Word of the day: brevier

It’s National Dictionary Day (Noah Webster was born on October 16, 1758). So here’s a word I recently looked up:


[From Webster’s Second.]

I puzzled over this word in Vladimir Nabokov’s Invitation to a Beheading, in which a drop of water falls on a page of a book, and

Through the drop several letters turned from brevier into pica, having swollen as if a reading glass were lying over them.

I like the Webster’s Second entry, with its manicule. But Webster’s Third offers a definition of greater precision: “a size of type between minion and bourgeois, approximately 8 point.” And a different etymology:

prob. fr. D[utch], lit., breviary, fr. M[edieval]L[atin] breviarium; fr. the use of this size of type in the printing of breviaries in 16th cent. Holland & Belgium.

Webster’s Third defines minion as “an old size of type of approximately 7-point and between nonpareil and brevier.” Why minion? The word comes from “F[rench] mignonne, fem. of mignon,” meaning “darling.” I can imagine a scene at a printer’s shop: “What a darling little typeface!” “I know — let us call it minion.”

Bourgeois is “an old size of type (approximately 9 point) between brevier and long primer.” The Oxford English Dictionary says that the word may be “a transferred use of bourgeois middle class,” suggesting either a type size between smaller and larger ones, or type used in “small books suitable for the use of the middle classes.”

Back to Nabokov, and letters turning from brevier into pica. Anyone of a certain age will remember pica, at least vaguely, from typewriter days. Webster’s Third: “a size of typewriter type with 10 characters to the linear inch and six lines to the vertical inch.” But earlier than that: “an old size of type between small pica and english” and “a size of type equivalent to 12 point.” And a surprising suspected origin:

prob. fr. M[edieval]L[atin], collection of church rules, prob. fr. L, magpie; perh. fr. its use in printing the service book and its resemblance to the colors of the bird.

So from small to large: nonpareil, minion, brevier, bourgeois, long primer, small pica, pica, english. This dictionary search has widened in two directions. I’ll leave nonpareil, long primer, and english for a fellow celebrant of National Dictionary Day.

Related reading
All OCA dictionary posts (Pinboard)

Dancing with Robert Walser

News of a performance already here (or there) and gone:

Choreographer John Heginbotham and artist/writer Maira Kalman co-conceive a new dance-play, HERZ SCHMERZ. Early 20th century Swiss author Robert Walser’s witty writings inspire an eccentric and hyper-detailed landscape of movement, text, visual design, and live chamber music, creating an impressionistic observatory of life's beautiful minutiae and most important themes.

Short reviews in The New York Times and The New Yorker. My favorite detail, from the latter, is about one person on the stage: “Susan Bernofsky, Walser’s biographer and the translator of seven of his books, folds and unfolds a white cloth napkin, serenely, for the duration of the show, which lasts a little under an hour.”

Related reading
All OCA Robert Walser posts (Pinboard)

Quiet

Another free 64-bit app to replace a 32-bit app that won’t run with macOS Catalina: Quiet. Quiet is a white-noise generator that lives in the menu bar. Click on the icon to play. Double-click to quit. If you don’t want the app to load at startup (that’s the default), just remove it from your login items.

I downloaded Quiet to replace Noisy, a pink- and white-noise generator that hasn’t been updated in a long time. In my final years of teaching, I relied on white noise during office hours to mask movies or music playing in a classroom at the end of the hallway. Now I have little need for white noise. But ya never know.

Searching for a replacement for the 32-bit app Free Ruler taught me something: when looking for a small utility app, search GitHub. It’s amazing what you can find there.

[Given early reports, I won’t be updating to Catalina any time soon.]

Harold Bloom (1930–2019)

The literary critic and teacher Harold Bloom has died at the age of eighty-nine. The New York Times has an obituary.

This post feels to me obligatory. I was never very much on the Bloom wavelength — partly because of my distrust of such schema as his six “revisionary ratios” of poetic influence, partly because of my distrust of his pronouncements of canonical value. I’m always suspicious of such authority.

