There’s A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers (2000)
A different sort of self-recommend was Steal This Book by Abbie Hoffman (1970)
And you may think of others …
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“What Is The Name Of This Book?” Raymond Smullyan
That ficticious marketing department is definitely more “on-the-ball” than Dagwood’s own syndicate. Given that a certain percentage of readers are certain to plug that phrase into various Internet search engines, it would have been logical to set up a website or at least a forwarding address that would have linked those searches to a relevant (or amusing) location. Alas, no: nothing even close turns up.
Oh, thanks, Ian Christian!
Another book by Smullyan is This Book Needs No Title.
Fans of logic puzzles probably know Smullyan already, but a reminder recommendation is not out of order!
One of my favorite childhood books was “The Monster at the End of this Book”, starring Grover from Sesame Street.
DON’T OPEN THIS BOOK ed. Marvin Kaye (horror anthology) and the DO NOT OPEN THIS BOOK juvenile series by Andy Lee are tangentially relevant….
Allegedly there was a shipping company called Best Way. So people would go to ship something and tell them “Send it the best way” and they’d get the business. I don’t believe this but it’s a fun idea.
And of course back in the Yellow Pages days there were all the companies named AAAAAAA Moving and the like. SEO before SEO!
Today’s Tom Falco on marketing :
A book title I loved was of this entertaining philosophy-for-dummies type thing called:
“There
Are Two
Errors in the
the Title of
This Book”
I’ll bite: what are the two errors? Is is something like there are no errors, therefore it’s an error to say that there is an error; and now that you’ve established there’s one error, it’s an error to say that there are two errors?
@lark: Read it again. Slowly. Perhaps out loud.
The first error is the reduplicated “the.” You’ve noted the second error.
I once bought a copy of David Lindley’s “Win This Record”. Guess I got taken…
My dad used to joke about how he wanted to start a band and name it “Free Drinks, No Cover”.
D’oh!
IIRC Whoopi Goldberg has a book….titled “Book”…
Grawlix, the close result seems to be “Whoopi Goldberg Book” (by Whoopi Goldberg of course)
I recall first seeing the reduplicated “the” puzzle with the text “Paris / in the / the Spring” in triangular layout.
And in the not-a-book category, I bought a cap with the Hebrew inscription “M’shahu b’eivrit.” Translation: “Something in Hebrew.”
True story: When “Steal This Book” first came out and was featured at the college bookstore I asked the clerk if I could steal it. She said no, I had to pay for it.
I didn’t buy the book because the title was dishonest.
What kind of theft is it if they just give it to you?
I had a free copy of Steal This Book, but absolutely no recollection of how I got it.
I have not read it, but John Dies at the End got good reviews.
Re: “Send it the best way” and they’d get the business.
Don’t know if that was done, but in the ’90s with the requirement to pick your long-distance carrier, a company (KTNT) registered 57 names in Texas (and similar in a few other states) including “I Don’t Care” and “It Doesn’t Matter”, “Any One Is Okay” and “Whatever”.
“Hey,Wait a Minute (I Wrote a Book!)” – John Madden
B.J. Novak wrote a very amusing children’s book called “The Book With No Pictures“(*). For the book to work right, it has to be read to the kid by an adult. Why anyone would bother to create an audiobook version is a mystery to me.
P.S. (*) In the publisher’s blurb on the back flyleaf, it mentions that “There are pictures of [the author], but none in this book.“
I wish I could just remember the author of that experimental novel titled “Encyclopedia”. Otherwise it’s hard to look up. You get Encyclopedia Brown series and every little compilation they carry with Encyclopedia in the name.
@Mitch4: Hmm. I did some digging on sites with “exact match” capabilities and didn’t find that. Are you shoo-ah?
Why anyone would bother to create an audiobook version is a mystery to me.
I’m not following you there. It would seem like a book without pictures would be a good candidate for an audiobook. Most of them don’t have pictures.
Mitch4: Librarians are your friends. This includes retired librarians, like your friendly neighborhood Shrug.
WorldCat record (edited):
Title: Encyclopedia /
Author(s): Horn, Richard (Novelist), author.
Publication: New York : Grove Press, Inc.,
Year: 1969
Description: 157 pages ; 21 cm
SUBJECT(S)
Descriptor: Bohemianism — United States — Fiction.
@billytheskink
a band and name it “Free Drinks, No Cover”.
Back before disco, I knew a bar whose DJ went by “Ample Parking”
and they had that name on the marquee sign every night, so:
“Happy Hour / with Ample Parking”
Not dishonest, since the bar shared a parking lot
with a supermarket which closed around 8 pm.
Thank you Shrug! That’s the one.
And it is on Amazon… if you have info beyond the title
This list from Kostelanetz of “neglected experimental books” includes Encyclopedia as well as the wonderful Double or Nothing by Ray Federman. (Which I think I previously raved about on CIDU
Long ago, Joan Rivers said she was writing a show and planned to call it “The New Neil Simon Play”, to get all the business from people who called ticket agencies.
About as long ago, a British humorist published a collection under the title “Golfing for Cats” with a large swastika on the cover. The blurb explained the title was unrelated to the contents, but studies showed books about golf, cats, and WWII were reliably big sellers.
Robert Benchley titled a book of his pieces “David Copperfield, or Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea”. Also totally unrelated to the content, but more a bit pure goofery. Likewise a collection titled “Love Conquers All”, which I reference in my self-published ebook …
(sounds of a scuffle and a door slamming)
The novel title version of clickbait.
@ Brian in StL – “…a book without pictures would be a good candidate for an audiobook”
Normally yes, but the explicit premise in B.J. Novak’s book is to let the kid embarrass an adult reader by making the adult say silly things (there’s even a “fill in the blank” edition that allows the kid to make up customized idiocy for the adult to read. Delivering the sounds from a mechanical speaker defeats the whole purpose.
I suppose an experimental novel list could include “Cloth” by Aram Saroyan. Every page contains a single word. Then there’s “Gadsby” by Ernest Vincent Wright which contains 50,000 words and not one occurrence of the letter E.
Ah, well now … If you’re going in the direction of lipograms and related language play, I should mention OULIPO (Ouvroir de littérature potentielle) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oulipo . Georges Perec wrote a 300-page lipogram novel La disparition (lipogram on ‘e’). Many of their works are fun to contemplate and discuss, for their formal properties and trickery. But some are also good reading. I enjoyed the work of their early American member, Harry Mathews (just one ‘t’).
I always wanted to open a bar that also specialized in serving Taiwanese food. I would call it “Tai One On”. (For those wondering, to “tie one on”, is to imbibe an adult beverage).
