Why are pencils so popular?

A hard-hitting investigation from MarketWatch: “Billions of pencils are sold a year. Why are they still so popular?”

In a word, according to MarketWatch: kiddos.

“Sure, Jan”

Mary Trump: “Sure, Jan.”

I’ve read that Trump thinks his serious face makes him look like Winston Churchill. I think it makes him look angry, lost, and more than a tad demented.

*

August 27: See also the Kubrick stare.

Brain food

Saveloy: isn’t that a kind of cabbage?

No, it’s not a kind of cabbage. That’s Savoy.

A saveloy is “a type of highly seasoned sausage, usually bright red, normally boiled and available in fish and chip shops around England.”

Merriam-Webster traces the word’s journey into English:

modification of French cervelas, from Middle French, from Old Italian cervellata, literally, pig’s brains, from cervello brain, from Latin cerebellum.

I came across saveloy while reading E.T.A. Hoffmann, The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr, trans. Anthea Bell (1999). I lack the patience to find out what was going on in the German — perhaps some kind of wurst.

*

[After having the question nag at me while I was walking.]

The word in German in Cervelaten, plural of Cervelat, first found in Rabelais (1522). I searched the German text at Project Gutenberg for Pinscher, which took me to the paragraph with the Cervelaten.

Also from this novel
“Scholarly voracity” : “My little right paw” : Reading and writing in the dark : “O Heaven, were my whiskers neglected!”

Mutts meta

“There are symbols”: today’s Mutts is meta.

Got bail?

“Charges pending in Fulton County?” Here’s where “America’s Mayor” goes: A 2nd Chance Bail Bonds.

The Martin family dictionary

[From the Lassie episode “Lassie’s Good Deed,” April 29, 1962. Click for a larger view.]

Timmy (Jon Provost) and Lassie have met an older man living in a cabin in the woods, a Mr. Jensen, who walks into town once a month to collect a pension check. He’s a Great War veteran, and he’s played by James Burke, who played the hotel detective Luke in The Maltese Falcon. A quick dissolve and we see Timmy back in his living room:

“I found it, Mom, in the dictionary, just like you said. ‘Recluse : retired from the world or from public notice; a hermit.’”

It seems certain that the Martin family dictionary is a Merriam-Webster’s Second:

[Click for a larger view.]

I can imagine Paul Martin resisting a purchase of M-W’s Third, which appeared in 1961: “Timmy, a farm family has to watch every penny. We have a perfectly good dictionary, and we can’t just buy a new dictionary every time one appears.” And Ruth: “Your father’s right, dear.”

The Merriam-Webster’s Third entry for the adjective recluse begins: “removed from society : shut up.” That graceful phrasing “retired from the world” has disappeared, as has the citation from William Cowper, from the poem “Retirement.”

The woods outside Calverton seem to welcome recluses and hermits. See also “The Hermit” (May 22, 1960). You can watch both episodes — “Lassie’s Good Deed,” “The Hermit” — at the usual place.

As a regular reader of these pages may recall, I like to watch Lassie when I fold laundry. Come at me.

Related reading
All OCA dictionary posts : Lassie posts (Pinboard)

[Yes, the episode’s writers merged the entries for recluse as an adjective and as a noun. Or Timmy quickly moved from the one to the other.]

Turning off Mac auto-punctuation

Dictation in iOS and macOS includes auto-punctuation, which again and again introduces errors, mostly unnecessary commas. In iOS, it’s easy to turn off auto-punctuation: go to Settings, General, Keyboard, and there it is. But in macOS, it might not be so easy. Go to System Settings, Keyboard, Dictation, and you might find nothing about auto-punctuation. Auto-punctuation was on by default on my Mac with no apparent way to turn it off.

I found the solution in a Reddit thread: under Dictation, add another language. I added English (UK). And hey presto, the option to turn off auto-punctuation appeared. I turned it off, removed English (UK), and auto-punctuation is still off.

I noticed that in iOS Settings, the word is spelled Auto-Punctuation. In macOS System Settings, it’s Auto-punctuation. Either way, it’s an unwelcome intrusion, and I’m happy to be done with it.

Related reading
All OCA punctuation posts (Pinboard)

Screen apnea

“The disruption of breathing many of us experience doing all kinds of tasks in front of a screen”:The New York Times reports on what Linda Stone calls “screen apnea.”

I recall what Stone wrote some years ago about what can happen to breathing when one checks e-mail, and now I’m wondering why I didn’t post about it. Perhaps because I was under the influence of continuous partial attention — that’s another term Stone coined.

How to improve writing (no. 112)

I made it almost through a New York Times article, and then I hit this single-sentence paragraph:

Mr. Trump has used a political action committee that is aligned with him, and that is replete with money he raised in small-dollar donations as he falsely claimed he was fighting widespread fraud after the 2020 election, to pay the legal bills of a number of allies, as well as his own.

There’s something odd about the phrase “replete with money.” The bigger problem though is that “that is aligned with him, and that is replete with money he raised in small-dollar donations as he falsely claimed he was fighting widespread fraud after the 2020 election” is just too much to position between “Mr. Trump has used a political action committee” and “to pay the legal bills.”

Better:

To pay his legal bills and those of several allies, Mr. Trump has used small-dollar donations to a political action committee that he falsely claimed was fighting widespread fraud after the 2020 election.

But making two sentences is better still:

To pay his legal bills and those of several allies, Mr. Trump has used funds from a political action committee that he falsely claimed was fighting widespread fraud after the 2020 election. The funds were raised mostly as small-dollar donations.

I like keeping the detail about small-dollar donations in a separate sentence, making it what we used to call a zinger.

E.B. White’s advice:

When you become hopelessly mired in a sentence, it is best to start fresh; do not try to fight your way through against the terrible odds of syntax. Usually what is wrong is that the construction has become too involved at some point; the sentence needs to be broken apart and replaced by two or more shorter sentences.

True that.

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

[This post is no. 112 in a series dedicated to improving stray bits of public prose. The passage from E.B. White appears in The Elements of Style, in “An Approach to Style,” the chapter White added when revising William Strunk Jr.’s book.]

Domestic comedy

[Trump’s lawyers have been moaning about how many documents they have to read: War and Peace seventy-eight times a day, &c., &c.]

“Don’t these people have staffs? Or staves?”

Related reading
All OCA domestic comedy posts (Pinboard)

[Only the composer in our household would think of the musical plural.]