Recently, Cinzia Dubois, who vlogs as The Lady of the Library, posted a video that offered lots of tips for folks who would become independent scholars. In particular, the invariably insightful Miss Dubois provided her viewers with ways to save money on academic books, explained the art of asking favors of established scholars, and, to no one’s surprise, reminded us of the marvelous resources available at many libraries.

The following list complements those recommendations.

When faced with an academic book that will cost you more than a week’s worth of groceries, look for a copy of the author’s doctoral thesis. Drachmas to donuts, as the Muses say, the thesis will provide you with much of what you seek, if not more.

If, for example, you wish to own, in a proper cloth binding, a copy of Science, Strategy and War: The Strategic Theory of John Boyd, the good people at Routledge will charge you 199.99 Yankee dollars. If, however, you visit the website of the University of Leiden, you can download, gratis, a PDF of the thesis that preceded it. (Gratis, by the way, is the word the ancient Romans used when they wished to explain that something cost squat, nada, naught, zip, zilch, or bubkes.)

How would you know to visit that particular university? All you need to do is type the name of the author (in this case, Frans Osinga) along with the words ‘doctoral thesis’ or ‘doctoral dissertation’ into your friendly neighborhood search engine.

(This trick works best with books written in the last two decades or so. Older theses hide in cave in Michigan that can only be opened by crossing the palm of the troll who guards it with copies amounts of silver.)

Recent scholarship builds, or, at the very least, should build, upon earlier attempts to make sense of the subject at hand. Thus, if you wish to become the world’s expert on a particular person, place, or phenomenon, begin your journey with the oldest writings that describe the who, where, or what in question.

Thanks to services like Hathi, Gallica, the Internet Archive, the Library of Congress, and Münchener Digitalizierungs Zentrum, the likes of you and me can download, for free, PDF copies of works that have passed into the public domain.

If your experience accords with mine, you will find older works to be more accessible, enjoyable, and thorough, as well as less parochial, self-important, and annoying as their latter day successors. At the very least, you will find them easier on your pocketbook.

Scholars often upload copies of their papers, book chapters, and the like to Academia.edu. So, before putting on your wellies and making that trek to the library, or shelling out your hard-earned happy cabbage for a subscription of some sort, spend a few minutes on the site where many academics post copies of their papers. (When doing so, decline the attempts to sell you premium services. If your needs resemble mine, the ‘for free’ level of service will give you everything that you need.

Scholars often post copies of their papers, book chapters, and, at times, complete books, to their personal websites. (My own website also offers two blogs, two collections of podcast reviews, companions to the books I have written, and a converted discussion forum where I hang PDF copies of many of the items mentioned in my footnotes.)

‘Tell me, Bright Muses, what brings us to turn-of-the-century Paris?’

‘I hope we’re here to fence!’

‘Don’t worry, Terp, we’ll enjoy a bit of parry and riposte before we return to Quantico. But before do that, we must sing for our supper, so to speak. Thus, without further ado … can either of you explain how this particular time and place relates to our duties?’

‘I know!’

‘Go ahead, Daisy.’

‘In the visual vocabulary of Extra Muros, pictures of French fencers from 1900 or so illustrate posts that promote the use of vibrant verbs.’

‘Precisely.’

‘Which active action words shall we celebrate?’

‘Today, we sing a paean to verbs that describe location.’

‘Isn’t that an … oxymoron?’

‘Not in the realm of poetry …’

‘Which all writers should visit …’

‘Often!’

‘Indeed. So, Terp, why don’t you start us out with your favorite ways to describe the lay of the land?’

‘How about … savannas stretch.’

‘Splendid. By the way, I love the alliteration.’

‘Twas thee who mentioned … poetree.’

‘Touché.’

‘Oh, I’ve got another.’

‘Please.’

‘Ridges rise.’

‘Nice. That also works for mountains, heights, hummocks …

‘… koppies, braes, tors, knolls …’

‘Not to mention hills, whether mole, ant, or fully fledged.’

‘Valleys hide, stretch, descend, rise, and run.’

‘Rivers also run …’

‘and flow, meander, wander, roll, glide, drift, and make their way to the sea.’

‘What about forests, copses, and other tree-filled places?’

‘Forests lie, sit, stand, and rise. Indeed, they do those things interchangeably, which, if you ask me, ranks as a mighty marvel.’

