Alan William Napier-Clavering (1903-1988), better known as Alan Napier, was an English actor. was the son of Claude Gerald Napier-Clavering (1869–1938) and Mary Millicent Napier-Clavering (née Kenrick, 1871–1932), sister of Wilfred Byng Kenrick, and a first cousin-once removed of Neville Chamberlain, Britain's prime minister from 1937 to 1940.  He was educated at Packwood Haugh School and after graduating from Clifton College, he studied at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, graduating in 1925.  He was engaged by the Oxford Players, where he worked with the likes of John Gielgud and Robert Morley.  As Napier recalled, his “ridiculously tall” 6’ 6” height played a crucial part in his securing the position and also almost losing it.  J. B. Fagan had dismissed Tyrone Guthrie because he was too tall for most parts.  Napier was interviewed (and accepted) as Guthrie's replacement while sitting down.  Fagan realized that Napier was even taller than Guthrie when he stood up, but honoured his commitment.  Napier performed for ten years (1929–1939) on the West End stage.  Napier described himself as having a particularly affinity for the work of George Bernard Shaw, and in 1937 appeared in a London revival of Heartbreak House supervised by Shaw himself.  He made his American stage debut as the romantic lead opposite Gladys George in Lady in Waiting.  Though his film career had begun in Britain in the 1930s, he had very little success before the cameras until he joined the British expatriate community in Hollywood in 1941.  He appeared in such films as Random Harvest (1942), Cat People (1942), and The Uninvited (1944).  In The Song of Bernadette (1943), he played the ethically questionable psychiatrist who is hired to declare Bernadette mentally ill.  He also played the vicious Earl of Warwick in Joan of Arc (1948).  He performed in two Shakespearean films:  the Orson Welles Macbeth (1948), in which he played a priest that Welles added to the story, who spoke lines originally uttered by other characters, and MGM's Julius Caesar (1953), as Cicero.  He appeared as Mr. Rutland in the Hitchcock movie Marnie (1964).  In 1949, he made an appearance on the short-lived television anthology series Your Show Time as Sherlock Holmes, in an adaptation of "The Adventure of the Speckled Band".  In the 1950s, he appeared on TV in four episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents and guest starred on Dale Robertson's NBC western series Tales of Wells Fargo.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Napier 

Stir-crazy describes being mentally disturbed due to a long confinement, whether alone or with others.  Stir-crazy was originally a prison term, coined around the turn of the twentieth century.  In this case, stir was and still is a slang term for prison, in use since the 1850s.  The origin of the term stir for prison is most probably the Romani word stariben, sometimes shortened to star.  The Oxford English Dictionary lists the term with a hyphen, as in stir-crazy, though the term is often rendered as two words, as in stir crazy.  https://grammarist.com/usage/stir-crazy/ 

Ten Best-Selling Books Rejected by Publishers Twenty or More Times  Find list going from #1, Dubliners by James Joyce through #10, Dune by Frank Herbert, at https://www.aerogrammestudio.com/2013/02/15/ten-best-selling-books-rejected-by-publishers-twenty-or-more-times/ 

Shorthand is an abbreviated symbolic writing method that increases speed and brevity of writing as compared to longhand, a more common method of writing a language.  The process of writing in shorthand is called stenography, from the Greek stenos (narrow) and graphein (to write).  It has also been called brachygraphy, from Greek brachys (short), and tachygraphy, from Greek tachys (swift, speedy), depending on whether compression or speed of writing is the goal.  Many forms of shorthand exist.  A typical shorthand system provides symbols or abbreviations for words and common phrases, which can allow someone well-trained in the system to write as quickly as people speak.  Abbreviation methods are alphabet-based and use different abbreviating approaches.  Many journalists use shorthand writing to quickly take notes at press conferences or other similar scenarios.  In the computerized world, several autocomplete programs, standalone or integrated in text editors, based on word lists, also include a shorthand function for frequently used phrases.  Shorthand was used more widely in the past, before the invention of recording and dictation machines.  Shorthand was considered an essential part of secretarial training and police work and was useful for journalists.  Although the primary use of shorthand has been to record oral dictation or discourse, some systems are used for compact expression.  For example, healthcare professionals may use shorthand notes in medical charts and correspondence.  Shorthand notes are typically temporary, intended either for immediate use or for later typing, data entry, or (mainly historically) transcription to longhand.  Longer term uses do exist, such as encipherment:  diaries (like that of Samuel Pepys) are a common example.  Read more and see graphics at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shorthand 

A.Word.A.Day with Anu Garg

Goldilocks  (GOL-dee-lahks)  adjective  Just right; a happy medium; optimal; not at either extreme.  After Goldilocks, a golden-haired girl in the fairy tale “Goldilocks and the Three Bears”.  In the story, she visits a bear house and chooses Baby Bear’s chair, bed, and porridge because they are just right.  Papa Bear’s porridge is too hot, Mama Bear’s too cold, for example.  Earliest documented use:  1949.  The story was first published in 1837.  The earliest documented use in the literal sense of the word is from 400 years earlier. 

