Shipping

[Click for a larger view.]

I like this at least semi-dowdy logo, which I noticed on a shipping container in the parking lot of our friendly neighborhood multinational retailer.

See also today’s Zippy.

A serious sign

Fresca noticed a sign outside a liquor store: “BIKES LEFT HERE WILL BE THROWN ONTO LAKE ST.” That store isn’t playing.

Meta

I plan to continue to use the word meta in its traditional (since 1988!) sense. I will not cede this word to Mark Zuckerberg.

[No, thanks.]

I presume the blue loop is meant to suggest infinity. I prefer to think of it as pair of handcuffs. Lemme out, Mark! Or maybe it’s head hitting itself against a mirror. Again, lemme out, &c. Elaine sees a Möbius strip. (Go back two sentences.)

I thought the following image was someone’s joke, but it’s credited to Facebook. Look! Mark is choosing an avatar. And I think of the Bhagavad-Gita: “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.”

[Poverty of imagination, with everything at its disposal. This is progress?]

I doubt that Mark Zuckerberg has read Steven Millhauser’s 1996 novel Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer, which might serve as a cautionary tale about the difficulty of replacing one world with another. Talk about handcuffs and mirrors.

[The Zuckerberg presentation is here. But I’m done thinking about the (so-called) metaverse.]

“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.