Current events

I put the news on earlier today and heard an analyst talking about what “Jared and Ivanka” wanted. First names only. And for a moment the news felt utterly indistinguishable from a reality-TV show. Alliances, rivalries: it’s Big Brother in the White House.

Jeanne Moreau (1928–2017)

From the New York Times obituary: “Jeanne Moreau, the sensual, gravel-voiced actress who became the face of the New Wave, France’s iconoclastic mid-20th-century film movement, most notably in François Truffaut’s 1962 film Jules and Jim, died on Monday at home in Paris.”

The Times obituary mentions many Moreau films. One that’s missing and that I’d like to mention: Jacques Demy’s Bay of Angels (1963).

A good skate

My mom told me that Ben is “a good skate.” That’s a compliment, of course, but — what? I had to look it up. The explanation, once I found my way to it, is simple. Bear with me:

Revolutionary War soldiers liked to sing the Scottish song “Maggie Lauder,” the chorus of which chided a blatherskate, a gabby person full of nonsense or hot air. The song is a very old one dating back to the l7th century, and the word blatherskate is older still, formed from bladder, an obsolete English word for an inflated pretentious man, a windbag, and a contemptuous use of the word skate, referring to the common food fish. Why the skate was chosen for the humorous word isn’t clear, perhaps because it was believed to inflate itself like a blowfish, or possibly just because it was common. In any case, “Maggie Lauder” made blatherskate popular in America and later, in the 19th century, when Americans invented their native word cheapskate, for a tightwad, they borrowed the skate from it. This is a more roundabout explanation than the theory that the skate in cheapskate comes from a British slang word for chap, but it seems more logical, as skate in the sense of chap never had much currency in the U.S., except in the term good skate, meaning a good person.

Robert Hendrickson, The Facts of File Encyclopedia of Word and Phrase Origins (New York: Facts on File, 1997).

So there it is: a good skate is a good chap, a good person.

Good skate at one point was clearly a matter of common knowledge, well-known enough to show up in titles: A 1929 comedy short (dir. Francis Corby): Good Skates. A 1939 news short: Good Skates. A 1964 episode of The Lucy Show: ”Lucy and the Good Skate.“ A 1967 episode of That Girl (in which Ann learns to roller-skate): “The Good Skate.” A 1980 Peanuts special in which Peppermint Patty trains for a figure-skating competition: She’s a Good Skate, Charlie Brown. A 1989 episode of Perfect Strangers: “Good Skates.” And as recently as 1992, a Disney Minnie ’n Me book by Ruth Lerner Perle: You’re a Good Skate, Lilly.

And then there’s this Boy Scout comic strip, Good Turn Bobby:


[“He Proves to Be a Good Skate.” Boys’ Life, January 1937. Click for a larger view and clearer joke.]

I’m sharing these discoveries with the good skate, and with my mom, who’s also a good skate, and whose one-off use of this expression started it all. Thanks, Mom!

[The Oxford English Dictionary has bletherskate and blatherskite. Perhaps Robert Hendrickson split the difference. About skate with reference to a person: “Etymology uncertain.” “Maggie Lauder” resides at YouTube in a bewildering number of incarnations. Here’s one.]

“Government schools”

In The New York Times, Katherine Stewart traces the origins of the term “government schools.”

The supply closet

In The Boston Globe, John Segal, creative director for Crane & Co., describes a primal scene:

“I recall visiting my father’s office as a child and raiding the supply closet — so much to choose from. Rows of pencils, stacks of legal pads and steno notebooks, reams of paper (cotton bond, the good stuff), ‘corrasable’ typing paper, onion skin, carbon paper, Whiteout, reinforcements, mucilage.”

O corrasable paper. I feel a Zippy “over and over” coming on: Eaton’s Corrasable Bond! Eaton’s Corrasable Bond!

Companions

Karl Rossmann is working as a lift-boy at the Hotel Occidental, a hotel with thirty elevators and forty lift-boys. One of Karl’s erstwhile ne’er-do-well traveling companions finds him at work:

Franz Kafka, Amerika (The Man Who Disappeared), trans. from the German by Michael Hoffman (New York: New Directions, 2002).

Nearing the end of Amerika, I’m convinced that this novel is a Wes Anderson film just waiting to be made.

Also from Amerika
An American writing desk : A highway : A bridge

New York attitudes

The New York Times has an article about what it calls “New York attitude” among denizens of the White House. A sample:

“The Mooch is a New Yorker like me,” said Rudolph W. Giuliani, the former mayor and an adviser to Mr. Trump who has yet to find his way to a White House job. “He’s a purebred New Yorker. He’s lit a firecracker in that place. What you’re seeing in Scaramucci is the president’s style.”

The Times reporter opines that even the New York transplants in Trump’s inner circle “sometimes behave as if they, and their boss, never left the five boroughs.”

What I notice every time I visit New York City is that most people go about the day with a thoughtful awareness of those around them. They hold doors. They say “Excuse me.” For every manspreader on the subway, there’s someone else offering a seat to someone who’s standing. I’ll quote from a 2010 post:

It is difficult to exaggerate the fellow-feeling of New Yorkers, evident in many small moments of care and tact. A woman on the subway lets go of her stroller for just a moment so that she can adjust her bag. Two people reach out to the stroller to steady it when the train begins to move. A man on the street asks a hot-dog vendor if it’s okay to put an empty soda can in his trash. Sure, go ahead.

I think that the Times should know better than to typecast residents of the five boroughs as crude vulgarians. Let’s not equate a New York City state of mind with the likes of Trump and Scaramucci.

Zippy Automat

[Zippy, July 28, 2017.]

Related posts
All OCA Zippy posts (Pinboard)
Automat, a 1964 guidebook entry
Automat beverage section
Automat sign, 1943

One vote and two other votes

From The Washington Post, a play-by-play look at John McCain’s vote: “How John McCain’s ‘no’ vote on health care played out on the Senate floor.” And from Slate: “McCain Got the Credit, But Don’t Forget: Collins and Murkowski Killed This Bill.”

June Foray (1917–2017)

June Foray was the voice of Rocket J. Squirrel. And Natasha Fatale. And Nell Fenwick. And other toons. The New York Times has an obituary and a sampler of her voice work. And here, from YouTube, are June Foray and Bill Scott (Bullwinkle J. Moose, Mr. Peabody, Dudley Do-Right) at work and play.