‘They also flourish, extend, and extend.’

‘Now, Sisters, isn’t that more fun than saying “is located”?’

Programs for reading the classic works of our civilization usually start with the oldest works and end with the newest ones. Thus, whether enrolled in a college with a great books curriculum, working through a curated set of volumes, or following a series of videos, a learner engaging enduring literature will, as a rule, move forward in time.

This manner of doing things provides the reader with a powerful advantage. Before he engages a fresh text, he has become familiar with many of the works the author at hand has read. Thus, he will understand more of the references, whether to works, events, personalities, or other writers, that he encounters.

Alas, reading forward in time can also promote the idea that, since each author builds upon a foundation laid by his predecessors, he necessarily achieves greater heights. If, however, the learner reads with care, he will also be able to notice cases of decline. As a result, progressive reading may, paradoxically, provide a degree of inoculation against the parlous presumption of progress.

These things said, some autodidacts will want to take a different approach to the systematic study of the great books. Rather than starting at the beginning and moving forward, they would start at (or near) the present and work backwards.

This contrarian approach offers the obvious benefit of familiarity. Reading a book sent to the press a hundred years ago offers fewer obstacles, of language, culture, and context, than one set down at the dawn of Western Civilization. Moreover, the many references to things, people, and ideas of the past will whet the appetite of the reader. ‘So’, he will think, ‘who is this Socrates who keeps popping up in the books I read?’

The one drawback to this approach stems from the antiquity of the classic collections of classic works. The Harvard Classics, for example, contains nothing that emerged from the press after 1909. Thus, the series contains little that was written in the past hundred and fifty years and nothing that dates from the past century. The most recent edition of The Great Books of the Western World went into print in 1990. Thus, it contains more from the twentieth century than its older competitor. Still, I would wager that few of the more recent works in that compendium were written by authors who had been too young to dance the Charleston.

So, to quote the immortal words of David Crowther, ‘You pays your money and you takes your choice.’ The heart of the matter, after all, lies more in the quality of books read than in the order of their engagement.

Recently, I went looking for a word that would do for ‘desiderata’ what ‘up’ does for ‘down’, ‘east’ does for ‘west’, and Maya Angelou does for Rudyard Kipling. Alas, and, indeed, alack (hat tip to David Crowther), none of the wells I dug struck water, let alone oil. And so, like so many writers before me, I resolved to add a new expression to the word-hoard of my mother tongue.

As ‘desiderata’ came from a piece of poster-plastered poetry popular in the 1970s the idiom of the Caesars, I began my quest in the realm of Romance (languages, that is.)

A Spanish dictionary yielded odioso, an adjective that, marvelous to say, means ‘worthy of hate’, and thus, without too much in the way of stretching, ‘other than desirable.’ This discovery led me to odiosa, a Latin noun that could, with the aid of a good shoehorn, be defined as ‘things not desired’.

Inspired by the completion of this pair of pleasingly parallel words, I sought other terms in need of a partner. Before long, I received inspiration from, believe it or not, Niccolò Machiavelli.

In Chapter XV of The Prince, Messer Niccolò compares the Italian nouns avaro and misero, using the first to describe those who take the wealth of others and the second to portray those who, in the manner of Ebenezer Scrooge, take pains to preserve their stock of legal tender. Alas (and, indeed, alack), this nicely matched couplet presents a problem to those who would render his words into English.

While the Anglophone world possesses, in ‘miser’ a direct translation for misero, it lacks an easy analogue of avaro. One could, of course, replace the Italian original with ‘avaricious person’, ‘grasping man’, ‘greedy Gus’, or ‘grasper’. None of these, however, enjoy the cognate elegance of ‘miser’.

Translating avaro as ‘avar’ risks insult to the Caucasian people who bear that name. So what’s a practitioner of ‘supply side linguistics’ to do?

I invite subscribers to use the comments section to propose solutions to this conundrum.

Some people study a second language in the hope of wielding it as well as their mother tongues. Others cast a wider net, developing, in parallel, a reading knowledge of several related vernaculars.