Aaron Rupar’s Twitter

And speaking of you-know-who and his crowds: the journalist Aaron Rupar’s Twitter account is a great resource for choice bits of the Donald Trump Improv Tour. Contrast, say, this bland Associated Press sentence — “[Pastor Andrew] Brunson led Saturday’s audience in a prayer for the president” — with what was said. Don’t hide the madness.

[“Don’t hide the madness”: from Allen Ginsberg’s poem “On Burroughs’ Work.”]

Maupassant on crowds

Guy de Maupassant, Afloat, trans. Douglas Parmée (New York: New York Review Books, 2008).

I think of an explanation of riot logic I once heard: that one person will be willing to act alone, that another will need one other person to act first, that a third will need two other people, and so on. I think also of you-know-who’s crowds, reveling in crudity and cruelty that in other circumstances would leave at least some members of the crowd ashamed.

Also from Maupassant
“La belle nature” : “What was it around him” : “All that has been, is now, and ever will be done by painters until the day of doom” ; “Swept strangely clean” : “Like pasta in a soup”

No bottom

In The New York Times tonight:

A video depicting a macabre scene of a fake President Trump shooting, stabbing and brutally assaulting members of the news media and his political opponents was shown at a conference for his supporters at his Miami resort last week, according to footage obtained by The New York Times.

Several of Mr. Trump’s top surrogates — including his son Donald Trump Jr., his former spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders and the governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis — were scheduled to speak at the three-day conference, which was held by a pro-Trump group, American Priority, at Trump National Doral Miami. Ms. Sanders and a person close Mr. Trump’s son said on Sunday that they did not see the video at the conference.

The video, which includes the logo for Mr. Trump’s 2020 re-election campaign, comprises a series of internet memes. The most violent clip shows Mr. Trump’s head superimposed on the body of a man opening fire inside the “Church of Fake News” on parishioners who have the faces of his critics or the logos of media organizations superimposed on their bodies.

Among the “parishioners” in this video: Bill and Hillary Clinton, John McCain, Mitt Romney, Bernie Sanders. One the Times doesn’t mention: Barack Obama. Also: a figure with the Obama campaign logo for a face.

To adapt a possibly apocryphal Gertrude Stein: There ain’t no bottom. There ain’t gonna be any bottom.

Free Ruler 2.0

For years I’ve made occasional use of the Mac app Free Ruler. It’s a 32-bit app, which means that it will no longer work with the new Catalina operating system. But as of a few days ago, there’s a new version: Free Ruler 2.0, 64-bit, and spiffier in appearance. It’s available at GitHub, and, yes, it’s free. Thank you, Pascal.

No quid pro quo?

“It was a quid pro quo, but not a corrupt one”: spoken by someone familiar with the upcoming testimony of Gordon Sondland, the United States ambassador to the European Union, as reported in The Washington Post. No pressure! Just a perfect quid pro quo!

Today’s Saturday Stumper

When I saw the credit for today’s Newsday Saturday Stumper, I thought I’m in for it. Or uh-oh. Or other short words to that effect. Because today’s puzzle is by “Garrett Estrada,” Brad Wilber and Erik Agard. But I did solve it.

I began with a hilariously elaborate clue for an obvious answer: 19-A, three letters, “‘I pity the fool who don’t eat my cereal’ guy (c. 1985).” And then my pace slowed. Two clues that opened up the puzzle’s left: 23-D, four letters, “Siberian railway hub,” and 34-D, five letters, “Gershwin’s Blue Monday.” If I ever find myself in Siberia, I will ask how to get to 23-D, not only because it’s a railway hub but because it’s the only Siberian place name I know. To the right, far from Siberia, 18-A, six letters, “Sea monster of Norse sagas,” and 66-A, eight letters, “Brat’s cousin,” gave me places to start.

So many clever and tricky clues in this puzzle: 9-A, six letters, “Dinner-and-a-show platform.” 29-A, eight letters, “Synagogue props.” 33-D, five letters, “Motion capturer with cameras.” 55-A, eight letters, “Red (or brown or black) snapper.” And especially 45-A, six letters, “Mini bar fixture.” Notice that there’s no hyphen.

Do co-constructors split the payment? I think Messrs. Peterson and Agard should be paid double for this puzzle.

No spoilers: the answers are in the comments.