Category: words

A pair of thieves spent that summer driving from Texas to Maryland to Illinois, going into university libraries and cutting out lithographs and engravings from 19th-century naturalist journals and newsweeklies that they would sell piece by piece – until, at last, they were foiled by a foolhardy change of method and an air-conditioning maintenance man.

Ben Zimmer recounts how he traced the origin of the slang word “props” to Aretha’s version of the hit “Respect” (not Otis Redding’s original) – and convinced the gatekeepers of The Oxford English Dictionary to give the Queen of Soul her due.

Judith Thurman (who speaks only three languages and came to grief with Vietnamese) meets with several of these savants to find out what (including any special neurological features) makes them tick.

Yoroshiku onegaishimasu. “It’s a crucial term in Japan heard every single day in thousands of contexts. But it’s really hard to come up with a simple, easily translatable definition. And some foreigners might find it completely baffling.”

Meg Wolitzer: “As a rule, I rarely reread my own old writing, but instead I tend to ignore it, much the way someone might sidestep an old flame seen on the street years or even decades after a relationship has ended.” But with the film version of The Wife coming out – and already generating Oscar buzz – Wolitzer realized that she’d have to revisit the book in order to do press interviews. Here’s how she experienced the process.

“It’s hard to avoid noticing that J.C. Gabel, a tall, almost burly transplant from Chicago, is — among other things — a bit of a ranter. … But the difference between Gabel, 42, and most people who declaim loudly on the patios of bookstores is that a) he’s generally — or at least arguably — right most of the time and b) he’s managed to put his money where his mouth is. … Surviving in the current publishing climate is impressive; thriving and expanding is almost bizarre. And Gabel and company have done it.”

During his mid-career crisis, Proust actually worked as an art critic, and In Search of Lost Time includes hundreds of aperçus on visual art and even a death scene that takes place in front of a Vermeer.

“If there is a Pride and Prejudice of kitschy bad fiction, Amanda McKittrick Ros’s 1897 masterpiece of overwriting” — Irene Iddesleigh — “is it. The book’s legion of avowed ‘admirers’ includes Mark Twain, the Bloomsbury Group, Aldous Huxley and C.S. Lewis. At parties, ardent devotees have been known to compete in seeing how long they can read aloud from its pages without laughing. The Oxford Companion to Irish Literature aptly sums up Ros’s work as ‘uniquely dreadful.'”

“There are, of course, plenty of people — including many women — who have no problem being addressed as ‘guys,’ think the word has evolved to be entirely gender-neutral, and don’t see a reason to change their usage. But others aren’t so sure. … In the course of reporting this story, I heard from teachers who wanted a better way to get students’ attention, an ice-cream scooper who wanted a better way to greet customers, and a debate coach who specifically encourages his students to use ‘y’all.’ These are representatives of a broad coalition of people who have contemplated, and often gone through with, excising ‘guys’ from their vocabularies.”