If chasing a major language, those who seek full fluency will quickly find that the internet offers an enormous array of tools designed for the learner who, having acquired a solid foundation of grammar and vocabulary, has begun to walk the long road to pukka bilingualism. Thus, for example, a splendid video called Comme une Française offers instruction in the finer points (one might even say nuances) of the present-day patois of French folk. (YouTube) In particular, the formidable Géraldine, who presents each episode of the program, often warns viewers about expressions that become ironic, have turned into clichés, or have fallen out of general use.

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Sometimes, self-directed learners treat audiobooks and podcasts like the lectures in a conventional college course. We listen intently, take notes, challenge assertions, check facts, and read complementary works. On other occasions, we play audio programs of a serious sort while doing something else.

People who study the science of learning (Robert and Elizabeth Björk come to mind) tell us that deliberate engagement will yield more in the way of edification than casual listening. Nonetheless, a learned monologue or erudite discussion playing in the background offers a number of benefits to the brain attached to a busy body (even if the business at hand consists of falling asleep.)

Casual listening exposes us to the rhythm and inflections, as well as the patterns and conventions, of formal speech. Thus, at the very least, it makes those things more familiar than they would otherwise be, thereby increasing both our ability to engage the the ideas of others and the ease with which we assemble thoughts of our own. In other words, the inadvertent eavesdropping that occurs as we pay imperfect attention to a parcel of prose improves our acquaintance with both the elements of elevated language and the frameworks used to hold them together.

This, of course, requires that the audio program in question repeat the well-spoken, well-chosen, well-prepared speech of articulate people. Thus, the deliberate easy listener will eschew recordings of chatty, impromptu, gabfests in favor of scripted monologues (of the type found on Defragged History), deliberate dialogues (like those of The Rest is History), and curated conversations (like those epitomized by In Our Time.)

As a rule, British blokes of properly posh persuasions pronounce imported idioms in a way that reflects their original enunciation. If you doubt this, listen to an episode or two of The Rest is History, paying special attention to the way that Tom Holland says things like avant la lettre, entente cordiale, à bientôt, and plus français que les français.

That said, the toffs who occupy the top drawer of social ladder of the ‘green and pleasant land’ will, from time to time, throw a curve ball. (If it weren’t for mixed metaphors, I’d have no metaphors at all.)

Consider, if you will, the case of ‘valet’. French folk seldom speak the terminal ‘t’. Indeed, the final consonant only appears in nearby ears when followed by a vowel, as in the title of eighteenth century play Le Valet à Trois Maîtres (The Valet with Three Masters). In imitation thereof, Americans will only pronounce the ‘t’ in ‘valet parking’ when making fun of people who pronounce the ‘t’ in ‘valet parking’. If, however, you watch Jeeves and Wooster, Downton Abby, or Upstairs, Downstairs, you will notice that characters in those program[me]s invariably ended ‘valet’ with an able-bodied ‘t’.

This apparent anomaly reminds us of the Rule of Recent Rambling. Americans say ‘valet’ à la française because it entered our lexicon in the past century or so. (American hotels began to offer ‘valet service’ in the 1920s and ‘valet parking’ in the 1950s.) Old timey Limeys, however, said ‘valet’ because the word crossed the English Channel in the days of doublets and hose. Indeed, in the days before standardized spelling, OG Anglophones would sometimes add an extra ‘t’ to the end of the word, thereby making ‘valett’.

In the land of its birth, the fraternal twin of ‘valet’ described a servant who cared for things less elevated than the person of his employer. (Thus, while a valet de chambre helped his master to dress, a varlet de chiens cared for the latter’s canine companions.) Alas, while valet survived the demise of the powdered wig, varlet had, by the end of the eighteenth century, suffered the fate of Marie Antoinette.

As a result, those who wish to observe ‘varlet’ in the wild (so to speak) will find themselves obliged to tune into old Looney Tunes cartoons, where they will hear Yosemite Sam employ it as an all-purpose term of abuse for his many antagonists, long-eared and otherwise.

This post belongs to a series of ‘discourses’ that build upon points made by Wallace Brett Donham in his Education for Responsible Living. As you might expect, both the title of this project and the approach that I take with the component essays owe much to the Discourses on the First Decade of Titius Livius of Niccolò Machiavelli.

In the year Dean Donham wrote these words, Congress passed Servicemen’s Readjustment Act. Often called the ‘GI Bill of Rights’, this law paid the college costs, to include both tuition and living expenses, of veterans who enrolled in institutions of higher education.

