Today’s Nancy

[Nancy, April 28, 2018.]

Today’s Nancy features a chorus of voices praising Nancy’s simplicity. See also Ernie Bushmiller on a preference for fewer words in comic strips.

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How to improve writing (no. 75)

Every time I look at Josh Marshall’s Talking Points Memo, I end up rewriting one or more sentences. Consider this sentence:

The fact that this taxicab family that is joined at the hip to Michael Cohen and his people is getting into the legal weed business is immaterial to me.

The fact that makes a bad start. The two instances of that don’t help. The three instances of is don’t help. Joined at the hip, his people, weed: all tiresome phrasing. (And his people turns out to refer only to Cohen’s father-in-law.) And the syntactic jumble of Michael Cohen and his people is getting into the legal weed business needs sorting out.

A larger issue: the question of agency in this sentence. Applying Richard Lanham’s command for sentence revision — “Find the action” — makes clear that nothing happens here. All we know is that the fact is immaterial.

A possible revision:

I don’t care that Semyon “Sam” Shtayner, a taxi baron close to Michael Cohen’s father-in-law, is entering the legalized cannabis industry.

Marshall uses the first-person pronoun later in his paragraph, so beginning with I makes sense: I don’t care. . . . But there’s new information. . . . I’ll follow up later. But no one needs to follow up with what Marshall calls “an explainer on what it seems to mean.” What else would an explanation seek to explain?

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[“Find the action”: from Richard Lanham’s Revising Prose (2007). The AP calls Shtayner a taxi mogul; I chose baron in honor of the old Trump pseudonym John Baron (or Barron). This post is no. 75 in a series, dedicated to improving stray bits of public prose.]

“I suspicioned you weren’t.”

Sophomore year:

Claudine and I studied The Century Handbook of Writing, giggling all the way. Examples seemed even funnier. When we came to Rule 68, “Avoid faulty diction,” we studied the examples: “Nowhere near. Vulgar for not nearly.” “This here. Do not use for this.” “Suspicion. A noun. Never to be used as a verb.” Our conversation became sprinkled with gleeful vulgarisms we had never used before. When I announced my presence by noisily tap-dancing on the Klums’ wooden porch and probably annoying all the neighbors on the block, Claudine said she was nowhere near ready for school.

“I suspicioned you weren’t.”

Claudine’s reply was something like, “This here shoelace broke.”

We thought our dialogue hilarious. Mrs. Klum sighed as she looked up from Science and Health and said with a smile, “Oh, you silly little girls.”

Beverly Cleary, A Girl from Yamhill: A Memoir (New York: William Morrow, 1988).

[From a 1922 edition of The Century Handbook of Writing, in Google Books.]

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“Thin it out”

When a “learning style” becomes an ignorance style. From a New Yorker article by Patrick Radden Keefe about H.R. McMaster and Donald Trump, “McMaster and Commander”:

The National Security Council has a comparatively lean budget — approximately twelve million dollars — and so its staff consists largely of career professionals on loan from the State Department, the Pentagon, and other agencies. When Trump assumed office, N.S.C. staffers initially generated memos for him that resembled those produced for his predecessors: multi-page explications of policy and strategy. But “an edict came down,” a former staffer told me: “‘Thin it out.’” The staff dutifully trimmed the memos to a single page. “But then word comes back: ‘This is still too much.’” A senior Trump aide explained to the staffers that the President is “a visual person,” and asked them to express points “pictorially.”

“By the time I left, we had these cards,” the former staffer said. They are long and narrow, made of heavy stock, and emblazoned with the words “THE WHITE HOUSE” at the top. Trump receives a thick briefing book every night, but nobody harbors the illusion that he reads it. Current and former officials told me that filling out a card is the best way to raise an issue with him in writing. Everything that needs to be conveyed to the President must be boiled down, the former staffer said, to “two or three points, with the syntactical complexity of ‘See Jane run.’”

The description of these cards seems to fit the card Tump held while he was listening to children and parents affected by school shootings. Or was he listening? Also in this article, an account from Ken Pollack, a friend of McMaster’s:

Initially, Pollack said, McMaster gave Trump “the benefit of the doubt,” assuming that he could understand complicated issues. Every day, McMaster subjected Trump to detailed briefings. According to Pollack, the President just sat there. “He would look like he was interested,” Pollack said. “He was probably trying to imagine how many times H.R. has to shave his head every day, while H.R. is going on and on about the complexities of Russia policy.” Only later, Pollack said, did McMaster realize that “the guy wasn’t absorbing a fucking thing he said!”

