Chicago decades

From The Chicago Manual of Style: the CMOS Shop Talk blog considers names for decades. I remember the semi-facetious “aughts” from a graduate course on the idea of the decade in literary history.

One small instance of the care that goes into revising The Chicago Manual of Style:

Sixteenth edition, 9.34: “Decades are either spelled out (as long as the century is clear) and lowercased or expressed in numerals.”

Seventeenth edition, 9.33: “Decades are either expressed in numerals or spelled out (as long as the century is clear) and lowercased.”

The sentence reads more easily with the shorter element, “expressed in numerals,” first. And switching the elements eliminates the slight glitch in reading that might come with “and lowercased or expressed in numerals.”

Yes, I love The Chicago Manual of Style. Chicago style is far superior to APA and MLA, IMO.

Word of the day: fuliginous

The Oxford English Dictionary Word of the Day is fuliginous. It’s a word I immediately associate with David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, where it appears in its 2.a. meaning in the story of Barry Loach trying to get a handshake outside Park Street Station.

Other words, other works of lit
Apoplexy, avatar, bandbox, heifer, sanguine, sempiternal : Artificer : Expiate : Ineluctable : Iridescent : Magnifico : Opusculum

WTC 2008

I‘ve pretty much kept September 11, 2001 at a distance today. But tonight I’ve been thinking about a visit to the World Trade Center and St. Paul’s Chapel that Elaine and I and made with friends in 2008. I wrote about it in a post that I just reread. It was thinking about the letters and drawings and the banner that got me. No more distance.

WTF’s chief meteorologist at work

The directive to rewrite the weather came from WTF’s chief meteorologist himself. From The Washington Post :

President Trump told his staff that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration needed to correct a tweet that seemed to contradict his statement that Hurricane Dorian posed a significant threat to Alabama as of Sept. 1, in contrast to what the agency’s forecasters were predicting at the time. This led chief of staff Mick Mulvaney to call Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross to tell him to fix the issue, senior administration officials said.

A related post
Wilbur Ross at work

Word of the day: dandy roll

In today’s Zippy, Dandyroll Washbasin looks at a steel-belted radial: “Hmm . . . ‘tired’ can mean having steel-belted radials, or getting ready for bed!”

Like a washbasin, a dandy roll is a thing:

a light wire-covered roll that rides on the wet web of paper on a fourdrinier machine to compact the sheet and sometimes impress a watermark.

A fourdrinier is a thing:

a paper machine in which the web of paper is formed on an endless traveling wire screen that passes under a dandy roll, over suction boxes, through presses, and over dryers to the calenders and reels.

A calender is a thing:

a machine for calendering cloth, rubber, or paper by passing it between rollers or plates

To calender is

to press (as cloth, rubber, paper) between rollers or plates in order to make smooth and glossy or glazed or to thin into sheets.

No etymology for dandy roll in the OED or Webster’s Third. The fourdrinier was named for Henry and Sealy Fourdrinier, nineteenth-century British papermakers and inventors. Calender comes from the Greek κύλινδρος, “cylinder.” The name Dandyroll Washbasin comes from Bill Griffith’s imagination and knowledge of papermaking.

The Johnston Dandy Company has a website full of dandy rolls and other mighty paper-making machines.

Related reading
All OCA Zippy posts (Pinboard)

[Definitions from Webster’s Third.]

A September 11 mural

The Braves of 9/11, a mural by Eduardo Kobra.

Found via Ephemeral New York.

Robert Frank (1924–2019)

The photographer Robert Frank has died at the age of ninety-four. The New York Times has an obituary.

I think of Frank’s The Americans (1959) as the photographic analogue of William Carlos Williams’s Spring and All (1923). “The pure products of America / go crazy — / mountain folk from Kentucky // or the ribbed north end of / Jersey.”

Bob and Ray’s House of Toast

[From A Night of Two Stars (1984).]

I remember the House of Toast from episodes of Mary Backstayge, Noble Wife. The Backstayges, Calvin Hoogavin, and Pop Beloved were operating a House of Toast. Toast, buttered on the far side or the near side, and shakes. What flavors? Just one. You’ll have to listen to find out.

Also from Bob and Ray
Mary Backstayge marigold seeds : “Puissance without hauteur”

A toast tip

From the manual accompanying our new toaster: “Do not place buttered breads in the toaster, as this could create a fire hazard.”

I daresay that’s not the only reason not to place buttered breads in the toaster.

Also from this manual
“Multiple shade options” : “Two equal halves”

A toast tip

The manual for our new toaster advises: “For your safety and continued enjoyment of this product, always read the instruction book carefully before using.” One tip from its pages: “Before toasting bagels, slice each bagel into two equal halves.”

Not three halves. So that’s how you get the bagel to fit.

Also from this manual
“Multiple shade options”