As she is spoke

As I am presently otherwise occupied, there will be very few posts in the next few weeks, but I would like to leave you with a little reminder: try not to split your infinitives if at all possible.

I say this in a spirit of relentless nitpicking, which is what good grammar calls for. Broadcast media  - and even occasionally print – continues to undermine standards of correct English whenever possible and we nitpickers are fighting a losing battle.

Early English Grammarian Bishop Robert Lowth

The use of ‘weaved’ for ‘wove, ‘had swam’ instead of ‘had swum’ and the reluctance to use ‘drunk’ except as an adjective are stones in my shoe.

“…citing Obama’s failure to reign in Iran’s nuclear aspirations…” makes me gag, as does “[she] shined in a metallic strapless frock…”

(If English is your second language, the first should be ‘rein’ and the second ‘shone’ – shined is what you did to the silver and your shoes.)

I am happy to say that there is a well-organized effort to keep us all on the straight and narrow – though I can’t figure out who’s behind it – and all you have to do is go to http://www.grammarist.com for help. (Sorry, the very bad URL link form isn’t working again…)

Although, as always, there is often a nit to pick there as well:  ”Both forecast and forecasted are widely used as the past tense and past participle of the verb forecast, but the uninflected form is more common. In 21st-century English it prevails by a large margin, but not by such a large margin that anyone should consider forecasted wrong.”

Bosh.  I for one feel perfectly free to consider ‘forecasted’ egregiously ungrammatical and do.  Especially when the Grammarist points out that we owe the frequent misuse of the ‘ed’ ending to financial writers – a plague on all jargon.

But that’s always how it begins – it looks authoritative in print and the source seems respectable and before you know it, busy little bad grammar bees have pollinated the language with shoddy usage.

And rather than fight the good fight, large segments of the community will give up all together – as they are in Devon in England.  The Guardian reports (http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2013/mar/15/council-ban-apostrophe) that the Mid Devon Council is considering the removal of apostrophes from all the area’s street signs since they are so widely misused.

(Apostrophe abuse is rampant – how many little house plaques have you seen saying ‘The Smith’s”?)

This of course will create lots of wonderful new errors – the Childrens’ Garden will become the Childrens Garden rather than the Children’s Garden – which hardly seems an improvement.

And there is a bit of backlash: According to the Guardian, ‘The Plain English Campaign led the criticism. “It’s nonsense,” said Steve Jenner, spokesperson and radio presenter. “Where’s it going to stop. Are we going to declare war on commas, outlaw full stops?”‘

(The Plain English Society website, btw, is worth a visit.)

Carry on, good Grammarians.

Breaking News from PES: Mid Devon District Council leaders have been forced to reconsider banning the apostrophe from street signs in the area.

Lighting up

If for some reason you were to look up the town of Wabash, Indiana, on Wikipedia, though it’s hard to imagine why you would, you’d find that it says – just after its location and population – that “Wabash is notable as being the first electrically lighted city in the world, which was inaugurated on March 31, 1880.”

A Brush arc lamp

The conviction that Wabash was the first all-electric city seems generally widespread, but it rests on a very shaky foundation, one that owes more to 19th century boosterism than to actual fact.

The facts are laid out  here. in a newspaper article (which reads like an oddly translated version of some Teutonic original) and there’s no getting around it: Wabash had a total of four lights suspended over the courthouse.

Cleveland had illuminated a park the year before and Wanamaker’s famous Philadelphia department store had lit up a window with similar lights in 1878. Stop by The Electric Museum for more fascinating factoids.

And who did they all have to thank for the amazing technological breakthrough – Thomas Edison? George Westinghouse? Nikola Tesla?

No, Charles Brush.  Brush was yet another  enterprising 19th century inventor and scientist; he made revolutionary improvements to the electric generator – then a mostly European invention – and  to the arc light. The generator,  with his arc lights, made for an electrical system that was practical well before power transmission was generally available.

Brush in his basement lab with an arc light

Brush arc lights were used in Wabash ,Cleveland and Philly and were the first bright lights of Broadway. The California Electric Light Company (which became PG&E) bought two Brush generators, then four more, for plants in San Francisco and hooked them up to transmission lines. They promised nonstop illumination from sundown until midnight – though the price of $10 per lamp per day was a bit steep.

