Category: words

“One thing every foreigner living in Denmark knows to be true is that it’s a lot easier to comprehend written Danish than spoken Danish. … But fret not foreigners, you’re not alone.” Now even Danes need subtitles with some mumble-mouthed actors.

Joanna Trollope: “It’s a rather unkind thing to have to say, and I don’t mean it unkindly, but I always say to people you will write much better fiction after the age of 35 than before. Merely because life will have knocked you about a bit by then.”

“The closest matches in Hawaiian mythology were forest-dwelling creatures called the mū, but they are unsophisticated creatures who make screechy noises in the mountains. NeSmith decided to adapt the mū, which are like the Eldar in the sense that they’re shy and sing in a haunting way, and added ‘wao,’ or ‘wilderness.’ Now elves are mūwao.”

“BuzzFeed is the hottest entertainment/news/advertising/whatever property on earth right now. Everyone is talking about it and everyone (even the celebrities) reads it. Even the fact that you might answer this is a testament to how popular they are. Would you answer this if I was having an existential breakdown over Mother Jones or the Washington Post? How can you feel good about yourself if you don’t work for such a massive, popular, successful company?”

Laura Miller: “Not much of ‘Things I Can Say‘ offers a fresh take on the endless MFA debate. More at issue is the swashbuckling, bridge-burning and sometimes contemptuous tone Boudinot adopts and the implication that, as a one-time MFA instructor, he is speaking the secret thoughts of every creative writing teacher to whom a student has entrusted her fledgling work.”

“Another day, another argument about whether a book about dragons is fantasy or not. … Well, if it walks like an orc, quacks like an orc, and generally behaves like an orc, it’s fantasy, right? The author isn’t so sure. … It is an argument that resurfaces every time an author with ‘literary chops dips a toe into the waters of SFF.”

“Set ninety years after the cataclysmic Terror of 1925, Sutphen’s book imagines that the world of 2015 has devolved into three tribes: the Painted People, the House People, and the marauding Doomsmen. Keeps, drawbridges, archery, and Sirs and Ladies have grown back as thickly as vines over the ruins of American civilization. At the center of it all is the city of Doom, ‘gigantic, threatening, omnipotent,’ and ruled by the post-apocalyptic godfather Dom Gillian.”

In the 1996 movie Black Sheep David Spade, “glances at a fold-up map and realizes he somehow has become unfamiliar with the name for paved driving surfaces. ‘Robes? Rouges? Rudes?‘ Nothing seems right. … ‘Rowds. Row-ads.‘ … Row-ad-type word wig outs similar to the one portrayed in that movie are things that actually happen, in real life, to people with full and total control over their mental capacities.”

“More than 1,700 bargain copies of The Communist Manifesto have sold in the last week, in the form of an 80p edition of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’s call to the working classes to revolt.”

“The truth is that the work of the copy editor is largely disdained. And because their work is so undervalued, copy editors (and fact checkers) routinely work significantly longer hours for much less money … The popular image of the copy editor as a usefully malfunctioning person justifies the natural order of things: In the Calvinistic world of magazines, maladjusted grammar weirdos simply fall to their natural station.”