Present-Day American Usage

 Galen Strawson's The Secret Connexion: Causation, Realism, and David Hume gives page numbers for its quotations from Hume in the manner (T 266) or (E 153), referring to particular Clarendon Press editions of Hume's works. It happens that I have the edition he uses for A Treatise of Human Nature, which in Part II, Causation in the Treatise, I did refer to at times. Having reached, Part III, Causation in the Enquiry, I went to find my copy, doubting I had the one used. I did not: I had an edition printed by Bobbs-Merrill.

Curiously, Bobb-Merrill printed it as An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding. On page lv, "A Note on the Text" concludes

Spelling and punctuation have been revised throughout to conform to present-day American usage.

And so it has. For example the edition replaces with "insure" the "ensure" in

The poorest artificer, who labours alone, expects at least the protection of the magistrate, to ensure him the enjoyment of the fruits of his labour.

And of course it removes the "u" from "labour".

This strikes me as just wrong. It is well to impose present-day American spelling on present-day American authors; though Jacques Barzun thought otherwise about publishers' conventions, as he wrote in the essay "Dialogue in C-Sharp", collected in A Word or Two Before You Go...: Brief Essays on Language. But though Bobbs-Merrill's market consisted of present-day Americans, its author was not one. I have to think that anyone capable of following the arguments of An Enquiry can manage English or Scottish spelling and an older system of punctuation.

It is fair to say that the edition appeared in 1955. Quite likely practices had changed with twenty or thirty years at Bobbs-Merrill and comparable publishers.

Alloys

 In checking a term in Liddell and Scott, I was interested to see "pankalkeos" defined as "all-brazen", being used to think of "kalkos" (χαλκός) as meaning primarily "bronze". And indeed in the main article on "kalkos", the lexicon says that antiquity did not know what we call brass, an alloy of copper and zinc. But evidently the ancients were loose in their designations, sometimes using "kalkos" for unalloyed copper, sometimes for what we call bronze, an alloy of copper and tin. The Romans were likewise free in their use of "aes". No doubt the purchasers of metal products were quite precise in specifying what they wanted and in checking what they received, though.

"Brass" does not quite sound as impressive as "bronze". Partly I suppose this owes to I Corinthians 13, partly to the colloquial use of "brass" for money or for effrontery. But it was the term that earlier English made do with, and that is why the Authorized Version used "brass" for "kalkos". The OED's earliest citation for "bronze" in the modern sense is from 1739; and in 1755 Johnson used "brass" in his definition of bronze.

David Lodge, RIP

 Last week, the New York Times carried an obituary of David Lodge, who died on New Years at the age of 89. Going through Wikipedia's list of his works, I find that I have read four of his novels, including his most recent, Deaf Sentence, which appeared in 2006.

 Alvin Kernan's memoir In Plato's Cave states that Stanley Fish cheerfully acknowledged that Lodge had modeled the character Morris Zapp (Changing Places and Small World) on him. The Times says that Fish put a Morris Zapp nameplate on his office door at Duke. That seems to me to speak well for Fish's sense of humor, and for Lodge's touch.

Books and Fates

One sees here and there the tag "habent libelli sua fata", "books have their fates". They do, and it has seemed to me that more and more it is a very quick fate--the Homeric epithet "okumoros", swift-fated, seems to apply. The book that was everywhere in 2010 became a special order in 2020, and now is simply unavailable at most stores.

A look through the best-seller lists of other years shows that the process is not always unfair, that many books deserve their quick disappearance. But there are others that deserve to be on the shelves and stay. Having looked into Sam Tanenhaus's biography of Whittaker Chambers, I thought it might be interesting to look into Lionel Trilling's novel The Middle of the Journey. The most likely local bookstore says that this is "not available"--NYRB Classics brought it back into print in 2002, but that was two dozen years ago. I gave a friend a copy of Hermann Broch's novel The Death of Virgil some years ago, but that also is not available. Well, Vintage brought it out 30 years ago. And apart from books never bought, there are those that one wishes to replace--lost by a loan, or to household disasters.

A textbook tells me that that the full clause is "pro captu lectoris habent libelli sua fata": books have their fates, according to the reader's ability. Fortunately, the ability of the reader is not fixed, and I have read with much interest books that I had set aside years before that as unreadable or uninteresting.

 

Then and Now

 In Chapter XI, "The Conqueror (1837)" of Across the Wide Missouri, Bernard DeVoto wrote of the American Fur Company's earnest but ineffectual response to the 1837 smallpox epidemic that devastated the tribes along the upper Missouri River:

Suppose however that [the company] had the knowledge of every American today--except the million or so who belong to anti-vaccination, anti-vivisection, anti-research organizations and sometimes produce smallpox epidemics which differ from that which destroyed the Mandans only in that the rest of have been vaccinated...

A page or so later DeVoto suggested the rural south as at least a recent area of resistance to vaccines. Such resistance had not become popular among the prosperous and expensively schooled.

Across the Wide Missouri appeared in 1947, and won a Pulitzer Prize and a Bancroft Prize.

Loie Fuller

 The New York Times last week noticed a new film, "Obsessed with Light", about the dancer Loie Fuller. I know little about dance, but one of the sections of Yeats's "1919" begins

When Loie Fuller's Chinese dancers unwound
A shining web, a floating ribbon of cloth,
It seemed that a dragon of air
Had fallen among dancers, had whirled them round
Or hurried them off on its own furious path;...

The movie does not seem to have made it to Washington yet. I will have to look out for it.

Glasses

When the effect of age on my eyes was beyond denying, the optometrist suggested progressive lenses, saying that they worked well for those who worked with computers. I found that this was so. I also found drawbacks. Steps down required care until I was used to the glasses. Distance vision was best at a narrow strip across the top of the lenses, which sometimes made me tuck my chin down to see a block or two down the street.

This time, with the distance band having moved a few degrees down, I thought that I should try bifocals. I got them on Monday. For distance they were excellent. For reading print they were good. For computer work they were deficient. I make my living working on computers.

The eyeglasses vendor will replace the bifocals with progressives, for a nominal price. I am wearing my old glasses until the new arrive.