“Mostly I read”

From a rebroadcast episode of Innovation Hub, “The Man Behind 24-Hour News,” in which Kara Miller interviews Lisa Napoli, author of Up All Night: Ted Turner, CNN, and the Birth of 24-Hour News. Napoli says that she stopped watching television in 2001:

“My mother called and said ‘Put the TV on,’ and I saw the second plane hit the tower, and I turned the television off, and I have not had it on — I have not had a television since then. . . .

“I just can’t — I can’t consume it. I live in a large apartment building in downtown Los Angeles. Last night we were sitting here eating dinner, and we could see someone with a gigantic television on — we see them every single day; all day long it’s on CNN. I don’t think it’s healthy; I just don’t think it’s healthy. . . .

“I just made the personal choice twenty years ago to turn it off, and I feel smarter because of it. I read. I listen. Mostly I read.”

[I could’ve sworn I posted these comments, more or less, when the show first aired. Apparently not.]

Words of the day: estrade and dais

What’s the word for the platform at the front of a classroom where the instructor’s desk stands? Is there a word for it? I was reaching for such a word on Saturday and later found one in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette : estrade.

From the Oxford English Dictionary : “a slightly raised platform; a dais.” Estrade is borrowed from French, which gets the word from the Spanish estrado. The first OED citation for the word in English is from 1696. But when Brontë uses the word, it’s undoubtedly meant to be read as French, in the company of classe, classroom; grenier, attic; salle à manger, dining room; and so on. The OED provides a citation that places us in a classroom. From J.G. Fitch’s Lectures on Teaching (1880): “The teacher . . . should have his desk on a mounted estrade or platform.”

Dais is a much older word, first appearing in English in the thirteenth century. It has relatives in Old French, modern French, Italian, and Provençal. The primal source is the Latin discum, table. The OED definitions:

A raised table in a hall, at which distinguished persons sat at feasts, etc.; the high table. (Often including the platform on which it was raised.)

The raised platform at one end of a hall for the high table, or for seats of honour, a throne, or the like: often surmounted by a canopy.

The dictionary notes that these meanings became obsolete in 1600 but were later revived by historical writers and antiquarians.

Another meaning came later, with a first citation from 1888, post-Brontë:

By extension: The platform of a lecture hall; the raised floor on which the pulpit and communion table stand in some places of worship.

I will admit that in my life as a student and teacher, I never heard anyone speak of a dais or an estrade. A reference to the first would have made me think of the table at a Dean Martin celebrity roast. A reference to the second would have baffled me:

Professor: “Come up to the estrade after class and we can talk about that question.”

Me: “?”

But some of my earliest teaching took place in a classe with an estrade. (I’m sticking to the French of Villette for fun.) The estrade — okay, platform — must have been at least a foot off the classroom floor, with an extra step between platform and floor. I often descended from my perch to walk around the front of the room at an altitude that felt more congenial.

*

A question came up in the comments: Geo-B wondered about a name for the front-of-the-room classroom fixture with sink and Bunsen burner. I asked a chemistry teacher. It’s called a demonstration table or demonstration bench. Thanks, Phyllis!

Here, from the American Chemical Society, is a description of a properly outfitted chemistry classroom.

“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