Impenetrable English

This morning for some reason, the phrase "pick up where we left off" popped into my head, and I realized it's one of those English (American?) idioms that would be impenetrable to someone new to the language.

"Pick up" in general is mysterious. According to etymonline, the verb phrase is from the 14th century, and relates to the idea of using fingers (as in picking) to lift or take up. The idea of casually obtaining (like "pick up a few things") dates from the early 16th century. The sexual meaning — which naive me had totally forgotten about — is from the very late 17th century. Its use to mean improving gradually is from the mid-18th century, while gaining speed doesn't come until the 1920s. 

Tidying up is from around the beginning of the U.S. Civil War, and the cops wouldn't have picked you up until about 10 years after that. One usage the site doesn't mention is pickup basketball. And then there's the question of whether it's two words or one when it's a noun or an adjective, or how adjectival uses become nouns (as in the way "pickup truck" becomes just "pickup"). 

Despite this substantial list of uses, none of these have the meaning of "start again," as in "pick up where we left off."

Then there's "left off." That doesn't even rate a page on etymonline. 

The main use I can think of for that phrase is something like "left off a list." I'm having trouble thinking of another example that uses "left off" to mean "stopped or stopped temporarily." 

But probably any adult native speaker of American English would know what "pick up where we left off" means, despite the fact that it's illogical that it should make any sense at all.

Talking Minnesota Turkeys

Minnesota has more than 70,000 wild turkeys, including a substantial number of urban turkeys. They live here in Saint Paul (and Minneapolis), where their traffic-stopping ways are well known. I just learned they even have an Instagram account at the University of Minnesota.

A few weeks ago, Minnesota Public Radio informed me that the wild turkey population of Minnesota was extirpated back in the 19th century and was only reintroduced in the 1970s from just 29 birds, which were brought from Kansas. They were released in Houston County in the southeastern part of the state.

These thousands and thousands of turkeys are the descendants of fewer than 30 individuals. Talk about a genetic bottleneck. 

According to the Minnesota DNR, we're not supposed to feed turkeys (so keep track of what falls off your bird feeder), and if a turkey is aggressive toward you, be aggressive back.


A teenaged turkey gang at a neighbor's house, 2012.


A different teenaged turkey gang in a neighbor's yard, 2021.

How Big Bird Works

A friend sent me a link to a video about Carroll Spinney, the man who was Big Bird from the time Sesame Street began production in the 1960s until he retired at age 84 in 2018, the year before he died.

This link goes right to the part of the video about how he did it from inside the Big Bird puppet — which I never thought about before. Spinney was not nearly as tall as Big Bird, so what part of him held up the bird's head? And if that's, let's say, his arm... what controlled the bird's arms? And… how did he see out of the puppet?

All questions are answered. 

(Spinney also played the Oscar the Grouch puppet.)

The whole video is more interesting than I would have thought, even for someone like me, who has never watched Sesame Street. 

Carroll rehearsing a scene in partial costume.

That Kind of Year

I've been saving this one:

It could have been posted any time, really.
 

Economics of London, 1919

I've read that Agatha Christie once wrote, "I couldn’t imagine being too poor to afford servants, nor so rich as to be able to afford a car."

I'm not sure she put it in those exact words, but according to Slate (2022), she did describe her young married life this way in her autobiography:

The year was 1919, the Great War had just ended, and Christie’s husband Archie had just been demobilized as an officer in the British military.

The couple’s annual income was around 700 pounds ($50,000 in today’s dollars)—500 pounds ($36,000) from his salary and another 200 pounds ($14,000) in passive income.

They rented a fourth-floor walk-up apartment in London with four bedrooms, two sitting rooms, and a “nice outlook on green.” The rent was 90 pounds for a year ($530 per month in today’s dollars). To keep it tidy, they hired a live-in maid for 36 pounds ($2,600) per year, which Christie described as “an enormous sum in those days.”

The couple was expecting their first child, a girl, and they hired a nurse to look after her. Still, Christie didn’t consider herself wealthy.

“Looking back, it seems to me extraordinary that we should have contemplated having both a nurse and a servant,” Christie wrote. “But they were considered essentials of life in those days, and were the last things we would have thought of dispensing with. To have committed the extravagance of a car, for instance, would never have entered our minds. Only the rich had cars.”

In 1919, Ford’s Model T cost 170 pounds—around $12,000 in 2022 dollars. So a car was worth about three months of income for the Christie family—but almost five years of income for their maid!

I'm sure the fact that they lived in a city with an extensive public transit system and businesses on every corner also made it possible for them to never think of having a car.

The pittance paid to the maid is the real shock in all of that. Just $2,600 a year in 2022 dollars! That's $1.25/hour if it she worked what is now considered full-time work, and I'm willing to bet that woman didn't work 40 hours per week. Yes, yes, she got room and board, too... 

Can you imagine legally hiring anyone for $1.25 plus room and board in 2022?

Now That's Emphatic

I saw this in the blood-draw area of a clinic:

The blue thing is a recycling bin, if I'm not mistaken. Not sure what kind of paper they put in the "DO NOT Throw away" box, but it must be something they want to keep.