In theory, this program made it easier for former students who had interrupted their formal schooling for the sake of military service to complete their courses of study. In practice, it convinced many who would otherwise have done something else to go to college. As a result, it provided the ‘vested interests’ of the academe with a bumper crop of fully-subsidized, highly-compliant, students, to the point where neither the suppliers nor the consumers of educational services sought the ‘fresh start’ that Donham had in mind.

Soon thereafter, the weaving of educational deferments into the warp and weft of the selective service system gave young men a powerful incentive, not merely to pursue undergraduate qualifications, but to crown the receipt of their bachelor’s degrees with several years of post-graduate studies. This effect, in turn, reinforced the trend, already in progress before the Second World War, to turn teacher training (‘normal’) schools into four-year colleges and four-year colleges into research universities.

To be continued …

Wallace Brett Donham Education for Responsible Living (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1944) (Internet Archive) pages 13 and 14 (Internet Archive)

V.R. Cardozier Colleges and Universities in World War II (Westport: Praeger, 1993) pages 29-38 and 51-61 (Internet Archive)

‘Welcome, Ladies and Gentlemen, real and imaginary, to the Mount Ida Union, a place where dreadfully clever characters of the mythological persuasion debate the great issues of the day, especially those that relate to self-directed education. Tonight, Euterpe, Muse of Philology, will defend the proposition This House Holds that Reading Books Does a Mind More Good than Reading Magazines. Terpsichore, Muse of Perspective, will oppose the motion.’

‘Thank you, Calliope, Muse of Good Writing, for that kind introduction.

One might argue … indeed, my esteemed opponent may soon tell us … that a book looks a lot like a very long article, or, at times, a series of articles that happen to be written by the same author. If this thesis speaks truth, then the difference between books and magazines lies chiefly in the realm of quantity.

Let us, for the sake of this discussion, to entertain that proposition. Allow me, moreover, to begin that visit by quoting the very bad man (one of the worst, Clio tells me) who famously said that quantity has a quality of its own.

So, how does this apply to reading, and, in particular, for the sort of reading that folks do, with ambition aforethought, for the sake of improving their minds?

For one thing, a book-length work gives a writer far more scope for the elaboration of his ideas. He can explain his thesis in greater depth, marshal more evidence, offer more examples, and deal, at leisure, with both doubts and exceptions. In doing this, moreover, he provides the reader with an idea that has been worked out in a multitude of dimensions, what our sister Urania might call n-space geometry.

Better yet, the link between an elaborated idea and a single, concrete object provides the reader with a handy way to store that thought in the warehouse of his mind. This, in turn, makes it easy for him to retrieve it, share it, and relate it to others of its ilk. Better yet, if he owns the book in question, the reader can use his bookshelf as a means of organizing his own thoughts, and, especially, of making a map that allows him to travel, so to speak, from one realm others.

So, to wrap up my remarks, I would like to share a tale told by our Aunt Aphrodite about the editor Extra Muros, the premier journal of self-directed learning on Planet Earth. Mr. Muros, it seems first laid eyes on the future Mrs. Muros in a book store, and has been smitten with her ever since. Now, ladies and gentlemen, mortal and mythological, can you imagine a legendary love story like that beginning at a news stand?’

‘Thank you, Euterpe. You have made a powerful case for the value of proper books. Now, to offer a different point-of-view, I call upon Terpsichore, Muse of Perspective.’

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When beau crossed the English Channel, it met the doom of most verbal immigrants. That is, it traded a mighty multitude of meanings for a decidedly definite definition. As a result, while neither a beau joueur (‘good sport’), nor a beau tireur (‘good shot’), nor a beau client (‘important client’) necessarily sports a handsome face, an Anglophone ‘beau’ could not, absent irony, dispense with a suitably square chin.

Despite this exercise in semantic constriction, the importers of ‘beau’ often retained the original plural of the word. Thus, rather than describing the gentlemen callers of Scarlet O’Hara as ‘beaus’, Margaret Mitchell (the author of Gone with the Wind) referred to them as ‘beaux’.

This practice presents problems for folks in the English-speaking world who wish to speak of a building style that flourished in the last three-quarters of the nineteenth century. If interested in such things, these people may have read that the ‘Beaux Arts’ style emerged from the École des Beaux Arts (School of Fine Arts) in Paris. They may also have heard people express the expression in several different ways.

