Blade tumbler

I asked my mom about the 1950 scare-buying frenzy, which rang no bell for her. But when I mentioned that people were stocking up on razors and razor blades, she remembered that in the WWII years, her father lengthened the life of his razor blades by sharpening them on the inside of a drinking glass.

That practice must have been common: it’s mentioned in a 1933 Everyday Science and Mechanics article by J.G. Pratt, “Delusions About Shaving.” Think of this article as an exercise in Depression-era mythbusting: “Many men,“ Pratt writes, ”fool themselves into believing that a razor blade can be sharpened on the inside of a tumbler, either with or without water.” Pratt acknowledges that a tumbler can sometimes sharpen a blade “to a very mild degree.” But he suspects that “the vast majority who are resorting to this practice are receiving no benefit from it at all.” Humph.

Pratt was Scientific Photographer for Department of Agriculture’s Bureau of Entomology. Accompanying his article: a photograph of a blade held in a tumbler of water and photographs of blade edges under magnification. Because science.

[One hundred posts this month. That’s all until September.]

Scare buying and Nancy

[Nancy, August 30, 1950. Click for a larger view.]

Sluggo is correct. “Scare buying,” a rush to accumulate in the summer of 1950, was prompted by the Korean War. Articles in the July 21 New York Times reported food hoarding, sharp rises in department-store sales, and high demand on wholesalers for appliances, housewares, and televisions. In a July 26 Times article, an executive of the American Safety Razor Corporation assured the public that there was no need for scare buying of razors, razor blades, or shaving brushes. By the time this installment of Nancy appeared, scare buying had apparently subsided. Click on the August 18 Times article for more.

And notice that in 1950 supermarket was two words.

You can read Ernie Bushmiller’s Nancy six days a week at GoComics.

Related reading
All OCA Nancy posts (Pinboard)

Recently updated

Colledge signage Now minus a sign.

Literally and figuratively

[Dustin, August 29, 2017. Click for a larger view.]

Even The Merriam-Webster Dictionary of English Usage (1989), which asserts that the hyperbolic literally is “neither a misuse nor a mistake for some other word,” cautions against indiscriminate use:

Is it necessary, or even useful, to add an intensifier like literally to a well-established metaphorical use of a word or phrase? Will the use add the desired emphasis without calling undue attention to itself, or will the older senses of literally intrude upon the reader’s awareness and render the figure ludicrous, as was the case when a football play-by-play man we heard some years ago said the defensive linemen had “literally hammered the quarterback into the ground”?

That quarterback, like Jason, must have been literally as slow as molasses. Fitch, Dustin, are you listening?

See also this strip’s treatment of copyediting, phrasal adjectives, and “rocket surgery.”

A related post
Literally, a Chrome extension

It takes a forest

Peter Wohlleben writes that in Europe, giant redwoods, planted in city parks as “exotic trophies,” never grow especially tall:

What is missing here, above all, is the forest, or — more specifically — relatives. At 150 years old, they are, when you consider a potential life-span of many thousands of years, indeed only children, growing up here in Europe far from their home and without their parents. No uncles, no aunts, no cheerful nursery school — no, they have lived all their lives out on a lonely limb. And what about the many other trees in the park? Don’t they form something like a forest, and couldn’t they act like surrogate parents? They usually would have been planted at the same time and so could offer the little redwoods no assistance or protection. In addition, they are very, very different kinds of trees. To let lindens, oaks, or beeches bring up a redwood would be like leaving human children in the care of mice, kangaroos, or humpback whales. It just doesn’t work, and the little Americans have had to fend for themselves.

The Hidden Life of Trees, trans. Jane Billinghurst (Vancouver: Greystone, 2016).

On a related note: Gabriel Popkin writes in The New York Times about curing yourself of tree blindness (found via Matt Thomas’s blog).

Also from The Hidden Life of Trees
A social network

[There’s considerable repetition in this book, and I sometimes think I will never get through it. But I’ve learned a lot, and I’ll never not look at trees in the same way again. In other words, I’ll never take them for granted as just somehow there in the landscape. Please notice that Wohlleben is writing about species. There is nothing in his argument here to suggest that children from one culture cannot be raised by parents from some other culture.]

Felix culpa

After reading Steven Harper’s timeline “Everything We Know About Russia and President Trump” last week, I wrote:

The figure who stands out to me in this timeline, again and again: Felix Sater, described by the BBC as “a Russian-American gangster.” He entered the Trump story in 2002. In 2013 and 2015, Trump denied being familiar with him.

