Category: words

UK Glamour magazine is going “digital first”, stopping its monthly editions and instead producing a “collectible, glossy” issue twice a year. A spokeswoman told the BBC the “mobile-first, social-first” move with a focus on beauty was based on how readers are “living their life today”.

“The ‘myth’ of language history: languages do not share a single history but different components evolve along different trajectories and at different rates.A large-scale study of Pacific languages reveals that forces driving grammatical change are different to those driving lexical change. Grammar changes more rapidly and is especially influenced by contact with unrelated languages, while words are more resistant to change.”

“Describing the collection, The Flame, as ‘an enormously powerful final chapter in Cohen’s storied literary career’, publisher Canongate said that the Canadian singer-songwriter had chosen and ordered the poems in the months before his death in November 2016. The overwhelming majority of the book, which will be published next October, will be new material, it added.”

“Poet, critic, and W.W. Norton editor Jill Bialosky has come under fire for borrowing the language of others in her book Poetry Will Save Your Life, a critical anthology-cum-memoir. The issue was first called out in a [harshly critical] write-up of the book that William Logan published this week in the Tourniquet Review. … We reached out to him with some questions.”

The story The Most Human Part of You, by Richard Kelly Kemick, a National Magazine Award-winning writer from Calgary, Alta., was found to share elements with the story The Dog of the Marriage by the American writer Amy Hempel. As a result, Kemick’s story, as well as a second work, have been pulled from The Journey Prize Stories, an anthology that features the best fiction published in Canadian literary journals and magazines.

Linguist Geoff Nunberg: “Fifty years after the Summer of Love, that’s been the fate of a lot of the language we associate with that era – faded psychedelia, sort of like acid rock and tie-dye, except that nobody ever tries to revive it. … But it’s striking how many words from the hippie era are still with us, from ‘uptight’ to ‘bummer’ to ‘freak show.’ As brief as the moment was, it changed the way we think and talk.” (includes audio)

The French original of the magazine is (in)famous for its ferocious, often blunt and sometimes offensive satirical cartoons. The American version – a limited-edition (four parts), online-only project – is graphic journalism: a Paris-based American reporter joined one of Charlie‘s cartoonists for a trip along the Northeast Corridor for a look at the American left.

“We at Tramp experience sexism in lots of ways all the time, being dreaded women. One really annoying way we experience it is when authors send us their manuscripts and do one or both of the following: 1. Addressing us as ‘Dear Sirs’ and 2. Sending us a cover letter in which they declare they do not read books by women.”

“One thing you’ll notice: A full 75 percent of this year’s finalists are women – that’s 15 of the 20 final contenders. In fact, in the category for young people’s lit, every single finalist is a woman writer. Winners will be named at a ceremony in New York Nov. 15; it’ll be livestreamed on Facebook.”