In beta

A typo in a post? I have always blamed carelessness and haste. But now I have an all-purpose excuse explanation, which hit me yesterday afternoon: the post is in beta.

Mack McCormick’s Robert Johnsons

Biography of a Phantom, an edited version of Mack McCormick’s never-finished biography of Robert Johnson, is now in print. Here’s an account of McCormick’s work by Michael Hall: “Hellhounds on His Trail: Mack McCormick’s Long, Tortured Quest to Find the Real Robert Johnson” (Texas Monthly ).

The strangest result of McCormick’s efforts: his contention that everyone has been looking at the wrong man, that the musician who recorded in 1936 and 1937 was a different Robert Johnson.

I will soon have the book in hand, and I’m sure I won’t know what to make of it then either.

Related reading
All OCA Robert Johnson posts (Pinboard)

A dictionary and a prison

The guy who made violent threats against Merriam-Webster last year over its definitions of female and girl has been sentenced to a year in prison.

Related reading
All OCA dictionary posts (Pinboard)

“All-In”

A look at the conditions of teaching and striking at a regional university in Illinois: “All-In.” It’s a point of view, of course, but it’s one that grounded in fact.

Our household is supporting the strike by picketing and by contributing to a fund to help strikers in need. And I’m now able to add the noise of my Metropolitan Police Whistle to the picket-line din. (It took me three days to find it.)

5:48 p.m.: The strike has been suspended.

[When I began keeping a blog in 2004, I made a decision never to mention my university by name. I wanted to keep this work separate. And now I’m retired, and I still do.]

MSNBC, sheesh

Chris Jansing, earlier this afternoon: “The Washington Post reports that Jack Smith is honing in on Trump’s post-election fundraising,” &c.

Garner’s Modern English Usage (2022) notes that home in is “the traditional and still preferred phrase”:

In modern print sources — both AmE and BrE — the collocation homing in on the ~ predominates over *honing in on the ~ by a 2-to-1 margin.

Garner puts hone in at stage 4 of GMEU’s language-change index:

The form becomes virtually universal but is opposed on cogent grounds by a few linguistic stalwarts (the traditionalists that David Foster Wallace dubbed “snoots”: syntax nudniks of our time).

So how can I not say “Sheesh”? But I’m still willing to acknowledge that usage seems to be honeward bound.

Related reading
All OCA sheesh posts (Pinboard)

Cloud-stuff

One more passage, from a visit to Atlantis.

Steven Millhauser, From the Realm of Morpheus (1986).

Related reading
All OCA Steven Millhauser posts (Pinboard)

Recently updated

Vekkia book light Now with a link to an apropos poem.

E.g. , i.e. , etc.

The Chicago Manual of Style explains their use.

Thimbles

Carl Hausman recounts a visit with Morpheus to a land of giants.

Steven Millhauser, From the Realm of Morpheus (1986).

Related reading
All OCA Steven Millhauser posts (Pinboard)

Vekkia book light

Curtains open in the morning? The sun is glaring. Curtains closed? Too dark. Enter the Vekkia book light. Small, sturdy, just right.

*

April 13: I should have added a link to this post: “Some Enchanted Evening.” More light!