Category: words

“After a year dominated by upstarts like “selfie,” “bitcoin” and “twerk,” the American Dialect Society’s Word of the Year honor for 2013 has gone to a seemingly old-hat vocabulary item.”

“Much of the 1920 book is centered on Mary Jones’s remarkable row of stone houses on Fifth Avenue, from 57th to 58th Street. But almost absent from Wharton’s writings is Mary’s sister Rebecca Jones, who built an equally impressive row just two blocks south.”

That is, not that great compared to Charlotte Brontë’s last book, Villette. “It is high time it was recognised as the blazing work it is.”

“Like a funhouse mirror (usually a useless metaphor), fan fiction isn’t just entertaining for what it exaggerates, but for what it reveals in the exaggeration.”

“Web comics have been around since the early days of the internet, but the combination of universal broadband, image-friendly blogging platforms and the marketing power of social media has seen their popularity explode in recent years.”

“Literature about sex should never be seen as a guide for the uninitiated, she warned; the choices for her Penguin anthology were driven by literary merit, not instructional value.”

“On the desolate beach that is the lot of the contemporary book reader, the footprints of one companion can still be found. They belong to the writer.”

Author Armistad Maupin “created a gloriously large world: his characters are a sprawling cast of eccentrics centered on 28 Barbary Lane, an address now firmly fixed in the canon of fictional residences.”

“A federal judge has issued a declarative judgment stating that Holmes, Watson, 221B Baker Street, the dastardly Professor Moriarty and other elements included in the 50 Holmes works that Arthur Conan Doyle published before Jan. 1, 1923, are no longer covered by United States copyright law, and can therefore be freely used by others ”

“As e-books are stripping down to the bare-bones of what is actually book-like, physical books are growing more sumptuous and fetishistic.”