Another word for today: ineluctable

It’s Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Day:

ineluctable \in-ih-LUK-tuh-bul\ adjective
: not to be avoided, changed, or resisted : inevitable

*

Like drama, wrestling was popular in ancient Greece and Rome. “Wrestler,” in Latin, is “luctator,” and “to wrestle” is “luctari.” “Luctari” also has extended senses — “to struggle,” “to strive,” or “to contend.” “Eluctari” joined “e-” (“ex-”) with “luctari,” forming a verb meaning “to struggle clear of.” “Ineluctabilis” brought in the negative prefix “in-” to form an adjective describing something that cannot be escaped or avoided. English speakers borrowed the word as “ineluctable” around 1623. Another word that has its roots in “luctari” is “reluctant.” “Reluctari” means “to struggle against” — and someone who is “reluctant” resists or holds back.

Ineluctable is a word I know from and always associate with James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922). The word begins the “Proteus” episode, as Stephen Dedalus wrestles with the nature of reality:

Ineluctable modality of the visible: at least that if no more, thought through my eyes. Signatures of all things I am here to read, seaspawn and seawrack, the nearing tide, that rusty boot. Snotgreen, bluesilver, rust: coloured signs.

[“Signatures of all things I am here to read”: from Jakob Böhme (1575–1624), mystic and theologian.]

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Word of the day: artificer (Another word from Joyce)
Bandbox (Other words, other works of lit)

Prepend?

[Say what?]

Poking around in the Lists options in TextEdit, the text-editor / word-processor that comes with every Mac, I was baffled by this drop-down box. What might it mean to “Prepend enclosing list marker”?

Prepend, I immediately discovered, is unmentioned in TextEdit’s Help file, which has little to say about lists at all. The word appears in neither the Mac’s New Oxford American Dictionary nor Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate. In Webster’s Third New International, the word means “consider, premeditate.” It’s the Oxford English Dictionary for the win, supplementing the word’s older meanings — “To weigh up mentally, ponder, consider; to premeditate” — with a more recent one: “trans. To add at the beginning, to prefix, prepose; esp. to add or append (a character, string, file, etc.) at the front of an existing string, file, etc.”

Further digging: Apple’ documentation says that
NSTextListPrependEnclosingMarker “Specifies that a nested list should include the marker for its enclosing superlist before its own marker.” One software developer notes, dryly, “We are confident that someone will find this useful.”

Well, I have: I’ve made a post about it. But I’ve made various lists, with and without the box checked, and I still cannot figure out what an enclosing list marker is and what difference prepending one might make. I wonder if any TextEdit user does.

Update, 10:39 a.m.: Someone does! An explanation may be found in the comments. Thanks, Arne.

Movie recommendation: Catfish

I recommend Catfish. I also recommend reading no reviews, watching no trailers, asking no questions of anyone who’s seen it. Go see Catfish!

Sparky Anderson on language

Steve Rushin remembers baseball manager Sparky Anderson:

“I truly don’t know the language,” Sparky once told me. “I wish I could know the difference between a noun and a pronoun and an adverb and a verb, but I don’t know, and you know, I don’t wanna know. Why do you have to know English? It's like ‘two.’ There‘s three ‘twos’! There’s tee-oh, there’s tee-double-ya-oh, and there’s tee-double-oh! Three twos! Now, if I put any one of those down in a letter, you know which one it is I’m talkin’ about. It’s like ‘there’ and ‘their.’ What’s the difference, as long as you know there’s a there there."

Former Tigers, Reds manager Sparky Anderson had own language (Sports Illustrated)

Sometimes, alas, there is no there there.

On One Morning in Maine

Elaine Fine has written a beautiful post on the crucial book of her childhood, Robert McCloskey’s One Morning in Maine: Surrogacy and Wishes.

Fake ironing

If you prefer, as I do, cotton shirts, the kind whose collars end up wizened after a spell in the dryer, you might be interested in fake ironing. Here’s how to fake-iron a shirt collar:

1. Roll collar into a tight ball, looking something like a cinnamon roll.

2. Wrap collar as tightly as possible with a rubber band.

3. Shower, shave, brush teeth, get partly dressed.

4. Remove rubber band from collar. Don shirt.

It works! I wasn’t plan to write this post this morning, but I wasn’t planning to invent fake ironing either. As you can see, I did, both.

