Category: words

A whole host of new Scrabble words relate to current lifestyle trends including plogging (picking up litter while jogging), sharenting (sharing news and images of one’s children on social media), babymoon (early period of new parenthood), dancecore (type of electronic dance music), zen (state of calm attentiveness), fleek (used in the phrase ‘on fleek’, stylish) and bizjet (small aeroplane used by business people). – Irish Times

We can learn much from the entrepreneurial community about the art of a good story. Great storytellers simplify. Richard Branson once said, “If your pitch can’t fit on the back of an envelope, it’s rubbish.” He is also the master at telling the warts and all story, compelling people to understand both his successes and failures, but most importantly to get his listeners invested in helping him solve his challenges. – Arts Professional

“We asked Mary Norris, The New Yorker‘s ‘comma queen,’ and … Benjamin Dreyer, copy chief of Random House, … about their love of editing, the mistakes people make, and whether or not this intro has too many commas. (It probably does, doesn’t it?)” – Literary Hub

The once-enormous market for popular crime novels in India’s most widely spoken language began falling off a cliff in the 1990s. Then Minakshi Thakur, an executive at HarperCollins India took on the challenge of bringing it back. – Verve (India)

You can learn basic grammar and vocabulary at any age. That explains my “good enough” French. But there’s also an enormous amount of low-frequency words and syntax that even native speakers might encounter only once a year. Knowing any one of these “occasional” words or phrasings isn’t essential. But in every context — a book, an article or conversation — there will probably be several. They’re part of what gives native speech its richness. – The New York Times

“Provost Persis Drell told the Faculty Senate Thursday that the university was ending that funding. She cited a tight budget ahead, due to a smaller than anticipated payout coming from the endowment. (The endowment is worth more than $26 billion and is the fourth largest in American higher education.)” – Inside Higher Ed

In 2015-16, just as new leaders were taking charge, the newspaper/website lost £57 million; three years later, operations are £8000,000 in the black — even as management has resisted instituting an online paywall. – BBC

“Baldwin has captured his own early lifetime of shame and filtered it through the alembic of [narrator] David’s own cave-journey. It is a solid shame, thick, heavy, cold, enveloping like a darkening star.” – Literary Hub

“The unfinished manuscript of [an essay collection titled] The Clockwork Condition was written by Burgess in 1972 and 1973, after Kubrick’s 1971 adaptation of A Clockwork Orange was accused of inspiring copycat crimes, prompting the director to withdraw it from circulation.” – The Guardian

As anyone who’s read The Iliad knows, it’s about men being mad at each other and going to war. That results in some great writing, true, but there’s a lot more left to say about the cost of anger and war. “The novels compel us to look at that cost, not by a poignant glimpse to the side, as in the Iliad, but as their chief subject. As well they might: after all, slavery, massacres and rape remain real-world consequences of conflict and male aggression.” – The Guardian (UK)