Recently updated

Words of the year Now with the American Dialect Society’s pick.

Stating the obvious

A “very stable genius” would not be tweeting in the pre-dawn. How do I know that? Because I’m, like, really smart.

A related post
Dunning K. Trump

[Context: here and here.]

From the Saturday Stumper

From today’s Newsday Saturday Stumper, not a tricky clue, but one I learned from. It’s 46-Across, eleven letters: “Word from the French for ‘stir up.’” No spoilers; the answer is in the comments.

Today’s puzzle, by Lester Ruff, is at least semi-tough. Either these puzzles are getting easier, or I’m getting better, or both.

NPR, sheesh

From Weekend Edition Saturday, spoken not someone in the story but by the reporter: “Me and people my age are redefining what it means to travel by car.”

Related reading
All OCA sheesh posts (Pinboard)

[I object not only to the object pronoun but to putting me first. But at least the reporter didn’t say “me and my friends.”]

Andrew Sullivan on a year of insanity

“It seems possible, after a year of this insanity, to entertain some measure of hope that it will some day be over, and the country and the world not irrevocably damaged in the process”: Andrew Sullivan explains why he has hope.

“Not irrevocably damaged”: that’s the kind of resolution I’m hoping for.

Poor K., poor Frieda

K., who has come to the Castle to work as a surveyor, is now working as the school janitor. K. and Frieda and K.’s two assistants are living in the schoolroom. Frieda has shown that she can make any room comfortable to live in, but there’s little she can do here.


Franz Kafka, The Castle, trans. Mark Harman (New York: Schocken, 1998).

Yes, the schoolroom doubles as a gymnasium. When K. and Frieda, sleeping late, are surprised by the arrival of schoolchildren and the schoolmistress, they throw their blankets over the parallel bars and pommel horse to make themselves a changing room.

Related reading
All OCA Kafka posts (Pinboard)

“Do you read?”

Joe Scarborough asked Donald Trump a question: “Do you read?”

“Fellow-billionaires”

From a New Yorker report on Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House:

Confirming long-running news accounts, Wolff reports that Trump often retires in the early evening to his bedroom, where he has three television screens, and interrupts his viewing only to converse by telephone with his friends and cronies, some of them fellow-billionaires.

That hyphen between fellow and billionaires? I think it’s The New Yorker being The New Yorker. I see two ways to think about how the noun fellow functions in the phrase fellow-billionaires.

The Oxford English Dictionary notes that the noun fellow can be used to form “a virtually unlimited number of compounds.” The dictionary calls the word (“designating a person or thing that belongs to the same class or category as another specified person or thing”) an “appositive, passing into adj.” An appositive is a noun or pronoun that stands next to and serves to identify another noun. In the movie title My Friend Irma, for instance, Irma is an appositive. The OED notes that compounds formed with fellow

are usually formed with a hyphen or as two words, although in early use single word forms also occur. From the 20th cent. formation as two words is more common. [My emphasis.]

And lookit: the OED has a 2008 citation from The New Yorker with the same fusty hyphen: “Pearl has been enlisted . . . to spy on her fellow-employees.”

While the OED identifies fellow as an appositive, Merriam-Webster has the word as “noun, often attributive.” An attributive noun is one that modifies another noun and functions as an adjective. Think apple pie or sock drawer. If one thinks of fellow as an attributive noun, a hyphen looks more than a little strange. No one eats apple-pie, though some people insist on having everything in apple-pie order, even the sock drawer, in which case the pie has been turned into a phrasal adjective. Fellow-billionaires looks as odd to me as fellow-Americans would.

What’s odder still, for me, is trying to understand how one might decide between between seeing fellow as an appositive and seeing it as an attributive. Maybe a fellow thousandaire can help.

Related posts
Bad hyphens, unhelpful abbreviations : “Every generation hyphenates the way it wants to” : Got hyphens? : The Hammacher Schlemmer crazy making hyphen shortage problem : Living on hyphens : Mr. Hyphen and e-mail : Mr. Hyphen and Mr. Faulkner : One more from Mr. Hyphen : Phrasal-adjective punctuation

[It hit me only after writing this post: The New Yorker seems to be following H.W. Fowler’s Modern English Usage (2nd ed.), which offers a puzzling take on fellow: “All the combinations of f. with a noun (except f.-feeling, for which see below) would be best written as two separate words without hyphen, and they all are sometimes so written. But, owing to the mistaken notion that words often used in juxtaposition must be hyphened, the more familiar combinations are so often seen with the hyphen that they now look queer and old-fashioned without it.” That’s hardly the case in 2018. At any rate, Fowler’s recommended forms seem arbitrary: a hyphen for fellow-countryman, no hyphen for fellow traveller. There’s no recommendation for fellow and billionaire.]

An Infinite Jest assignment

Just for fun: my waking self wants to defend itself against my dreaming self. Here, reformatted for readability, is what I once gave out to begin Infinite Jest. You can click on each image for a larger view.







Related reading
All OCA David Foster Wallace posts (Pinboard)

Teaching Infinite Jest

I was about to begin teaching David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest in a one o’clock class. But I couldn’t bring myself to go, so I retreated to the library and sat down to watch the clock. At two I left to walk to the classroom, and the students, five of them, were still there waiting. I told them that I had lost track of time in the library and that we were now going to begin Infinite Jest. And then, if we had time, we’d dip into The Pale King. I had a copy of Infinite Jest with me but no notes and no reading assignment to hand out. I decided to say a few things about the novel. No chapters, but sections marked with a moon-like ❍. And subsections. Highly autobiographical: “I am in here” is one the first sentences, but not a retelling of the writer’s life. And there are endnotes, which you have to read.

When I tried to show where the notes began, my paperback Infinite Jest turned into my hardcover Modern Library Ulysses, and I was paging through the “Ithaca” episode. Class dismissed. After which several new students showed up, and I went through my flimsy introduction to the novel all over again. After which I walked back to the library and found yet another student who had just signed up for my class. He wore a blue dress shirt and sat at a table. An Eagle Scout stood by his side, serving, it seemed, as a bodyguard. The new student explained that he had signed up for the class because there was a spot open. “But do you want to put in the time to read Infinite Jest ?” I asked him. “That’s my decision!” he shouted. “Of course,” I said. “I’m just wondering if it’s something you want to invest time in.”

I then walked out to a parking lot to call Elaine for a ride home. But I needed numbers to stick on my phone to make the call. I tried to buy some at a newsstand, but they were sold out.

This is the eleventh teaching-related dream I’ve had since retiring. None of them have gone well. The others: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, and 10.

[Elaine identified some likely influences on this dream. “Ithaca”: DFW’s time in Syracuse. The Eagle Scout: the Honeymooners episode “The Hero,” in which Ralph claims to be an Eagle Scout. The numbers: the pages of stickers that came with my 2018 Moleskine planner. I can add one more possible influence: looking up Modern Library logos last night.]