11 Comments
Jun 4Liked by Nancy Friedman

I did miss one of the answers in the Merriam quiz, but it also made me appreciate being old. References that might be really obscure to younger people are entirely familiar to me.

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May 30Liked by Nancy Friedman

These are exceptionally good. I too LOVED Pennies From Heaven.

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As a person going by his middle name, I'm not surprised by the victory of the computers regarding apostrophes on street signs. There is no place in computer world for noncompliant information from troublemakers. I now respond to medical assistants and mechanics shouting "William?"

I do have hope that the coming tsunami of artificial intelligence will include more space on official forms for nicknames, middle names, and opinions. ("This sucks!")

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May 30·edited May 30Author

Unlikely, but we can dream.

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Thanks so much for the shoutout! I really appreciate it -- and this list of links is great. Digging in now!

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May 30Liked by Nancy Friedman

>Don't rent a car

... among other reasons, because voluntarily driving in San Francisco is nuts, all the worse if you don't know the city. And anyway, your car will be broken into. :( :( :(

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. . . and if you get lucky and it isn't vandalized, and you get doubly lucky and find a place to park, you'll probably be ticketed for not curbing your wheels.

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What a bounty! I'll be dipping into this all day, I'd imagine. At least.

I'm still trying to wrap my head around the whole anti-Semitism/antisemitism thing. Yes, I get that "anti-Semitism" was a bad birth, but I don't really get how "antisemitism" addresses/resolves that in any meaningful way. It strikes me as particularly (ineptly) cosmetic rather than meaningful. I mean, if you want to say "Jew-hatred" or "anti-Judaism," then go ahead and say it.

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People attach magical qualities to capital letters? That's all I got.

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P.S. I first encountered the term "nostalgia" in the earlyish 1970s during what was frequently referred to as "the nostalgia craze," and it seemed to me to be so particularly associated with No, No, Nanette, art deco, and girls in fringed dresses with feathered headdresses that I assumed that nostalgia particularly meant "a longing for the 1920s."

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I remember reading when I was a little too young about Marie Antoinette's nostalgie de la boue and thinking it was weird to be wistful about mud.

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