Good one, RC2! Though maybe you could improve it by making it Thai food, which nowadays is more familiar a category for Americans than is Taiwanese.
arseetoo: I like it. My idea was a vegetarian German Beyond-Meat/Saitan restaurant called Faux Schnitzel. Or a vegetarian/Vietnamese soup joint called Frond or Pho (yes, I know “pho” isn’t pronounced as you’d expect).
I thought “to tie one on” meant to drink enough to be drunk?
As in A college student holding his head after he just woke up and saying ” I really tied one on last night”.
As a non drinker of alcoholic drinks (including at the Passover Seder) I may be remembering this wrong.
@ Meryl A – No, your memory is correct.
Even if your memory is correct, meanings often change right out from under you.
I was recently reading a book when I discovered that “first generation” in the immigration sense had redefined itself out from under me. Used to be it was the first generation born in the new country; now apparently it means the first generation to come to the country, which is rather imprecise, as that can include gramma and grampi, mom and dad, and any number of kids from young adulthood down to infants, whose individual experiences will be quite different! (Anyone from around 7 or 8 down (and a few lucky older ones) will natively speak the new language, whereas anyone older (yes, with exceptions) will forever have an accent in the new language, for example.) Back in the day, all those who immigrated themselves were called immigrants. There was a smaller band of imprecision on the infants and toddlers who immigrated, whose experience really more closely resembled the first generation’s, but they were immigrants. (I should know, I was an immigrant, despite being young enough that I natively speak English; imagine how weird I found it to have those like me referred to as first generation, when all my life I have been differentiated from first generation in things like my retention of original language and lesser degree of assimilation and retention of knowledge and habits of the original culture — in my experience, first generation kids were usually indistinguishable from natives, possibly even more native than the natives, while the immigrants often were the weirdos, missing just enough of the shibboleths to mark us as foreign; I remember distinctly not knowing the choreography to “The Itsy Bitsy Spider” (or indeed “The Itsy Bitsy Spider” song at all), and how the other kids jumped up as a synchronized unit, as if they were professionals, and with casual confidence, did the whole damn song and dance as if this was the purpose of being a child, to be able to confidently do “The Itsy Bitsy Spider”, as if they had been training for it their whole lives, like this was the Olympics or something — here, at last, was something in Kindergarten they were prepared for! I still don’t know the damn choreography to “The Itsy Bitsy Spider”, and I never will; any kids I might have had would have grown up “Itsy Bitsy Spider” deficient, and would have had to pick up that knowledge on the shady streets, and it might well have cost them their shot at attending the college of their choice, but there it is — just one more drop in the ocean of things that marked me as an immigrant in the hard knock brutal jungle that is Kindergarten… These differences between immigrant and first generation could and did exist among siblings, with the younger siblings seeing how the older sibling was marked out from the herd, and them doing everything in their power to avoid that fate — becoming more native than the natives — refusing to speak the original language, refusing to eat the immigrant food, and making damn sure they knew their “Isty Bitsy Spider” choreography cold, for example.)
Thanks for that account, larK!
I notice you use “first generation” apparently as a noun phrase on its own. I’m more used to seeing it as a sort of compound adjective, modifying a proper noun for the nationality, thus for example “a first-generation American”. Indeed, I think the independent nominal form in my experience is only used after there has been some discourse already with the form including the nationality — or in linguistic discussions where the particular location and nationality is not fixed to just one. E.g. “And these patterns are seen more often in first-generation speakers than in second-generation, as borne out in our studies of immigrant families in the U.S. and Ireland, and Schwarz & Weiss 1975 in Myanmar.” That may be closer to what you are patterning?
But indeed I think we all have seen (if not noted) the indecision you mention, on whether the generation count is zero-based or one-based. But good point that there is an additional twist about the children brought in. My Aunt Marie was already born when she came from Russia with my paternal grandparents (actually it was from the USSR at the time), who settled in Ohio and had four more boys, including my father. So am I second-generation American while my cousins from Aunt Marie are first-generation?
Speaking of Shibboleth, the University of Chicago provides a sort of single-sign-on service for public-facing but restricted access web sites, and the address where this is all mediated is called shibboleth.uchicago.edu .
Another speaking-of …. Speaking of nationally restricted familiar nursery rhymes and the like, even within a single language community — I recently watched a very involving TV limited-series called “Doctor Foster”. I had no idea until something called my attention to it, that there is an apparently fairly well-known nursery rhyme about a Doctor Foster in the UK. A child recites part of it (about stepping in a puddle) to the title character (played by Suranne Jones), and when the child’s mother hushes him and starts to apologize, Dr. Foster says it doesn’t matter, and anyway she is about to divorce and will change her name
Quoth Mitch: ” Indeed, I think the independent nominal form in my experience is only used after there has been some discourse already with the form…”
Well, yes, but when you are an immigrant or even first generation, that discourse is always lingering there; you can safely assume that any discussion about anything is only at most one degree of separation from the topic of immigration…
So yes, first generation American, but you can just assume as given the context of immigration…
So in the book I was reading where I was surprised by the redefinition, the phrase, as far as I can see now upon rechecking, was only used once: “A large majority of first-generation kids speak English well.” And then there are a few tables and graphs by generation, (1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc.) (making clear that counting does not start at zero) where I guess it’s assuming the “kids” part, though I have no problem seeing it as an independent noun phase.
We in the computer industry also have our own use of “first generation.” The ENIAC was typical of the very first electronic computers. Each was unique, and they were difficult to design, difficult to build and difficult to use. Then a number of people including John von Neumann worked out a “stored program” architecture that was quickly adopted. The designers of these machines still had to do a lot of calculations, but they were able to use existing computers like ENIAC to help. This is a rare case of a machine or tool being used to design an improved version of itself; one could say ENIAC had children which were the first stored-program machines including the Univac 1 and IBM 701. They were the first computers generated by a computer, thus “first generation.” These vacuum-tube computers were used to design the transistorized computers like the IBM 1440 and the GE 225 that we call the “second generation”, which were then used to design the “third generation” computers built with integrated circuits like the IBM 360. But after the third generation the later generations start to get indistinct with no clear line for a fourth or fifth generation, just as with an immigrant population where a person could be fourth generation on his mother’s side but fifth generation on his father’s side.
Thanks, MiB for that interesting précis on computer design generations.
It strikes me now that the cellular networking systems 3G, 4G, 5G, are widely treated as standing for Generation ; yet you rarely see those spelled out.
