Category: words

“While it was too early to tell at this year’s book fair, more than one publisher was whistling a happy tune as they entered the Olympia exhibition centre on Tuesday. With print books having a higher average price point than ebooks, and with a weaker pound benefitting exporters – German publishers in particular bought big this year – the mood among the hundreds of publishers was optimistic.”

With the first chapter of her new book, Kory Stamper of Merriam-Webster describes how she came to work for the venerable dictionary and offers a look at the complicated process of getting the reference work together.

“More than 30 years after winning a National Book Critic Circle award for her first novel, Love Medicine, Louise Erdrich has won again. LaRose, the tale of two Ojibwe families linked by tragedy, took the NBCC fiction prize Thursday night in New York.”

“Later this year, Dubai-based education technology firm ATLAB will release into classrooms across the United Arab Emirates a swarm of cutesy robots with cartoon eyelashes, penguin-arms, and robustly apportioned 3D cameras and infrared sensors … The platform, called TeachAssist, will function as a sort of in-class librarian, helping students locate and check out books, responding to questions, and pulling research materials from the cloud.” (Anyone else think it reminds them of the Jetsons’ robot maid, Rosie?)

“Paul Muldoon, who for a decade has served as the poetry editor of The New Yorker, will step down, the magazine announced on Wednesday. His successor will be Kevin Young, who moved to New York from Atlanta last year to become the director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.”

“In other words, the use of English could be just as important to indigenous identity as mother-tongue languages.” Tristan Ahtone looks into the origins of the accent and what it signifies – to Indians themselves and to other Americans.

Generally speaking, the smaller and more commonly used the word is, the more difficult it is to define. Words like “but,” “as,” and “for” have plenty of uses that are syntactically similar but not identical. Verbs like “go” and “do” and “make” (and, yes, “take”) don’t just have semantically oozy uses that require careful definition but semantically drippy uses as well. “Let’s do dinner” and “let’s do laundry” are identical syntactically but feature very different semantic meanings of “do.” And how do you describe what the word “how” is doing in this sentence?

“The above is not my real name – the fellow it belongs to gave me his permission to sign it to this story. My real name I shall not divulge. …”

A conversation between New Yorker fiction editor Deborah Treisman and Margaret Daniel, the editor of ‘I’d Die for You’ and Other Lost Stories.

“As well as works by Coach House poets Damian Rogers and Jeramy Dodds, the page for the centre’s contemporary poetry reading group featured high-quality reproductions of entire books by such high-profile Canadian writers as Governor-General’s Award winner Dionne Brand and nominee Lisa Robertson, and international poetry superstar Anne Carson, as well as leading U.S. poets including Claudia Rankine, Ariana Reines and Maggie Nelson. The books, most of which would retail for less than $20, were available to download free to anybody who clicked on a link.”