Category: words

“I knew you were going to take a hit, but I had no idea it would be like this. Are you worried? Because you should be. What if Amazon says, ‘Why should we sell Doug Preston’s books? He’s a thorn in our sides.’ Guess what? All this goes away.”

Ian Crouch explores the various drafts, notes and edits included in a new edition of Hemingway’s novel.

“There’s a lot of advice about English usage that we largely take for granted, from split infinitives to dangling participles, but where did anyone get these ideas in the first place?” Linguist Robin Straaijer writes about his Hyper Usage Guide of English (HUGE)database project, using as an example the hopefully wars, which (like so many culture wars) has been fought since the ’60s.

What were they thinking? There are many ill-conceived covers of course, but these five seem to miss out altogether the point of the books they’re fronting.

“The ‘user’ simply chooses a moral, and the system automatically determines a sequence of events (ie a story) which make characters feel the emotions required to convey that moral.”

“In a series of experiments, it finds people incorrectly believe they will have a stronger emotional reaction to stories that are based on fact, or ones that are set in the recent rather than the distant past.”

“See, who celebrated her 80th birthday earlier this year, has been championing great books and wittily skewering bad ones for decades. (Her first review – of C.Y. Lee’s China Saga – ran in The Washington Post on Sept. 3, 1987.)”

“When a word becomes identified with some ideal state of being, its original specific meaning becomes clouded.”

Having already abandoned its e-book stores for North America and Europe, the tech giant announced that it will stop producing e-reading hardware because it isn’t “economically viable”. … “Sony will instead focus on the Japanese e-reading market and in particular business customers.”

“U.S libraries have made the most headway with e-books in libraries, but internationally, the situation remains problematic, according to a new report from the International Federation of Library Associations (IFLA). … And overall, the situation is not looking good for libraries around the world.”