advertising: fooling all the people (1)

New York Times, February 12, 1910


For your enjoyment, a small collection of advertisements that used some variation of Abraham Lincoln's famous saying, "You can fool all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time." Click images to make them bigger. More later.





New York Times, August 25, 1895





















New York Times, February 10, 1915






















Los Angeles Times, October 26, 1914























Boston Daily Globe, June 16, 1895






















Los Angeles Times, November 2, 1931

y’all’s or y’alls?

How does one form the possessive of y’all: with ’s, or with an s and no apostrophe? I sort of want the answer to be y’all’s, because I like the way it looks, and I like that it sometimes makes my students mad when I write it that way on the board (without telling them that it’s really wrong), and because it’s one word that illustrates both uses of the apostrophe (to form both contractions and possessives).

But alas....

Personal or definite pronouns--that is, pronouns that refer to something definite and that have a clear antecedent--do not have apostrophes in their possessive forms. Examples of these pronouns are he, she, you, and it. The possessive form of these pronouns: his, her, your, and its (not he’s, and of course not it’s, which is not a possessive but is a contraction for it is).

Some pronouns, called indefinite pronouns, do use an apostrophe to form the possessive. Example: anybody, a pronoun that, unlike those above, does not refer to anything specific and has no real antecedent. (“Anybody can grow up to be president.”) The possessive of anybody is anybody’s, with an apostrophe. Other examples of indefinite pronouns: everybody, someone, and nobody.

But y'all is not an apostrophe-taking indefinite pronoun; it is a personal pronoun, and hence the possessive does not get an apostrophe: y’alls.

Another good question: Why am I bothering with this? Because I came across the following today in Wikipedia’s entry on y’all: “There is some debate on the spelling of the possessive form of y’all. Some will spell it ‘y’all’s’ while others will spell it ‘y’alls.’ As there does not seem to be an official answer, it is a matter of personal preference.”

So here you have it, Wikipedia, the official answer: y’alls.

(And yes, I do claim to be official when it comes to y’all.)

the real reason I read Andrew Sullivan

Sure, the Daily Dish offers a great discussion of political and economic matters. But what keeps me coming back is stuff like this (all links from yesterday):

dead people twittering: "Poke around and you'll find a whole bunch of dead people on Twitter, like Susan Sontag, George Washington and Sigmund Freud. It's fascinating to digest the life's work of a great thinker in 140 character chunks. Some are like performances — others are really trying to converse in the Twitterverse, ‘in the voice of’ or otherwise. Gandhi just uses the platform to spew quotes. Most fascinating is Charles Darwin, who is tweeting and blogging in real time on board the HMS Beagle (via his 1839 ‘Voyage of the Beagle’ diary).”

when Jesus rode dinosaurs: a page from a creationist coloring book

NASCAR as religion: “Is your spiritual engine running on fumes? Do you feel like you're falling behind in the race of life, or that you've hit the wall? Get ready to start your engine once again. In The Race: From Pit Row to Victory Lane, author Rick Lemons offers timely and comprehensive insights that will fuel your relationship with God. Join him as he parallels the Christian life to NASCAR racing.”

comparing Lincoln and Davis

Today is Kennesaw State University's New Interpretations of the American Civil War Symposium. This year's topic: Envisioning America: The Leadership of Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis. We have four of the best Lincoln and Davis scholars around: William Cooper, George Rable, Brian Dirck, and Stephen Berry.

Mildred Lewis Rutherford, state historian of the United Daughters of the Confederacy for Georgia, made that same comparison almost a century ago in a little booklet she published. Given her affiliation, perhaps it's not a surprise that Lincoln came in second. Davis, she said, was a Christian, a humanitarian, a philanthropist, a patriot, a statesman, and a scholar. As for the U.S. president: "Shall Lincoln be held up as an exemplar for the imitation of our American Youth? We cannot hold him up as a GENTLEMAN OF REFINEMENT AND CULTURE.... We cannot commend Lincoln for integrity of character.... We cannot hold him up as humane or tender hearted.... The evidence is very strong against him as a VIOLATOR OF THE CONSTITUTION." And so on.

Well, I guess that settles it. No need for the meeting now.

information age prayer

I was trying to tell a student the other day about Dial-A-Prayer, the telephone service that you would call to hear a 30-second or so generic prayer. Needless to say, she had no idea what I was talking about. (Dial-A-Prayer started back in the 1950s. I remember it growing up. I guess it went the way of--well, the way of the dial telephone.)

Well, now there's Information Age Prayer, "a subscription service utilizing a computer with text-to-speech capability to incant your prayers each day. It gives you the satisfaction of knowing that your prayers will always be said even if you wake up late, or forget." $3.95 a month-- but check the "Popular Prayers" link for some special deals.

