“More traditional”?

I started turning pages in the October 25 New Yorker and found a listing for a Brooklyn jazz festival: Kurt Elling, Cecile McLoren Savant, and others. And then: “the Sun Ra Arkestra — led by nonagenarian saxophonist Marshall Allen — represent more traditional fare.”

What’s up with “more traditional”? More traditional than a singer singing a great American standard? I wondered whether the writer assumed, given Marshall Allen’s age, that the Arkestra is some old-timey outfit. But no, the writer knows jazz. So perhaps “more traditional” is a wink of sorts, given that the Arkestra (which has outlived Ra) has been going since the early 1950s.

I was hoping to see the Arkestra in April 2020: they were scheduled to play a free concert at a theater in east-central Illinois. But everything changed.

“The key to this disorder”

James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room (1956).

Related reading
All OCA Baldwin posts (Pinboard)

PLEASE

[A genuine sign.]

I photographed this sign in a medical building some time ago. Tororo’s photograph of a mirror under repair made me think of this photograph, look for it, and post it.

This sign must have been meant as a warning to employees with deconstructive tendencies. Hands off the signifier and the signified! Notice the tape at the top: this sign about a sign must have been a placeholder for an even more portentous signifier.

Related reading
All OCA signage posts (Pinboard)

Chicago pronouns

“This quiz is looking for answers that reflect formally correct usage, which won’t necessarily coincide with common usage.” It’s a Chicago Manual of Style quiz: “Who, Me?” It’s about subject and object pronouns.

Gotta wonder if this quiz was prompted by John McWhorter’s recent defense of me as a subject pronoun. Him and me disagree about that.

A related post
John McWhorter’s me

Stefan Zweig’s diaries

For the first time in English, Stefan Zweig’s diaries, 1931–1940. Here’s a review.

Related reading
All OCA Stefan Zweig posts (Pinboard)

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.