Anne Fadiman on singular they

In Harper’s, Anne Fadiman writes about coming to terms with singular they :

For more than six decades, I’ve accepted without thinking that when we say that someone went to the store, we don’t have to specify whether that someone was old or young, rich or poor, fat or thin, tall or short, but we do have to specify whether the someone was a “he” or a “she.” Now I’m starting to think that’s a little weird.

My thinking about singular they has changed twice: first about the use of the word with an indefinite pronoun and again about the use of the word to refer to a non-binary person. A sentence of my own made me rethink things the first time. It was a radio commentary by Geoffrey Nunberg that made me rethink things a second time.

Thanks, Stefan, for pointing me to this essay.

Virginia Tufte (1918–2020)

The teacher and scholar Virginia Tufte has died at the age of 101. Her 2006 book Artful Sentences: Syntax as Style (recommended many times in these pages, often in contrast to far less impressive books) is a glorious exposition of the possibilities of the sentence.

Your Postal Service

[Your Postal Service, from The March of Time (1949).]

Please notice the Mongol pencil at 1:30. And do your best to ignore the ads.

Related reading
All OCA mail posts (Pinboard)

Shut up and carry on

From The Chronicle of Higher Education :

A tenured faculty member at Juniata College, in Pennsylvania, is facing censure after writing a comment on Facebook critical of his institution’s reopening plans in light of the pandemic.

Administrators at the college placed a letter of reprimand in Douglas A. Stiffler’s personnel file after he wrote that “as the result of Juniata’s decision to hold classes in person, it is quite possible that people who come on to Juniata’s campus will die, as will people in town. That is what is at stake.”

Stiffler was cited for “not exercising the restraint and respect expected of faculty.”

See also, from McSweeney’s , “Our Successful Return to Campus: An Update from Your University President.”

[Even free articles from the Chronicle now require a reader to register and disable adblocking. Sigh.]

Today’s Saturday Stumper

A crossword solver intimidated by the Newsday Saturday Stumper would do well to give today’s puzzle a try. It’s by Stan Newman, the puzzle’s editor, and it’s easy, as Stumpers go, probably the easiest Stumper I’ve seen, with just a couple of tricky spots in lower left corner. At least that’s where I found them.

Shout-outs to these clue-and-answer pairs:

3-D, nine letters, “Italian erupter.” Sorry, MOUNTETNA.

13-D, five letters, “Place for a pilot.” Back in the day. And today, but elsewhere.

18-A, seven letters, “Animal float or wind-up boat.” The rhyme is nice.

21-A, six letters, “Calzone's conic kin.” At this point 21-A is much more familiar to me than the calzone. When did I last see a neon CALZONES?

23-A, four letters, “Novel designation.” The clue redeems the answer.

33-D, nine letters, “Tobacco plant genus (unsurprisingly).” Dammit, I knew this one right away. (I’ll always be an ex-smoker, never a non-smoker.)

39-D, seven letters, “LG introduction of 2011.” Part of the brief lower-left snarl. LG means phones, right?

52-D, four letters, “Notes with a Manitoban museum.” Just so weird.

56-A, seven letters, “Cupid colleague.” Also part of the trouble in the lower left. Misdirection!

58-A, seven letters, “Downton Abbey role.” I was trying to run through character names. Uh, CARRSON? SYBILLL? CALZONE?

No spoilers: the answers are in the comments.

An EXchange name sighting hearing

[The Case Against Brooklyn (dir. Paul Wendkos, 1958). Click for a larger booth.]

Police Captain T.W. Wills (Emile Meyer) drops a dime: “Hello. Call me back at GEdney 5-1099.”

GEdney was a genuine Brooklyn exchange name, the exchange of my family’s first telephone number.

More EXchange names on screen
Act of Violence : The Amazing Dr. Clitterhouse : Armored Car Robbery : Baby Face : Blast of Silence : The Blue Dahlia : Blue Gardenia : Boardwalk Empire : Born Yesterday : The Brasher Doubloon : The Brothers Rico : Chinatown : Danger Zone : The Dark Corner : Dark Passage : Deception : Deux hommes dans Manhattan : Dick Tracy’s Deception : Down Three Dark Streets : Dream House : East Side, West Side : Fallen Angel : Framed : The Little Giant : Loophole : The Man Who Cheated Himself : Modern Marvels : Murder by Contract : Murder, My Sweet : My Week with Marilyn : Naked City (1) : Naked City (2) : Naked City (3) : Naked City (4) : Naked City (5) : Naked City (6) : Naked City (7) : Nightfall : Nightmare Alley : Out of the Past : Perry Mason : Pitfall : The Public Enemy : Railroaded! : Red Light : Side Street : The Slender Thread : Stage Fright : Sweet Smell of Success : Tension : This Gun for Hire : Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?

Briefcase madeleine

[The Case Against Brooklyn (dir. Paul Wendkos, 1958). Click for a larger briefcase.]

Ahh, I get it — the case against Brooklyn. And the movie opens with a briefcase! I am belaboring the obvious.

This image was an instant madeleine for me: as a elementary-school kid in Brooklyn, I carried my books to school in an inexpensive knock-off that looked much like this briefcase. That’s what boys carried. High-school guys too. It was a pre-backpack world. I remember girls as carrying their books in bookstraps or in plaid bookbags, something like a fabric-and-vinyl version of a briefcase. Briefcases were made of genuine something — bonded leather? I remember the smell.

And I remember a briefcase for the start of school purchased from Century 21 on Brooklyn’s 86th Street. That’s the chain that just went out of business.

By sixth grade, I had switched to a metal attaché case. And when my family left Brooklyn for a New Jersey suburb, I found that carrying an attaché case was the cue for instant mockery. Mine promptly disappeared. The attaché case, that is. Not the mockery. Damn suburbs. Yes, abolish them.

Reader, did you carry your books to school in a briefcase?

A related post
NYC schooldays

Another time and place

[Massimo Vignelli, a detail from the New York City Subway Diagram. 2008. From The Vignelli Canon (2010).]

Up the road a ways

The New York Times reports on life at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign: “What the scientists had not taken into account was that some students would continue partying after they received a positive test result.”

Expel ’em.

“What?”

Walking on campus, Elaine and I, masked, see a student, unmasked, headed straight toward us, slowly, head down, reading his phone. We left the pavement and stepped far away to walk around him.

“Giving you a wide berth, son!” I shouted.

He turned. “What?” He looked a bit like Joe Kennedy III. No, more than a bit. Maybe he was reading about his doppelgänger’s primary loss.

“I’m giving you a wide berth!”

This time he didn’t say anything. He just kept walking and reading, unmasked.

It didn’t occur to me until much later that he may not have known what it means to give someone a wide berth. Someone will have to explain it to him. (Joe Kennedy III?)