Santa Clause

That’s his name, in a genuine headline: “Santa Clause has come to town.”

The elves must be his subordinates.

Elaine suggests that retailers are his dependents.

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Happy birthday, Willa Cather

Willa Cather was born on this day in 1873. From a letter to her lifelong friend Carrie Miner Sherwood, January 27, 1934:

Now I don’t often write, even to my dearest friends, about my own work, but you just tuck this away where you can read it and when people puzzle you, or come at you and say that I idealize everything and exaggerate everything, you can turn to this letter and comfort yourself. The one and sole reason that my “exaggerations” get across, get across a long way (Antonia has now been translated into eight languages), is that these things were not exaggerations to me. I felt just like that about all those early people. If I had exaggerated my real feeling or stretched it one inch, the whole book would have fallen as flat as a pancake, and would have been a little ridiculous. There is just one thing you cannot fake or counterfeit in this world, my dear Carrie, and that is real feeling, feeling in people who try to govern their hearts with their heads.

I did not start out to write you a long lecture, but someday I might get bumped off by an automobile, and then you’d be glad to have a statement which is just as true as I have the power to make it.

                                    My heart to you always,
                                                               Willie

The Selected Letters of Willa Cather, ed. Andrew Jewell and Janis Stout (New York: Knopf, 2013).

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Teaching writing by the sentence

“Two teachers show how their middle and high school students work with sentence structure using New York Times models. They also pose a sentence-writing challenge for your students”: “Sentences That Matter, Mentor and Motivate” (The New York Times).

William Carlos Williams wrote that “A poem is a small (or large) machine made of words.” So too a sentence. To become a better writer is to understand these machines: the kinds of work they can do and the contribution of each part to the whole.

I like the model of instruction described in this Times article. When I taught upper-level writing classes, we’d sometimes spend an entire fifty minutes working on a handful of student sentences in need of revision. Remove this word? Put it here? Replace it? Turn the parts around? That attention to the sentence fosters the healthy writerly self-consciousness that makes every word a choice subject to change.

[Williams: from the introduction to The Wedge (1944): “To make two bald statements: There’s nothing sentimental about a machine, and: A poem is a small (or large) machine made of words. When I say there’s nothing sentimental about a poem I mean that there can be no part, as in any other machine, that is redundant.” Omit needless words!]

2020

“Sometimes, I just stare at the stars on a cold, wintry night and pretend 2020 never happened”: from today’s Zippy.

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CW Pencil and

From New York: “After almost six years exclusively selling graphite, the notoriously niche CW Pencil Enterprise is soon to become a full-service office supply shop.”

[But “tourists” has such an awful ring. How about ”visitors to the city”? Like me. Someday, once again.]

One, two, three ...

From The New York Times: “Three Steps for Safe Living.” Even if you find the advice obvious, you might still find it reassuring to read.

See also, from The Washington Post, “Eight facts about the coronavirus to combat common misinformation.”

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Anna Stiga, Anna Stiga, Stan has named you. Her name (“Stan again”) is the pseudonym for easier Newsday Saturday Stumpers by the puzzle’s editor, Stan Newman.

Today’s Stumper, by Ms. Stiga, is pretty easy as Stumpers go. A distinctive feature: it’s totally symmetrical. That’s the technical term, isn’t it? As in, “Man, this puzzle is, like, totally symmetrical.” The puzzle takes shape as four hearts. Top and bottom, easy. The sides were tougher. I found the real difficulties on the right.

Some clue-and-answer pairs I especially liked:

1-D, three letters, “Whom Emerson called ’the jingle-man.’” It’s possible to appreciate one writer sneering at another without participating in the sneer.

11-D, thirteen letters, “Youngsters’ support group.” Probably not meant as a tricky clue, but having the first two and last three letters of the answer made it tricky for me.

13-D, eleven letters, “Agent’s quest.” What kind of agent?

16-A, three letters, “Iliad mischief maker.” It’s always someone else’s fault. Right, Agamemnon?

25-D, five letters, “Board.” A nice reminder of what the word can mean.

30-A, five letters, “Sandwiches since the 1600s.” PBJS — no, doesn’t work.

40-A, four letters, “Collector’s item.” The joy of a mild pun.

51-A, eleven letters, “They’re not serious.” Google shows the singular form peaking in American English in 1932. Clearly, we need to get more serious about criticizing others engaged in their harmless endeavors.

No spoilers: the answers are in the comments.

Peanuts in French

A crossword clue — three letters, “Parisian’s ‘Rats!’” — made me wonder what Charlie Brown says in French. And now I know.

A New York Times article from 1975, “Peanuts Bridges a Language Gap and Captivates the French” gave me an initial answer:

Zut et grands dieux! — Rats and good grief!

They said it would never happen here, but a million French are now hooked on Peanuts, the comic strip by Charles Schulz with the water‐headed beagle Snoopy, the lifetime loser Charlie Brown and the horrible Lucy, all speaking the Gallic tongue here.

But I wanted better evidence. I found some in Google Books, in strips collected in two volumes of Snoopy et le petit monde de “Peanuts” (2014, 2015). Behold:

  [Peanuts, November 11, 1973; September 10, 1978. Click either image for a larger view.]

And here are the originals, from the GoComics Peanuts page, which has the strip’s complete run available for browsing:

  [Peanuts, November 11, 1973; September 10, 1978. Click either image for a larger view.]

Just as in the crossword, the exclamation “Zut!” is the French equivalent of “Rats!” I could not find panels with “Grands dieux!” [Great gods!], but Snippet View makes enough of Peanuts visible to confirm that “Grands dieux!” is (or was) indeed the French equivalent of “Good grief!”

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It’s the most wonderful time

Madame Laoutaro speaks:

Robertson Davies, The Lyre of Orpheus (1988).

The Lyre of Orpheus is the third novel of The Cornish Trilogy.

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SASE, PetSmart

I learned only a few days ago that a self-addressed stamped envelope is an envelope addressed to yourself.

I’ve always known, of course, that the address on a self-addressed stamped envelope is your own. (Well duh.) But I always thought that self-addressed meant that you had addressed the envelope yourself, that you hadn’t left it for someone else to do. But no, self-addressed means that it’s addressed to you yourself.

Elaine learned a few days ago that PetSmart is a pun: Pets Mart, a market for pet supplies.

Yes, it’s called life-long learning. See also Kasie DC, Men’s Wearhouse and TUMS.