Category: words

Think about Call Me By Your Name or Sag Harbor, for instance. “At its most basic, this means a release from the usual constraints, although at the same time summer provides a usefully closed system.”

We’re suckers for these galleries – it’s pure library picture porn. The amazing images of these libraries around the world speak to the place books have in our consciousness.

Last month, for instance, it started going around the web that “tag” (as in the game) was an acronym for “touch and go.” (Merriam-Webster was not amused.) “Etymythology [was] coined by the Yale linguist Laurence Horn for the general phenomenon of using fabricated etymologies (acronymic or otherwise) in the service of telling attractive origin stories, doing for words what Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories did for animals.”

Having survived decade after decade of the America-dominated post–World War II global order, French may indeed look a bit worse for wear, cluttered with sometimes risible English loanwords and dismissed as useless by the increasingly many students who pass it up in favor of Spanish and Mandarin. Yet however many now regard the French language as little more than a fussy antiquarian hobby, as many others continue to revere it.

“Not seen by many beyond scholars and academics over the last six decades, the story” – “A Room on the Garden Side”, written in 1956 – “takes place in Paris’s Ritz hotel and is narrated by a character called Robert, who shares the author’s own nickname, Papa. Robert and his entourage of soldiers, who are all due to leave the city the next day, drink, quote Baudelaire and debate ‘the dirty trade of war’.”

“The 14-line poem, by a young poet named Anders Carlson-Wee, was posted on the magazine’s website on July 5. Called ‘How-To,’ and seemingly written in the voice of a homeless person begging for handouts, it offered advice on how to play on the moral self-regard of passers-by by playing up, or even inventing, hardship. But after a firestorm of criticism on social media over a white poet’s attempt at black vernacular, … the magazine said it had made a ‘serious mistake’ in publishing it.”

A 13th century bible, one of a handful of books which survived intact when the library of Canterbury Cathedral was broken up at the time of the Reformation, is back in the building after almost 500 years.

“In particular, [a new paper] proposes that certain literary exercises, like rewriting short stories that involve ethical dilemmas, can expand doctors’ worldviews and make them more attuned to the dilemmas real patients face” than traditional medical ethics case studies do.