Freedom and Honor

I was waiting to see if this story would ever show up in The New York Times. It did, finally, this afternoon:

Former President Donald J. Trump on Thursday described the Presidential Medal of Freedom, which honors civilians, as being “much better” than the Medal of Honor, because service members who receive the nation’s highest military honor are often severely wounded or dead.

Mr. Trump’s remarks follow a yearslong series of comments in which he has appeared to mock, attack or express disdain for service members who are wounded, captured or killed, even as he portrays himself as the ultimate champion of the armed forces.

At a campaign event at his golf club in Bedminster, N.J., billed as a discussion about fighting antisemitism, Mr. Trump recounted how he awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Miriam Adelson, the Israeli-American widow of the casino magnate Sheldon Adelson. Ms. Adelson, who attended the event, is among his top donors.

“It’s actually much better, because everyone gets the Congressional Medal of Honor, that’s soldiers, they’re either in very bad shape because they’ve been hit so many times by bullets, or they’re dead.” Mr. Trump said, using a common misnomer for the military award. “She gets it, and she’s a healthy, beautiful woman.”

Standing in front of six American flags, Mr. Trump added that the honors were “rated equal.”

How to send a telegram

A Chicago-to-Los Angeles train pulls up to a station for a brief stop. Sandwiches, coffee, and telegrams await. From The Narrow Margin (dir. Richard Fleischer, 1952). Click any image for a larger view.

[Det. Sgt. Walter Brown (Charles McGraw) walks into the Western Union office. That guy reading a newspaper: one Joseph Kemp (David Clarke).]

[It’s always busy.]

[Composing the message. Don’t even think of stealing that pencil.]

[All done.]

[The only problem is that bad guys like Kemp also know how to send telegrams.]

Related reading
All OCA telegram posts (Pinboard)

Old Bay

“I admit there’s nothing I’d like more than for Old Bay to take over the world”: in The New Yorker, Casey Cep writes about what she calls “the greatest condiment in America.” There’s also a recipe for Mr. Keith’s Crab Soup.

[In the recipe, “mixed vegetables” is a tad vague. A cursory search suggests celery, corn, carrots, green beans, lima beans, onions, and potatoes as among the possibilities.]

How to improve writing (no. 125)

Another sentence in need of repair, this one from The Washington Post, about Donald Trump’s repeated references to Hannibal Lecter:

He typically mentions the fictional serial killer in the context of immigration, claiming without evidence that migrants are coming in from insane asylums and mental institutions and often using dehumanizing language.

I tried out this sentence in the Orange Crate Art test kitchens, where it met with puzzlement. The false parallelism of coming and using is the problem. It’s so easy to fix:

He typically mentions the fictional serial killer in the context of immigration, dehumanizing migrants and claiming without evidence that they are coming in from insane asylums and mental institutions.

Related reading
All OCA How to improve writing posts (Pinboard)

[This post is no. 125 in a series dedicated to improving stray bits of professional public prose.]

How to improve writing (no. 124)

My son Ben pointed me to a awkward-sounding sentence in The New York Times. It’s about Nancy Pelosi’s friendship with Joe Biden:

What she did not say is that you can’t make friends of 50 years when you are in your ninth decade, the kind who knew you way back when.

Is this sentence as oddly phrased as Ben thinks it is? I think so. The two not s at the start are confusing, at least for a moment. And the kind falls strangely after ninth decade.

What I think this sentence wants to say is something like this:

What she left unsaid is that you can’t begin fifty-year-long friendships when you’re in your eighties.

Related reading
All OCA How to improve writing posts (Pinboard)

[This post is no. 124 in a series dedicated to improving stray bits of professional public prose.]

Writing on a train

I knew I’d seen it somewhere in a movie. Here’s a train with a writing desk for passenger use. The desk accessory and the drawer below no doubt hold stationery.

[From The Narrow Margin (dir. Richard Fleischer, 1952). Click for a larger desk.]

Possessive forms of Harris and Walz

Harris’ and Walz’s? Or Harris’s and Walz’s? “Grammar geeks are in overdrive,” says a New York Times article, which presents the choice as “apostrophe hell.” Not really. The best solution is to add ’s to make each name possessive.

Bryan Garner looks at Harris and Walz in today’s LawProse Lesson, “Possessive Anomalies.” The AP Stylebook, he points out, would have the possessive forms as Harris’ and Walz’s. But:

The better policy, followed by The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, is to reject the AP rule on this point and to follow instead the rule specified by The Chicago Manual of Style (followed by most book publishers). Just add ’s to any singular noun to make the possessive.

I’ll add that Chicago recommends ’s even for names from antiquity, which are often treated as exceptions: Euripides’s, Jesus’s.

Garner adds another reason to follow the Chicago rule. Both Harris’ and Harris’s are pronounced with an additional s, and with the Chicago rule, “what you see is what you get.” Though that wouldn’t be the case with Euripides’s.

The Chicago Manual of Style is a reference conspiciously missing from the Times survey of apostrophizing. As is Garner’s Modern English Usage.

[This latest LawProse Lesson is not yet online. I trust that it will soon be available here. You can subscribe to the (free) e-mails here. For the unusual exceptions to ’s, see Chicago 7.20–22. The plural possessives of Harrises and Walzes: Harrises’ and Walzes’. ]

WCBS Newsradio 880 to disappear

After fifty-seven years, WCBS Newsradio 880 is going off the air. Taking its place: ESPN New York.

One of the strange pleasures of driving late at night in downstate Illinois is pulling in WCBS 880 or WINS 1010. I always like hearing about traffic and weather from a distant land. You can still listen to WCBS 880 online, while it lasts.

WCBS newstime: 10:34. (It’s Eastern.)

Siamese connections

[“Pipe Down!” Zippy, August 13, 2024.]

Today’s Zippy honors a bit of urban design: the Siamese connection. Here’s a sampling, along with an explanation.

Attention, Zippy: “th’ 1860s” seems to be more accurate.

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Earworms

Last Thursday’s word from Anu Garg’s A.Word.A.Day was earworm :

1. A catchy song or tune that keeps involuntarily repeating in one’s mind.

2. An agricultural pest commonly known as corn earworm, of the species Helicoverpa zea or Helicoverpa armigera.

I did not want to call attention to this word last week, as I had an pernicious earworm raging: the Jardiance jingle. I dared not do anything to provoke it. But when my son asked me where “Hi-de-ho” came from, Cab Calloway’s “Minnie the Moocher” stepped up and kicked that other worm out before it got to my brain. Hi-de-hi-de-hi-de-hi.

Click on either of the Jardiance links at your own risk. They’re really swell.