The ODAAE

Underway, the Oxford Dictionary of African American English. From Henry Louis Gates Jr., the editor-in-chief:

Every speaker of American English borrows heavily from words invented by African Americans, whether they know it or not. Words with African origins such as ‘goober,’ ‘gumbo’ and ‘okra’ survived the Middle Passage along with our African ancestors. And words that we take for granted today, such as ‘cool’ and ‘crib,’ ‘hokum’ and ‘diss,’ ‘hip’ and ‘hep,’ ‘bad,’ meaning ‘good,’ and ‘dig,’ meaning ‘to understand’ — these are just a tiny fraction of the words that have come into American English from African American speakers, neologisms that emerged out of the Black Experience in this country, over the last few hundred years.

To appear in 2025.

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All OCA dictionary posts (Pinboard)

An EXchange name sighting

[From Black Angel (dir. Roy William Neill, 1946). Click for a larger view.]

I can’t remember the last time I saw a matchbook in the wild (next to the cash register, say, on a counter in a candy store). But I always remember when I see a matchbook filling the screen.

The movie is set in Los Angeles, and CRestview was indeed a Los Angeles telephone exchange.

More telephone EXchange names on screen
Act of Violence : The Amazing Dr. Clitterhouse : Armored Car Robbery : Baby Face : Black Widow : Blast of Silence : The Blue Dahlia : Blue Gardenia : Boardwalk Empire : Born Yesterday : The Brasher Doubloon : The Brothers Rico : The Case Against Brooklyn : Chinatown : Craig’s Wife : Danger Zone : The Dark Corner : Dark Passage : Deception : Deux hommes dans Manhattan : Dick Tracy’s Deception : Down Three Dark Streets : Dream House : East Side, West Side : Escape in the Fog : Fallen Angel : Framed : Hollywood Story : Kiss of Death : The Little Giant : Loophole : The Man Who Cheated Himself : Modern Marvels : Murder by Contract : Murder, My Sweet : My Week with Marilyn : Naked City (1) : Naked City (2) : Naked City (3) : Naked City (4) : Naked City (5) : Naked City (6) : Naked City (7) : Naked City (8) : Naked City (9) : Nightfall : Nightmare Alley : Nocturne : Old Acquaintance : Out of the Past : Perry Mason : Pitfall : The Public Enemy : Railroaded! : Red Light : Side Street : The Slender Thread : Slightly Scarlet : Stage Fright : Sweet Smell of Success (1) : Sweet Smell of Success (2) : Tension : Till the End of Time : This Gun for Hire : The Unfaithful : Vice Squad : Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?

Domestic comedy

“That house was already mid-century modern; then they renovated it to make it look even more mid-century modern. I guess now it’s mid-century postmodern.”

Related reading
All OCA domestic comedy posts (Pinboard)

Missing posts

For some reason, two Bloomsday posts today never made it to my RSS, The Old Reader. I don’t know about other services. So just in case, here they are: “Fellows of the right kidney” and How to enjoy Ulysses.

“A clear and present danger”

Retired federal judge J. Michael Luttig, at today’s hearing of the January 6 committee:

“I have written . . . that today, almost two years after that fateful day in January 2021, that still, Donald Trump and his allies and supporters are a clear and present danger to American democracy. That’s not because of what happened on January 6. It’s because to this very day the former president, his allies, and supporters pledge that in the presidential election of 2024, if the former president or his anointed successor as the Republican Party presidential candidate were to lose that election, that they would attempt to overturn that 2024 election in the same way that they attempted to overturn the 2020 election, but succeed in 2024 where they failed in 2020.”

These comments look back to an opinion piece that Luttig wrote earlier this year: “The Conservative Case for Avoiding a Repeat of January 6” (The New York Times ).

The pardon list

“I’ve decided that I should be on the pardon list, if that is still in the works”: John Eastman, in an e-mail to Rudy Giuliani.

He didn’t make it.

Clarence to Ginni to John?

Yet another revelation that everything was/is even worse than it had appeared. From The New York Times:

A lawyer advising [John Eastman] President Donald J. Trump claimed in an email after Election Day 2020 to have insight into a “heated fight” among the Supreme Court justices over whether to hear arguments about the president’s efforts to overturn his defeat at the polls, two people briefed on the email said. . . .

Mr. Eastman’s email, if taken at face value, raised the question of how he would have known about internal tension among the justices about dealing with election cases. Mr. Eastman had been a clerk for Justice Clarence Thomas.

And as the Times notes, Eastman and Virginia Thomas had been exchanging e-mails.

Notice too the threat of calculated chaos that supported the scheme to challenge election results in the Supreme Court: “Be there, will be wild!” Trump tweeted on December 19, 2020. And then a pro-Trump lawyer to Eastman, circa December 24: “odds of action before Jan. 6 will become more favorable if the justices start to fear that there will be ‘wild’ chaos on Jan. 6 unless they rule by then, either way.”

[Post title: after “Tinker to Evans to Chance.”]

How to enjoy Ulysses

From Random House, 1934, an advertisement: “How to enjoy James Joyce’s great novel Ulysses” (Harry Ransom Center, UT Austin).

Related reading
All OCA Joyce posts (Pinboard)

[The Ransom Center files this advertisement under “Indecent Behavior — Sexuality, Gender, and Transgression.”]

Bloomsday 2022

Stephen Dedalus closes his eyes as he walks with his father Simon:

James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916).

Thursday, June 16, 1904. The day begins:

James Joyce, Ulysses (1922).

Bloom is indeed a fellow of the right kidney. The left too. But Simon Dedalus could never have imagined his son in the company of Mr. Bloom.

I have to grant that the kidney bit is almost certainly no more than coincidence. But if Hugh Kenner can make meaning of his car’s odometer reading on Bloomsday, I’m entitled to this kidney connection.

Related reading
All OCA Bloomsday posts

[Bloomsday : “the 16th of June 1904. Also: the 16th of June of any year, on which celebrations take place, esp. in Ireland, to mark the anniversary of the events in Joyce’s Ulysses” (Oxford English Dictionary ). Stephen’s closing his eyes as he walks already prefigures the Proteus episode of Ulysses.]

Vanishing pencils

From the Lou Grant episode “Hunger” (March 1, 1982). Animal (Daryl Anderson) talks with Lou (Ed Asner) and Art (Jack Bannon):

Animal: “Hey, we have another memo from the eighth floor.”

Lou: “Hot dog.”

Animal: “How’s this for an arresting opening line: ‘Where have all the pencils gone?’”

Lou: “Hey, that’s kind of lyrical.”

Art reads: “Pencils are vanishing at the rate of one hundred per day at the Tribune. Are people taking them home, tossing them in the trash, or eating them for lunch? They certainly aren’t wearing them out at work. Please conserve. The Tribune management.”

Lou: “Isn’t Mrs. Pynchon wasting a lot of energy on this conservation campaign?”

Art: “Hey, pencils disappear. That’s their style. They like to vanish.”

And:

Animal: “I’m gonna buy my own pencils. You can get seconds from the pencil company. A whole cigar box full’ll cost you seven bucks. I got some one time. The writing said ‘Knowledge Is Power.’ ‘Knowledge’ was spelled wrong.”

Lou: “Get me some, okay?”

Animal: “Sure. Hey, who needs the Trib’s pencils?”

[He picks up a pencil, snaps it, and tosses the halves.]

Art: “Atta boy. Gesture of defiance with my property.”

Wasted pencils: a light variation on the theme of wasted food running through the episode.

Other Lou Grant posts
HB, or no. 2 : Lost LA : Lou’s who : Visitors to the newsroom