Everything you wanted to know about St. Patrick's Day

... at Everything Is History.

the universe knows....

Yesterday, early afternoon, I started to get hungry. It's spring break here, so nothing's open on campus, and I hadn't packed any lunch. I told a colleague I was going to walk to Wendy's, a little over half a mile away. By the time I got downstairs and started to leave the building, I'd decided to drive to a Chinese restaurant not far from campus. The fortune in my fortune cookie said: "Work on improving your exercise routine."

Everything is amazing, nobody is happy

A former student sent this to me. At least he was kind enough not to say, "I think you'll identify with this guy; he reminds me of you."

Sunday afternoon

Mid-70s today. I pulled out the sandals for the first time of the year.

Booker T. (formerly of Booker T. and the MGs) is releasing his first album in a long time next month--Potato Hole--and to kick it off, he's touring with his back-up band, which in this case was the Drive-By Truckers! First tour date, April 1 at the Variety Playhouse in Atlanta! Ought to be a great show!

The semicolon, properly used, is a thing of beauty. It is not always properly used. This semester, I asked students in one class if they knew what we professors do when we see a well-used semicolon in a student paper. Answer: We check Google to find the source of the obvious plagiarism. I guess they took it as a challenge, because in a set of papers I returned this week, I must have written "Good use of semicolon!" a dozen times.

The GAH conference went well last weekend. The weather was bad--rain, at times pretty hard--but that was a good thing, because it kept everyone inside and at the sessions instead of out driving around the beautiful Georgia mountains. (The meeting was at Dahlonega.)

The only known color photograph of Lincoln. That's what I said when this popped up on the first slide of my PowerPoint presentation. A silly comment, I thought; the audience thought it was hilarious. I pointed to the corner with the little laser thing and said that if you look closely, you can see "Olan Mills." More laughter. I think the fact that I was giving the last presentation at the last session of the conference explains it.

Spring break has begun here at Kennesaw State. Woohoo! The first half of the semester passed quickly, but those last few days, I decided I was ready for a break from classes. I suspect my students felt the same way, at least about that last point.

The Inauguration String Quartet Revealed:


(hat tip to WFMU's Beware of the Blog)

In the Garden? Out the window

Today in the history of American religion class we were talking about chapter two ("Sweet Savior") of Stephen Prothero's American Jesus: How the Son of God Became a National Icon. The chapter describes the move from the wrathful Calvinist God of the 18th century to the loving evangelical Jesus of the 19th.

Near the end of the chapter, Prothero quotes the first verse and chorus of "In the Garden," the hymn that perhaps best represents this new view of Jesus:

I come to the garden alone,
While the dew is still on the roses,
And the voice I hear falling on my ear
The Son of God discloses.

And He walks with me and He talks with me,
And He tells me I am His own,
And the joy we share as we tarry there,
None other has ever known.

"How many of you know this song?" I asked the students. There were 22 or 23 in the room; four raised their hands.

It's not that they're a bunch of heathens. I suspect the great majority go to church, or did until recently, on a pretty regular basis. And most of them, I suspect, are mainstream Protestants, the kind of people who would have heard this song often just a couple of decades ago.

I threw out the names of a few other hymns--"Softly and Tenderly, Jesus Is Calling," "O for a Thousand Tongues To Sing," "Jesus, Lover of My Soul," "Shall We Gather at the River," "What a Friend We Have in Jesus," "How Firm a Foundation"--always about four hands, the same small bunch of students. I didn't ask about "Amazing Grace."

How can one teach late 19th-/early 20th-century revivalism without "Softly and Tenderly"?

Fortunately there's NetHymnal, with over 10,000 hymns--not just lyrics, but tunes (midis) and brief sketches of the song writers.

I do love Prothero's book, though.

fooling the people earlier

You can fool all the people some of the time and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.

Abraham Lincoln said that, right? Well, maybe, maybe not, but the first time we know the saying was ever attributed to Lincoln was August 26, 1887, in a political speech given by a man named Fred Wheeler in New York. I wrote about this here a couple years ago, and at greater length in an article for the Abraham Lincoln Association Newsletter.

This coming weekend, I'm giving a talk at the annual meeting of the Georgia Association of Historians about my efforts to track down old words and sayings. So this afternoon, taking a break after class, I was just fooling around on a new database--Gale's 19th Century Newspapers--and guess what I found.


The image might be hard to read. It's the Milwaukee Daily Journal, October 29, 1886. And on the front page, just under the date, is an article about another political speech, this one ending with

In the language of Abe Lincoln: "You can fool all the people a part of the time, or a part of the people all the time; but you can never fool all the people all the time."

