Separated at birth

  [Aaron Taylor-Johnson as Count Alexei Kirillovich Vronsky in Anna Karenina (dir. Joe Wright, 2012) and Gene Wilder as Dr. Frederick Frankenstein in Young Frankenstein (dir. Mel Brooks, 1974). Click either image for a larger view.]

I wish someone had said “We need to make him look less like young Frankenstein.”

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 : Chico Marx and Robert Walden : Elisabeth Moss and Alexis Smith : Jean Renoir and Steve Wozniak : Molly Ringwald and Victoria Zinny

Newsstands

From Trevor Traynor: Newstands, 100 photographs.

(Found via Present & Correct.)

Sardine dreams

In The Harvard Crimson, Una R. Roven, college student, writes about sardines:

There’s nothing like the smooth metallic pop of an opening tin. The fireworks of healthy fats in the very first bite. These oily fish fill my dreams.

Related reading
All OCA sardine posts (Pinboard)

Sold a Story

Coming tomorrow, from American Public Media, a podcast series by Emily Hanford: Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong.

In 2018 Hanford wrote an opinion piece for The New York Times: “Why Are We Still Teaching Reading the Wrong Way?”

Here’s a related article from the Times: “In the Fight Over How to Teach Reading, This Guru Makes a Major Retreat.”

If you have any doubt that reading instruction has gone wrong, listen to the average, everyday college student read aloud in class. But that’ll be difficult to do, because many instructors have learned not to ask students to read aloud. It’s likely to be painful.

Related posts
Reading, really fast : A story from my literacy tutoring : W(h)ither grammar

[“Read aloud”: I don’t mean cold-calling on students to read. I mean, say, asking a student to read a passage that they’ve referenced in a discussion.]

Cheesy vignette

[As seen in the OCA test kitchens. Click for a larger view.]

What’s wrong with this picture?

Yesterday’s A.Word.A.Day explains.

Stemside

Elaine and I like to invent imaginary radio shows. O reason not the need. Please.

This one is mine: Stemside. It’s all about tomatoes. E.g.:

“Coming up on Stemside: tomato sandwiches. Are they really as good as people say?”

[Spoiler: they are. And you should always let tomatoes sit stem down.]

La Fabrique de l’oeuvre

From stale bread to a madeleine: La Fabrique de l’oeuvre is a French National Library exhibition devoted to the evolution of À la recherche du temps perdu .

Here is a report from Le Figaro, in French and English. And here is a report from The Guardian, with the detail of the stale bread (pain rassis ).

Related reading
All OCA Proust posts (Pinboard)

The reason is not because

In the latest episode of Michigan Radio’s That’s What They Say, Rebecca Kruth, host, and Anne Curzan, linguist, talk about “the reason is because.” Citing the Merriam-Webster Dictionary of English Usage as an authority, Curzan says that this construction is “fine.” The word because, she says, reminds the reader that an explanation is coming. I would think that the words the reason is are reminder enough, even if other words fall between reason and is.

A point that Curzan doesn’t mention: MWDEU argues against the charge that “the reason is because” is redundant by pointing out that because here need not mean “for the reason that.” No, MWDEU says, because here can mean “the fact that.” Which would make “the reason is because” the equivalent of “the reason is the fact that.” But if that’s the case, it’s simpler and more graceful to say “the reason is that.”

In Garner’s Modern English Usage, Bryan Garner offers a markedly different take on “the reason is because.” While MWDEU cites many well-known writers who have used this construction (Francis Bacon, Jonathan Swift, Robert Frost, Ernest Hemingway, P.G. Wodehouse, Groucho Marx, and others), GMEU uses the Google Ngram Viewer get a sense of contemporary usage, with “reason is that” significantly outnumbering “reason is because” in print. In the GMEU Language-Change Index, “the reason is because” falls into Stage Four: “Ubiquitous but  . . . .” And Garner quotes a withering assessment:

This construction is loose because reason implies because and vice versa. Robert W. Burchfield, the distinguished OED lexicographer, put it well: “Though often defended by modern grammarians, the type ‘the reason . . . is because’ (instead of ‘the reason . . . is that’) aches with redundancy, and is still as inadmissible in Standard English as it was when H.W. Fowler objected to it in 1926.” Points of View 116 (1992).

Garner, as you can already guess, recommends replacing because with that.

Recommending that a writer stick with “the reason is because” if it feels “natural” and “sounds good,” as Curzan does, is decidely unhelpful. If “the reason is because” is far less common in writing, if it’s likely to stand out to many a reader as a known redundancy, it’s in a writer’s interest to change because to that. It doesn’t matter what Robert Frost did. Or Jane Austen.

That’s What They Say is fun when Kruth and Curzan investigate idioms and word meanings. But I’d check the feature’s advice about usage before going along.

NetNewsWire

Yes, there’s a problem with FeedBurner. But one also needs an an app or service that picks up RSS feeds in a snappy manner. NetNewsWire for macOS and iOS is my new choice. It’s fast, easy to figure out, and free. It has a long history, with a developer, Brent Simmons, who has a sense of cultural purpose and doesn’t even invite donations. Here is the app’s website.

“The old Internet”

Marie LeConte misses “the old Internet.”