What MiB said. What many folks don’t realize is that all of this generation stuff meant that with each new generation, you got to rewrite all your programs! Yippee! One of the guiding principles of the IBM System/360 in 1964 was that it was a family of machines that could all (FSVO “all”–I’m looking at you, 360/20) run the same programs. Surprise, that was a success and now we’re baffled by the idea that this would NOT be the case.
Mitch4: The cellular “Generation” thing got badly blurred. 4GLTE, for example, was “Fourth generation long term evolution”, which originally meant “Yeah, this isn’t REALLY 4G” and perhaps never really was. (I’m also astonished that any marketing department let something new and whiz-bang be called LTE, which always looked like LITE.) So there’s 4G and then there’s 4G, to some extent. Not to mention that with all the different bands and a few mixed technologies, it’s even harder to draw the line.
I hope that 5G and beyond will be clearer, but hold out little hope for it.
With the early computers, “generations” were literally about generation. But because the first generation was all vacuum tubes and the second generation was all individual transistors and the third generation was all integrated circuits, “generation” came to mean a level of technology. They also spoke of “generations” of programming languages: first-generation languages like Fortran and COBOL, second generation like Algol. That would make PL/I, developed by IBM specifically to go along with the IBM 360 computer, a “third generation” language. Which I think would be enough in itself to stop all talk of generations of programming language. PL/I is like when a line of royalty has gone on too long and the heir apparent is an idiot.
MiB: The heir apparent being C?
(Let the language wars begin!)
Selecting a Programming Language Made Easy (by Daniel Solomon and David Rosenblueth)
With such a large selection of programming languages it can be difficult to choose one for a particular project. Reading the manuals to evaluate the languages is a time consuming process. On the other hand, most people already have a fairly good idea of how various automobiles compare. So in order to assist those trying to choose a language, we have prepared a chart that matches programming languages with comparable automobiles:
Assembler = A Formula I race car. Very fast, but difficult to drive and expensive to maintain.
FORTRAN II = A Model T Ford. Once it was king of the road.
FORTRAN IV = A Model A Ford.
FORTRAN 77 = A six-cylinder Ford Fairlane with standard transmission and no seat belts.
COBOL = A delivery van. It’s bulky and ugly, but it does the work.
BASIC = A second-hand Rambler with a rebuilt engine and patched upholstery. Your dad bought it for you to learn to drive. You’ll ditch the car as soon as you can afford a new one.
PL/1 = A Cadillac convertible with automatic transmission, a two- tone paint job, white-wall tires, chrome exhaust pipes, and fuzzy dice hanging in the windshield
C = A black Firebird, the all-macho car. Comes with optional seat belts (lint) and optional fuzz buster (escape to assembler).
ALGOL 60 = An Austin Mini. Boy, that’s a small car.
Pascal = A Volkswagen Beetle. It’s small but sturdy. Was once popular with intellectuals.
Modula II = A Volkswagen Rabbit with a trailer hitch.
ALGOL 68 = An Astin Martin. An impressive car, but not just anyone can drive it.
LISP = An electric car. It’s simple but slow. Seat belts are not available.
PROLOG/LUCID = Prototype concept-cars.
Maple/MACSYMA = All-terrain vehicles.
FORTH = A go-cart.
LOGO = A kiddie’s replica of a Rolls Royce. Comes with a real engine and a working horn.
APL = A double-decker bus. Its takes rows and columns of passengers to the same place all at the same time. But, it drives only in reverse gear, and is instrumented in Greek.
Ada = An army-green Mercedes-Benz staff car. Power steering, power brakes and automatic transmission are all standard. No other colors or options are available. If it’s good enough for the generals, it’s good enough for you. Manufacturing delays due to difficulties reading the design specification are starting to clear up.
Source: Hewlett-Packard, circa 1985
Kilby: Nice. But they show their bias: it’s “PL/I”, not “PL/1”. Common mistake.
@ PS3 – Oops, that’s not HP’s mistake, that was mine. It happened when I was eliminating tabs (and replacing them with “=”, because I didn’t trust what WordPress would do with the tabs). I’ve never programmed in PL/I, but I had a friend in high school who did, so I knew that the last character was pronounced “one”
FAQ: Which programming language is right for you?
This summary of the expected results should help you make an informed selection:
C = You shoot yourself in the foot.
C++ = You create a dozen instances of yourself and shoot each one in the foot. Emergency medical care is impossible since nobody can tell which are bitwise copies and which are just pointers saying, “that’s him, over there.”
BASIC (interpreted) = You shoot yourself in the foot with a water pistol until your leg is completely soaked and rots away.
BASIC (compiled) = You shoot yourself in the foot with a suction cup dart using a SCUD missile launcher.
Assembler = You crash the system and overwrite the root disk. The system administrator shows up and shoots you in the foot.
COBOL = USE HANDGUN.COLT(45), AIM AT LEG.FOOT, THEN WITH ARM.HAND.FINGER ON HANDGUN.COLT(TRIGGER) PERFORM SQUEEZE. RETURN HANDGUN.COLT TO HIP.HOLSTER.
FORTRAN = You shoot yourself sequentially in each toe, until you run out of toes. You shoot the sixth bullet anyway since no exception processing was anticipated.
dBase = You buy a gun. Bullets are only available from another company, but are guaranteed to work, so you buy them, too. You then find out that the NEXT version of the gun is the one scheduled to actually shoot bullets.
Modula II = You execute a shot on what might currently be a foot, with what might currently be a bullet, using what might currently be a gun.
Pascal = Same as Modula II, except that the bullet is not the right type for the gun and your hand is blown off.
Smalltalk = After you play with graphics for three weeks the programming manager shoots you in the foot.
Snobol = You grab your foot with your hand and rewrite your thumb to be a bullet.
APL = You hear a gunshot, and there’s a hole in your foot, but you don’t remember enough linear algebra to understand what happened.
PL/I = After consuming all mainframe resources including memory, diskspace, and bullets, the data processing department doubles its size, purchases two new mainframes, and drops the original one on your foot.
Ada = The Department of Defence stands you up in front of a firing squad, offers you a blindfold and a last cigarette, and then orders the soldiers to “shoot at his feet.”
Haskell = We’re terribly sorry, but we can’t update your foot in place. Instead, we’ll take it off, create a new one with a bullet hole, and reattach it, all while insisting that this is the only rational approach to the situation.
Well I start working with computers with learning to program in Fortran IV I think (may have been Fortran II – both stick in my head) back in high school. (When I cleaned out my bedroom at my parents house when we sold it a couple of years ago I found the original manuals we used and have kept them.)
