Category: Words Words Words

Updike decoded

Two notes from Rabbit Is Rich:

I’d never run across the expression “to pass papers” (chapter IV, p. 975 in the Everyman omnibus volume) to describe closing on a real estate transaction. Maybe it’s a Pennsylvania thing. It’s certainly descriptive.

And look who shows up in the closing pages of chapter V, p. 1040:

… the way his brain is going on reminds him of some article he read last year in the paper of Time about some professor at Princeton’s theory that in ancient times the gods spoke to people directly through the left or was it the right half of their brains, they were like robots with radios in their heads telling them everything to do, and then somehow around the time of the ancient Greeks or Assyrians the system broke up, the batteries too weak to hear the orders, though there are glimmers of still and that is why we go to church…

And then Harry uses a couple of epithets to remind us of when and where he grew up. But there, in mangled form, is a précis of the work of Julian Jaynes and his opus, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind.

Textbook pastebin

When I’m recording a textbook at Learning Ally, I often find it necessary to scribble a sentence fragment from the top or bottom of a page onto a scratchpad, so that I can read the complete sentence smoothly without a noisy rustle of turning pages. I recently worked on Theodore J. Lowi et al., American Government: Power and Purpose (2012), 12/e. In an exercise in political science found art (or spammy nonsense, you may decide), I collected all my scribbles from various page turns in the book, and here they are:

held on to their seats—nearly 80% of Democrats and more than 98% of Republicans.
of bills considered by Congress each year are defeated long before they reach the president.
He cannot aggregate the votes in his
negotiations, proposals, and counterproposals that were taking place.
There is ample evidence that Wilson’s
of information.
foreign policy initiatives.
On January 24, 2002, the 28 judges
Furthermore, in the Judiciary Act of 1789, Congress conferred on the Supreme Court the power
claims on that principle during their terms in office.
legislatures.
Voters were unhappy about the state’s economy and dissatisfied with Davis’s
Voters, as we discussed in the
A grassroots campaign can
American farmers were frustrated with federal agricultural policies
The challenge is how to regulate the participation of groups without
of legislators’, judges’, and executives’ deliberations.
the nation’s economy.
their taxable income any money they can justify as an investment or a “business expense.”
As we noted in Chap-
culture.
providing the states with incentives to carry out federal mandates or shifting the program’s administration to a federal bureaucracy.
favor those already in positions of power and through prejudices that tend to develop against any group that has long been on the lower rungs of society.
the Soviet Union.
hundreds of millions on trade policy, we spend relatively little on environmental, human rights, and peacekeeping efforts.

Williams decoded

There seems to be some confusion about the significance of the phrase “Magnolia 9047,” as it appears in this passage from scene 8 of A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), by Tennessee Williams:

BLANCHE [at the phone]: Hello. Mr. Mitchell, please…. Oh…. I would like to leave a number if I may. Magnolia 9047. And say it’s important to call….

MAgnolia is the telephone exchange, and 9047 the number within the exchange. The MAgnolia exchange was used from 1938 until 1960, when it was replaced with JAckson 3.

Some well-meaning souls have interpreted Magnolia 9047 as a street address, but it’s very clear that Blanche’s sister Stella and brother-in-law Stanley live in the French Quarter at 632 Elysian Fields Avenue, as this passage in scene 1 with upstairs neighbor Eunice exposits:

EUNICE [finally]: What’s the matter, honey? Are you lost?

BLANCHE [with faintly hysterical humor]: They told me to take a street-car named Desire, and then transfer to one called Cemeteries and ride six blocks and get off at—Elysian Fields!

EUNICE: That’s where you are now.

BLANCHE: At Elysian Fields?

EUNICE: This here is Elysian Fields.

BLANCHE: They mustn’t have—understood—what number I wanted…

EUNICE: What number you lookin’ for?

[Blanche wearily refers to the slip of paper.]

BLANCHE: Six thirty-two.

EUNICE: You don’t have to look no further.

However, Williams’ grasp of light rail routefinding is trumped by the poetics of Blanche traveling from desire to death to her celestial reward, as it is the Canal Street cars that are marked Cemeteries (for the terminus at Metairie Avenue), and this line does not intersect Elysian Fields Avenue.

Acute

Another Words Words Words post, or more accurately, a Marks Marks Marks post: Jeff Z. Klein reports on the recent move by Montréal Canadiens equipment manager to include diacritics in players’ name bars on the backs of their sweaters. The explanation by Pierre Gervais as to why the marks hadn’t been rendered in the past is a bit weak, but no matter:

Gervais said the accents were made possible by technology. Until recently, the strip of cloth for name bars was too shallow.

“I would have had to sew the accent mark onto the uniform itself, above the name bar,” said Gervais, who started working as a Canadiens equipment manager in 1987. “Until a few years ago, we used to reuse the uniforms, so I couldn’t do it.”

Weird little marks

I use a lot of apostrophes. And usually, I use them according to standard practice. But sometimes you have to ask yourself, “what would happen if I didnt?” Faulkner, Selby, McCarty, and Kelman get along fairly well without most of them. Lucy Ferriss thinks we might be better off without the oft-misused mark.

And even if all the apostrophes in the world were vaporized tomorrow, it wouldnt solve all usage and punctuation peeves. Wed have more energy to focus on the teeming millions who seem to think that the second person nominative pronoun is spelled u.

Seeking native speakers

The Washington, D.C. studios of Learning Ally, where I have been recording textbooks for a number of years, handles foreign language texts in addition to English language materials. The studio has put the word out that it is specifically seeking volunteers with proficiency in any of the following languages:

  • Khmer
  • Polish
  • Korean
  • Tagalog
  • Urdu

Do you speak one of these languages, and would you like to help? Do you know someone else who might be able to assist? Drop me a line, or contact the studio directly.

In search of a problem

New words acquired via studio reading: a couple of intermodal transportation schemes that don’t appear to have moved beyond the coinage of cutesy names: fishyback and birdyback.

Fishyback service is named by analogy with piggyback service, and consists of carrying loaded truck trailers on boats or barges. The top search results that aren’t definitions are newspaper clippings from the 1950s—and the textbooks where I read about it in the first place. Perhaps the transportation scheme was pushed aside in favor of the containerized shipping that we know today. I did find an Egyptian shipping company that advertises the service.

Birdyback intermodal transportation is the same idea, but with the trailer carried by a cargo plane. Presumably in the cargo hold, not Space Shuttle-style.

Supercaliflawjalisticexpialadoshus

Ben Zimmer antedates the Disney team’s most famous nonsense word, precious to user interface designers and testers worldwide, made canonical by Henry Spencer’s decalogue. With the primary accent on the “flaw,” the word appears in a 1931 humor column for a Syracuse University student newspaper under the byline of Helen Herman.

ᔥ Languagehat

Get on the boss

Julie Sedivy summarizes recent work by William Labov: there is evidence that the spread of a vowel shift that’s working its way through the northern parts of the Rust Belt (sort of an Albany-Buffalo-Detroit-Milwaukee axis) is being curbed by more conservative speakers to the south and west.

Are we moving toward an era where Americans will speak discernibly red versus blue accents? It’s hard to say…. But I suspect that political ideology may become an anchor for accents to the extent that large social groups collectively identify themselves by their political beliefs….

So perhaps it’s not surprising that George W. Bush acquired a distinct Texan accent, despite having abundant exposure to people from the Northeast, or why Barack Obama sprouted a mild set of Chicago vowels, even though he was fully an adult before ever living there.

ᔥ The Morning News