Computers and butterflies

Italo Calvino, from “The Tale of the Forest’s Revenge,” in The Castle of Crossed Destinies, trans. William Weaver (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979).

The Decameron-like premise for this work: a group of travelers who have lost the ability to speak tell their stories by means of the tarot deck. The passage above is the narrator’s interpretation of The Moon.

Related reading
Four passages from If on a winter’s night a traveler

Hallmark censors Frasier

As our household makes its way through Frasier, we listen closely for the missing words. The Hallmark Channel bleeps ass, balls, bastard, bitch, and butt. Buncha prigs! Yet the overtly bawdy often stands, as when Niles Crane reports a typo in the advertisement he placed for his Jungian practice. From “Love Bites Dog,” (September 24, 1996):

Niles Crane. Hung specialist. Servicing individuals, couples, groups. Satisfaction guaranteed. Tell me where it hurts.

You can watch the scene at YouTube.

The most awkward excision thus far, from “High Crane Drifter” (12th March 1996), Niles speaking:

“Oh, for God’s sake, Frasier, don’t waste your breath on this hairy, knuckle-dragging, mouth-breathing troglodyte who’s probably the only male in existence who suffers from envy.”

Hallmark apparently cuts scenes as well. See this Reddit thread: Damn you, Hallmark channel! And if it doesn’t go without saying, everything is a tad speeded up to make more room for commercials.

A related post
Hallmark is a bleep

Recently updated

Emporia, firing Enrollment at Emporia State University drops sharply. It appears that students aren’t keen on attending a school whose administration engages in the wholesale firing of faculty.

Sardines in the news

From Christie’s, a Picasso ceramic, now sold: Trois sardines.

In The New York Times, “How TikTok Fueled the Tinned Fish Trend.” With a dazzling photograph of the Times Square store The Fantastic World of the Portuguese Sardine.

Thanks to Chris at Dreamers Rise and Stephen at pencil talk for catching these items.

A thingy

[“Such Language!” Zippy, September 27, 2023. Click for a larger view.]

In today’s Zippy, Mr. Toad tells Claude Funston that th’ thingy has no name. But what does th’ toad know? It’s called a bread clip, among other things. My dad once repurposed one that gave us a happy surprise.

Merriam-Webster traces thingy (“something that is hard to classify or whose name is unknown or forgotten : thing, thingamajig”) to 1927. The OED has it as “originally and chiefly Scottish” for “a little thing. Also more generally: a thing (usually with some suggestion of small size).” Its first citation, from 1787: “In Scotlands familliar diccion evvery littel thing iz a thingy, annimate or inannimate.” The OED traces a colloquial meaning (“= thingummy”) to 1927: “Today the fairy hand of Judith burst the wood thingy that runs along under the sink.”

*

One’s attention goes where it goes. I got so caught up in thingy that I read right past dingus. Merriam-Webster: “an often small article whose common name is unknown or forgotten : gadget, doodad,” with a first appearance in 1873. And a later American slang meaning: “a dim-witted, silly, or foolish person ➝ often used in a joking or friendly way.” M-W has the word coming from Dutch and German: “Dutch dinges, probably from German Dings, from genitive of Ding thing, from Old High German.”

And now I recall the hilarity that Ding an sich brought to my grad-school days.

The OED definition:

colloquial (chiefly North American and South African). A thing, esp. a gadget or contraption, or (less commonly) a person, whose name the speaker or writer does not know, cannot remember, or does not care to specify precisely; a ”thingummy.”

Other meanings: “the penis,” “a silly or inept person.” The OED suggests multiple origins: “Partly a borrowing from Dutch. Probably also partly a borrowing from Afrikaans.” Green’s Dictionary of Slang takes the word further.

I would like to have seen a Dashiell Hammett citation in the OED. But M-W has it covered, with a citation from Mark McGurl:

In his [Dashiell Hammett’s] writings of the period from 1924 to 1952, “dingus” signifies, variously, a magician’s prop, a typewriter, a short story, a novel, and an elusive artifact, a black bird better known as the Maltese Falcon.