Charles Brush  sold his electric company to Thomson-Houston Electric ( which eventually became General Electric) in 1889 and retired.  He built a mansion on Euclid Avenue in Cleveland and raised his family there, keeping only a small laboratory in the basement.  He did however install yet another of his inventions – the first automatically operated wind turbine generator which ran the house’s 12 batteries.  His was the first electrically lit home in town and over the next 20 years, the turbine never failed.

* * *

Seems a pretty stellar day to be born – among those celebrating (in chronological order); Franz Josef Haydn, Nikolai Gogol, John LaFarge, Andrew Lang, Octavio Paz, Richard Kiley, Cesar Chavez, Gordie Howe, Liz Claiborne. Shirley Jones, Herb Alpert, Richard Chamberlain, Barney Frank, Christopher Walken, Al Gore, David Eisenhower, Rhea Perlman and Ewan McGregor.  Many happy returns to the celebrants, and we should all have a little Haydn for Easter:

In the beginning

Imagine, if you will, a very low tech world in which most of your information about foreign lands and exotic animals comes from National Geographic or sometimes Life magazine. Then suddenly, a regular American guy shows up on your little black and white TV and not only tells  you about those animals, but shows them to you live.

Well, on film actually, but it was almost like live. The guy was Marlin Perkins, the show was Zoo Parade, the animals were in the Lincoln Park Zoo and during the ’50s, it was pretty exciting stuff.  By the ’60s, the show had become Wild Kingdom, it was in color and Marlin was actually in Africa wrestling with an anaconda and creeping up on a crocodile.

Marlin Perkins was born on this date in 1905. During his 81 years, he rose from zoo laborer to zoo director, became one of television’s most popular and venerable hosts and taught millions to value endangered species  and their environments.  Wild Kingdom turns 50 this year and Marlin goes on forever on YouTube. There is even an archived episode of Zoo Parade available. Below, Marlin and the anaconda:

Aries achievers

Many happy returns to the grandmother from San Francisco who turns 73 today – Nancy Pelosi may be a fairly recent role model for most of us, but her savvy, her energy and her political acumen made a big impression when she came to everyone’s notice as Speaker of the House of Representatives in 2007.

With that election,  ’Pelosi became the first woman, the first Californian, and the first Italian-American to hold the Speakership.’

Alan Arkin, who celebrates his 79th today, became a cultural icon more than four decades ago when he starred in his first movie. Right in the middle of the cold war it turned out that – according to Hollywood at least – not all Russians were bad.  The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming, released in 1966, was full of Russkis you could love, which was a relief because we were starting to realize that getting under our desks at school  might not be the best way to survive nuclear confrontation. Here is a bit of Arkin:

West meets East

For a long time after WWII, there remained a dearth of popular information about the Japanese and their culture – Japan had been the cruel enemy, after all. But by the end of the 50s, things began, albeit slowly, to change. First came Sayonara, a Hollywood blockbuster that showed us that if Marlon Brando could shed his prejudice, then of course so could we.

About the same time came Akira Kurosawa and Seven Samurai and then there was no turning back. Kurosawa had already won a Golden Lion at Venice for Rashomon in 1951, but it took a few years for him to gain solid footing in the art houses that were popping up everywhere.

Even in Cleveland, where Seven Samurai both fascinated and baffled us – and led, in my case, to a lifelong addiction to Kurosawa’ s work. He was born on this date in 1910, lived to be 88 and wrote a wonderful memoir called Something Like an Autobiography, which I highly recommend. To celebrate him, watch one of the greatest scenes ever filmed, featuring one of Kurosawa’s regulars, Seiji Miyaguchi:

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Sometimes it’s personal

The end of March provides a plethora of notable birthdays, but so many of them resonate with me that I’m devoting the next week to celebrating the luminaries who provided my personal  cultural context. No doubt your choices would be very different (and don’t hesitate to post your own list), but these are some of the highlights of my formative years – beginning with the redoubtable Carl Reiner, who turned 91 on Wednesday:

I wouldn’t be at all surprised to find that for many readers another March 20 birthday – that of Fred Rogers – is way more significant, but for my generation, cutting edge humor began with the gang of Five: Reiner, Sid Caesar, Howie Morris, Imogen Coca and Mel Brooks.

