[3 1/2″ × 1 1/2″. Click for a larger view.]
I found one of these slips in 2019, nestled amid (where else?) the sweet potatoes in Aldi. I found another earlier this week, sporting a new seal, the signature of a section manager instead of a director, and “Plant Industries Division,” plural. But the slip remains hyphen-free.
More about hyphens
Bad hyphens, unhelpful abbreviations : “Every generation hyphenates the way it wants to” : “Fellow-billionaires” : Got hyphens? : The Hammacher Schlemmer crazy making hyphen shortage problem : Living on hyphens : Mr. Hyphen and e-mail : Mr. Hyphen and Mr. Faulkner : One more from Mr. Hyphen : The opposite of user-friendly : Phrasal-adjective punctuation
[Lest you think I’m Mr. Hyphen: he’s the title character in Edward N. Teall’s Meet Mr. Hyphen (And Put Him in His Place) (1937).]
Thursday, May 16, 2024
Weevil- and hyphen-free
Perhaps the best words I’ll read today
“MOUSE CAUGHT”: on the side of a Tomcat Kill & Contain Mouse Trap. I had to weigh our two traps on a postal scale to make sure that one held a mouse.
A post with a mouse in it
“HOME SWEET HOME”
[In the thirty-three years we’ve lived in our house we’ve had four mice, one at a time, two killed, two found and released.]
Wednesday, May 15, 2024
Shrinking Trump
Cognitive decline + personality disorder = Shrinking Trump, a new podcast, available from the usual purveyors. Drs. John Gartner and Harry Segal plan to chart, week by week, the declining wellness of the presumptive Republican nominee. Highly recommended.
I have one criticism: too much laughter. It’s possible, sometimes, to see moments in a loved one’s decline with a stoic sense of humor. But with a country and a world in the balance, there’s nothing funny about Donald Trump’s decline. Turning his gaffes and rants into comedy (as on late-night television) helps to make it all seem acceptable.
What John said
“ ‘I Dig a Pygmy,’ by Charles Hawtrey and the Deaf Aids”: after all these years, I discovered by chance who Charles Hawtrey was. John says his name in the bit that precedes the Beatles song “Two of Us.”
Related reading
All OCA Beatles posts (Pinboard)
[“Deaf aid”: British for “hearing aid,” and supposedly the Beatle name for an amp.]
Handwriting vs. typing
Old news by now, I’d say, but still news: “Why writing by hand beats typing for thinking and learning” (NPR):
Both handwriting and typing involve moving our hands and fingers to create words on a page. But handwriting, it turns out, requires a lot more fine-tuned coordination between the motor and visual systems. This seems to more deeply engage the brain in ways that support learning.Related reading
All OCA handwriting posts (Pinboard)
Tuesday, May 14, 2024
“Mister”
NBC Nightly News: it’s galling to hear Laura Jarrett call Michael Cohen “Cohen” and call Donald Trump “Mister Trump,” every damn time. Too much deference.
Alice Munro (1931-2024)
The writer Alice Munro has died at the age of ninety-two. From the New York Times obituary, about Munro’s response to an interviewer about being awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature:
Still groggy when interviewed by the CBC, Ms. Munro admitted that she’d forgotten that the prize was to be awarded that day, calling it “a splendid thing to happen,” adding, “more than I can say.”Related reading
Struggling to control her emotions, she reflected on her success and what it might mean for literature. “My stories have gotten around quite remarkably for short stories,” she told the interviewer. “I would really hope that this would make people see the short story as an important art, not something you play around with until you got a novel written.”
All OCA Alice Munro posts (Pinboard)
Redbud and sky
[Click for larger leaves.]
The solar storm gave us a sky dark as night. Because it was night, and night is dark, even when seen via cameras, which are said to pick up more light. Our cameras picked up more dark. O dark dark dark, as the poet said.
Much more attractive is the sky seen through the leaves of our redbud tree.
Paul Berman on slogans
Paul Berman was a key figure in anti-war protests at Columbia University in 1968. He recalls chanting, “Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh, the NLF is going to win!” Here he comments on slogans in use in contemporary protests. From an interview with The Chronicle of Higher Education:
Those slogans are horrifying. People will say that the chants are calls for the human rights of Palestinians. And people will say that in chanting those slogans that’s what they mean. But this is an example of bad faith.Berman blames professors, not students. An opinion piece published in The Washington Post explains why.
Bad faith is when you don’t like the truth so you lie about it. Then you lie about having lied about it. You might even convince yourself that in lying about lying you’re not lying. That’s bad faith. It’s a twisted consciousness. We’re seeing a mass movement for a twisted consciousness.
The real meaning of the “river to the sea” is that the state of Israel should not exist, that 50 percent of the world’s population of Jews should be rendered stateless. And the real meaning of “globalize the intifada” is that there should be a globalization of the events that introduced the word “intifada” to the world, namely the intifada of circa 2001, which was a mass movement to commit random acts of murderous terror. But people don’t want to acknowledge that. They get red in the face denying that’s the case. But they can’t explain why the students want to chant these things. The students want to chant these things, of course, because these slogans are transgressive. But no one wants to say what the transgression is because it’s too horrible. So we’re having a mass euphemism event: Horrible things are being advocated by people who deny that they’re advocating it.
Here, also from the Chronicle, is an article about a course at Johns Hopkins that moves beyond sloganeering: “Yes, Students Can Have a Reasoned Debate about Israel–Hamas.”
Related posts
Current events : A “Day of Resistance” toolkit : Nihilism in disguise
