Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday Saturday Stumper is by Greg Johnson. It’s a solid sender.

I looked at the shape of things: twelve-, thirteen-, and fourteen-letter answers across. Uh-oh. I looked at 1-A, twelve letters, “Low-altitude airborne pollutant” and 1-D, five letters, “Silas Marner exclamation.” Uh-oh. But I found a start in 26-A, three letters, “Fabled ready-for-winter creature.” And another: 31-A, three letters, “Pontiac clubber’s pride.” And those two gave me 20-D, six letters, “They have big food bills.” So there’s my secret strategy: look for clues whose answers I can fill in. I ended up where I began, with the first three Across clues. Tough stuff.

Some clue-and-answer pairs I especially liked:

18-A, four letters, “One often stuck in traffic.” TAXI? No.

35-D, five letters, “Hairpin stealing, circa 1885.” Yes, it’s true. The kids yesterday. . . .

62-D, three letters, “Parallel line part.” I always like seeing a junky answer redeemed by its clue.

63-A, thirteen letters, “Got ticketed.” Dang clever.

64-A, twelve letters, “Urban survival skill.” But I’m not sure it’s a skill. More a state of mind, I’d say.

Nits to pick: 13-A, thirteen letters, “It’s stalked in the kitchen.” Not in this kitchen. And the obligatory cryptic clue in this puzzle is just a rAW FULcrum — in other words, too contrived.

My favorite in this puzzle: 15-A, fourteen letters, “Oxymoronic appliance.” Yes, it is oxymoronic. And I used one for years, a gift from my fambly.

No spoilers: the answers are in the comments.

Four panels, “some rocks”

[A first panel. Bliss, October 23, 2020.]

Thanks to George Bodmer, who draws Oscar’s Portrait, for passing on yesterday’s Bliss.

“Some rocks” are an abiding preoccupation of these pages.

The death tour

From USA Today:

As President Donald Trump jetted across the country holding campaign rallies during the past two months, he didn’t just defy state orders and federal health guidelines. He left a trail of coronavirus outbreaks in his wake.

The president has participated in nearly three dozen rallies since mid-August, all but two at airport hangars. A USA Today analysis shows COVID-19 cases grew at a faster rate than before after at least five of those rallies in the following counties: Blue Earth, Minnesota; Lackawanna, Pennsylvania; Marathon, Wisconsin; Dauphin, Pennsylvania; and Beltrami, Minnesota.

Together, those counties saw 1,500 more new cases in the two weeks following Trump’s rallies than the two weeks before — 9,647 cases, up from 8,069.

Trump* = death. Literally.

Masks, freedom, and toxic masculinity

From a brief interview with Anand Giridharadas about the American aversion to masks:

I think the expectation of invulnerability in men is quite universal.

But the idea of “freedom from” is an American obsession — freedom from the government and so on. But freedom to — to be able to eat or to pursue your dreams — we’re much blinder to those types of freedoms, which political philosophers call positive freedom.

I think that “freedom from” obsession results in this feeling that government is emasculating.

The common sense exertion of public institutions to protect people makes many American men feel weakened, as though faceless bureaucrats are doing for their family what maybe they feel like they should be doing for their family instead.

Related posts
Andrew Cuomo, Edward Gibbon, Edith Hamilton, Margaret Thatcher, and “freedom from” : Huck Finn and “freedom from” : Sociopathy unmasked : “You wear a mask”

On the crisis in the humanities

Jon Baskin and Anastasia Berg, writing in The New York Times:

No one should minimize the impact of the closing and contracting of humanities departments and liberal arts colleges on students, professors and staffs. And, to be sure, there remains scholarly work that requires the resources and support that today only a university can provide. But the case for humanistic education should never rest solely on the survival of these institutions. This means the “crisis” cannot be adequately described either by the number of openings on the academic job market, or the number of Great Books on university syllabuses. The health of the humanities should be measured instead by whether our society provides ample opportunities for its citizens to ask the fundamental questions about the good life and the just society.

By that yardstick, it seems, the humanities are healthier than the doomsayers might lead us to believe.

In recent months, in the midst of a pandemic, a protest movement and a presidential election season, millions of Americans have gravitated to online reading groups and book clubs, attended Zoom panels on the burdens of history and the meaning of open discourse, watched philosophy lectures on YouTube and flocked to longform, humanistic magazines (as editors of one of them, The Point, we can attest that our readership has nearly doubled since March). Those who truly care about the future of the humanities, as opposed to the viability of certain career paths, might begin by seeing such public-facing pursuits as central, rather than ancillary, to their mission.

I’m sympathetic to Berg and Baskin’s argument. As the formal study of literature continues to wane, small group efforts (assisted, often, by digital technology) will become increasingly important to the work of serious reading. “Houses of reading,” to use George Steiner’s phrase, need not be classrooms.

Two related posts
Book clubs and the Internets : George Steiner on reading

How to improve writing (no. 89)

A sentence from a New York Review Books e-mail:

Thomas Tryon’s The Other narrates the tale of two identical twins, one of whom begins to terrorize the peaceful New England town that they call home.

