Madeline Kripke’s dictionaries

“We don’t really know how many books it is”: Atlas Obscura visits Madeline Kripke’s dictionary collection, now housed at Indiana University. The Kripke collection may be the largest collection of dictionaries ever amassed.

A must-see: two pages from Dobie Gillis: Teenage Slanguage Dictionary.

Recently updated

Words of the year Now with hallucinate and Matilda.

A “Now and Then” surprise

[Click for a larger view.]

A surprise: liner notes inside the sleeve, by the music writer John Harris. They explain, among other things, what’s up with the assemblage on the back cover. It’s the work of an American artist, Chris Giffin, purchased by George Harrison in 1997. Harris writes that Olivia Harrison “recently decided to have a closer look at it”:

“I put it on the mantlepiece,” she says. “Then the phone rang. It’s Paul, and he begins to remind me of this third song with Real Love and Free as a Bird. I said, ‘I remember it.’ He said, ‘It’s called Now and Then.’ I’m standing there with the phone in one hand, looking at the clock that said Now and Then. I was sort of dumbfounded. I said, ‘I think this is George saying it’s OK.’”

Here, from Oregon Art Beat, is a 2010 feature about Chris Giffin and her art. There are many clocks.

“My terrible predicament”

Riding in a carriage, Dr. Matthew-Mighty-grain-of-salt-Dante-O’Connor tells Jenny Petherbridge that God has made him a liar:

Djuna Barnes, Nightwood (1936).

Dr. O’Connor (an unlicensed gynecologist) is the novel’s great talker, a man who knows he should have been born a woman (we would call him trans), a teller of his own troubles, a confessor to his friends, a philosopher of the night. This recounted reconciliation of father and son is the only moment of human reconciliation in Nightwood. And as so often happens in the novel, one character is talking past one another: “Jenny had shrunk into her rug and was not listening.”

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[It doesn’t matter if the doctor said what he said to his father only to comfort him: it’s still a moment of reconciliation.]

Screensavers, lost

I was disappointed to discover today that Yuji Adachi’s Fliqlo screensaver, which turns the screen into a flip clock, no longer works in macOS Sonoma. The Fliqlo website mentions a bug in Sonoma’s screensaver engine.

So I decided to renew my acquaintance with Simon Hey’s Word Clock screensaver, which works — but now uses an inordinate amount of memory. For the first time in ages, I could hear the MacBook Air fan firing up as the screensaver ran. The Activity Monitor showed Word Clock using close to 1GB of RAM.

I then tried two humble built-in screensavers, Drift and Hello, and with each, the fan fired up. I shouldn’t have been surprised: online discussions report enormous amounts of memory use with so-called legacy screensavers. The Apple screensavers named for versions of macOS (Sonoma, Ventura, Monterey) seem to work without problems, but the swirling colors aren’t to my taste. And I wouldn’t dare try one of Sonoma’s new video screensavers.

The simple though unhappy fix, at least for me, is to skip using any screensaver, at least until a Sonoma update fixes the engine trouble.

“I adore ice-cream”

Still in a villa on the Mediterranean. The mysterious caller has identified himself as Mr. Walter Prodger, an American friend of mother’s late husband. Miss Anderson, mother’s companion, has joined mother, daughter Milly, and Mr. Prodger for lunch. Milly has announced that she’d like to go to America — “awfully.”

Katherine Mansfield, “The Doves’ Nest” (1923).

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All OCA Katherine Mansfield posts (Pinboard)

“C'est un très beau Monsieur"

In a villa on the Mediterranean. Two Englishwomen — Milly and her mother — a French servant, and a mysterious caller.

Katherine Mansfield, “The Doves’ Nest” (1923).

Related reading
All OCA Katherine Mansfield posts (Pinboard)

Whom is not calling

The professor in me wants to get this said:

In yesterday’s Newsday Saturday Stumper, the clue “Receptionist’s pronoun” takes the answer WHOM. The answer appears to play on the well-known formula of telephone etiquette: “Whom should I say is calling?” The pronoun who, not whom is what’s appropriate there. I think the puzzle’s constructor, Matthew Sewell, must know that, but not every solver will.

Flipping the sentence arounds makes the right choice clear:

I should say he — not him — is calling.
I should say she — not her — is calling.
I should say they — not them — are calling.
I should say who — not whom — is calling.

“Whom should I say” is a hypercorrection, a mistake that comes about in an effort to avoid a mistake, as when someone says “between you and I” in the mistaken belief that me is always mistaken.

I am trying to remember the last time I spoke to a telephone receptionist. The best I can do is say back in the day.

A missing word

David Skinner tells the story of “the only major expletive left out of Webster’s Third”: “Philip Gove and ‘Our Word’” (The American Scholar ).

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All OCA dictionary posts (Pinboard) : The Story of Ain’t (Skinner’s history of W3)

Tires and skins

[31 Frankfort Street, Manhattan, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

I went looking for a tax photograph of 53–63 Park Row, the now-demolished World Building, whose name was the answer to a clue in yesterday’s Newsday Saturday Stumper: “Where Pulitzer’s Big Apple office was.” The World Building, aka the New York World Building, aka the Pulitzer Building, is amply documented online (for instance), but no tax photograph is available. And for whatever reason, tax photographs of several streets off Park Row are relatively few. But there is a photograph for this building with the tires, right across from the Frankfort Street side of the majestic World.

No. 31 had several lives. William Whitlock, a sea captain, lived there at the end of the eighteenth century. An 1845 directory shows Herman Wendt, a cutter (fabric? leather?), living at no. 31. An 1851 directory shows James Gibson, a tailor, and Louis Madis, a barber, living at this address.

At some point no. 31 must have been repurposed for commerical use. By 1901 the address housed the Fulton Rubber Type, Ink and Pad Manufacturing Company.

[The American Stationer (September 28, 1901). Click for a larger view.]

Frankfort Street was home to many tanners and leather-goods merchants. If you click for a larger tax photograph, you’ll see a name: John F. Kaiser Co. Inc. And there he is in the 1940 Manhattan telephone directory, a dealer in skins:

[Click for a larger view.]

Which doesn’t explain the tires.

What now occupies this space, and much more than this space: One Pace Plaza West, on the campus of Pace University. The World Building was torn down in 1955 to make way for a broadened entrance to the Brooklyn Bridge.

Sources
Doggett's New-York City Directory (1845). The directory distinguishes glass cutters and stonecutters from “cutters.”
The New York City Directory (1851).
Joseph Alfred Scoville, The Old Merchants of New York City (1864).

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More photographs from the NYC Municipal Archives (Pinboard)