A Thank-You Letter to Benjamin Bass

Strand Bookstore, New York City. Photo by Ajay Suresh

Dear Benjamin Bass, 

When as a struggling Lithuanian immigrant you founded the Strand Bookstore nearly a century ago in 1927, I'm sure you wanted to see the day when it would flourish. And you did, long before you died 51 years later. Your store continues to be a must-visit spot for travelers around the world who come to New York City, whether to buy a reasonably priced, hard-to-find book or to satisfy their curiosity about the store's mammoth size (18 miles of books, as your tagline says).  

You were alive when I first frequented your store in 1971 as a City University of New York student living 12 miles away in the Bronx, and although I now live 32 miles away, I still stop by whenever I can. I look at the hundreds of used books on my shelf that I've bought in excellent condition and at affordable prices from Strand, realizing that I owe much of my education to you. In truth, your legacy is one of the reasons I hesitate to move much farther away. 

So thank you for offering the perfect deal to the millions of people who have wanted to be educated or entertained through the endless, transformative power of books. I have always felt that when it comes to the book business, the customer always gets the better end of the bargain. We can reread the same book at different ages in our life and discover how much we have changed. This might be a good time for me to acknowledge your business model as a labor of love, too. Finally, thank you for believing in the magic of books and for being such an important part of my life. Here's to the next hundred years.

With appreciation and admiration,

Phil Vassallo

On Forgetting Words

In a dream last night, a friend pointed to the vertical groove between his nose and lip and asked me for the word identifying it. I couldn't recall no matter how hard I tried. I learned the word in the third grade, when I was eight years old, but I just couldn't name it. I woke up at 3:30 a.m. in a Porto, Portugal hotel room, realizing I couldn't recall the word in my waking life either. So I looked it up on my phone as my wife slept peacefully beside me. Philtrum. A word I have not used, or probably seen, since I learned it more than six decades ago. How could I forget? My name, Phil, starts the word!

In a sweat, I started going through other visible body parts: eye, iris, pupil, lens, cornea, eyebrow, eyelash, then down to my foot, heel, Achilles tendon, ankle, ball or plantar fascia, toes, instep—what's the formal word for instep? Another one that sent me to my Google assistant: dorsum. Darn, another forgotten word! I was experiencing a waking nightmare. Was I at the doorstep of dementia? I kept naming body parts, like a child counting sheep, until I fell asleep.

I woke up a few hours later pleased that I recalled philtrum and dorsum, but doubting I'd remember them for long. My minor difficulty made me think of the poem "Forgetfulness" by Billy Collins. When I first read it more than thirty years ago, I found it amusing, but it reflected my reality more and more as time passed. 

When a more focused temperament grounded me, a familiar adage came to mind: If you don't use it, you lose it. Philtrum, philtrum, philtrum, philtrum. Dorsum, dorsum, dorsum, dorsum.

Toilet Humor: Watch What You Say!

East side, West side, it makes no difference when it comes to communicating clearly. People know not what they say, at least some of the time. Take the three photos on the left as evidence. I snapped shots of these signs, from top to bottom of a wall above a urinal in a men's restroom in a New Haven, Connecticut restaurant; a toilet door in a men's restroom in a Maui, Hawaii restaurant; and a bathroom wall in a hotel room in Kennebunkport, Maine. 

The top one is intentionally funny, but the bottom two are unintentionally so. Most English-reading people who understand metaphorical language would laugh at the top sign if they were standing at that urinal. But the middle, unwittingly a double entendre, conjures an image of David spying on Bathsheba as she bathed, and the bottom one is more like a solecism, evoking a scene too revolting to explain in this blog.

How do we guard against creating such unintended meanings and logical errors? The wicked side of me would answer, "Why guard against them? They're funny. The more, the merrier." But my professional side must say that in serious writing, from business messages dramatic scripts to novels, we should avoid them, and we can do so by carefully examining syntax (word order) and diction (word choice). Errors in semantics are most  common when we are rushed or careless. All the current writing tools notwithstanding, including AI, we need to make a final careful read before pressing send.