Archives for October 2008

THE COLLAPSE OF ENGLISH.

October 2, 2008 by 104 Comments

Craig Brown in the Telegraph has a very funny reductio ad ab-sir-dum of the Disgusted in Tunbridge Wells genre of letters to the editor, linguistic subsection: The collapse of the English language [archived, in case you don’t want to give the Torygraph your clicks]. It starts thus:

SIR – The word I have just written is surely the most commonly mispronounced. In these sloppy times, why do so many people insist on saying “sur”?
R. Birtwhistle, Bicester

…and descends into a maelstrom of increasingly crazed prescriptivism. (Thanks, Paul!)

R.I.P. HAYDEN CARRUTH.

October 1, 2008 by 9 Comments

I discovered via jessamyn‘s fine obituary MetaFilter post that Hayden Carruth died last night at his home. (I urge you to visit the post for the links, for the poems people quote in the thread, and for the Carruth quote jessamyn cites that ends “His sympathies extend even to despised creatures like rats and car salesmen. ‘I’ve always felt sorry for the rats,’ he says.” [And of course there are more good links and poems at wood s lot.]) As I wrote there:

I can’t say this is unexpected news, but that doesn’t make it any easier to take. For many years I’ve been saying Carruth was one of my favorite living poets, and now I have to remove one of those qualifiers. I became acquainted with him through The Voice That Is Great Within Us and didn’t discover his own poetry for years afterwards, but I made up for lost time. His Collected Shorter Poems and Collected Longer Poems are essential for any poetry collection, and if you can find a CD of him reading his poetry, he’s one of those rare modern poets who can really do justice to his own poetry.

The Voice That Is Great Within Us is still my favorite poetry anthology, three decades after I bought it, and the reason it took me so long to discover the editor’s own great poetry is that, being self-effacing to a fault, he included only a few haiku of his own in this tremendously influential anthology. But his poems tend to be long enough that they’re hard to anthologize anyway. Here’s the one I quoted at MetaFilter:

[Read more…]

COASTER.

October 1, 2008 by 3 Comments

My wife just mentioned to our year-old grandson (who took the news with equanimity) that a coaster had fallen off the table. It suddenly occurred to me to wonder why a small object placed under a glass is called a “coaster,” so I turned to the OED, where I found: “So called from ‘coasting’ or making the circuit of the table after dinner.” This makes sense because it used to mean “a low round tray or stand for a decanter,” so when you passed the port you were actually passing the tray it stood on. I love it when there are good answers to interesting questions.

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