WEAR A BOW TIE

Trying a second hand at an NYC store, BIlly Reid has been shot calling. Their new bowties are made from vitage fabric and so any single style of tie might only have two or three counterparts.

Rag & Bone has also incorporated more bowties into their spring collections. Mr. Wainwright , one half of the company said, “It’s one of those things you sort of yearn to go back to.”

Most of all, they come in all fabrics now. From wool to seersucker and linen, the newly threaded bow-ties make them more versatile. The Wall Street Journal notes Beau Ties Ltd, out of Middlebury, Vermont as a premeir company. They weave over 50,000 bow-ties each year. Their most popular style is pictured below.

The Most Popular BEAU TIE from Vermont.

Rugby has been pushing bowties for a long time now. They must tell their employees to always have one on. I think only the manager knows how to actually tie a bow-tie.

But do you think that:

Burberry Prorsum called it first in Milan?:

vjb2,3

The Pulsifer Hampton is a boat model that Richard Pulsifer has revived from a model originally designed and built by Charlie Gomes from 1902-1950. Gomes’ boats were essentially lobster boats, made for working and lasting.

Mr. Pulsifer has now been building the same inboard powered workboat for more than 20 years now. The boat is built of white pine, oak, and cedar, and has only a 29-hp Yanmar engine. It is 22 feet long and 8 feet at its widest.

As far as options and customizing goes, Pulsifer-Hampton’s site lists “life jackets, flares, anchor….” After speaking with Mr. Pulsifer at this past Maine Boat Builders show, he immediately dismissed me when I asked about customization. “No you can’t change that.”

After backing away I said, “..But the canvas, you can change the color of the canvas right?”

Dick Pulsifer’s Director’s Chair. Period.

VJB3

Below is a real correspondence between two young gentlemen, Mr. M. and Mr. E., and a few large dictionary companies. They were fet up with the ambiguity, as they say, of the term “bi-weekly.” (Emphasis added) They explain:

To Whom It May Concern,
The confusion over the true definition of the word ‘biweekly’ is an absolute absurdity. The ambiguity related to its real meaning leaves thousands curious over whether their rendez-vous will occur twice a week, or, equally plausibly, once every two weeks. Just the other semester, as my colleague Mr. M and I enrolled in one of Yale University’s linguistics courses, we were ashamed at the end of the term to find that we had missed three quarters of our appointments! Despite our high scores on the final exam, the incident inspired us to request an end to this linguistic anomaly.

We propose that Merriam-Webster take the lead in once and for all eliminating the confusion and provide a singular definition for the word. We propose that the word ‘biweekly’ be re-defined to mean ‘once every two weeks.’ The merit of our decision is founded on two justifications:
In the first) Human society has, for thousands of years, been irreversibly dividing time into smaller and smaller segments…Let us, as a society, take a giant step back and slow down our existence. Let us divide our months, not our weeks, into two….

In the second) The definition of ‘biweekly,’ when referring to scholarly and other journals, describes their publication as ‘every other week.’…

Sincerely,
Mr. M
Mr. E
Yale University

Merriam Websters Response:

Dear Mr. Maruca and Mr. Ettinger,

You make a compelling case for wrangling the signification of “biweekly” down to one meaning. Unfortunately, meanings are a lot like cats—very difficult to herd….

Since we enter what the language tells us, and the language tells us of two meanings, however maddening that can be, we are unable to accomplish nips and tucks on the face of the English language by unilateral fiat. …

So if you need bimonthly or biweekly, you should leave some clues in your context to the sense of bi- you mean….

Sincerely,

Thomas P.
Associate Editor
Composition Manager
Merriam-Webster Inc.

The Oxford Comma Comeback:

Mr. M. and Mr. E.,

Thank you for your message. It appears to be directed to another dictionary publisher, so I shall merely point out that Oxford dictionaries exist to describe the language as it is, with all its ambiguities and imperfections.

Some of our larger dictionaries provide usage notes; the Oxford Dictionary of English (2005), our largest one-volume dictionary of current English, provides such a note at BI-:
‘The meaning of [BI-WEEKLY] is ambiguous. Such words can either mean “occurring or produced twice a week” or “occurring or produced every two weeks”. The only way to avoid this ambiguity is to use alternative expressions like EVERY TWO WEEKS and TWICE A MONTH.’

Your university cannot expect full attendance if the frequency of a course is not clearly specified.

Margot Charlton
Oxford English Dictionary

“

In May of 1954, at Stettin, a port in East Germany, dock workers loaded crates labeled in Czech onto Alfhem, a Swedish merchant ship. They were being observed by a German businessman and amateur birdwatcher, sitting on a nearby hill with a pair of binoculars and a bagged lunch. After double-checking what the crates carried, the businessman took some notes and, from his office later that day, had his secretary write a long, detailed letter to an automobile parts concern in Paris, filled with specifications of eastern-bloc machines that were cheaper than British-made ones, citing exact amounts that the buyer would save, etc. The innocent-looking letter was approved by the commissar and mailed to Paris. There, the recipient brought it to a CIA microfilm expert who scraped at every period on the page with a tiny razor until one fell off the paper. This was a microfilm dot which had been glued to the letter and hidden by the ink of the typewriter when a period was typed over it. The microdot contained the twenty-second prayer of David from the Book of Psalms, which began, “My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?” The recipient in Paris sent the message to Washington, D.C. via radio. In Washington, a C.I.A. agent copied down the message and brought it to Allen Dulles, Director of Central Intelligence. It was concluded that night that a shipment of Communist-made weapons was headed for Guatemala.
Two days after the ship had arrived at Puerto Barrios, Guatemala, Dulles’ brother, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, held a press conference announcing the shipment. The Senate declared that the arms shipment was “part of the master plan of world communism.” After an Intelligence Advisory Committee Meeting, chaired by Allen Dulles, official permission from the National Security Council to stage a coup in Guatemala was given, and the coup, the climactic component to the plot against the country, was scheduled for the following month. This plan was carried out in the name of stopping communism. While the Guatemalan government had never officially been communist, Communism had taken root in Guatemala. Although it was hard to measure the degree to which it had done so, its presence was quite evident. However, the United Fruit Company, which had vital interests to protect in Guatemala, strong ties to crucial people within the US government and a group of talented and powerful people on its payroll, pulled quite a few strings to ensure that their interests were indeed protected. The CIA’s operations in Guatemala, although partially justified by the threat of communism, were influenced by United Fruit and those connected with it.

“

To read the full version of “Friends in High Places” email vjb229@nyu.edu.