Here’s a beautiful example of a garden-path sentence that needed additional context to disentangle. I was wondering how the cinematographer Autumn Durald Arkapaw pronounced her name, and as is my wont I tried to find a video in which someone said it aloud (ideally her, but I’ll take a well-informed interviewer). No luck so far, but at the 1:57 mark in this video she says “And obviously I’m picking glass that the director is comfortable with and works for his or her story.” I was immediately distracted from my quest by a linguistic question: what did “picking glass” mean? It sounded to me like an idiomatic phrase parallel to, say, “sweating bullets,” but I couldn’t think of an obvious interpretation. I googled but found nothing, so I decided to go back and finish the video, whereupon I heard her say “I tend to like softer glass, vintage glass…” Oh! She meant literally picking glass — choosing which lens to use! So I thought I’d share that with y’all. (Also, I’m delighted to see a female cinematographer on a blockbuster movie. I wasn’t as thrilled with Sinners as a lot of people, e.g. Richard Brody, but I’m glad it was a hit and I hope everybody involved gets lots of work.)
I was familiar with glass as a term for lenses. The photogs at The Tech used to joke about our “nine pounds of glass”—the enormous telephoto lens that the paper had bought for several thousand dollars.* Using glass as a mass(?) noun the way she does in that quote seems natural when she says it, but when I read it in the post before watching the video it seemed strange.
* Part of what made for the humor was that the lens had been bought by one of the photogs—a Saudi nobleman—with cash out of his own pocket and just a hand-scrawled receipt he had written to get reimbursement. At that time, the big-money student groups at MIT operated essentially without oversight. However, a couple years later, after it turned out that the internal accounting for the smaller student groups was totally incompetently done, there was a lot more scrutiny about expenditures from the administration. If we had been audited, and the only documentation we had for that lens was that Wan Yusof Wan Morshidi** had written that he paid almost $8,000 for it, The Tech might have been in trouble. (However, The Tech eventually ended up in much worse trouble, so in the long run it wouldn’t have mattered.)
** One of the other photo editors insisted on crediting him under that four-part name, even though it seemed like it was contrary to our style guide. They claimed because he was a Saudi nobleman he had complicated multi-part first and last names. I thought that was a bullshit power play. Wan didn’t care one way or the other; he just wanted to take pictures and produce Bose-Einstein condensates. He did get ribbed for taking a lot of pictures of the freshmen women at their swim tests one year, but I thought there was nothing untoward about his photos—except perhaps that he shot more of the women than the men. No one suggested he acted inappropriately, unlike another graduate student photographer who kept hitting on a sixteen-year-old freshman reporter. (She wasn’t emotionally ready for college, much less being hit on by an adult.) Since I was also a graduate student at that point, I was assigned the job of telling him to back off. I tried a couple tacks before I found one that worked; “You are half again her age!” finally brought it home to him that they could not have a relationship.
So is “Wan” some kind of variation on Ibn?
Some rather illicit searching in student data suggests that it’s Malaysian, as (it turns out) does wikipedia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malay_styles_and_titles
‘Wan, is a title inherited through the male line, given to a son or a daughter of a royal-family mother who married a commoner.’
Thanks!