Quote of the Day (Ambrose Bierce, Defining the People Who Define Words)

“Lexicographer, n. A pestilent fellow who, under the pretense of recording some particular stage in the development of a language, does what he can to arrest its growth, stiffen its flexibility and mechanize its methods.”— American journalist and satirist Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914?), The Unabridged Devil's Dictionary, edited by David E Schultz and S. T. Joshi (2002)

As soon as I saw this quote, it struck my fancy: The satirist making fun of himself. And that was before I realized that I would be using it on the 180^th birthday of Ambrose Bierce today.

Bierce might be best known for the last act of his life: his disappearing act in the Mexican Revolution, an event depicted in the film adaptation of Carlos Fuentes’ novel The Old Gringo, with Gregory Peck in one of his last big-screen roles as the writer.

But, unlike many authors, his life (including the most dramatic parts, such as his service as a Union soldier in several Civil War battles) does not distract attention from his writing.

In particular, The Devil’s Dictionary stands as his great achievement in biting cynicism. It is, as the title suggests, hardly the stuff of traditional dictionaries. Its mockery does not age in the slightest after all these years.

His insults could be something to behold, as in this description of Oscar Wilde when the young writer came to lecture in San Francisco in 1882:

“That sovereign of insufferables, Oscar Wilde has ensued with his opulence of twaddle and his penury of sense. He has mounted his hind legs and blown crass vapidities through the bowel of his neck, to the capital edification of circumjacent fools and foolesses, fooling with their foolers. He has tossed off the top of his head and uttered himself in copious overflows of ghastly bosh. The ineffable dunce has nothing to say and says it—says it with a liberal embellishment of bad delivery, embroidering it with reasonless vulgarities of attitude, gesture and attire. There never was an impostor so hateful, a blockhead so stupid, a crank so variously and offensively daft. Therefore is the she fool enamored of the feel of his tongue in her ear to tickle her understanding.”

Such invective derived from Bierce's wide-ranging misanthropy, as explained by historian Kevin Starr in Americans and the California Dream, 1850-1915:

“He hated democracy and he hated Walt Whitman. He hated ministers. If dogs harassed him as he pedaled his bicycle along country roads, he would dismount, draw his pistol and shoot the offending animal, sometimes before an astonished owner's eyes.”

TV Quote of the Day (‘One Day at a Time,’ With Schneider on ‘One of the Basic Rules of Grammar’)

Julie Cooper [played by Mackenzie Phillips]: “Barbara, do you spell 'faithful' with one 'L' or two 'Ls'?”

Barbara Cooper [played by Valerie Bertinelli]: “I think it's one 'L'.”

Dwayne F. Schneider [played by Pat Harrington Jr.]: “It's two 'Ls'.”

Julie: “Two? That doesn't sound right. Are you sure?”

Schneider: “'Course I'm sure. It's one of the basic rules of grammar. Whenever the 'F' precedes a vowel, it's always two 'Ls', except after 'C', unless it's used in conjunction with a pronoun. Whaddaya think, I forget these things?”

Julie [looking it up]: “Schneider, 'faithful' - one 'L'.”

Schneider: “When was that dictionary printed?”

Julie: “1974.”

Schneider: “Well, there's your answer! It's outdated. It's an old dictionary.”

Barbara: “What has that got to do with it?”

Schneider: “Well, it's just like automobiles. If they don't change the way words are spelled every couple'a years, how they gonna sell new dictionaries? Come on!”— One Day at a Time, Season 2, Episode 20, “The Butterfields,” original air date Feb. 22, 1977, teleplay by Norman Paul and Jack Elinson, directed by Herbert Kenwith

My Irish father and I didn’t always share the same cultural tastes (Lawrence Welk vs. Bruce Springsteen was a rather big divide), but about one matter we absolutely agreed: Dwayne Schneider, the cocky building custodian of Norman Lear’s 1970s sitcom One Day at a Time, was a hoot and a half whose mere appearance was enough to make us guffaw at will.

Maybe it was a shared Celtic thing among us and the actor who embodied the character. Pat Harrington Jr., who played Schneider throughout the nine-season run of the series, was the son of a song-and-dance man who was part of a circle of Irish-American entertainers that also included Bing Crosby, Pat O’Brien and James Dunn.

