Couldn’t this be written without Key-Value Coding as follows?
- (id)tableView:(NSTableView *)tableview objectValueForTableColumn:(id)column row:(int)row
{
ChildObject *child = [childrenArray objectAtIndex:row];
return [child performSelector:NSSelectorFromString([column identifier])];
}
Given the dynamism of Objective-C, why is Key-Value Coding necessary here — or anywhere?
He who has known the other days, the angry ones of gout attacks, or those with that wicked headache rooted behind the eyeballs that casts a spell on every nerve of eye and ear with a fiendish delight in torture, or soul-destroying, evil days of inward vacancy and despair, when, on this distracted earth, sucked dry by the vampires of finance, the world of men and of socialized culture grins back at us with the lying, vulgar, brazen glamor of a Fair and dogs us with the persistence of an emetic, and when all is concentrated and focused to the last pitch of the intolerable upon your own sick Self–he who has known these days of hell may be content indeed with normal half-and-half days like today.
That’s Herman Hesse from Steppenwolf. Makes you feel better about your overcooked omelette, doesn’t it? But what about that word, “emetic”? What does that mean?
Usually, when a word appears in a vivid, concrete passage like this one, I can derive its meaning from context. There are exceptions, of course–“palimpsest” just about beat me over the head–but “emetic” has a quality that should make it easy to figure out even when context fails: It looks similar to lots of other words. The prefix “e,” the apparent root “met,” the suffix “ic”: I’ve seen those before. And yet, I can’t quite decode it.
“E-” makes me think of “ingress” and “egress,” i.e. coming in and going out. The prefix “e-” here must mean “out.” The middle of “emetic,” “met,” reminds me of the verb “meter” in Spanish, which means “to put” or “to insert” (among lots of other things; it’s one of those verbs like “arrancar” that seems to mean just about everything). The suffix “ic” recalls “diuretic” (I’m a big coffee drinker) and “analgesic”–medical words–but then again, does “aesthetic” have anything to do with medicine? And–oh no!–what about cleric? Hesse loves depicting the clergy like a crazed mob, and I’m sure the speaker of this passage, the Steppenwolf himself, would not disagree.
Having read the passage three or four times, my best guesses are the following: (a) a drug administered to induce vomiting, i.e. the putting-out of whatever’s in you, or (b) a functionary of the church or court who pursues heretics or tax-evaders, “persistently.”
Merriam-Webster, shockingly, confirms guess (a): “emetic: an agent that induces vomiting.” My amateur etymology, for once, succeeds! Both M-W and the Online Etymology Dictionary trace “emetic” to the Greek “emein,” “to vomit,” and the latter relates the noun “emesis,” meaning “action of vomiting.” Now I’m reminded of one of my favorite science words, “lysis.” I’m not sure what the shared suffix “sis” means, but I’m not going to look into that just now. I am content indeed with this middling comprehension.
The cover of the June 6, 2011 issue of the New Yorker depicts eight people on a New York City street. All of them are white. Given the racial composition of New York (44.6% white) and assuming an equal chance of picking any New Yorker, the likelihood of this scene is less than one fifth of one percent (0.0016).
Now, judging from the the broad, immaculate sidewalks, the middle-aged pedestrians, the conservative clothing, and the proximity of three pieces of well-maintained government property (a flowerbed, a mailbox, a guillotine), we may safely assume that the scene takes place in Manhattan, where, according to the 2000 census, 56.4% of the population is white. Even so, the probability rises to just 1.02%.
But, you say, that isn’t just any Manhattan neighborhood. Look at the vaguely Hebrew lettering in the window, the stately plaque marking a historical site or a doctor’s office, the right angles, the bookstore! Fair enough. If I were to guess, I’d say we are looking at Manhattan Community District 7, otherwise known as the Upper West Side. In this neighborhood, a slice of Manhattan whiter even than Staten Island, almost eight in ten residents are white (78.8%). Ignoring all non-residents — cabbies, vendors, city employees, custodians, nannies, etc — we have a 14.9% chance of capturing eight whites and nobody else on camera.
I’ve also noticed this phenomenon in New York Magazine. A recent cover, entitled “Brooklyn’s Sonic Boom,” depicted twelve Brooklyn-based musicians, all white. What a warped perspective on the borough that produced Biggie Smalls, Lil’ Kim, Lil’ Cease, Jay-Z, Mos Def, Talib Kweli, and Busta Rhymes, to name just a few. Brooklyn’s been “booming” for a long while.
I have to wonder, are the editors of these magazines aware of their bias? Are they intentionally producing these covers to appeal to whiter-than-average readerships? Or are the images evidence of a more subconscious slant that blocks out black and brown people, who constitute more than half of the city’s residents? It’s hard to say, but I do know that until their covers show a more accurate picture of New York, neither magazine deserves its name.
