Not pocalypse, but fest / A day on which I’m blest: September 6th is the coming AMZ duodecfest, the celebration of my 84th birthday, 84 being the 7th — and therefore lucky — duodecade (a duodecade is a dozen years, the duodecimal counterpart of the decade in the decimal system). I’m posting now about my associations with 84, to get that stuff out of my head, so that 8 weeks from now I can just lie back and let the occasion wash over me.
So: first thing, my lucky duodecade. A notion that bubbled up from my mathematical past, along with things like triangular numbers, the Fibonacci sequence, repeating decimals, the infinity of primes, transfinite numbers, and all that good stuff.
Then, second thing, the 84 Lumber Company and the Pennsylvania town of Eighty Four, which leads me to the phallicity of lumber, logs, and planks; if there’s a phallus or phallic act somewhere in a topic, I’ll find it. (I continue to hope that someone has used 84 like 69, to name a sexual act — he 84ed like a crazed mink.)
Finally, Helene Hanff’s delightful 1970 book 84, Charing Cross Road, which takes me to life histories (in this case, of two people) and to rambles through books, both old friends and fresh discoveries (which is what those two people engage in, in transatlantic correspondence). Two more themes from my writing.
Into the lumber room. I’ll start with 84 Lumber Company and radiate out from there. From the company’s website:
Founded in 1956 and headquartered in Eighty Four, Pennsylvania, 84 Lumber Company is the nation’s largest privately held supplier of building materials, manufactured components, and industry-leading services for single- and multi-family residences and commercial buildings.
(#1) The company logoThe company operates 310 facilities which includes stores, component manufacturing plants, custom door shops and engineered wood product centers in 33 states. 84 Lumber also offers turnkey installation services for a variety of products, including framing, insulation, siding, windows, roofing, decking and drywall.
In the early days, founder Joe Hardy, in conjunction with his two brothers, Norman and Bob Hardy, and family friends Ed Ryan and Jack Kunkle, pooled together $84,000 in funds to purchase land and buildings for a new “cash and carry” lumberyard. The idea was that customers would pay by cash or check and if merchandise was unable to be “carried” out, an additional charge was implemented to have the item personally delivered.
… During the 1970s, 84 Lumber’s expansion continued, and the company opened 229 stores. In 1984, the company began remodeling and renovating stores, evolving from no-frills lumberyards to new and improved building materials stores. As this improvement plan generated success, the company relaxed their strict cash and carry policy, and introduced credit options in 1987.
The company and the town. The company gets its name from the town of Eighty Four PA. About this place, and its odd name, from Wikipedia:
Eighty Four is a census-designated place in … Washington County, Pennsylvania. It lies approximately 25 miles (40 km) southwest of Pittsburgh and is in the Pittsburgh metropolitan area.
… Eighty Four was originally named Smithville. Due to postal confusion with another town of the same name, its name was changed to “Eighty Four” on July 28, 1884. The origin of the name is uncertain. It has been suggested that the town was named in honor of Grover Cleveland’s 1884 election as President of the United States, but that occurred after the town was named. Another possibility is the town’s mile marker on the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. Another is that the town was named after the year the town’s post office was built, by a postmaster who “didn’t have a whole lot of imagination.”
Unimaginative seems like a good bet.
timber, lumber, logs, planks, boards. Some basic vocabulary in this domain. Here we have something of a terminological morass, because of usage differences between AmE, BrE, AuE, and more, and variation within several of the dialects. Here I’ll stick to the main facts about AmE and BrE.
Starting with AmE timber, from NOAD:
noun timber: [a] wood prepared for use in building and carpentry … [this is the M(ass) noun; there is also a C(ount) noun, most often used in the plural timbers ‘a wooden beam or board used in building a house, ship, or other structure’ (NOAD)]
This sense is the BrE usage of lumber; from the Britannica site:
M noun lumber: collective term for harvested wood, whether cut into logs, heavy timbers, or members used in light-frame construction.
In this entry we also get the term log (common to AmE and BrE); from NOAD:
C noun log: 1 a part of the trunk or a large branch of a tree that has fallen or been cut off …
So we come to this Britannica illustration of lumber:
(#2) Sawn-off tree trunks — logs — already processed in preparation for sawing into building material
But the Britannica entry on lumber notes that:
The term often refers specifically to the products derived from logs in a sawmill.
This is the AmE usage of lumber; from NOAD:
M noun lumber-2: 1 mainly North American timber sawn into rough planks or otherwise partly prepared …
And so we come to the stuff on sale at 84 Lumber, and the final two lumber words. From NOAD:
C noun plank [and rough synonym board]: 1 a long, thin, flat piece of timber, used especially in building and flooring …
Lumber raunch. Logs, lumber, planks, and boards — elongated items made of (stiff) wood — are natural metaphors for the penis, so English has developed sexual senses for all of the lumber words. A quick tour of the phallic lumber yard, using entries in GDoS …
— noun log: … 7 (US) the penis [1st cite 1965]
From my 12/18/16 posting “The Yule log”:
The Old Log Inn joke. A joke that’s been around for a long time — since Middle English, for all I know — has a lost traveler stopping to ask his way of a couple in the midst of making love (a man and a woman in some versions, two men in another). “How far is the Old Log Inn?”, the traveler asks, and gets beaten up for his query.
