E-mail, or email ?

From Bryan Garner’s LawProse Lesson #364:

From the inception of email in the late 1970s, the word was predominantly hyphenated. (Same with e-business, e-commerce, etc.) In print sources, the turning point came in 2012: that's the year in which, in books at least, the solid form overtook the hyphenated form in frequency of use. Today the solid form predominates by a 2:1 ratio in books. The ratio is much higher in other types of writing. The Chicago Manual of Style acknowledged the shift in its 17th edition of 2017. If you've been a stalwart hyphenator and intend to continue, just know that your communications will strike people as ever more quaint.

I like the consistency of e-noun, no matter the noun, and have no plans to remove hyphens from my 2005 post How to e-mail a professor. I’m content to have my communications strike people as ever more quaint. Just look at some of the meanings of quaint : “clever, ingenious; wise, knowing; skilled” (OED). Granted, those meanings are obsolete.

If you like to subscribe to Bryan Garner’s Usage Tip of the Day & LawProse Lessons, you can sign up for the free e-mails or emails here.

Spencer Silver (1941–2021)

He inadvertently created the adhesive that found a use in “repositionable pressure-sensitive adhesive sheet material” — aka the Post-it Note. The New York Times has an obituary.

OCA is big on Post-it Notes. I see eight partial pads on my desk as I’m typing.

Some Post-it Note posts
Disses, digital and analog : Jim Lehrer’s Post-it Notes : Post-it Note bird : Post-it Note history : Thelonious Monk : Twenty uses for a Post-it Note

A Fine Price

[“Adoration,” by Florence Price, arranged by Elaine Fine. Randall Goosby, violin. Zhu Wang, piano.]

Elaine just learned that her arrangement of Florence Price’s “Adoration” for violin and piano will appear on violinist Randall Goosby’s first album, Roots (Decca), to be released on June 25. HIs performance, with pianist Zhu Wang, has been released on YouTube as a calling card for the album.

This performance of “Adoration” is the first recording of Elaine’s arrangement. But “Adoration” seems to be everywhere in this grief-stricken time. Last July a string orchestra in Chicago played “Adoration” (Elaine’s arrangement) as part of a musical vigil for Elijah McClain, the violinist killed by police in Aurora, Colorado.

[Price wrote “Adoration” for organ. How was Elaine able to make an arrangement? The piece is in the public domain in the United States. Elaine’s arrangements of “Adoration” for duos and for string orchestra are available in the IMSLP under a Creative Commons license.]

M-W, NFT, WTF

Merriam-Webster is selling an NFT of its definition of “NFT.” The pitch begins: “Many people don’t really know what “NFT” means. But you do. So does Merriam-Webster, America’s most trusted dictionary.”

The current high bid: Ξ 7 ($26,344.89).

Yes, it’s for a good cause, with the proceeds going to Teach for All. But I dunno. My post title is meant to suggest my amused disbelief. You’d never catch The American Heritage Dictionary engaging in this kind of postmodern stunt, harumph. (My harumph is in jest.)

Matt Thomas’s Times digest

Matt Thomas is ending his Sunday New York Times Digest after more than thirteen years. He explains why here. He will continue to blog at Submitted for Your Perusal.

Matt reads the print Times, and thus always finds items that a reader/skimmer of the online Times is likely to miss. I am grateful for his dedication to finding items worth sharing.

Notebook sighting

[Caught (dir. Max Ophuls, 1949). Click for a larger view.]

Two doctors chat, and as the camera swings from one side of the office to the other to track their conversation, The Spiral gets a brief turn as the center of attention — or at least of my attention. No cropping here: the desk fills the screen.

The Spiral was a venerable name in notebooks. Here’s another, older model.

More notebook sightings
All the King’s Men : Angels with Dirty Faces : The Bad and the Beautiful : Ball of Fire : The Big Clock : Bombshell : The Brasher Doubloon : Cat People : City Girl : Crossing Delancey : Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne : Dead End : The Devil and Miss Jones : Dragnet : Extras : Eyes in the Night : The Face Behind the Mask : Foreign Correspondent : Fury : Homicide : The Honeymooners : The House on 92nd Street : Journal d’un curé de campagne : Kid Glove Killer : The Last Laugh : Le Million : The Lodger : Ministry of Fear : Mr. Holmes : Murder at the Vanities : Murder by Contract : Murder, Inc. : The Mystery of the Wax Museum : Naked City : The Naked Edge : Now, Voyager : The Palm Beach Story : Perry Mason : Pickpocket : Pickup on South Street : Pushover : Quai des Orfèvres : The Racket : Railroaded! : Red-Headed Woman : Rififi : La roue : Route 66 : The Scarlet Claw : Sleeping Car to Trieste : The Small Back Room : The Sopranos : Spellbound : Stage Fright : State Fair : A Stranger in Town : Stranger Things : Sweet Smell of Success : Time Table : T-Men : To the Ends of the Earth : 20th Century Women : Union Station : Vice Squad : Walk East on Beacon! : Where the Sidewalk Ends : The Woman in the Window : You Only Live Once

“Cheezit!! Th’ cops!!”

[“Lower East Slide.” Zippy, May 12, 2021.]

That’s the first panel. Today’s Zippy continues on a Boweryesque note.

I admire the Bowery Boys. Their cooperative spirit in fisticuffs (“Routine Nine!”) is a model for us all.

Related reading
All OCA Zippy posts (Pinboard)

Norman Lloyd (1914–2021)

The actor Norman Lloyd has died at the age of 106. The New York Times has an obituary.

Here’s a short video profile from The Hollywood Profile: Norman Lloyd: Creative Until You Die.

My longest-standing memory of Lloyd: as Frank Fry in Hitchcock’s Saboteur. “The sleeve”: unforgettable.

[The Times description of Fry as “a chilly fascist sympathizer” is highly inaccurate. The obituary later comes closer: "a fifth columnist bent on attacking American targets during World War II.” But Fry isn’t bent on attacking targets: he does attack, and destroy, two.]

Meta-12

The pleasures of television: Hal Smith, Otis Campbell of The Andy Griffith Show, appears as a drunk driver in a 1969 episode of Adam-12.

Simple fixes for Big Sur’s menu bar

Looking for something to do, I updated my Mac to Big Sur yesterday. All seems well. But I take exception to the newly transparent menu bar. I like a dark wallpaper for the desktop, but a dark menu bar is too severe for my taste.

One fix: In System Preferences, go to Accessibility and check Reduce transparency. The wallpaper will no longer show through.

Another (inspired, I’d say) fix, from Mac user Railgun: Create a dark wallpaper with a lighter line across the top. For my MacBook Air (2880 × 1800), I made a 44-pixel light-gray line across the top of my preferred wallpaper (this one). I doubled Railgun’s 22 pixels to take my Mac’s Retina display into account.

There’s a more complicated fix that uses the Terminal, ChangeMenuBarColor, but it’s beyond my ability, or courage. Your ability or courage may vary.

The strange thing about Big Sur: its drop-down menus remind me so much of the ultra-minimalist, highly tweaked Windows 95 setup I used on a university computer all those years ago. Back to the future.