Category: words

Lisa Lucas: “I do think it matters that I come from outside of the publishing industry – it gives one a completely different perspective. It’s a boon to be able to learn from film, theater and publishing and to apply all these strengths to the task at hand. For instance, theater is incredible at audience development.”

“Some call it ‘verbing,’ which sounds like a new dance craze, while linguistic nerds call it denominalization. Benjamin Franklin preferred to call it ‘awkward and abominable’ … [but] Shakespeare was also quite the inveterate verber.” This very article, in fact, elbows its way through the controversy.

“Simply, many readers, many critics, don’t notice. Or if they do, don’t particularly care. They read for content. The clamor of idioms about us has become so loud that we hardly notice when a translation, or indeed any piece of prose, is cluttered with incongruities.”

“For this edition of the Fishko Files, WNYC’s Sara Fishko sat down with a husband-and-wife team of star translators to talk (as quickly as possible) about a very, very long book – War and Peace.” (audio)

“Funeral directors were once called undertakers; today’s lavatory or restroom was yesterday’s bathroom, or – in the 18th century – water closet. … Language is a slam-dance between bullies and their targets, the uncouth and the civil.”

“No books have been banned on the grounds of obscenity recently but there have been books banned on the grounds of advocating abortion or miscarriage.”

“While e-books retailers like Amazon, Apple and Barnes & Noble can collect troves of data on their customers’ reading behavior, publishers and writers are still in the dark about what actually happens when readers pick up a book. Do most people devour it in a single sitting, or do half of readers give up after Chapter 2? Are women over 50 more likely to finish the book than young men? Which passages do they highlight, and which do they skip?”

“Questions immediately arose about why Ms. Lee, who died less than a month ago at 89, might have wanted to discontinue an edition that was popular with students.”

“Figuring out the identity of Ms. Ferrante, who has never been identified, has become one of the literary world’s favorite guessing games, and on Sunday Italy’s leading daily, Corriere della Sera, delivered its latest twist: Ms. Ferrante might be a professor in Naples named Marcella Marmo.”

“She is discovering details that have been overlooked for centuries, from mistranscriptions and mysterious seals to an unpublished document tucked away in the Venice state archives that describes Italian and French diplomats attending ‘Pericles’ in London.”