New Year’s Eve 1914

[“RECORD REVELS USHER IN 1915. Broadway’s Largest Crowd Gives a Noisy Welcome to the New Year.” The New York Times, January 1, 1915.]

Steven Pinker, name-caller

Steven Pinker in The Sense of Style:

slinging around insults like simplistic , naïve , or vulgar , does not prove that the things the person is saying are false. Nor is the point of disagreement or criticism to show that you are smarter or nobler than your target.

Steven Pinker in The Atlantic :

Nathan Heller’s an ignoramus.

Again with the name-calling. This epithet joins a lengthy catalogue of epithets that appear in The Sense of Style: “anal-retentives,” “faultfinders,” “the Gotcha! Gang,” ”grammar nannies,” and so on.

What Heller says (about the sentence “It was he”) is mistaken. Pinker is right about that. But again with the name-calling, which violates The Sense of Style ’s fifth and final piece of advice (quoted above) about what’s really important in writing.

I have no idea if Pinker has read my review of his book. If he has, he hasn’t called me an ignoramus, at least not publicly. But then unlike Heller, I don’t write for The New Yorker. (Also, I’m not an ignoramus.)

I’ll quote my post on bad advice and misinformation: “It’s easier to persuade someone that what you’re saying is true and useful if you can keep from calling them stupid.” Or better still: “It’s easier to persuade someone that what you’re saying is true and useful if you can keep from thinking that they’re stupid.”

Related posts
Bad advice and misinformation
Pinker on Strunk and White
Steven Pinker’s The Sense of Style

[Yes, I realize that the post title is an instance of name-calling.]

Overheard

In a nearby city, weeks and weeks ago, as I was walking down the street:

“Party, party, party! Hey, old year, let’s all go to sleep.”

Related reading
All OCA “overheard” posts (Pinboard)

The McNulty

To mark the remastered release of The Wire, McDonald’s has added an item to its menu: the McNulty. I quote from the press release, which describes the ingredients like so: “a generous helping of horseshit and testosterone, served on a bed of broken promises, garnished with red ribbon and Jameson’s.”

Overtime not included.

A related post
“Day at a time”

Looking up salve

The noun salve (“a healing ointment for application to wounds or sores”): even though the l is silent, the word must come from the Latin salvāre , no? Some idea of saving, healing, making whole, no?

No. The OED, source of the definition above, explains:

Old English sealf (feminine) = Old Saxon salƀa , Middle Low German salve (whence Middle Swedish salva , Swedish salfva , Danish salve ), Middle Dutch salve , salf (Dutch zalf ), Old High German salpa , salba (feminine), salb , salp neuter (Middle High German, German salbe feminine) < Germanic *salbā strong feminine < pre-Germanic *solpā , cognate with Sanskrit sarpís clarified butter, sṛpra greasy, and Albanian ǵalpe butter; perhaps also with Greek ὄλπη , ὄλπις oil-flask.

Yes, it came up in conversation.

Domestic comedy

“The opposite of instant isn’t pour-over. The opposite of instant is regular.”

Related reading
All OCA domestic comedy (Pinboard)

[Though in our house, regular is pour-over.]

Jack DeJohnette, Made in Chicago

Coming in January on ECM, Made in Chicago, a recording of a 2013 Chicago Jazz Festival concert with Jack DeJohnette, Muhal Richard Abrams, Larry Gray, Roscoe Mitchell, and Henry Threadgill. I’m excited to hear this music again: I’ve never before attended a performance that made it to disc.

Correction: I don’t know that I’ve ever attended a performance that made it to disc. I may have been in the audience for one or more of the tracks on Miles Davis’s We Want Miles. Not remembering which night of Miles’s three-night Boston 1981 run I was there for, I’ve never been able to figure it out. And besides, there were two shows each night —

But I know I was at the Jack DeJohnette concert.

How about you? Have you ever attended a performance that ended up on disc?

*

January 13, 2015: The release date has been reset as March 10.

A related post
Jack DeJohnette in Chicago

Jack Teagarden, model-train enthusiast

The trombonist Jack Teagarden loved model trains. Here is how Barney Bigard told it. Bigard, who played clarinet and tenor saxophone for many years with Duke Ellington, played alongside Teagarden as members of Louis Armstrong’s All-Stars:

If we played a long engagement somewhere and you went into Jack’s hotel room, you’d see nothing but all kinds of wires, little whistles and steam engine things. He told me that he learned about all that stuff when he was a kid. One time, we were checking into a hotel and he had this great big trunk like a sailing trunk. He had all his contraptions in there, all this iron and steel stuff. So the bus driver helped him put this trunk on the sidewalk and here came the bellboys. “Which one is yours, Mr. Teagarden?” “This one, this one and this trunk.” Do you know, those bellboys had to send for help to get that thing up to his room. He was quite a man.

The girls all used to flock around Jack. He had that sort of personality where they would want to “mother” him; to take care of him. They all thought they were on to something big when he would ask them to come up to see the steam engines in his hotel room after the show. Those poor chicks would just sit on the bed waiting for something to happen, while Jack laid out on the floor blowing the whistles and making the engines work.

With Louis and the Duke: The Autobiography of a Jazz Clarinetist (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).

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Bix to Yoko in three or four

[This story makes me think of Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy and uncle Toby’s interest in military fortifications.]

Another Henry gum machine

[Henry, December 28, 2014.]

It may appear that Henry is questioning. In truth he is preparing a disguise with which to launch a snowball attack. Either way, one can never have too many streetside gum machines.

More gum machines
Henry : Henry : Henry : Perry Mason : Henry : Henry : Henry

Santa’s helper

[“Santa Claus School”. Photograph by Alfred Eisenstaedt. 1961. From the Life Photo Archive.]

The November 17, 1961 issue of Life ran a two-page photo essay on Charles Howard’s Santa Claus school in Albion, New York. The photograph above did not appear, but another one did, with this caption:

John Ray holds the diploma naming him a Santa’s helper. Next year he can work for B.S.C. degree. To get it he will have to present recommendations from customers and write 1,500-word thesis.

Charles Howard’s school, now based in Michigan, goes on.

[For The Crow: yes, Martha, there really is a Santa Claus School. I thought Elaine in Arkansas was wondering about that. No, it was Martha.]