Bastard file

I just used such a file to make a door accommodate a new knob. But why is it called a bastard file?

The Oxford English Dictionary defines bastard file as “a file intermediate between the coarse and fine ‘cuts.’” The dictionary notes that as early as 1418 the word bastard was applied to things “of abnormal shape or irregular (esp. unusually large) size”: swords and guns at first, followed by ships, files, type and printed titles, and script. The dictionary’s first citation for bastard file, from Joseph Moxon’s Mechanick Exercises; or, The doctrine of Handy-Works (1678):

The Bastard-Tooth’d File is to take out of your work the deep cuts … the Rough File made: the Fine Tooth’d file is to take out the cuts . . . the Bastard file made.

The bastard file appears then to be that other file, not this one, not that one, neither rough nor fine.

A more fanciful explanation of bastard file appears on a British tool company’s website:

In heraldry, coats of arms belonging to people born outside of wedlock (also known as bastards) bore a device known as the “barre sinister,” a diagonal stripe that ran from the top right of the crest to the bottom left.

This is the same direction that the teeth of a single cut file run in.

That bastard was first applied to things with no resemblance to the barre sinister makes this explanation, to my mind, unlikely. Another fanciful explanation, which brings in a fellow with an unfortunate surname:

The name is a misnomer in that the file was invented by an Englishman named Barsted. When English workers came to the United States and requested a Barsted file, Americans thought this was the English pronunciation for “bastard.”

Richard Pohanish, Glossary of Metalworking Terms (New York: Industrial Press, 2003).

That’s a good story. But it seems impossible to find any trace of Mr. Barsted outside the story of the bastard file. And if bastard was applied to irregular things as early as 1418, this explanation won’t work.

But the bastard file worked, and we now have a door that accommodates its knob.

“Impostor Syndrome”

[“Impostor Syndrome,” xkcd, February 12, 2018.]

The mouseover text: “It’s actually worst in people who study the Dunning–Kruger effect. We tried to organize a conference on it, but the only people who would agree to give the keynote were random undergrads.”

;;;;;;;;

From the Department of Wait, What: Do you remember the 2017 court case in which the absence of an Oxford comma (or serial comma) was crucial? The section of the Maine law at issue in that case has been amended in an unusually ungainly way: by the addition not of one comma but of eight semicolons.

Before:

The canning, processing, preserving, freezing, drying, marketing, storing, packing for shipment or distribution of:

(1) Agricultural produce;
(2) Meat and fish products; and
(3) Perishable foods.

After:

The canning; processing; preserving; freezing; drying; marketing; storing; packing for shipment; or distributing of:

(1) Agricultural produce;
(2) Meat and fish products; and
(3) Perishable foods.

What I would consider a real improvement:

The canning, processing, preserving, freezing, drying, marketing, storing, packing for shipment, or distributing of:

(1) agricultural produce,
(2) meat or fish products, or
(3) perishable foods.

Replacing the semicolons is common (or comma) sense. Replacing and with or forestalls the persnickety argument that the provision (which governs overtime pay) applies to work with meat and fish products or to work with all three categories of foodstuffs. The legislature did get something right in changing distribution to distributing: the new word lines up with the other gerunds.

Paper jams

Vicki Warner, an engineer at Xerox: “Printers are essentially paper torture chambers.” In the latest The New Yorker, Joshua Rothman learns “Why Paper Jams Persist.”

From the Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday Saturday Stumper, by Frank Longo, is a tough one. Much trickery along the way, and some sheer difficulty. What was the name of J. Edgar Hoover’s fourth successor? Not a name that one can easily derive from crosses, not without already knowing the name.

I especially like the clues for 18-Across and 59-Across, each ten letters: “It won’t click beyond a circle” and “Tall twin, say.” No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

Finishing the Saturday Stumper once again feels like cause for minor self-congratulation.

Australia is a country

From The Chronicle of Higher Education, not The Onion: “Southern New Hampshire University has apologized to a student who failed an assignment because her professor insisted Australia was a continent, not a country.”

I especially like the professor’s reply to an e-mail from the student, who provided a link to the website of the Australian government: “Thank you for this web address. After I do some independent research on the continent/country issue I will review your paper.” And when the professor acknowledged her error, she warned the student to “make sure the date, the facts, and the information you provide in your report is about Australia the country and not Australia the continent.”

