Emblematic of their decline

[xela]

When I was little, the Sears catalog was a fixture of our house. Most of our clothes came from it. So did most of my dad's tools, and much else of what little we had. Some of our neighbors lived in houses that had been ordered from the Sears catalog, shipped flat-packed, and assembled on site. Sears was where you good, solid stuff for a reasonable price.

I remember how I used to love to page through their catalogs. In those pre-internet days, I learned a lot about the world from Sears catalogs: from what kind of tools people in various lines of work used to what girls looked like in their underwear. One of the things I loved about them was the attention to detail: Everything where you might possibly care, be it a suitcase or a toolbox, an end-table or a chain-hoist, was accompanied by exact dimensions. Reading about a vise with eight-inch jaws, I would go into my dad's shop, find his tape measure, and measure in the air around his vise to get a concrete sense how big it was. Those catalogs, with all their obsessive detail, fed my nerdy little imagination like little else.

Today I was browsing the web for medicine cabinets, and when I clicked on one that looked like the one I grew up with, found myself on the Sears web site. Looking at the web page for a medicine cabinet that almost entirely fails to actually describe it. What little description there is in the "Product Overview" is ungrammatical. ("Each piece is made from MDF and have a white finish with glass windows.") Nor could they be bothered to hire competent web monkeys. (The word "décor" earlier in that paragraph renders in my and presumably any non-windows user's browser as "d?cor".) If you click hopefully on "Specs" the entirety of the new information the page now displays consists of three words: "Type: Bath storage."

There are no dimensions. None whatsoever. No width. No height. No depth. No weight. Not even so much as the number of shelves. It is, in short, an entirely non-descriptive product description. For a product, I might add, available "online only."

Comments

[eccentrific.livejournal.com]

We did not shop from a catalogue, but I recall going to the Sears store for nearly everything when I was little. It was great. Going into a Sears store these days is just depressing. They no longer carry quality products.

[sammason.livejournal.com]

Over here, 'to actually describe' is ungrammatical. But I don't know whether it's ok, Stateside, to daringly split infinitives which no man has split before.

[yakshaver.livejournal.com]

I tend to generally side with the descriptivist camp when it comes to English grammar and usage, albeit sometimes uncomfortably. Englishmen and Americans have been known to wantonly split infinitives for over two hundred years now — and other speakers of our cousin languages have been disposed to valiantly take umbrage over it for nearly as long. Fowler in 1926, in the first edition of Modern English Usage, wrote: "No other grammatical issue has so divided English speakers since the split infinitive was declared to be a solecism in the 19c: raise the subject of English usage in any conversation today and it is sure to be mentioned."

(You might be interested in The Wikipedia article, from which I got the Fowler quote.)

[sammason.livejournal.com]

Lol!

[yakshaver.livejournal.com]

Takes a bow.