At some point much later I went to a computer store (Electronics boutique? it is the one which I think still exists as computer store and was in the big shopping malls) to buy the first James Bond computer game for Robert for Christmas. He preferred it for his IBM 286 compatible computer. I went in and was looking for it – being a young woman it was presumed I was either lost or an idiot. I asked for the game. They did not have it. So I asked if they had it for Commodore 128. The salesman gave me the lecture for idiot women on how the games for the Commodore could not be used on the IBM for about 10 minutes. When he was finished I looked him square in the eye and told him that I well knew the difference and that software for one could not be used in the other and that I had been programming main frame computers before he was born – and that we have both computers as well as an Atari 800 and I would be going to another store to make the purchase. (His attitude was REALLY that deprecating and sexist.)
“games for the Commodore could not be used on the IBM for about 10 minutes”
For how long could they be used?
“They didn’t know it is for real” Part 2.
But there is a product called Remarkable which is named for sort of the same reason. It isn’t a dry-erase board, but an e-ink based tablet that accepts freehand stylus input.
Mike P – Oops – was rushing to finish for the night – the salesman went on for 10 minutes telling me that I could use not use games for the Commodore on IBM.
Wow, there’s been a lot of drift on this thread!
I’m reviving it to post further documentation that the meaning of first generation, second generation, in terms of immigration, has indeed shifted from what it meant when I learned them, where “first generation” was the first generation born in the new country, and the zero generation were the people who actually immigrated. James S. A. Corey, in the author’s note to the short story “Strange Dogs” write: “We know a lot of second-generation immigrant families that suffer this break between an old world that the parents know and the culture their kids belong to.” From my understanding that I grew up with, that “second-generation” in the quote should clearly be “first-generation”, but apparently the meaning has shifted…
I remember a similar thing happening with “Third World” and “First World”: the term “First World” didn’t exist, the counting went from the West, the developed world — us — and then went to the Communist Bloc, the other “developed” part of the world, but clearly not us — them! — that we competed with; then there was the rest of the world, the undeveloped world that wasn’t in the communist bloc. It was called the “Third World”. Sometimes, if you were clever, you might ironically refer to the West as “the First World”, but it sounded weird, and was clearly an affectation, like saying “Tar-jzay” for “Target”, like it was French (though that came much later), or saying “virii” for “viruses”, or “boxen” for boxes”; you might even force the joke by referring to the Communist Bloc as “the Second World”. Then the Second World collapsed and went away as such. Most parts of it became part of the “First” world, sort of, because they clearly weren’t the Third World (well, some parts were), and so we were left with the Third World, and everything else. And then using “the First World” to describe the non-Third World part became non-ironic. I think I noticed it especially, because I was in a “Third World” country (Brazil) when it became more and more imperative not to talk so much about “the Third World”, partly because Brazil was developing rapidly, partly because of the stigma that attached to it (I knew someone from Mexico who around that time used to make the point that the Earth was the third world from the Sun, thus we were all “Third Worlders”), but it was still important to talk about how the developed countries were different from the rapidly developing countries, what their goal was, and so talk of this First World, non-ironic, and less and less as a sequence ending in the Third World (especially because what was the Second World then?), but just as a thing in itself: the end goal was for everyone to become First World. There was now First World, and developing world (and maybe an ironical “Fourth World”, to describe the really sh!t-hole places still left, like Newark Airport or Detroit…)
(And just the other day I had to inform my neighbors that no, Target was not a French chain, it’s from Minnesota…)
Since you mention your experience with Brazil, let me ask if you encountered the idea of a BRIC group of countries, sort of second world or up-and-coming? That was Brasil, Russia, India, and China. I think today that looks wildly wrong, but maybe there are still some who have good reason to look at it that way.
Only recently have I noticed the Tarzhay pronunciation; but I thought it must still be like 95% jocular. But going back to the 1980s I knew people who said garbage as gar-bàzh; probably under the influence of Jonathan Winters. (I was going to say the pronunciation is like that of garage [with an added b], forgetting that that would not be completely helpful as there are two very common American pronunciations of garage.)
So I was already gone from Brazil when BRIC was coined (or at least when I first heard the term); I was in Brazil during hyper-inflation, and was there for the successful transition out of that after more than a decade of failed attempts. There was finally hope that they might actually be getting somewhere. I left Brazil while it was still hopeful. But Brazil is ever destined to be the country of the future, and only the future, never the now. In my cautious optimism, I actually invested in Petrobras, saying the only way this investment could go wrong is if they actively, consciously, worked to screw things up, and that is exactly what they did, government level corruption, all the way up, in what became known as the Lava Jato (car-wash) scandal. On one of the more recent trips back during the previous Olympics, we found out that Walmart had pulled out of Brazil, even they couldn’t run their stores there in a profitable manner, and while I’m no fan of Walmart and usually don’t see the coming of one as progress or something to be celebrated, in Brazil it was, it really was, but it couldn’t survive, Brazil beat them down.
Ah, Brazil, the only reliable thing about you is how you endlessly disappoint…
As to Russia… let me just say there was a family in-joke that my father passed on to our generation from his, which was saying of any consumable item, “it has to go, before the Russians come”, ie: no point saving those potatoes for later, eat them now, while you can, before the imminent arrival of the advancing Russians. This was at a specific time a very literally true thing for my father growing up in Berlin during the War, and I am almost glad that he didn’t quite live long enough to see it become a real thing again….
Once again reviving a thread:
I’m reading Bear Braumoeller’s 2019 Only the Dead (the best response to Steven Pinker I have yet read, and I’m a Pinker fan), and in talking about the post WWII Cold War era, I came across this sentence (remember, he’s writing in 2019, so this is not in any way proof that the terms were used this way at the time):
“Although the superpowers mostly went out of their way to avoid direct conflict, members of the so-called First World–the industrial, capitalist countries that were aligned with the United States against the Communist bloc–and those of the Communist Second World clashed around the globe, sometimes directly, bust mostly in proxy wars in the third world.”
Things I found interesting: First World and Second World are capitalized, but third world isn’t, and Second World is used at all.
A few pages later:
“These decisions best captured the “first world–second world” distinction that was often used to sort countries into one camp or the other during the Cold War.”
I dispute that those exact terms were used at the time, though they certainly were imputed, and thus the use of “third world” for all those that didn’t lump into the first two, however they were designated. (Note in this instance there is no capitalization.)
