“I’m not a big fan of Errol Flynn. But at least it’s not a swashbuckling movie.”
“It’s post-swashbuckle.”
“He’s too old to buckle or swash.”
Related reading
All OCA domestic comedy posts (Pinboard)
[“It”: The Big Boodle (dir. Richard Wilson, 1957). We didn’t see it through.]
Thursday, June 9, 2022
Domestic comedy
Wednesday, June 8, 2022
Barometers
Mr. Farrington has been humiliated at his office. He will never finish copying the contract by the end of the workday. His mind begins to wander to “the glare and rattle of the public-house.”
James Joyce, “Counterparts,” in Dubliners (1914).
That sentence later began a novel:
Charles Jackson, The Lost Weekend (1944).
Related reading
All OCA James Joyce posts (Pinboard)
Domestic comedy
“It’s true!”
“Everything Roz Chast says is true!”
Related reading
All OCA domestic comedy posts (Pinboard)
[Context: a Roz Chast drawing of a box of Crayolas. The built-in sharpener is labeled “Black Hole of Doom” and “Will Break Crayon.”]
Tuesday, June 7, 2022
Love and grammar
Bob Doran, boarding house resident, and Polly Mooney, daughter of Mrs. Mooney, the house’s proprietor, have sinned. Mr. Doran has confessed to the priest. Polly and her mother (a silent observer of her daughter’s doings) have talked things over, and Mrs. Mooney wants to speak to Mr. Doran, who wonders whether to marry or flee. Will his family look down on Polly?
James Joyce, “The Boarding House,” in Dubliners (1914).
Related reading
All OCA James Joyce posts (Pinboard)
[Mrs. Mooney’s silence is purposeful: “she thought of some mothers she knew who could not get their daughters off their hands.” That Mrs. Mooney is known to her boarders as The Madam (Joyce’s italics) tells us everything about her management of her daughter’s life.]
Trump on Trial
From the Brookings Institution, a free PDF: Trump on Trial: A Guide to the January 6 Hearings and the Question of Criminality.
The first hearing: this Thursday at 8:00 p.m. Eastern.
Monday, June 6, 2022
How to improve writing (no. 102)
From a New York Times obituary for the dance teacher Martha Myers:
Ms. Myers was diminutive — the 1998 newspaper article said she described herself as “5 feet 2 inches and shrinking” — but impactful.Diminutive seems to me an odd word to apply to a person, at least as a predicate adjective. Perhaps the writer thought short pejorative?
As for impactful, Garner’s Modern English Usage calls it
barbarous jargon dating from the mid-1960s. Unlike other adjectives ending in -ful, it cannot be idiomatically rendered in the phrase full of [+ quality], as in beautiful (= full of beauty), regretful (= full of regret), scornful (= full of scorn), and spiteful (= full of spite). If impact truly denotes a quality, it does so only in its newfangled uses as a verb <it impacts us all> and as an adjective <the mechanic’s tool known as an impact driver>.One need not find the point about -ful persuasive to cringe a bit at impactful.
Whatever its future may be, *impactful is, for now, a word to be scorned. Among its established replacements are influential and powerful.
Back to the Times. How about this sentence instead?
Ms. Myers was slight of stature — the 1998 newspaper article said she described herself as “5 feet 2 inches and shrinking” — but mighty.And to remove the interruption when quoting from the article cited earlier in the obituary:
Just “5 feet 2 inches and shrinking,” as she said in the 1998 newspaper article, Ms. Myers was slight of stature but mighty.Related reading
All OCA How to improve writing posts (Pinboard)
[This post is no. 102 in a series dedicated to improving stray bits of public prose.]
Our tube
From oldest to youngest: Charles Lane, Arthur Space, Whitman Mayo, and Matthew Broderick, all in the Lou Grant episode “Generations” (January 26, 1981). Familiar faces in new arrangements: one of the pleasures of television. See also these arrangements.
[Charles Lane’s face should be familiar to any I Love Lucy viewer. Arthur Space: Doc Weaver on Lassie. Whitman Mayo: Grady Wilson on Sanford and Son.]
Long Promised Road coming to PBS
Brian Wilson is coming to the PBS series American Masters: Long Promised Road (2021) airs on June 14.
As they used to say, “Check your local listings.” (What listings?)
Related reading
All OCA Brian Wilson posts (Pinboard)
Sunday, June 5, 2022
“Home of Piccalilli”
[Grant’s Pickle Works, 2533 Third Avenue, Bronx, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]
I love the motto, the list of products, and the partly horizontal, partly vertical telephone number.
The two buildings to the right still stand. The Pickle Works has given way to a gas station.
For Honeymooners fans: “When I finish with you, there’ll be piccalilli all over Bensonhurst!”
Related posts
More photographs from the NYC Municipal Archives
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