Cinderella  (sin-duh-REL-luh)  noun  1.  One who deserves success or recognition, but instead suffers from neglect or obscurity.  2. One who achieves sudden triumph or recognition, especially after a long period of neglect or obscurity.  After Cinderella, the fairy-tale character who is mistreated by her stepmother and stepsisters.  With a little help from a fairy godmother, she attends a royal ball thrown by a prince.  Ultimately, she marries the prince and lives happily ever after.  What’s behind the name Cinderella?  It’s a pseudo-translation of the French name of the girl, Cendrillon, from cendre (cinder), perhaps an allusion to her day-to-day existence, tending to the fireplace and hearth, and as a result she has cinders all over her.  It may also be a hint to the hidden spark in her otherwise dismal life.  Earliest documented use:  1840.

ugly duckling  (UHG-lee DUHK-ling)  noun  One that seems unattractive or unpromising at first but has great potential and later turns out to be quite attractive or successful.  From the protagonist of the story “The Ugly Duckling” by Hans Christian Andersen, in which a young bird believes himself to be a duck and is unhappy because he doesn’t look like a duck, only to later learn that (spoiler alert) he is a beautiful swan.  Earliest documented use:  1877. 

Monte Testaccio (alternatively spelled Monte Testaceo; also known as Monte dei cocci) is an artificial mound in Rome composed almost entirely of testae (Italian: cocci), fragments of broken ancient Roman pottery, nearly all discarded amphorae dating from the time of the Roman Empire, some of which were labelled with tituli picti.  It is one of the largest spoil heaps found anywhere in the ancient world, covering an area of 20,000 square metres (220,000 sq ft) at its base and with a volume of approximately 580,000 cubic metres (760,000 cu yd), containing the remains of an estimated 53 million amphorae.  It has a circumference of nearly a kilometre (0.6 mi) and stands 35 metres (115 ft) high, though it was probably considerably higher in ancient times.  It stands a short distance away from the east bank of the River Tiber, near the Horrea Galbae where the state-controlled reserve of olive oil was stored in the late 2nd century AD.  The mound later had both religious and military significance.  The hill was constructed using mostly the fragments of large globular 70-liter (15 imp gal; 18 U.S. gal) vessels from Baetica (the Guadalquivir region of modern Spain), of a type now known as Dressel 20.  It also included smaller numbers of two types of amphorae from Tripolitania (Libya) and Byzacena (Tunisia).  All three types of vessel were used to transport olive oil.  However, it is not clear why Monte Testaccio was built using only olive oil vessels.  The oil itself was probably decanted into bulk containers when the amphorae were unloaded at the port, in much the same way as other staples such as grain.  There is no equivalent mound of broken grain or wine amphorae and the overwhelming majority of the amphorae found at Monte Testaccio are of one single type, which raises the question of why the Romans found it necessary to dispose of the amphorae in this way.  One possibility is that the Dressel 20 amphora, the principal type found at Monte Testaccio, may have been unusually difficult to recycle. Many types of amphora could be re-used to carry the same type of product or modified to serve a different purpose—for instance, as drain pipes or flower pots.  Fragmentary amphorae could be pounded into chips to use in opus signinum, a type of concrete widely used as a building material, or could simply be used as landfill.  The Dressel 20 amphora, however, broke into large curved fragments that could not readily be reduced to small shards.  It is likely that the difficulty of reusing or repurposing the Dressel 20s meant that it was more economical to discard them.  Another reason for not re-cycling olive oil amphorae into concrete of the opus signinum type may have been that the fragments were too fatty due to residual oil.  Also, oil happens to react chemically with lime (a major component of concrete) and the product of this chemical reaction is soap; the resulting concrete would have had unsatisfactory quality. Wheat amphorae and wine amphorae on the other hand were certainly "clean" enough to be re-cycled into concrete.  The first archaeological investigation of Monte Testaccio began in January 1872 under the German archaeologist Heinrich Dressel, who published his results in 1878.  Further work was carried out in the 1980s by the Spanish archaeologists Emilio Rodríguez Almeida and José Remesal Rodríguez.  Read more and see pictures at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monte_Testaccio  Thank you, Muse reader!

A THOUGHT FOR AUGUST 12  If you would be pungent, be brief; for it is with words as with sunbeams--the more they are condensed, the deeper they burn. - Robert Southey, poet (12 Aug 1774-1843) 

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2241  August 12, 2020