The joke could of course be adapted to the name Yule Log Inn; you could re-work the story of the movie White Christmas with that name.
— noun lumber-3: 1 (US) the penis (pun on noun wood-1) [1st cite 1972 in Rodgers’s Queens Vernacular, so in actual use before then]
Not cited in GDoS, but more entertaining: the Lumber Yard Bar, a gay bar in (south) Seattle WA; from the bar’s website (largely unedited):
Nathan Adams and Michale Farrar welcome you to their Lumber Yard Bar. An all-inclusive LGBTQ bar and restaurant in the heart of White center. In the Lumber yard bar we boast hand crafted cocktails, premium wines and draft beers and a friendly staff to serve you. Reopened after a tragic fire the new Lumber yard boasts two distinct areas. The lumberYard bar is your neighborhood meeting place. The loading dock is for entertainment, drag shows, dancing and other live entertainment.
Despite its phallic name, the Lumber Yard Bar is clearly not the sort of place to have a back room, where men could, um, enjoy each other’s lumber.
— noun plank-3: the penis; usu. in combs. [like yank the plank ‘masturbate’ and plankspanker ‘masturbator’; the cites are recent]
— verb plank: … 4 to have sexual intercourse [1st cite: from a 1959 Ed McBain murder mystery: You are harbouring dark thoughts of planking her]
Encountering this verb plank, I’m inclined to visualize planked salmon — salmon cooked on a wooden plank — or someone wielding a wooden plank, rather than couples pronging, so the first images called up by the McBain quotation were ludicrous, but I think I could get into planking.
The epistolary memoir.
(#3) The cover of the book, with a British postbox (for Frank) and an American mailbox (for Helene)
From Wikipedia:
84, Charing Cross Road is a 1970 book by Helene Hanff. It is an epistolary memoir composed of letters from the twenty-year correspondence between the author and Frank Doel, chief buyer for Marks & Co antiquarian booksellers, located at the eponymous address in London. It was later adapted into a 1975 television play, a 1976 radio drama, a 1981 stage play, and a 1987 film.
Background: Hanff was in search of obscure classics and British literature titles that she had been unable to find in New York City when she noticed an ad in the Saturday Review of Literature. She first contacted the shop in 1949 and it fell to Doel to fulfil her requests. In time, a long-distance friendship developed between the two and between Hanff and other staff members, as well, with an exchange of Christmas packages, birthday gifts and food parcels to help with the post-World War II food shortages in Britain. Their letters included discussions about topics as diverse as the sermons of John Donne, how to make Yorkshire Pudding, the Brooklyn Dodgers and the coronation of Elizabeth II. Hanff postponed visiting her English friends until too late; Doel died in December 1968 from peritonitis from a burst appendix, and the bookshop eventually closed in December 1970. Hanff did finally visit Charing Cross Road and the empty shop in the summer of 1971, a trip recorded in her 1973 book The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street.
Charming conversation between two interesting people.
About HH, from Wikipedia:
Helene Hanff (April 15, 1916 – April 9, 1997) was an American writer born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She is best known as the author of the book 84, Charing Cross Road
Career: Helene Hanff’s literary career saw her move from unproduced playwright to writer of some of the earliest television dramas to becoming a noted writer and personality in her own right, as a quintessential New Yorker. She wrote a memoir in 1961 called Underfoot in Show Business that chronicled her struggles as an ambitious young playwright trying to make it in the world of New York theatre in the 1940s and 1950s. She worked in publicists’ offices and spent summers on the “straw hat circuit” along the East Coast, all the while writing one play after another. Her plays were admired by some of Broadway’s leading producers, but somehow none of them ever made it to the stage, Hanff herself saying her plays specialized in “plotless charm.”
When network television production geared up in New York City in the early 1950s, Hanff found a new career writing and editing scripts for many early television dramas. Chief among these was the Dumont Network series The Adventures of Ellery Queen. At the same time, she continued to try to get one of her plays produced on Broadway and not just be “one of the 999 out of 1,000 who didn’t become Moss Hart.” (In later editions of Underfoot, this reference was changed to Noël Coward.) The bulk of television production eventually moved to California, but Hanff chose to remain in New York. As her TV work dried up, she turned to writing for magazines and, eventually, to the books that made her reputation.
Final note. Yes, I haven’t mentioned George Orwell’s dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. Just too honking obvious. And be honest: aren’t sexy lumber and Hanff’s epistolary memoir a lot more fun? (I am fully aware of the direness of the time we are in — but I’ll also seek play and joy wherever I can find them.)