Red Pen

“Serving up object lessons on syntax and style with style, and in a way that won’t put you to sleep”: Red Pen is a new podcast about grammar from Columbia Journalism Review.

The first episode (forty-four minutes) is ostensibly about who and whom, but it’s really two friends talking, and their talking goes all over the place: Christopher Columbus, bad reviews of the Sistine Chapel, commercialism at Egypt’s pyramids, a Geocities fan page for Rage Against the Machine, Jay McInerney’s tweets, and looting at Duane Reade stores, with none of those topics touching upon who or whom.

For me, the noise to signal ratio makes this podcast a slog (even at 1.5 speed). You could learn much more in a fraction of the time by reading the entry about who and whom in Garner’s Modern English Usage. Then spend the time left over talking with a friend of your own.

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper, by Matthew Sewell, is a tough one. Consider the southeast corner: 54-D, four letters, “Only Oscar role for a French performance”; 60-A, four letters, “‘Pan-’ antonym”; 62-A, four letters, “School-____”; 64-A, four letters, “It means ‘focused gathering.’” Yeow, and yeow again.

Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:

1-D, six letters, “Generous gifts from the Czars.” Did they really give them away? My guess turned out to be correct.

3-D, eleven letters, “How ghosts do their thing.” I kept thinking of trick-or-treating.

5-A, ten letters, “Provided bonus footage.” Good misdirection.

8-D, five letters, “Flyer’s announcement.” Also misdirectional.

18-A, ten letters, “They don’t care for customs.” Clever.

27-D, eleven letters, “Miss one’s conviction.” Inaptly phrased, I’d say. Neither miss nor conviction fits the answer well.

28-D, eleven letters, “Indie pubs.” Nicely phrased, but the answer feels a bit dated. See 63-A: are these pubs, too, old-timey?

47-A, five letters, “Part of the bottling process.” I was ready to quibble with the clue until I rethought part.

53-A, five letters, “‘Thrice happy he whose name has been well ____’: Byron.” From Don Juan.

55-A, ten letters, “Within reach for searchers.” The answer feels preposterous, but it’s in use.

63-A, ten letters, “Old-timey exhibitions with carousels.” I thought of STATEFAIRS. Old-timey, really?

My favorite in this puzzle, because it’s just so weird: 56-D, three letters, “Silence, perhaps.”

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

Sold a Story : responses

Here are two responses to the podcast Sold a Story : How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong.

From a letter signed by fifty-eight teachers, writers, and administrators. “A call for rejecting the newest reading wars”:

We’re dismayed that at this moment in our history, when all of us should be banding together to support literacy education, the podcast Sold a Story fans divisiveness, creating a false sense that there is a war going on between those who believe in phonics and those who do not.

From a reply to that letter signed by more than 650 current and former teachers, “For the students we wish we’d taught better”:

A central point of the Sold a Story podcast is that the research “wars” around foundational reading skills were already won and lost decades ago — and that few educators have ever heard of this research, because an entire industry of education publishers, coaches and curriculum writers have either ignored or actively resisted it, needlessly encumbering the efforts of thousands of teachers like us, our students, and their families along the way.

If you’re a regular reader of Orange Crate Art, you already know what I think about Sold a Story and reading instruction.

A quiz, revised

A quiz, found via Mueller, She Wrote: Which Head of State Should You Date? I had to do some revising, even if I lack Adobe’s Proxima Nova font.

Before:



After:


Related reading
All OCA misspelling posts (Pinboard)

[But I’m much too fun-loving to think of hyphenation as a favorite quality in a partner.]

Frenship

Life in Texas:

When Wolfforth School District was unified with three other rural districts (Carlisle, Hurlwood and Foster) in 1935, they applied for the name “Friendship Independent School District.” The application was rejected as the name was already taken by a Houston-area school district; thus, officials opted for the name Frenship.

The Frenship Independent School District hosted a district-wide spelling bee earlier this year.

Thanks, Seth.

Treehouses

I took a photograph of a tree two years ago, thinking I’d post it. I never did. So I took a picture of the tree again a couple of days ago. Click either for a larger view.

[November 26, 2020.]

[December 6, 2022.]

