Category: words

“Optical character recognition, or OCR, is a technology that came up with computing in general. In a lot of ways, it still feels like magic – even though it’s a problem we solved long ago. Today’s Tedium tells its story.”

“Of all the arts, writers most envy music, for being both abstract and immediate, and also in no need of translation. But painting might come a close second, for the way that the expression and the means of expression are coterminous—whereas novelists are stuck with the one-damn-thing-after-another need for word and sentence and paragraph and background and psychological buildup in order to heftily construct that climactic scene.”

“My work has at times been criticized for being overly nostalgic, or too much about nostalgia. That is partly my fault, … but it is not nostalgia’s fault, if fault is to be found. Nostalgia is a valid, honorable, ancient human emotion, … the ache that arises from the consciousness of lost connection.”

“Some writers swoon over language: ‘It’s my muse, my lover’, and so on. Well, it’s my enemy, and I seem to spend all my life arguing and battling with it. Also, sitting down at a desk aggravates my sacroiliac joint, so by the end of a week of solid writing I’m pretty much bed-bound or crawling around on all fours. What else? Writing is static, unsocial, and restricts opportunities for the uptake of vitamin D via dermal synthesis.”

That might be because literary adult books need time and distance, not topicality – or at least that’s the idea. “Anecdotal evidence would suggest to me that YA novels take, on average, less time to get from idea to hardcover than literary novels, so that may be a factor in all of this. But there’s also the fact that in literary publishing, there’s a definite ick factor that comes along with being too timely.”

Well, at least in the UK: “Poetry book sales have gone up by more than 50% in four years, while there are now more than 30 annual events devoted to celebrating spoken and written verse.”

“In April of [1917], he broke with Russian social-democratic orthodoxy and, in a set of radical theses, called for a socialist revolution in Russia. A number of his own close comrades denounced him. In a sharp riposte, Lenin quoted Mephistopheles from Goethe’s masterwork: ‘Theory, my friend, is grey, but green is the eternal tree of life.'”

“I was a traditional product of the Cold War. … There was little sympathy for Communism in our house. So I felt like le Carré’s character George Smiley, who learns of yet another betrayal: I felt like I had taken an elbow deep in the gut.”

There are only about 50 lexicographers working at dictionary companies in the United States today, Kory Stamper estimated. But their work, she believes, remains as vital as it was in Noah Webster’s day. “There’s something to having a bunch of nerds sitting in an office dispassionately reading lots and lots of material and distilling the meaning of a word as it’s been used in lots of places,” she said. “It really is this weird democratic process.”

“Fluency in English is endemic of the deep class-based divisions that continue to plague Indian society. A 2014 report from the Centre for Research and Debates in Development Policy in India found that only 20 percent of the population speaks English, and only 4 percent of the population speaks the language fluently. The report emphasizes that men in India who spoke fluent English earned 34 percent higher wages than those who had some fluency.”