It’s 1903. Mary-Jacobine McRory, a young Canadian, is abroad enjoying “the London Season.” From Robertson Davies’s What’s Bred in the Bone (1985), the second volume of The Cornish Trilogy :
Monday, October 26, 2020
Deevie and diskey
But no diskey in the OED .
Eric Partridge’s A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English (1970) glosses deevie/deevy/dev(e)y as a perversion (!) of divvy and gives the meanings “delightful, charming.” Partridge notes 1900–c. 1907 as the time of the word’s vogue.
But no diskey in Partridge.
Green’s Dictionary of Slang has deevie, “wonderful, excellent.” But here, too, no diskey.
You’ve probably already guessed what the adjective diskie must mean. But is it authentic slang, or something Robertson Davies made up? Because he does at times invent. Google Books has the answer. Here’s a small catalogue of slang words from the smart set:
[Sydney Brooks, “The Smart Set in England.” Harper’s Weekly, February 27, 1904.]I wish the scan were more readable. I will note that nightie, pals, and undies are still with us. And diskie, yes, means “disgusting.” And yes, twe-est is “dearest,” and my twee meant “my dear.” The mnystery here is cassies. Or is it cossies ?
One more source, pairing the words as Davies does:
[Clement Scott, “The Smart Set and the Stage.” The Smart Set, April 1900.]I don’t know how Davies came by his knowledge of deevie and diskey (maybe by reading The Smart Set ?), but I’d like to think he would admire a reader’s effort to track down both words.
Related reading
All OCA Robertson Davies posts (Pinboard)
Sunday, October 25, 2020
Something Kamala Harris said
I wrote it down as soon as I heard it: “Our democracy is as strong as our willingness to fight for it.” That was Kamala Harris, speaking this afternoon in Troy, Michigan.
Bye, Odwalla
I saw the news that Coca-Cola is discontinuing Odwalla, among other brands.
Did you know that the juice company took its name from the work of the Art Ensemble of Chicago? Odwalla, teacher to “the people of the sun,” is a character in a “myth poem” by Joseph Jarman, recited in the Malachi Favors composition “Illistrum,” on the Art Ensemble album Fanfare for the Warriors (Atlantic, 1973). Wikipedia has the story, with inaccuracies.
More famously, Roscoe Mitchell’s composition “Odwalla” was long the Art Ensemble’s closing theme in performance. Here are four versions, from 1972, 1981, 1991, and 1998. For a good idea of the Art Ensemble in performance, choose 1991. For the best sound, choose the 1998 studio recording (minus Jarman, who had left the group in 1993).
Some AEC posts
The AEC in Boston : The AEC in Cambridge : Joseph Jarman (1937–2019) : Joseph Jarman again : Lester Bowie on Fresh Air
[The Wikipedia inaccuracies have already been pointed out on a Talk page. I have the LP right here as I’m typing, but it hardly qualifies as a Wikipedia source.]
Hi and Lois watch
[Hi and Lois, October 25, 2020. Click for a larger view.]
It’s coincidence, I think. Daily comic strips are created well in advance of publication. But here, as in a recent New Yorker cartoon, a dream of blue leaves.
Related reading
All OCA Hi and Lois posts (Pinboard) : Trying to figure out the New Yorker cartoon
Saturday, October 24, 2020
Mail early in the day, today
10 days.
— The Lincoln Project (@ProjectLincoln) October 24, 2020
Today is the last day to safely mail out your ballot and expect it to arrive before Election Day.
If you can, mail out your ballot today.
I don’t know that it's true everywhere, but if you’re voting by mail, it would be wise to assume it’s true.
And as they used to say, mail early in the day, so that your ballot doesn’t sit in a mailbox till Monday.
The Lincoln Project, whatever the backstory, is doing great work in this election. The Times Square billboards are aptly brutal. And the Kushner–Trump threat to sue has now given those billboards more prominence than they would have had otherwise. There’s a name for that phenomenon: the Streisand effect.
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.
Friday, October 23, 2020
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.Trump* = death. Literally.
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.
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.Related posts
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.
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.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.
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.
Two related posts
Book clubs and the Internets : George Steiner on reading
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