A John McWhorter page-ninety test

Spur of the moment: I thought to try the page-ninety test with John McWhorter’s Nine Nasty Words: English in The Gutter: Then, Now, and Forever (New York: Avery, 2021). Here’s what I found:

The metaphorical meaning closest to the root connotation of feces is that of the unwelcome, given the noxious nature of the substance. Hence the idea of haranguing someone as giving them shit. When I was in college, one of the managers in the dining hall I worked in was a brilliantined fellow with a pencil mustache (a look that was already obsolete by the 1980s) and a keening, petulant voice, given to complaining, “Everybody shits on me!” But the man is relevant to us in that the expression he was so fond of embodied this metaphorical usage of shit as a burden and insult.

It is not difficult to improve this paragraph:

The primary metaphorical meaning of shit is that of what’s noxious or unwelcome. Hence the idea of haranguing someone as “giving them shit.” As an undergraduate I worked in a university dining hall with a manager who was given to complaining, “Everybody shits on me!” His pet expression embodied this metaphorical meaning.

Granted, this kind of revision might make a much shorter book. But I think I’ve made a better paragraph.

~ “Root connotation”: I have no idea what a “root connotation” is. You won’t find an explanation elsewhere in the book, as this passage marks its only appearance. As for the root of feces, it’s the Latin faeces, “dregs,” which McWhorter does mention earlier. But he characterizes the Latin word as “euphemistic,” which doesn’t jibe with an emphasis on noxiousness.

~ I removed the awkward phrase that ends the first sentence.

~ It may be that I’ve drained some color from this paragraph. But if your point is to illustrate the use of shit as a metaphor, the description of a dining-hall manager is beside it. And this description of a brilliantined, mustached man with a keening, petulant voice smacks too much of some sort of ethnic and/or sexual stereotype.

~ “But the man is relevant to us”: I hate condescension.

~ I’ve changed the final sentence to echo “metaphorical meaning.” And I’ve removed “burden and insult” to let the idea of what’s noxious or unwelcome carry the meaning here. Giving someone a homework assignment might burden them, but it’s not necessarily giving them shit.

And now it occurs to me that I’ve written another “How to improve writing” post. This one is no. 95.

Related reading
All OCA “How to improve writing” posts (Pinboard) : John McWhorter’s me

[Benjamin Dreyer and Steven Pinker have both blurbed this book. And Bill Maher has praised it. Yikes, yikes, and yikes again.]

An Aldi find

A seasonal item at Aldi: Brussels sprouts with balsamic-glazed bacon. Though I think it should be balsamic-glazed Brussels sprouts with bacon. But either way, it’s a dark, delicious side dish. It’d be swell with Thanksgiving dinner.

Did you know that balsamic-glazed Brussels sprouts with bacon are a thing? I didn’t. There are many recipes available online.

Recently updated

Chock full o’Nuts in Brooklyn Now with more Chock full o’Nuts.

Eddie’s Sweet Shop

From The New York Times, “An Ice-Cream Parlor Where Time Stands Still”:

Often described as New York’s longest surviving ice cream parlor, Eddie’s is a neighborhood institution beloved for both its frozen confections and the fact that it has remained pretty much unchanged since Giuseppe Citrano, an immigrant from Southern Italy, bought it in 1968.

[+1 for the hyphen in ice-cream parlor. But -1 for the absence of a hyphen in the other ice cream parlor.]

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (1934–2021)

The psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi had died at the age of eighty-seven. Nothing in The New York Times yet, but Boing Boing has an obituary.

I heartily recommend Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (1990). Here are a couple of OCA posts — 1, 2 — with excerpts.

Sardines on a bus

In The New York Times Metropolitan Diary, sardines on a bus.

Related reading
All OCA sardine posts (Pinboard)

[Even when there’s big news, there is room enough for sardines.]

Big news

From Rolling Stone:

As the House investigation into the Jan. 6 attack heats up, some of the planners of the pro-Trump rallies that took place in Washington, D.C., have begun communicating with congressional investigators and sharing new information about what happened when the former president’s supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol. Two of these people have spoken to Rolling Stone extensively in recent weeks and detailed explosive allegations that multiple members of Congress were intimately involved in planning both Trump’s efforts to overturn his election loss and the Jan. 6 events that turned violent.

One remarkable detail: Arizona congressman Paul Gosar promised presidential pardons for all:

“Our impression was that it was a done deal,” the organizer says, “that he’d spoken to the president about it in the Oval . . . in a meeting about pardons and that our names came up. They were working on submitting the paperwork and getting members of the House Freedom Caucus to sign on as a show of support.”

That’s a novel premise: a “rally” whose participants are assured of pardons. Pardons for what?

I must point out that though she isn’t mentioned as a member of Congress with whom the planners met, Illinois’s own Mary (“Hitler was right on one thing”) Miller is a member of the House Freedom Caucus.

John McWhorter’s me

I flagged this sentence when I linked to John McWhorter’s commentary on a professor’s showing of an adaptation of Othello :

Were me and my students missing something about which our modern era is more enlightened?

And now McWhorter has written a column defending his choice of me. Many readers, he says, insisted that the sentence should read “my students and I.” (Well, yes.) But McWhorter assures us,

I’m aware of this “rule.” However, my being a linguist is much of why I often flout it. The idea that pronouns must be in what is termed their subject form whenever they are used as subjects seems so obvious, and yet it is just something some people made up not too long ago. It isn’t how English works from a scientific perspective.

