Giant telephone

[Life, January 30, 1950. Click for a larger telephone.]

Maybe an early version of the monolith?

See also: Giant scissors, giant pencil.

Telephone FTW?

“A recent study suggests that, at least when it comes to two people working together remotely, we might be better off going old-school, and scrapping the cameras”: James Surowiecki suggests that the world of work bring back the telephone.

Overheard

“Oh, it’s jazz. All they do is improvise.”

Related reading
All OCA “overheard” posts (Pinboard)

A mail chute in the movies

[From Nazi Agent (dir. Jules Dassin, 1942). Click for a larger view.]

This mail chute filled the screen. The florid handwriting, which belongs to a courtly stamp and rare-book dealer, fits.

This post is for my friend Diane, who has quite a (virtual) collection of mail chutes from real life. Diane’s attention to mail chutes got me looking at them too.

Doris Miller and democracy

“I hear a lot these days about how American democracy is doomed and the reactionaries will win. Maybe. But the beauty of our system is that it gives us people like Doris Miller”: from the December 7 installment of Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters from an American.

Pronouncing omicron

From The Wall Street Journal : “However You Pronounce ‘Omicron,’ You’re Probably Saying It Wrong.”

I go with this pronunciation: \ ˈä-mə-ˌkrän \, which is the way Dr. Anthony Fauci pronounces the word. Dr. Fauci, as you may already know, majored in classics. That doesn’t mean his pronunciation is the correct one. He may be making the word more easily intelligble for American ears.

A related post
How to pronounce omicron

[Yes, the COVID-19 variant is capitalized. But it’s the name of a Greek letter that we’re pronouncing.]

Chock full o’Nuts sighting

[Terry (Geraldine Brooks) and John (George Montgomery) and coffee. From Street of Sinners (dir. William Berke, 1957). Click for a larger view.]

That’s a can of Chock full o’Nuts, immediately recognizable, even in blurry black and white. Here’s a can in color.

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

The non-breaking hyphen

I saw something odd when previewing a recent post:

A modern rule might be formulated thus: when the -
ing (present) participle has the force of a noun, it preferably takes a possessive subject, especially in formal contexts.

It was time to look for a non-breaking hyphen. And one exists: ‑. Behold:

A modern rule might be formulated thus: when the ‑ing (present) participle has the force of a noun, it preferably takes a possessive subject, especially in formal contexts.

The detached hyphen seems to be a sometime thing, a matter of device or browser or font or some combination thereof — or perhaps it’s just the magic of Blogger. In the sentence from Garner’s Modern English Usage that I’ve quoted here, the hyphen sometimes detached itself and sometimes stayed put. Here, for the sake of the example, I’ve detached the hyphen by means of a line break.

A related post
Looking for a non-breaking thin space

Recently updated

Words of the year Now with allyship.

Heebie-jeebies

“The geek — he’s got the heebie-jeebies again”: a great line from Nightmare Alley (dir. Edmund Goulding, 1947), on TCM now.

A related post
“GEEK WANTED IMMEDIATELY”