Them as pinched it, done her in.

Cavett and Kapuscinski.

The illicit trade in TimesSelect delivered this, Dick Cavett's rant on pronunciation. It's rather a lot of this,

And what about the various distortions of the easy word "heinous." From lawyers especially you get "hayney-us," "heeny-us" and even "highness." Look, guys and gals, it's easy. It rhymes with a well-known two-syllable word which some might consider not nice, but I guarantee will stick the correct pronunciation in your brain, especially if you compose a silly rhyming couplet. ("His behavior was heinous/ And … etc." — which, by the way is not pronounced "ECK-cetera.")

Unlike the rants about punctuation, grammar and literary style that many of my readers are fond of, this is about oral language. Technological determinist that I am, I assume Cavett cares about how words sound because he was deeply involved in a very aural form of an audio-visual medium, the interview show as it appears on TV.

So are ranters about punctuation, grammar and literary style then more literary characters? Well, consider Amardeep Singh's brief but wildly suggestive thoughts on Ryszard Kapuscinski's contribution to the Feb 5 New Yorker, "Personal History, The Open World." AS's post actually made me go back and read the article, which I'd skipped, because I hate travel writing. But not this travel writing. The important thing is, I would agree with the comments that follow the post,

"the way in which language itself becomes the theme of his visit. It's quite different from other western travelers in India, who have tended to notice the poverty, the traffic chaos, the ancient/exotic beauty, etc."

The city as textual literary signs, not sensory experience. Oh, la.

Though there is, actually, lots of noticing the poverty (from K's communist bloc POV) and exotic sensory experience, but that too is put into perspective.

when time is like a map of new jersey

Adam Gopnik's "Talk of the Town, Comment, Gothamitis" in the Jan 8 issue caught my attention and held it. Although I've been hearing this particular corporate gentrification sob story from New Yorkers for awhile, Gopnik takes a specific rhetorical event, this Bloomberg speech, and expands on the sort of sad fear it both invokes and attempts to address.

But I don't think I would have read it all the way through - the depressing cliches involving a (cringe) "Greenwich Village bard" and (groan) "Baghdad-on-the-Hudson" - would have scared me off. Except that I had, in the course of my travels to the dark corners and bustling thoroughfares (and concrete bunkers and soul-less main streets) of New York, Philadelphia and Washington, DC read Luc Sante's "My Lost City" in The Best American Essays volume (2004) that (of course) Louis Menand edited. Which provides a kind of picturesque backdrop for Gopnik's argument. Weirdly nostalgic, but, then, not entirely. Anyway, they make a nice pair.

Of course, if Mr. Sante really loves burned out buildings to huddle in, he can move to North Philly.

But I guess what I liked about both pieces was the emphasis on how incredibly myopic citizens (of anywhere, really) can be, and the dangers of that. And how, it would seem, no one would have predicted New York in the 1970s decades before, and how no one can explain, exactly, the recovery and how, unless one seizes control of the planning and plotting of these things, no one will be able to account for New York 2030, among other things.

On a maybe related note, about that smell, did they all totally forget that they are RIGHT NEXT TO NEW JERSEY? I wish Mike Davis would write a New York book. Or has he?