Sliced Bread

“The latest ad-hyped products and trending fads promise to make us healthier, happier and greener, but are they really ‘the best thing since sliced bread’? Greg Foot finds out”: Sliced Bread is an excellent podcast from the BBC. Kombucha, portable heaters, zillion-blade razors, and many more.

“Antic grace”

Wednesday’s Wordle was ANTIC. It’s odd to see the word in its singular form, isn’t it? One thinks of antics, suggesting, like hijinks (which has no singular form), a neverending parade of silliness. But antic is also an adjective. I thought of the phrase “antic grace.”

And then I wondered where I know that phrase from. From Theodore Roethke’s poem “The Heron,” I think:

He walks the shallow with an antic grace.

But did Roethke borrow the phrase? Maybe from Shakespeare? No, though Hamlet does announce his intention “To put an antic disposition on.”

Google’s Ngram Viewer shows “antic grace” first appearing in print in 1851 (where?), but there at least two earlier (and accurate) dates. From 1680, “An Answer to the Satire on the Court Ladies,” by an anonymous poet:

His scragged carcass moves with antic grace.

And from 1813, Six Engravings by H. Thielcke. After the Designs of Her Royal Highness the Princess Elizabeth, “with illustrations in verse.” The phrase appears in the poem “Pleasures of Childhood”:

         And many a playful, antic grace
Awakes the endearing smile upon the Mother’s face.

The poet is unidentified. Was it Henry D. Thielcke (b. 1788) himself? These lines appear nowhere else in Google Books, which makes me think that “Pleasures of Childhood” was not a widely anthologized sentimental poem.

Fast-forward to the early twentieth century, and “antic grace” is suddenly everywhere:

1905: “He preserves us from antic grace.”

1911: “The antic grace and delicious poetry.”

1916: “Such antic grace is in the day.”

1920: “One with thine antic grace.”

1924: “A little, bobbing, staccato motion of antic grace.”

We might say that by the time Roethke was writing, “antic grace” was in the air. Whatever happened between 1813 and 1905 will remain a mystery, at least for me. Google Books turns up nothing. The Corpus of Historical American English (1820–2019) and the Hansard Corpus (1803–2005), both available from English-Corpora.org, turn up nothing.

I am marking this rabbit hole For Rabbits Only.

[The OED on antic: “Probably originally a variant of ANTIQUE adj. and ANTIQUE n.” The earliest meaning: “a grotesque or fantastic ornamental representation of a person, animal, or thing; spec. a sculpted human figure represented in an unnatural posture and serving as a column; (also) a structure or tableau decorated with such representations. Also formerly as a mass noun: †decorative painting or sculpture consisting of the interweaving of human and animal forms with flowers and foliage (obsolete). Now rare.”

On antics: “grotesque, absurd, or amusing gestures or actions; silly, foolish, or outrageous behaviour.”

On the adjective antic: “esp. of a person, or a person's attributes or actions: grotesquely amusing or playful; absurd, fantastical”; “ff a person's clothing or attire: grotesque, absurd; fantastically incongruous”; “of the face or features: grotesquely distorted like a gargoyle; grinning or grimacing grotesquely.”

Though the noun hijinks has no singular form, the Oxford English Dictionary has the singular jink: “the act of eluding; a quick turn so as to elude a pursuer or escape from a guard”; “a ‘turn’ or ‘point’ in an argument.” And the dictionary has high-jink as an attributive: “high-jink enjoyments.”]

Naked Town, a Mad parody

From 1961: “Naked Town,” a parody of Naked City. Convincing caricatures by Mort Drucker, but the humor is not especially funny. But then again, it’s the only parody of Naked City I’m aware of. Attention must be paid.

Our household loves Naked City.

Thanks, Elaine.

Related reading
All OCA Naked City posts (Pinboard)

How to improve writing (no. 106)

I was going to quote a sentence from The New York Times this morning until I realized how awful it was:

The Republicans who blocked Representative Kevin McCarthy of California from becoming speaker on Tuesday include some of the most hard-right lawmakers in the House; most denied the 2020 election, are members of the Freedom Caucus, or both.

The lack of parallelism in the sentence almost — almost — passes by unnoticed. But once you notice it, it’s, uh, noticeable: there’s no pair of elements for both to tie together. Here’s a simpler sentence to illustrate the problem, about members of an imaginary musical group:

Most studied piano, are guitarists, or both.

A possible revision:

Most are proponents of the “Big Lie” or members of the Freedom Caucus or both.

Elaine thinks that including numbers would help:

Nineteen of the twenty are members of the Freedom Caucus. Twelve are election deniers. Eleven are both.

Both revisions improve on the original.

Related reading
All OCA How to improve writing posts (Pinboard)

[In news coverage, the Times typically uses quotation marks with Big Lie. This post is no. 106 in a series dedicated to improving stray bits of public prose.]

Getting things done

The Republican House majority got something accomplished yesterday. From the January 3 installment of Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters from an American :

The first thing they did was to remove the metal detectors that were installed after the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. The removal was one of the things Republican leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) promised far-right Republicans in hopes of winning their votes to elect him speaker. The House has not yet voted on the rules package that ends “Democrat fines for failure of Members to comply with unscientific mask mandates and security screenings before entering the House floor,” but the metal detectors are gone, just three days before the second anniversary of the January 6 attack.

So far, the removal of those metal detectors is the only concrete outcome of McCarthy’s attempt to woo the extremist members of his conference.

The New York Times looks at those extremist members and finds that most are proponents of the Big Lie or members of the (so-called) Freedom Caucus or both. Illinois’s own Mary Miller is, of course, both.

[I watched a lot of news yesterday without learning about the metal detectors. One more reason to read Letters from an American.]

“Eccentric adventures”

Steve Young, devotee of industrial-musicals, in the documentary Bathtubs Over Broadway (dir. Dava Whisenant, 2018):

“Life can be so rich and wonderful when we step off the logical path and embark on eccentric adventures.”

EXchange names on screen

From Mr. District Attorney (dir. Robert B. Sinclair, 1947). The movie is a bit ’phone-crazy. Click any image for a larger view.

[B.: Berotti (Steven Geary), no first name. His MA: MAdison, I presume.]

The next three screenshots show a clever trick. How can Marcia Manning (Marguerite Chapman) let District Attorney Craig Warren (Adolphe Menjou) know that B. is hiding in the next room? By making a phony call to spell out B-E-R-O-T-T-I.


It’s a good thing Marcia wasn’t trying to spell L-E-D-D-Y, which could have been mistaken for J-E-F-F-Y.

More telephone EXchange names on screen
Act of Violence : The Amazing Dr. Clitterhouse : Armored Car Robbery : Baby Face : Black Angel : 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 : The Dark Corner (again) : Dark Passage : Deception : Deux hommes dans Manhattan : Dial Red 0 : 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 : She Played with Fire : 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?

Recently updated

Updating Now with more lies from George Santos.

Look closely

[Click for a larger view.]

We heard it before we saw it. And then we watched for several minutes. Elaine thinks that our quiet words of encouragement made a difference.

[If you’re stumped, keep looking. And then, if you’re still stumped, there’s an explanation in the comments.]

On the conjunction train

From YouTube user blakrootz: “‘Conjunction Junction’ Model Train.” Just wonderful, and if I were teaching a writing class, I would be hard put not to find three minutes to share it.

Thanks to Jim at 30 Squares for sharing it with me.

[All seven coordinating conjunctions? The FANBOYS. For, and, nor, but, or, yet, so.]