Metaphor of the day

“He is fat Elvis”: Nicole Wallace's characterization of Donald Trump*, just now on MSNBC.

SPA day

Me, in the supermarket earlier today:

“This person’s COMING THE WRONG WAY. Let’s back out and go down two aisles.”

“Here’s ANOTHER PERSON NOT WEARING A MASK.”

“Let’s go the other way. THIS PERSON DOESN’T HAVE A MASK ON.”

“Could you keep your distance? ESPECIALLY IF YOU’RE NOT GOING TO WEAR A MASK.”

I would estimate that half the customers in the supermarket this morning wore no masks and paid no attention to one-way aisles or social distancing.

SPA is my newly invented acronym: Sparring Passive-Aggressively. My other new acronym: SITEEMO. Shop In The Early, Early Morning Only. Today we were too late.

Our tube

John Amos, Ernest Borgnine, LeVar Burton, Jerry Orbach, Adam West, all in the Murder, She Wrote episode “Death Takes a Dive” (February 22, 1987). Familiar faces in new arrangements: one of the pleasures of television.

Domestic comedy

“It looks absurd — it’s like a Love Boat toupee!”

Related reading
All OCA domestic comedy posts (Pinboard)

Reluctant professors

“Thousands of instructors at American colleges and universities have told administrators in recent days that they are unwilling to resume in-person classes because of the pandemic”: The New York Times reports on reluctant professors.

The University of Illinois faculty and staff petition for an open forum on re-opening, mentioned in the article, is worth reading.

A related post
College, anyone?

“The time just before”

Every so often I’ve tried to track down a passage I read years ago — something to the effect that the time we’re most curious about or enamored of or nostalgic for is the time just before our own. I thought I might have finally found the passage:

The time just before our own entrance into the world is bound to be peculiarly fascinating to us: if we could understand it, we might be able to explain our parents, and hence come closer to persuading ourselves that we know why we are here.

The only problem: this passage appears in “The World in a Very Small Space,” a review by Robert B. Shaw of The Stories of John Cheever, published in the December 23, 1978 issue of The Nation. Was I reading The Nation in 1978? No. Would I somehow have found my way to a 1978 issue years later? That’s doubtful, though I did subscribe to The Nation in the late 1980s. Did I have an interest in John Cheever’s work that would have brought me to this review? Nope. So the search must go on.

This review has a wonderful passage from Cheever’s preface to the collection:

These stories seem at times to be stories of a long-lost world when the city of New York was still filled with a river light, when you heard the Benny Goodman quartets from a radio in the corner stationery store, and when almost everybody wore a hat. Here is the last of that generation of chain smokers who woke the world in the morning with their coughing, who used to get stoned at cocktail parties and perform obsolete dance steps like “the Cleveland Chicken,” sail for Europe on ships, who were truly nostalgic for love and happiness, and whose gods were as ancient as yours and mine, whoever you are.

There are ample reasons not to miss that long-lost world. But it’s hard to beat the Benny Goodman quartet — or trio. Maybe I should read some John Cheever.

The sentences that made me give up on Shirley

Charlotte Brontë, Shirley (1849).

“Ah!” said I, shaking my head, and heaving a deep sigh. Life’s too short. And Shirley hadn’t even shown up yet.

Also from Charlotte Brontë
A word : Three words : Jane Eyre, descriptivist : Bumps on the head : “In all quarters of the sky” : Small things : Some trees

Simile of the day

[Watching the news, thinking about those who chose to support him.]

"It’s like they hitched their wagon to a time bomb.”

Idiom of the day: go to pot

Elaine and I wondered about the pot in go to pot . We had three guesses between us: a chamber pot, a cooking pot, and a pot for a plant.

The kitchen wins. The idiom “dates from the late 1500s and alludes to inferior pieces of meat being cut up for the stewpot.” Source: Christine Ammer, The American Heritage Dictionary of Idioms (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997).

I suppose that if something wasn’t good enough for the stewpot, it might have become hogwash.

Word of the day: hogwash

As found in Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley (1849). Hortense, indignant, reports what Sara said about the choucroute. Go ahead, Hortense:

“That barrel we have in the cellar — delightfully prepared by my own hands — she termed a tub of hog-wash, which means food for pigs.”

Yes, it does, or did.

The Oxford English Dictionary: “kitchen refuse and scraps (esp. in liquid form) used as food for pigs; pigswill. Now chiefly historical.“ The dictionary’s first citation is from circa 1450. Its most helpful citation is the most recent one, from Judith Flanders’s The Victorian House (2004):

Cooks who were not thrifty put all the kitchen leavings into a bucket. The content was called “wash,” and the washman visited regularly to buy it: he then sold it as “hog-wash,” or pigswill.

By 1610 the word acquired a “depreciative” meaning: “any liquid for drinking that is of very poor quality, as cheap beer, wine, etc.” I like this citation, From Thomas Boyd’s Through the Wheat (1923):

“Wine? You call that red hog-wash wine?”

And later, a third colloquial meaning originated in the United States: “nonsense; esp. worthless, ridiculous, or nonsensical ideas, discourse, or writing.” The dictionary’s first citation is from Mark Twain, writing in The Galaxy (1870):

I will remark, in the way of general information, that in California, that land of felicitous nomenclature, the literary name of this sort of stuff is “hogwash.”

In OED citations, it’s sometimes hogwash, sometimes hog-wash. In our time, the hyphenless form is vastly more frequent. As perhaps is hogwash itself.