Anthea Bell (1936–2018)

The translator Anthea Bell has died at the age of eighty-two. The Guardian has an obituary. I know Stefan Zweig’s fiction in large part through Bell’s translations. W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz too.

Hand wash cold

From Smithsonian: “If Americans turned down the heat when washing their hands they could save 6 million metric tons of CO₂ every year.”

Even if the numbers here are subject to questioning (hot water isn’t always available in public bathrooms to begin with), washing one’s hands with cold water would seem to make good sense. Done. Though I already do it anyway. Who wants to wait for hot water?

[Found via Matt Thomas’s Twitter.]

Early voting

A dream last night: CNN announced that Beto O’Rourke had won election to the United States Senate. “Already?” I asked. And on the TV screen, a photograph of the three pickups of a Fender Stratocaster. Meaning that the Democratic Party had picked up three Senate seats?

Precognitive, I hope.

Related posts
Beginning King Lear
Dreaming of autumn and fall
Nabokov, dreaming

“The deepest motive for writing”

Richard Lanham:

Motive has always been the question of questions for Freshman Composition. Perhaps more success might flow from assuming, paradoxically, that the deepest motive for writing is not communication at all but the pleasures of writing for its own sake. Writing to others is a writing for ourselves. Clarity in communication may be less the cause of our pleasure in prose than the result.

Style: An Anti-Textbook, 2nd. ed. (Philadelphia, Paul Dry Books, 2007).

Also from this book
“Slow Reading”
Writing and speech

Writing and speech

Richard Lanham:

Much has been written about prose that gains authority through the speaking voice. It gains still more by manipulating time scale. We condense ten hours’ writing and thinking into one hour’s reading. The best ad-libbers always prepare their spontaneity. Writing’s advantage, as a presentation of self, is not that it allows us to adopt the mannerisms of speech but that it allows us to adopt the tempo of speech without its hesitant waste.

Style: An Anti-Textbook, 2nd. ed. (Philadelphia, Paul Dry Books, 2007).

Also from this book
“Slow Reading”
“The deepest motive for writing”

“Slow Reading”

Richard Lanham:

Before prose rhythm can be sensibly considered, one must redefine reading. It cannot be a jet flight coast-to coast. It must be a slow walk in the country, taken, as all such walks should be, partly for the walking itself. Every course in composition ought to be a course in Slow Reading.

Style: An Anti-Textbook, 2nd. ed. (Philadelphia, Paul Dry Books, 2007).

Also from this book
Writing and speech
“The deepest motive for writing”

[Lanham has also written a genuine textbook, Revising Prose (2007), immensely helpful and ridiculously expensive. (Thanks, Pearson). A sentence from that book has been running through my head for years. A presentation of the book’s core, the Paramedic Method of revision, may be found at Purdue OWL. Scroll down or you’ll think you’ve hit an empty page.]

Language, evolving

[Nancy, October 17, 2018. Click for a larger view.]

Today’s Nancy is a delight.

Related reading
All OCA Nancy posts (Pinboard)

Practicing

Elaine and I went to a political debate last night, in which two candidates for the Illinois House of Representatives answered questions chosen by moderators from audience submissions. One direct question: are you an LGBTQ ally? The question was prefaced by a brief, clear definition of ally. One candidate answered “Yes,” spoke about bullying and discrimination, expressed a commitment to supporting LGBTQ issues, and avowed that LGBTQ people would be represented on her staff. The other candidate dodged the question of allyship. Instead, he avowed his belief in the Fourteenth Amendment, which, he said, meant that the question didn’t concern him. But then: he added that his family had had “a practicing homosexual” at dinner the other night. Good grief. Elaine and I just looked at each other. Other people looked at one another. A friend in front of us put her head in her hands. I think she was attempting to stifle her disbelief. We had just been given a reminder of where we live.

What I want to know: What was this “practicing homosexual” practicing? And why at the dinner table? And why couldn’t the candidate and his family have found someone already accomplished enough not to need practice?

Related reading
Stylebook entries for practicing and homosexual (NLGJA: The Association of LGBTQ Journalists)

[An exchange from The Honeymooners inspired this post. From “A Matter of Life and Death” (October 29, 1955): “Dr. Norton, just exactly where do you practice medicine?“ “Oh, I don’t have to practice it, I know it.”]

Words of the day: apricity, apricot

Paging through Ammon Shea’s Reading the “OED”: One Man, One Year, 21,730 Pages (2008), I noticed Shea noticing the word apricity::

Apricity (n.) The warmth of the sun in winter.

A strange and lovely word. The OED does not give any citation for its use except for Henry Cockeram’s 1623 English Dictionarie. Not to be confused with apricate (to bask in the sun), although both come from the Latin apricus, meaning exposed to the sun.

That’s the end of Shea’s entry. Cockeram defines apricity as “the warmeness of the Sunne in Winter.” A strange and lovely definition.

Does the word apricity prompt you to wonder about another, more familiar word? Yes, that’s right, apricot. Does that word have anything to do with apricity? No and yes.

The OED traces apricot to the Portuguese albricoque or Spanish albaricoque, later assimilated to the cognate French abricot (with a silent t). Similar words appear in Italian, Old Spanish, Spanish Arabic, Arabic, Latin, and Greek. The Latin praecoquum, “early-ripe, ripe in summer,” was an epithet and later a name for this fruit, originally called prūnum or mālum Armeniacum. The English word apricot is older than apricity.

Now here’s the fun part: the change from abr- to apr- may be the result of a mistaken etymology. In 1617 the English linguist and lexicographer John Minsheu explained the name of the fruit as deriving from Latin, “in aprīco coctus,” “ripened in a sunny place.” Oops. So apricot isn’t and is related to apricity. And what were apricots called before they were called apricots? Abrecockes, abrecox, abricocts, abricots, aphricokes, aprecox, apricocks.

Like the word apricity and Cockeram’s definition, the OED’s definition of apricot, too, is lovely and strange: “a stone-fruit allied to the plum, of an orange colour, roundish-oval shape, and delicious flavour.” Allied to the plum!

Cover stories

From The Washington Post:

As pressure mounted on Saudi Arabia to disclose what it knows about [Jamal] Khashoggi’s fate, U.S. officials began predicting over the weekend that the Saudis would inevitably admit complicity in the death of Khashoggi and claim a “botched operation,” said one person familiar with the discussions.

Was our president’s suggestion of “rogue killers” the advance effort to legitimize this cover story?

I’m reminded of what Captain Reynaud says about the courier Ugarte in Casablanca: “We haven’t quite decided whether he committed suicide or died trying to escape.”