Category: words

The stories we tell matter: “We are born into a certain world, and how we navigate that world is part spunk and part, frankly, wariness and warning.”

In Sweden in 1998, “among the ten bestselling books of the month was not even a single Swedish crime novel. There were historical novels, chick lit, contemporary novels, satire. And just two crime novels of any description: one British, one American. That’s how the literary scene looked just 20 years ago! … The Swedish crime novel — the Scandinavian crime novel — was stuck in a rut of whodunnits, essentially the same thing written over and over again.” Then things changed.

It’s especially clear in Orlando, but that’s not the only text that shows how much Woolf took and learned from what she knew of Einstein’s theories. “In Woolf’s vision of life — which echoes the ever-evolving flow of her language — the universe may remain a godless dark riddle, but some starry doors remain ajar, leading to the wonderful and terrible who-knows-where.”

Mr. Rabinovitch died on Sunday at the age of 87, a few days after falling down the stairs of his Toronto home. On Wednesday he was laid to rest, with hundreds of mourners gathering at the city’s Beth Tzedec Congregation to pay their respects to the man who, through a small act of literary philanthropy, did more to alter the course of Canadian letters over the last few decades than just about anyone else in the country.

“Books published in 2005-08 (were) 28 times more likely to include swear words than books published in the early 1950s,” the researchers report in the journal Sage Open.

Big vocabulary, flexible syntax, lots of homophones – perhaps only Chinese is better suited for wordplay. Indeed, in the U.S. an entire circuit of punning tournaments has arisen. Says one frequent competitor, “I sometimes get embarrassed by how seriously I take this.”

Among the new items in the authoritative Duden dictionary: Selfie, postfaktisch (post-truth), Emoji, Cyberkrieg (cyber-war), and tindern (to do online dating).

“‘BookTubers’ as they are (slightly irritatingly) known, post videoed book reviews on YouTube and many rack up hundreds of thousands – even millions – of views. … Who could have predicted that, in the age of smartphones, video games and constant distraction, a vast audience of young people would be clamouring for broadcast literary coverage?”

Seventy-four parchments that had been scraped over and re-used by the monks of St. Catherine’s at Mt. Sinai during the Middle Ages are now being re-examined using cutting-edge spectrography. They’ve uncovered previously unknown Greek poems and treatises (including a pharmacological recipe by Hippocrates), some of the oldest Christian texts in Arabic, and writing in some ancient languages that had been thought unrecoverable.