Two nests look as if they might be the same, but since November 2020 I’ve sometimes seen this tree with no nests. The current tenants are all hoping that the building doesn’t go condo.

[They must be squirrel nests, right?]

Domestic comedy

“We should watch — we haven’t seen it in years, and gaslight is a word of the year.”

“Michael, we watched Gaslight just a few months ago.”

Related reading
All OCA domestic comedy posts (Pinboard)

[Let the record show that Elaine’s response was instantaneous.]

On Willa Cather’s birthday

Willa Cather was born on this day in 1873.

From a letter to the writer Zoë Akins, April 19, 1937, in The Selected Letters of Willa Cather, ed. Andrew Jewell and Janis Stout (New York: Knopf, 2013). The subject is Daniel Totheroh’s dramatic adaptation of Cather’s 1923 novel A Lost Lady. In an earlier letter to Akins, Cather had already made clear that she would not permit a dramatic adaptation of her work. The diaeresis in Akins’s first name sometimes appears in the letter, sometimes not.

My dear Zoë:

You will forgive me if I say [a] word in typewriter about Mr. [Daniel] Totheroh’s play, which I am sending back to you.

Take Mrs. Forrester’s first entrance in Act I. What does she say when she comes into the Judge’s office? My, your stairs are steep! That is what the scrub woman says when she arrives. Did you ever, Zoe, know a woman with any spunk or sparkle who used “my” as an exclamation? 1 remember a fat old Methodist neighbour who used to drag out “My, but the days are warm, Mr. Cather!” In her first sentence, Zoe, he shows her up for a common, dreary thing. In her next sentence, she refers to her (1) age and to her (2) travelled state! Two things she would never have done. (1. Her particular weakness, 2. Bad taste.)

A little later she trills to this lumping Swede that his little boy’s eyes are “blue as a mountain lake”. Ho-Ho! When she doesn’t talk like a corsetless old Methodist woman, she talks like a darling club woman, and says she “would die” to have such eyes etc. That expression stamps her socially. So does “you can help me out”. Everything she says stamps her socially, except when she brazenly quotes me. She says Niel will be “a great asset” to Sweet Water society. Lord, they needed assets—some future, with Marian as the social leader!

Everything that Niel says is the speech of a cotton-mouthed booby. As to Mrs. Forrester’s smirking about “drinking here alone, with two men” —— the dining-room girls in our little town-hotel might have said that; the commonest King’s Daughter or Eastern Star sister would have refused the sherry, or drunk it and said nothing. On page 13, the playwright becomes unbearable because he makes the Judge bring out discreditable insinuations about Captain Forrester. The integrity of the book really rests on Captain Forrester.

My dear Zoë, I read no further than the first act. Nothing could induce me.

And later in the letter: “We’ll forget this episode forever.”

Related reading
All OCA Cather posts (Pinboard)

Opening night

This is quite wonderful:

I don’t know who needs to hear this but Neil Diamond, who retired from performing five years ago because of Parkinsons, just had a Broadway show of him open and it at the opening night he did this pic.twitter.com/eJ02YUAzr5

— Ben Phillips (@benphillips76) December 6, 2022

“Their needs,” “your livelihood”

Abdulkader Sinno, professor of political science at Indiana University Bloomington, wrote a letter to graduate students explaining his decision to resign as his department’s job-placement director. An excerpt:

I am resigning because I don’t want to be complicit in keeping you in a PhD program that doesn’t help your advancement. The department needs graduate students to cheaply teach or assist in teaching its undergraduate students, and for faculty to keep claiming that we have a serious PhD program. I just don’t believe that you should pay for their needs with your livelihood.

The faculty are perpetuating the myth that a PhD from a modest department like ours can be a reliable route to a middle class life. It is not anymore.

Inside Higher Ed has the story, complete with vague reassurances and evasions from the department’s director of graduate studies: “It would be good if this dies down soon for sake of our students’ mental health.” You can read the letter, across two screenshots, here.

Before I started in a doctoral program, the director said, “Of course, you know there are no jobs.” And of course, I wasn’t prepared to believe it. My path to a tenure-track position is one that still amazes me. I wrote it out in this post: Fluke life.