Category: words

Not so long ago it was said that Arabic books were written in Cairo, published in Beirut and read in Baghdad. Now hundreds of writers and artists are preparing tributes to the Iraqi capital’s traditional bookselling hub, Al-Mutanabbi Street, which was destroyed in 2007 by a car bomb.

Michael Profitt: “My idea about dictionaries is that, in a way, their time has come. People need filters much more than they did in the past. As much as I adhere to the O.E.D.’s public reputation, I want proof that it is of value to people in terms of practical use.”

“Around 15,000 people braved freezing temperatures – as low as -14C – to form a chain stretching more than a mile across the capital, deliberately echoing 1989’s Baltic Way when some two million protesters formed a human chain across Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia to fight for independence from the Soviet Union.”

“Take a famous writer, preferably one with some marketing mojo, and argue that their work anticipates contemporary scientific insights. There is only one problem with this approach: it is intellectually bankrupt.”

Even the iconic first sentence is tricky – the phrase English-speakers think of as “giant insect” – “ungeheueres Ungeziefer” – isn’t nearly so simple as that.

The survey, conducted in the first weeks of 2014, found that most people who read e-books also read print books, and that just 4% of readers are “e-book only.”
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“Priced out, writers move out of the boho enclaves and the corporate crowd moves in. The city – in not supporting artists – becomes a more homogenous less diverse place.”

“This kind of book, Archer wrote, is ‘not favorable toward sex, lust and passion, bodies described, marital relationships or remote natural settings. It also doesn’t like emotional expression. What it does like are middlebrow thematics. Education, law, travel, money, cities, technology, childhood relationships, history and dining out’ are all wise subjects to cover ‘if you’re penning a future bestseller.'”

Turns out that The Mirror and the Light, the final volume in Mantel’s Cromwell trilogy, will not be her next book- that will be a collection of short stories titled The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher. (Mantel does have a bit of news on the Cromwell front, though.)

“People rather like [those] end-of-the-year … columns, it seems. Timothy Egan chipped in “Words for the Dumpster” in the New York Times on December 28th. There are 1,123 comments, nearly all nominating the commenter’s own least-favourite words. At the bottom of this present column are the first few hundred of them. … Now we can turn to a bit of analysis of what annoys people.”