Leap Into Fall

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

The photo above was taken at around 1:00 p.m. September 21, 2014, in upstate New York, as the leaves were just beginning their annual color change. Starting with a deep green, they shift in color to a weak green, then yellow, then a red that I find beggars my attempts to describe it; it is a red I refer to as “fall foliage red,” because I do not run into it elsewhere.

This of course is a global phenomenon and most human beings do not need my poetical-ish endeavors in description, but we here in the Northeastern United States have fashioned something of a tourist trap out of this simple natural fact of life. “Come See Biology Happen!”

And today, September 22, at 10:21 a.m. autumn struck with warning once again. Today is the autumnal equinox.
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Today in History: September 22

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

He was an unlikely spy. Perhaps the best spies are supposed to be “unlikely,” unsuspectable, but Nathan Hale probably was too honest to be a spy. Sent by the Continental Army to Lower Manhattan to track and report on British Army movements, he was caught within days of his arrival. Arrested on September 21, 1776, he was executed by hanging the next day.

Not one contemporary account has an exact description of the scene on the gallows, because the hanging, which did not follow a trial, was not a public event. All of the contemporary accounts, all written by the British, describe the calm composure of the 21-year-old spy as he faced death, however. What he said was close enough to, “I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country,” that that may indeed have been what he said 240 years ago today. (Some millennials have offered this as America’s first-ever mic drop.)
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The Stylish Stylist

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

In 1926, Henry Watson Fowler published A Dictionary of Modern English Usage, a book that has remained in print ever since. (The first edition and the second edition use Fowler’s sentences; the third edition, which was published in 1996, is a substantial rewriting of the classic and uses the Fowler name as a form of brand.) Fowler’s book is not a dictionary of definitions, like Johnson’s or Webster’s, it is a usage dictionary, an instructional manual for better using this beautiful tool we have devised called the English language.

Its entries give instructions on pronunciation, offer the pros and cons of employing a variety of idiomatic expressions, and argue again and again for simplicity in expression. Many style guides have followed—the MLA, the AP, the Chicago Manual—and each one is more useful in answering day-to-day questions about one’s writing than Fowler’s guide is, but none is as entertaining as his. His fight was a fight against cliché, obfuscation, and empty rhetoric. He fought for style, for clarity.

He fought against pointless rules. One might think from the description of his work that he is the reason for the commonplace rule against ending a sentence with a preposition. The opposite is true. In a two-page essay on the topic (two pages!), titled, “Preposition at end,” he writes:
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