Vesuvius

The DaD series on handwriting continues. In the above page from an 1887 diary, Frederick Douglass visits Pompeii during his travels. The whole diary is available online from the Library of Congress.

“Under the Bus”

Newsweek has an interesting comment on the use of the phrase “to throw under the bus.” The expression is both evocative and totally weird. Is it a city bus, or a school bus? Is it moving? Why use the definite article instead of the indefinite article – “the” bus instead of [...]

Luxuries

Lately a number of writers have begun to mark the 30th anniversary of the TV series “Dallas.” Of course, someone had to spoil the party by being too serious about it: Nick Gillespie, an editor at Reason, has published a piece in the Washington Post claiming that the “Dallas” phenomenon had a “shockingly unremembered” part [...]

Stability

Darwin’s first recorded doubt about the “stability of species” from his notebook. See more of Darwin’s handwriting at this new Darwin Online archive.
I’ll keep posting images of handwriting from time to time, as a regular feature of this blog.

Gobbledygook

The House passes Bill H.R. 3548 , The Plain Language in Government Communications Act of 2008. The New Republic has an amusing anecdote about Jeff Flake (R-AZ), the lone dissenter in the House.
Here’s what sponsor Bruce Braley (D-IA) has to say about the Bill:

Anyone who has done their own taxes knows the headache [...]

Crazy

About Paul Auster’s op-ed today in The New York Times. This is an “emperor’s new clothes” moment for me. I’ve admired the sheer stylishness of Auster’s writing for many years. But it’s difficult to see a sophisticated and careful writer behind the prose of this indulgent and sloppy “memory-piece.”
It’s hard to read, [...]

Don’t [Tase?] Me, Bro.

One of the elegances of English is how easily it allows you to turn a noun into a verb and vice versa.
We took a flight.
We flew.
The doctors examined the patient.

The doctors performed an examination of the patient.
Notice that both nouns and verbs denote actions accurately. At the uchicago writing program, we [...]

Misspoke

Hendrik Hertzberg has a quick and dirty archeology of the word “misspoke” in The New Yorker. The article is not really exceptional, but Hertzberg distinguishes himself by calling attention to an interesting fact: as one of its samples of how people use “to misspeak,” The OED offers a statement from none other than Richard [...]

“Ties”

Yesterday, I meditated a little on the degree to which a speaker is implicated in the words of another person. I argued that to ascertain this implication, it is helpful to measure the extent to which the words of others appear in the speaker’s voice, and to make some effort to learn the manner [...]

Spreadeagled

I do a lot of research into advertising trade publications from the mid 20th century. I came across this quote in an issue of Advertising Age from 1938. Speaking to a group of his peers, General Mills executive Walter Barry was explaining how successfully radio advertising has helped to hawk one of his [...]

Flimsy

Watching ABC’s Democratic debate (transcript) last night, I was struck by the degree to which Sen. Obama was being defined by his associations, a process that has been taking place ever since the Jeremiah Wright story broke a few weeks ago. Last night, Obama had already become frustrated with this when [...]

Treason

Some of my research has been into the correspondence of Archibald MacLeish, the poet, playwright and a B-list member of the Lost Generation. During World War II, MacLeish served as Librarian of Congress and wrote propaganda. Around this time, Ezra Pound was seized by Allied forces during the invasion of Italy and accused [...]

Furnished

“Two Men in a Furnished Room” is the title of a short story thriller by Cornell Woolrich (aka William Irish, aka George Hopley). It was made into a film the subsequent year under the title The Guilty.
The change is really a shame. I marvel at how much work the word “furnished” accomplishes. [...]

Thought, Language, Politics and Common Sense

Yesterday, I described George Orwell’s “Politics and Language” using two versions of his hypothesis. In the first version, Orwell writes that chaotic politics is a result of chaotic language. In the second version, Orwell’s idea is that thought corrupts language while language corrupt thought. These two versions are not identical, but [...]

An Egregious Collocation of Vocables

Ducks and Drakes is a blog about language written by Neil Verma.
The title comes from one of the classic texts on writing in English, George Orwell’s essay “Politics and Language” (1946), available here.
In the essay, Orwell chastises Professor Lancelot Hogben for the following sentence:
Above all, we cannot play ducks and drakes with a native battery [...]