“Music from Nancy”

[“Music from Nancy,” by Steve Sweet, Steve Cunningham and Jesse Poimboeuf.]

Thanks, John.

Related reading
All OCA Nancy posts (Pinboard)

Separated at birth

  [Chico Marx and Robert Walden. Click either image for a larger view.]

We were watching Lou Grant, and Elaine saw the resemblance.

Also separated at birth
Claude Akins and Simon Oakland : Ernest Angley and Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán : Nicholson Baker and Lawrence Ferlinghetti : William Barr and Edward Chapman : Bérénice Bejo and Paula Beer : Ted Berrigan and C. Everett Koop : David Bowie and Karl Held : Victor Buono and Dan Seymour : Ernie Bushmiller and Red Rodney : John Davis Chandler and Steve Buscemi : Ray Collins and Mississippi John Hurt : Broderick Crawford and Vladimir Nabokov : Ted Cruz and Joe McCarthy : Benedict Cumberbatch and Michael Gough : Henry Daniell and Anthony Wiener : Jacques Derrida, Peter Falk, and William Hopper : Adam Driver and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska : Bonita Granville and Cyndi Lauper : Charles Grassley and Abraham Jebediah Simpson II : Elaine Hansen (of Davey and Goliath) and Blanche Lincoln : Barbara Hale and Vivien Leigh : Pat Harrington Jr. and Marcel Herrand : Harriet Sansom Harris and Phoebe Nicholls : Steven Isserlis and Pat Metheny : Colonel Wilhelm Klink and Rudy Giuliani : Ton Koopman and Oliver Sacks : Steve Lacy and Myron McCormick : Don Lake and Andrew Tombes : Markku Luolajan-Mikkola and John Malkovich : William H. Macy and Michael A. Monahan : Fredric March and Tobey Maguire : Elisabeth Moss and Alexis Smith : Jean Renoir and Steve Wozniak : Molly Ringwald and Victoria Zinny

“Striking similarities” between commencement speeches

At Duke University, a commencement speech that bears “striking similarities” to one delivered at Harvard University eight years ago.

One way to ensure that your commencement speech will not bear striking similarities to someone else’s commencement speech: don’t carefully “reword” (as they say) passages from that other speech.

The awkward question to ask: How likely is it that this commencement speech marks the first time the speechmaker has taken someone else’s words and ideas, made slight alterations, and presented the result as her own work?

*

May 13: Here’s a side-by-side video comparison.

Related reading
All OCA plagiarism posts (Pinboard)

“Coming back as a cat”

William Russ, sixty-one, gravedigger:

Ronald Blythe, Akenfield: Portrait of an English Village (1969).

Also from Akenfield
Davie’s hand : Rubbish : “Just ‘music’” : “Caught in the old ways” : “The blue rode well in the corn” : “I began in a world without time”

A pencil truck

In Somerville, Massachusetts, a giant (non-working) pencil atop a truck.

Another vote from Mary Miller

My (nominal) representative in Congress, Mary Miller (R, IL-15), was one of fifty-seven House Republicans to vote yesterday against additional emergency appropriations for Ukraine. There’s something about Mary.

Related reading
All OCA Mary Miller posts (Pinboard)

Heather Cox Richardson’s latest

“Socialism — it starts with democracy”: so says a Republican candidate for governor of Michigan. Today’s installment of Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters from an American is a must-read.

Lou’s who

The Tribune ran an article about an NCAA investigation into the “Los Angeles University” football program. Readers got angry. And now Lou (Ed Asner) has a security guard, Frank (Mike Henry), outside his house. From the Lou Grant episode “Sports” (January 10, 1978):

Frank: “I’m here to protect you.”

Lou: “Against who?”

Frank: “Cranks, weirdos. Say, isn’t that ‘against whom’? I mean, I know you’re an editor.”

Lou (resignedly): “Against whom.”

Frank: “I’ve been taking Business English at night.”

Lou: “You’re doing great, Frank. Come on, I’ll buy you a cup of coffee.”

Related whoms
Fritzi Ritz : Hallmark : Mutts : Peanuts : Shirley Temple : Some Came Running

Mystery actor

[Click for a larger view.]

I think it’s a tough one — tough as in I have no idea. How about you?

Leave your best guess in the comments. I’ll add hints if they’re needed.

Thanks, Brian.

*

Here’s a hint: this actor is best known for a role in a television series. And known, really, only for that role, beginning in the 1950s and extending into the 1960s.

*

The answer is now (sort of) in the comments.

More mystery actors
? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ?

