theater, natural history and conservation, the utterly mundane, and Etruscan 8-tracks
I found some near misses online, but nothing in my unabridgeds to give a clear definition of crongle from this passage:
Hens cluck, croon, and crongle in their enclosure.
—David Mitchell, The Bone Clocks (2014), p. 594
The closest match describes a person with an ample beard sufficient to shelter small animals.
Icelanders strive to maintain their native language as an option for communication with computers, as well as something that its children can read and speak.
Most high schools are also waiting until senior year to read works by the writer Halldor Laxness, the 1955 winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, who is buried in a small cemetery near his farm in western Iceland.
I was consolidating some old files of clippings and I found this gift from 1990 David: a copy of Nicholson Baker’s story, “Room Temperature.”
And yet I had always envied normal households that had (besides aluminum screen doors whose hissing pistons could be locked into the open position by moving a little ring) doorstops wedged permanently into place under the open swinging kitchen door.
TIL the New York Times does not have a rule in its style manual concerning capitalization of the titles of artistic works set in lower case by their creators.
It does call for following American capitalization rules for the titles of foreign-language works (“Così Fan Tutte,” not “Così fan tutte”); urges avoiding “fanciful” punctuation in company names (“Yahoo,” not “Yahoo!”); and calls for capitalizing only the first letter of acronyms that exceed four letters (“Unicef,” not “UNICEF”).
“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?!
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.
Kaveh Waddell sketches Adlam: a script not yet 30 years old, invented for speakers of Fulani, a language spoken by 40 million West Africans.
… 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!
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.
Oh, dear. How did this escape my notice? For many speakers, a button-down shirt now does not refer specifically to a shirt with a buttons securing the collar, but rather to any shirt with buttons down the placket.
David Crystal and Ben Crystal talk to Michael Rosen and Laura Wright of BBC Four’s Word of Mouth about Shakespearean Original Pronunciation (OP), with generous audio demonstrations. David Crystal has a reference book, to be released this summer, The Oxford Dictionary of Original Shakespearean Pronunciation.
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.
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.
Baseball considers itself the most thoughtful of games, a pastime more than a sport, written about with reverence and lyricism, in which pitching is considered more art than athleticism.
Yet the primary term used to explain the art of pitching, which often determines who wins and who loses, is an inelegant word of ill-defined mush.
ᏍᏏᏉᏯ (Sequoyah) explains how Cherokee script has evolved and adapted with changes in technology.