“In Your Classroom”

The latest xkcd : “In Your Classroom.”

My contribution to the Good and Weird sector: ancient weaponry, in the form of a recurve bow. A student devoted to archery brought such a bow to class at my invitation to show how Odysseus strings his bow in Odyssey 21.

No arrows, of course. And yes, it was a different time.

Shadow-world

Charlotte Brontë, Villette (1853).

Related reading
All OCA Charlotte Brontë posts (Pinboard)

Today’s Newsday Saturday

Today’s Newsday  Saturday crossword is by Greg Johnson. Not especially amusing, not especially tricky. A solidly challenging puzzle. Reader, I solved it.

Some clue-and-answer pairs I especially liked:

1-D, five letters, “Puff filler.” Seems obvious, but which way to spell it?

6-D, six letters, “Do over a walkway, say.” Represent!

8-D, four letters, “53-Across category.” This one messed me up for an inordinate amount of time. I was thinking of a kind of 53-A, not a category that subsumes 53-A.

10-A, five letters, “’50s command for Bogart.” GETAWAYFROMTHATPHONE doesn’t fit. Also, Casablanca is from the wrong decade.

22-A, seven letters, “Certain face-covering feature.” Very clever.

23-D, five letters, “Reminiscent of Saharan transportation.” The first letter tricked me up here.

27-D, five letters, “They’re handled at the beach.” And the park. O childhood.

32-D, nine letters, “Rhode Island Reds’ prides.” I first saw these in Boston.

41-D, six letters, “Occupations that go nowhere.” Nice misdirection.

46-D, five letters, “Return from the right.” I was thinking typewriters.

50-A, seven letters, “What a valet is asked to do.” Really? For a grown-up? Then again, I haven’t employed a valet in many years.

53-A, fifteen letters, “Produce from the Northwest.” A main staple!

57-A, nine letters, “What are needed to say ‘Aye!’” A weird plural.

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

Accounts, multiple and definitive

In a books newsletter from The Washington Post, news of scholars pleading that Philip Roth’s papers not be destroyed as Roth wished:

In a statement released this week by the Philip Roth Society, dozens of professors begged the executors to ignore Roth’s wishes. “Arrangements limiting access to one biographer run counter to conventions of academic inquiry,” they wrote. “Scholarship can only be advanced when qualified researchers engage freely with essential sources. . . . A writer of Mr. Roth’s stature deserves multiple accounts of his life in keeping with the nuance and complexity of his art.”

And the next item, a link to a book review: “The Double Life of Bob Dylan is the definitive account of a shape-shifting genius’s early years.”

Livonians in Latvia

“With a population estimated at just around 200, Europe's smallest ethnic group is fighting to save its language and culture from extinction”: the BBC looks at the Livonian people of Latvia. Smoked fish are part of the culture. Now I have a new way to understand Baltic Gold sprats.

x

Thinking alphabet thoughts made me wonder: why do we solve (or fail to solve but maybe at least get partial credit) for x ? Wikipedia, relying on a celebrated 1928 study of mathematical notation, credits Descartes: “The modern tradition of using x to represent an unknown was introduced by Descartes in La Géométrie (1637).” Speculation abounds about Arabic and Greek sources and about why Descartes chose x : Why We Use “X” as the Unknown in Math (Gizmodo).

A strange confluence: when I asked Murray, a mathematician, about x, I mentioned that perhaps the names of the x and y axes are explained by y ’s following x in the alphabet. And it turns out that Descartes gave us the x axis. The y came later. And then I realized that axes is yet another heteronym.

My favorite x is an X, in Wallace Stevens’s poem “The Motive for Metaphor”: “The vital, arrogant, fatal, dominant X.” Yikes! That line makes me wonder how Wallace Stevens did in algebra class.

But seriously: the X of that poem names an ultimately unknowable reality that resists and exceeds the imagination. I think I should get at least partial credit for that last sentence.

Thanks to Murray for the Gizmodo article.

Heteronyms

In The Washington Post, John Ficarra, a Mad editor, writes about his problem with heteronyms:

The English language has something to confuse or annoy just about anyone — the mysteries of who and whom usage, the e.g. vs. i.e. standoff, the polarizing Oxford comma. I have a long-standing, personal problem with heteronyms — words that are spelled the same but don’t sound alike. Allow me to explain with a little story.

In order to graduate from the graduate program at my university, every student was required to take part in a group discussion of heteronyms. My group asked me to take the lead which, alas, went over like a lead balloon.

And we’re off.

Thanks, Murray!

[If there’s an excise tax on heteronyms, I may have to excise them from my writing.]

The alphabet and the encyclopedia

Encyclopedias haven’t always been alphabetical. The structure of a medieval encyclopedia was hierarchical, reflecting a divinely ordered universe. Begin with God, then human beings, animals, and on to inanimate things. The change to alphabetical order, Judith Flanders argues, marks a change in worldview. From A Place for Everything: The Curious History of Alphabetical Order (New York: Basic Books, 2020):

Just as the spread of alphabetically organized dictionaries and indexes had indicated a shift from seeing words purely as meaning to seeing them as a series of letters, so too the arrival of alphabetically ordered encyclopedias indicated a shift from seeing the world as a hierarchical, ordered place, explicable and comprehensible if only a person knew enough, to seeing it as a random series of events and people and places.

As Flanders also points out, Wikipedia is an encyclopedia that makes the principle of alphabetical order moot.

Also from this book
On “the preeminence of ABC” : Meaningful letters : Pen and paper and

Baltic Gold

The large print on the jar says “Sardines,” but the small print says “Sprats, Sprattus sprattus.” Baltic Gold whatever-they-ares are incredibly delicious: tiny, tender, lightly smoked fish from Latvia. The only catch, as it were: once opened, the jar goes in the refrigerator and the remaining fish are to be consumed within twenty-four hours. The label says so. So an 8.82 oz. jar requires some dedicated interest in smoked fish, and maybe more than a single eater. Add bread or crackers, a little olive oil (to supplement the jar’s rapeseed oil), and a few flakes of red pepper. The 8.82 oz. will disappear.

I found Baltic Gold in an international foods store and called Gold Star USA in Brooklyn after finding nothing about Baltic Gold on the company’s website. But no, this product has not been discontinued. It’s in their downloadable catalog. “They’re great!” I said to the person on the phone. “Very high quality,” she said. “Enjoy.” Yes.

Related reading
All OCA sardine posts (Pinboard)

[“Sprats are not sardines, but they are closely related”: Trevor Day, Sardine (London: Reaktion, 2018).]

Zombie cicadas

Brood X cicadas (coming soon to a yard near me) will be contending with a “death-zombie fungus.” Matthew Kasson, associate professor of plant pathology and mycology at West Virginia University, explains:

“Infected cicadas, despite the fact that a third of their body has fallen off, continue to go about their activities like mating and flying as if nothing happened.”

I think at this point it’s safe to say that “things” are never going back to “normal.”