“The important thing is handwriting”

[Chus Lampreave, Ángel de Andrés López, and Juan Martínez. What Have I Done to Deserve This? (dir. Pedro Almodóvar, 1984. Click for a larger view.]

Three generations: grandmother, father, son. Dad is asking about how school is going. Dad is a cabdriver. Also a forger.

Related reading
All OCA handwriting posts (Pinboard)

OCR App

OCR App (LEAD Technologies) is a Mac app for optical character recognition. The results are not perfect, but the app is free. The app icon: T as in text.

I tried OCR App with a recent piece of writing. A scan of an image file of the first page began:

It was a beautiful morning on the Martin farm. Sun streamed into the kitchen, where Paul and Ruth Martin and Uncle Petrie were enjoying a second cup of couee. Lassie was drinking from her water dish. The sunlight made her coat glisten. Timmy Martin was just finishing his milk when his mother noticed a small story in the Calverton Herald.

Almost perfect. Small glitches with apostrophes and quotation marks were the only other problems. A scan of a PDF of the whole story was better: OCR App missed a couple of dashes, misread goin’ as gain’, and turned a quotation mark into the numeral 11. Be prepared to proofread carfully.

Anyone who makes significant use of optical character recognition will probably require an app with greater accuracy. But for occasional use, this free app is perfect.

[If there’s any doubt: carfully is a joke.]

“Like all gamblers”

Stefan Zweig, Burning Secret. 1911. The Collected Novellas of Stefan Zweig. Trans. Anthea Bell (London: Pushkin Press, 2015).

Related reading
All OCA Stefan Zweig posts (Pinboard)

Someone is having a birthday

Orange Crate Art turns thirteen today. Thirteen! Orange Crate Art is embarrassed by my calling attention to its birthday. And by my using an exclamation point. Orange Crate Art is embarrassed by so many things that I say and do these days. It’s a difficult age.

Thank you, everyone who’s reading.

[Post title after Ted Berrigan’s “A Final Sonnet.”]

Misused word of the day: refute

Pay attention to the news for a while, and you’ll notice the word refute misused. The word is not, as Garner’s Modern English Usage (2016) points out, “synonymous with rebut or deny”:

That is, it doesn’t mean merely “to counter an argument” but “to disprove beyond doubt; to prove a statement false.” Yet the word is commonly misused for rebut.

As it was tonight: “At the White House, press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders quickly refuted the Democrats’ version of events.” No. She contradicted their version, or denied it. But she didn’t prove it false.

For a different perspective on refute being used to mean “to deny the truth or accuracy of,” see The Merriam-Webster Dictionary of English Usage (1989):

Most usage commentators now routinely take note of it, and all that do consider it a mistake (the British, in particular, seem to feel strongly on this subject). It is, however, extremely common, and the contexts in which it occurs are standard.

Yes, but it’s still a mistake, and a terribly misleading one if a listener or reader takes refute to mean that a statement has been disproved when it has merely been denied. “I am not a crook”: denial, not refutation.

Recently updated

Stornography Now appearing in a cartoon.

Timmy Martin, Ticonderoga user

[Timmy Martin (Jon Provost) writes an urgent message. From the Lassie episode “The Phone Hog,” April 3, 1960. Click for a larger view.]

The ferrule is the giveaway. A Dixon Ticonderoga appears in at least one other Lassie episode.

More Ticonderogas
Bells Are Ringing : The Dick Van Dyke Show : Force of Evil : Harry Truman : The House on 92nd Street : Perry Mason : Pnin

All OCA Lassie posts (Pinboard)

The 26 Old Characters

From the W.A. Sheaffer Pen Company, a dowdy-world history of our alphabet and fountain pens: The 26 Old Characters (1947). Dig the young people eagerly opening letters at 17:38.

Thanks, Martha!

Snowy Day stamps

[Art by Ezra Jack Keats. Stamp design by Antonio Alcalá.]

On October 4 the United States Postal Service will issue four stamps to honor Ezra Jack Keats’s The Snowy Day (1962). The Los Angeles Times has the story.

See also “The Snowy Day” and the Art of Ezra Jack Keats (Skirball Cultural Center).

Thanks, Rachel!

How to (finally) Read “Nancy”

Paul Karasik and Mark Newgarden’s long-awaited How to Read “Nancy” is due to appear from Fantagraphics next month, with a three-sentence foreword by Jerry Lewis.

Related reading
All OCA Nancy posts (Pinboard)