A guest lecture

I had a guest lecturer coming to talk to my class. When I walked into the room, the guest was already there, standing at the front of the room, ready to begin. I said I first wanted to take a minute or two to show my students how I had solved a problem with a sentence. I handed out strips of paper with the sentence, which was about Lorine Niedecker’s poetry, and had something to do with making clear the difference between “blue-black and green” and “blue, black, and green.”

I took a seat and looked for my copy of the sentence in the sheaf of papers I’d brought to class and found another strip of paper with a much longer sentence about political philosophy. And I realized that there was nothing in it about colors. I asked the student sitting next to me if I could borrow his strip of paper. I had just handed out copies, but he didn’t have one.

Then a student two desks away volunteered how much he liked Simon and Garfunkel. Yes, I said, Paul Simon’s songs really hold up, though I always thought that Simon and Garfunkel’s albums suffer from too much production.

Half an hour of class time had now gone by. Twenty minutes left.

Another student volunteered to let me borrow her strip of paper. It was, she explained, in her underwear. She proceeded to remove her bloomers from under her dress — yes, bloomers, bright pink, made of crepe — and handed them to me. I asked her if she could remove the piece of paper herself.

Related reading
All OCA teaching dreams (Pinboard)

[This is the twenty-third teaching-related dream I’ve had since retiring. In all but one, something has gone wrong.]

“Idiosyncratic excess”

Uh-oh:

This sentence represents an extreme instance of Anne Brontë’s idiosyncratic excess and defect in the use of commas. I have not deleted the formally intrusive comma after “Because,” because I have chosen to read it as an emotional notation indicating the staccato breathlessness of speech under high stress; neither have I inserted a comma between “a trifle more” and “I imagine,” which may therefore represent the outpouring of indignation Anne Brontë intended.

I think I’m going to stop reading the notes in my edition of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. ”Idiosyncratic excess” too often describes the editor’s commentary.

Gotham Book Mart

For many years the Gotham Book Mart (1920–2007) stood at 41 West 47th Street in Manhattan. But when the WPA and the New York City Department of Taxation were photographing all city properties (1939–1941), the Gotham made its home at 51 West 47th. That must be the Wise Men Fish Here sign hanging above the door. I’d love to be able to see what books (and prints?) were on display in the window.

[Gotham Book Mart, 51 West 47th Street, c. 1939—1941. Click for a larger view.]

Related posts
Andreas Brown (1933–2020) : Berger’s Deli : A Gotham bookmark, by Edward Gorey : A Gotham tumblr

[All the Gotham addresses: 128 W. 45th Street (1920–1923), 51 W. 47th (1923–1946), 41 W. 47th (1946–2004), 16 E. 46th (2004–2007). Sources: Bill Morgan, The Beat Generation in New York: A Walking Tour of Jack Kerouac’s City (1997) and a 2004 New York Times article.]

Merriam-Webster and Typeshift

“The standards for word-based games continue to evolve”: The Washington Post reports on a dictionary, a game, and words.

John McWhorter on Othello at Michigan

I find myself disagreeing with John McWhorter about lots of things. (For instance.) But I think his discussion of Othello at Michigan gets it right.

[But “Were me and my students missing something”? Block that pronoun: “my students and I.”]

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper is by “Lester Ruff,” or Stan Newman, the puzzle’s editor. It felt to me like a New Yorker Monday — not too rough (but also not as self-consciously hep). A kinder, gentler Stumper.

Some clue-and-answer pairs I especially liked:

1-D, four letters, “Partner in eye health.” I’ve known the answer from childhood, but with no relation to eye health.

10-D, seven letters, “Big name in big heads.” EGOTISM? No, that’s a word, not a name. It’s a good clue for an ugly, ugly name.

14-A, ten letters, “What may infuse olive oil.” MOREGARLIC? This idea is new to me.

13-D, five letters, “Apple, mostly.” What kind of Apple/apple?

17-A, ten letters, “Rather soft.” I liked seeing the answer, new to me in crosswords.

20-A, nine letters, “45 descendants.” Ugh — I thought of you-know-who. Fortunately, the answer has nothing to do with his spawn.

25-D, four letters, “They may get into a jam.” Yes, but it’s harmless fun.

26-D, ten letters, “Number associated with Yale.” I sometimes wonder what it might be like to be a Yale grad and see oneself — as ELI — in crosswords day after day. Would one preen? Swell with self-regard? The closest I’ve gotten to Yale: 1. watching Gilmore Girls, 2. eating pizza from Frank Pepe, though not at the same time.

34-A, three letters, “Olympic VIP.” Ha.

56-A, ten letters, “Crime story where the perpetrator is revealed early.” New to me, but I realize that it describes every episode of Colombo. Is this a well-known term?

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

National Dictionary Day

In case you hadn’t noticed: it’s National Dictionary Day. Here to celebrate are some pages from an unusual item available at archive.org, a salesperson’s 1937 demonstration model of Webster’s New International Dictionary, second edition, aka Webster’s Second or W2.

The comments at archive.org are cranky: “random pages,” “of little or no value.” What the commenters fail to understand is that this item isn’t the dictionary but a tool with which to sell the dictionary. Thus, promotional pages, front matter, color plates, sample pages of entries, an advertisement for dictionary stands, and endorsements. “Here for the seeker are many evenings of word orgies,” promises O. O. McIntyre, newspaper columnist.

Click on any image for a much larger view. And don’t miss the weigh-in.


Dictionaries are in the news today: Madeline Kripke’s dictionary collection will have a new home in Indiana University’s Lilly Library.

Related reading
All OCA dictionary posts (Pinboard)

Mongol sighting

[Elizabeth Wilson as Dr. Anna Willson, Cliff Robertson as Lee Tucker. From Man on a Swing (dir. Frank Perry, 1974). Click either image for a larger view.]

Elizabeth Wilson might be recognizable as “Mrs. Braddock” (no first name), Ben’s mother in The Graduate. A Mongol pencil is always recognizable as itself.

Related reading
All OCA Mongol pencil posts (Pinboard)

“”Think metric!”

[Peanuts, October 18, 1974.]

Peppermint Patty’s reaction to Franklin’s whisper: “AAUGHH!”

Wikipedia notes that “the International System of Units has been adopted as the official system of weights and measures by all nations in the world except for Myanmar, Liberia, and the United States.” Yesterday’s Peanuts truly is today’s Peanuts.

I’m not sure how the sequencing works, but there may be a Sunday “Think Metric” Peanuts coming in the near near future.

Related reading
All OCA Peanuts posts (Pinboard)

A notebook and a pencil

When Gary Paulsen was a teenager, a librarian gave him a library card, then a book a month, then a book a week, and then a Scripto notebook and a no. 2 pencil:

“She said, you should write down some of your thought pictures, which I called them, you know. I said, who — for who? And she said, me. None of this would have happened except for that.”

Gary Paulsen died earlier this week. NPR has an obituary: “Beloved children’s author and wilderness enthusiast Gary Paulsen has died at 82.” And here is the conversation I’ve quoted from.

I’d never heard of Paulsen before today. Now two copies of Hatchet are on the way to our house.

Thanks, Ben.