(PS: I should clarify, this is the best response to Pinker’s Better Angels of Our Nature…)
Comics I Don't Understand 
“What Is The Name Of This Book?” Raymond Smullyan
That ficticious marketing department is definitely more “on-the-ball” than Dagwood’s own syndicate. Given that a certain percentage of readers are certain to plug that phrase into various Internet search engines, it would have been logical to set up a website or at least a forwarding address that would have linked those searches to a relevant (or amusing) location. Alas, no: nothing even close turns up.
Oh, thanks, Ian Christian!
Another book by Smullyan is This Book Needs No Title.
Fans of logic puzzles probably know Smullyan already, but a reminder recommendation is not out of order!
One of my favorite childhood books was “The Monster at the End of this Book”, starring Grover from Sesame Street.
DON’T OPEN THIS BOOK ed. Marvin Kaye (horror anthology) and the DO NOT OPEN THIS BOOK juvenile series by Andy Lee are tangentially relevant….
Allegedly there was a shipping company called Best Way. So people would go to ship something and tell them “Send it the best way” and they’d get the business. I don’t believe this but it’s a fun idea.
And of course back in the Yellow Pages days there were all the companies named AAAAAAA Moving and the like. SEO before SEO!
Today’s Tom Falco on marketing :
A book title I loved was of this entertaining philosophy-for-dummies type thing called:
“There
Are Two
Errors in the
the Title of
This Book”
I’ll bite: what are the two errors? Is is something like there are no errors, therefore it’s an error to say that there is an error; and now that you’ve established there’s one error, it’s an error to say that there are two errors?
@lark: Read it again. Slowly. Perhaps out loud.
The first error is the reduplicated “the.” You’ve noted the second error.
I once bought a copy of David Lindley’s “Win This Record”. Guess I got taken…
My dad used to joke about how he wanted to start a band and name it “Free Drinks, No Cover”.
D’oh!
IIRC Whoopi Goldberg has a book….titled “Book”…
Grawlix, the close result seems to be “Whoopi Goldberg Book” (by Whoopi Goldberg of course)
I recall first seeing the reduplicated “the” puzzle with the text “Paris / in the / the Spring” in triangular layout.
And in the not-a-book category, I bought a cap with the Hebrew inscription “M’shahu b’eivrit.” Translation: “Something in Hebrew.”
True story: When “Steal This Book” first came out and was featured at the college bookstore I asked the clerk if I could steal it. She said no, I had to pay for it.
I didn’t buy the book because the title was dishonest.
What kind of theft is it if they just give it to you?
I had a free copy of Steal This Book, but absolutely no recollection of how I got it.
I have not read it, but John Dies at the End got good reviews.
Re: “Send it the best way” and they’d get the business.
Don’t know if that was done, but in the ’90s with the requirement to pick your long-distance carrier, a company (KTNT) registered 57 names in Texas (and similar in a few other states) including “I Don’t Care” and “It Doesn’t Matter”, “Any One Is Okay” and “Whatever”.
“Hey,Wait a Minute (I Wrote a Book!)” – John Madden
B.J. Novak wrote a very amusing children’s book called “The Book With No Pictures“(*). For the book to work right, it has to be read to the kid by an adult. Why anyone would bother to create an audiobook version is a mystery to me.
P.S. (*) In the publisher’s blurb on the back flyleaf, it mentions that “There are pictures of [the author], but none in this book.“
I wish I could just remember the author of that experimental novel titled “Encyclopedia”. Otherwise it’s hard to look up. You get Encyclopedia Brown series and every little compilation they carry with Encyclopedia in the name.
@Mitch4: Hmm. I did some digging on sites with “exact match” capabilities and didn’t find that. Are you shoo-ah?
Why anyone would bother to create an audiobook version is a mystery to me.
I’m not following you there. It would seem like a book without pictures would be a good candidate for an audiobook. Most of them don’t have pictures.
Mitch4: Librarians are your friends. This includes retired librarians, like your friendly neighborhood Shrug.
WorldCat record (edited):
Title: Encyclopedia /
Author(s): Horn, Richard (Novelist), author.
Publication: New York : Grove Press, Inc.,
Year: 1969
Description: 157 pages ; 21 cm
SUBJECT(S)
Descriptor: Bohemianism — United States — Fiction.
@billytheskink
Back before disco, I knew a bar whose DJ went by “Ample Parking”
and they had that name on the marquee sign every night, so:
“Happy Hour / with Ample Parking”
Not dishonest, since the bar shared a parking lot
with a supermarket which closed around 8 pm.
Thank you Shrug! That’s the one.
And it is on Amazon… if you have info beyond the title
This list from Kostelanetz of “neglected experimental books” includes Encyclopedia as well as the wonderful Double or Nothing by Ray Federman. (Which I think I previously raved about on CIDU
https://neglectedbooks.com/?p=6448
Long ago, Joan Rivers said she was writing a show and planned to call it “The New Neil Simon Play”, to get all the business from people who called ticket agencies.
About as long ago, a British humorist published a collection under the title “Golfing for Cats” with a large swastika on the cover. The blurb explained the title was unrelated to the contents, but studies showed books about golf, cats, and WWII were reliably big sellers.
Robert Benchley titled a book of his pieces “David Copperfield, or Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea”. Also totally unrelated to the content, but more a bit pure goofery. Likewise a collection titled “Love Conquers All”, which I reference in my self-published ebook …
(sounds of a scuffle and a door slamming)
The novel title version of clickbait.
@ Brian in StL – “…a book without pictures would be a good candidate for an audiobook”
Normally yes, but the explicit premise in B.J. Novak’s book is to let the kid embarrass an adult reader by making the adult say silly things (there’s even a “fill in the blank” edition that allows the kid to make up customized idiocy for the adult to read. Delivering the sounds from a mechanical speaker defeats the whole purpose.
I suppose an experimental novel list could include “Cloth” by Aram Saroyan. Every page contains a single word. Then there’s “Gadsby” by Ernest Vincent Wright which contains 50,000 words and not one occurrence of the letter E.
Ah, well now … If you’re going in the direction of lipograms and related language play, I should mention OULIPO (Ouvroir de littérature potentielle) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oulipo . Georges Perec wrote a 300-page lipogram novel La disparition (lipogram on ‘e’). Many of their works are fun to contemplate and discuss, for their formal properties and trickery. But some are also good reading. I enjoyed the work of their early American member, Harry Mathews (just one ‘t’).
Not actually aligned with OULIPO but gloriously fun while also doing formal trickery, was Alphabetical Africa by Walter Abish https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alphabetical_Africa .
