Diagramming sentences

At the Public Domain Review, Hunter Dukes writes about “American Grammar: Diagraming Sentences in the 19th Century”:

More than a century before Noam Chomsky popularized the idea of a universal grammar, linguists in the United States began diagramming sentences in an attempt to visualize the complex structure — of seemingly divine origins — at their mother tongue’s core.

Dukes provides many examples of these efforts (with links to the books they’re drawn from). Here is a fairly tame diagram of a syntax tree, from Charles Gauss and B. T. Hodge’s A Comprehensive English Grammar (1890):

[Click for a larger tree, which you must imagine as standing upright.]

Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellog’s streamlined (and soil-less, and bark-less) approach to diagramming sentences — still taught in some schools — is an earlier invention, introduced in Higher Lessons in English (1877). I wonder why anyone would have opted for the ornateness of Gauss–Hodge instead.

Thanks, Steven, for letting me know about this PDR post.

A related post
“We’re supposed to decorate a sentence”

Off the bot

In response to a comment from Matthew Schmeer that describes inventive assignments to keep students from turning in AI-generated writing, I came up with a phrase that I’d like to share: “off the bot,” after “off the grid.”

I am thinking and writing off the bot. Off the bot!

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All OCA AI posts (Pinboard)

“Human interaction might be preferred”

I asked ChatGPT: “What would be some good reasons not to use ChatGPT?” It came through with ten — concerns about accuracy, concerns about accuracy, privacy, bias, and so on — and offered to provide more details. The phrasing in this passage is what most struck me:

Lack of Human Touch: For tasks requiring empathy, emotional intelligence, or nuanced understanding, human interaction might be preferred.

Might be preferred!

Related reading
All OCA AI posts (Pinboard)

[The ways in which I’ve found AI useful to me: creating Alfred workflows and a Pinboard bookmarklet. That’s all.]

Domestic comedy

“What does this guy have his high beam on?”

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All OCA domestic comedy posts (Pinboard)

[Only one headlight. “What does”: not a typo. More like Brooklynese.]

The joys of repetition

Reading a book to a child on a train:

Alice Munro, “To Reach Japan,” in Dear Life: Stories (New York: Vintage, 2012).

Related reading
All OCA Alice Munro posts (Pinboard)

Rainbow Quest, all of it

I just discovered that the complete run of Pete Seeger’s 1965–1966 television series Rainbow Quest is at YouTube.

I watched at least some episodes as a young folkie, when the show must have been in repeats on New York’s Channel 13, and I recall being well-prepared enough to record Reverend Gary Davis’s appearance, holding a cassette recorder’s microphone up to the television. (The other guests for that episode: Donovan and Shawn Phillips). Though I still haven’t seen all episodes, I think that one must be a high point. As is an episode with Paul Cadwell, Mississippi John Hurt, and Hedy West. And for sheer (and painful) human interest, there’s the final episode, with June Carter and Johnny Cash.

The IMDb page for the series has details, episode by episode.

Related reading
All OCA Pete Seeger posts (Pinboard)

Obsolete jobs now obsolete

An article from The Washington Post (gift link): “Social Security to drop obsolete jobs used to deny disability benefits.” An excerpt:

For decades, the Social Security Administration has denied thousands of people disability benefits by claiming they could find jobs that have all but vanished from the U.S. economy — such occupations as nut sorter, pneumatic tube operator and microfilm processor.

On Monday, the agency will eliminate all but a handful of those unskilled jobs from a long-outdated database used to decide who gets benefits and who is denied, ending a practice that advocates have long decried as unfair and inaccurate.

In 2022 I wrote a post about a Washington Post article on this same theme: Nut sorter, dowel inspector, egg processor. I was especially drawn to listing for pen and pencil repairer. See also the work of can reconditioning.

How to use a dictionary as a weapon

George Macready isn’t really a reverend holding a dictionary. He’s Matthew Stoker, a bad guy with a dictionary who’s pretending to be a reverend. Lee Bowman is Gilbert Archer, a newspaper columnist moonlighting as an amateur detective. Both men are looking for the Bibles that hold the answer to the whereabouts of a lost Leonardo painting of Joshua and the city of Jericho. From The Walls Came Tumbling Down (dir. Lothar Mendes, 1946). Click any image for a larger view.

[He’s a rather menacing “reverend,” isn’t he?]

Says Archer, “Joshua led his troops seven times around the city of Jericho. Remember, Reverend? Did you look on page seven of this dictionary?” Get the dictionary, riffle through the pages, point to something, and push the dictionary into your opponent’s face. Ow.


That's a Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary. Two giveaways: the cover design (visible in the first screenshot) and the frontispiece of Noah Webster (visible in the third). Archer is holding the dictionary upside-down, with its thumb notches slanting the wrong way. No matter: for his purposes, upside-down is fine.

Related reading
All OCA dictionary posts (Pinboard)

Edith Boebert, Lauren Prickley

[Andrea Martin as SCTV station manager Edith Prickley. Click for a larger view.]

Every time I see Lauren Boebert’s face in the news, I try to figure out who it is she looks like. And now I have figured it out. It’s Edith Prickley. And I see that the Internets figured it out first.

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[No Boebert picture here: I don’t want her face in these pages. For the reader who suggested that an apostrophe is missing from Internets: that's the humorous plural of Internet, which I sometimes prefer to the singular.]

O Pioneer!

[263 Bowery, Manhattan, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for an enormous view.]

The Pioneer Restaurant makes a brief appearance in A.J. Liebling's “Bowery Boom,” in Back Where I Come From (1938):

Five cents pays for a shave at the barber college. For 20 cents the Boweryite may have “shave, massage, shampoo, singe and hair tonic,” just like a 46th Street bookmaker. Ten cents will buy “pig snouts, vegetables, potatoes and coffee, bread or rolls,” at the Pioneer Restaurant, 263, and 15 cents will buy an even more elaborate spread at Minder’s Restaurant.

If you click on the photograph, you’ll be able to read at least most of the Pioneer menu. And you’ll be able to better see three ghosts.

This tax photograph reminds me of Berenice Abbott’s 1935 photograph of the Blossom Restaurant at 103 Bowery. There’s also a 1937 Abbott photograph of a Pioneer Restaurant on West Third Street (64, not 60 as the page with the photograph says). The tax photograph of that corner shows the Pure Food Restaurant. Perhaps the Pioneer had moved to the Bowery by the time the Liebling wrote that piece. Or perhaps the Pioneer on West Third was a Bowery sibling, or an unrelated establishment.

In 2007, the building at 263 Bowery was still recognizable as itself. By 2011, everything had changed.

Here, before we leave the Bowery, is a barber school, 15¢ for a shave and a haircut.

Related reading
More photographs from the NYC Municipal Archives (Pinboard)

[Post title with apologies to Walt Whitman and Willa Cather.]