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Mushrooming

[The Washington Post, April 26, 2018.]

And I thought the allegations were limited to alcohol, Ambien, and Percocet.

“Say telephone.”

High school, and Beverly Bunn and Claudine Klum are friends:

In freshman English, tiny Miss Hart led us through Treasure Island, which pleased the boys. The book bored me. This was followed by As You Like It and Silas Marner. We also waded into a compact little green book, The Century Handbook of Writing, by Garland Greever and Easley Jones, a valuable book that was to accompany us for four years. Completeness of thought, unity of thought, emphasis, grammar, diction, spelling, “manuscript, etc.,” and punctuation — we went over it all every year.

Claudine and I, who were inclined to giggle at almost anything, found The Century Handbook entertaining. We often quoted examples. If I said, “Phone me this evening,” she replied, “‘Phone. A contraction not employed in formal writing. Say telephone.’”

After a test, one of us quoted, “‘If I pass (and I may),’ said Hazel, ‘let’s celebrate.’” This, from a rule on the use of quotation marks, was worth a fit of giggles.

Beverly Cleary, A Girl from Yamhill: A Memoir (New York: William Morrow, 1988).

[From a 1922 edition of The Century Handbook of Writing, in Google Books. But no sign of Hazel.]

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“Volunteer adjuncts”

Says one professor, “It looks like an attempt to outsource work to unpaid labor.” I agree. The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that Southern Illinois University at Carbondale is looking for alumni with terminal degrees to serve as what the school calls “volunteer adjuncts”:

In an email to department chairs, Michael R. Molino, associate dean for research, budget, and personnel, asked for help in finding alumni with terminal degrees who would apply “to join the SIU Graduate Faculty in a zero-time (adjunct) status.“

Alumni who accepted the three-year positions might serve on graduate students’ thesis committees, teach graduate or undergraduate lectures, or collaborate on research projects, according to Molino’s e-mail.

I suggest that Associate Dean Molino visit the SIU School of Medicine and have his head examined.

“What would I have done without the library?”

Sixth-grade, and Beverly Cleary (then Bunn) has moved from fairy tales to the Myths and Legends shelves of the Rose City Branch Library:

There I came upon the story of Persephone and her mother, Demeter. The flowers that enticed Persephone to stray from her companions reminded me of our pasture in Yamhill, where I had often been enticed to run on to a thicker clump of buttercups or a patch of fatter Johnny-jump-ups. In my imagination I became Persephone. Turning into the daughter of a Greek goddess was easy — I had had so much experience turning from a brown-haired girl with crooked teeth into a golden-haired or raven-haired princess in fairy tales. At home, the wet Oregon winter with its sodden leaves became the dark underworld, and somehow Mother’s telephone soliciting kept the world from blooming. Demeter’s search for Persephone comforted me. What would I have done without the library?

A Girl from Yamhill: A Memoir (New York: William Morrow, 1988).

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[“Telephone soliciting”: selling magazine subscriptions.]

“Deaccessioning”

“Worse than a travesty, it’s a tragedy”: Bryan Garner writes about the trend of “deaccessioning” books from university libraries (ABA Journal).

This trend threatens public libraries as well. A nearby library was the site of a disgraceful adventure in “weeding” a few years back, when the library’s director ordered the removal of all non-fiction more than ten years old. The library board ended up removing the director.

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LY 1–7116

Sean at Blackwing Pages and Contrapuntalism passed on this photograph of the back of a photograph. Two contributors to the Telephone EXchange Name Project identify Irvington’s LY as LYric.

You’d wonder about Daniel Berry too, wouldn’t you? Emmett Daniel Berry (1927–2011) worked as a photographer before devoting himself to the cause of fire safety. For more than fifty years, he was a volunteer firefighter in Irvington, serving as chief from 1973 to 1974. His obituary describes him as strong advocate for fire-safety legislation, “responsible for sprinkler code legislation throughout municipalities in New York State.”