Y Words of 2024: Pointy and Putin-y

On view at the Boulder Public Library.

I realize, five readers of mine, that you have been deprived of the quarter-finals, semi-finals, and finals. Mainly this is because there are only seven words to choose from this year.

Re-reading them now, I can say that the finalists are eleventy, pointy, and Putin-y. 

And, tied for the win are pointy and Putin-y. 

Thank you for reading. 

By the way, the James scene I keep mentally returning to is the angel scene. Great scene.

And, a line spoken by Mr. Short that comes back to me time and again is not the Putin-y one; it’s the retort to Charles (Steve Martin) during a quick back-and-forth in Season 3.

CHARLES 

But I wanted Paramount Plus!

OLIVER 

Didja?

Martin Short is my man of the year! (However, eyes of the year must be awarded to Timothée Chalamet.)

Piano, interior.

And now, a couple of good-byes. 

First, to my father, who died October 10th, at the age of 97. 

He prepared breakfast for me and my sisters every morning of our childhood. (Our mother could make applesauce.)

Our father insisted the telephones be taken off the hook during dinner. 

My father started me on reading dictionaries, simply by saying, every time we would look up a word together (because, of course, he was never going to tell me outright what a word meant) “Do you ever read the dictionary?”

Lucky me, for that.

Also at the Boulder Public Library. 

The second good-bye is to William Toye, who was one of the co-editors of Letters of Marshall McLuhan (Oxford University Press, 1987), and who died in Toronto on May 1st, at the age of 98. This week I came across the following saved note about Toye:

William Toye, who co-edited the book Letters of Marshall McLuhan, provides one possible rationale to believe in the notion of media literacy:  “ . . . any potentially crucial new technological development should be confronted squarely, and its hidden dimensions imagined so that we can foresee and prepare to master their likely effects rather than be surprised, decades hence, when they have carried us in unwanted directions.” 

Echoes of Aldous Huxley being interviewed by Mike Wallace, no? . . . 

***

Now: Do you know the book Ask the Fellows Who Cut the Hay? It was first published in 1956 by Faber and Faber Limited. This is the first epigraph.

COUNTRYMAN:  We old men are old chronicles, and when our tongues go they are not clocks to tell only the time present, but large books unclasped; and our speeches, like leaves turned over and over, discover wonders that are long since past.

             (From a XVII Century Tract)