Category: Words Words Words

Spark decoded

“Guy’s account,” said Henry, “is substantially the same as the others, with the most interesting exception that he gets Tol calls from London at between six and seven in the evening when the cheap rate is on. In his opinion the offender is a schoolboy.”

—Muriel Spark, Memento Mori (1958), chap. 11

 

A slip? Tol for toll? But here it is again:

“Nonsense,” said Dame Lettie. “A middle-aged man.”

“It is simple,” said Henry, “to trace a Tol call from London to the country. And yet the police have not traced any caller to Guy Leet at Stedrost.”

And indeed, Tol was a shorthand for placing a metered call within the London exchange:

Previously, making a trunk call involved what was known as ‘delay working’ where a subscriber booked long distance calls in advance and was later rung back by the operator when one of the trunk lines became available. Obviously, the greater the demand made on the exchange, the longer the wait. Under the new ‘Toll’ system subscribers were now able to ask the local operator for ‘Tol’ for calls to exchanges within the London Toll Area. They were then connected to the Toll operator who completed the call while the subscriber remained at the telephone. Later, as more automatic exchanges were introduced, the subscriber simply had to dial ‘TOL’ to be connected to the Toll operator.

Dialing TOL was a service like dialing TIM for the time, as fans of Tom Stoppard’s If You’ll Be Glad I’ll Be Frank know. Or dialing UMP to get cricket scores?!

Leonard decoded

This one isn’t too obscure, but Leonard’s rendering of the company name is idiosyncratic:

“You cut the wire,” Donnell said.

“Is that all?” Chris brought out the Spyder-Co knife that was always in his right-hand coat pocket. “Here, you do it.”

—Elmore Leonard, Freaky Deaky, p. 219

 

Chris handles his Spyderco knife at least two other times in the course of the book. The company is still in business. I don’t know whether its cult following was stronger in the last 80s, when this book appeared, or now. I suspect that Chris carries a Leatherman tool now.

Faulkner decoded: 2

… the spring weather, the spring which an American poet, a fine one, a woman and so she knows, called girls’ weather and boys’ luck.

—William Faulkner, The Town, chap. 20

Not too hard to track this one down, as it’s been decoded by other writers. It’s from Ryder (1928), by Djuna Barnes, from the “Rape and Repining!” chapter:

It is Spring again, O Little One, the Waters melt, and the Earth divides, and the Leaves put forth, and the Heart sings dilly, dilly, dilly! It is Girls’ Weather, and Boys’ Luck!

Bleached

Oh, dear Fox, yes: Stop Saying ‘I Feel Like.’

This is what is most disturbing about “I feel like”: The phrase cripples our range of expression and flattens the complex role that emotions do play in our reasoning. It turns emotion into a cudgel that smashes the distinction—and even in our relativistic age, there remains a distinction—between evidence out in the world and internal sentiments known only to each of us.

Composure

Craig Havighurst has proposed a new umbrella term for that thing that most people call classical music, that my friends in college (particularly in the School of Music) encouraged me to call art music or serious music, and that I have also heard described as Western concert hall music. Havighust likes the term composed music, and he makes some good points.

Composed Music’s primary virtue is its blunt veracity. It is what it says it is: works by a singular mind, fixed and promulgated in written form. …it emphasizes the actual creator of the music, giving credit where it’s due in an era when the general public has been conditioned to associate works with performers.

And lest we forget,

The awkwardness of there being a Classical Period in Classical Music becomes moot.

In a follow-up, he points out that he intends the term to include jazz and third stream compositions as well, written by artists as diverse as Brubeck and Zappa.

Of course, we can always go with the dichotomy associated with Edward Kennedy “Duke” Ellington:

There are simply two kinds of music, good music and the other kind.

ᔥ ArtsJournal

Connell decoded

In Mrs. Bridge, Evan S. Connell’s “log-log duplex decitrix” (Chapter 49) appears to be a small error for the Keuffel & Esser Log Log Duplex Decitrig slide rule.

Similarly, this sentence from Chapter 13, “Guest Towels,” is initially confusing:

She had a supply of Margab, which were the best, at least in the opinion of everyone she knew, and whenever guests were coming to the house she would put the ordinary towels in the laundry and place several of these little pastel towels in each of the bathrooms.

Slantwise searching turns up Cynthia’s Linen Room:

Marghab Linens were produced in Madeira, Portugal between 1934-1984 and were marketed as some of the finest embroidery of the time. Vera Way Marghab was the driving force behind the imaginative and beautiful designs executed by her company, Emile Marghab, Inc.

The linens were hand-embroidered as a home industry by the Madeirans.

Shipped

work in progressLearning Ally staff posted on the bulletin board the log sheets for several books that our team of transcribers had recently completed. Sometimes it’s nice to get a little attaboy. I worked on at least one of these titles. The books we recorded include:

  • United States Government
  • Texas Science Fusion: Lab Manual Grade 8
  • Economics: New Ways of Thinking, 2/e
  • Working with Young Children, 7/e
  • Basic Drama Projects

Rare precision

Mark Memmott, interviewed by Scott Simon, takes the time to parse out the meanings of the word “suicide,” and explores when the word is (and is not) appropriately applied to someone who takes other lives along with his or her own. Memmott wants to inform, not inflame.

But I should note that the phrase suicide bomber can be problematic, and I want to be very careful with what I say next. I am not suggesting anything about what happened aboard the Germanwings jet, but, especially when information is scant, it’s important to remember that what seems obvious may not be. For instance, there is evidence that some of those who have been called suicide bombers have been forced to or tricked into carrying explosives into buildings and crowds. Should they be called suicide bombers? I don’t think so. I don’t think most people would. And I know I’m a nag on this topic. It’s usually best to avoid labels, and the phrase suicide bomber is a label. Unless you’re sure those labels apply, stick to the facts, be precise with your words, choose them carefully.