Category: words

“Listen, I was so angry that I stormed and cursed around the room. I felt like punching the wall. … But I had to keep that pseudonymous poem in the anthology because it would have been dishonest to do otherwise. If I’d pulled the poem then I would have been denying that I gave the poem special attention because of the poet’s Chinese pseudonym. … I would have pulled it because I didn’t want to hear people say, ‘Oh, look at the big Indian writer conned by the white guy.’ I would have dumped the poem because of my vanity.” (The entry is long, but it’s worth reading all of it.)

“The comma, colon, semicolon and their siblings are integral parts of writing, pointing out grammatical structures and helping us transform letters into spoken words or mental images. We would be lost without them (or, at the very least, extremely confused), and yet the earliest readers and writers managed without it for thousands of years. What changed their minds?”

Watch how “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog” can be gradually converted into the kind of quasi-meaningless statement delivered somewhere or another every day by ass-covering bureaucrats and spokespeople.

“Just about no one has a good feeling about the word “criticism.” Most of the time, it simply means chastisement; it sounds like what you don’t want to get on your performance review, or from your parents. If you have a critic, that person is likely to be your enemy, and to be critical means to be ill disposed, hard to please or actively hostile — in short, a hater. When it comes to the arts, for many people a critic is someone whose job it is to tell you why you’re wrong to like the movies or music or books you like.”

“With iOS 9, app developers will be able to create ad blocking software for Safari’s mobile browser, which could hurt publishers who depend on ads online. At the same time, Apple is touting its news reader as another way for those same publishers to get their stories in front of readers on their phones.”

“Google took something we trusted and filed off its dignity. Now, in its place, we have an insipid “G,” an owl-eyed “oo,” a schoolroom “g,” a ho-hum “l,” and a demented, showboating “e.” I don’t want to think about that “e” ever again. But what choice do I have? Google—beneficent overlord, Big Brother, whatever you want to call it—is at the center of our lives. Now it has symbolically diluted our trust, which it originally had for all the right reasons.”

“The sound of the language is where it all begins. The test of a sentence is, Does it sound right? The basic elements of language are physical: the noise words make, the sounds and silences that make the rhythms marking their relationships. … This is just as true of prose as it is of poetry, though the sound effects of prose are usually subtle and always irregular.”

“Translated books, Goldstein says, ‘hardly ever get this much attention.’ And when they do, it’s unusual for much of that attention to be directed at the translator. But Ferrante, by insisting on preserving her own anonymity despite her international audience’s growing curiosity, has (perhaps unintentionally) managed to create an unlikely spotlight for her American translator.”

At least it was long and meaty enough to be made into a two-part Q&A.

“Self-publishing, print-on-demand and the fan-fiction phenomenon have eroded the distinction between amateurs and professionals in the literary industries, but every so often you get a small reminder that sometimes you need to send in a pro.”