Pronouncing omicron again

“What is this penchant for using Greek to designate disasters?” In The New Yorker, Mary Norris looks at omicron and other letters.

I noticed a setence that needs improvement:

Though there is no universal agreement about it, many American classicists pronounce omicron with a short “o,” as in “om,” and omega with a long “o,” like an Irish surname: O’Mega.

As in “om”? I think that “om” here is too easily misread as the word om, pronounced with a long o : \ ˈōm \. Clearer:

Though there is no universal agreement about it, many American classicists pronounce omicron with a short o, as in Tom, and omega with a long o, like an Irish surname: O’Mega.

Tom goes nicely with O’Mega too.

A related post
How to pronounce omicron

[Why I added italics: “When a word or term is not used functionally but is referred to as the word or term itself, it is either italicized or enclosed in quotation marks": The Chicago Manual of Style (7.63). I replaced the quotation marks with italics for consistency. The New Yorker of course doesn’t use italics. The important change here is Tom for om.]

“Book-wrapt”

In its real-estate section, The New York Times hypes the idea of being “book-wrapt” in your “bookroom.” “Well-groomed libraries in brownstones,” we are told, “help spark bidding wars.”

Well-groomed indeed: five of the ten photographs accompanying the article show pretty meager shelves. How many books are needed “to make a place feel like home”? One thousand, the article’s expert says, and then he cuts that number in half, and the Times writer adds that “even that number is negotiable.”

Reading this article finally prompted me to make a rough count (with Elaine’s help) of what’s in our “bookroom,” which means our house, minus the bathrooms and the laundry room: about 3,200 books.

The Watts Towers at 100

“A hundred years ago, in what was then the semi-rural farming community of Watts, a 40ish-year-old Italian immigrant laborer named Sabato Rodia bought a little home on a dead-end block by the railroad tracks and started collecting junk”: The Watts Towers at 100 (Los Angeles Times).

The towers have been closed for for restoration since 2017. I feel fortunate to have seen them up close in 2014.

Related posts
Watts Towers : Watts tiles : Watts House Project

Noir filter

[Click for a larger view.]

Elaine and I went on a walk after sunset last night. When I saw these street-light-lit student apartments and the strong shadows, I thought film noir? and took a picture. When I browsed the phone’s filters to turn the picture black and white, I found that the filter I wanted is called Noir. But I think it could just as plausibly be called Horror.

And now I am seeing this image as a still from a cheap, grainy, imaginary horror movie: Stairway to Terror. God knows what’s at the top of those stairs. I didn’t want to get any closer.

Zippy’s thesaurus

In today’s Zippy, a thesaurus. See also April 9, 1921. See also this OCA post, Beware of the saurus.

[It matters not that ‑saurus and thesaurus are unrelated.]

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper, by Matthew Sewell, is the most difficult Stumper in memory, or at least in my memory. Forty-five minutes last night, another fifty this morning.

This post is a placeholder. There is work to be done, to be done, to get set for the rest of the day. I’ll post some choice clues with comments later today.

*

And here they are:

5-D, ten letters, “Look before you leap.” Nifty.

5-A, eight letters, “What often accompanies a barbershop soloist.” I was thinking of background harmonies.

18-A, three letters, “Background figures.” A killer clue.

24-A, five letters, “Put one’s thumbs down, say.” I thought of a butcher and a scale.

21-D, three letters, “Bridesmaid duo.” Grr.

28-D, ten letters, “One on a panel.” I had to get my head out of academia, and I did.

33-D, five letters, “They can be used to find roots.” I was thinking about DNA tests.

36-D, three letters, “Document placeholder.” I know the newspaper abbreviation TK (“to come”), but this one is new to me.

37-D, eight letters, “Visually striking marine cavern.” I learned something that I hope never to put into use.

40-A, six letters, “Choice words.” My first thought was ABCORD, but A, B, C, and D aren’t really words.

34-A, fifteen letters, “What a trimmer might maintain.” Took me longer than any other clue, perhaps because I take exception to what’s being maintained here, or what it might be called.

43-D, six letters, “Uncle’s relative.” Nice misdirection.

57-A, fourteen letters, “Commencement accelerators.” STARTINGPISTOLS doesn’t fit.

59-D, three letters, “College class suffix.” A bit ridic. My first guess was IOI, or one-oh-one, which would also be ridic.

60-A, eight letters, “Abe Lincoln, as a teen.” My start in the puzzle, in the bottom row.

61-A, five letters, “Boarding announcement.” Clever.

My favorite clue in this puzzle: 39-D, eight letters, “Reasons to ask, ‘What was I thinking?’”

What am I thinking? That this might be the best Saturday Stumper ever. A Christmas gift!

No spoilers: the answers are in the comments.

Christmas 1821 in 1921 in 2021

In 1921, a New York Times writer looked at old newspapers to write about Christmas a century before.

[F.A. Collins, “Christmas a Century Ago: Holiday Gifts Which Pleased New Yorkers in 1821 — Vogue of ‘Vernacular Cards.’” The New York Times, December 25, 1921.]

Merry Christmas to all who celebrate it.

Sondheim with a Blackwing

[From Original Cast Album: “Company” (dir. D.A. Pennebaker, 1970). Click either image for a larger view.]

There’s Stephen Sondheim with an Eberhard Faber Blackwing pencil, his pencil of choice. Sondheim’s affection for the Eberhard Faber Blackwing — and for thirty-two-line yellow legal pads — is well known.

Note to a pencil company known, infamously, for its shameless and unacknowledged appropriation of other people’s work: Orange Crate Art is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. If you want images for commercial purposes, get a Criterion Channel subscription and get them yourself. And then see if the Pennebaker and Sondheim estates take kindly to what you’ve done.

Again, Sondheim is using an Eberhard Faber Blackwing, not a twenty-first-century replica.

I post these images in memory of my friend Sean Malone, the most dedicated and knowledgable Blackwing user ever known (and whose work was shamelessly appropriated by a certain pencil company). Sean’s website Blackwing Pages has many references to Sondheim. I would like to have been able to send these images Sean’s way. Perhaps I have.

Related reading
All OCA Blackwing posts and Sondheim posts (Pinboard) : Sondheim’s writing habits

Domestic comedy

[Watching the news.]

“She has the same glasses. But they look better on me.”

[Laughter.]

Related reading
All OCA domestic comedy posts (Pinboard)

[It’s true: they do.]

Streets

The New York Times, earlier today, in an obituary for Franklin A. Thomas, former president of the Ford Foundation, and the first Black person to head a major American philanthropy: “He rose from working-class Brooklyn,” &c.

The PBS NewsHour, tonight, in a seconds-long obituary: “He rose from the streets of working-class Brooklyn,” &c.

Ah, yes, “the streets.” A cheap — not to mention insulting — cliché. Not even the sidewalks?

The Times obituary notes that Thomas was born in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, and “grew up in a tight-knit family of immigrants from Barbados.”