencing makes a comeback under Attorney General Jeff Sessions.” Theater of Law is a collaboration between New York University’s Forum on Law, Culture and Society and Theater of War.

It has to be said: as ancient Greek and Roman texts become increasingly peripheral to undergraduate English studies, the world beyond academia continues to find such texts remarkably relevant.

Related posts
Aeschylus and RFK
Aeschylus in three translations
Not dead yet (On teaching “the classics”)
Veterans read from Sophocles

[A question that I hope would arise in any consideration of justice and The Eumenides: what about Iphigenia?]

Jacket in the foreground

[Zippy, July 22, 2017.]

With folds. O, reason not the need.

Related reading
All OCA Zippy posts (Pinboard)

[Griffy has posed and attempted to answer the question of what is so fascinating about diners and laundromats. The strip’s title: “Take a Haiku.” Zippy’s reply is a syllable short of one. A recent Zippy strip about drawing fedoras made me remember a remark, somewhere, from R. Crumb: that clothing folds are the most difficult things to draw.]

From Sir Thomas Browne

A signpost on the road to oblivion:

To be namelesse in worthy deeds exceeds an infamous history.

Sir Thomas Browne, Hydriotaphia, Urne-Buriall, or, a Brief Discourse of the Sepulchrall Urnes Lately Found in Norfolk. 1658. From the text in Selected Writings, ed. Sir Geoffrey Keynes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968).

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Thomas Browne in The New York Times
Word of the day: quincunx

Royal Motel

[Ozymandias slept here. North Syracuse, New York, early in the morning.]

The sign appears to be repurposed: the pinkish capital letters behind MOTEL spell DINER.

Daughter Number Three has posted a photograph from a different angle.

Related reading
All OCA signage posts (Pinboard)

Oil and reading habits

Last Thursday, I felt fairly confident that Elaine and I were the only people in the world reading Sir Thomas Browne’s The Garden of Cyrus while waiting for an oil change. This Thursday, I felt extremely confident that I was the only person in the world reading Peter Wohlleben’s The Hidden Life of Trees while waiting for an oil-access cover to be fastened properly in place after a recent oil change. We saw the cover hanging down underneath the car this morning.

And I feel totally confident that I am the only person who read The Garden of Cyrus while waiting for an oil change who then read The Hidden Life of Trees while waiting for an oil-access cover to be fastened properly in place after that oil change.

To and too

Speaking of bad copyediting:


[From a landscaper’s flyer, found on the handle of our storm door.]

One of my earliest posts to Orange Crate Art was about a handyman’s flyer that my dad saved for me. It read “No job to small.” But this landscaper’s flyer, with its attention to capitalization and type size, and its subtle distinction between to and too, beats all. To much!

[In September 2004, Google had 5,950 results for “no job to small” and 34,900 for “no job too small.” Today, it’s 676,000 for to, and 593,000 for too. But it appears that results for too are included with those for to. Google’s Ngram Viewer has no results for no job to small in American English between 1800 and 2008. The Ngram shows “no job too small” spiking in popularity between 1915 and 1922. Why?]

”There’s no excuse for bad copyediting”

[Dustin, July 19, 2017.]

Fitch’s L, for loser, is backward. Good call, Dustin.

See also this strip’s treatment of phrasal adjectives and “rocket surgery.”

More Vivian Maier

From the Chicago Tribune: “Almost 500 never-before-shown Vivian Maier prints have found a new home at the University of Chicago Library, the university announced Wednesday.”

A slideshow of fourteen photographs accompanies the Tribune article.

A related post
Henry Darger and Vivian Maier

Against “Jane”

The novelist Howard Jacobson, on why readers should not refer to Jane Austen as “Jane”:

[I]t is more than an impertinence; it is singularly cloth-eared, considering the precise forms that address takes in Jane Austen’s work. It isn’t only manners that are at stake when one person trespasses on another’s privacy and distance, it’s morality.

In novel after novel, we see how disregard for the niceties of respect will lead to what is described in Mansfield Park as “too horrible a confusion of guilt, too gross a complication of evil.” Outside the barriers that ceremony erects, “barbarism” lies in wait.

And if that sounds altogether too prim and unforgiving a view of human society, then you haven’t read Jane Austen.

See also: museum docents who talk about “Emily.”