The age of “40”

This photograph, a few weeks old now, is as close as I will get to our friendly neighborhood multinational retailer on this Bleak Friday. Or to any store today.

Ben Leddy hosts The Rewind

Here’s the latest installment of WGBH’s The Rewind, “A Vegetarian Thanksgiving,” hosted by our son Ben. You can find all episodes of The Rewind at YouTube.

Thanksgiving 1919

In 1919 Thanksgiving fell on November 27. This ad appeared in The New York Times on November 16, 1919.


[Click for a larger squirrel.]

Happy Thanksgiving to all who celebrate it.

[Today 223 and 225 Fulton Street are ghosts in a pedestrian area between One World Trade Center and the 9/11 Memorial North Pool. But 309 Madison Avenue is fresh&co, offering a “blended nut & nut-free and gluten-free & gluten environment.”]

HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME

A headline today: “Trump tweets doctored photo of his head on Sylvester Stallone’s body” (The Washington Post). Keep scrolling and you’ll see it.

It’s time — for impeachment, or the Twenty-Fifth Amendment, or a resignation for “medical reasons,” none of which T.S. Eliot had in mind.

Sailing out of Walden Pond

Bessie Glass has just left the bathroom where she’d been talking to her son Zooey, who is still in the bathtub, on the other side of the shower curtain. So many wonderful bits of phrasing in this passage:


J.D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey (1961).

Related reading
All OCA Salinger posts (Pinboard)

Warfighter on The Late Show

On The Late Show last night, Stephen Colbert commented on the appearance of the word warfighters in a presidential tweet:

“Warfighters? Nobody calls them that. I’m pretty sure that’s the name of the generic video game your grandmother buys when you ask for Call of Duty. ‘It was in a three-dollar bin outside of Jo-Ann Fabrics.’”

Watch here.

Warfighter does appear in both movie and video game titles. But as Language Log pointed out in 2012, the word has its origin in military culture.

As regular readers already know, I made a post about warfighter yesterday.

Recently updated

From “Stalin as Linguist — II” Barrett Watten has been removed from teaching and advising at Wayne State University.

The ubiquitous warfighter

The word warfighter suddenly seems ubiquitous. Neither Merriam-Webster nor the OED has an entry yet. The American Heritage Dictionary gives these definitions:

1. A soldier, especially a US soldier who is engaged or has engaged in combat.

2. A person, especially a member of one of the US armed services deployed to an area of conflict, who is responsible for making decisions involving the use of military force.

Google’s Ngram Viewer has nothing for the word before 1971, with use sharply rising since 1988.

Here is an excerpt from William Treseder’s thoughts about the word. Treseder served in the United States Marines and deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan:

Sometime in the mid 2000s, a strange new word started to get popular: “warfighter.” It catapulted out of obscurity from the military, quickly becoming the de facto label for all active-duty and reserve personnel. This word is seriously misleading; it presents the exact opposite of military reality at a time when Americans need to be questioning our role in global security more than ever before.

[“From the military”: a link to a Language Log post on the word’s origin.]

To my ear, warfighter has something of the sound of a kenning. As spoken by our president, it sounds like a sanction for war crimes. A service member belongs to a community with norms and values; a warfighter is an independent agent. A warfighter: so anything goes.

Pallet pencils

Making 1,000 pencils from pallet wood: a short video from Jackman Works.

Paul Jackman is ultra-adept at woodworking. But I think he’s less familiar with pencils. The question that begins the project: “Do people even use pencils anymore?” Heck, yeah.

But they don’t slam or throw their pencils around. That might crack the lead, leading to endless resharpening as new points break off, one after another. Remember Turkish Taffy?

Thanks, Ian, for letting me know about these pencils.

Related reading
All OCA pencil posts (Pinboard)

[For slamming and throwing, see 7:44 and 8:06 in the video. Note that this project doesn’t really contradict the claim that no single person knows how to make a pencil. The materials and tools are of course the work of others.]

Projecting

Here, from Meghan Bogardus Corteza of EdTech, is a profile of the overhead projector of classrooms past. I remember these projectors from high school, in several ways:

I remember digging the markers that teachers used for writing on transparencies, in class, in real time. Corteza asks, “Who doesn’t remember the thrill of being allowed to write on the transparency with a dry-erase marker and seeing the results projected on the wall?” That would be me — because we never got to write on transparencies. Teachers only!

Were they really dry-erase markers? I think I remember grease pencils, with a rag to wipe the transparency clean.

I remember the tremendous heat that the projector threw off. And the blinding light from inside the machine.

I remember that some projectors were equipped with one long scrolling transparency: write, crank, write, crank. The erasing later on must have been a pain.

I can’t recall a projector ever in use in one of my college classes. (I do remember a slide projector in art history class.) As a professor, I would notice the overhead projector stashed on the wall convector, next to lost scarves and notebooks and a little box or two of spare bulbs. A sad, neglected projector in every classroom. But every once in a while, even in the age of document readers and PowerPoint, I’d enter a classroom to find a projector sitting on the instructor’s desk at the front of the room. Someone must have been making a presentation.

I made use of an overhead projector just once in my teaching career: when reading Wallace Stevens’s “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” I asked my students to write a short stanza about a way of seeing the projector that sat in the room. We put the stanzas together (in a chance sequence) to make what turned out to be a pretty wonderful poem. I wish I could find it now.

Thanks, Mike, for thinking about old tech and sending the link.