Pat Jr. must have inherited at least of his father’s body awareness. At least I’ve come to believe so, thinking again on how, as Schneider, he would swagger into the apartment of single mom Ann Romano and her two daughters, jangling his tool belt and letting his cigarette pack poke out from his T-shirt, practically winking with a Neanderthal come-on.

“The ladies in this building don’t call me ‘super’ for nothing,” Schneider announced early on. The joke was on him, of course—nobody fell for the act, anymore than they would for that thin moustache he felt was so appealing.

I have never gotten around to seeing the recent cable reboot of the series. Nevertheless, I find it hard to believe, as Jen Chaney claimed in a 2017 New York Magazine article, that the new incarnation of Schneider was superior to Harrington’s. Only in a hyper-politically correct time could anyone fail to realize the insecurity (including, in the above quote, the patriarchal need to be an Authority On Everything) behind the painfully thin macho membrane of Schneider.

Harrington’s skill in milking laughs—even as he let you see the anxious character beneath—accounted for why Lear came to regard him as “the comic strength of the show”; why the sitcom’s writers relied on that gift to make the series’ lessons on feminism and sexism sound less overtly preachy; and why the actor won a Golden Glove and Emmy for his performance in the role.

Pat Harrington Jr. died five years ago today at age 86 of Alzheimer’s Disease, leaving more than a few viewers—including a father and son in New Jersey—smiling at his memory.

Tweet of the Day (Comic Daniel Edison, on an Unusual Ailment)

“I swallowed a dictionary. It gave me thesaurus throat I've ever had.” ―Stand-up comic Daniel Edison, tweet of Feb. 27, 2017

This Day in Literary History (Noah Webster’s "American Dictionary")

April 21, 1828—After more than a quarter century of obsessive labor, Noah Webster –soldier, schoolteacher, spelling reformer, textbook author, newspaper and magazine editor, county judge, and copyright advocate – published Original American Dictionary of the English Language. Like fellow Federalist John Marshall, “America’s Schoolmaster” produced a grand nationalist body of work that unified his country.

After the Revolutionary War (in which not only served but played “Yankee Doodle Dandy” at the head of fellow Yale students for the benefit of lifelong hero George Washington), Webster turned to teaching and was disheartened by the state of American education, particularly by schoolchildren’s use of English rather than American materials. In response he created A Grammatical Institute of the English Language (1783), a combined speller-grammar-reader. Benjamin Franklin was just one of many Americans to use the so-called "Blue-backed Speller" to teach his granddaughter how to read, spell, and pronounce words.

Like the somewhat younger James Fenimore Cooper, Webster possessed somewhat cranky political views that at times put him at odds with his countrymen, but he also took a British literary model and gave Americans a completely distinctive form of literature. Cooper (who, in later years, was frequently in court over libel suits against Whig defamation) started out as an unsuccessful imitator of Jane Austen and Sir Walter Scott before his Leatherstocking Saga carved out a niche as the first Western series. Webster, a Federalist who often felt out of place in the Age of Jackson, took the British form of the dictionary and gave it a very American turn.

For a simple, uncorrupt people, Webster’s 70,000-word 1828 dictionary stripped language to its essentials: “Music” instead of “Musick,” for instance. More important, it included 12,000 words and from 30,000 to 40,000 definitions that had not appeared in any earlier dictionary. He completed a revision of his bestseller only a few days before his death at 1843.

I did not realize until researching this post that Webster also produced a translation of the Bible five years after his epic dictionary. Some scholars feel as if it were a missed opportunity, since, although he knew Latin and Greek, he mostly confined himself to correcting grammar in the King James version and eliminating any passages "so offensive, especially to females, as to create a reluctance in young persons to attend Bible classes and schools, in which they are required to read passages which cannot be repeated without a blush.”

At a time when several translators were engaged in a Thomas Jefferson-like effort to expunge portions that did not conform to their less orthodox theologies, Webster had no interest in offering anything that would overturn traditional notions of Christianity. That, combined with his rather light editing of the King James version, meant that his version would not displace the two-centuries-old one.

But today, Webster’s translation is enjoying somewhat of a vogue. Because it is now in the public domain, it is available in the public domain and can thus be downloaded for free.