Category: words

The popularity of “textisms,” a research team led by Australian psychologist Nenagh Kemp writes in the journal New Media and Society, “has not undermined university students’ ability to write words using conventional spelling when appropriate.”

“More than 135,000 books still in copyright are going online for free in Norway after an innovative scheme by the National Library ensured that publishers and authors are paid for the project.”

Think about it: the word is hardly as clear as, say, “the ‘Proustian’ reminiscence, the ‘Dickensian’ slum, [or] the ‘Orwellian’ surveillance program.” Ben Marcus argues that Kafka’s parable “A Message From the Emperor” gives us the real essence of Kafkaesque-ness.

The ladies are writing and reading countless stories wherein the detective (specifically in the Benedict Cumberbatch incarnation) gets hot and heavy with Dr. Watson, Prof. Moriarty, and even brother Mycroft. (Wait till you see what the Chinese call them.)

“Really, the idea of an immutable and unchangeable text dates only to the printing press. Before that, every scribe tasked with producing a tome thought he was an author. Like movie producers dabbling with plot, it was difficult for the hand-copiers of text not to make a tweak here or there. Books were ever-changing. Stories evolved. And that was the way things were until Gutenberg’s time.”

As it happens, for the first time we have a writer nominated as both hatcheter and hatchetee.

Traditional techniques of close reading only ever brought us knowledge of a tiny sliver of literary history—less than one percent of the novels written in one country in one century. In short, we have always been “flimsy” readers.

D.C.’s ASL interpreters – who call themselves “terps” – “are charged with re-creating in crystal clarity speeches often known for nuance, importance and opacity.”

“Why do we have this uncritical reverence for the published writer? Why does the simple fact of publication suddenly make a person, hitherto almost derided, now a proper object of our admiration, a repository of special and important knowledge about the human condition?”

“Writing is a dance that involves imitation, inspiration, and originality. But all things considered, writerly disapproval of plagiarism has remained remarkably consistent over the centuries—really, even over millennia.”