Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper, by Matthew Sewell, left me in a quarrelsome mood — not just because I missed by one letter but because the fit between some clues and their answers is awfully strained.

Four clue-and-answer pairs I especially liked:

4-D, nine letters, “Part of the Doctor Zhivago score.” LARASTHEM?

18-A, nine letters, “Quadruped symbol of Idaho.” Weird and kinda wonderful.

34-A, fifteen letters, “Rivalry with rarefied ESPN ratings.” I have no idea what’s on ESPN beyond “sports,” and no idea what rarefied ratings are (uh, high ones?), but I liked seeing the answer.

42-D, five letters, “They’re often canvas-covered.” Nice misdirection.

Occasions for quarrels:

16-D, thirteen letters, “Starts of Rhapsody in Blue performances.” A giveaway, sure, and my starting point in this puzzle. But starts here makes no sense. Performances of Tristan und Isolde don’t begin with overtures; they begin with the overture. Performances of Hamlet don’t begin with Act Ones. Not a great clue, not a great answer. As the answer is already a giveaway, I’ll suggest what I think is a better clue: “Goodman productions.” Or trickier: “Shaw productions.”

26-A, four letters, “Workbook portmanteau.” What is a workbook portmanteau? A word in a workbook? A word for a workbook? Not a great clue: it’s comparable to calling brunch a silverware portmanteau.

48-A, eight letters, “Approach incautiously.” Approach implies movement toward a literal or figurative destination. The answer here involves no destination, only sustained movement at a relatively fixed distance. Not a great clue.

52-D, three letters, “Waffle.” No. Just no. This answer never or virtually never appears on its own to mean waffle. Elaine suggests a much better clue: “Part of a waffle.”

The final letter of the crossing answers for these clues messed me up:

41-D, five letters, “Hold nothing back, these days.”

56-A, four letters, “Meeting place.”

I had a strained answer for the latter, but no idea about the first. But now I know something I might do, “these days.”

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

Joe and me and I

From yet another e-mail from the Biden-Harris campaign inviting me to make a contribution and win the chance to have a cup of coffee:

[“The chance to meet Joe and me.” Click for a larger view.]

Ah, thought I, they’re paying attention to pronouns. I thought they’d gotten it together when my daughter Rachel pointed me to a November 29 tweet: “Have a cup of joe with Joe and me.”

But the next paragraph of today’s e-mail repeats an error from a November e-mail: “One of Joe and my favorite parts about being on the campaign trail.”

Sheesh.

And three paragraphs later:

[“With Joe and I.” Click for a larger view.]

Sheesh and sheesh again.

I e-mailed about the first e-mail in November. And yes, I’m going to contribute at some point. But I can’t be moved by this kind of appeal. Who writes this stuff? And who approves it?

*

December 30: The hits just keep on coming. In today’s e-mail: “I have one more important request: to ask that you consider contributing to support President Biden and I ahead of the last public fundraising deadline of the year.”

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[This post is no. 117 in a series dedicated to improving stray bits of public prose.]

Horizons

Helen Keller, The World I Live In (1908).

Also from this book
On lines

Forecast, *forecasted

[From Apple’s Weather widget. Click for a larger view.]

I noticed the verb yesterday. Garner’s Modern English Usage:

forecast > forecast > forecast. So inflected. *Forecasted is a solecism that spread during the 20th century and continues to appear.

Bryan Garner puts *forecasted at Stage 2 on the GMEU Language-Change Index: “Widely shunned.” He has the ratio of forecast that to *forecasted that in print as 6:1.

But seeing *forecasted as wrong is likely to become to increasingly difficult if one sees it again and again on a screen. “Light rain expected” might solve the problem, as “Light rain forecast” looks, at least to me, like an odd use of the noun forecast.

[Yesterday was rain. Today it’s snow.]

Bravery!

“Still, millions choosing to brave America’s airports”: a reporter on NBC Nightly News tonight.

[Travel is sometimes a matter of bravery. But sometimes not.]

Another meaning of snail mail

Reading Sarah Ogilvie’s The Dictionary People made me recall my one submission to the Oxford English Dictionary: snail mail, meaning not mail sent via a postal service but mail addressed without a ZIP Code. I found this use of snail mail in 2011, in a 1968 Life advertisement, and right away, I notified the dictionary.

Crickets.

The OED defines snail mail thusly:

(a) colloquial mail or post which takes a long time to be delivered; (b) Computing slang (originally U.S.) the physical delivery of mail, as by the postal service, considered as slow in comparison to electronic mail; a letter, etc., sent by post.

The dictionary has a 1929 (pre-ZIP) citation from The Indianapolis Star:

Snail mail ... Edward Ranton has just received a statement of account which the Wild Automobile Agency here mailed nearly three years ago.

All other citations, beginning in 1982, are about mail mail, as opposed to e-mail. Nothing about ZIP Codes.

Of course snail mail as a name for ZIP-less mail never caught on. But it amuses me to know that there was snail mail before there was snail mail.

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The Dictionary People

Sarah Ogilvie. The Dictionary People: The Unsung Heroes Who Created the Oxford English Dictionary. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2023. x + 370 pp. $30.

I should prefer that my biographer should have to say, “Oxford never made him a Fellow or a D.C.L., and his country never recognized his work, but he worked on all the same, believing in his work and his duty.”