Related reading
All OCA Zippy posts (Pinboard)

A pocket notebook sighting

[From Ivy (dir. Sam Wood, 1947). Click for a larger view.]

Police Inspector Orpington (Cedric Hardwicke) and his pocket notebook mean business.

More notebook sightings
All the King’s Men : Angels with Dirty Faces : The Bad and the Beautiful : Ball of Fire : The Big Clock : Bombshell : The Brasher Doubloon : The Case of the Howling Dog : Cat People : Caught : City Girl : Crossing Delancey : Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne : Dead End : Deep Valley : The Devil and Miss Jones : Dragnet : Extras : Eyes in the Night : The Face Behind the Mask : The Fearmakers : The Flight That Disappeared : A Foreign Affair : Foreign Correspondent : Four in a Jeep : Fury : The Girl in Black Stockings : Homicide : The Honeymooners : The House on 92nd Street : I See a Dark Stranger : If I Had a Million : L’Innocent : Journal d’un curé de campagne : Kid Glove Killer : The Last Laugh : Le Million : The Lodger : Lost Horizon : M : Ministry of Fear : Mr. Holmes : Mr. Klein : Murder at the Vanities : Murder by Contract : Murder, Inc. : The Mystery of the Wax Museum : Naked City : The Naked Edge : Now, Voyager : The Palm Beach Story : Perry Mason : Pickpocket : Pickup on South Street : Portland Exposé : Pushover : Quai des Orfèvres : The Racket : Railroaded! : Red-Headed Woman : Rififi : La roue : Route 66 : The Scarlet Claw : Sleeping Car to Trieste : The Small Back Room : The Sopranos : Spellbound : Stage Fright : State Fair : A Stranger in Town : Stranger Things : Sweet Smell of Success : Time Table : T-Men : To the Ends of the Earth : 20th Century Women : Union Station : Vice Squad : Walk East on Beacon! : What Happened Was . . . : Where the Sidewalk Ends : The Woman in the Window : You Only Live Once : Young and Innocent

Uh-oh, a Marxist

From today’s decision in Donald Trump’s bank-fraud case, page 21:

As detailed infra , the documents here clearly contain fraudulent valuations that defendants used in business, satisfying OAG’s burden to establish liability as a matter of law against defendants. Defendants’ respond that: the documents do not say what they say; that there is no such thing as “objective” value; and that, essentially, the Court should not believe its own eyes.⁹

And the footnote:

⁹ As Chico Marx, playing Chicolini, says to Margaret Dumont, playing Mrs. Gloria Teasdale, in “Duck Soup,” “well, who ya gonna believe, me or your own eyes?”

[Chico is at YouTube.]

Phone etiquette

[Ann Rutherford and Tom Conway in Two O’Clock Courage (dir. Anthony Mann, 1945. Click for a larger view.]

The Washington Post has tips about phone etiquette in our times (gift link). Useful stuff.

I’m not sure about the suggestion to stay still for video calls: “When people, especially kids, move around during a video call, it can be disorienting for the person on the other end.” It can also be charming, if, say, a grandchild is carrying the phone while walking from room to room to show you stuff. But the Post makes allowances: “The closer you are to someone, the less the rules apply.”

[No, the people in the movie are not talking to one another on pay phones. That would be, as they say, childish and immature, and best reserved for kids.]

James Joyce holiday cards

The Reader’s Catalog, a New York Review of Books enterprise, is offering James Joyce holiday cards, six for $29.95. The card has an illustration of a man in suspenders looking dreamily at the night sky. Next to the picture, a partial sentence from “The Dead,” source unidentified:

His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe.

So cozy. But look at the entire (final) sentence of “The Dead”:

His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

Not cozy. Not cozy at all!

Random House’s Proust gift tags and note cards (no longer available) also took statements out of context and wildly distorted their meanings.

Awkward metaphor of the day

“Nikki Haley has tried to straddle it, and all she’s gotten is strained muscles”: Claire McCaskill on MSNBC just now.

Related reading
All OCA metaphor posts (Pinboard)

[“It”: the line between Trumpism and conservatism.]