I always wanted to open a bar that also specialized in serving Taiwanese food. I would call it “Tai One On”. (For those wondering, to “tie one on”, is to imbibe an adult beverage).
Good one, RC2! Though maybe you could improve it by making it Thai food, which nowadays is more familiar a category for Americans than is Taiwanese.
arseetoo: I like it. My idea was a vegetarian German Beyond-Meat/Saitan restaurant called Faux Schnitzel. Or a vegetarian/Vietnamese soup joint called Frond or Pho (yes, I know “pho” isn’t pronounced as you’d expect).
I thought “to tie one on” meant to drink enough to be drunk?
As in A college student holding his head after he just woke up and saying ” I really tied one on last night”.
As a non drinker of alcoholic drinks (including at the Passover Seder) I may be remembering this wrong.
@ Meryl A – No, your memory is correct.
Even if your memory is correct, meanings often change right out from under you.
I was recently reading a book when I discovered that “first generation” in the immigration sense had redefined itself out from under me. Used to be it was the first generation born in the new country; now apparently it means the first generation to come to the country, which is rather imprecise, as that can include gramma and grampi, mom and dad, and any number of kids from young adulthood down to infants, whose individual experiences will be quite different! (Anyone from around 7 or 8 down (and a few lucky older ones) will natively speak the new language, whereas anyone older (yes, with exceptions) will forever have an accent in the new language, for example.) Back in the day, all those who immigrated themselves were called immigrants. There was a smaller band of imprecision on the infants and toddlers who immigrated, whose experience really more closely resembled the first generation’s, but they were immigrants. (I should know, I was an immigrant, despite being young enough that I natively speak English; imagine how weird I found it to have those like me referred to as first generation, when all my life I have been differentiated from first generation in things like my retention of original language and lesser degree of assimilation and retention of knowledge and habits of the original culture — in my experience, first generation kids were usually indistinguishable from natives, possibly even more native than the natives, while the immigrants often were the weirdos, missing just enough of the shibboleths to mark us as foreign; I remember distinctly not knowing the choreography to “The Itsy Bitsy Spider” (or indeed “The Itsy Bitsy Spider” song at all), and how the other kids jumped up as a synchronized unit, as if they were professionals, and with casual confidence, did the whole damn song and dance as if this was the purpose of being a child, to be able to confidently do “The Itsy Bitsy Spider”, as if they had been training for it their whole lives, like this was the Olympics or something — here, at last, was something in Kindergarten they were prepared for! I still don’t know the damn choreography to “The Itsy Bitsy Spider”, and I never will; any kids I might have had would have grown up “Itsy Bitsy Spider” deficient, and would have had to pick up that knowledge on the shady streets, and it might well have cost them their shot at attending the college of their choice, but there it is — just one more drop in the ocean of things that marked me as an immigrant in the hard knock brutal jungle that is Kindergarten… These differences between immigrant and first generation could and did exist among siblings, with the younger siblings seeing how the older sibling was marked out from the herd, and them doing everything in their power to avoid that fate — becoming more native than the natives — refusing to speak the original language, refusing to eat the immigrant food, and making damn sure they knew their “Isty Bitsy Spider” choreography cold, for example.)
Thanks for that account, larK!
I notice you use “first generation” apparently as a noun phrase on its own. I’m more used to seeing it as a sort of compound adjective, modifying a proper noun for the nationality, thus for example “a first-generation American”. Indeed, I think the independent nominal form in my experience is only used after there has been some discourse already with the form including the nationality — or in linguistic discussions where the particular location and nationality is not fixed to just one. E.g. “And these patterns are seen more often in first-generation speakers than in second-generation, as borne out in our studies of immigrant families in the U.S. and Ireland, and Schwarz & Weiss 1975 in Myanmar.” That may be closer to what you are patterning?
But indeed I think we all have seen (if not noted) the indecision you mention, on whether the generation count is zero-based or one-based. But good point that there is an additional twist about the children brought in. My Aunt Marie was already born when she came from Russia with my paternal grandparents (actually it was from the USSR at the time), who settled in Ohio and had four more boys, including my father. So am I second-generation American while my cousins from Aunt Marie are first-generation?
Speaking of Shibboleth, the University of Chicago provides a sort of single-sign-on service for public-facing but restricted access web sites, and the address where this is all mediated is called shibboleth.uchicago.edu .
Another speaking-of …. Speaking of nationally restricted familiar nursery rhymes and the like, even within a single language community — I recently watched a very involving TV limited-series called “Doctor Foster”. I had no idea until something called my attention to it, that there is an apparently fairly well-known nursery rhyme about a Doctor Foster in the UK. A child recites part of it (about stepping in a puddle) to the title character (played by Suranne Jones), and when the child’s mother hushes him and starts to apologize, Dr. Foster says it doesn’t matter, and anyway she is about to divorce and will change her name
Quoth Mitch: ” Indeed, I think the independent nominal form in my experience is only used after there has been some discourse already with the form…”
Well, yes, but when you are an immigrant or even first generation, that discourse is always lingering there; you can safely assume that any discussion about anything is only at most one degree of separation from the topic of immigration…
So yes, first generation American, but you can just assume as given the context of immigration…
So in the book I was reading where I was surprised by the redefinition, the phrase, as far as I can see now upon rechecking, was only used once: “A large majority of first-generation kids speak English well.” And then there are a few tables and graphs by generation, (1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc.) (making clear that counting does not start at zero) where I guess it’s assuming the “kids” part, though I have no problem seeing it as an independent noun phase.
We in the computer industry also have our own use of “first generation.” The ENIAC was typical of the very first electronic computers. Each was unique, and they were difficult to design, difficult to build and difficult to use. Then a number of people including John von Neumann worked out a “stored program” architecture that was quickly adopted. The designers of these machines still had to do a lot of calculations, but they were able to use existing computers like ENIAC to help. This is a rare case of a machine or tool being used to design an improved version of itself; one could say ENIAC had children which were the first stored-program machines including the Univac 1 and IBM 701. They were the first computers generated by a computer, thus “first generation.” These vacuum-tube computers were used to design the transistorized computers like the IBM 1440 and the GE 225 that we call the “second generation”, which were then used to design the “third generation” computers built with integrated circuits like the IBM 360. But after the third generation the later generations start to get indistinct with no clear line for a fourth or fifth generation, just as with an immigrant population where a person could be fourth generation on his mother’s side but fifth generation on his father’s side.
Thanks, MiB for that interesting précis on computer design generations.
It strikes me now that the cellular networking systems 3G, 4G, 5G, are widely treated as standing for Generation ; yet you rarely see those spelled out.