After the killing of Osama bin Laden, President Obama said that Al Qaeda may have “metastasized to other parts of the world.” That word, metastasize, is one that, like patronize, has always confused me even though I know what it means. Obama, in his infinite cool, pronounced the word without difficulty, but I always find myself saying “metastatize,” as if the noun form were not metastasis but metastatus (a fake word which, now that I think of it, summarizes Daniel Boorstin’s definition of celebrity: “a person who is well known for his well-knownness”). Moreover, metastasis has that strange, fullerene property of being unusual despite familiar constituents: I know what meta and stasis mean, but how do you get “spread” from that?
My going theory, based on a simple breakdown of the word, is that metastasis originally described a situation where a disease had become so strong that it might be called stable or static and where the very condition of stasis couldn’t be changed. The disease had achieved an unalterable dominance; it had won. Perhaps the spread of disease from one organ to another signaled this victory and so the literal meaning gave way to, as Merriam-Webster defines it, “a change of position” or “the spread of a disease-producing agency from the initial site … to another part of the body.”
Unfortunately, the venerable Online Etymology Dictionary proves me wrong. The origin of metastasis is nothing like what I thought! Forget the prior paragraph, all ye who read this blog! The stasis in metastasis isn’t stasis as we know it in English. No, the word derives from the Greek methistanai containing the root histanai, meaning “to place” or “cause to stand,” and the prefix meta, which can simply mean “over” or “across.” I can see how “place across” might become “transference” (the old Greek meaning of metastasis) and then, finally, the modern-day metastasis.
My silly theory demonstrates the rise of a colloquial sense of meta meaning “self-referential” as in metadata, metasearch, and “that’s so meta.” In this age of instant photos, check-ins, status updates, and countless other ways of symbolizing our own lives, I’m not surprised that this form invaded my brain and crowded out the good old Greek.
On a recent trip to Duane Reade, I endured three of my many pet peeves.
First, the cashier said, “Have a blessed day.” When Daniel Dennett was in the hospital, on the edge of death, he received letters from friends saying they had prayed for him. Later, after he had recovered, he remarked that he had had “to forgive” those friends. What he meant, I think, was that to him (an atheist of the first order), praying is just as good as, say, watching an episode of Laverne & Shirley or, to use a Dennett-ism, making a ham sandwich. What if you received a letter from a friend saying, “Sorry to hear about your illness. I’m making a ham sandwich.”? That’s how an atheist feels when you wish him a “blessed day.” Cashiers and other service-people, you should probably keep your religion to yourself. (And so should public servants, i.e. the President; “May God bless the United States of America” at the end of every speech seems not only excessive but also disrespectful of our atheist citizens.)
Second, the cashier called me by saying, “Following guest, please.” This innocuous statement demonstrates two of my pet peeves. While “guest” is intended to emphasize respect, it is, in fact, patronizing. A guest is someone to whom you show politeness and hospitality, to whom you give something, for little or no personal gain. There is no quid pro quo in a guest-host relationship. Certainly you would expect no payment from a guest at a dinner party or your vacation home. A “customer,” on the other hand, is a person who has decided to sacrifice something for your goods or services. If you call a customer a guest, you are diminishing that sacrifice, implying that you are serving him out of good will, and ascribing to yourself a little bit of undeserved altruism.
If you are still reading, you are probably thinking, “This guy is a nitpick.” Just you wait. The first word in the cashier’s call — “following” — actually annoys me even more. At my usual lunch spot, one of the cashiers says “next customer” while the other says “following customer.” Which seems more natural to you? The reason “following” rankles is not only that it officiously wastes two syllables but also that it means something slightly different than “next” (in my view, and in contrast with some dictionaries that list the two as synonyms). “Following,” as an adjective, means “about to be stated” (“the following reasons”) or “next in time” (“the following day”) but, unlike next, the word does not mean “next in sequence.” For example, after seeing Mission Impossible III, you could not have said, “That was great! I wonder how many motorcycles John Woo will destroy in his following movie.” No, when you apply “following” to sequences, you must state the starting point: “The Conversation — the film following The Godfather in Coppola’s filmography — is a beautiful, if forgotten, piece of work.”
Thankfully, I overcame these obstacles and bought my earplugs. Interpretation of that purchase is left to the reader.
I found it ironic that the following description appeared on a web site for an app called Writer:
Writer is actively designed to help you write.
