Writing instruction

From a New York Times article about different approaches to teaching writing:

Three-quarters of both 12th and 8th graders lack proficiency in writing, according to the most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress. And 40 percent of those who took the ACT writing exam in the high school class of 2016 lacked the reading and writing skills necessary to successfully complete a college-level English composition class, according to the company’s data.

One of the approaches described in this article, Judith Hochman’s, was the subject of a 2012 Atlantic article.

I used to ask students in writing classes: What does it mean to go through twelve or more years of schooling and not be able to recognize a sentence in your language — or a noun, or a verb? More than a little crazy. You can guess where my sympathies lie.

Two related posts
On “On the New Literacy”
W(h)ither grammar?

Fashion-forward

A new Lands’ End catalogue has tips:

These days, a buttondown isn’t just “that thing you wear under a suit.” It’s a whole lot more — a versatile staple you can dress up AND down.

Three tips follow:

Skip the jacket.

Roll ’em up.

Change your collar.

It must be said that the third tip, to wear something other than a buttondown shirt, makes no sense as a way to dress a buttondown up OR down. That’d be like trying to dress up a pair of cargo shorts by wearing gabardine slacks instead. But the first two tips: I’ve been doing those for years. Fashion-forward, always.

A related post
Lands’ End: The White Album

[“’Em”: shirtsleeves, not joints.]

Words from Eleanor Roosevelt

I honor the human race. When it faces life head-on, it can almost remake itself.

Eleanor Roosevelt, You Learn by Living: Eleven Keys for a More Fulfilling Life (New York: Harper & Row, 1960).

Recently reissued in paperback.

Hortatory pavement

[“Let’s Be Better Humans.”]

Yes, it’s the hortatory subjunctive: let us whatever. Being a better human might mean not spray-painting the pavement, but in this case, I think that the painter was making an improvement.

A related post
Hortatory subjunctive FTW

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