What MiB said. What many folks don’t realize is that all of this generation stuff meant that with each new generation, you got to rewrite all your programs! Yippee! One of the guiding principles of the IBM System/360 in 1964 was that it was a family of machines that could all (FSVO “all”–I’m looking at you, 360/20) run the same programs. Surprise, that was a success and now we’re baffled by the idea that this would NOT be the case.
Mitch4: The cellular “Generation” thing got badly blurred. 4GLTE, for example, was “Fourth generation long term evolution”, which originally meant “Yeah, this isn’t REALLY 4G” and perhaps never really was. (I’m also astonished that any marketing department let something new and whiz-bang be called LTE, which always looked like LITE.) So there’s 4G and then there’s 4G, to some extent. Not to mention that with all the different bands and a few mixed technologies, it’s even harder to draw the line.
I hope that 5G and beyond will be clearer, but hold out little hope for it.
With the early computers, “generations” were literally about generation. But because the first generation was all vacuum tubes and the second generation was all individual transistors and the third generation was all integrated circuits, “generation” came to mean a level of technology. They also spoke of “generations” of programming languages: first-generation languages like Fortran and COBOL, second generation like Algol. That would make PL/I, developed by IBM specifically to go along with the IBM 360 computer, a “third generation” language. Which I think would be enough in itself to stop all talk of generations of programming language. PL/I is like when a line of royalty has gone on too long and the heir apparent is an idiot.
MiB: The heir apparent being C?
(Let the language wars begin!)
Selecting a Programming Language Made Easy (by Daniel Solomon and David Rosenblueth)
With such a large selection of programming languages it can be difficult to choose one for a particular project. Reading the manuals to evaluate the languages is a time consuming process. On the other hand, most people already have a fairly good idea of how various automobiles compare. So in order to assist those trying to choose a language, we have prepared a chart that matches programming languages with comparable automobiles:
Assembler = A Formula I race car. Very fast, but difficult to drive and expensive to maintain.
FORTRAN II = A Model T Ford. Once it was king of the road.
FORTRAN IV = A Model A Ford.
FORTRAN 77 = A six-cylinder Ford Fairlane with standard transmission and no seat belts.
COBOL = A delivery van. It’s bulky and ugly, but it does the work.
BASIC = A second-hand Rambler with a rebuilt engine and patched upholstery. Your dad bought it for you to learn to drive. You’ll ditch the car as soon as you can afford a new one.
PL/1 = A Cadillac convertible with automatic transmission, a two- tone paint job, white-wall tires, chrome exhaust pipes, and fuzzy dice hanging in the windshield
C = A black Firebird, the all-macho car. Comes with optional seat belts (lint) and optional fuzz buster (escape to assembler).
ALGOL 60 = An Austin Mini. Boy, that’s a small car.
Pascal = A Volkswagen Beetle. It’s small but sturdy. Was once popular with intellectuals.
Modula II = A Volkswagen Rabbit with a trailer hitch.
ALGOL 68 = An Astin Martin. An impressive car, but not just anyone can drive it.
LISP = An electric car. It’s simple but slow. Seat belts are not available.
PROLOG/LUCID = Prototype concept-cars.
Maple/MACSYMA = All-terrain vehicles.
FORTH = A go-cart.
LOGO = A kiddie’s replica of a Rolls Royce. Comes with a real engine and a working horn.
APL = A double-decker bus. Its takes rows and columns of passengers to the same place all at the same time. But, it drives only in reverse gear, and is instrumented in Greek.
Ada = An army-green Mercedes-Benz staff car. Power steering, power brakes and automatic transmission are all standard. No other colors or options are available. If it’s good enough for the generals, it’s good enough for you. Manufacturing delays due to difficulties reading the design specification are starting to clear up.
Source: Hewlett-Packard, circa 1985
Kilby: Nice. But they show their bias: it’s “PL/I”, not “PL/1”. Common mistake.
@ PS3 – Oops, that’s not HP’s mistake, that was mine. It happened when I was eliminating tabs (and replacing them with “=”, because I didn’t trust what WordPress would do with the tabs). I’ve never programmed in PL/I, but I had a friend in high school who did, so I knew that the last character was pronounced “one”
FAQ: Which programming language is right for you?
This summary of the expected results should help you make an informed selection:
C = You shoot yourself in the foot.
C++ = You create a dozen instances of yourself and shoot each one in the foot. Emergency medical care is impossible since nobody can tell which are bitwise copies and which are just pointers saying, “that’s him, over there.”
BASIC (interpreted) = You shoot yourself in the foot with a water pistol until your leg is completely soaked and rots away.
BASIC (compiled) = You shoot yourself in the foot with a suction cup dart using a SCUD missile launcher.
Assembler = You crash the system and overwrite the root disk. The system administrator shows up and shoots you in the foot.
COBOL = USE HANDGUN.COLT(45), AIM AT LEG.FOOT, THEN WITH ARM.HAND.FINGER ON HANDGUN.COLT(TRIGGER) PERFORM SQUEEZE. RETURN HANDGUN.COLT TO HIP.HOLSTER.
FORTRAN = You shoot yourself sequentially in each toe, until you run out of toes. You shoot the sixth bullet anyway since no exception processing was anticipated.
dBase = You buy a gun. Bullets are only available from another company, but are guaranteed to work, so you buy them, too. You then find out that the NEXT version of the gun is the one scheduled to actually shoot bullets.
Modula II = You execute a shot on what might currently be a foot, with what might currently be a bullet, using what might currently be a gun.
Pascal = Same as Modula II, except that the bullet is not the right type for the gun and your hand is blown off.
Smalltalk = After you play with graphics for three weeks the programming manager shoots you in the foot.
Snobol = You grab your foot with your hand and rewrite your thumb to be a bullet.
APL = You hear a gunshot, and there’s a hole in your foot, but you don’t remember enough linear algebra to understand what happened.
PL/I = After consuming all mainframe resources including memory, diskspace, and bullets, the data processing department doubles its size, purchases two new mainframes, and drops the original one on your foot.
Ada = The Department of Defence stands you up in front of a firing squad, offers you a blindfold and a last cigarette, and then orders the soldiers to “shoot at his feet.”
Haskell = We’re terribly sorry, but we can’t update your foot in place. Instead, we’ll take it off, create a new one with a bullet hole, and reattach it, all while insisting that this is the only rational approach to the situation.
Well I start working with computers with learning to program in Fortran IV I think (may have been Fortran II – both stick in my head) back in high school. (When I cleaned out my bedroom at my parents house when we sold it a couple of years ago I found the original manuals we used and have kept them.)