A recent stroll through the boulevards of YouTube turned up three of these pronunciations. In one case, the pleasantly posh provider of a tuppenny tour to the Beaux Arts Building of London Town rhymed ‘Beaux Arts’ with ‘no darts’. In another, the North American narrator of a video about fashion in the 1920s inserted a ‘z’ between the two halves of the previous pair, thereby producing ‘bohz artz’. In a third example, the disembodied voice celebrating the exterior of New York’s Plaza Hotel said ‘bohz arrr’, thereby forging a fair facsimile of the Francophone form of the phrase.

None of the aforementioned pronunciations offended my ear. Better yet, none could easily be confused with something else. Thus, though my Francophile heart inclines towards the last option, I find myself thinking that any of these three options would work well in any viva voce discussion of art or architecture. To make the same point in a simpler way, the secret to avoiding embarrassment while saying ‘beaux arts’ in English lies in the avoidance of ‘boh arrr’.

We have often been told that, when speaking aloud, Francophone folk forgo their terminal tees. We have also learned that they do the same with concluding consonants of the hissing persuasion. So, in honor of those customs, we voice beaux as ‘boh’ and arts as if we were larping as pirates.

When, however, Gallic gals and Gallic guys put the two sounds together, the ‘s’ sound made by the tail-end ‘x’ in days of yore returns to the Land of the Living. (This practice bears the name of élision, whence the title of this section.)

So, if you seek to say beaux arts in a fully French fashion, don’t stop at the pukka pronunciation of the building blocks. Rather, take the advice of Obélix the Gaul and go for the whole hog.

When found in English, ‘beaux arts’ always appears in its plural form. Thus, while Pierre Mille could write a book called Le Bel Art d’Apprendre (The Fine Art of Learning), Anglophones may not follow suit. (Note, by the way, that, whenever it precedes a word that starts with a vowel, beau becomes bel.)

In this respect, the expression ‘beaux arts’ sails in the same boat as ‘belles lettres’. That is, while French permits its speakers to describe a handsome piece of correspondence as a belle lettre, English limits us to placing the collected letters of ink-stained artists, along with novels, plays, and volumes of poetry, on the shelf marked ‘belles lettres’.

Pierre Mille Le Bel Art d’Apprendre (Paris: Hachette, 1926) (Hathi Trust)

This essay belongs to a series of ‘discourses’ that build upon points made by Wallace Brett Donham in his Education for Responsible Living. As you might expect, both the title of this project and the approach that I take with the component essays owe much to the Discourses on the First Decade of Titius Livius of Niccolò Machiavelli.

The critique that Dean Donham leveled upon the Army Specialized Training Program enjoyed the advantage of hindsight. That is, when, late in 1944, he handed his final draft to his publisher he knew that the war would not last as long as the designers of that schemes had feared. He also knew that most of the participants in the Army Specialized Training Program had left the program prematurely. That is, the replacement crisis of 1944 caused the Army to find new assignments for more than sixty percent of the soldiers who had been studying on college campuses. As a result, those who had studied ‘the certainties of elementary science and mathematics’ to prepare for advanced courses in engineering or the natural sciences ended up doing other things.

Donham also errs in conflating the Navy’s V-12 program with its Army counterpart. In particular, while the first thirty-two weeks of the V-12 program (which devoted 73% of academic hours to science and math) looked a lot like the first thirty-six weeks of the Army Specialized Training Program (which set aside 70% of classroom time for those subjects), most of the sailors who passed those courses went on to study navigation or engineering. In other words, while intense engagement with ‘the certainties of elementary science and mathematics’ prepared few soldiers for the challenges they would face in the last year of the war, a similar foundation fit the needs of many sailors.

Donham’s conflation of the two programs may reflect contact with the largest exception to the general rule of the V-12 program. As a professor at the Harvard Business School, he would have had some knowledge (and, I suspect, considerable contact) with the Navy Supply School located at that university. Thus, I would not be surprised if he had spoken with graduates of the V-12 course designed to prepare sailors for that school, the graduates of which earned commissions in the Navy Supply Corps. Furthermore, I can imagine conversations in which business-minded students expressed frustration at having to learn chemistry and calculus before focusing on the finer points of contracting, business law, and logistics.

