Domestic comedy

[Watching an episode of Freaks and Geeks.]

“I’m so glad our kids are not in high school anymore.”

“I’m so glad I’m not in high school anymore.”

Related reading
All OCA domestic comedy posts (Pinboard)

TV days

Donald Trump, quoted in a New York Times report on the course of the presidential day:

“I know they like to say — people that don’t know me — they like to say I watch television. People with fake sources — you know, fake reporters, fake sources. But I don’t get to watch much television, primarily because of documents. I’m reading documents a lot.”

Yep, lots of documents, with lots of pictures.

The Times reports that “people close to him estimate that Mr. Trump spends at least four hours a day, and sometimes as much as twice that, in front of a television.”

Myth appeal

[Zippy, December 9, 2017.]

I admire Bill Griffith’s willingness to reference American ephemera with little or no explanation. Will someone get it? Who knows.

That sphinx’s face belongs to Bert Piel. He and his brother Harry were cartoon spokesmen for Piels Beer, with voices by Bob and Ray. (Bob Elliott was Harry; Ray Goulding, Bert.) In 2013 the cartoon brothers appeared on a television screen in a Zippy strip. And who knows in how many Zippy strips before that.

A Wikipedia article about Piels cites a beer expert who explains that the popularity of the Bert and Harry commercials hurt the brand:

“Unfortunately, the beer itself was not very good. Because of the great ads, all kinds of people bought it for the first time, hated it and spread the news everywhere about how awful it was. It was a case of terrible word of mouth caused by a wonderful ad campaign.”

YouTube has a goodly number of Bert and Harry television commercials.

Related reading
All OCA Zippy posts (Pinboard)

Finals approaching

[Nancy, May 17, 1950.]

Jim, Nancy, don’t!

You’ll find better advice in this post: How to do well on a final exam. And for those inclined to the dark side: How to do horribly on a final exam. My StatCounter stats this week show that entire classes are looking at the first of these posts: visit, visit, visit, as exams loom, loom, loom.

Related reading
All OCA Nancy posts (Pinboard)

[Nancy, a literalist of the imagination, looks up cram in a dictionary and sits down with cake, cookies, a donut, fruit, jam, popcorn, and a sandwich.]

New AHD entries

Burner, saltimbocca, GOAT: among the additions this year to the American Heritage Dictionary.

I know burner from The Wire; GOAT, from Infinite Jest, where it’s turned into P.G.O.A.T., a name for Joelle van Dyne, the Prettiest Girl of All Time. Saltimbocca? As my mom would say, I never heard of it. Saltimbanque, yes. Saltimbocca, no. The words have a common source in the Italian saltare. A saltimbanque jumps on a bench or platform to perform. Saltimbocca, as you may have already figured out, jumps into one’s mouth. I know about saltimbanques from Guillaume Apollinaire and Pablo Picasso.

[The Apollinaire link goes to Ron Padgett’s translation of an Apollinaire poem. The Picasso link goes to a catalogue from the National Gallery of Art. I always love a free PDF. Also, free association.]

How to start a sentence

In the ABA Journal, Bryan Garner offers some advice about how to start a sentence. Key principles:

(1) A fair percentage of sentences should begin with short contextualizing phrases, often adverbial. (2) A fair percentage should begin with one-syllable transitional words—normally But, Yet, So or even And.

[If you noticed the absence of a comma before or: the ABA Journal follows AP style, sans serial commas. As Garner writes in an earlier column, “I don't have the clout to overrule them. It's as simple as that.”]

Imaginary local news

“Well, they don’t call it FALL for nothing. Leaves this week continue to ‘fall’ from area trees. The small colorful objects have been spotted on lawns, sidewalks, and streets in many communities. Experts say this trend will continue for some time, followed by — you guessed it — the white stuff. And Jack here is going to tell us when we can expect the first of that white stuff.” Segue to weather.

[This post started as one sentence in a letter to a friend.]

Bully for Woolly

A short New Yorker piece, “Disruption Spreads to the Nightstand,” describes a new product from the mattress company Casper: Woolly, “a magazine that embraces the hunger for hygge and covers the bedtime beat.”

I thought I was reading a spoof, but no, Woolly is real. The first issue contains, among other things, a feature on sweatpants comfort pants and an “Adulting Coloring Book.” A picture caption: “I flossed!”

Opinions

One narrator’s family:


Alice Munro, “Family Furnishings,” in Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage (New York: Vintage, 2002).

Also from Alice Munro
“Rusted seams” : “That is what happens” : “Henry Ford?” : “A private queer feeling” : “A radiance behind it”

Pronouns and institutions

Lindsay Shepherd is a graduate student and teaching assistant in communication studies at Wilfrid Laurier University in Ontario. Teaching first-year students about pronoun use, Shepherd showed a short clip from a television debate about gender-neutral singular pronouns — and specifically, about whether speakers and writers should be required by law to honor the pronouns that other individuals choose for themselves. As Shepherd tells it, she was not taking sides; she was presenting a debate and inviting students to comment. Later, one or more students complained. The Chronicle of Higher Education reports on what followed.

Part of what followed: a meeting in which two faculty members and a staff member questioned Shepherd and opined about what happened (and about much else). The recording of that meeting offers a deep experience of the Kafkaesque. No one will tell Shepherd who or how many students complained, or the nature of the complaint or complaints. Shepherd’s presentation of a current debate about language is deemed by her interlocutors to have created a “toxic climate.” Shepherd is told that she has targeted “trans folks” and committed an act of “gender-based violence” and transphobia. Even as a faculty member tells Shepherd that there are “two sides” to every story, it’s clear that he and his colleagues have already made up their minds about what happened.

What might be the most extraordinary moment: “Your role as TA is not really to be teaching about the politics of grammar; it’s to be teaching grammar.” And yet teaching grammar includes teaching the use of singular pronouns, which, in English, are gendered — which is to say, political. Someone then asks Shepherd if she’d be willing to stick to “more traditional” matters in grammar. And yet a “more traditional” presentation would likely prohibit any consideration of gender-neutral singular pronouns. As I said, Kafkaesque.

Lindsay Shepherd describes herself as “a reasonable leftist.” The conclusion she has reached about her university, as presented on her Twitter page: “Confirmed: WLU is a mental institution.”

*

December 19: An investigation has exonerated Lindsay Shepherd of any wrongdoing. From a statement issued by Wilfrid Laurier president Deborah MacLatchy:

There were numerous errors in judgement made in the handling of the meeting with Ms. Lindsay Shepherd, the TA of the tutorial in question. In fact, the meeting never should have happened at all. No formal complaint, nor informal concern relative to a Laurier policy, was registered about the screening of the video. This was confirmed in the fact-finding report. . . .

There was no wrongdoing on the part of Ms. Shepherd in showing the clip from TVO [TVO: TVOntario, an educational television station] in her tutorial. Showing a TVO clip for the purposes of an academic discussion is a reasonable classroom teaching tool. Any instructional material needs to be grounded in the appropriate academic underpinnings to put it in context for the relevance of the learning outcomes of the course. The ensuing discussion also needs to be handled properly. We have no reason to believe this discussion was not handled well in the tutorial in question.

[A specifically Canadian context for this controversy: Bill C-16. See also a recent post by Geoffrey Pullum, unrelated to events in Canada: “I’m on the same side as my non-binarist and gender-neutral and transsexual friends,” Pullum writes, but he thinks of singular they with a personal name for antecedent as ungrammatical.]