Kids ’n’ coffee

Fresca’s Penny Cooper adventure made me think of my repurposed Ovaltine advertisement, and that made me think of a Nancy panel that I saved some time ago.


[Nancy, January 7, 1955.]

I love the weirdly grown-up threat “We’re through.” “We’re through, finished, washed up — if you don’t stop dunking!” Though the inside of each cup is white, I think that Nancy and Sluggo must be drinking and dunking in coffee. Who dunks in milk? Not kids who use cups with saucers. Which raises all kinds of questions: Are Nancy and Sluggo in a café? Would a café serve coffee and donuts to kids? Is the Ritz household the setting for this strip? Did Aunt Fritzi brew the coffee? Does she know that her niece is drinking it? Is Nancy using the good china? Does Aunt Fritzi dunk? Does Sluggo’s dunking remind Nancy of her aunt?

I’ve revised this panel in the interest of coffee.


[Nancy revised, January 7, 1955.]

*

September 27, 2021: When this strip returned today, I realized that the splash needed coloring in. Again, in the interest of coffee.

[Nancy revised again, January 7, 1955.]

Related reading
All OCA coffee and Nancy posts (Pinboard)

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday Saturday Stumper, by Lester Ruff, is pretty, pretty easy, save for one fifteen-letter answer that still baffles me. I got it, but what’s it mean?

The puzzle begins with what looks to me like a giveaway: 1-Across, eight letters, “What ‘Rhapsody in Blue’ was first scored for.” Two clues I especially liked: 3-Down, six letters, “Right-spun yarn term.” And 37-Down, eight letters, “Menu of a sort.” 3-Down, which might be a giveaway for someone else, was for me a matter of getting the crosses. 37-Down I liked for its subtle misdirection. (When I see menu in a crossword I think only of food and computers.)

The clue for the answer that baffles me: 36-Across, fifteen letters, “Start of a updated auric adage.” What?

Oh, wait — I just tried typing out the answer, and now I see it.

No spoilers: the answers are in the comments.

[“A updated”: not a typo, or at least not my typo. My typo was “Satuday” in the post title, now corrected.]

“So now we have everything so beautifully handled”

I transcribed a chunk from the archived broadcast and punctuated to try to match the cadences of speech. The incoherence speaks for itself, but I find the frantic disjunction even more frightening in pixels.

“Now the steel is actually more expensive than the concrete, but I think we’re probably talking about steel because I really feel the other side feels better about it, and I can understand what they’re saying. It is more expensive. We mentioned the price, that we want 5.6 billion dollars, very strongly. Because numbers are thrown around, 1.6, 2.1, 2.5. This is national security we’re talking about. We’re not talking about games; we’re talking about national security. This should have been done by all the presidents that preceded me, and they all know it. Some of them have told me we should have done it. So we’re not playing games; we have to do it. And just remember human traffickers, remember drugs. The drugs are pouring into this country. They don’t go through the ports of entry. When they do, they sometimes get caught. When we finish, and the Democrats do want this, they want ports of entry strengthened, and I wanna do that, too, in fact, we have it down, it’s about 400 million dollars, and we can have the best equipment in the world. Now what they’ll do, if we have the protection, and we have strong ports of entry, with this incredible drug-finding equipment, I dunno what they’re gonna do, because they’re not comin’ in through past the steel gates or the steel walls or the concrete walls, depending on what’s happening, because we are meeting this weekend. We have a group, I’ve set up a group; they are going to tell us who their group of experts, and probably people in the Senate, and Congressmen, and -women, are gonna come, and we have three. I said, ‘Give us three.’ Then I said ‘You know what? Send over nine or six or three or two, it doesn't matter, send over whoever you want,’ but it's common sense. So now when they make that turn, they make it, and now all of a sudden they can’t go any further, and they have to go back, and that’s gonna stop the caravans for two reasons. Number one, they’re not gonna be able to get through, but when they realize they can’t get through, what’s gonna happen? They’re not gonna form, and they’re not gonna try and come up. And they can apply for asylum, and they can, most importantly, they can apply for citizenship because the companies that I told you that created these great job numbers — they’re incredible job numbers, beyond anybody’s expectations, I don’t think there was one Wall Street genius, of which I know many of them, but they’re not geniuses, there’s not one that predicted anywhere close to these job numbers. I thought they were gonna be good, but there wasn’t one that I saw. So now we have everything so beautifully handled.”

As my mom says, “I think there’s something wrong with him.”

Mid-century cigarette machine

[Walter Baldwin, Robert Mitchum, Lizabeth Scott, Robert Hutton. From The Racket (dir. John Cromwell, 1951). Click for a larger view.]

I wondered early on if a better glimpse of that cigarette machine might be in the offing. And there was. There are many ways for a movie to hold my interest. I wondered too if suspected perps were allowed to purchase cigarettes in the police station.

It’s remarkable how recognizable those cigarette packs are at such distances of space and time, at least the first seven: Chesterfield, Chesterfield, Lucky Strike, Camel, Old Gold, Camel, Philip Morris. I’d say “iconic,” but I avoid that overused word.


[Who is the eighth who stands always beside you?]

