Category: words

Children’s books in particular seem ripe for the cinematic wonder-inducing treatment. But Wonder isn’t one of those books. “Here is where I encourage anyone whose child has not yet read the book, or seen the movie (and let’s remember that with children’s literature, an entirely new audience ages into a book every year): Try to get hold of a copy that is not the brand-new ‘movie tie-in edition.’ As the cover trumpets, this new edition ‘includes full-color movie photos and exclusive content!’ No, no, a thousand times no.”

“Modern languages with a long literary tradition show a stark split between their written and spoken styles across many contexts. In current English, writing uses more varied vocabulary than conversational speech, and it uses rarer and longer words much more often. Certain structures (such as passive sentences, prepositional phrases, and relative clauses) appear more often in written than spoken language. Writers generally elaborate their ideas more explicitly through syntax whereas speakers leave more material implicit. And written language stacks clauses inside each other to a greater depth than spoken language. This is one of the most striking differences between speech and text; sentences like the opening line of the Declaration of Independence simply do not occur in conversation.”

Facing the “aberration” of gender-inclusive styles, the French language is henceforth in “mortal peril.” (Yes, it says that.) Adaptations such as écrivaine for female writer, or la ministre for a female minister, will end in a “disunified language, disparate in its expression, creating a confusion that verges on illegibility.” The new spellings and syntactical signs will burden teachers and complicate reading. The dream of a coherent francophonie – the international community of French speakers – will be annihilated by the additional spellings and complexity “to the benefit of other languages that will profit from this confusion to prevail around the world.”

“English and German have common origins, Anglo-Saxon, or Old English. There’s a lot of overlap, but there are also some crucial differences. English is a left-leaning language, meaning that relevant information tends to be clustered on the left side of a sentence. German, on the other hand, is a right-leaning language. (We are a generally a right-leaning people.) As a result, German sentences can surprise you with an unexpected verb or participle at the end of a sentence.”

Michael Erard: “Immediately after the election, Masha Gessen … called for a ‘language beat’ to track the erosions [in the meanings of words in the current climate]. But here’s a reality check that I hope isn’t merely pedantic: language consists of more than words. This gives the writer interested in politics, language, and the shifting of realities many topics to tackle beyond lexicography and semantics. As someone who’s been writing about language and linguistics for a long time – I consider myself a ‘language journalist’ – here are some that I have my eyes on.”

The association’s Job Information List — a proxy for the tenure-track (or otherwise full-time) job market in English and foreign languages — included 851 jobs last year in English, 11 percent (102 jobs) fewer than the year before. The foreign language edition list included 808 jobs, or 12 percent (110 jobs) fewer than the year before.

One force behind the rise of these fairs was Shannon Michael Cane, an exuberant, heavily tattooed Australian expatriate and autodidact book aficionado who in 2013 took over the Printed Matter book fair in New York, the granddaddy of such gatherings. He proceeded to transform it into a radically inclusive affair, attended by venerable rare-book dealers alongside obscure zine makers so scrappy that they could barely afford the plane fare to participate.

“Found in Chandler’s archives at the Bodleian Library in Oxford …, the story, “It’s All Right – He Only Died,” opens as a ‘filthy figure on a stretcher’ arrives at a hospital.”

“A new study suggests that the few words infants know are structured in their minds the same way as an adult’s vocabulary, in a complex web of related concepts. The evidence: When words have similar meanings, babies can get confused. That confusion hints that babies know more about language, at a younger age, than scientists have found before.”

On becoming a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters: “To paraphrase Mary Godwin’s line about the vindication of the rights of women, it’s a vindication of the rights of science fiction. To have my career recognized on this level makes it a lot harder for the diehards and holdouts to say, ‘Genre fiction isn’t literature.'”