Category: words

“In July 1845, British curiosity-seekers headed to London’s Egyptian Hall to try out the novelty of the summer. For the price of one shilling, they could stand in front of a wooden bureau, pull a lever, and look behind a panel where six drums, bristling with metal spokes, revolved. At the end of its ‘grinding,’ what it produced was not a numeric computation or a row of fruit symbols, but something quite different: a polished line of Latin poetry.”

Of the six finalists, five are women with Gary Barwin, author of Yiddish for Pirates, the sole male finalist for the prestigious prize.

“The bookstore covers a sprawling 21,000 square feet, draws in more than a million tourists, and sells about 700,000 books every year. And while most of the titles are printed in Spanish, just marveling at the theater-turned-bookshop is worth a trip.”

“The manuscript has baffled cryptographers since book dealer Wilfrid Voynich found it in an Italian monastery in 1912. It contains hundreds of pages of fine calfskin parchment, which scientists have dated to the first half of the 15th century. … Academics continue to hotly debate whether the manuscript is an elaborate hoax designed to fool 15th-century book collectors, or a detailed secret code that remains unbroken.”

“In the United States, a bidialectal person might be someone who speaks both Standard American English and African-American Vernacular English (called AAVE but also known as ‘Ebonics’), which differ a lot in pronunciation, syntax and vocabulary – so much so that AAVE has controversially been called a distinct language. So do bidialectals enjoy the same cognitive benefits as bilinguals?”

“E-book sales have fallen precipitously for months, in part because many publishers have raised their prices after negotiating with Amazon and gaining the ability to set their own prices.”

“A writer has the right to inhabit any character she pleases — she’s always had it and will continue to have it. The complaint seems to be less that some people ask writers to think about cultural appropriation, and more that a writer wishes her work not to be critiqued for doing so, that instead she get a gold star for trying.”

“I am locked in a battle between self-doubt and self-discipline, and the former usually wins. I have the concentration of… oh, I like your shoes. It is so much easier to plummet down the sinkhole of Twitter.”

Yaa Gyasi: “This novel was an attempt for me to say: We cannot look away when something like this is happening. We can’t look away. We don’t get to.”

“Shakespeare refuses to be boxed in. Not only do we know very little about what he really thought, felt and believed, but the plays themselves are elusive. Just when you think you’ve got a meaning nailed down, your interpretation melts like jelly and you’re left scratching your head. Maybe he’s deep, very deep. Or maybe he didn’t have a continuity editor. And Shakespeare will never turn up on a talkshow and be asked to explain himself, the lucky devil.”