In Donham’s defence, I find myself imagining an introductory curriculum for both programs that would promote ‘qualities of human leadership, of trained imagination in dealing with the unexpected emergency, of elasticity of mind and of judgment’. This, I believe, would make use of the same elements that he championed as dean of the Harvard Business School - case studies that posed problems from the point of view of particular protagonists and Socratic discussions about ways such leaders might solve the described dilemmas.

Donham, who stood at the helm of the Harvard Business School for twenty-three years, enjoyed advantages that would not have been available to the academics (both in and out of uniform) who ran the two ‘students in uniform’ programs. For one thing, while Donham was able to spend two decades building a faculty full of professors able to teach in a Socratic manner, his wartime counterparts were obliged to make do with the teachers who happened to be at hand. Likewise, the latter lacked the time, talent, and treasure that would have allowed them to obtain suitable case studies.

To be continued …

Wallace Brett Donham Education for Responsible Living (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1944) (Internet Archive) pages 13 and 14 (Internet Archive)

V.R. Cardozier Colleges and Universities in World War II (Westport: Praeger, 1993) pages 29-38 and 51-61 (Internet Archive)

With this essay, I continue a series of ‘discourses’ that build upon points made by Wallace Brett Donham in his Education for Responsible Living. As you might expect, both the title of this project and the approach that I take with the component essays owe much to the Discourses on the First Decade of Titius Livius of Niccolò Machiavelli.

In his critique of the two programs that sent servicemen to college during World War II, Dean Donham focused all of his attention on students engaged in ‘elementary scientific training’. In doing this, he neglected to mention the soldiers trying to master a foreign language, make sense of psychology, or learn veterinary science, sailors completing degrees in theology, or the participants in both programs attending medical or dental school.

This said, I do not doubt Donham’s report of the shock experienced by colleagues upon discovery that neither program provided students with opportunities to take courses in the humanities or the social sciences. Likewise, I sympathize with Donham’s opinion that men who had devoted a year to the art of ‘operating and maintaining complex machinery’ would have made greater contributions to the war effort than those who had spent the same amount of time completing the first half of an accelerated undergraduate degree. (According to the time-table used by the Army Specialized Training Program, a soldier completed a semester in thirteen weeks and a full academic year in twenty-six weeks.)

That said, Donham, who put his manuscript to bed after the Normandy landings of June of 1944, knew much more about the likely duration of World War II than the designers of either of the collegiate training programs. Indeed, in the fall of 1942, when these officers of the Navy and War Departments completed their designs, they expected that the conflict might continue though 1946 or 1947. Likewise, the architects of the Army Specialized Training Program did not know that most participants would spend less than a year on campus. (Early 1944, a military manpower crisis would cause the War Department to find new assignments for eighty percent of the hundred and fifty thousand soldiers then assigned to college campuses.)

Tragically, more than half of the men pulled out of the Army Specialized Training Program ended up as privates in combat units, where many found themselves in reporting to non-commissioned officers who struck George C. Marshall, then serving as chief of staff of the US Army, as ‘below satisfactory standards of intelligence and qualities of leadership’. With that in mind, I find myself thinking that, instead of sending them to college, the US Army would have been better off putting its clever young men in programs that combined service in operational units with intensive preparation for service as squad leaders, tank commanders, and forward observers.

The failure of the Army to do this owes much to a presumption already well established in many corners of American society in 1943, the notion that every young man with sufficient brain power to handle the academic challenges of tertiary schooling ought to spend the last season of his youth in a college or university.

Wallace Brett Donham Education for Responsible Living (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1944) (Internet Archive) page 11

Kent Roberts Greenfield, Bell I. Wiley, and William R. Keast Procurement and Training of Ground Combat Troops (Washington, DC: Center of Military History, 1991) pages 28-39 (Center of Military History)

Kent Roberts Greenfield, Robert R. Palmer, and Bell I. Wiley Organization of Ground Combat Troops (Washington, DC: Center of Military History, 1987) pages 192-193, 237-238, and 247-248 (Center of Military History)

‘So, Sisters … who can tell me why we are here.’

‘We need an excuse to wear gorgeous dresses in a gorgeous place?’

‘Well, that’s part of it. Daisy, can you provide a more practical reason?’

‘Let’s see, we’re not in a salon d’armes in Paris during the Belle Époque. So, we can’t be here to promote active verbs.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Well, it’s the seventeenth century, so a lot of folk are fencing.’

