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For the Love of Sentences

For the Love of Sentences
From Frank Bruni’s NYT Opinion Column May 11, 2023

ONE OF MY FAVORITE PASTIMES! If this doesn’t make you laugh, you don’t love sentences like I do!


Pool photo by Stefan Rousseau
In the prelude to last weekend’s coronation of King Charles III, Helen Lewis visited and considered royals less fussed over. “One peculiarity of European aristocrats is that their names pile up, like snowdrifts,” she observed. “It’s lunchtime in Tirana, the capital of Albania, and I am about to meet Leka Anwar Zog Reza Baudouin Msiziwe Zogu, crown prince of the Albanians.” She has to pass through a gate “guarded by an elderly manservant for whom the term ‘faithful retainer’ might have been invented. Because I am British, his thinly disguised irritation at my presence makes me feel right at home.” (Thanks to Lizzy Menges of Garden City, N.Y., for drawing my attention to Lewis’s excellent article.)
Rachel Tashjian in The Washington Post weighed in on the ostentation of Charles’s coronation: “The red velvet robes trimmed in ermine, the five-pound crown, the gold robes on top of gold robes dragging over gold carpets — the regalia often made it feel like a Versace fashion show staged in an assisted-living facility.” (Ann Kolasa Zastrow, Evanston, Ill., and Merrio Morton, Lancaster, S.C., among many others)
And from Tom Holland in The Guardian: “Watching a coronation is the constitutional equivalent of visiting a zoo, and finding a Triceratops in one of the enclosures.” (Dot McFalls, Charlottesville, Va.)
In The New Yorker, J.R. Moehringer, the ghostwriter of Prince Harry’s memoir, “Spare,” reflected on the impossibility of walking entirely in this particular man’s shoes: “I’d worked hard to understand the ordeals of Harry Windsor, and now I saw that I understood nothing. Empathy is thin gruel compared with the marrow of experience.” (Sara Klemmer, Charlotte, N.C., and Susan Kochan, Brooklyn, among others)
In The Times, Ligaya Mishan celebrated the infinite textures of food: “What of the coy half-surrender that the Italians venerate in pasta as ‘al dente’ and the Taiwanese in noodles and boba as ‘Q’ (or ‘QQ,’ if the food in question is exceptionally springy); the restive yolk threatening to slither off a six-minute egg; the seraphic weight of a chiffon cake; the heavy melt of fat off a slab of pork belly, slowly liquefying itself? What of goo, foam, dust, air? What of the worlds that lie between slime and velvet, collapse and refusal, succulence and desiccation?” (Judy Cress, El Cerrito, Calif.)
Also in The Times, Robert Draper profiled William J. Burns, the C.I.A. director: “His ascent is an unlikely turn for a tall, discreet figure with wary eyes, ashen hair and a trim mustache, a sort you could easily imagine in a John le Carré novel whispering into a dignitary’s ear at an embassy party that the city is falling to the rebels and a boat will be waiting in the harbor at midnight.” (Jefferson M. Gray, Baltimore, and Ed Lyon, Cincinnati)
And Michael Levenson reported on the odd dumping of hundreds of pounds of pasta alongside a creek in Old Bridge, N.J. “When photos of the discarded pasta were shared on a Reddit discussion about all things New Jersey, it became fertile ground for puns and dad jokes,” he wrote. “Someone commented: ‘We should send the perpetrators to the state penne tentiary.’” Town workers cleaned up and disposed of the pasta in under an hour. “It was not clear if a large fork had been used.” (Pat Reneman, Kettle Falls, Wash., and Margaret Koziel, Cambridge, Mass., among others)
To nominate favorite bits of recent writing from The Times or other publications to be mentioned in “For the Love of Sentences,” please email me here and include your name and place of residence.
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2023 OHA Call for Awards is OPEN!

2023 OHA Call for Awards is OPEN!

As OHA gears up for our conference in Baltimore we are pleased to announce that the Annual Call for Awards is OPEN!  This year we are accepting applications for the following four categories: Article Award Book Award Mason Multi-Media Award Martha Ross Teaching Award Click this link to read more about each award and fill […]

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OHA Call for Conference Workshops & Events

OHA Call for Conference Workshops & Events

As our program committee members review your great submissions for our upcoming 2023 annual meeting in Baltimore, October 18-21, we’d like to extend an invitation to propose additional workshops, meetings, and special events for our time together at the conference. Please use this link to submit your ideas by April 30th.

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FAQs Friday: Questions We Encountered This Week!

FAQs Friday: Questions We Encountered This Week!

FAQs Friday!!!

Hi everyone!!!

Thanks for reading Capturing Voices! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

We thought it would be helpful to send a summary of the inaudibles we had this week so this way we can learn something new every week, and maybe one of these inaudibles will appear in the next interview you’re transcribing, and it’ll save you some time!

