Blog

New Word Order

Ten thousand new words made it into the new Merriam-Webster Dictionary. Editors are constantly monitoring language for new words to include. “If ‘cowboy up’ or other promising newcomers – at the moment, ‘blog’ and ‘senior moment’ are coming up fast on the outside – appear in a wide range of published sources over a sustained period of time, they could land a spot in the next edition of Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary a decade or so from now. If not, they will meet the fate of such former up-and-comers as “vidiocy” and “cable-ready,” which now sit forlornly atop the citation files in brown cardboard boxes marked “rejected,” or old standbys like “long play,” which was dropped from the dictionary because CDs have supplanted long-playing records.”

Dario Fo Vs. Those In Power

At 77, Italian playwright/director Dario Fo is still rabble rousing. He’s in Genoa restaging Rossini’s opera, Il Viaggio a Reims: “They discovered I had re-written some of Rossini’s text, a story about Charles X, the King of France immediately after the French revolution. He threw out the Government, called for new elections, limited the number of voters, made laws for his own benefit. Yes! Many understood him to be similar to (the Italian Prime Minister) Berlusconi! So the politicians said we could not do this opera in Genoa. It was a big struggle. In the end, the city council said to the provincial governors, ‘Sorry, the program is set, tickets have been sold, we cannot stop the production’.”

NY Phil, Carnegie, Call off Merger

Carnegie Hall and the New York Philharmonic have decided to call off their proposed merger. “Rumors that the deal was unraveling had been circulating in recent days after weeks of growing doubt about whether the boards of these two proud organizations would ultimately sanction the move. Lincoln Center officials said today that they were pleased to have the orchestra remain. `If you were to capture our feelings about this, they could be succinctly stated: Welcome home. All is forgiven. We have a lot to discuss.”

The National’s Big Year

Nicholas Hytner’s first season at the head of London’s National Theatre has been a big success. “You come in new, and the continuity of the institution has to be grappled with. It is constitutionally required of us that we should be skeptical and disreputable, and that all the time we should be looking for stories that would not be told unless we are prepared to tell them.”

An Essay Defending Essays

“It is an article of the most unshakable faith that the personal, familiar, Montaignian – call it what you will – essay is minor stuff, a second-rate employment undertaken by bankrupt novelists and other failures. In literary rankings its place lay well below the novella and scarcely above the book review. Indeed, the personal essay’s most esteemed and acclaimed practitioners have to a man voiced misgivings about their trade.” And yet, is it true that “there are no second-rate genres, “only second-rate practitioners?”

The BBC, (Partly) Online

Recently the BBC announced it would put all of its archives online, available free over the internet. The initiative, “if successful, could enable viewers to download some of the 1.5 million TV programmes and 750,000 radio shows hitherto buried in the BBC archive. To enable viewers to download their favourite programmes, both archive and current, the BBC is developing a new internet media player or IMP.” But, predictably, there are numerous issues to be worked out. And the likelihood of getting all the BBC’s shows online isn’t likely…

Editor: Why I Killed A Negative Review

The editor who killed a negative review of a book by one of her newspaper’s writers, defends the decision: “I didn’t kill the review because I disliked it (though I’ve been widely quoted saying that I did). And I didn’t kill it because I thought it was poorly done. A tamer version of the same review has since appeared in at least one newspaper, and I find no fault with that. I assumed the freelance writer would sell it elsewhere, and I wasn’t trying to protect Albom from a negative review. I decided not to publish it because that’s not how I want to treat any single employee, and because I think all our employees should be protected from, as one colleague put it, the ethical dilemma and no-win position of passing critical judgment on a colleague’s work.”

How To Kill A News Network

For decades, the voice of news in Quebec was Radio Canada. But “since the network relaunched its flagship news programs on Sept. 1, viewers have abandoned Radio-Canada in droves and discussions of its botched effort to inject a ‘convivial’ tone into its broadcasts have become water-cooler common in Quebec.”