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Thursday, January 20, 2005
STUDENTRY
Laura Bush and UD are reading the same thing. Today’s New York Times has a front page feature about her in which the reporter asks what book she has on her night table at the moment. The ‘really, really wonderful’ Essays of E.B. White, she answers. UD picked up the essays at Louise Horn‘s estate sale (see UD post dated 12/13/04) a few weeks back, and she’s been reading one or two of them every evening. She likes White’s description of William Strunk, Jr., author of the iconic Elements of Style: " [The book] was known on the Cornell campus in my day as ‘the little book,’ with the stress on the word ‘little.’ I must have once owned a copy, for I took English 8 under Professor Strunk in 1919 and the book was required reading… [It] was privately printed (Ithaca, N.Y.) and …copyrighted in 1918 by the author. It is a forty-three page summation of the case for cleanliness, accuracy, and brevity in the use of English. Its vigor is unimpaired, and for sheer pith I think it probably sets a record that is not likely to be broken. …From every line there peers out at me the puckish face of my professor, his short hair parted neatly in the middle and combed down over his forehead, his eyes blinking incessantly behind steel-rimmed spectacles as though he had just emerged into strong light, his lips nibbling each other like nervous horses, his smile shuttling to and fro in a carefully edged mustache. …He despised the expression ‘student body,’ which he termed gruesome, and made a special trip downtown to the Alumni News office one day to protest the expression and suggest that ‘studentry’ be substituted, a coinage of his own which he felt was similar to ‘citizenry.’ " |