Tonight The New York Times reports that

a business associate of President Trump promised in 2015 to engineer a real estate deal with the aid of the president of Russia, Vladimir V. Putin, that he said would help Mr. Trump win the presidency.

The pronoun reference in that sentence is a little ambiguous, but “he” is the business associate, Felix Sater. The Times reports that Sater thought a Trump Tower in Moscow “would highlight Mr. Trump’s savvy negotiating skills and be a political boon to his candidacy.” Here is some of what Sater wrote in a November 2015 e-mail to Trump’s lawyer Michael Cohen:

Michael I arranged for Ivanka to sit in Putins private chair at his desk and office in the Kremlin. I will get Putin on this program and we will get Donald elected. We both know no one else knows how to pull this off without stupidity or greed getting in the way. I know how to play it and we will get this done. Buddy our boy can become President of the USA and we can engineer it.

Святая корова! According to Google Translate, that’s Russian for “Holy cow!”

[Ivanka Trump sitting in Putin’s “private chair”? The ick factor is high. All mistakes in the text of the e-mail are Felix Sater’s.]

Donald Trump’s spelling

In The New York Times, Farhad Manjoo makes a contrarian suggestion: “There are lots of reasons to criticize Mr. Trump’s policies, conduct and statements, especially his tweets. But we should lay off his spelling.” Manjoo makes three arguments: In a medium that encourages immediacy and error, a spelling mistake “suggests humanity.” To criticize spelling is “elitist.” And to focus on spelling “blinds us to content.” I’ll address each point:

~ Trump’s spelling mistakes — hear by, unpresidented, for instance — suggest much more than their writer’s “humanity.” They are signs of someone who reads very little. One learns how to spell words correctly by seeing them, again and again, in print, correctly spelled. Trump is, famously, a non-reader of books, and his errors are often those of a writer who spells by ear. And his administration’s carelessness about names and words in non-Twitter contexts suggests not ”humanity” but carelessness.

~ Manjoo argues that it’s an elitist mistake to equate correct spelling “with a good education and outsize intelligence.“ No. If anything, only the most naïve among us would equate correct spelling with intellectual superiority. Correct spelling, like correct punctuation, calls no attention to itself. When we read words in print, correct spelling should be something to take for granted. It’s certainly not evidence of a brainiac at work.

And to argue that ”everyone’s sloppy sometimes” and that Barack Obama and his staff also made spelling mistakes is a feeble defense. Carelessness is carelessness. But one can also look at the evidence of Obama error that Manjoo cites and consider whether, say, misspelling Frantz Fanon’s first name as Franz is at all comparable to mistaking, say, heel for heal. The first mistake is evidence of a writer who reads; the second, evidence of someone who doesn’t.

~ Yes, misspellings can blind us to content. And here I’ll cite Bryan Garner, writing about what he calls “the fallacy of intelligibility”:

Wrong words are like wrong notes in music: they spoil the tune. And wrong words make readers stop thinking about your message and start pondering your educational deficits.

If anyone tells you otherwise (that is, if someone says it don’t make no never-mind), don’t believe it.

I’ve had relatively little to say about Donald Trump’s misspellings, which speak for themselves. This post, like Farhad Manjoo’s column, has no mistakes in spelling.

Related reading
“Tapps” (A poem)
“No challenge is to great” (An inaugural poster)
No job too small (A handbill)
All OCA spelling and misspelling posts (Pinboard)

Donate to the Red Cross

The Red Cross has a page for donations to help those affected by Hurricane Harvey.

Memorizing poetry

“Is it difficult to learn a poem by heart? Of course”: Molly Worthen, historian, writes about the value of memorizing poetry: “Memorize That Poem!” (The New York Times).

Or as Brisbane once said, “Learn that poem.”

What do I know by heart? Poems by Ted Berrigan, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Emily Dickinson, John Donne, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Philip Larkin, Lorine Niedecker, the Shake, William Carlos Williams, William Butler Yeats. All by osmosis. How about you?

DJT + JA

At The New Yorker, Margaret Talbot asks why Donald Trump likes Joe Arpaio. An excerpt:

Trump is likely a fan of Arpaio’s because Arapio is a fan of his — an early supporter who also went all in for birtherism, at one point sending members of a so-called Cold Case Posse to Hawaii to dig up something incriminating about Barack Obama’s birth certificate.

But Trump probably also likes Arpaio because the former sheriff represents in miniature what the President would like to be more maximally — a successful American authoritarian.

With a link to William Finnegan’s 2009 New Yorker profile of “Sheriff Joe,” who once called his jail “a concentration camp.”