Category: words

“To the casual reader, much of Wikipedia appears adequate, but be warned, nothing can be trusted. If your life depends on it, go elsewhere. Sources can be biased, but at least with other sources you know who has written what you are reading. With Wikipedia, you do not. Everyone has an agenda, but with Wikipedia you never know who is setting it.”

“From sexual innuendo to antisemitism, a wealth of censored material that was sliced out of F Scott Fitzgerald’s short stories by newspaper editors is being restored in a new edition of the author’s work which presents the stories in their unbowdlerised form for the first time in almost 80 years.”

Can yinz guess which one? We dink so.

“But in failing to mount any noticeable challenge to the language police, academic linguists have left the rest of us easy prey to nonsense and ashamed of our English when we should be celebrating our extraordinary mastery of a language which really is ours.”

Adam Gopnik: “Of all the books written in French over the past century, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Le Petit Prince is surely the best loved in the most tongues. This is very strange, because the book’s meanings – its purpose and intent and moral – still seem far from transparent, even seventy-five-plus years after its first appearance.”

Says the short-story wizard and MacArthur fellow, “I can’t write incorrectly. I find it very difficult to just relax and have spelling mistakes and grammar mistakes and punctuation -– I cannot do that. But I can’t do that even if I write a shopping list.”

“The emancipation of digital reading habits, like those of the printed book before them, allows us to choose the way we read. Just as some prefer edited collections and anthologies, some will enjoy having their fictions selected for them each month, apportioned in daily servings that arrive at appointed times that make them easier to consume.”

“As a literary critic who says he aims to study books without actually reading them, Franco Moretti … [treats them] like data: taking massive digital archives of texts and using computers to scan them for patterns no human reader would have the time, attention or patience to sift out.”

On one hand, many Alan Hollinghurst fans complained about how (relatively) demure his 2012 novel The Stranger’s Child was. On another, as Michael Cunningham observed about his The Hours, “I can’t help but notice that when I finally write a book in which there are no men [redacted], I suddenly win the Pulitzer Prize.”

The Idler Academy, an offshoot of the magazine which offers courses in everything from philosophy to ukulele playing, has announced the shortlist for its 2014 Bad Grammar award, set up to highlight “the incorrect use of English by people and institutions who should know better”.