Sped up, or speeded up

The car chase at the end of High Sierra: was the film sped up, or speeded up ?

Garner’s Modern English Usage is on the case:

The best past tense and past-participial form is sped, not *speeded. It has been so since the 17th century. But there’s one exception: the phrasal verb speed up (= to accelerate) <she speeded up to 80 m.p.h.>.

But the GMEU recommendation may have to change as usage changes: the Google Ngram Viewer shows sped up on the rise and speeded up steadily declining.

The Viewer’s peak years for speeded up are 1942 and 1943. High Sierra is from 1941, so let’s say that the film was speeded up.

*

Bryan Garner tells me that he’ll be revising the entry for speed > sped > sped.

[1942, 1943: because of references to wartime production?]

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No hoax Now there are charges.

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday Saturday Stumper is by Brad Wilber, and it’s a tough one. I started with 8-A, eight letters, “St. Thomas, compared to the other US Virgin Islands.” Wrong answer, but at least the last two letters were right, and they sent me on my way. Two answers had me thinking they couldn’t be right, but they were. And so all the answers were right.

Clue-and-answer pairs I especially liked:

12-D, eight letters, “Curb cut beneficiary.” Been there. Will be again, someday.

24-A, six letters, “Pulse quickeners.” No, that can’t be right, I thought. Even after I had the answer, it took me a while to see it. I was expecting a more recognizable plural.

25-D, five letters, “They often keep the change.” Among other things.

30-D, six letters, “Ready for delivery.” I like the indirection.

32-A, five letters, “Mentor of Mozart.” Rudimentary knowledge of classical music pays off.

35-D, four letters, “Showerhead essential.” Here too the answer had me thinking That can’t be right. I have a love-hate relationship with this kind of clue.

43-A, five letters, “Prepares on canvas.” I was thinking of something having to do with gesso. Bob Ross, help!

50-D, five letters, “Justifications for bizarre behavior.” Well, maybe not justifications. Occasions?

63-A, six letters, “Dairy delivery.” And thanks, once again, after many years, to the student who corrected my pronunciation of the answer.

65-A, five letters, “Voyages of the ‘USS Enterprise.’” This clue had me stuck, not because of an admitted lack of Star Trek knowledge but because I didn’t understand the form that the answer took.

And one clue I liked, but whose answer, not at all: 18-A, eight letters, “Backdrop for moonwalks.” I was trying to think of an answer having to do with MTV. Nope.

No spoilers: the answers are in the comments.

John Lewis (1940–2020)

A giant of our country, past, present, and future. The New York Times has an obituary.

From a January conversation with Valerie Jackson for StoryCorps:

“My philosophy is very simple: when you see something that is not right, not fair, not just, you have to stand up, you have to say something, you have to do something. My mother told me over and over again, when I went off to school, not to get in trouble. But I told her I got in good trouble, necessary trouble. Even today, I tell people, ‘We need to get in good trouble.’”

[My transcription.]

“Let’s Work Together,” again

It’s occurred to me that “Let’s Work Together” makes a suitable anthem for these times. The song is by Wilbert Harrison, who recorded it in 1969 as Wilbert Harrison One Man Band. Canned Heat recorded the song later that year with greater success.

And now the Heat has recorded the song again, with William Shatner, for — Lord have mercy — a Shatner blues album. Listen if you dare.

I still think “Let’s Work Together” is right for these times. But I’ll take Wilbert Harrison and Bob “The Bear” Hite over Captain Kirk any day.

Related reading
All OCA Canned Heat posts (Pinboard)

[Extraneous matter: I discovered only recently that the song’s lyrics borrow from two lines of “Don’t Quit,” a poem attributed to Edgar A. Guest, among others: “When things go wrong, as they sometimes will, / When the road you're trudging seems all up hill.”]

Another day in downstate Illinois

From Newsweek : a member of the school board in the town of Shelbyville resigned last night after making racist and homophobic comments on Facebook.

A related post
Where I live

“Hearing an iron rod being sawed”

Another version of the preparations for a nocturnal expedition:


Xavier de Maistre, Nocturnal Expedition Around My Room. 1825. In Voyage Around My Room. Trans. from the French by Stephen Sartarelli (New York: New Directions, 1994).

The passage from “I soon noticed” to “I should certainly have produced a masterpiece” is a deletion from a manuscript. The translator explains that he has included it

because the author himself said in a letter that he had regretted that deletion and that “this jest on the baroque names of Ossian’s heroes is no worse than the rest,” and because I myself found the passage too amusing to relegate to an end note.

Also from de Maistre
“I rarely follow a straight line” “Three steps backwards”

[Whatever Blogger’s limit is for image size, I ran up against it in trying to post this passage as one image. The orator Demosthenes practiced speaking with pebbles in his mouth.]

“Three steps backwards”

New room. No servant, no dog. Xavier de Maistre prepares for a second journey:


Xavier de Maistre, A Nocturnal Expedition Around My Room. 1825. In A Journey Around My Room. Trans. from the French by Andrew Brown (Richmond, UK: Alma Classics, 2013).

This journey includes a theory of infinite worlds (expressed in a single sentence) and a moment of inept flirtation with a beautiful neighbor seen on a nearby balcony (“Lovely weather tonight!”). Wonderful, funny stuff.

*

Later that same morning: As I just discovered, the New Directions edition of de Maistre’s works restores to this passage some sentences that de Maistre regretted deleting. I’ll post that version soon.

*

Here it is.

A related post
A passage from A Journey Around My Room

[Pope: the poet, Alexander. Ossian: the poet-identity attached to James Macpherson’s pastiches of Gaelic poetry.]

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Found via Laura Olin’s newsletter: Circular. Draw a circle and see how close you get to perfect. Caution: highly addictive. Hint: the more pixels you put on the screen, the better. Go slow.

I had to check: it was Henry Dreyfuss who liked to draw perfect circles freehand. He designed the Honeywell Round Thermostat, among many other things.

Fauci, mensch

As everyone should already know, Dr. Anthony Fauci is a mensch. This tweet is just one small bit of evidence.