Category: words

In 17th-and-18th-century Europe and America, storage boxes of all kinds proliferated: bible boxes, bridle boxes, voting boxes, keepsake boxes for baby’s first tooth and lock of hair, and photo boxes, among others. Writing boxes stored physical writing tools as well as ephemeral fruits of writing—traces of literacy, ritual, and memory. Like laptops today, writing boxes were common tools of working writers.

And also, the circulation desk generally doesn’t have fake moustaches to check out. Or chalk. “How can you guys not have sidewalk chalk? This is the worst library!”

The country used to have a three percent literacy rate, and now it’s around 60 percent. “The number of bookshops is increasing; there are around a dozen in the capital, Thimphu, and a few more in far-flung districts. Bhutanese writers are publishing books more than ever before — fantasy novels, poetry, short story collections and especially folklore.” And then there’s the international literary festival.

Teaching Huck Finn is near universal, but Little Women? What if the boys don’t like it? “As far as I can tell, no one is concerned about whether 12-year-old girls are engaged by Tom Sawyer. But their reaction is not what concerns educators. It’s the boys’ responses they are worried about.”

Two friends in very different circumstances try to reread together, but it’s not the same – especially when it comes to the magic mirror that shows someone’s deepest desires. “This shift in her life’s longing was so obviously different from mine that we could no longer avoid the fact of our 12-year separation.”

Tracing the linguistic path of mmhmm, and many other words commonly used today, from West Africa to the U.S. South is difficult, is riddled with controversy — and experts say it has lingering effects on how the speech of African-Americans is perceived.

The 11th-century verse epic Shahnameh (Book of Kings), the longest poem ever written by a single author (Abolqasem Ferdowsi) is perhaps the single most important source of the history and lore of pre-Islamic Persian civilization. It’s also considered the founding work of the modern Persian language, and some give it credit for the language’s survival.

“In my view, poetry is the most organic art form; it does not require money or physical labor. A poem doesn’t need to follow any particular grammar rules; it is the record of one’s own experience of the singular mind and/or body, a singular voice. For many of us, it is also a way of “being in the world,” a world that in many ways was not made for us and actively resists our participation. Through poetry, we are able to remake and reinvent that world.”

Some people act as though librarians have (or should have) the answers to everything. As in – do you have: The book with the blue cover, the book with the red cover, the book with the green cover…The book that’s about horses . . . but not like about, horses, you know?… Breath mints (cinnamon preferred)

The Wall Street Journal, followed up by the Financial Times, reported that the Wasserstein family (as in investment bank Wasserstein Perella), which owns New York Media, has retained a firm to explore a sale. Then an internal email from CEO Pam Wasserstein became public, and it makes things seem much more ambiguous.