How about that. I get to go to the conference with a brand new earliest date.

Like the 1887 date, this is probably not the first. My guess is that someone published an article or a book about Lincoln (and there was a LOT written about Lincoln in the 1880s) that put the words in Lincoln's mouth, like how Mason "Parson" Weems invented stories about George Washington.

Coloring 101; crosslisted as American History 101

I just had the chance to see an advance copy of new American history textbook. (I'm not going to post author, title, or publisher.) This book is different. Publishers have to do this, of course--show why their books are different (and better) than all the others. Here's the gimmick for this book: the publisher asked students what they wanted in a textbook and gave it to them. "Textbooks get boring," said a student review quoted on the publisher's web site; "it is the same thing page after page." So this book looks like a nicely-produced glossy magazine. Chapters have lots of subheadings, many followed by one paragraph of four or five sentences (I kid you not) and then a new subheading. The book even has a half dozen or so full-page advertisements (for the book itself, or rather its special features).

I saw the Instructor's Edition, which means it comes with detachable cards, one for each chapter, that list the learning outcomes, useful web links, possible assignments, group activities, and the like. The following is a group activity from the card for the Progressive Era chapter:

As the instructor, you may be ready for a tension-breaker, since the chapter will be reached somewhere near mid-semester, when students are usually frazzled. Spring for several boxes of the original eight Crayola crayons, perhaps even one box per student. Print a blown-up picture of Teddy Roosevelt and the teddy bear. Make a copy for each student and give them free time to color the drawing.... Relate to the class the story of Roosevelt's Mississippi trip that gave the world the "teddy bear."

Really.

Yes, this is a college-level textbook.

Make sure you have plenty of gold star stickers.

I'm so sorry...

Found, on the first day of the semester: a note left behind by a student in an earlier class that I kept and now re-found under a stack of papers on my desk:

I'm so sorry.... I only went by what people said on rate my professors. This can't be the same guy.

18 very funny seconds

One of the worst (i.e., best) puns I've heard in a long time.



found at Language Log

UPDATE: I showed this to a couple of folks here, and apparently I greatly overestimated its funniness.

the Lost Cause

I'll be teaching the Lost Cause in both my History of American Religion and Georgia History classes soon, so I paid particular attention to a video created by Caitlin GD Hopkins at Vast Public Indifference. This masterpiece gets at certain aspects of the Lost Cause as well as anything I've seen:



I don't know that I could do better than start class with that. Should provoke a bit of discussion, don't you think? Thanks, Caitlin! Good job. (I'm a little jealous that she can do all that.)

I've already told students in one class about Caitlin's "18th Century Connecticutian or Muppet?" quiz (see, she's really into old graveyards....).

She made the above video after reading a posting on Kevin Levin's Civil War Memory, so we have to thank Kevin as well.

Saying Good-bye on the Trail of Tears

Several months ago, I became interested in old Georgia history textbooks. As I've said here before, history ain't what it used to be, and you'll come across some stuff in these old books that looks awfully strange today.

Take, for example, the picture below. It's from the first page of the chapter that discusses the removal of the Cherokee from Georgia in the 1830s.

(click for bigger image)

Last week, as we discussed Cherokee removal in my Georgia history class, I put this image up on the screen in front of the classroom. The students loved it. One asked when the book was published. 1950s, I said. Didn't they use the phrase "Trail of Tears" back then? Yes, they did. Another student suggested that perhaps the illustrator thought the phrase meant "tears of joy."

from Ruth Elgin Suddeth, Isa Lloyd Osterhout, and George Lewis Hutcheson, Empire Builders of Georgia (Austin, TX: The Steck Company, 1957), 141. Thanks to my colleague Stephen Bartlett for the image.

Queen Elizabeth lays up to 2,000 eggs a day

Language Log has written on the Cupertino effect-- when a writer carelessly uses the suggestions of a word processor's spell-checking program, often with funny results. As Ben Zimmer describes it: "Some older spellcheckers had wordlists containing co-operation but not cooperation without the hyphen. So when a user typed in unhyphenated cooperation, the spellchecker would flag it as an error. The first suggestion thrown up was not co-operation, however, but Cupertino, the name of a city in northern California."

I had a great example of my own a couple years ago, when a student wrote a paper in my class about the American colonists fighting against Tierney. It's even funnier when it happens in the press.

But here's a neat variation:

How did the Boston Metro arrive at the following: "King's birthday is Jan. 15, but the federal holiday bearing his name is observed on the third yesterday in January."

And what exactly did Reuters mean when it said that "Queen Elizabeth has 10 times the lifespan of workers and lays up to 2,000 eggs a day."

Language Log has the answer.