Category: words

“According to a new study, our brain sees words we know like a picture, recognizing whole words, rather than strings of letters that require processing. By tuning neurons to respond to complete words that have been seen before, our brain allows us to read quickly.”

“Demand isn’t fixed or finite; it has the opportunity to surprise us. In strict consumer terms, people can’t demand what they don’t know about. The introduction of a service​, a product or an idea is what ultimately drives demand. One of the things the LA Review of Books proved was that the demand for smart writing is larger than anyone expected, and what we’ve found in recent weeks is that there does seem to be demand for what we’re supplying.”

Here’s the text of Carol Ann Duffy’s encomium, which was recited at the funeral by Benedict Cumberbatch.

In a Princeton test paper, a section headed “Grammar in Real Life” told students: “Pop lyrics are a great source of bad grammar. See if you can find the error in each of the following.” Taylor Swift’s song Fifteen was then cited as containing the line “Somebody tells you they love you, you got to believe ’em.” A fan posted her sad reaction online: “I was just having an amazing time studying for the SAT and now I feel attacked.” Then Swift herself responded on Tumblr: “Not the right lyrics at all pssshhhh. You had one job, test people. One job.”

Judith Thurman looks at the people – in Chile, Manhattan, the New York-Ontario borderlands, Hawaii, Massachusetts, and Ohio – who are trying.

“The meta-question, of course, is what these affinities mean. What’s at stake when we opt for snow over sun, anger over awkwardness, herring over prosciutto, women over men, the north over the south, 1955 over 1985? What does our preference for Knausgaard or Ferrante suggest about us?”

The Indian-American banker-turned-author won the second-ever award “for a novel which took him 13 long and painful years to complete, charting one emigrant family’s heartwrenching search for the American dream.”

Three African nations and one Caribbean island have authors on the shortlist for the first time; a few familiar names (Amitav Ghosh, László Krasznahorkai, Fanny Howe) made the cut, but literary stars Karl Ove Knausgaard and Haruki Murakami did not.

“Though writers and historians have been arguing since the seventeenth century that Richard III wasn’t the villain whom Shakespeare described, it was a 1951 mystery novel that sparked mass interest in Richard’s redemption. The writer went by the name Josephine Tey, and the novel was called The Daughter of Time.”

How did it come to be, Lynch asks, that “those of us for whom English is a line of work are also called upon to love literature and to ensure that others do so, too”?