Word of the day: coolth

Yesterday’s Los Angeles Times crossword, by Stu Ockman, traded in rarely used antonyms: couth, gainly, kempt, ocuous, onymous, ruthful. And one more, which was new to me. From Webster’s Second:

coolth (kōōth). n. [cool + 1st -th.] Coolness. Humorous.

Webster’s Third offers a nuanced definition and drops the usage label:

coolth \'külth\ n -S [cool + -th (as in warmth)]: the state or occasion of being cool

The Oxford English Dictionary traces the word to 1547, gives the definition “coolness,” and adds the tags “chiefly literary, archaic, or humorous.” A citation I like, from Tom Taylor (1863): “In pleasant dreams Of English coolth and greenery.”

A later meaning (1748?): “a cold; the common cold. Now rare.” And from 1966:

colloquial (orig. U.S.). Chiefly humorous. The quality of being relaxed, assured, or sophisticated in demeanour or style.

A citation from The Christian Science Monitor (1983): “Music lovers might argue the relative coolth of the newer jazz groups.” Which makes me imagine that in a parallel universe, people might be listening to Miles Davis’s The Birth of the Coolth.

Domestic comedy

“New Age-y at this point is sort of like Old Age-y.”

Related reading
All OCA domestic comedy posts (Pinboard)

Peanuts and D-Day

As I discovered only after making a post earlier today, Charles Schulz marked D-Day in a number of Peanuts strips. So I looked them up:

1993 June 6
1994 June 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10
1996 June 6
1997 June 6
1998 May 31

No D-Day strip in 1999. The last new Peanuts strips appeared in January and February 2000.

Pianos, drinking and non-

Billy Joel: “And the piano sounds like a carnival, / And the microphone smells like a beer.”

Tom Waits: “And the carpet needs a haircut, / And the spotlight looks like a prison break.”

It took me lo these many years to realize that Billy Joel’s “Piano Man” (1973) must have been the jumping-off point for Tom Waits’s “The Piano Has Been Drinking (Not Me) (An Evening with Pete King)” (1977). Here is Waits’s studio version, from the album Small Change. My favorite Waits performance of the song is from Fernwood 2 Night (August 1, 1977). In the post-performance interview with Barth Gimble (Martin Mull) and Jerry Hubbard (Fred Willard), Waits plays his part to the hilt.

And of course, in 1939 Earl Hines and His Orchestra recorded “Piano Man,” a Hines composition, no relation.

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December 26, 2019: Aw, jeez, I just discovered that I had this thought in 2017.

June 6

[Peanuts, June 6, 1996. Click for a larger view.]

Yesteryear’s Peanuts is this year’s Peanuts.

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Later in the day: I made a post with links to all the Peanuts D-Day strips.

Madhouse

“This place isn’t a country. It’s a Coney Island madhouse!”

Dialogue from Escape (dir. Melvyn LeRoy, 1940), spoken by Mark Preysing (Robert Taylor), who, in 1936, comes to Germany in search of his actress mother. As he will learn, she is being held in a concentration camp.

Recently updated

The Barrett Watten story, cont. Wayne State’s Graduate Employees Organizing Committee has released a statement.

[Unlike the Avital Ronell story, the Watten story has attracted relatively little interest. How did I notice it? By way of a chance search, prompted by a years-ago interest in (so-called) “language poetry.”]

Schools and TV dinners

Fresca suggested in a comment that virtual schools are to school as TV dinners are to dinner. Right on.

And that made me realize: the TV dinner and the virtual school proceed from the same model: one person, in front of a screen. Get out your laptop, or TV tray; it’s time for “school,” or “dinner.”

“Constructed like the early stages of the automobile”

There are many questions to be asked about engineers:


Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities. 1930–1943. Trans. Sophie Wilkins (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995).

Also from this novel
“At least nine characters”

Virtual schools

The Washington Post examines the case for the “virtual school.” Conclusion: “It sure sounds good. As it turns out, it’s too good to be true.”

A related post
“Personalized learning”

[A “virtual school” is not a school. And “personalized learning” is utterly depersonalized.]