Category: words

Basically, because not all languages have the same sounds. For instance, in Japanese, a bee simply can’t go bzzzzz …

“So far the American troubadour has responded with silence since he won the prize on Thursday. He gave a concert in Las Vegas that very night, but made no mention of the accolade … [though his] set ended with a cover of Frank Sinatra’s ‘Why Try to Change Me Now’.”

“I have to admit that the judges have done something remarkable. And you have to say, chapeau! For they have thrown the cat among the pigeons in a most delightful manner. First they have given the prize to someone who wasn’t courting it in any way, and that in itself is cheering. Second, in provoking the backlash of the purists who demand that the Nobel go to a novelist or poet, and the diehard fans who feel their literary hero has been short changed, they have revealed the pettiness, and boundary drawing that infests literary discourse. Why can’t these people understand? Art is simply not about a solemn attachment to this or that form. The judge’s decision to celebrate a greatness that also involves writing is a welcome invitation to move away from wearisome rivalries and simply take pleasure in contemplating one man’s awesome achievement.”

“Shouldn’t there be ways of improving academic writing without sacrificing scholarly credibility? Journalists, essayists, and even memoirists make use of academic research all the time to bolster their prose. Why couldn’t scholars steal some literary techniques from them?”

“To have been born and raised in such a place is a stain on the psyche and a strange blessing, an embrace of soft air all your life, laced with whiplash Santa Ana winds sweeping off the wastes of the Mojave and electrifying an atmosphere already charged with the energies of untethered development and entrepreneurial ambition. Buildings are constructed and routinely erased, yet they remain implanted in the native’s mind like seeds of some vaguely remembered myth.”

The video shows “what happened just before the staff at the New York Public Library reopened their 100-year-old Rose Main Reading Room after a makeover in the fall. 52,000 books had to be put back onto their shelves, one-by-one. That’s a lot of books.”

“3. They have great names: Prairie Schooner, River Teeth, Barrelhouse, Hobart, Tin House, ZYZZYVA, River Styx, Pleiades, Alligator Juniper.”

Adam Gopnik, reviewing several titles in the Hogarth Shakespeare Project: “We are supposed to say that he would be pleased, but in truth he would be puzzled. … The low-key, chastened, anti-dramatic movement of Anne Tyler’s imagination – no marvels or events, really, just inner action rebounding off half-spoken idea – would have baffled him. This sells? He was used to getting half of London on their asses for a play, and he knew you needed bloody scenes and children baked in pies to do it.”