And the Space Age? Forget astronauts – our great explorer was William Shatner, who celebrates his 81st today:

The red priest

Born on the day of an earthquake 335 years ago and not apparently very strong, Antonio Vivaldi was baptized the same day by the midwife who delivered him and again, officially, two months later in church. Maybe his frailty and the shock of the quake were what prompted his mother to promise him to the priesthood, which he dutifully began to study for at the age of 15.

One of three known images of Il Prete Rosso.

In the meantime his father, a violinist as well as a barber, taught him the instrument and the redheaded Vivaldis  performed all over Venice.  Not long after his ordination, Antonio became known as ‘the Red Priest,’ and as a musician of great proficiency.  He was hired as violin teacher at the Ospedale della Pieta, an orphanage where boys were taught a trade and girls were taught music.  If you were good enough you might grow up to become a permanent member of the Ospedale orchestra, which under Vivaldi became famous all over Europe.

Long story short, Vivaldi was admired and well off during his prime, but ended impoverished and forgotten by the time he died in 1741, forced at the end to sell his original manuscripts for almost nothing.  And he stayed forgotten until the 20th century, when violinist Fritz Kreisler made one of Vivaldi’s compositions famous and scholars and musicians got interested in him again.

(As it turned out the Kriesler Vivaldi was actually a pastiche composed by Kriesler in Vivaldi’s style, but it served to get the ball rolling.)

Since the Ospedale wanted new music for every important  occasion and Vivaldi worked there for almost 30 years, it should not be surprising that he wrote about 500 concerti, lots of sacred choral music , 90 sonatas and some incidental pieces, in addition to the 46 operas he wrote for various patrons.

And herewith, some Vivaldi performed by the wonderful Il Giardino Armonico:

Summer of ’69

Why this song means Woodstock to me – more than Jimi or Janis or Country Joe and the Fish – I really can’t say,  but it does.  And as today is the birth date of Robert (‘Bear’) Hite, it’s time to hear it again.  (Sadly, Bob Hite  died of a heart attack in 1981 at the age of 38.)

It’s in the mail. . .

It mattered to the Continental Congress and so it became one of a handful of government tasks specified by the Constitution – right in Article I, it says the Congress is required ‘to establish Post Offices and Post Roads.’

And a postal service, the Founding Fathers thought – oh the irony – would be an excellent source of revenue for the young country. (Although Thomas Jefferson  disagreed, seeing it as just a source of patronage and expense.)

The United States Post Office became official on this date in 1792.

Mailing a letter 221 years ago cost six cents, more than a dollar today;  the price has only gone down because of inflation. When the first stamps were printed in 1847, five cents was the going rate – still more than a dollar today. We should be paying about $1.35 for a stamp, just to be on par with the 19th century.

For 175 years, the US Postal Service trundled along without making much news, except when stamp prices went up.  Than in 1970, carriers in New York City went on strike for more money and better working conditions.

Eventually, they got what they wanted, as well as the right to form a union, but in 1971 we all got the Postal Reorganization Act, which abolished the Post Office as a cabinet position and created the kind of weird quasi-independent monopoly that we have with Amtrak.  I haven’t quite ever figured out the purpose of these things, except in Amtrak’s case, it’s a given we will always be making up its deficits.

And btw, was abolishing the post office without a constitutional amendment legal? Seems a little high-handed.

Then, in 2006, Congress took  another shot at the USPS and since then we’ve all been asking  ”Who’s killing the post office – and why?’

The fact that the 2006 Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act  has a notorious  requirement that the PO fund its retirement accounts far into the future – to the tune of billions of dollars over ten years – to provide benefits for workers that haven’t even been hired yet is pretty generally known.  What articles on the subject fail to ask and answer is: Why?

Without going into detail about the various Congressional players responsible for the Act, let’s just follow the money – who profits from the demise of the USPS?

The answer seems to be – not surprisingly – the banks.  Take a moment and read this article - ‘Banks find opportunity in Postal Service woes’ – at Reuters.

And here is a reminder of why mailing a letter is a good option to have – it’s not likely to be hacked.

Deep space

Just in case I’m not the last person to have seen this absolutely mind-boggling video [h/t Carol Oneal]:

http://www.youtube.com/embed/doN4t5NKW-k