Category: words

Though some speakers have begun using x in place of gender markers a or o – Latinx instead of Latina or Latino, for instance – this publisher took a different tack: “The book doesn’t use the X and instead uses an E (for example, todes instead of todas or todos, and les instead of los or las).”

Nothing is completely new, but this is a blend of media and writing that might change the genre: “The multimedia series … blends the chat-fiction format — presented as a text-messaging thread — with custom illustrations and a voiceover ‘reminiscent of 1940s radio dramas,’ according to Hooked. ‘Dark Matter’ is longer than Hooked’s usual fare: The pilot clocks in at about 4,700 words, with 32,000 words total for the series. Most Hooked chapters are around 1,000 words each.”

But writers don’t get to choose what their words mean after they send them out into the world. “Kindly and self-skewering, Lamott, now 64, has been doggedly chronicling the messy stuff of life — refracting her own complicated stories of addiction and loss — in mordantly comic and sharply observed memoirs and novels for over three decades.”

Yes, in the 1970s and 1980s, there were some famous bodice-rippers – the kind where women are “overcome” by lusty men, and fall for their rapists over the course of the book. But that was then, and this is now. Author Jasmine Guillory: “One of the women told me that she wanted her little girl, when she got old enough, to read my book to know what consent was and how a man should treat her.”

The poet believed that Shakespeare wrote some of the plays almost as a single work, about Puritan suppression of sexuality and an avenging goddess. Why read it now? “The thrilling effrontery of Hughes’s vision has three outstanding and transcendent qualities. First, it hot-wires the reader into the wild voltage of his fascination with myth, language and folklore.”

The guy who started them wanted to outdo Andrew Carnegie by one library – but now there are more than 75,000 Little Free Libraries across the world. “They promote a friendly, sharing economy. No one tracks who took what. There’s no due date. No fines. You might never return a book. You might leave another instead. And, they are inherently cute.”

It’s called glottophobie: “Derived from the Greek words for tongue and fear, it refers to discrimination against those who speak the language of Molière and Proust with non-standard pronunciation. Regional accents are hardly unique to France. But a history of imposing homogeneity means that, even today, those whose French does not sound Parisian face derision.”

Canadian writers are making less money than ever — with incomes from writing dropping 78 per cent from 1998, according to a report released Monday by the Writers’ Union of Canada. The numbers, accounting for inflation, have been undergoing a steady drop. According to the report, writers made $9,380 in 2017, down from $12,879 in 2014 — a 27 per cent drop in just three years.

“We have so few great public spaces in our sprawling metropolis. And Ken Brecher has, in one quick stroke, changed the library from a sacred site of learning to a battleground, threatening its support from the literary, intellectual and civic-minded community here in Los Angeles.”