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How to improve writing, no. 89 Now with more tedious discussion of the phrase a pair of twins.

Thankful

I am so thankful that Joe Biden is our president.

[Typed during the memorial service for William “Billy” Evans, Capitol police officer.]

Time travel

Yes, you can roam around.

Marcel Proust, The Fugitive, trans. Peter Collier (London: Penguin, 2003).

Proust’s narrator is speaking, of course, of memory. But as Carol Clark points out in the introduction to her translation of The Prisoner in this same volume, the narrator can indeed be years older or younger from pargraph to paragraph. She quotes from a letter by Evelyn Waugh to John Betjeman:

Well, the chap was plain barmy. He never tells you the age of the hero and on one page he is being taken to the W.C. in the Champs-Elysées by his nurse & the next page he is going to a brothel. Such a lot of nonsense.

Clark says that Waugh was “facetiously complaining.” I hope so.

Related reading
All OCA Proust posts (Pinboard)

SAFE-T

The killing of Daunte Wright and the events that followed last night in Brooklyn Center, Minnesota, prompt me to share a Chicago Reader article about Illinois’s SAFE-T Act. It’s a criminal-justice reform bill, signed into law in February. The acronym stands for Safety, Accountability, Fairness and Equity — Today. In other words, now.

“That attention to detail”

The Duc and the Duchesse de Guermantes admire Mademoiselle de Forcheville’s tact and intelligence.

Marcel Proust, The Fugitive, trans. Peter Collier (London: Penguin, 2003).

The Duc and Duchesse’s evaluation of Mademoiselle is (at least thus far) wholly positive. Add to Mademoiselle’s tact and intelligence her wit, and the way she pronounces certain words — just like her father! Oh, and her brio. Yes, her father was witty too, but he did not have such brio. Let the hair-splitting analyses begin.

Related reading
All OCA Proust posts (Pinboard)

“It’s pathetic”

Here’s an anonymous resident of Villa Grove, Illinois, quoted in the Chicago Sun Times. She’s speaking of life in the town where a bar opening in February 2021 was linked to forty-six cases of COVID-19 and a two-week-long school closing. You can easily figure out why she chose to be anonymous:

“They don’t check to see how many people are in businesses. There are no mask mandates. When restaurants and bars were supposed to be closed except for pickup, there were still several that were open like there was nothing going on,” she said. “There’s hardly anywhere that mandates masks. It’s pathetic.”

That’s the meaning of “freedom” in downstate Illinois.

And that’s my airing of grievances for the day.

A related post
COVID-19 in Douglas County

[Says the bar’s owner, “We don’t want Chicago telling us what to do.” The state capital is Springfield.]

Airing of grievances

For some people, every day is Festivus.

[Worth clicking through if only to see the startling photograph.]

Idiom of the day: soup up

A clue in yesterday’s Newsday crossword — five letters, “Jazzes (up)” — prompted me to (finally) write a post about soup up.

My guess about an origin: perhaps a way to describe the adding of soup to a meal. I imagine a seedy little café, circa 1927, adding a bowl of soup to, say, the beef stew, roll, and coffee it usually serves its patrons: “We souped up the dinner for ya, Bill. Eat hearty.” But it’s tough to guess correctly about these things.

Merriam-Webster gives these definitions for soup up:

to increase the power, efficiency, or performance of

to heighten the impact of : to make more exciting or colorful

It’s the origin of the verb that’s surprising. According to M-W, soup up comes from soup, “drug injected into a racehorse to improve its performance.” M-W dates soup up to 1924. The Oxford English Dictionary dates the verb to 1931. The OED dates soup-as-drug to 1909, citing the 1909 ‌Webster’s New international : “any material injected into a horse with a view to changing its speed or temperament.” The OED suggests the prefix super- as an influence.

And now I recall that in The Asphalt Jungle (dir. John Huston, 1950), “soup” is what the criminal gang calls the nitroglycerine they use to blow up a bank vault. Sure enough, the Oxford English Dictionary has soup as nitroglycerine or gelignite, with a first citation from 1902. I like this 1903 citation, from Isaac Kahn Friedman’s The Autobiography of a Beggar: “Louis learned how ter make de ‘soup’ from a gang of ‘yeagers’ dat used ter blow de doors off country banks.” Yeagers are more commonly known as yeggs: that is, safecrackers.

And crackers remind me of soup, and of the imaginary café. If I keep going on with this post, it’ll soon be time for lunch. There will be soup.

[The Autobiography of a Beggar is not an autobiography. It’s a book of what look like colorful stories by a Chicago journalist.]

Today’s Newsday Saturday

Today’s Newsday  Saturday crossword, by Anna Stiga (Stan Again, Stan Newman, the puzzle editor), was easy but satisfying, with inventive clues and unusual answers. Some clue-and-answer pairs that I especially liked:

6-A, five letters, “Big name in guitar making.” Surprising to see this answer clued as a name. But it is one, or was.

7-D, six letters, “’13’ preceder.” Seems obvious when you see it, but strange at first.

10-D, eight letters, “Topical application.” Just because the answer is such a squeamish-making word.

16-D, five letters, “Nickname like Rin.” I had no idea that Rin is a nickname. The only Rin I know of barked.

18-A, five letters, “Dark-meat delicacy.” Has anyone ever eaten it? Enjoyed it?

25-A, ten letters, “They’re paid to strike.” MERCENARIE — ? No. The answer makes me think of just one name, from kidhood TV.

30-A, thirteen letters, “Expedient but imperfect.” Not sure if this idiom originates in the world of coding or is just widely used there.

32-A, eight letters, “Box-set pastime.” “Box-set” still makes me think, first, of CDs.

37-D, six letters, “Smears with ink.” Ha.

44-A, three letters, “Needle point.” The clue redeems the answer.

51-D, three letters, “Grammy Album of the Year sharer (1982).” I didn’t see this answer coming, partly because “1982.”

56-A, five letters, “Jazzes (up).” I’ve been meaning to write a post about the answer.

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

Katalin Kariko

The New York Times reports on Katalin “Kati” Kariko, whose work with colleagues on messenger RNA became the foundation for the Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines. I like this paragraph:

By all accounts intense and single-minded, Dr. Kariko lives for “the bench” — the spot in the lab where she works. She cares little for fame. “The bench is there, the science is good,” she shrugged in a recent interview. “Who cares?”

As the Times article makes clear, Dr. Kariko’s position in academia has long been precarious. I’m guessing that might change, and that she’ll soon be sharing a Nobel Prize. Signs point to yes, don’t you think?