‘In earnest.’

‘Indeed.’

‘I’ll give you another hint. Who’s my favorite historian?’

‘Francis Parkman, of course.’

‘And why do you I him so much?’

‘Because he uses active verbs and goes easy on copular constructions?’

‘Terp! This is family blog!’

‘No, Silly, “copular constructions” doesn’t mean … that. The expression refers to the use of “to be” to link two words together, and, in particular, to make an equation of some sort.’

‘Mortals have been doing that more often. I blame Pasithea, Patroness of Pedantic Prose.’

‘I blame modernity. Machine-age humans find it easier to coin new nouns than forge fresh verbs.’

‘Don’t forget the adjectives, which, of late, have been keeping pace with the nouns.’

‘So, what’s a mere mortal to do?’

‘My advice - and that is why we are here - calls for writers to sheep dip themselves in the work of writers from days gone by.’

‘What a colorful image!’

‘Thank you. I try.’

‘Consider, if you will, the work of …’

‘Francis Parkman?’

‘Bull’s eye, Terp. Consider what he wrote about the time and place of our present rendez-vous.’

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With this essay, I continue a series of ‘discourses’ that build upon points made by Wallace Brett Donham in his Education for Responsible Living. As you might expect, both the title of this project and the approach that I take with the component essays owe much to the Discourses on the First Decade of Titius Livius of Niccolò Machiavelli.

Education for Responsible Living made its debut in 1944, a year in which, thanks to the ‘present emergency’, many of the men who might otherwise have been enrolled in institutions of higher learning were storming beaches, hunting submarines, or catching (literal) flak. A year or two later, when survivors of these adventures began to matriculate, the presence of so many veterans on college campuses placed academic authorities on the horns of a dilemma. On the one hand, they appreciated the absurdity of treating fully grown, well-traveled, and, in many cases, battle-hardened men as if they were callow adolescents. On the other, they realized that tailoring their institutions to the needs of fully-fledged adults would undermine the liminal character of the classic college experience.

Colleges often squared this circle by giving academic credit for the things that veterans had seen, done, and thought while in uniform. Thus, in one especially well-described case, a dean at Princeton College allowed a student returning from the war to skip the last year of a four-year course of study.

When not awarding direct dispensations, the colleagues, counterparts, and contemporaries of Dean Root used summer sessions, evening classes, and testing-for-credit to accelerate the academic careers of former servicemen. Nonetheless, many spent the next five years or so running a pair of parallel systems: one for returning veterans and one for college kids of the conventional kind.

Lest this happen again, the folks who ran American colleges convinced Congress to weave generous educational deferments into the Selective Service Acts of 1948 and 1951. Thus, while all young men became eligible for conscription at the age of eighteen and a half, somewhere between sixty and seventy percent of those studying on a full-time basis enjoyed the option of postponing their military service until after they completed their collegiate careers. (A young man could qualify for this stay of execution by earning a passing score on a test of scholastic aptitude; receiving average grades; or enrolling in the Reserve Officers Training Corps.)

Advocates of educational deferments often presented them as a means of avoiding interruptions in the production of the scientists and engineers needed to staff the Arsenal of Democracy. The rules for the granting of these delays, however, made no distinction among courses of study. Thus, they convinced many young men of little academic inclination to matriculate and, once they arrived on campus, to pursue less rigorous courses of study. Thus, at a time when some of their contemporaries found themselves fighting in Korea, many young men enjoyed the ability to devote four years to ‘not-too-hard intellectual effort, bull sessions, organized athletics and social events’.

Wallace Brett Donham Education for Responsible Living (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1944) (Internet Archive) page 11

William Zinsser Writing to Learn (New York: Harper and Row, 1988) pages 7, 8, and 9 (Internet Archive)

Merriam Hartwick Trytten Student Deferment in Selective Service (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1952)

‘My stars! Clio! I haven’t seen you in ages.’

‘It’s been ages.’

‘Far too long.’

‘What’s new with you?’

‘Well, as you can see, I’ve got a new job.’

‘I heard. You gave up on astronomers and navigators to inspire …’

‘Indexers! Librarians! The authors of search engines!’

‘How’s that going?’

‘Splendidly. The basic idea remains. I help the folks who help folks find things.’

