Category: words

“The sight of my father’s or mother’s script on a small white envelope was what I anticipated right until mail call, after lunch, and what kept me going for the long afternoon hours afterward. I liked letters on which their handwriting was rushed and slightly illegible, because if I had trouble deciphering the handwriting the letter lasted longer. When my grandmother wrote, I had difficulty deciphering her elegant, Palmer Method hand, but I enjoyed the antique nature of the challenge. It felt as if I were playing tennis with a wooden racquet.”

One influence will certainly be our language’s centuries-old habit of shifting vowel sounds over time. The other will be the huge number of people – well over a quarter of the world’s population – that speaks English as a second language. Here are some educated guesses as to how those influences will take shape. (includes sound clips)

“The 54-year-old Los Angeles-born writer won for The Sellout, a laugh-out-loud novel whose main character wants to assert his African American identity by, outrageously and transgressively, bringing back slavery and segregation.”

“Thien, a 42-year-old Montreal writer, has been awarded this year’s English-language fiction prize for her breakout novel Do Not Say We Have Nothing. The prize, which celebrates its 80th anniversary this year, counts many of the giants of CanLit among its previous winners: Hugh MacLennan, Gabrielle Roy, Margaret Laurence, Alice Munro, Mordecai Richler, Robertson Davies, Timothy Findley, Margaret Atwood, Mavis Gallant, Rohinton Mistry, Michael Ondaatje.”

Typically, as noted above, science fiction authors posit a united world under benign or tyrannical world government. How our present divided world came to be united in the future is seldom explained. Science fiction authors are notorious for getting out of plot holes by inventing new technologies like “handwavium.” The political equivalent of handwavium is the World Federation of Handwavia.

Judging fiction is easier said than done. Cyril Connolly, formerly of the Observer, once wrote that “the great difficulty in reviewing new novels is to maintain a double standard – one to judge novels as fiction and the other as literature. Luckily, very few novels pretend to be literature, but when they do it is necessary to slate them by one rule and praise them by another.” In recent memory, several Booker panels have given masterclasses in the fine art of making a sow’s ear out of a silk purse.

The first is that handwriting has always been a treasured mode of self-expression. Not so, according to Socrates, whom Plato quotes as saying that men’s acquisition of writing “will implant forgetfulness in their souls” and that writing’s value pales in comparison to the living art of conversation: “If you ask a piece of writing a question, it remains silent.”

“Gone are the days in which functional literacy, i.e., being able to read and write and do basic math, is enough for people to find their way around. The Internet bombards us with so many blocks of text, images, and videos that online navigation is turning into an increasingly complex and, for those lacking information literacy skills, mind-boggling enterprise.”

“Using old-fashioned scholarship and 21st-century computerised tools to analyse texts, the edition’s international scholars have contended that Shakespeare’s collaboration with other playwrights was far more extensive than has been realised until now.”

“I immersed myself in the expressive worlds of music, the filial act of copying, survival in an age of destruction, in the effort to understand how a person tries to be free. Bach’s Goldberg Variations played in my head and on the page, showing me how structural constraint – limitations on freedom – might provoke artistic creativity, individuality, resonance. To write a novel is to find many other ways of being alive.”