The examples he uses to cast doubt on this “rule”: 1. we don’t say “I and you know,” and 2. if someone asks who did it, we answer “Me,” not “I.” Yes, and yes. But that’s because you and I and this use of me are idiomatic, just as aren’t, not amn’t, is the standard contraction for am I not. That’s just the way the language goes, and there’s nothing “scientific” about it.

McWhorter goes on to assert that

before or after a conjunction, one may use either I or me : “You and me know”; “Me and you know.” This is true of subject versus object forms of he, she, we and they, as well: “You and him know”; “Her and me know.”

He also gives the okay to between you and I :

Shakespeare used “between you and I,” for example, in The Merchant of Venice. English speakers simply sense I as OK when it sits a certain distance from the preposition, such as after a pronoun plus an and.

There’s what an astute editor (whose blog has disappeared) called the “Jane Austen” fallacy — if Jane Austen, &c. used it, it must be okay. As that editor wrote, “past usage does not justify modern practice.”

And now I’m thinking of a cringe-worthy line from the Brian Wilson song “The Night Was So Young”: “Love was made for her and I.” I’m not sure what John McWhorter would say about those pronouns.

My conclusion: if readers wonder about a sentence, if the sentence looks blatantly wrong, if the sentence displaces attention to your argument, if you feel obliged to take 1,210 words to justify that sentence, you’re doing it wrong. A wiser strategy: practice what Garner’s Modern English Usage calls preventive grammar. Faced, for instance, with the choice between “Neither you nor I am a plumber” and “Neither you nor I are a plumber,”

The best recourse is a rewording. Why perpetrate a sentence that’s awkward but arguably defensible? A sentence that’s only defensible will raise doubts in the reasonable reader’s mind.

Thus: “You’re not a plumber, and neither am I.”

I told Elaine about the plumber sentences, and both her and me came up with Bryan Garner’s recommended rewording.

But of course John McWhorter wasn’t even faced with an awkward choice between two ugly sentences. “Were my students and I missing out” is good English. “Were me and my students missing out” isn’t. Even if one insists that we look at language “from a scientific perspective,” it’s still a good idea not to create distraction.

And speaking of distraction, look again at these sentences:

I’m aware of this “rule.” However, my being a linguist is much of why I often flout it.

So much better:

I’m aware of this “rule,” but as a linguist, I often choose to flout it.

But not, I bet, in official correspondence at Columbia U.

Chock full o’Nuts in Brooklyn

[519 Fulton Street, Brooklyn, c. 1939–1941. Click for a larger view of the many details, including the plucky luncheonette next door.]

The 1940 Brooklyn telephone directory lists two Chock full o’Nuts locations. This is the one for which there’s a tax photograph.

The strange part: when I was a kid and our family went shopping on weekends, we’d get lunch from Chock full o’Nuts. Abraham & Straus, a department store of the day, stood at 422 Fulton Street. We may have been getting lunch from this Chock. As I remember it, we’d eat in the car. It was no doubt impossible to find four open stools in a row on a Saturday.

Abraham & Straus was subsumed by Macy’s in 1995. Everything changes.

Thanks to Joe DiBiase for catching my mistake with the address and putting the location of this Chock full o’Nuts — 519 Fulton, not 159 — back on the map.

*

An informed reader informs me that in the 1970s there were two Chock full o’Nuts outlets on Fulton Street, at 451 and 538. Here from the blog Then and Now is a post with a photograph of 451 (now a pawnshop). Note also in the post the addresses of present-day Chock Cafés in Brooklyn: 1510 Avenue J and 1611 Avenue M. It appears that only the Avenue M outlet is still going.

Thanks, Brian.

Related reading
All OCA Chock full o’Nuts posts (Pinboard)

Today’s Saturday Stumper

[A caution: there’s one very slight spoiler at the end of this post.]

I think it’s safe to say that the Newsday Saturday Stumper is back. Every Newsday Saturday crossword since August 7 has been a Stumper. To quote Peppa Pig and friends, “Hooray!” Today’s puzzle, by Greg Johnson, is chockablock with clever clues. Remember when people used to say “chockablock”? Me neither. But someone must have. It is, after all, a word.

Some clue-and-answer pairs I especially liked:

1-D, nine letters, “French zipper (no, not a minor boast).” I had no idea this word exists.

3-D, nine letters, “They tell only half the story.” A wonderful clue.

14-D, five letters, “Inedible chips, frequently.” Aha.

26-A, four letters, “Stand-in for absentees.” The clue adds value to a common answer.

32-A, three letters, “Construction site carrier.” I am a tileman’s son, so I better know this, even if it’s not used in tile work.

33-D, nine letters, “Uncommon bank deposit.” A recent puzzle or two readied me for this clue.

37-D, eight letters, “Six-decade game show panelist in A Night at the Opera.” This clue might be better phrased like so: “Six-decade game show panelist who appeared in A Night at the Opera.” There was no six-decade game show panelist in the movie. But the person in question did speak at Elaine’s graduation from Juilliard. Our household is a 37-D-friendly zone.

35-A, seven letters, “Above-center piano key.” I am a piano player of sorts, but I was not familiar with this term.

38-A, seven letters, “Serving in a paper cup.” A much nicer answer than I anticipated. I was thinking of the dispensation of meds in institutional settings.

55-A, four letters, “Carbs around fillings.” Clever.

60-A, eight letters, “Log-shaped desserts.” What? I’m sure they’re chockablock with goodness.

One clue I would take issue with: 54-A, five letters, “Big name on cake boxes.” Well, no. An alternative (and maybe arcane) clue: “Fatha of ‘Rosetta.’”

No real spoilers; the answers are in the comments.