Psst, David Brooks

I wasn’t going to make this post. But after reading David Brooks’s baffling appraisal of the speech Joe Biden gave last night, here I am.

David Brooks didn’t like the speech. In The New York Times he writes, “I was hoping for something in the spirit of the Harris campaign — ebullient and joyful.”

I noticed ebullient twice in Brooks’s comments during PBS’s coverage of the DNC last night, each time pronounced /EB-yə-lənt/. As Garner’s Modern English Usage notes, that’s a common mispronunciation.

Has David Brooks latched onto this word for use in talking and writing about Kamala Harris? If so, I hope he gets it right. (Perhaps Jonathan Capehart can clue him in.) I will be listening and watching.

[I left a comment about ebullient on the Times piece. Maybe Brooks will see it.]

Firing the librarians

From Inside Higher Ed:

Western Illinois University is laying off all nine of its library faculty — eight of them tenured or on the tenure track — as part of wider efforts to offset a $22 million budget deficit driven by rising operational costs and a 21 percent enrollment drop since fall 2019.

While the university said in an Aug. 9 news release that it’s “made every effort to minimize the impact on students,” the planned elimination of the library faculty by May 2025 has academic librarians both inside and outside the institution questioning how WIU’s library will be able to effectively serve faculty and students in the future.

“It’s quite alarming,” said Leo Lo, president of the national Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL), adding that in addition to assisting faculty in their teaching and research, librarians are especially helpful to first-generation college students finding their footing in higher education. “Without libraries to help them, it may hurt student retention” and recruitment, he said.

But Alisha Looney, a spokesperson for WIU, wrote in an email Friday that the university “will continue to have adequate coverage in the library” after the layoffs.

Western is also closing a library at a branch campus, to be replaced by a service desk at which patrons can put in requests for materials, Monday through Friday, 10:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. It’s all part of “a new vision” for that campus.

Loony, indeed.

Related reading
All OCA library posts (Pinboard)

Calendaring and efforting

Calendaring and efforting ? I learned about them just a couple of days ago, but they’ve been around for a while. Columbia Journalism Review has them covered: “When nouns are turned into verbs.”

What do I think about efforting ? Eff that!

Jackie’s in the house

“Higher and Higher,” playing at the DNC.

[Orange Crate Art is a Jackie Wilson-friendly zone.]

Extra strength

From Rachel Cohen’s A Chance Meeting: American Encounters (New York: New York Review Books, 2024), the story of a present, from Marcel Duchamp to Joseph Cornell:

It was a readymade, “done on the spot.” Cornell was almost beside himself with pleasure at how cleanly and swiftly Duchamp had made his present. He had picked up a red-and-yellow glue carton that said “strength” on one side and, admiring the American phrase, had written “gimme” above it and then signed the whole “Marcel Duchamp,” dated Christmas 1942.

On Saturday morning Elaine and I went for a walk after reading about Cornell and Duchamp. And where a road ended and a path through a meadow began, I saw this tiny Tarot card, 1 3/8″ × 13/16″.

You can see Duchamp’s gift via Google Books.

Related reading
All OCA synchronicity posts (Pinboard)

Hold the hold music

From Letters of Note, a plea to CVS: “Please change your hold music.”

A New Utrecht address

[New Utrecht Hand & Electric Shoe Repairing, 5515 New Utrecht Avenue, Boro Park, Brooklyn, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

Just another establishment in the old neighborhood, just up the avenue from Eddie’s Fish Market. The 5515 address makes several appearances in the newspapers collected at Brooklyn Newsstand. The earliest is grim:

["Wife Dies, Husband, Girl Hurt at Fire.” The Brooklyn Daily Times, June 26, 1916.]

“Unknown cause,” “empty store”: as the article says, the fire was deemed suspicious. Mary Fenis dropped her three children from the third floor to her husband George, who had jumped to the sidewalk. She then jumped, falling on her head and grievously injuring her husband. George Fenis or Feneis wrote to a civic group later in the year to plead for fire escapes on what he called “two-family firetraps”:

[“Women Ask for Fire Protection: Man's Story Leads to Request for New Laws.” The Brooklyn Daily Times, October 5, 1916.]

By 1925, the first floor was a shoe-repair business:

[The Brooklyn Daily Times, November 27, 1925.]

And in 1945 the building was for sale:

[The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, January 28, 1945.]

By 1951, the first floor had become a liquor store:

[“Lone Thug Robs 2 Liquor Stores of $600 Total.” The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, November 10, 1951.]

In 1965, there’s another owner:

[Coney Island Times, February 12, 1965.]

After 1965 the newspapers go dark. Today 5515 is a real estate agency, Gold Realty: “List with Gold and have it sold.”

I chose this tax photograph for the “Ladies & Gents” sign. I wonder if anyone who isn’t reading this post knows of the tragedy that visited this address just over a century ago.

[“Ladies & Gents.”]

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

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.