In addition to its one cigarette machine, The Racket has one Mongol pencil and one great insult, crime boss Nick Scanlon (Robert Ryan) to Irene Hayes (Lizabeth Scott): “Why you cheap little clip-joint canary!” And two pocket notebooks.

Also from this film
One Mongol pencil : Two pocket notebooks

“How to use the passive voice”

At the OUPblog, Edwin L. Battistella writes about how to use the passive voice. He zooms in on a familiar target:

Writing instructors and books often inveigh against the passive voice. My thrift-store copy of Strunk and White’s 1957 Elements of Style says “Use the Active Voice,” explaining that it is “more direct and vigorous than the passive.”

Like the passive voice, The Elements of Style (1959 not 1957) has become an easy target. But the book offers more nuance on the passive voice that Battistella allows. Yes, William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White offer “Use the active voice” (no cap on active or voice) as an “elementary principle of composition.” But they immediately qualify this maxim: the active voice is “usually more direct and vigorous than the passive” (my emphasis). And: “This rule does not, of course, mean that the writer should entirely discard the passive voice, which is frequently convenient and sometimes necessary.”

Like Battistella, Strunk and White recognize that a writer’s emphasis will determine the choice of voice. Battistella says that the choice of passive voice puts “the focus on the object of the action rather than the subject.” Strunk and White give two sample sentences to show exactly that:

The dramatists of the Restoration are little esteemed today.

Modern readers have little esteem for the dramatists of the Restoration.

The first would be the preferred form in a paragraph on the dramatists of the Restoration; the second, in a paragraph on the tastes of modern readers. The need of making a particular word the subject of the sentence will often, as in these examples, determine which voice is to be used.

The habitual use of the active voice, however, makes for forcible writing.

Granted, Battistella goes on to enumerate more contexts in which the passive voice is appropriate. But I think it would be difficult for him, or for any writer, to disagree with Strunk and White’s conclusion: “The habitual use of the active voice, however, makes for forcible [forceful?] writing.” Or as William Zinsser puts it, “The difference between an active-verb style and a passive-verb style — in clarity and vigor — is the difference between life and death for a writer.” Any teacher who has seen student-writers work to strip all sense of agency from their sentences (“It will be argued that,” “It is observed that”) understands the point of “Use the active voice.”

Related reading
All OCA Elements of Style posts (Pinboard)
Oliver Kamm on The Elements of Style and the passive voice
Steven Pinker on The Elements of Style and the passive voice
Geoffrey Pullum on The Elements of Style and the passive voice

[I’m not a fan of The Elements of Style as a resource for teachers, but I think it’s important to distinguish what the book says from what folklore says the book says. For instance: Geoffrey Pullum’s claim that Strunk and White prohibit adjectives and adverbs. All Elements of Style quotations are from the 1959 edition that Battistella cites. The Zinsser quotation is from On Writing Well (2001). I left a much shorter version of this post as a comment at OUPblog, where it has yet to appear.]

Domestic comedy

“Trisha Yearwood! What does she know about flooring?”

“She uses it.”

Related reading
All OCA domestic comedy posts (Pinboard)

[We were watching a commercial.]

Selected titles

Some of the titles Talia removed from a bookshelf during her visit:

Rudolf Arnheim, Visual Thinking
J.L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words
John Berger, Ways of Seeing
Stanley Cavell, Must We Mean What We Say?
Nelson Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking

All age-appropriate, when you think about it. The kid is on the go. “Go.”

Philadelphia Solari

From NPR’s All Things Considered: “Fans of an Iconic Philly Rail Sign Are Rallying to Save It from Retirement.” The sign in question is a flip board, aka a split-flap display, aka a Solari board.

Related posts
Solari board : Solari e Tufte

Notebook sightings: The Racket

[Robert Mitchum as Captain Thomas McQuigg, William Talman as Officer Bob Johnson, Virginia Huston as Lucy Johnson. From The Racket (dir. John Cromwell, 1951). Click for larger notebooks.]

Good cops use pocket notebooks. And they don’t waste time posing so some camera jockey gets a better shot of the notebook. There’s a racket to be fought.

More notebook sightings
Angels with Dirty Faces : Ball of Fire : Cat People : City Girl : Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne : Dead End : Dragnet : Extras : Eyes in the Night : Foreign Correspondent : Fury : Homicide : The Honeymooners : The House on 92nd Street : Journal d’un curé de campagne : Kid Glove Killer : The Last Laugh : Le Million : The Lodger : Ministry of Fear : Mr. Holmes : Murder at the Vanities : Murder by Contract : Murder, Inc. : The Mystery of the Wax Museum : Naked City : The Naked Edge : The Palm Beach Story : Perry Mason : Pickpocket : Pickup on South Street : Pushover : Quai des Orfèvres : Railroaded! : Red-Headed Woman : Rififi : La roue : Route 66 : The Sopranos : Spellbound : Stage Fright : State Fair : A Stranger in Town : Time Table : T-Men : 20th Century Women : Union Station : Where the Sidewalk Ends : The Woman in the Window

Reading, really fast

I learned yesterday that for some English majors, it’s now a point of pride to go really fast when reading aloud, with little or no regard for phrasing or intonation. Why is going fast a point of pride? Because so many students cannot read aloud with much fluency.

These fast readers are like touch typists of reading. But reading aloud isn’t typing.