Update, 5:58 p.m.: In response to a request for visual clarification, here’s a photograph. Note the cinnamon-roll effect. More clarification: start by grasping the collar at the back. Bring the two ends together. Roll from the back to the ends, keeping the fabric as smooth and as tightly wrapped as possible.

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Minor kitchen wisdom (Household hints)

BUCK TO READING: DROP DEAD

Principal Andrew Buck explained in a horribly written memo why books are not necessary at his school, Brooklyn’s Middle School for Art and Philosophy. A sample:

Personal experience aside, which surfaces a concern about the potential adverse affects of textbooks to students learning, let’s return to the essential question of learning and how it is best achieved.

Yes, let’s.

Writing-challenged principal Andrew Buck stands behind his idiotic letter (New York Daily News)

November 5, 2010: For some reason (a stray touchpad or mouse move), comments were off for this post. Now they’re on.

[Post title with apologies to this Daily News headline.]

Mitch McConnell’s to-do list

Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY): “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.”

By now this statement has been widely quoted. But I haven’t seen anyone ask: is there any precedent in modern American political life for this sort of declaration? Has anyone in a comparable position ever said such a thing about a sitting president?

Stephen Sondheim’s writing habits

Pencil and paper, but not just any pencil or paper:

For those who like me are curious about a writer’s habits: the pencils I write with are Blackwings, a brand formerly made by Eberhard Faber but alas, no longer. Their motto, printed proudly on the shaft, is “Half the Pressure, Twice the Speed,” and they live up to that promise. They utilize very soft lead, which makes them not only easy to write with (although extremely smudgy) but also encourages the user to waste time repeatedly sharpening them, since they wear out in minutes. They also have removable erasers which, when dried out, can be reversed to resume their softness and which are flat, preventing the pencil from rolling off a table. The pad I write on is a yellow legal pad with thirty-two lines, allowing alternate words to be written above one another without either crowding or wasting the space. These pads are hard to find, as most legal pads come with fewer or more lined spaces. Having been warned by Burt Shevelove, a stationery aficionado, that stationery supplies are frequently discontinued, I had the good sense to stock up on them as well as the Blackwings before they disappeared, and now have a lifetime supply.

Some people write sitting at a desk, some standing at one; I write lying down on a couch (except when I’m at the piano), for the obvious reason that it allows me to fall asleep whenever I encounter difficulties, which is often.

Finishing the Hat: Collected Lyrics (1954-1981) with Attendant Comments, Principles, Heresies, Grudges, Whines and Anecdotes (New York: Knopf, 2010).

[“They utilize very soft lead”: utilize? Well, as Elaine observes, he’s not writing lyrics.]

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Stephen Sondheim on pencils, paper
All Blackwing posts

Hitting the sauce

As a half-Italian kid, I regarded sauce as a mystery. (It was always “sauce,” never “gravy.”) My grandma made sauce in her kitchen. We took large amounts home with us in Tupperware. End of story.

Now, with a little help from my wife Elaine, I’ve started making sauce. It is ridiculously easy to do. Sauce from a jar? Not in my kitchen, as a commercial once said. Here’s my recipe:

1 28 oz. can Cento Tomato Puree
olive oil
1 medium onion, finely chopped
3 cloves garlic, smashed and finely chopped
2 tsp. dried basil
2 tsp. dried oregano
1/4 tsp. sea salt¹
20 turns of a McCormick Black Peppercorn grinder (between 1/8 and 1/4 tsp.)
20 turns of a McCormick Italian Seasoning grinder (between 1/8 and 1/4 tsp.)²
1 tbsp. sugar
3 oz. red wine (Cabernet Sauvignon, says I)

Brown onions in oil. Add garlic. Add basil, oregano, salt, pepper, Italian seasoning, and sugar, and stir. Add wine and stir.³ Add the tomato puree and stir. Reduce heat, cover, and let simmer for one hour, or two, or more.

Thank you, Elaine, for encouraging me in this adventure in cooking (and for everything else). Yes, today would be a good day to hit the sauce.

[January 2023: I’ve made minor revisions, doubling the salt and adding optional hours to the cooking time.]

¹ This recipe has a fraction of the salt found in jarred sauces. You won’t miss the extra salt. Promise.

² If you choose a different brand of Italian seasoning, make it one without basil and oregano. The McCormick grinder is mostly rosemary, black pepper, and red pepper.

³ It’s Elaine who suggests adding the wine after adding the spices, for maximum distribution of flavor.