“China in the early 20th century, my book’s focus,” says historian Christopher Rea (whose book, says the Times, is “hilarious”), “was, to put it mildly, a rough and tumble place. But it fostered a whole industry of mirth populated with cultural figures from hack jokesters to respectable writers slumming it as humorists.”
Category: words
How Two Brothers Created And Spread The First Alphabet For A Language Spoken By 40 Million People
For several centuries, people have tried to write Fulani – which is spoken across a huge swath of West Africa, from Senegal to Cameroon – with adaptations of the Arabic and Latin alphabets, neither of which can properly represent Fulani’s sounds; neither ever fully caught on. So Fulani remained mostly a spoken language, its speakers taking their school classes in French or English. In 1990, two Guinean teenagers developed a new script, and they’ve spent a quarter-century spreading it.
Winners Of This Year’s National Book Awards
Here’s a complete list of finalists and winners.
Critical Juncture – The Role (And Reach) Of Critics Is Changing
Once, critics like Trilling, Sontag, and Kael commanded the attention of a large audience and were expected to shape and challenge a still roughly homogenous public opinion. Today, many critics struggle to find a unified culture to interpret and criticize and a public to address. As A.O. Scott insists, the critic’s role is “to disagree, to refuse to look at anything simply as what it is,” and yet in an age in which critics often are forced to set their sights on films like Avengers: Age of Ultron, it appears that the critic can be nothing other than “the vanguard of pointing out the obvious.”
The Year Of The African-American At A Somber 2016 National Book Awards
Of the four prizes, three – for fiction, nonfiction, and young people’s literature – went to black writers; the winning books deal with slavery, racism, and the civil rights struggle. (Why was the event somber? You know why.)
Hey Bay-Bay, What’s With The Cray-Zay Way So Many Pop Singers Sing The ‘Ee’ Sound?
Dan Nosowitz talked to linguists and voices coaches and eventually found a likely theory: It started out as a particular little trick of pop vocal technique and morphed into a way “to co-opt the signifiers of intensity.” (That’s not academic gobbledygook: when you get to that point in the article, it will make sense.)
How The Interstate Highway System Transformed The St. Louis Accent
Time was that St. Louisans said “good marning” and ate “carn on the cob.” Then along came I-55 and the Northern Cities Vowel Shift.
Librarians In Philadelphia To Get Training As ‘Community Health Specialists’ – Because They’re Already Doing That Kind Of Work
Philly is the poorest of the country’s ten largest cities, and since the Free Library of Philadelphia is just that (free), it’s become a major resource for people who have almost none. Staffers have been helping residence connect with health-related services for some time – so now UPenn is starting a program to give those staffers training that will help.
Protect Your Library From Theft The Way Medieval Scribes Did Theirs – With Terrifying Curses
“If anyone take away this book, let him die the death; let him be fried in a pan; let the falling sickness and fever size him; let him be broken on the wheel, and hanged. Amen.” Yes, this was a real thing.
How The Oxford English Dictionary Reinvented Its Relevance
“To tell you the truth, the OED was going nowhere in 1976, when I signed on. We didn’t know that at the time, but the University Press—who controlled its purse strings—couldn’t see how they could restore its relevance. Behind closed doors, discussions raged on about whether the dictionary should be mothballed as soon as the current update had reached Z.”