An elliptical FLOTUS?

The headline for a New York Times review of a biography of Pat Nixon: “A New Biography Attempts to Complicate an Elliptical First Lady.”

When it’s not characterizing a shape, elliptical characterizes a manner of expression. Merriam-Webster:

of, relating to, or marked by ellipsis or an ellipsis

of, relating to, or marked by extreme economy of speech or writing

of or relating to deliberate obscurity (as of literary or conversational style)

And J.I. Rodale’s Synonym Finder:

(all of speech and writing ) economic, terse, laconic, concise, succinct, concentrated, compact, neat

(all of speech and writing ) ambiguous, abstruse, cryptic, obscure, recondite, mysterious

It’s speech or writing that might be elliptical, not a person. I think the word the Times needed here is enigmatic.

[The Synonym Finder (1978) is the work of the strange fellow who founded Prevention magazine and died during a taping of The Dick Cavett Show. I don’t know what accounted for his interest in synonyms. I snagged a copy of The Synonym Finder in a used-book store some years ago. I sometimes rely on it for amusing strings of adjectives to describe Newsday Saturday Stumpers.]

Seeming and appearing

Peter Baker of The New York Times on MSNBC just now, when asked about Donald Trump’s assertion that the Presidential Medal of Freedom, a civilian honor, is “much better” than the the military Medal of Honor, whose recipients are often wounded or dead:

“Yeah, I mean, look, you know, he has continually and repeatedly said things that seem to denigrate military service.”

Seem?

Hearing Baker’s response made me notice the evasion in his paper’s characterization of Trump’s remarks:

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.

Has appeared to?

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Sally R. Stein and Anna Stiga (It’s Really Stan, Stan Again) are the pseudonyms that signal an easier Newsday Saturday Stumper by Stan Newman, the puzzle’s editor. Today’s Stumper might be a bit easier than usual, but not much easier. I found obvious starting points in the northeast: 9-A, six letters, “Sumerian descendants” and 12-D, eight letters, “Un Louis très célébre.” The northeast came together, and so did everything else. The toughest part of the puzzle: the northwest. Brr.

Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:

1-A, eight letters, “Help for drafts.” See what I mean about the northwest? I didn’t know whether to think about beer taps, horses, or manuscripts.

7-D, three letters, “End of many record labels.” Great clue for a minor answer.

8-D, fifteen letters, “Recreates with a roundball.” I like the clash of diction between clue and answer.

15-A, eight letters, “Sticky situation risk.” Pretty Stumper-y.

27-A, three letters, “What dancing rushers celebrate.” Not especially difficult to figure out, but wonderfully defamiliarizing.

29-A, five letters, “Pianist echoing a peninsula.” Has the name ever been clued thusly?

31-A, six letters, “Magic word/ancient hero acronym.” I knew the word but had to look up the acronym after the fact.

32-A, fifteen letters, “Phillumenists’ collection.” Whose collection? What? Huh?

32-D, eight letters, “Whom J-Lo auditioned for, for MTV (1990).” Now here’s a throwback.

41-D, six letters, “Cold comfort.” Terrific clue.

44-D, five letters, “Quit lying.” Two types of ambiguity.

45-D, five letters, “Mathematician echoing a sort of ship.” I knew it had to be _____, but I didn’t know that’s how it’s pronounced.

55-A, eight letters, “What’s on Scrooge McDuck’s beak.” A word I always associate with a certain poem.

My favorite in this puzzle: 3-D, six letters, “They often follow speeches.” I had it on crosses and was baffled, then delighted, when I looked at the answer.

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

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’. ]