Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper is by Steve Mossberg, whose Stumpers have sometimes given me fits. Today’s puzzle felt difficult, particularly in the southwest. But I did it.

Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:

1-A, ten letters, “Film with the most AFI top 100 quotes (6).” I’d call it a gimme, for me maybe the only gimme in the puzzle. It didn’t hurt to have listened to a podcast episode about this film yesterday.

1-D, four letters, “Brown Derby owner who gave his name to a green course.” Are we golfing? A nice bit of dowdy trivia.

11-D, eleven letters, “Emeril makes them with yogurt and coconut.” No thanks.

12-D, ten letters, “Taste of philosophy.” A bit forced.

15-A, ten letters, “Set aside.” I’m surprised to see that that is what the word can mean.

19-A, three letters, “Frost line.” Hah.

20-A, five letters, “Frost lines.” Hah.

22-D, eleven letters, “One concerned with approach, take-off and landing.” Get the first and third letters and you’ll struggle to see the rest.

27-D, ten letters, “Brown sugar.” Tricky, but not tricky enough!

32-D, four letters, “Off-the-wall call.” A nice way to clue a familiar word.

34-A, five letters, “Pumps (up).” At least three plausible answers, all of which begin with the same letter. So sussing out 25-D, four letters, “Lift to greet” helped not a bit.

38-A, ten letters, “Words that add depth to a video game character.” Certainly a gimme for some. New to me. My video-game play has been limited to three arcade games — Cruis’n World, Ms. Pac-Man, Night Driver — and one computer game, Mario Kart. Do the words “I’m-a Luigi, number one” add depth?

55-A, ten letters, “Big Apple’s Pastrami Queen, e.g.” Also new to me. And speaking of “new,” can’t we just write “NYC’s”? I remember advising a great student who told me that she was moving to “the Big Apple”: “Never call it ‘the Big Apple.’ It’ll mark you as an outsider.” Good advice, no?

My favorite clue in this puzzle: 45-A, seven letters, “Case workers.”

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

Coffey, comma, ay caramba

Who gives a darn about an Oxford comma, as The New York Times might ask? That would be Thérèse Coffey — Liz Truss ally, head of the UK’s Department of Health and Social Care, and punctuation peever. Coffey hates the Oxford comma, is unashamed to say so, and wants it removed from her department’s written communications.

I of course stand by the Oxford comma. I’ll quote myself:

Items in a series should be separated with commas. What do I mean by “items in a series”? Wine, women, and song. Life, love, and laughter. John, Paul, George, and Ringo.

There’s no consensus about using a comma before that final item — the so-called “Oxford comma” or “serial comma.” Keeping that comma seems to me the better choice, simplifying, in one small way, the problems of punctuation. If you always put the comma in, you avoid problems with ambiguous or tricky sentences in which the comma’s absence might blur the meaning of your words.

The real question, as asked by Vampire Weekend: “Who gives a fuck about an Oxford comma?” It made for a hilarious moment (with bleeps) on The Colbert Report in 2010. Great for classroom use, at least for my classroom.

Related reading
All OCA punctuation posts (Pinboard)

Recently updated

Threatening the dictionary Now with a guilty plea.

Abyssinia

I had a pleasantly disorienting moment while doing yesterday’s Newsday crossword. The puzzle was by Stan Newman; the theme, “Famous Last Words.” 28-A, nine letters, “Last word (1920s).” The answer: ABYSSINIA.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang cites a 1934 dictionary of slang: “[College slang] Abyssinia, I’ll be seeing you.” The Oxford English Dictionary has a 1932 citation from the Chicago Tribune: “ [High school and college slang] Abyssinia, I'll be seeing you.” Maybe the class of ’32 took the expression with them to college. Both sources cite Jessica Mitford (1960): “You’ll find people generally say, ‘I’ll be seeing you’ instead of ‘goodbye’ . . . You may be able to raise a laugh by saying, ‘Abyssinia.’”

Uh, probably not. The only place names I can think of that now lend themselves to puns: Alaska, Delaware, Europe. The Boy Scouts have many more.

[Wikipedia: “Afroasiatic-speaking communities make up the majority of the population. Among these, Semitic speakers often collectively refer to themselves as the Habesha people. The Arabic form of this term (al-Ḥabasha) is the etymological basis of ‘Abyssinia,’ the former name of Ethiopia in English and other European languages.”]

Turning what into what

A mathematician is a machine for turning what into what? A series of cartoons (Math with Bad Drawings).

Thanks, Murray.

A related post
Cows : food : milk :: mathematicians : coffee : theorems

[I wanted to wait until I had a least a slight understanding of the Taylor series before posting the link, but that might take forever.]

Dave Mustaine, stickler

Dave Mustaine of Megadeth, in an interview:

“The songs really never are done until they’re done. The lyric is a whole different subject because I am a stickler for grammar. And a lot of times I’ll go back and look at my lyrics and think, ’God, what are you? A fourth grader?’ Because some of the grammar and the punctuation and stuff will be off.”

Teachers, share with your students.