At some point much later I went to a computer store (Electronics boutique? it is the one which I think still exists as computer store and was in the big shopping malls) to buy the first James Bond computer game for Robert for Christmas. He preferred it for his IBM 286 compatible computer. I went in and was looking for it – being a young woman it was presumed I was either lost or an idiot. I asked for the game. They did not have it. So I asked if they had it for Commodore 128. The salesman gave me the lecture for idiot women on how the games for the Commodore could not be used on the IBM for about 10 minutes. When he was finished I looked him square in the eye and told him that I well knew the difference and that software for one could not be used in the other and that I had been programming main frame computers before he was born – and that we have both computers as well as an Atari 800 and I would be going to another store to make the purchase. (His attitude was REALLY that deprecating and sexist.)
“games for the Commodore could not be used on the IBM for about 10 minutes”
For how long could they be used?
“They didn’t know it is for real” Part 2.
But there is a product called Remarkable which is named for sort of the same reason. It isn’t a dry-erase board, but an e-ink based tablet that accepts freehand stylus input.
https://remarkable.com/
Mike P – Oops – was rushing to finish for the night – the salesman went on for 10 minutes telling me that I could use not use games for the Commodore on IBM.
Wow, there’s been a lot of drift on this thread!
I’m reviving it to post further documentation that the meaning of first generation, second generation, in terms of immigration, has indeed shifted from what it meant when I learned them, where “first generation” was the first generation born in the new country, and the zero generation were the people who actually immigrated. James S. A. Corey, in the author’s note to the short story “Strange Dogs” write: “We know a lot of second-generation immigrant families that suffer this break between an old world that the parents know and the culture their kids belong to.” From my understanding that I grew up with, that “second-generation” in the quote should clearly be “first-generation”, but apparently the meaning has shifted…
I remember a similar thing happening with “Third World” and “First World”: the term “First World” didn’t exist, the counting went from the West, the developed world — us — and then went to the Communist Bloc, the other “developed” part of the world, but clearly not us — them! — that we competed with; then there was the rest of the world, the undeveloped world that wasn’t in the communist bloc. It was called the “Third World”. Sometimes, if you were clever, you might ironically refer to the West as “the First World”, but it sounded weird, and was clearly an affectation, like saying “Tar-jzay” for “Target”, like it was French (though that came much later), or saying “virii” for “viruses”, or “boxen” for boxes”; you might even force the joke by referring to the Communist Bloc as “the Second World”. Then the Second World collapsed and went away as such. Most parts of it became part of the “First” world, sort of, because they clearly weren’t the Third World (well, some parts were), and so we were left with the Third World, and everything else. And then using “the First World” to describe the non-Third World part became non-ironic. I think I noticed it especially, because I was in a “Third World” country (Brazil) when it became more and more imperative not to talk so much about “the Third World”, partly because Brazil was developing rapidly, partly because of the stigma that attached to it (I knew someone from Mexico who around that time used to make the point that the Earth was the third world from the Sun, thus we were all “Third Worlders”), but it was still important to talk about how the developed countries were different from the rapidly developing countries, what their goal was, and so talk of this First World, non-ironic, and less and less as a sequence ending in the Third World (especially because what was the Second World then?), but just as a thing in itself: the end goal was for everyone to become First World. There was now First World, and developing world (and maybe an ironical “Fourth World”, to describe the really sh!t-hole places still left, like Newark Airport or Detroit…)
(And just the other day I had to inform my neighbors that no, Target was not a French chain, it’s from Minnesota…)
Since you mention your experience with Brazil, let me ask if you encountered the idea of a BRIC group of countries, sort of second world or up-and-coming? That was Brasil, Russia, India, and China. I think today that looks wildly wrong, but maybe there are still some who have good reason to look at it that way.
Only recently have I noticed the Tarzhay pronunciation; but I thought it must still be like 95% jocular. But going back to the 1980s I knew people who said garbage as gar-bàzh; probably under the influence of Jonathan Winters. (I was going to say the pronunciation is like that of garage [with an added b], forgetting that that would not be completely helpful as there are two very common American pronunciations of garage.)
So I was already gone from Brazil when BRIC was coined (or at least when I first heard the term); I was in Brazil during hyper-inflation, and was there for the successful transition out of that after more than a decade of failed attempts. There was finally hope that they might actually be getting somewhere. I left Brazil while it was still hopeful. But Brazil is ever destined to be the country of the future, and only the future, never the now. In my cautious optimism, I actually invested in Petrobras, saying the only way this investment could go wrong is if they actively, consciously, worked to screw things up, and that is exactly what they did, government level corruption, all the way up, in what became known as the Lava Jato (car-wash) scandal. On one of the more recent trips back during the previous Olympics, we found out that Walmart had pulled out of Brazil, even they couldn’t run their stores there in a profitable manner, and while I’m no fan of Walmart and usually don’t see the coming of one as progress or something to be celebrated, in Brazil it was, it really was, but it couldn’t survive, Brazil beat them down.
Ah, Brazil, the only reliable thing about you is how you endlessly disappoint…
As to Russia… let me just say there was a family in-joke that my father passed on to our generation from his, which was saying of any consumable item, “it has to go, before the Russians come”, ie: no point saving those potatoes for later, eat them now, while you can, before the imminent arrival of the advancing Russians. This was at a specific time a very literally true thing for my father growing up in Berlin during the War, and I am almost glad that he didn’t quite live long enough to see it become a real thing again….
Once again reviving a thread:
I’m reading Bear Braumoeller’s 2019 Only the Dead (the best response to Steven Pinker I have yet read, and I’m a Pinker fan), and in talking about the post WWII Cold War era, I came across this sentence (remember, he’s writing in 2019, so this is not in any way proof that the terms were used this way at the time):
“Although the superpowers mostly went out of their way to avoid direct conflict, members of the so-called First World–the industrial, capitalist countries that were aligned with the United States against the Communist bloc–and those of the Communist Second World clashed around the globe, sometimes directly, bust mostly in proxy wars in the third world.”
Things I found interesting: First World and Second World are capitalized, but third world isn’t, and Second World is used at all.
A few pages later:
“These decisions best captured the “first world–second world” distinction that was often used to sort countries into one camp or the other during the Cold War.”
I dispute that those exact terms were used at the time, though they certainly were imputed, and thus the use of “third world” for all those that didn’t lump into the first two, however they were designated. (Note in this instance there is no capitalization.)
(PS: I should clarify, this is the best response to Pinker’s Better Angels of Our Nature…)