Word Matters on Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language”

I like what George Orwell says about language. I think of him as an ally, not an enemy. Thus the recent discussion of the 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language” on the Merriam-Webster podcast Word Matters (transcript here) disappoints me. All three M-W editors — Emily Brewster, Ammon Shea, Peter Sokolowski — weigh in against the essay, with Shea leading the way. It’s “a bad piece of writing,” he says, the work of a writer who doesn’t understand “how language works” and has “no business” writing about it. Sokolowski pitches in: “All [Orwell] really is doing is listing his peeves.” Brewster, who begins by saying that she can defend at least some elements in the essay, ends up going along with her fellow editors.

The spirit of Geoffrey Pullum hovers over the discussion, which is to say that the M-W editors, like Pullum, take a celebrated work about writing and avow that it’s worthless. It’s no coincidence that The Elements of Style, Pullum’s favorite target, should make its way into the discussion, with Shea calling it “a horrible dated document that should be burned in a trash heap,” and Sokolowski approvingly offering a near-quotation from Pullum: “a toxic little compendium of nonsense.”

But as with Pullum’s examination of The Elements of Style, this examination of “Politics and the English Language” distorts what Orwell says. Contra Shea, Orwell doesn’t say that one can never use long words. Contra Shea, Orwell doesn’t say that one can never use the passive voice, only that one shouldn’t use it when one can use the active voice.¹ It may be true that Orwell uses the passive voice in a fifth of the sentences in this essay, a point that Shea likely gleaned from page 720 of The Merriam-Webster Dictionary of English Usage, but page 720 also points out that Orwell’s uses of the passive are wholly appropriate. And contra Shea, Orwell doesn’t contradict himself by using metaphors and similes, because Orwell doesn’t prohibit the use of metaphors and similes. (How could he?) He cautions only against using those that are already familiar from print.² Orwell’s own comparisons by contrast are original and vivid: “outcrops of simplicity will occur here and there in the worst-written page”; “an accumulation of stale phrases chokes him like tea leaves blocking a sink”; “one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.”

When the M-W editors are not distorting, they’re dismissing, asserting with confidence that Orwell’s “rules” (that’s Orwell’s word) won’t help anyone become a better writer. Here are the rules, which Orwell says will cover “most cases”:

Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.

Never use a long word where a short one will do.

If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.

Never use the passive where you can use the active.

Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.

Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

That’s the kind of advice that teachers of writing have long given to students to counter cliché, clutter, and pomposity. The M-W editors’ insistence that there are no “steps” one can follow to become a better writer is unpersuasive: while there are no steps that one can follow to a finish line, there are things that a writer can do, again and again, to improve a piece of writing sentence by sentence.³ And there are overarching questions that Orwell suggests a scrupulous writer bear in mind:

A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: What am I trying to say? What words will express it? What image or idiom will make it clearer? Is this image fresh enough to have an effect? And he will probably ask himself two more: Could I put it more shortly? Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly?⁴

The M-W editors’ distortions and dismissals dismay me, but I find greater fault with their failure to address Orwell’s consideration of political language. Orwell indeed sees an English in decline, but he’s not carping about, as Sokolowski puts it, “kids today”: Orwell is writing about the debasement of language in high places. And unlike a typical declinist, he thinks that each of us can do our bit to reverse decline by getting rid of bad language habits and thinking more clearly. It’s astonishing to me that the M-W editors make no space for a consideration of, say, the insidious euphemism of enhanced interrogation techniques or special military operation, or the genteel dishonesty of alternative facts. Nor do the editors discuss what seems (to me) the great weakness of Orwell’s argument: its failure to acknowledge that plain language, too, can serve toxic political ends. Lock her up is clearly barbarous.

Scrupulous or even cursory reading of “Politics and the English Language” reveals, again and again, that the Merriam-Webster editors’ criticisms of the essay have no basis in the essay. Orwell deserves better than he got in this podcast.

Related reading
All OCA Orwell posts (Pinboard) : Couric and Palin and Orwell (One of the most widely read posts on my blog)

¹ I take Orwell’s meaning to be that one should use the passive voice when the active voice is inappropriate: “I was born in Brooklyn,” not “My mother gave birth to me in Brooklyn.” Similarly, one should not use a long word when a short one will do. When a long one is appropriate, a short one won’t do. Orwell’s advice to cut words that can be cut should be read as a suggestion to write, say, now instead of at this particular moment in time, not as a suggestion to sacrifice detail.

² I’m reminded of Pullum’s extraordinary claim that The Elements of Style prohibits the use of adjectives and adverbs.

³ Richard Lanham’s Paramedic Method (Revising Prose (2007), and outlined here) is one example. The mental or written notes that writers make about things to watch for in their work — e.g., “Avoid ‘this’ alone”; “Check on ‘if’ and ‘whether’ — are others.

⁴ Merriam-Webster’s definitions of scrupulous: “having moral integrity,” “acting in strict regard for what is considered right or proper,” “punctiliously exact,” “painstaking.” I think of care in writing as a moral imperative, even if I still make typos.

[This post is for my friend Stefan Hagemann.]