The date? The facts and the information? The date, facts, and information is? A “report”? This is college?

Academic futures

Behind the Chronicle of Higher Education paywall, Sharon O’Dair writes about “Shamelessness and Hypocrisy at the MLA.” What she found at the Modern Language Association’s 2018 convention: a profession that produces too many Ph.D.s, and then encourages those degree recipients to seek a future outside academia:

If the way to a career with a Ph.D. in English is to take one-third of an M.B.A. program, why not take the M.B.A., a mere two years, rather than the six or eight years for a Ph.D. in English? Why spend all those years studying slave narratives, if your digital-humanities work is going to get you a career in an IT department? #Opportunity-Cost, if you want to get businesslike about it.

Who benefits from the overproduction of Ph.D.s? Colleges, whose budgets depend on inexpensive teaching labor. This overproduction also serves the interests of tenured faculty members, whose lives are cushioned by reduced teaching loads and research help. John Guillory’s dour judgment in 1996 that "graduate education appears now to be a kind of pyramid scheme" still strikes at the heart of the question.

I’ll quote from a post I wrote about academic futures: “the very telos of doctoral study in the humanities is a life of teaching and scholarship on the tenure-track. That’s what grad school is supposed to be for.” But a tenure-track position in the humanities is an ever-diminishing possibility. And it’s doubtful that the years of work required for a doctorate in the humanities are sensible preparation for any other career.

I’ll quote myself again: “Imagine going to medical school when the odds are slim that you’ll ever practice.”

Monsters

Jennie Willoughby, talking to Anderson Cooper last night:

“That’s a question that I am asked a lot: Why did you stay if he was a quote-unquote monster? And the reality is that he’s not a monster. He is an intelligent, kind, chivalrous, caring, professional man — and he is deeply troubled, and angry, and violent.”

One could argue that “intelligent, kind, chivalrous, caring, professional” just makes for a monster who is less likely to be recognized as such.

That and which

Bruce Ross-Larson’s Edit Yourself: A Manual for Everyone Who Works with Words (New York: W.W. Norton, 1982) has impressed me again. Twenty-six pages in, I have found useful advice for solving the problem of a relative clause that doesn’t follow the noun it modifies.

Ross-Larson’s example: “The meaning of the sentence, which is usually obvious from. . . .” What can make it clear that the relative clause beginning with which modifies meaning and not sentence ? Ross-Larson suggests four workarounds:

~ “Make the object of the prepositional phrase plural and rely on verb number.” Thus: “The meaning of sentences, which usually is obvious from. . . .”

~ “Repeat the noun before a relative clause.” Thus: “The meaning of the sentence, meaning which usually is obvious from. . . .”

~ “Delete the intervening prepositional phrase.” Thus: “The meaning, which usually is obvious from. . . .”

~ ”Rewrite the sentence.” Thus: “The meaning of sentences usually is obvious from. . . .”

This small (half a page) section of Edit Yourself interests me because it offers alternatives to the rather loopy New Yorker strategy of “the irregular restrictive which,” a which that replaces that when a relative clause is separated from the noun it modifies. Notice that in Ross-Larson’s example, which could be the work of a writer who intends an irregular restrictive which. But that intent does nothing to remove the ambiguity.

And consider this New Yorker sentence, by John McPhee, which accompanies his explanation of the irregular restrictive which :

In 1822, the Belgian stratigrapher J. J. d’Omalius d’Halloy, working for the French government, put a name on the chalk of Europe which would come to represent an ungainly share of geologic time.

If you want to avoid that because a reader might mistakenly read “that would come to represent . . .” as referring to chalk and not to name, you can avoid the irregular restrictive which by rewriting the sentence:

In 1822, the Belgian stratigrapher J. J. d’Omalius d’Halloy, working for the French government, gave the chalk of Europe a name that would come to represent an ungainly share of geologic time.

Problem solved. At $13.95, Edit Yourself is a bargain.

[I’d prefer a slightly different rewriting: “The meaning of a sentence is usually obvious from. . . .” No need for the plural, and usually, to my ear, falls more naturally after the verb.]

An art catalogue

It’s varnishing day at the Salon Carré:


Guy de Maupassant, Like Death, trans. Richard Howard (New York: New York Review Books, 2017).

Also from this novel
“La belle nature” : “What was it around him”