I first thought Omit needless words :

Thomas Tryon’s The Other narrates the tale of two identical twins, one of whom begins to terrorize the peaceful New England town that they call home.

But wait a sec — what if it’s a tale of a town’s worth of identical twins? The village of the twins! The context for this sentence is an e-mail devoted to horror and science-fiction, so anything is possible, no?

But wait another sec — the phrase “one of whom” pretty clearly suggests that the story is about two twins.

But wait one more sec — without “two,” perhaps there’s still a slight risk of misreading before one gets to “one of whom.” Okay, leave it in.

I would like to think that the writer of the sentence went through the same process of overthinking that I just did. Sometimes writing can be improved by going back to what you had. Not every improvement is an improvement.

This sentence got Elaine and me to thinking about the word pair. Why say “a pair of shoes”? They’re just shoes, right? Only sometimes. An everyday shopper buys “a pair of shoes.” Imelda Marcos bought “shoes.”

*

November 25: It occurred to me to look up pair. From the entry for pair in Garner’s Modern English Usage:

Is it right to speak of a pair of twins — that is, does this phrase denote two people or four? Because twins are always two per birth, a pair of twins is two people. (Shoes also come in pairs, and a pair of shoes is two — not four — shoes.) Four twins are two pairs of twins. But the redundant phrase pair of twins can be found in print sources fairly steadily from 1800 to the present day.

*

April 24, 2021: A passage I found by chance, in Theodore M. Bernstein’s Miss Thistlebottom’s Hobgoblins: The Careful Writer’s Guide to the Taboos, Bugbears and Outmoded Rules of English Usage (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1971):

In ordinary, forgivable usage a pair of twins is the customary phrase. In some situations it is almost necessary. If you were walking down the street and two like-looking creatures approached, you would probably nudge your companion and say, “They are twins”; but if you were relating the incident to a companion who had not been present, you would be quite likely to say, “Coming toward me was a pair of twins,” rather than “Coming toward me were twins.” Incidentally and not altogether irrelevantly, “a pair of trousers” is never questioned, although, of course, “trousers” by itself covers the thought (as well as the legs). But it should be noted that no idea of two-ness is inherent in that word.

Miss Thistlebottom? “Your eight-grade English teacher,” Bernstein says. The sexism of Bernstein’s unfortunate title lives on in Steven Pinker’s The Sense of Style (2014). Pinker borrows the name Thistlebottom and adds his own sexist insults: ”grammar nannies,” “Ms. Retentive and her ilk,” “schoolmarm,” “schoolteachers,” “spinster schoolteacher,” and “usage nannies.”

Related reading
All OCA “How to improve writing” posts

[I read The Other for my tenth-grade English class. It was good then. Would it still be good now? And how many shoes are “some shoes”? This post is no. 89 in a series dedicated to improving stray bits of public prose.]

Shudder

“They are so well taken care of”: Donald Trump*, in tonight’s debate, speaking of the 545 children taken from their parents at the United States–Mexico border, parents who cannot now be found.

We know who Donald Trump* is. But it’s still, always, shocking to see it so clearly. Any parent — any person — should shudder at this president’s utter lack of empathy.

Lordy

Donald Trump*, interviewed by Lesley Stahl for 60 Minutes: “When I finish, this country will be in a position like it hasn’t been maybe ever.”

Yes, exactly.

You can watch this interview, or some edited version of it, on Trump*’s Facebook page. Ten minutes in, I’ve seen nothing but falsehoods, distortions, and endless repetition: we got hit, we got it, we saved millions of lives, we saved millions of lives, we just picked up 11.4 million jobs, we just picked up 11.4 million jobs, the check is in the mail, the check is in the mail. No water drinking yet. But it’s fascinating to see Trump* working up his serious face as the interview begins.

[Look, it’s in the mail. I put it in the mail days ago, okay? Days ago. If you have a problem, take it up with your mailman. Not with me.]

“What should I do until then?”

[“Biden His Time.” Zippy, October 22, 2020.]

Today’s Zippy poses an urgent question. Griffy explains that he has to keep Zippy “offstage & blindfolded” while awaiting the end of one “long national nightmare” or the start of a nightmare even worse.

What to do in the next twelve days? I’ve voted, and I’ve given all the money to candidates that I can. I will follow the news, some of it, and try to remind myself that CNN and MSNBC seek to intensify angst.

Also: read, write, walk, do FaceTime, and listen to music. And have a glass of wine, a bottle of beer, or two ounces of Scotch at night. Reading includes the comics and Robertson Davies’s The Cornish Trilogy. Music includes The Harry Smith B-Sides. Scotch means Glenmorangie.

How do you plan to get through the next twelve days?

A Langston Hughes Zoom event

Jameatris Rimkus, archivist, presents “The Mystery Recordings of Langston Hughes: A Poet Visits the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign,” Thursday, November 5, 12:00 p.m.–1:00 p.m. CST. Registration is free, via this link.

The mystery recordings, found in a box in the University Archives, are of Hughes reading his work for a live audience. The only documentation: the recordings were made by WILL Radio. But the archivist is on the case.