Found: a Roman library

“Built about 150 years after the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest, its walls recently reemerged after centuries of darkness during the construction of a new community center next to the city of Cologne’s famous cathedral”: “Long-lost Roman library reemerges in Germany after 2,000 years in darkness” (The Washington Post).

A perpetual calendar

I found it while looking for something else:


[Webster’s Second International Dictionary (1934).]

One major difference between Webster’s Second and Third is the disappearance of encyclopedic or nonlexical content: proper names (people, places, things, events, organizations), epithets, proverbs, titles of literary works, in short, the material that made W2 an all-purpose home reference. As Herbert C. Morton points out, Philip Gove, W3’s editor, was not charting a new direction in lexicography in removing the nonlexical: he was following in a tradition established by Johnson’s Dictionary and the Oxford English Dictionary.

I wonder what debate the W2 entry for perpetual calendar might have sparked in the W3 editorial conferences. Clearly, the calendar itself is a nonlexical item. But as the preface to W3 says about cutting nonlexical material, “Selection is guided by usefulness.” Without a perpetual calendar, how might the layperson answer a what-day-of-the-week question? I like to imagine a Merriam-Webster editor shuddering at the thought of a dictionary user having to head out to a newsstand or supermarket in search of an almanac.

For whatever reason, the calendar stayed for W3. But the differences between the W2 and W3 entries are revealing. W3 makes no mention of the Gregorian and Julian calendars and omits the fairly tedious presentation of calendar mathematics. Will a W3 reader wonder why the calendar begins with 1753? Apparently not: all 1961 wants to know is how to find out what-day-of-the-week.


[Webster’s Third New International Dictionary (1961).]

Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate (2004) has no calendar, only a definition:

n (1895) : a table for finding the day of the week for any one of a wide array of dates

Of course. Calculate-the-date websites and calendar apps have made a printed perpetual calendar obsolete. The Calendar app on my Mac is reported to run well past the year 200,000.

Related reading
All OCA dictionary posts (Pinboard)
Review: The Story of Ain’t: America, Its Language, and the Most Controversial Dictionary Ever Published

[Herbert C. Morton’s The Story of “Webster’s Third”: Philip Gove’s Controversial Dictionary and Its Critics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994) gives a careful inventory of the materials removed from or reduced in W3.]

Hotdish

I’ve had it only once before, at a potluck, where I wondered, “Are those Tater Tots on top?” Yes, they were. Huh.

Elaine made hotdish tonight, chicken pot hotdish, following a recipe from Molly Yeh, daughter of Elaine’s Juilliard pal John Bruce Yeh, and host of the Food Network’s Girl Meets Farm.

OMG: hotdish is so good. Good enough to make me forget about al pastor and panang curry, at least for a while. A culinary world has opened to us.

Here, from 2013, is a short, highly informative film by Maria Bartholdi: Minnesota Hotdish: A Love Story.

Like father, like daughter

Over the weekend, my daughter Rachel read a piece of journalism that she deemed poorly written. She texted me a link. I read and concurred. I copied and pasted a terrible sentence to send back, but then thought, “It’s not bad enough.” Then another, but again I thought, “It’s not bad enough.” And then I hit the right sentence. I copied and pasted and wrote, “Especially this sentence.” And Rachel replied that it was when she hit that sentence that she decided to send the link.

Dad, i.m.

My dad, James Leddy, died three years ago today, a day that feels both recent and distant. Yesterday, while Elaine and I were watching Three Identical Strangers, I thought about how fortunate I am to have had the father I had. And have. He’s an example, always, of how to be a father.

Here’s what I wrote after he died.

Today in history

Adam Davidson writes about August 5 past and present:

August 5, 1974, was the day the Nixon Presidency ended. On that day, Nixon heeded a Supreme Court ruling and released the so-called smoking-gun tape, a recording of a meeting, held two years earlier, with his chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman. Many of Nixon’s most damaging statements came in the form of short, monosyllabic answers and near-grunts — “um huh,” the official transcript reads, at one point — as he responds to Haldeman’s idea of asking the C.I.A. to tell the F.B.I. to “stay the hell out of” the Watergate investigation. . . .

On August 5, 2018, precisely forty-four years after the collapse of the Nixon Presidency, another President, Donald Trump, made his own public admission.

Read it all: “The Day Trump Told Us There Was Attempted Collusion with Russia” (The New Yorker).

A movie recommendation

Three Identical Strangers (dir. Tim Wardle, 2018). Don’t read a word about it. Just go see it. You won’t regret it.

And if you’ve already read about it, go see it anyway. You won’t regret it.

Orwell on totalitarian history

George Orwell, in "The Prevention of Literature" (1946):

From the totalitarian point of view history is something to be created rather than learned. A totalitarian state is in effect a theocracy, and its ruling caste, in order to keep its position, has to be thought of as infallible. But since, in practice, no one is infallible, it is frequently necessary to rearrange past events in order to show that this or that mistake was not made, or that this or that imaginary triumph actually happened.

As I just discovered, I posted this passage in 2008. But it’s worth reposting. I don’t see any reason why it wouldn’t be. Now more than ever, as the saying went.

I reencountered this passage in a new sampler, Orwell on Truth, ed. David Milner (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018).

Related reading
All OCA Orwell posts (Pinboard)

[About would and wouldn’t: Trump rearranged past events in order to claim that he did make a mistake. That’s another way to lie.]

From the Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday Saturday Stumper, by Matthew Sewell, is tough, mostly because of clues that point in several directions, or in no direction. For instance, 5-Across, five letters: “Puts out.” EMITS? OUSTS? No.

Two clues I especially liked: 25-Down, four letters: “Element of film noir lighting.” And 34-Down, “Film studied in physics labs.” No spoilers: the answers are in the comments.

Today’s headlines

[Zippy, August 4, 2018.]

Or if you’re a suspect in a murder investigation, like Hitchcock’s Uncle Charlie, you could turn a single page into a house.

The headlines in The Dingburg Decoder, front to back: “Valvoline Tank Explodes,” “Thousands Flee Anne Bancroft,” “Polystyrene Is Edible,” “W.C. Fields Is Mean Anew.”

That’s Moe Strauss of the Pep Boys on the table. The Boys have appeared in several Zippy strips. You can search and find them all.

Related reading
All OCA Zippy posts (Pinboard)

[Uncle Charlie: in Shadow of a Doubt.]