Related reading
All OCA grammar posts (Pinboard)

[I don’t have any previous Megadeth posts.]

Cursive at Harvard

In The Atlantic, Drew Gilpin Faust says that her students can’t read or write cursive writing:

It was a good book, the student told the 14 others in the undergraduate seminar I was teaching, and it included a number of excellent illustrations, such as photographs of relevant Civil War manuscripts. But, he continued, those weren’t very helpful to him, because of course he couldn’t read cursive.

Had I heard him correctly? Who else can’t read cursive? I asked the class. The answer: about two-thirds. And who can’t write it? Even more.

If the name rings a bell, Faust was the president of Harvard. The scene of instruction in these paragraphs: a Harvard classroom.

Related reading
All OCA handwriting posts (Pinboard)

Emporia, firing

From The Chronicle of Higher Education:

Emporia State University got permission on Wednesday to fire employees, including tenured professors, for any of a host of reasons, including “current or future market considerations.” Many faculty members there object that the plan essentially suspends tenure. The cuts have already begun.

The move was made possible by the Kansas Board of Regents. In January of last year, regents approved a policy that allowed the six state universities to suspend or terminate employees, including tenured professors, even if the institution had not declared financial exigency or initiated that process. The board wanted to give its institutions the flexibility they needed to deal with financial strain brought about by the Covid-19 pandemic, regents said at the time.

The school’s student newspaper, The Bulletin, counts twenty firings thus far, including five in English, Modern Languages, and Journalism, and another five in Social Sciences, Sociology, and Criminology.

It’s true that other forms of work don’t offer tenure. But something people outside academia often don’t understand: a professor who loses a tenured position will find it exceedingly difficult to find another such position. There’s very little chance of lateral movement. As William Pannapacker explains in a recent Chronicle piece,

When you leave a tenured position in the humanities, the chance of finding another one — unless you are a freshly minted Ph.D. or a star in a hot field — is close to zero. You must rebrand yourself for a new career path in ways that will cut your identity to the core.

Emporia's marketing mantra, “Changing lives since 1863,” is taking on new meaning.

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2:30 p.m.: Now it’s twenty-five firings.

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10:50 p.m.: Now it’s thirty-three.

[Looking at Emporia’s English, Modern Languages, and Journalism webpage, I count seven professors, four associate professors, six instructors, three lecturers, four graduate assistants, one assistant online coordinator, and one administrative specialist.]

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July 15, 2023: Some former faculty members have filed a lawsuit. From Kansas Reflector:

Eleven former Emporia State University professors in federal court documents accuse school administrators, Kansas Board of Regents members and unknown other individuals of conspiring to fire tenured and “problematic” professors.

The federal lawsuit is a response to the university’s decision last year to fire 30 tenured or tenure-track professors as part of a KBOR-approved “framework” to stabilize finances and restructure the university. The lawsuit argues that defendants willfully violated constitutional rights to due process, equal protection, liberty, property and free speech.

The 11 former professors were targeted, the lawsuit alleges, because they were tenured, not Republicans, involved in efforts to form a union or outspoken critics of ESU president Ken Hush. The university relied on KBOR’s pandemic-era Workforce Management Policy, which stripped professors of the right to determine why they were fired, or examine reports or other evidence that was used to determine who would be fired.

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September 28, 2023: OCA reader Kirsten sends news that while overall enrollment in public higher education in Kansas has risen by 2% this fall, Emporia State has seen a steep decline in enrollment. From Little Apple Post:

The only institution in Kansas’ public higher education system with a double-digit enrollment decline this fall semester was ESU, a campus that has endured a 19.6% reduction in enrollment over the past five years. Meanwhile, the University of Kansas welcomed the largest freshman class in the school’s history and Kansas State University reported its first enrollment increase in nine years.

Emporia’s president, though, is unfazed, observing that “‘Enrollment, while important, is just part of the story.’” And he further baffles:

“The rest of the story is what it costs to operate the university. Enrollment numbers hold little significance unless they are compared to expenses. This means enrollment isn’t necessarily equal to success.”

“Enrollment isn’t necessarily equal to success”: that sounds like something a hapless George Costanza might tell the vice president for enrollment management. “But George,” the vice president might ask, “wouldn’t more students mean more money to cover expenses?” And George would have to get back to them on that.

The sad part is what’s obvious: that prospective students and their families know a failing school when they see one. Going to a school where your field of study might be cut at any time is a risky venture, and it appears that Kansans are not eager to take the risk.

Dickinson State and West Virginia University, take note.

Thanks, Kirsten.

MSNBC royal hierarchy

Katy Tur was over in London last week. Chris Jansing is there now. I’d be willing to bet a nickel — no, make that a whole quarter — that it’ll be Andrea Mitchell who’s there for the funeral of Queen Elizabeth.

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September 18: Guess who’s in London? Andrea Mitchell.

Toothache

Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, translated by Constance Garnett, revised by Leonard J. Kent and Nina Berberova (New York: Modern Library, 2000).

Yes, but it still hurts. As anyone who has had a tooth extracted knows.

Also from this novel
“The turning point of summer” : Theory of dairy farming