The funniest thing about this is that this is a newly built clinic. The building opened in 2025 — purpose-built from the ground up in a greenfield location — but they couldn't make the phlebotomy area functional for the people who use it.
 

The Lost Art of Bus Passes

I always appreciate posts by the English stationery and ephemera shop Present & Correct, and share some of their visuals in my BlueSky roundups. They have a blog where they write up particularly interesting finds.

A recent one was a collection of weekly 1950s bus tickets from Milwaukee. Here are a few of them:

There are 30 tickets altogether, no two alike. 

Here are some thoughts about how the tickets would have been made.

Each one was printed in three ink colors. The large dates were hand-lettered, while the smaller words were set in metal type, likely either on a Linotype or Ludlow system, then printed to a proofing press. The proof type was cut out and pasted up with the hand lettering and other ornaments.

Each color had its own paste-up, possibly done as acetate overlays with the black on the bottom layer on illustration board. Registration marks were on each layer. The layers may have sometimes include rubylith for large areas of color.

Each layer was then shot with a large camera to make an offset printing plate, which was printed in one of the predetermined colors. Offset lithography was a common printing process by the 1950s, and was faster and cheaper for the type of long runs needed like these. These were probably sheet-fed, rather than web.

Why they used three colors instead of two or four, I don't know; I assume it was based on the press they ran on. Maybe it was a five-color press and they ran two passes at a time, with black ink common to both. Or if we could match up the dates of all the passes, we would find that two consecutive passes share one color in addition to black, and therefore could run on a four-color press. 

One additional detail to note: each ticket has an individual number added in the bottom right corner. So that's a final process the tickets went through before being distributed. I don't know why some of them have a letter A added and some don't.

It's clear these tickets were designed by the same person, and it was probably a major part of that person's job to create each one — from sketch to full design to final production and press check each week. 

All replaced by magnetic strips and barcodes. 

Some Mural!

I've had this tab open for a long time. It briefly tells the story of a mural in Lyon, France, created in 1987 by the artist collective CitéCréation, and updated several times since then:

This is what the wall looked like before:

It's really still there. Here it is in Google Streetview at 31 Boulevard des Canuts. 

The mural collective's website — with its tagline "monumental mural design" — includes a large number of other examples of their work over the past 40 years. 

Well worth checking out and exercising your French along the way. 
 

No Bug Zappers!

Take down your bug zapper, if you have one!

I've never had one, myself.
 

Nicole Hollander

I just learned today that cartoonist Nicole Hollander died on April 23 at the age of 87.  

I first found Hollander in the 1980s, probably when I was just out of college and working in Washington, D.C. Her work must have been in the City Pages.

I still have her first two collections:

The comiclopedia has a great write-up about her life and work, about which I knew just about nothing.

Among many other things, I learned that she began her mid-life switch to graphic arts and cartooning in Chicago's Monadnock Building, which I saw while on a trip to that city last December.

The description of her life makes me realize how few women cartoonists there have been.

Here's the final panel from one of her books, particularly appropriate now:

 
Thanks to Nicole Hollander for the attitude, the funky clotted line, and all the women.

It's Saturday

I had a pretty nice day today and I will not ruin it by looking at social media.

I had a meeting with a neighbor about trying go do something to make a local intersection safer.

I looked at plants in my yard and took some pictures.

I cut down some of last year's plants in a local public garden. 

I took a tiny nap.

I had some ice cream at the neighborhood ice cream shop, which opened for the season last weekend. 

I did some tasks for an upcoming major event. 

Now I am going to read a book, or maybe see if there is anything worth watching on television.

I will not ruin it by looking at social media. 

We'll Be Left with the Afterglow

As sometimes happens after a BlueSky post, there's a remnant that's too long to include.

This one is from a person named April Daniels. She wrote,

When radioactivity was discovered, there was a rush to market for all sorts of radioactive consumer goods. There were water jugs made out of uranium glass, for example. I think about that a lot these days whenever I see AI products being marketed to consumers.

I have no doubt that this technology is very useful in important ways. I also have no doubt that many of the proposed applications right now are entirely, hilariously, horrifyingly inappropriate.

This happened with asbestos, too. My grandpa brought some home for his kids to play with, like clay.

And the AI industry is seriously trying to push Congress into making it entirely illegal to regulate them so they can push this stuff out as fast as possible and make it as hard as possible to remove from our lives. 

It's like they KNOW it's radioactive asbestos, and want to get ahead of the cleanup.

Some of the responses were:

Dracula Enthusiast @kmfao.bsky.social

Radium emanation bath salts to cure arthritis, rheumatism, and fatigue, that was a thing. I can’t remember what they were called, but they had x-rays machines in shoe shops that they used to ensure the shoes were fitting properly, but kids played with them to see the bones in their feet
Chicago Tafia Welsh Society

There were radioactive breakfast cereal toys stuffed with literal Polonium, aka the stuff the Russians use to poison their enemies:


Christian Mutig @ductos.bsky.social

a digression, but my favorite examples of this are from old comics where you'd see Donald's nephews or Bob Hope or Little Audrey or whoever going "I love this chunk of uranium I found! Its so much fun to hug and listen to it tick! I think I'll put it in my mouth for safe keeping!"
Michaela Joffe @joffeorama.bsky.social

The original “now with AI!”:


Sharon Z