Adventures in hyphenation

Stan Carey poses a question: What would serve as an apt compound modifier for the opposite of user-friendly ?

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October 5: From a television commercial for Paycom: “My HR app is user-unfriendly.”

Related posts
Bad hyphens, unhelpful abbreviations : “Every generation hyphenates the way it wants to” : “Fellow-billionaires” : Got hyphens? : The Hammacher Schlemmer crazy making hyphen shortage problem : Living on hyphens : Mr. Hyphen and e-mail : Mr. Hyphen and Mr. Faulkner : One more from Mr. Hyphen : Phrasal-adjective punctuation

[As I wrote in a comment on Stan’s post, user-unfriendly sounds best to my ear. I hear in it a touch of wit, a quick negation of the more familiar term.]

Ticonderoga sighting

[Since You Went Away (dir. John Cromwell, 1944). Click for a larger view.]

No, Brig Hilton (Shirley Temple) is not gasping at the conductor’s Dixon Ticonderogas, even if they are sporting nifty clips. The conductor is played by Harry Hayden, who also turns up as the counterman in the opening scene of The Killers (dir. Robert Siodmak, 1946). I know that I’m supposed to be thinking about pencils, not diners. But the setting here is a railroad dining car. Speaking of which, the Railroad Dining Car Archives are a wonder to browse. Though they’re short on pencils.

Other Ticonderoga sightings
The Dick Van Dyke Show : Force of Evil : The House on 92nd Street : Lassie : Lassie, again : Perry Mason

Orange Crate Art at fifteen

Orange Crate Art turns fifteen today. It’s applying for a learner’s permit tomorrow. Wish us luck.

Writing every day, or nearly every day, is a great pleasure to me, whatever the fortunes of “the blogosphere,” whatever the number of hits per post. For me, keeping a blog is a way of fostering a habit of attention, which means fostering a habit of learning, permit or no permit.

Thank you for reading.

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday Saturday Stumper is the work of Lars G. Doubleday, who might be a Bob and Ray character if he were not, in truth, Doug Peterson and Brad Wilber. I thought at first that I was in for another Saturday debacle. See 1-D, five letters, “Confound.” But this puzzle proved to be doable and highly enjoyable.

My starting point was 6-D, seven letters, “Authorities on diamonds,” which gave me most of 6-A, eight letters, “In defiance of warnings, say,” and 18-A, eight letters, “Cooperate.” And between 6-A and 18-A, sat 16-A, eight letters, “Curser of Capulets and Montagues.” My reading of another poet, Geoffrey Hill, gave me 40-A, eight letters, “Holy Week candle-snuffing service.” I took a guess at 4-D, fifteen letters, “Pitch dismissal,” and it turned out to be right. And the parts of the puzzle fell into place, with the southwest corner bringing a final bit of difficulty. A happy solving experience.

Clues I especially liked: 24-A, four letters, “Tip of Italy,” a nice way to make a piece of crosswordese more interesting. 30-A, eight letters, “Frequent I Love Lucy sight.” 55-A, eight letters, “Light pop style.” And for sheer over-the-top idiosyncrasy, 10-D, fifteen letters, “Koi pond filler and filter.” If you say so.

No spoilers: the answers are in the comments.

Go64

“Apple has announced that macOS 10.14 (Mojave) will be the last version capable of running 32-bit applications. Go64 identifies the apps on your Mac that are still 32-bit so you can plan to update or replace them in the near future.” Go64 is a free app for Mac.

Running Go64 on my Mac turns up a handful of 32-bit apps I’ve been using about as long as I’ve been using a Mac: Free Ruler, the timer Minuteur, and the white- and pink-noise generator Noisy. The last two appear to be abandoned. The same goes for a more recent 32-bit app, the bookmark alphabetizer SafariSort.

A turntable recommendation

“Make sure you have the record player on at night”: I’m still not sure whether Joe Biden was suggesting it’s a good thing or a bad thing to have the record player on at night. This morning I’m leaning toward bad. But if you want to have a record player on at night, or at any other time, I would like to recommend the Audio-Technica AT-LP120-USB turntable. Best turntable I’ve ever had.

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In 2023, it’s there’s the Audio-Technica AT-LP120XBT-USB turntable.

[I thought that Biden was criticizing parents who might blast music while their children are trying to do homework. But if he was saying that young children need to hear the spoken word, why not suggest that parents talk to their children? Why invoke a record player? I acknowledge that my recommendation moves forward from the record player into the world of “components”: turntable, receiver, speakers.]

Ben Leddy hosts The Rewind

Here’s the latest episode of WGBH’s The Rewind, “Let’s Read Zoom Mail!,” hosted by our son Ben. And by a special guest-host. And featuring our son Ben. You’ll have to watch to understand.

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.