Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday Saturday Stumper, by Brad Wilber, is rated G, as in Goldilocks: not too easy, not too difficult, just right, with some beautifully clever clues. The four I liked best: 22-Across, three letters, “Beat back.” 40-Across, five letters, “Inferior cut, to many.” 3-Down, eight letters, “Boxing venue.” And 12-Down, six letters, “Fahrenheit or Celsius.” I especially like the likes of 22-Across, with so much trickiness going toward a three-letter answer.

No spoilers: the answers are in the comments.

Block that metaphor

From Harold Evans’s Do I Make Myself Clear? A Practical Guide to Writing Well in the Modern Age (2017):

The tsunami of new words has not so far relieved us of the encroaching corruptions of political vocabulary skewered by Orwell seventy years ago.

Seventy years skewered but still encroaching. And the tsunami can’t help. Help.

Countless books on writing offer less egomania, greater clarity, greater concision, better organization, and fewer mixed metaphors. In other words, better writing. I have only 233 pages of Sir Harold’s book to go.

Related reading
All OCA metaphor posts (Pinboard)
How to improve writing (no. 78)

[How did this book pass the page-ninety test? Good question. Page ninety offers a succinct statement — “The passive voice is preferable if not inescapable in four categories” — followed by examples. The page is atypical.]

Dunham’s

“My customer, the little old lady, is being forgotten”: Dunham’s is a family-owned department store in Wellsboro, Pennsylvania.

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“Undercover whispers”

The last two pages of Toni Morrison’s Jazz (1992) are two of my favorite pages of fiction. From the next-to-last page:



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Grammar Table

All over Manhattan, Ellen Jovin engages the public at her Grammar Table: “No choking your brother at the Grammar Table!” “Oh, and ‘choking’ is a gerund.”

[Notice Garner’s Modern English Usage on the Table.]

Thanksgiving 1918

[“Asks for Holiday Liberty: Prisoner Pleads with Magistrate for a Chance to Reform.” The New York Times, November 29, 1918.]

“Yesterday” in this story is Thanksgiving Day. I can find nothing more of the story in the Times, but I hope James McDonald got his chance and took it. His Marion Street address (where a school now stands) is a four-minute walk from 328 Chauncey Street (still standing), Jackie Gleason’s childhood home and the fictional address of Ralph and Alice Kramden.

Happy Thanksgiving to all.

▲ ▲ ▲

A new-ish podcast series from Little Everywhere and Stitcher: The Dream, an examination of multi-level marketing (MLM) schemes. They seem quite similar to another kind of scheme (see post title).

A good friend says that everyone in the midwest should listen to this podcast. We know of area people who perpetrate MLM schemes through Facebook (“PM me”) and their “church families.” Our household, though wily, is scheme-free.

Oh — and guess which sitting United States president shilled for an MLM scheme.

How to improve writing (no. 78)

I’m reading Harold Evans’s Do I Make Myself Clear? A Practical Guide to Writing Well in the Modern Age (2017). It’s the work of a prominent journalist and editor whose prose is often graceful and witty. But there are odd lapses: missing referents, errors of fact, paragraphs and chapters that veer off in new directions. (I dare anyone to explain what happens toward the end of chapter four.) And there’s verbal clutter: “This is the laconic way he writes at the opening of an essay.” Better: “He begins laconically.” And what the hey is “the modern age”?

Perhaps most disappointing: Evans’s revisions of other people’s prose too often seem surprisingly clunky. Here is one example from the chapter “The Sentence Clinic.” The sentence in need of repair is from a 2014 Wall Street Journal article about Barack Obama:

The president, detached and defeatist when he isn’t in your face and triumphalist, let David Remnick, in the New Yorker interview people keep going back to as the second term’s Rosetta Stone, know that he himself does not expect any major legislation, with the possible exception of immigration, to get done.

Evans says that the sentence has “a hole in the middle” (unexplained), and he calls attention to the gap between David Remnick’s name and know. Here is Evans’s revision:

The president, detached and defeatist when he isn’t in your face and triumphalist, suggested, in a David Remnick interview in the New Yorker, that he does not expect any major legislation to pass, with the possible exception of immigration. People have viewed the interview as the Rosetta Stone of the second term.

Yet this revision preserves, unremarked, the gap between president and a verb (suggested) and adds a gap between suggested and that. There’s something awkward about having the participle detached and the verb suggested in close proximity. The rhyme of viewed and interview seems a distraction. And that long first sentence with parts rearranged — it’s still a clunker. Here’s my revision:

When he is not in your face and triumphalist, the president seems detached and defeated. In an interview with David Remnick of The New Yorker, Obama suggested that he does does not expect any major legislation to pass, with the possible exception of immigration. Many observers see in this interview the key to understanding his second term.

First, a statement. Second, evidence to support that statement. Third, a comment on the importance of the evidence. I omitted the Rosetta Stone metaphor, as it suggests the deciphering of a mystery, not at all what’s involved in reading an interview. But I’d like to take greater liberties with the WSJ ’s prose and revise like so:

When he is not in your face and triumphalist, the president seems detached and defeated. In a New Yorker interview that many observers see as the key to understanding his second term, Obama suggested that he does not expect any major legislation to pass, with the possible exception of immigration.

Or better still:

When he is not in your face and triumphalist, the president seems detached and defeated. In a New Yorker interview that many observers see as the key to understanding his second term, Obama suggested that with the possible exception of immigration, he does not expect any major legislation to pass.

In The Elements of Style, the derided but still sometimes useful William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White have advice that’s helpful in approaching the WSJ sentence:

When you become hopelessly mired in a sentence, it is best to start fresh; do not try to fight your way through against the terrible odds of syntax. Usually what is wrong is that the construction has become too involved at some point; the sentence needs to be broken apart and replaced by two or more shorter sentences.

In this case, three sentences. Or, with the reference to David Remnick removed, two.

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[DuckDuckGo tells me that the original sentence is by Peggy Noonan. I’m on page 141 of Do I Make Myself Clear?, with 293 pages to go. The passage from The Elements of Style is by E.B. White. This post is no. 78 in a series, dedicated to improving stray bits of public prose.]

“He did”

Stephen Colbert just now:

“Did Donald Trump just knowingly provide cover for a murderous autocrat? Maybe he did, maybe he didn’t.”

And then, mouthing the words: “He did.”

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“In any case”

“In any case”

Anyone who doubts that nationalism, so-called, is toxic to our moral values would do well to read the “Statement from President Donald J. Trump on Standing with Saudi Arabia.” It reads as if dictated or written by Trump himself, beginning and ending with the exclamation “America First!” The statement plays the game of whatabout (re: Iran), smears Jamal Khashoggi, sides with indeterminacy in all things (“it could very well be that the Crown Prince had knowledge of this tragic event — maybe he did and maybe he didn’t!”) and endorses a grim realpolitik: “In any case, our relationship is with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.” Why? Investments (wildly exaggerated) and oil prices. So they killed a journalist (and United States resident) who criticized their regime? Hey, a lot of people get killed. I mean, look at Chicago, &c.

America First! seems to mean Values Last.

[If this is Trump as a seventy-two-year-old head of state, imagine what we must have been like as a college student. See this evaluation: “Donald Trump was the dumbest goddam student I ever had.” “Hey, a lot of people get killed. I mean, look at Chicago, &c.”: doing my best to channel the president.]