A reader wonders about books about writing

A reader mentions that I long ago recommended books about writing by Claire Cook, Michael Harvey, Verlyn Klinkenborg, and Virginia Tufte and wonders if I’ve since found other books as good or better. That reader must be thinking of this 2013 post, which recommends Cook’s Line by Line, Harvey’s The Nuts and Bolts of College Writing, Klinkenborg’s Several Short Sentences about Writing, and Tufte’s Artful Sentences: Syntax as Style.

Several others I’d recommend:

Roy Peter Clark, Writing Tools: 50 Essential Strategies for Every Writer

Sir Ernest Gowers, The Complete Plain Words, revised by Sidney Greenbaum and Janet Whitcut

David Lambuth et al., The Golden Book on Writing

Richard Lanham, Revising Prose

Bruce Ross-Larson, Edit Yourself: A Manual for Everyone Who Works with Words

Francis-Noël Thomas and Mark Turner, Clear and Simple as the Truth: Writing Classic Prose

And for authoritative and extensive guidance in usage: Bryan Garner’s Garner’s Modern English Usage

Four highly touted books I wouldn’t recommend:

Benjamin Dreyer, Dreyer’s English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style

Stanley Fish, How to Write a Sentence: And How to Read One

Steven Pinker, The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century

Jim VandeHei, Mike Allen, and Roy Schwartz, Smart Brevity: The Power of Saying More with Less

Reader, I hope you find these suggestions useful.

Five review posts
Dreyer’s English : The Golden Book on Writing : How to Write a Sentence : The Sense of Style : Smart Brevity

From The Complete Plain Words
If and whether : Incongruity : Involve : Thinking and writing

From Edit Yourself
Managing items in a series : That and which

[Full disclosure: I was a member of the panel of critical readers for the new fifth edition of Garner’s Modern English Usage.]

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper, another repeat from 2012, is by Lars G. Doubleday, aka Doug Peterson and Brad Wilber. It started so easily, with 1-A, ten letters, “Trattoria dessert” and 1-D, four letters, “Navigates an obstacle course, maybe.” I navigated nearly the whole course alone. But that southeast section — oy. I had to open a kitchen cabinet to get 58-A, ten letters, “Phrase on a Cheerios box.” And that answer gave me the answer for 44-D, six letters, “Meat rich in zinc,” another clue that flummoxed me. Are Cheerios, too, rich in zinc? I would have to go down to the kitchen again to answer that.

Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:

10-D, eight letters, “Egregiousness.” Yay, properly defined.

13-D, four letters, “NYC storefront closures of 2010.” This clue has, well, aged.

14-A, ten letters, “Head scratcher’s comment.” Nicely colloquial.

15-A, four letters, “Antlered animal.” One that I know only from poetry.

16-A, ten letters, “‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ feature.” This pairing seems weirdly arbitrary: countless titles could be substituted for this one.

23-A, seven letters, “Quantum of Solace introducer.” Another arbitrary pairing.

27-D, ten letters, “Where to see shooting stars.”

34-D, eight letters, “’20s fad just before the crossword craze.” Even when you’re spelling it right, it looks wrong.

40-A, five letters, “Polyester in paints.” SRSLY?

47-A, six letters, “She was billed above Bogart in High Sierra.” And she gets the last word.

56-D, three letters, “Beethoven symphonic notation.” Like 16-A and 23-A, the pairing seems arbitrary.

60-A, ten letters, “Show off a certain paint job.” Groan.

My favorite in this puzzle: 12-A, ten letters, “Asset in an appraisal.” Very tricky.

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

Word of the week: shitshow

Yep, that’s it:

something (such as an event or a situation) that is chaotic, contentious, or unpleasant to an excessive or absurd degree

[The fourteenth vote for Speaker of the House is concluding.]

Mystery actor

[Click for a larger view.]

Leave your best guess in the comments. I’ll drop a hint if one is needed.

*

That was fast. The answer is now in the comments.

More mystery actors
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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.”