Sir James A.H. Murray (1837–1915), primary editor of the Oxford English Dictionary (1879–1915), in a 1908 letter

“He worked on all the same”: so too did those whom Sarah Ogilvie calls the Dictionary People, the worldwide volunteer assembly of readers who between 1858 and 1928 became Readers for the OED, sending in quotations from their reading on 4 × 6 slips of paper for all words that struck them, in Murray’s description, as “rare, obsolete, old-fashioned, new, peculiar, or used in a peculiar way.” The OED was a great work of crowdsourcing, “the Wikipedia of the nineteenth century,” as Sarah Ogilvie calls it, the product of a “radical and open process.” But not absolutely open: Murray himself thought that extracting quotations was the only work of value that what he called “the average amateur” could manage. Above Readers were Subeditors, who sorted bundles of slips, and Specialists, who advised on etymologies, meanings, and usage. And at the heart of things sat or stood Murray and his assistants, working in the Scriptorium, the iron shed behind Murray’s house where the Dictionary (Ogilvie always capitalizes it) achieved its form.

Sarah Ogilvie has a long and intimate knowledge of the OED, having worked as an editor and having written both a doctoral dissertation and a previous book about the Dictionary, Words of the World: A Global History of the OED (2012). And she has visited the site where Murray’s Scriptorium stood. It’s fitting that she had the extraordinary luck to happen upon the materials in the OED archive that made The Dictionary People possible: three of James Murray’s address books and another three that belonged to the earlier editor Frederick Furnivall, with names and addresses of Readers — three thousand of them — and detailed, sometimes cryptic notations about their work. The Readers were a various lot: autodidacts and members of learned societies, vicars and murderers, inventors and poets, men and women with all manner of expertise and interests. How to write about some of them? Alphabetically, course, in chapters from “Archaeologist” to “Zealots” — the zealots being Murray, Chris Collier (a prolific contributor of slips in our time), and, I think, Ogilvie herself.

We meet some extraordinary people in these chapters. Alexander John Ellis (D: “Dictionary Word Nerds”), a gentleman scholar, expert in music, mathematics, and pronunciation, carried in a twenty-eight-pocket coat named Dreadnought letters and papers, a knife sharpener, a corkscrew, and a scone — among many other items. He is said to have been one model for Henry Higgins. Eleanor Marx (H: “Hopeless Contributors”), a writer, translator, and socialist (and Karl’s daughter), sent in words, not quotations, and expected to be paid for her work. William Herbert-Jones (N: “New Zealanders”) awed unsuspecting British audiences with his fanciful magic-lantern presentation of “New Zealand, Wonderland of the World,” whose flora and fauna included non-existent plants and non-existent fifteen-foot-tall birds. Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper (Q: “Queers”), an aunt and niece in a decades-long lesbian relationship, wrote poetry and plays together using the penname Michael Field, whose work is quoted in the OED more than two hundred times thanks to other Readers reading “his” work.

The research that went into The Dictionary People — the work of Ogilvie, student assistants, librarians, and archivists — is of staggering proportions. And at times, the details and divagations become overwhelming. There are countless inventories of words whose presence in the Dictionary we owe to a particular Reader; brief asides about words absent from or present in the 1928 Dictionary (absent: appendicitis, condom; present: feminism, suffragette), and lengthier discussions of varied topics: the scientific observation of weather, spelling reform (“had a long tauk widh him about foanetiks”), and the “Dictionary War” between Noah Webster and Joseph Worcester. There are details that charm: for instance, the unattributed sample sentences with which Murray marked the birth of a daughter. “As fine a child as you will see” illustrates the article a following an adjective; “The new arrival is a little girl” illustrates arrival. Knowing a bit about rabbit holes, I know the importance of knowing when to stop. But I understand the impulse to keep going, for it’s unlikely that there will be another book about the Dictionary’s Readers.

Ogilvie describes James Murray — a Scottish Nonconformist who left school at fourteen — as a perennial outsider at Oxford. In the year before his death, the university at last awarded him an honorary doctorate. And now the Dictionary’s Readers, too, have had their work recognized.

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[D.C.L: Doctor of Civil Law, I think. There are no notes in The Dictionary People : I found the source for “I should prefer” in K.M. Elisabeth Murray’s Caught in the Web of Words: James A.H. Murray and the Oxford English Dictionary (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001). Ms. Murray (1909–1998) was James Murray’s granddaughter.]

“Writer-y”

Analog Zits : “Doing it this way feels more ‘writer-y.’”

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“The loop”

[From Sweet November (dir. Robert Ellis Miller, 1968). Click for a larger view.]

In a hardware store with her latest project, Charlie Blake (Anthony Newley), Sarah Deever (Sandy Dennis) spots it:

“Oh — oh there you are.”

“What? What is it?”

“The loop. That’s an expert. When you have striped overhalls and a loop on the side like that, that’s it, that’s the whole show. That’s an expert, a master handyman. You know what you can hang in that loop? Anything — a hammer, a chisel, a ruler, a stick. It simply does not matter, as long as you have a loop. That’s it.”

You can find this lovely, kooky scene, from a lovely, kooky, poignant movie, at YouTube.

I’m a big fan of pants with a loop, namely B324, Carhartt’s Relaxed Fit Twill Utility Work Pant[s], the pant[s] formerly known as Washed Twill Dungarees. They have a loop, yes, and if I were a carpenter, and if I had a hammer, I’d keep that hammer in the loop. But the reason I like B324 is that the pocket on the right leg is the perfect place to carry an iPhone.

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[I wonder if “overhalls” (a regionalism) was Sandy Dennis’s embellishment.]

Helen Keller on lines

Helen Keller writes that what she calls beauty is “largely derived from the flow of curved and straight lines which is over all things”:

Helen Keller, The World I Live In (1908).

The book is in the public domain, available in print form from Google Books, the Internet Archive, and Project Gutenberg, and in audio and Braille from the Library of Congress. Our household has it in its New York Review Books edition.