We all know how much time we spend researching things, so everything helps! 🙂

We also want to include some of the questions you ask us, hoping our answers might help you in the future.

1- AREN’T ACRONYMS TRICKY?

– Unless they—LDRs took days, too.  

LDR? What is that? 

Well, you might be interested to know that the LDR rate is the number of departures minus those delayed for maintenance reasons, divided by total departures.

Check out this link!

2- WHAT HAPPENS WHEN SOMEBODY MENTIONS PHRASES IN A LANGUAGE THAT’S NOT ENGLISH?

 Well, we do our research, of course! This week, Meia deserves a gold star for this one 🙂

– I spoke a little bit of the language. I could still—[???00:14:05_Speaking Korean]. 

What was the veteran saying, you might be wondering? Well, he said, “Annyeong Hasimnikka,” which means good day in Korean. 

What languages do you speak???

3- THIS WAS A COMPLICATED ONE!

So the glass industry was in a city called [???inaudible___00:45:39]. [in former Czechoslovakia] 

Not easy, right?

 So John stepped in and said this:

I’m hearing Neugablonz, but this is complicated – Gablonz is a glassmaking city in Czechoslovakia. Neugablonz is a glassmaking center founded by refugees from Gablonz after the war, but it’s in Germany. I’m definitely hearing that extra syllable at the start of the word though – is there any chance he’s talking about the one in Germany? 

And Beth added some more information:

I think John’s nailed it, he’s right, it IS complicated. There is no Czechoslovakia anymore; they separated in 1993. Gablonz was in the Sudentenland, which was one of Hitler’s first moves:

The Sudetenland (/suːˈdeɪtənlænd/ German: [zuˈdeːtn̩lant]; Czech and Slovak: Sudety) is the historical German name for the northern, southern, and western areas of former Czechoslovakia which were inhabited primarily by Sudeten Germans. These German speakers had predominated in the border districts of Bohemia, Moravia, and Czech Silesia since the Middle Ages. Sudetenland had been, since the 9th century, an integral part of the Czech state (first within the Duchy of Bohemia and later the Kingdom of Bohemia) both geographically and politically.

We’re doing some serious detective work here! 

Did you learn something new today? I really hope so! 

Thanks for reading Capturing Voices! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Uncategorized

FAQs Friday: Questions We Encountered This Week!

FAQs Friday: Questions We Encountered This Week!

FAQs Friday!!!

Hi everyone!!!

Thanks for reading Capturing Voices! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

We thought it would be helpful to send a summary of the inaudibles we had this week so this way we can learn something new every week, and maybe one of these inaudibles will appear in the next interview you’re transcribing, and it’ll save you some time!

We all know how much time we spend researching things, so everything helps! 🙂

We also want to include some of the questions you ask us, hoping our answers might help you in the future.

1- AREN’T ACRONYMS TRICKY?

– Unless they—LDRs took days, too.  

LDR? What is that? 

Well, you might be interested to know that the LDR rate is the number of departures minus those delayed for maintenance reasons, divided by total departures.

Check out this link!

2- WHAT HAPPENS WHEN SOMEBODY MENTIONS PHRASES IN A LANGUAGE THAT’S NOT ENGLISH?

 Well, we do our research, of course! This week, Meia deserves a gold star for this one 🙂

– I spoke a little bit of the language. I could still—[???00:14:05_Speaking Korean]. 

What was the veteran saying, you might be wondering? Well, he said, “Annyeong Hasimnikka,” which means good day in Korean. 

What languages do you speak???

3- THIS WAS A COMPLICATED ONE!

So the glass industry was in a city called [???inaudible___00:45:39]. [in former Czechoslovakia] 

Not easy, right?

 So John stepped in and said this:

I’m hearing Neugablonz, but this is complicated – Gablonz is a glassmaking city in Czechoslovakia. Neugablonz is a glassmaking center founded by refugees from Gablonz after the war, but it’s in Germany. I’m definitely hearing that extra syllable at the start of the word though – is there any chance he’s talking about the one in Germany? 

And Beth added some more information:

I think John’s nailed it, he’s right, it IS complicated. There is no Czechoslovakia anymore; they separated in 1993. Gablonz was in the Sudentenland, which was one of Hitler’s first moves:

The Sudetenland (/suːˈdeɪtənlænd/ German: [zuˈdeːtn̩lant]; Czech and Slovak: Sudety) is the historical German name for the northern, southern, and western areas of former Czechoslovakia which were inhabited primarily by Sudeten Germans. These German speakers had predominated in the border districts of Bohemia, Moravia, and Czech Silesia since the Middle Ages. Sudetenland had been, since the 9th century, an integral part of the Czech state (first within the Duchy of Bohemia and later the Kingdom of Bohemia) both geographically and politically.

We’re doing some serious detective work here! 

Did you learn something new today? I really hope so! 

Thanks for reading Capturing Voices! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Uncategorized