Category: words

It’s familiarity, true: “There is an allure to the repetition of rereading, submitting to the rhythms of a narrative, place, and characters you know well, and the familiar emotions they evoke. Rereading also has a different pace. I tear through a book on the first read, to find out what happens next, but rereading feels mellower and more leisurely, even while relearning the parts I’ve forgotten.” But then, there’s the discovery of racism, sexism, classism, homophobia – basically, there’s the risk of understanding the suck fairy.

What’s ‘standard’ English? What’s ‘colloquial’? Why is one right or wrong? “There is no official source of grammar prohibitions. For the English language, no one has the authority to lay down laws. Rules exist. It is possible to speak or write ungrammatically. It’s possible to be ‘wrong.’ But right and wrong derive from a far more powerful, albeit hard-to-pin-down source: us.”

Naomi Hirahira, who is “a one-woman Japanese American history project,” is best known for a seven-book crime novel series. “She has also authored several nonfiction titles on Southern California Japanese-American history. Her newest Mas Arai mystery title and the final one of the series, Hiroshima Boy, was just published by Prospect Park Books in March 2018, and in April her latest nonfiction title, Life After Manzanar, was published by Heyday.” In this article, she takes a LARB reporter on a literary walking and driving tour of Los Angeles.

For many, having kids of their own provides an opportunity to share these beloved stories with the next generation. But revisiting them alone as adults can also provide comfort, relaxation and the pleasure of rediscovery. Not only do rereaders rediscover the story, but they may also rediscover themselves.

Ondaatje’s Booker wins are complicated. More than anything, Ondaatje’s Golden Booker win showcases the contradictions of literary value in the current context of the global commodifications of creative goods. His 1992 success can be examined within the broader context of the prize, its relation to postcolonial fiction and the globalization of Can Lit.

“Harvard researchers … [have] crafted reprogrammable braille that could eliminate the need for unique pages without the bulk of a display. The concept is straightforward. The team compressed a thin, curved elastic shell using forces on each end, and then made indents with a basic stylus (similar to how you print a conventional braille book). Once you remove the compression, the shell ‘remembers’ the indents. You can erase them just by stretching the shell. … There’s no lattice holding it up, and it works with everything from conventional paper to super-thin graphene.”

Their possible existence was first teased at in 1992, when a private collector at an estate sale scooped up material belonging to Alex Haley, Malcolm X’s collaborator on the book, who died that year. Years later, one biographer was allowed a 15-minute look at some of the papers, but otherwise they have been mostly locked away, surrounded by a haze of carefully cultivated mystery.

There is to my mind one word that is so uniformly mispronounced all around the world that it should clearly be a linguistic crime, if not an outright human rights violation. And so without further ado, I give you the winner in the category of the most mispronounced word in the world.

“According to the Allegheny County District Attorney’s Office, the library’s former archivist and an antique bookseller allegedly conspired to steal and sell over $8 million worth of rare books from the [Pittsburgh] library, including [Isaac Newton’s] Principia, valued at $900,000. The archivist, Greg Priore, and the bookseller, John Schulman, were arrested on Friday for the crime.”