In The New York Times, a plea from thirty-three writers: “Please use language that will clarify the issues at hand.” “Bribery” or “extortion.” Not “quid pro quo.” “Create false evidence,” “find incriminating evidence,” or “tell lies about.” Not “dig up dirt.”
Sunday, November 10, 2019
“89.9, Manahawkin”
When I’m driving at night with the radio on, the announcement of an unfamiliar NPR affiliate’s frequency and location always makes me think of a lonely tower standing at the edge of a field in some tiny village. There may be moonlight. Or the moon may be obscured by clouds. Or there may be no moon at all. Is anyone else listening?
That’s what my imagination does with, say, “89.9, Manahawkin.”
Saturday, November 9, 2019
Today’s Saturday Stumper
Today’s Newsday Saturday Stumper, by Greg Johnson, begins with a clue that baffled me: 1-A, seven letters, “Pharaoh-era figurine.” Oh, but look, there’s 1-D, eight letters, “Place to buy inedible peanuts.” And off I went. And I found further gimmes helpfully scattered through the grid: 14-D, eight letters, “+ or -, to mathematicians.” 24-D, eleven letters, “California flag depiction.” 44-D, six letters, “Astronaut who found Eden (1965).” 48-D, six letters, “LeVar’s mom on Roots.”
Three non-gimmes I especially liked: 38-A, nine letters, “What cats crave.” 57-A, seven letters, “How some cars are made.” (BYROBOT? No.) 59-A, seven letters, “Volume control device.” And two clues that, along with 1-A, taught me something: 18-A, seven letters, “Dogood, for Franklin.” And 21-D, four letters, “Word from Old English for ‘useless.’”
No spoilers: the answers are in the comments.
Friday, November 8, 2019
Ben Leddy hosts The Rewind
Here’s the latest installment of WGBH’s The Rewind, “Eleanor Roosevelt, Henry Kissinger, and the Atomic Bomb,” hosted by our son Ben. You can find all episodes of The Rewind at YouTube.
How to ruin “English,”
one small example
I looked, from morbid curiosity, to see what one dreadful book says about that passage from “De Daumier-Smith’s Blue Period”:
As he gazes at the contents on exhibit — enamel bedpans and urinals overseen by a wooden dummy wearing a rupture truss — [Daumier-Smith] experiences an abrupt stripping of his ego that reveals his alienation. He suddenly comes to realize that no matter how technically perfect his art might become, it is tied to intellectual logic and he will always remain uninspired, adrift in a world he considers mundane and ugly. He recognizes that he is spiritually unconscious, with no connection to the divine inspiration that true art requires or true living demands. His art is polluted by ego.Oh yeah? That’s the kind of reading that ruins “English” for so many students: skip the details of the surface in favor of an “interpretation” of a sort that seems available only to teachers. When I was in high school, we called it “deep reading.”
What might be more deserving of attention in that passage: Daumier-Smith’s feeling of being out of place (which recalls his earlier feeling of being a loser in a game of musical chairs), the awkwardness of navigating the garden (as in Eden, you have to watch your step), the “dummy-deity” (a blind god, or a self-effacing lavatory attendant). And: the price of the truss has been marked down.
“A visitor in a garden”
It is 1939. “Jean de Daumier-Smith” — not his real name — is in Montreal, working as an instructor at Les Amis Des Vieux Maîtres, a husband-and-wife correspondence art school. One night de Daumier-Smith stops and looks into the window of the orthopedic-appliances store on the ground floor of the building that houses Les Amis. And “something altogether hideous” happens:
J.D. Salinger, “De Daumier-Smith’s Blue Period,” in Nine Stories (1953).
Related reading
All OCA Salinger posts (Pinboard)
Thursday, November 7, 2019
Is guys a pronoun?
I am puzzled as to why anyone would consider guys a pronoun. A plural noun that includes everyone — folks , people — is a noun. When you precedes such a noun — you folks, you people — you functions as a vocative, denoting the person or thing addressed or invoked. And as the Oxford English Dictionary says, the vocative you is used “chiefly in apposition to a following noun or noun phrase” (my emphasis). And now I’m remembering the children’s book: “You monkeys, you! You give me back my caps.”
Bill of Occam can help here: we need not multiply entities unnecessarily. To my mind, calling guys a pronoun is just such a feat of multiplication. But if I’m missing something here, please let me know.
A related post
The guys problem
The Eye of Sauron in the news
On Morning Edition, David Greene asked Andrew Weiss, who served under two administrations in the Pentagon, State Department, and National Security Council, if it’s possible for National Security principals to disagree with the current president. Weiss’s response:
“I think the best analogy I’ve heard for how things work comes from the movie The Lord of the Rings, where there’s this disembodied eye, the Eye of Sauron, that hovers over everything. In the Trump administration, if the Eye is looking at you, it’s basically all hope is lost.”[I don’t know The Lord of the Rings. But I know people who do.]
“Letter-writing types”
April 1944. Devon, England. Of “some sixty American enlisted men” taking a pre-Invasion training course, “there wasn’t one good mixer in the bunch”:
J.D. Salinger, “For Esmé — with Love and Squalor,” in Nine Stories (1953).
Related reading
All OCA Salinger posts (Pinboard)
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