What does that mean, “actively designed?” The question reminds me of a passage from On Writing Well that criticizes the verb “to finalize.” The problem with this verb is that it is vague. It means “to finish” (I think), but it also implies a certain purpose or method. The writer does not supply this extra information, leaving the reader with a lingering uncertainty. “Finalize” should be replaced with a specific explanation or simply “finish.”
The same goes for “actively.” This adverb has invaded writing of all kinds. Pop-technical writing, especially, seems infected, but I also witnessed multiple instances of the word in a recent New Yorker article. In the workplace, it’s not uncommon to hear statements like, “I’m actively investigating the problem.” The speaker here wants to put emphasis on the fact that he’s on it: Not only is he investigating, he’s actively doing it. But really he’s wasting a word and, worse, introducing vagueness. Now we are forced to wonder how he is investigating, which is beside the point.
What “actively” and “finalize” have in common is that they both imply without explaining. They distract us with questions that aren’t important. They go too far. William Strunk thought of a piece of writing as a swamp and the writer as a guide who helps the reader through. Words like “finalize” and “actively,” then, are quagmires that a good guide will navigate around.
A lot of times I get the veggie dog at Bark then stop at Brooklyn Larder for the molasses cookie. This cookie is dark brown and chewy with large granules of sugar embedded in its smooth surface. It’s a very good cookie.
Last week, I noticed that the molasses cookie had changed: it was brittle, bumpy, and lighter in color. The sugar stood on top like braille. Examining the unfamiliar object, I thought, “Inga must have quit.” Inga is a former roommate of mine and, as pastry chef at Brooklyn Larder, the architect of the molasses cookie. This new version wasn’t terrible, but it just didn’t say, “Inga.”
Today (after an egg salad on white) I bought a chocolate square, spurning what I assumed was the new chef’s recipe. But as I exited the store, I heard, “Jonah!” Lo, there approached Inga. We exchanged pleasantries. I said, “Did you change the molasses cookie?” She said, “Yes.” I could hardly believe it. This pale, uneven mass came from the steady hands of Inga? Couldn’t be.
And it wasn’t. Inga explained that her usual molasses supplier had gone out of business. She had been forced to use a lesser, lighter molasses while she searched for a purveyor of the original. She had just found one, and the old cookie would be back soon. Brooklyn yuppies, rejoice! The molasses cookie lives on.
See also: I Am Rewarded for My Loyalty to the Tuscan White Bean Sandwich
A few years ago, I bought a used copy of Billy Collins’s Picnic, Lightning. I had been reading it for a while when I flipped to the title page and saw, scrawled in black ink, a message:
To Joan—
Such sweet pain.
Love Billy
1999
I wondered, had Billy Collins himself written this message? Had I come into a signed copy? Who was Joan — a friend, maybe, or a lover? — and what was causing her pain?
Today, in need of a password (which I like to take from books), I happened to pick up Picnic, Lightning for the first time in years. I remembered the message and read it again. It seemed appropriate for a solo Valentine’s Day.
Not to get all Garrison Keillor on you, dear readers, but here’s one of my favorite poems from the book, the eponymous “Picnic, Lightning.” It doesn’t make a bad Valentine’s Day read itself.
It is possible to be struck by a meteor
or a single-engine plane
while reading in a chair at home.
Safes drop from rooftops
and flatten the odd pedestrian
mostly within the panels of the comics,
but still, we know it is possible,
as well as the flash of summer lightning,
the thermos toppling over,
spilling out on the grass.And we know the message
can be delivered from within.
The heart, no valentine,
decides to quit after lunch,
the power shut off like a switch,
or a tiny dark ship is unmoored
into the flow of the body’s rivers,
the brain a monastery,
defenseless on the shore.This is what I think about
when I shovel compost
into a wheelbarrow,
and when I fill the long flower boxes,
then press into rows
the limp roots of red impatiens–
the instant hand of Death
always ready to burst forth
from the sleeve of his voluminous cloak.Then the soil is full of marvels,
bits of leaf like flakes off a fresco,
red-brown pine needles, a beetle quick
to burrow back under the loam.
Then the wheelbarrow is a wilder blue,
the clouds a brighter white,and all I hear is the rasp of the steel edge
against a round stone,
the small plants singing
with lifted faces, and the click
of the sundial
as one hour sweeps into the next.
Seen on the Internet:
I graduated from Penn State with a B. A. in Advertising, but realized my heart was in acting. So I picked up and moved to Hoboken.
Here’s what someone wrote to me today:
Feel free to reach out to our support team, 602.850.5200. Please note that they may tell you to reach out to Brightcove, who, in turn, will reach out to us.
One of my first posts on this blog lamented the overuse of the valediction “best.” “Best” is a hummingbird compared to the winged nazgûl that is “reach out.”