‘That’s why I’m here. The historian I inspire has run into a problem.’

‘What sort of problem.’

‘Well, the back catalogue of his two Substacks has been growing like kudzu. It weighs in at … believe it or not … something like two thousand posts.’

‘Does he have a card catalogue for them?’

‘I’m afraid not. Mel, Thalia, Calliope, and I have been making some aggregators for him. But those can only go so far.’

‘I see. He wants readers to use the search features of Substack?’

‘Precisely. And that’s where you come in.’

‘So … I should tell readers about the little magnifying glass on the masthead. The one just left the Subscribe button.’

‘That’s right. Something tells me that you’d start with the magnifying glass.’

‘Well, I always keep one close to my heart!’

‘And then, you could explain The Gateway, which organizes articles by subject.’

‘Just like Topics and Themes.’

‘Exactly.’

‘Finally, you can remind them that most posts that feature pictures of us - the repurposed Muses - provide express lanes to articles of particular types.’

‘Like the one in which Thalia and Mel were …’

‘A little bit Country … and a little bit Rock-and-Roll.’

‘I love that song! One day, just for fun, I’m going to index the entire oeuvre of Donny and Marie.’

‘Finally, you can point out the archive feature on both The Tactical Notebook and Extra Muros.’

‘This sounds like fun, and right up my alley. When do I begin?’

‘Begin, Dear Urania? You’ve already finished the job!’

The maiden post of this series began with a paean to katzenfreundlich. However, in recommending the naturalization of that wunderbares word, I failed to mention that the language of the Brothers Grimm employs many other expressions that celebrate the weird and wonderful ways of our feline friends.

Thanks to The Katzenjammer Kids, who have graced the funny pages of American newspapers for more than a century, ‘katzenjammer’ has already found a home in American English. Moreover, while some friends of freedom fries have changed the pronunciation of that import, replacing the ‘y’ sound in ‘jammer’ with a hard ‘j’, all of us hold fast to the original meaning. That is, Americans use ‘katzenjammer’ to describe anything that resembles, whether in form or content (or both), the chaotic cacophony that sometimes erupts when Tom and Thomasina host a hoolie.

In 1927, for example, H.L. Mencken employed the word in the opening barb of a (less-than-friendly) review of four recently published works on the subject of American nationhood.

In the same year, the same author used the same word to make a more serious point.

Read more

Two years ago, Rob Watts, the eponymous host of Rob Words, posted a program calling for the English-speaking world adopt ten untranslatable German words.1 In homage to that video, I offer my own list of expressions that, in my own most humble opinion, we Anglo-Saxons ought to import from the Müttersprache of our Continental cousins.

Let’s start with katzenfreundlich.

Literally translated as ‘friendly like a cat’, katzenfreundlich describes a person who feigns friendship in order to obtain an immediate reward.2

Read more

Who sees the problem as a whole, has calmed the tempest in his soul.

Friedrich Schiller

For years, I plundered The Profession of Arms for depictions of battle in the age of Machiavelli and Michelangelo. Indeed, so eager was I to skim the combative cream that I neglected to watch the film from start to finish.

A few weeks ago, a spell of solo travel gave me the opportunity to make up for this failure to heed the advice Herr von Schiller. So, I loaded the full measure of the movie onto my venerable iPad Mini and preceded to work my way through the tale of Giovanni delle Bande Nere, the sword-swinging son of the unshakable Catarina Sforza and a minor Medici, who provided Il Mestieri delle Armi with its protagonist.

Read more

Madness waits in ambush for any man who tries to make sense of the patois of the needle trade. Nonetheless, the brave soul who ventures into the world of wearables may, at times, plumb the secrets of many French words imported into English in the relatively recent past.

Consider, if you will, peignoir.

Read more

The Three Musketeers have returned from their little holiday … tanned, rested, and ready to host the online meetings of the Decision Game Club.

On Saturday, 16 May 2026, they will begin a series of decision games, both imagined and historical, from the 1930s. One week latter, they will resume the series of decision-forcing case studies based on the experience of the American expeditionary force that landed in Siberia in 1918.

Athos, Constance, and Porthos invite all full-bore subscribers to join in the fun. To get on the distribution list for the weekly announcement - which provides times, readings, and log-in information - please send an e-mail message to thecasemethodclub@gmail.com.

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